Never Known as a Nonbeliever: Tom Smucker on Disco and The Beach Boys

Tom Smucker is a major first-generation rock critic with an unusual career trajectory. By choice never a fulltime critic, he still wrote for The Village Voice, placed an essay in the seminal 1980 edition of The Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock and Roll, and broke through the popular vs. academic press wall by publishing a superb book on the Beach Boys in 2018. Smucker appeals to me so much because his arguments are as challenging of critical habits as his tone is friendly. He has sincerely championed the unhip and uncelebrated without ever coming off as if he were just being contrary to get attention. Why The Beach Boys Matter (University of Texas Press, 2018) is deceptively trim in appearance. Don’t let that fool you: it is one of the great books for anybody who likes to think about pop music (or the USA). Smucker efficiently shares fresh sociocultural thinking right along with answering the crucial “but is it good listening?” questions. Perhaps I can generate further reader intrigue by sharing three chapter titles demonstrating the range his short book takes on:

Readers seeking a comprehensive introduction to Tom Smucker’s biography, writing, thoughts on rock criticism, “career as a technician at what we used to call The Phone Company,” labor activism, and faith, are directed to Steven Ward’s extensive 2000 interview on this site. Smucker has influenced both my thinking and prose for the better since I was 16 years old, so I wanted to talk to him specifically about two areas of concentration: his 1980 RS History article on disco and his book on the Beach Boys. He graciously agreed to an email interview, conducted during the endless summer of 2023.

VP:  How did you get to write the first book in the ever-expanding Why___Matter(s) academic series of books on influential pop musicians?

TS: The Music Matters series was the idea of Stephen Hull, at the time at UPNE—University Press of New England.  I don’t quite remember, but he brought Evelyn McDonnell on board as the editor for the series, and I was the first person to go back and forth with Stephen as he figured out what he was looking for in the series. My Beach Boys book was edited by Stephen and then copyedited by UPNE, and then prepared for publication and promotion by UPNE.

And then: the main New England University decided to shut down UPNE. Stephen, I believe, got a job at the University Press of New Mexico, and the Music Matters series along with Evelyn as editor went to the University of Texas Press.  My book and the Ramones book arrived at Texas ready to be published but out of cycle with the Texas publication and promotion routines, so we were underpromoted. But I am grateful that Texas published my book in the first place and has kept it in print.

VP: Has your book been assigned in some college courses? Have you heard back on reception by students and profs, or been invited to visit any classes?

TS: I have never been invited to any type of academic situation other than the publication of my Janelle Monae article.

VP: That article was published in 2021, a few years after your book. Would you unpack your title “Tracing the Consecrated Anima from The Beach Boys to Janelle Monae” for those of us who recognize exactly three words in that title?

TS: I was invited to participate in an academic journal after the book came out and decided to write my version of a fancy, and hopefully incomprehensible academic title. To explain in regular English: in much of the early Beach Boys car songs the car (and sometimes the studio) are technologies with symbolic, even spiritual meanings. Janelle Monae, in her early videos, concerts, and albums plays with the idea of social outcasts as robots. So, according to me, anyway, she would naturally choose Brian Wilson to write and sing the choral background to the opening of “Dirty Computer.”

Anima is a fancy idea about a female archetype in symbols that appears in the writing of Carl Jung, a contemporary of Sigmund Freud, who was into the idea of a collective, or social consciousness.

The rise and fall of disco as a mass phenomenon occurred in the time it took me to go to junior high school. In early 1978 “disco dancing” was available as a P.E. option. We students learned moves to “Disco Inferno” by The Trammps, played over and over. I never tired of the song, nor the safe space for dancing with girls provided by the class. But the first stirrings of discontent had emerged earlier: in late 1977, when I told my friends I bought the 45 of “I Feel Love” by Donna Summer, they were all “how could you possibly like that?” About a year later, in fall 1978, I was bonding with an amiable longhaired stoner named Jay over this awesome new band called Van Halen. Not wanting to overly stretch my metal cred, I also admitted to liking Fleetwood Mac. Jay laughed graciously: “aw that’s cool, man. What I can’t stand is that disco shit.” This was the first time I heard anybody spell it out. By early 1979, “disco sucks” was a graffiti all over town and several novelty songs had come out attacking it (they all suck more than disco ever did at its worst).

A year later, 1980, Tom Smucker’s essay “Disco” in The Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock and Roll made sense of my cultural confusion. A defense and obituary of disco, Smucker’s essay placed it in a context of changing audience relationships with rock music. Indeed, he challenged the whole venture the book celebrated, as surely as Greil Marcus’s great essay on punk in the same volume did. In a book devoted to the history of rock, Smucker wrote “once upon a time the idea of rock history may have been creative.” In a book enshrining various musicians as meaningful artists, Smucker wrote “once upon a time the idea of stars with interesting careers as artists and songs with meaningful lyrics may have been creative.”

VP: One of the premises of your 1980 Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock and Roll essay on disco was that disco had risen and fallen. Do you think disco mutated into hip-hop, techno, rave, etc? Even if it did, is there something that was truly “over with” and has never returned?

TS: Dance music, above or underground, goes on and on of course, but yes I do believe that Discoish Disco first established the idea of the DJ as an artist and the Disco Explosion led to hip-hop. House, maybe EDM, rave. In its prime, when it was the most popular music in America and much of the world, disco was optimistic and inclusive. That came to an end and maybe house grew out of that—when disco “went underground.” For me, that’s a long and interesting story. As I remember the 1970s, disco and punk, and funk were reactions to a Rock Establishment having trouble dealing with a changing economy and culture.

VP: Here’s a bunch of disco Q’s: When did “disco dancing” evolve into something different from what had been just dancing to records in public? Which discos did you like (or not) to dance at? What DJs stand out in your memory as particularly worth remembering? Did you ever see any disco DJs who, creating hip-hop, worked scratching or other kinds of record-messing into their sets?

TS: I have never been the behind the scenes guy or the insider guy. I’m interested in how it feels to be part of the audience, and how music “creates” audiences. I’m friends with some of those who helped shape and document disco, but I didn’t. I spent time at Danceteria, The Garage, and the Brooklyn disco that was featured in Saturday Night Fever. I saw Donna Summer in her prime. So I never had a club I hung out at. In fact, I had an 8 to 5 fulltime job and small kids during the disco era.

What I loved about disco was the fact that for a while, everyone (except some punk fundamentalists) liked disco. It was underground, Top 40, AM Radio, covered by Dolly Parton, James Brown, and the Rolling Stones. I thought, initially, that it was a very generous musical genre. I found it fascinating that it upended some of the assumptions of classic rock. Then there was a reaction against it, and some of it turned into the soundtrack of the snobby decadence of places like Studio 54.

And of course, a good case can be made that disco birthed hip-hop.

VP: I think perhaps the photos surrounding your Disco essay gave me the impression that you had been more of an insider than, as you say, you were. Grace Jones pointing a toy gun at some semi-clothed revelers, with a caption providing the dictionary definition of “decadence”, for example.

TS: I had no control over the photos used by Rolling Stone for my disco article and in fact felt they did not match the positive tone of the article and were not typical of the photos used elsewhere in that anthology.

Rereading Tom’s essay in light of his answers, two paragraphs stand out as descriptive of a much more “in the streets” disco experience:

Although it didn’t last long—and terrified those who couldn’t stand the music—disco’s brief hegemony provided some beautiful pop moments. In 1978, in a disco-mad city like New York, you could walk down the street and every radio in a passing car, on a stoop, in a store, out an apartment window, carried down the street by a teenager, would be turned to the same disco station. The cacophony of the city was suddenly a ripple of changing volumes on the same song.

And also the ending sentences of the article:

At its best, disco wasn’t really much like a big private club, and certainly not like a family, a commune, a tribe or a world view. It was like a city street. A place where strangers could interact with each other if they wanted to, without having to become like each other. It reminded us that cities aren’t just places where people get mugged. If the vibes are right, they’re places where people can be stimulated, or even fall in love.

VP: In your 1980 essay you name the main two likely and oft-cited suspects: racism and homophobia. But you also point out that the musical aims of disco departed from other pop music forms of the time: “this tension, between the tendency of disco to mean anything good to dance to, and its tendency to mean a certain idea about what’s good to dance to, would structure its subsequent history.” I’d add that not just what would now be called “classic rock” fans, or the far less numerous punks, objected to what it developed into as music. George Clinton didn’t like disco either (“it’s like making love on one stroke!”) To the list of suspects I would add general oversaturation at its height, although people would eventually accept far narrower playlists than even the most discofied radio brought.

The most unusual reason you give for the reaction against disco is its open embrace of sex as just a fine thing to have (including plenty of family-friendly hetero sex too). Supposedly rock music is already very sexual, so there shouldn’t have been a problem, right? But rock is kind of puritanical too. In any case whatever conversation was getting started there by disco was done in well before the AIDS epidemic derailed all kinds of developments and killed a lot of people. Decades later, what do you think?

TS: You are right about George Clinton. The rise of P-Funk was a wonderful moment and may have signaled a critique of disco extravagance and optimism. As I recall, funk was a genre initially ignored by white people. Then comes hip-hop. All springing from a newer social context that is less hopeful but not less creative.

It’s also possible that disco exhausted its own possibilities after euro-disco. Maybe the same reason there really isn’t any new prog rock after awhile. Or why there wasn’t a second Sgt. Pepper.

Of course you are right about AIDS changing everything.

I am on vacation away from some books I would like to look at before going further with what happened when and why. So I’ll save some of my thoughts about sex and disco for another day but just say this: there was an element of heterosexual male sexual frustration and dominance in rock music that I did not hear in disco, so in that sense disco was sex positive.

One minor phrase in Smucker’s Disco essay stood out to 16-year-old me as a puzzle, a sentence beginning with the words “as an obsessive Beach Boys fan.” I couldn’t imagine anyone who was into music being an obsessive Beach Boys fan. In an appreciation of Smucker’s book, guitarist Mark Ribot writes that “although the Beach Boys were part of my early teenage pop musical landscape I never identified with them. They were simply there: like the Post Office.” Growing up in San Diego, my friends and I were much more negative about them than that in the early ’80s. I don’t recall any of us voluntarily playing the Beach Boys, or even seeing any albums by them in our collections unless they were hand-me-downs from parents. We loved the beach but resented “Southern California beach culture” (overly sensitive about being typecast as stupid, we were spoiled, and I will never be able to afford to live in San Diego again). It seems strange to have needed rock critics to appreciate this widely loved music, but I did. The onset of adulthood really did the trick, for me and those friends with whom I traded the most music. By the end of the ’80s, we were all into Pet Sounds and beyond (All Summer Long, Today, Sunflower, Wild Honey, Smiley Smile, and so on…).

Any book on The Beach Boys published in the 21^st C. has to take on Pet Sounds as music and the history of its initially mixed reception and ultimate hyper-canonization. As a culture we have moved on from the dismissive but much repeated statement that its main importance is that it “inspired Sgt. Pepper”. Still, Paul McCartney may yet outlive us all; the man is a talking, bottomless pit of need who once claimed to have helped invent rock videos. So, a question that has bothered me for a long time is why it was still rock, and therefore Good, when The Beatles used non-rock forms and instruments, but pretentious, and therefore Bad, when Brian Wilson did it earlier. Tom Smucker nails it:

It was one thing to appropriate string quartets on “Eleanor Rigby” and to be The Beatles […] But it was something else to appropriate Percy Faith, Martin Denny, lounge, Tiki, faux jazz, cowboy songs, your dad’s sentimentality; mix all that with Aaron Copland, George Gershwin, Phil Spector, Stephen Foster, and the Brill Building; and use a theremin, violins, kettle drums, electric organ, French horns, electric bass, string bass, a bicycle horn, rock guitars, keyboards, whistles, drum kits, bass harmonica, bongos, and vibes. And to pace heartfelt, secular-spiritual, doo-wop originated, jazz-inflected vocals on the top. That’s what Brian Wilson achieved on Pet Sounds. He summoned up an enormous chunk of lower middle-class, white, suburban 60s America, and made it swing.

TS: Don’t know much about San Diego but I know there was a period of time when the Beach Boys were more popular in the northeast and NYC than in Southern California. Some of this I think was that surfers did not think the Beach Boys played surf music.  And some of this might have been embarrassment about one’s own local cornballs, the way hard core old-time country went out of fashion in Nashville for awhile.

VP: One of the more challenging rockcritical-aesthetic-assumption claims you make in Why The Beach Boys Matter would be that there is a general lack of respect for the importance of harmonic group singing (particularly church-inspired group singing) for the development of rock ’n’ roll. I’ve paraphrased you here, possibly inaccurately, but would you say it has been underrated, and if so, why?

TS: As I remember it, lots of white rock critics, including myself, learned to think about pop music coming out of the world of folk music. That world de-emphasized group harmonic singing and valorized, if that’s the right word, a kind of romantic image of the lone folk singer with guitar. Dylan, Baez. Rock groups featured a lead singer for the most part, and even Motown groups such as the Temptations traded lead vocals.

There was a cultural value connected to the individual breaking free from a confining society, group, milieu, family. I think I’ve made the case that in the long run that might be one of the reasons the Beach Boys Story continues to resonate. It dramatizes the tension between group and individual.

Doo-wop, I believe, was undervalued as an influence on 1960s/70s Rock in Rock Critic world, especially with the Beach Boys. It influenced Brian and Mike for sure and shows up all over their pre Pet Sounds records. Lennon and McCartney harmonized a lot on their classic cuts, of course, but that was Everly Brothers duo harmonies. I don’t think the group as a whole harmonized as did the Beach Boys. And I don’t think any of the British Invasion groups harmonized, although they were certainly thought of as groups.

Maybe the fact that there was no one group that could encapsulate the history of doo-wop made it hard to think about in the ’60s/’70s. It’s the one musical genre I know of that wasn’t even named until it was over. I don’t think doo-wop singles made it over the Atlantic Ocean to the UK, along with Chess Records blues.

Another possibility for skimping on attention to group harmony singing might be its association with “corny” trad religious or barbershop singing. Or its obvious connection to Golden Age African-American Gospel of the 1940s/50s. White rock critics knew who Sam Cooke was but didn’t know much about his origins in Gospel. Some describe that music as the gospel blues and it could be considered where blues harmony singing developed.

VP: Some further ideas on the meaning of harmony singing in Beach Boys music. From Why The Beach Boys Matter:

Brian was fashioning complex harmonies on top of his complex chord changes inside pop songs that could pull you in deep. That’s why the harmonies still worked in concert even when group members were feuding in later years—they contained those dramas of conflict and resolution inside the vocals themselves. And that’s why the harmonies didn’t work when they were used on uninspired late-career songs as a musical trademark trying to recover the lost world (and sales) of the early ’60s—that wasn’t their function.

VP: Mike Love has kind of turned into a villain in the currently circulating version of the band’s story, and to some extent has embraced the role, so I like how you treat him as the contributory, complicated, and contradictory character he is. He’s a great singer, possibly even underrated as a great rock singer, since I never see him get mentioned on those kinds of lists, but you point out much more surprising stuff. How, for example, he was the only white rocker to sing about the Jackson State slayings that occurred around the same time as the Kent State shootings. Or that he went to a mostly black high school and drew the phrase “out doin’ in my head” (sung at the beginning of “Help Me Rhonda”) from that local slang. Still, post-Donald-Trump, it is hard to love Mike Love.

TS: I think Mike added a crucial persona to the Beach Boys early line-up. He was the somewhat obnoxious slightly tough guy in high school. This nicely set-up the innocent and sensitive rest of the band. Mike is indeed a great singer in the Chuck Berry mode with a similar sensitivity to beat and clipped phrasing. I also think lots of his early lyrics are perfect. He’s also the one with a feel for doo-wop and doo-wop embellishments, a crucial little piece of the Beach Boys sound.

Over the years when Brian was absent but the BBs were a great live band, Carl was clearly the musical leader and lead vocalist and Mike was the only Beach Boy with stage presence and the desire to pull the concert together as an event.

Still, there’s a trace of Trumpian resentment in Mike’s live shows now and a willingness to accommodate a bit of the angry nostalgia floating around. I don’t know who screwed who out of royalties, and I give Mike credit for dragging his ass out on tour just because he wants to. If I could I’d like to travel around the country when Mike is on tour and get a feel for who his audience is at this point and how he connects to them. Unfortunately, I’m not sure I would like what I found.

VP: Not covered in the book, but totally blowing my mind is the news from a different article that Mike Love attended and performed at the event organized by Phil Ochs in 1974 called “An Evening With Salvador Allende.” Never in the world would I have supposed that Mike Love would have shown up for that, much less the odd info that Bob Dylan suggested he sing “California Girls” there, of all things. You were there for that event; did you also see the famous “gold suit” show Ochs did a few years earlier?

TS: I was at the concert, Dylan and Ochs were very drunk. I distinctly remember a Beach Boy singing “California Girls,” but I don’t’ remember it being Mike Love. That detail was from Mike’s own memoir.

If Dylan was the one suggesting “California Girls” he may have been fucking with Mike, who knows. I believe it happened because I saw it. In those days the Beach Boys were interested in getting recertified as with-it and the anti-war movement was still considered a legit credential. Interesting stuff, and interesting that Mike mentions it.

Times were about to change, and not just in Chile, and I think Ochs sensed it, or maybe just his own personal demons matched up with the end of a certain sensibility wrapped up with the folk scene and 1960s optimistic liberal/radical leftism.

I did see Ochs in concert but not when he wore his gold lame suit. I continue to find him an interesting, complicated character.

VP: Lastly, with your lifelong involvement in the American labor movement, I’m curious about how you feel it’s going lately. There has been a lot of inspiring activity and some victories in recent years, mostly of course not getting much mass media coverage (or worse, negative coverage blaming workers for causing inflation, etc.). A brief period of wage hikes following COVID has already been more or less rolled back. What’s happening, what might happen, what should happen?

TS: Personally, I believe things are difficult for enough people in a lot of different work situations that labor unions feel like a useful corrective for journalists, nurses, delivery people, grad students, factory workers, doctors, baristas. However, the anti-union playbook is well-developed. We have yet to get to a showdown in a big industry that is not yet unionized.

I’m encouraged to see the energy bubbling through the unions of late, but we have not seen a really big win and a really big piece of legislation on the national level. Here’s hoping.

READING

1. tomsmucker.net is where you go to read about a lot of things Tom cares about.

2. For example, Anne Murray. Lester Bangs also wrote about Anne Murray, I am doomed to eventually also write about Anne Murray too because she is cool/not cool and I play her songs all the time. Here is Tom’s Anne Murray: The Woman Who Would Be Schlock, 1976.

3. This is where to read about the political event from 1974 mentioned in the article. Phil Ochs, Pinochet, Allende, Bob Dylan, Mike Love, Nano Stern.

4. Mark Ribot, whose guitar playing added immensely to the artistic success of Rain Dogs by Tom Waits, wrote a long appreciation of Tom’s book—and swerved into a passionate defense of The Recording Studio as an endangered technology, very much in the mode of Tom Smucker correctly writing about all this stuff as forms of technology. Why The Beach Boys Matter: Print, Ebook, Audio, Essays, Blurbs, Links.