Song 177: “Never Learn Not to Love” by the Beach Boys, Part 3: “Mister, Can You Give Me Some Direction?”
1/31/20250 min
For those who haven’t heard the announcement I posted, songs from this point on will sometimes be split among multiple episodes, so this is the third part of a multi-episode look at the song “Never Learn Not to Love” by the Beach Boys, and the links between Charles Manson and the LA music scene, as well as the life of Huddie “Lead Belly” Ledbetter. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode.
Patreon backers also have a forty-eight-minute bonus episode available, on “Fruit Tree” by Nick Drake.
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Transcript
12 sentencesAndrew Hickey· Host0:00
[singing] A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs by Andrew Hickey. Song 177, Never Learn Not to Love by the Beach Boys. Part three: Mister, Can You Give Me Some Direction? Before I begin, this episode, like all of this miniseries, deals with some difficult topics, including grooming and manipulation, and with racist exploitation of Black people. It also contains some quotations from people expressing extremely racist opinions. I have tried to steer away from quoting anything with a direct slur in, but some of the quotes are nonetheless disturbing, but needed to be quoted to give context for the rest of the narrative. We talked back in part one of this series on Never Learn Not to Love about the roots of American popular music in vaudeville, which in turn had its roots in minstrelsy. But in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, there was a competitor to vaudeville, and that competitor was known as Chautauqua. These days, if people have heard of Chautauqua at all, they've heard of it from one of two sources. They've most likely heard about it from Robert Pirsig's mega bestselling book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, which he wrote between 1968 and 1974. That book was one of those books that becomes culturally ubiquitous for a few years and then vanishes again just as suddenly. Pirsig later tried to explain the success of the book, which came as as much of a shock to him as to anyone else, saying, "The book also