{"id":763,"date":"2004-07-09T10:42:22","date_gmt":"2004-07-09T17:42:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp\/2004\/07\/son_of_early_plastic\/"},"modified":"2019-12-18T11:41:21","modified_gmt":"2019-12-18T16:41:21","slug":"son_of_early_plastic","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/2004\/07\/son_of_early_plastic.html","title":{"rendered":"SON OF EARLY PLASTIC"},"content":{"rendered":"

Since some critics have gone apeshit about the\u00a0upcoming Brian Wilson release — see\u00a0Newsweek’s Malcolm Jones on\u00a0“Smile,”<\/span><\/em><\/b><\/a> which he calls (unbelievably, to my ears) a “masterpiece,” or\u00a0Deborah Solomon’s interview with\u00a0Wilson<\/span><\/em><\/b><\/a> in The New York Times Magazine — we offer our friend Bill Reed<\/span><\/em><\/b><\/a>‘s more explicable Beach Boys\u00a0adulation:<\/p>\n

In the 1960s, while nearly all my rock crit brethren had the good sense to
\ndirect their energies toward writing about such trendoid outfits as Martha Proud and the Birth of\u00a0God, AxeMeat, Urban Sprawl, the Desi-Rays, and the Triffids, etc., I had the “bad fortune” to be\u00a0deeply strung out on the uncool Beach Boys. I was flakking for the BB’s at a time when they
\ncouldn’t even get arrested.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Pre-Beatles, they were the hottest thing in American pop, but by the time of the so-called\u00a0<\/span>Summer of Love, in 1967, they were considered a joke. A 1969 concert at the Fillmore East<\/span>was\u00a0a near disaster. They came on stage in ice-cream colored suits. Fillmore habitu\u00e9s liked
\ntheir groups grungy, raw and au courant, and the Good Humor apparition on the stage couldn’t
\nhelp but bring out their sadistic side. By the end of their set the Beach Boys were reduced to
\ngoosing each other and acting like panicky circus ponies.<\/p>\n

The “Boys” were so desperate for coverage of any kind, that I received their full cooperation
\nduring this period on numerous pieces I wrote about them in Rolling Stone, Fusion and in ROCK.
\nFor ROCK I had the opportunity to do a phone Q & A with the then notoriously reclusive Brian
\nWilson.<\/p>\n

BRIAN: Have you ever talked to Mick Jagger?
\nME: I never have. Why?
\nBRIAN:
\nAre you going to?
\nME: I’d sure like to. But I don’t foresee it in the near future.
\nWhy?
\nBRIAN: I think you should.
\nME: What do you mean?
\nBRIAN: I think he
\nwould be a really interesting rap. He’s in this movie “Performance,” where he’s dressed like a girl,
\nand I think he’d make a really interesting rap.
\nME: Uh, okay.<\/p>\n

In the same publication, after penning a slightly uncharitable piece about bubble gum music
\npurveyors, Buddah Records, I received a phone call from its president, Neil Bogart, that
\nessentially amounted to a death threat. It seems I had deemed most of their product “Mafia
\nRock.” Big deal. It was the Sixties. I could write anything I wanted to. Big Man did manage to
\nscare little me, though; in the end, I begged Bogart’s forgiveness.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The last time I wrote about Bill Reed<\/span><\/em><\/b><\/a>, in April,
\nhe was just back from Japan, where he’d arranged the Japanese re-issue of jazz singer Pinky
\nWinters’s CD, “Rain Sometimes,”<\/span><\/em><\/b><\/a> which he’d produced. He also
\nsold other masters for Japanese releases, but it turns out the trip was largely a bust. One company
\nwent belly up since his return, and others didn’t follow through on their agreements.<\/p>\n

The main problem, he says, is illustrated by the following joke. Man #1 goes into a
\nJapanese business meeting and makes Man #2 across the table an offer: “How would you like a
\npoke in the eye with a sharp stick?” Man #2 replies: “Let me think about it.” <\/em>“In other
\nwords,”\u00a0Bill says, “the Japanese will absolutely not come out with an unequivocal NO.
\nThey consider doing so an insult. Arghhhhhhh …”<\/p>\n

Meantime,\u00a0he has been working on a sequel to his funny, affecting memoir “Early Plastic,”<\/span><\/em><\/b><\/a>
\nand he’s peddling it to agents and\/or publishers. It’s called “Son of Early
\nPlastic,”<\/span><\/em><\/b><\/a> and includes Bill’s paean to the Beach Boys as well as
\npassages like this:<\/p>\n

In 1970, I sold my first article to a national magazine article, Rolling Stone.
\nEven at that relatively late date, RS was not the impregnable corporate monolith that it would
\neventually become, and so I was able to slip this one in “over the transom.” Of course, it helped
\nthat I was writing about some unreleased Bob Dylan recordings I came across while rummaging
\nthrough the closet of a Woodstock crash pad. None of the material was known to have existed
\nbeforehand, so it was basically a case of “Stop the presses … Film at eleven.” A scoop as it were.
\n…
\nEventually I began to write more, shall we say, “grown-up” material for non-rock publications
\nsuch as: Variety, the L.A. Reader, the San Francisco Examiner, International Documentary, and a
\nnumber of others. For a short while, I even wrote for TV sitcoms, namely the hit series “One Day
\nat a Time.” Yet another fluke … do we detect a pattern here?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And this:<\/p>\n

My best luck with “go away kid you bother me” material was in the 1980s at
\nthe free paper, the L.A. Reader, which eventually became New Times, which finally ceased to
\nexist altogether somewhere around 2001. The Reader’s editor James Vowell was almost always
\nreceptive to my ideas, and several of my personal favorites in this collection [“Son of Early
\nPlastic”] — especially the Sally Marr and Lord Buckley profiles — first appeared in its pages.<\/p>\n

The Reader was far from being the only Southern California publication to undergo multiple
\nfoldings and mergers. Few magazines and\/or newspapers in SoCal have been so re-conglomorized
\nin recent times as Los Angeles magazine.<\/p>\n

Somewhere around 1990 one its editors approached me to write an article on L.A.’s
\nlegendary black nightlife district Central Avenue. That’s the sort of thing I usually had to beg to
\ndo. I completed the assignment in record time, then waited for the article to appear, followed by a
\ncheck. But weeks went by, then months. … I had been aware that during the interim, Los Angeles
\nhad been sold again and was skedded for yet another format overhaul. I phoned them. The long
\nand the short of it was my editor who had assigned the piece was no longer there, nor was their
\nany record of the assignment. How much was I to have been paid? I told the truth. $5,000. A few
\ndays later I received the check. Years later my head stills reels at the trusting efficiency of that
\ntransaction. I might try it again with Los Angeles some day just to see if it still works: “Hello, you
\ndon’t know me, but …” (Ah, the free-lancer’s life.)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Any agents or publishers out there interested in getting a more complete look at “Son of
\nEarly Plastic,” feel free to contact me. I’ll be happy to let Bill know.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Since some critics have gone apeshit about the\u00a0upcoming Brian Wilson release — see\u00a0Newsweek’s Malcolm Jones on\u00a0“Smile,” which he calls (unbelievably, to my ears) a “masterpiece,” or\u00a0Deborah Solomon’s interview with\u00a0Wilson in The New York Times Magazine — we offer our friend Bill Reed‘s more explicable Beach Boys\u00a0adulation: In the 1960s, while nearly all my rock crit […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-763","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-main","7":"entry"},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pbvgEs-cj","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/763","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=763"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/763\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":37192,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/763\/revisions\/37192"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=763"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=763"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=763"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}