Return to Good-Times Rock

The conga line forms midway through the Beach Boys' second encore, a lilting paean to puberty called California Girls. By the time the song ends, the line has grown to 5,000 teen-agers and is snaking all over Kansas City, Mo. 's Arrowhead Stadium. Turning toward the stage, the churning serpent finds a lion's voice: "Chicago, Chicago!" As 35,000 spectators pick up the chant, seven young men amble onstage to join the Beach Boys for a socko finale. They are the group known as Chicago. With five guitarists, two drummers and a three-piece brass section wailing, the combined bands form a rock juggernaut that quickly transforms the stadium into an enormous, throbbing, outdoor discotheque. The crowd has been on its feet for most of the six-hour concert.

In the entire history of rock, there have been few groups as popular or durable as the Beach Boys and Chicago. Between them they have sold over 65 million records and survived the popularity of scores of psychedelic, protest and glitter groups. For more than a decade, the anthem of-the Beach Boys has been sweet, close harmony, and its gospel essentially nothing more profound than the joys of teen-age love, uncluttered California freeways and the eternal search for the perfect wave. As for Chicago, they are hard-jazz rockers whose first album in 1969 included a taped replay of some of the street violence at the Democratic Convention the year before.

The joining of the Beach Boys and Chicago has turned out to be the event of the burgeoning outdoor rock season. By the end of their twelve-city trek, the double bill will have played to a total audience of 700,000 and grossed an estimated $7.5 million. Though allowances may be recession-tight, and the price of gas high enough to make cruising prohibitive, the kids have poured into town just as though the music were an old-time religion.

Unaffected by the anguish of the recent past, they are waving off hard drugs and hard political lines in favor of good-time music and that oldest of adolescent verities: fun. Gone are the trademarks of yesteryear: denim fatigues, dove-crowned peace flags, bottles of Ripple wine. In their place can be found pastel tennis shoes, American flags and Tab. Many fans come in halter tops for a suntan and to be part of the carnival scene. They just want to dance boogie and sing along. Says Chicago Lyricist Robert Lamm, 30: "These days nobody wants to hear songs that have a message."

American Context. One of the first to detect the trend to conservatism was James William Guercio, 29, a former Mothers of Invention guitarist turned millionaire moviemaker (Electra Glide in Blue). He manages Chicago and occasionally sits in on bass with the Beach Boys. Guercio brought the groups together. Garbed in a baggy football jersey bearing his last name and the numeral 1 and sitting in the living room of his $30,000 mobile home, Guercio tries to explain it all: "The American experience is found in Southern California and the streets of Chicago. These bands sing about youth, love and marriage in an American context. America--it's the common denominator."

Inside the Kansas City stadium where TIME Correspondent David DeVoss caught the show, three acrobats and a high-wire aerialist warmed up the audience. Vaudeville too is a common denominator. The Beach Boys came out first and launched into Sloop John B. Later came Sail On Sailor and Surfer Girl, all close-harmony classics. The Boys broke the aquatic mood by asking the kids to sit down during a reverent a cappella version of Their Hearts Were Full of Spring. Obviously, the avoidance of message was no sweat for the Beach Boys. At their peak, in the early and middle 1960s, it was not necessary to live in California to understand them. Everyone knew what it meant to Be True to Your School, and there was room in every male imagination for a Surfer Girl. The only time the Beach Boys ever took up political topics was in their 1971 album Surfs Up, in which they dabbled in ecology (Don't Go Near the Water) and warned their followers of the perils of mob action (Student Demonstration Time).

Turnabout Play. Chicago invested more in pretest. In early songs they sang out against police brutality, linked Viet Nam and the riot in Watts and protested the student apathy that followed the Kent State killings. Then-1971 album, Chicago Ill. contained a war-casualty poster. Chicago Live at Carnegie Hall came with a chart explaining voter-registration procedures. But the group's message songs have regularly been outnumbered by pulsating instrumentals. Four of Chicago's seven members studied at music schools, and the group's glory has been a classically constructed mix of jazz-rock, rhythm and blues, calypso and country. So it was last week. There was no sitting down while Chicago blasted out such ballads as Saturday in the Park and their new Top 20 record, Old Days.

Rock as a social force may well be dead, but the music itself is getting more varied and lively all the time. Jazz and country, for example, now play as important a part in rock as blues and folk. Anyway, says Lamm, "we always considered ourselves professional musicians, not pop stars or politicians. The world in the past two years has done a 180DEG turn in terms of political expression." Turnabout can be fair play for both performer and listener. Says Beach Boy Mike Love, 34: "We're giving the kids something positive for their money, and it appears that it is working in our favor." As a way of savoring the favor, the Beach Boys will include their own version of Battle Hymn of the Republic on their next album.

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