A hard road to hoe
A prescient title from the Black Keys that might allude to tour woes, the folly of ranked listmaking in the age of streaming, and the challenge of capturing a complex band in a two-hour film
A few long-gestating, disparate things woven together into what one hopes is a fairly coherent whole. We hit on the Black Keys and the incredible shrinking arena tour, the flattening of genre distinctions due to streaming, Apple's silly Top 100 list, and the recent, fairly disappointing Beach Boys documentary. Trust me: the dots connect.
Everybody had a good chuckle at the Black Keys’ expense last month when the band announced it was canceling its arena tour and moving to theaters. In an official statement they cited a recent tour of smaller venues in Europe and said they want “to offer a similarly exciting, intimate experience for both fans and the band.”
That came just an hour or so after I saw that the band's show in Minneapolis's Target Center had been canceled. A look at the seating chart showed why, as a sea of open seats surrounded the few that had been sold. With prices ranging from $100 to $300 each, it's no wonder. The last and only time I saw the band was in 2004 when the tour for their second LP, Thickfreakness, brought them to Gabe's in Iowa City. That was the perfect venue for the band, its skronky, unadorned blues meshing well with the seedy nature of our favorite upstairs dive. I don't begrudge bands getting more refined, but each subsequent Black Keys album has been a little more polished, a little more boring. I can't imagine paying $100 to see them.
Caveat here: I'm cheap. I paid $60 to see Springsteen in 2001 and vowed to never spend more than that on a rock ticket, then broke that vow in 2003 by paying $80 to see the Police before making a similar pledge. I don't think I've broken that yet, though I've certainly paid more to see jazz or other non-rock genres. I'm not happy about it, but for the right act in the right location, I'll hold my nose and loosen my wallet.
This isn't necessarily a knock against the Black Keys. I wouldn't pay that much, but others might. Two factors are at play here. The first is the diversification of taste brought about by streaming. It used to be, if you were the Black Keys, you knew which other acts in your narrow market segment were out on tour, who had just been out on tour, and who might go out on tour. So, you knew roughly what the demand was for, in this case, warmed-over boogie rock (OK, I'll stop). Had the Kings of Leon been out recently, then maybe that segment would have been satisfied for a while. But now, people listen to so much, and have so much diversity in their interests, you’re competing against a much broader swath of acts. You might see a clear path, but a country act, an R'n'B band, or a hip hop artist might have just come through and sucked up the dollars and interest in that market.
At the same time, this isn’t a Black Keys problem, it’s the problem of the tour managers, booking agents, and arena managers who miscalculated. They should know what will sell. Dan Auerbach isn't calling up the Target Center to offer his band's services. Others are involved, and they guessed wrong.
That streaming-based diversification, certainly a good thing when it comes to finding good music, led to a rather odd list of the 100 Best Albums from Apple Music. This, according to the streaming service, is its "definitive list of the greatest albums ever made." A ludicrous claim rendered absolutely silly by the composition of the list.
Thanks to streaming, everything is current, and so it seems to make sense to rank everything against everything else. But in doing so, the list reveals the illogic of evaluating Frank Ocean’s Blonde on the same scale used to evaluate Pet Sounds or Purple Rain.
Others have pointed out the absurdity of this list, which goes from 1959's Kind of Blue through last year's 1989 (Taylor's Version) from Taylor Swift. Two jazz albums? One country-adjacent album from Kacey Musgraves? No real metal to speak of? It's a ridiculous exercise to think anyone could whittle six-plus decades of popular music down to 100 albums across multiple, disparate genres. Setting that aside, the real humor is to be found in what made the list, where it resides, and the crazy juxtapositions that result.
I'll limit myself to the Top 25, which is cringe-inducing enough. It starts strong, with Miles Davis (the other jazz LP was, of course, John Coltrane's A Love Supreme), and David Bowie's The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars, before moving to Daft Punk's 2001 album, Discovery. Odd, sure, but then back to classics with Born to Run, Revolver, and Pet Sounds, before Dr. Dre and last year's reimagined Taylor Swift album. Never mind that something released last year belongs on no best of anything list, or that an album reimagined for the sake of commerce probably ought not to best the original, but how do you compare any of those albums on an objective scale and declare one better than the others?
Pet Sounds is always toward the upper reaches of such lists, and rightly so. It wasn't my first Beach Boys album — that distinction goes to The Beach Boys Super Hits, a 1978 Ronco cash-in that I'm sure I picked up at a department store when on a shopping trip with my parents. It duplicates about two-thirds of 1974's shot-in-the-arm Endless Summer, and cemented my fandom. As an eight year old, I didn't know Brian Wilson was a genius, didn't know about Smile, and didn't know the Beach Boys were corny. I liked the harmonies and the songs about cars and surfing.
I've come to learn a lot about the band. I've read the books both good and bad, watched documentaries and YouTube videos, own a couple of boxed sets, several of those 1990s twofer CDs, some vinyl, and a lot of bootlegs stuffing folders on my hard drive. So, I came to the new Disney+ documentary, cleverly titled, The Beach Boys, with low expectations. Reader, those expectations were met.
It would be interesting to come to this documentary with nothing but a passing knowledge of the band beyond the few hits that still permeate pop culture, but I can't imagine that person watching this. Instead, it will be diehards hoping for something new. Sadly, they'll find little of that here.
By the end of the film, it is clear the goal is as much to rehabilitate Mike Love (and to a lesser extent, Al Jardine's) reputations as it is to turn someone on to the band's music. Love seems aware that most hardcore Brian Wilson fans consider him to be a dick, and he strikes a different tone here. It's not exactly conciliatory; instead, he tries and fails to thread the needle between "I was worried about my cousin Brian, the troubled genius," and "Gee, it would have been nice to get more credit." The thing is fans know about the lawsuits against Wilson to get more money and the tours where Brian wasn't included seemingly out of spite. No matter the situation, Mike Love looks out for Mike Love. Period.
That means his comments about Wilson ring hollow. Post-"Good Vibrations," Wilson was widely considered to be a genius. Love says he wishes the Boys — particularly him — had been given more credit. Not because they needed it, but because this might have made it easier on Brian. Better is Jardine, who notes — not without merit — that while the Boys were lucky to have Wilson at the helm, Wilson was lucky as well, finding four singers who could carry out his increasingly complex harmonies.
Wilson's mental state is such that he isn't really able to speak for himself, and Love fills the vacuum. Though I doubt his motivation, I was pleased Love mentioned Wilson's mental health struggles in a way that wasn't meant to mock. So much of the lore around Wilson has focused on pianos in sandboxes and hinted at a mind wracked by LSD and other drugs. Here, they talk about these as the mental health struggles they were, and it is refreshing to hear. Still, one can't help but see this as Love attempting to seem compassionate more than one cousin actually caring about another.
Final notes:
The USC Annenberg professor, Josh Kun, who waxes eloquently about the Beach Boys' presentation is two years younger than me. I don't recall when I was first getting into the band at age 8 worrying much about how the band fit in the broader cultural context, but maybe that's why he's a professor and I'm on Substack.
It seems Don Was is the new Rick Rubin, a ubiquitous presence in every music documentary no matter how tenuous the connection.
The little bit about Dennis Wilson here shows he is well worth a deeper dive in the form of his own documentary. All of the Wilson brothers are interesting in their own way, but Dennis could certainly carry a film of his own.
With so many younger acolytes of Wilson and the Beach Boys out there — the entire Elephant 6 universe comes to mind — the one contemporary talking head is the singer from One Republic, a band whose music I first heard about 10 minutes ago (consciously, anyway. I'm sure they drifted past my ears in a mall sometime in the past two decades) and will be fine never hearing again.