Why the sudden dropoff in popularity for groups like The Monkees and Beach Boys?

Because The Cowsills, The Archies and The Royal Guardsmen came on the scene !! ?


I just believe that others took their place. Both bands had projected a certain style...then changed, matured, got 'headier'....whatever....and the 10-12 year olds were now 14-16, so we had to have replacements.

I just watched a Herman's Hermits DVD and Peter Noone was saying how he wanted to break out of the HH mold, but they'd set themselves up for what they did and the popularity that achieved. He was saying how The Stones and The Who could progress because they didn't limit themselves, so to speak.

 

See the Rolling Stone review I posted above: it praises the music on Sunflower, but at the same time can't resist the digs at the group as "Muzak" and "plastic geniuses." After the group's no-show at Monterey and the failure of Smile to come out, the "counterculture" never forgave them, and could never get past their square image.

 

Tell me about it. Mine's still on backorder.

 

Ha!

Jann Wenner really is the SHF bogeyman - anything "bad" that happened in rock since 1967 seems to get blamed on him!

 

Yeah, though the counter-culture, such as it was, was still only a relatively small portion of the record buying public. I think both bands were caught in no man's land: They'd grown too weird for the "straight" audiences that initially propelled them to stardom, but they were still perceived as being too square for the hip types. You'd like to think that quality will win out and I guess it did somewhat eventually for the Beach Boys, but maybe the timing wasn't right for Sunflower.

 

I think you're exactly right that, after 1967, the Beach Boys were caught in no-man's-land between hip and square.

I also don't think all of their problems were Jann Wenner's fault - I think that U.S. radio pretty much abandoned them after 1967. Also, the group managed to shoot themselves in the foot plenty of times - even though Sunflower didn't give them a U.S. hit, on that album Dennis really stepped up to the plate as someone who could have taken the reins from Brian as the group's artistic and commercial force, but then, for whatever reason, group politics caused all of Dennis's offerings to get pulled from Surf's Up and the group never really took Dennis seriously as a writer thereafter, so, in the mid-70s, they were operating without either Brian or Dennis fully engaged as writers. Pacific Ocean Blue showed what could have been, but, by then, it was too little, too late.

 

That's embarrassing for us in the US.

 

That almost sounds like The Association.

Were they the straightest hip band...or the hippest straight band ? Hmmmm.....

 

Also in the UK, most of these were top ten

 

So many people don't understand the true meaning of this quote. It has nothing to do with the death of surf music or The Beach Boys - rather, at that time, Dick Dale was going through serious health issues (can't remember what exactly....), and Jimi was commenting that if Dale died, it would be a tragedy for the music community.

 

[reference needed].

In all seriousness though, I've never heard this before. And didn't Jimi tell a live audience "You've heard the last of surf music" around the time the Beach Boys cancelled Monterey Pop?

 

Same here.....ironically The Monkees probably sold more records during 1967 than any other year in their career! By the following year 1968, it was nearing the end for the most part.

 

I like all three of them, but, in hindsight, the macho aggression of the new wave of "heavy" groups that you mention strikes me as at least as silly as the twee sounds of the Monkees and the Beach Boys.

When I was a teenage boy, I loved this clip because the Who were loud and smashed their guitars and blew stuff up on stage, not because of any deep meaning behind the music:

 

Jimi also made the following comment to the UK music press regarding "Heroes and Villains": ""Don't much care for the Beach Boys. They remind me of a psychedelic barbershop quartet."

 

Again - this quote is taken out of context. When he said "don't care much for The Beach Boys"....he meant "don't care much for the Beach Boys new single" as in Heroes and Villains. In the article, he was reviewing different current singles.

Here's a ref. for the Dick Dale/Surf Music comment. You can find others on around the web.

http://www.surfermag.com/features/k...music-again-that’s-a-big-lie”-–-jimi-hendrix/

 

I do recall Jimi's "Blind Date" (Melody Maker) review of "Heroes And Villains" - "Don't particularly like The Beach Boys. Reminds me of a psychedelic barber-shop quartet".

Then, when Bruce Johnston did a "Blind Date" review later that year he slagged off "The Burning Of The Midnight Lamp".

EDIT: I see Driver 8 mentioned this at the same time I did!

 

http://steveroby.wordpress.com/2012/03/19/dick-dale-meets-jimi-hendrix-1965/

 

Thank you! That's why I love this forum, I learn something new every time I poke around. Though it usually ends up costing me money! This time being no exception, I now need to hunt down an introduction to Dick Dale, a player I'm not familiar with.

 

In my small circle of friends, neither band were ever considered "cool or hip". The Beach Boys especially looked so silly in love beads and Nehru jackets. They were like a square, freaked out caricature from a Dragnet episode.

 

The Beach Boys certainly didn't have a monopoly on looking silly in hippie garb:

 

LOL. That's the funny, intangible thing about image in popular culture. At the time, some performers or bands like the Beatles could pull that look off, some couldn't. Frank Sinatra tried the beads and Nehru look and we weren't impressed. On the other hand, The Smothers Brothers had some unofficial stamp of cool approval, go figure. As always, YMMV.

 

I personally think the Beatles looked just as clownish as the Beach Boys in their hippie garb. A select few people, such as Jimi Hendrix, did manage to pull off that look without making fools of themselves - but very few people did, in my opinion.

 

Interesting. I loved the late 60's Beach Boys because they reminded me of a psychedelic barbershop group.

 

And then there's Mike Love...

in his guru stage:

 

Of course, there was always something vaguely Monty Python-esque about the Beatles, which Magical Mystery Tour makes obvious. And the Sgt Pepper outfits are a send-up of the British establishment. They weren't taking themselves as seriously as maybe some of the American hippies, at least fashion wise. It kind of was fancy dress time, if you think they were "making fools of themselves" it's probably not your sort of party!