Brian Wilson and the Monterey Pop Festival
I’ve seen lots of sources talking about one of the actual big reasons for the group skipping out on the festival was because Brian’s (and possibly others’) fear that the group’s image wouldn’t come across well. There was a fear that the Beach Boys would be seen as passé or un-hip.
If they were this self-conscious about how their image made them seem, why wouldn’t they just make a conscious effort to change their image? They had like 10 albums of surf, “established” material, and I would think at the point of Monterey they would be willing to roll the dice and start to jive with the other underground emerging artists. They were hugely successful up to this point, with Brian’s issues only really starting to come to a head right then.
I once heard an anecdote that Brian wanted the Boys to change their name to just “The Beach”. I think this would’ve been actually a really evocative choice. I think it would’ve been cool to see them evolve from the preppy, striped-shirts type of surf imagery to the watery, artsy, nautical and psychedelic feel of something like The Mollusk by Ween. I dunno, I really do feel like it was just a huge fumble for the group.
Why were they even so fixated on writing surf-oriented music that long to begin with if none of their hearts were in it and they wanted to expand their sound? The Beatles were pulling crazy artistic reinvention with the release of every new album and the public (broadly) took it just fine