The Beach Boys' 1968 US tour with Maharishi Mahesh Yogi


In May 1968, the American rock band the Beach Boys undertook a concert tour of the United States with Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, their Indian meditation guru. The tour preceded the release of the Beach Boys' Friends album, which similarly reflected the influence of the Maharishi's Transcendental Meditation technique on the band, and was a commercial and artistic failure. The program comprised a set of songs by the Beach Boys, followed by a lecture from the Maharishi on the benefits of meditation. Twenty-nine concerts were originally scheduled, many of them in college venues, but the venture was abandoned after three days of low ticket sales and hostile audience reaction to the Maharishi's segment. The guru's commitment to making a documentary film about himself, for Four Star Television, was cited as a further impediment.
The tour was initiated by Mike Love, who became devoted to TM in December 1967 and joined the Beatles for two weeks at the Maharishi's training course in India in early 1968. Given the Maharishi's popularity when the bookings were made, the Beach Boys hoped that the tour would alleviate the financial shortfall caused by an abortive tour they made in the US South, in April. The Maharishi's spiritual pronouncements held little appeal for the group's fan base, however. Canceling their tour dates with the Maharishi cost the Beach Boys $250,000, and a commentator later described the pairing as "one of the most bizarre entertainments of the era".

Background

Along with his Beach Boys bandmates Dennis Wilson and Al Jardine, Mike Love was one of the many rock musicians who discovered the teachings of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi following the Beatles' public endorsement of his TM technique in August 1967. In December that year, Love and his bandmates attended a lecture by the Maharishi in Paris and were moved by the simplicity and effectiveness of the meditation process as a means to obtaining inner peace. In January 1968, the Beach Boys attended the Maharishi's public appearances in New York and Cambridge, Massachusetts, after which he invited Love to join the Beatles at his training seminar in Rishikesh in northern India. While the other Beach Boys were similarly taken with meditation, they voted against Love's idea that the group should finance a documentary film about the Maharishi. The latter was a project that the guru had planned with Charles Lutes, the president of his organisation, the Spiritual Regeneration Movement.
From February 28 until March 15, Love studied Transcendental Meditation at the Maharishi's ashram in Rishikesh, along with the Beatles. While there, he and Lutes planned a US concert tour that would feature the Beach Boys and the Maharishi as co-headliners. The tour would allow the Maharishi to propagate his message to an audience of young pop fans and, according to author Peter Ames Carlin, it would improve the Beach Boys' standing at a time when they and their music had fallen out of step with contemporary trends. On a stopover in London before returning to Los Angeles, Love enthused to Melody Maker: "We're going to use a lighting system to project the Maharishi on screens above the stage so everybody will be able to see him. We'll perform with a band for 45 minutes followed by an intermission with a TV documentary. Then he'll come out and lecture the audience with time for questions and answers." In early April, the tour was announced with a starting date of May 3 and a duration of seventeen days.

Financial pressures and the Maharishi's public standing

Once back in Los Angeles, Love rejoined the Beach Boys and helped them complete their new album, Friends, which included songs that reflected the group's enthusiasm for meditation. From April 5, the band attempted a series of self-financed concerts in the US South, known as "the Million Dollar Tour". For these dates, their support acts were Buffalo Springfield and Strawberry Alarm Clock. The concerts were poorly attended and a commercial failure, due partly to the militant mood following the assassination of Martin Luther King, and the tour was abandoned on April 12. After this setback, according to Nick Grillo, the Beach Boys' business manager, the band hoped that their upcoming tour with the Maharishi would alleviate the financial shortfall. Love later wrote that the intention was for the Beach Boys to cover their expenses while the remainder of the proceeds went to the Maharishi.
Due to the Beatles' popularity and influence, the Maharishi's status had been elevated to that of an international celebrity. Although his apolitical stance concerned some commentators in the US, he was accepted by the counterculture as an important voice in the collective search for change and self-awareness. However, on April 12, George Harrison and John Lennon, the two Beatles most committed to TM, abruptly left the ashram in Rishikesh, signaling the band's split with the Maharishi. Some witnesses said that Lennon and Harrison's departure was in reaction to the Maharishi's alleged sexual impropriety towards some of his female students; others cited the arrival of Lutes, accompanied by a film crew to film the planned documentary, after he had signed a contract with Four Star Television on the understanding that the Beatles would appear in the production. The Beatles' disenchantment with the Maharishi and the Spiritual Regeneration Movement had a detrimental effect on the guru's standing among music fans.

History

The concerts were advertised as "The Most Exciting Event of the Decade!" and promoted by Budd Filippo Attractions. The program comprised a set of songs by the Beach Boys followed by the Maharishi's lecture on the benefits of meditation. The band was augmented by eleven backing musicians. The Maharishi failed to show up for the pre-tour press conference in New York on May 2. The press were told that he had caught pneumonia, but Grillo, speaking later in a BBC Radio 1 interview, said that in fact the Maharishi was preoccupied with his documentary film. The following day, the guru arrived late at the Beach Boys' press conference at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. An unimpressed John Sherwood of the Washington Evening Star reported: "The Maharishi was coming to Mohammed on the sacred banks of the Potomac, but in search of what? He was coming with... he was coming with... The Beach Boys, a fading rock music group in white suits bent on a head-shrinking concert tour... from here to California."
The tour opened on May 3 at the 8000-seat Washington Coliseum, playing to 1500 fans. William Rice, in his review for The Washington Post, described the band's 40-minute performance as "dreadful", citing the poor sound system, the under-rehearsed backing musicians, and the Beach Boys' out-of-tune singing. Following an intermission, the Maharishi addressed the audience for 30 minutes, while seated on a green sofa in the center of the stage. His lecture was also hindered by the poor acoustics, and drew jeers and heckling from many of the fans. By this point, the Beach Boys had gone on to the Baltimore Civic Center, in preparation for the next stop on the itinerary.
in the New York borough of Queens. The Beach Boys–Maharishi concert at the venue was canceled after sales of just 800 tickets.
By May 4, when the tour reached Iona College in upstate New York, several of the mid-tour dates had already been canceled. Writing in New York magazine, Loraine Alterman said that, although the Maharishi's commitment to making his documentary film was given as the reason, "more likely lagging ticket sales made him meditate on the advisability of performing to half-empty houses." Earlier that day, an early-afternoon show at the 16,000-seat Singer Bowl was canceled twenty minutes before the performance, due to only 800 tickets having been sold. The Iona College show was again poorly received, and the crowd were all the more restless due to the long delay between the Beach Boys' set and the Maharishi's arrival. Alterman reported that, with the Beach Boys having joined the audience for the lecture, Bruce Johnston was visibly irritated by the fans' ridiculing of the guru, and Love returned to the stage to admonish the hecklers, adding: "I know there are a lot of young people here but you will get older and I know you'll want to remember the Maharishi at Iona." At The Spectrum in Philadelphia, around a third of the 17,000-plus seats had been sold, at reduced prices, and some people walked out rather than listen to the Maharishi. The Maharishi's teachings on spirituality held little appeal for the Beach Boys' fan base.
On May 5, the tour recorded a healthy 3000 tickets sold at the 3277-seat Bushnell Memorial Hall in Hartford, Connecticut. After this early afternoon show, however, that evening's concert at Providence Arena was canceled at the last minute. A spokesman for the venue said he was told that the Maharishi had opted to focus instead on his film commitments, and the Beach Boys would not consider performing alone. In his Radio 1 interview, Grillo recalled that the band then announced to the press that the Maharishi's exit from the tour was due to illness. Grillo added that, while the Maharishi had been unwell, the tour's cancellation was in fact motivated by the band wishing to avoid creating tension between the guru and Four Star Television, and to avoid losing more money. All of the scheduled concerts starting with the May 6 booking at Boston Garden were canceled. In the May 11 issue of Billboard magazine, it was announced that jazz musician Paul Horn, who had also attended the retreat in Rishikesh, had formed a production company to make the Four Star documentary.
In June 1968, Amusement Business magazine reported that "the Beach Boys camp insists that the lingering atmosphere of hostility and violence" in the wake of King's death had been the cause of the tour's cancellation, and not the Maharishi's failure to draw crowds. Carl Wilson told the magazine: "A lot of people just would not let their children out. Nobody wants to get hurt." He added that the group's goal was to appeal mainly to young people, "but not the teeny-boppers", while Love commented that the shows were "not put together for commercial purposes".

Aftermath

Lennon and Paul McCartney expressed concerns over the Maharishi on The Tonight Show in mid May. McCartney—who had attempted to dissuade Love from undertaking the concerts—ridiculed the tour as a failure. Others criticized Love for attempting to align himself with the contemporary trend for Eastern mysticism. In Jardine's opinion, the tour "completely fell on its ass" since the two acts "had distinct paths, neither of which belonged on the same stage together". The Beach Boys' declining popularity in the US was further reflected in the commercial failure of Friends, which peaked at number 126 on Billboards albums chart, with total US sales estimated at 18,000 copies. Speaking to Keith Altham of the NME later in the year, Johnston said the tour was "a costly mistake for us but that's showbiz!" He added that, while their popularity on the West Coast had suffered, the band had recently toured successfully in other areas of the US.
In his book , Gary Lachman describes the Beach Boys' professional collaboration with the Maharishi as a "disastrous flirtation" that, for Dennis Wilson, was soon superseded by a more damaging personal association with the Manson Family cult. Despite the ignominy of the 1968 tour, the Beach Boys remained ardent supporters of the Maharishi and his teachings. In June 1969, the band played two charity shows at the Birmingham Odeon for the UK branch of the Spiritual Regeneration Movement. Jardine became a TM initiator in 1972, as did Love, who then progressed to more advanced levels such as the TM-Sidhi Course. In 1976, Dennis Wilson said of the tour: "I don't really care that there were empty seats... at least it got something going or started."
Author Jon Stebbins lists the 1968 tour—specifically, the fact that the band "toured with the Maharishi after the Beatles had rejected him"—among the Beach Boys' major "artistic missteps" that also included their cancellation of the Smile album and their refusal to perform at the 1967 Monterey Pop Festival. In a 2013 interview, in response to the suggestion that such a tour seemed "unthinkable" in the present day, Love said: "The '60s was a time of unthinkabilities." In his autobiography, Love writes: "I take responsibility for an idea that didn't work. But I don't regret it. I thought I could do some good for people who were lost, confused, or troubled, particularly those who were young and idealistic but also vulnerable, and I thought that was true for a whole bunch of us."

Tour dates

According to David Beard and Keith Badman:
Date
CityCountryVenue
May 3Washington, D.C.United StatesWashington Coliseum
May 3BaltimoreUnited StatesBaltimore Civic Center
May 4New RochelleUnited StatesIona College
May 4PhiladelphiaUnited StatesSpectrum
May 5HartfordUnited StatesBushnell Memorial Hall

Cancelled bookings