COLLECTORS WILL BE WINNERS, TOO, WHEN HISTORY-MAKING GEMS FROM THE RIVAL BANDS CROSS THE BLOCK AT HERITAGE
By Christina Rees
There’s a famous 115-year-old bronze sculpture of a Native American on horseback, titled Appeal to the Great Spirit, in front of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston that is hardly associated with its creator, Cyrus Dallin. It is instead associated with the Beach Boys.
Brian Wilson, the band’s resident genius, chose it as the group’s company logo in the 1960s because, as his brother and bandmate Carl has explained, the Wilson brothers’ grandfather felt that there was a spiritual guide who watched over them from the “other side.” Brother Records, the Beach Boys’ recording and holding company, has employed the image of the horseback rider on all of the band’s output for decades, and famously, a bronze edition of the sculpture graced Brother Records’ Los Angeles headquarters from the start, where the band referred to the mascot as “The Last Horizon.” Now this deeply historicized slice of rock-and-roll lore is a highlight in Heritage’s July 19-20 Music Memorabilia & Concert Posters Signature® Auction.
This bronze sculpture was once on display in the entrance to the Beach Boys’ Brother Records office.
The familiar bronze sculpture is just one standout in an event packed with rare and significant memorabilia from the bands that defined the 1960s, the most explosively creative decade of rock and roll, and were often spurred on by each other’s most brilliant work: the Beach Boys, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, Jimi Hendrix and many more. After the Beach Boys’ teen surf-song beginnings, the band’s “Last Horizon” sculpture aptly symbolized Brian Wilson’s evolving wilder impulses and his determination to musically go for broke.
July 19-20, 2024
Online: HA.com/7377
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“I was the person who wrote ‘God Only Knows,’ and here was another person – the person who wrote ‘Yesterday’ and ‘And I Love Her’ and so many other songs – saying it was his favorite,” Wilson once said of the Beatles’ Paul McCartney. “It really blew my mind.” So much so that in response he wrote “Good Vibrations,” one of the most thrilling cuts of all time.
In the mid-’60s, rock and roll was so culturally urgent that the press tried to manufacture a rivalry between the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. But a far more fertile dynamic was brewing across the Atlantic, between the Beatles and the Beach Boys. The Beatles were open about their admiration for the Beach Boys and especially Wilson’s 1965 masterpiece Pet Sounds. It has long been argued that the drastic innovation of Pet Sounds was driven in part by Wilson’s admiration for the more mature direction of the Beatles’ 1965 Rubber Soul and that the experimental bounty of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band was inspired by Wilson’s ambitious work on Pet Sounds. And so on.
While the aborted Beach Boys album Smile and the subsequently released Smiley Smile may well have been influenced by the Beatles’ (and producer George Martin’s) creative bursts, the Beach Boys’ Mike Love insists that after the release of Pet Sounds, the only thing Brian Wilson wanted to top was Pet Sounds. Wilson was so determined to take the Beach Boys into uncharted musical territory that, more than a year before the Beatles conceived of Apple Records, he started Brother Records – a new label that would get the Beach Boys out of their dependence on a more cautious Capitol Records and give Wilson complete freedom.
Joining the Brother Records bronze sculpture in this auction are the fruits of Wilson’s inspiration by the Fab Four’s excellence as well as his own. Among them: an impressive boxed set reissue of The Smile Sessions, released in 2011 and signed by the five members of the group at the time. It and the bronze, along with other Beach Boys treasures in this auction, came from the estate of longtime Beach Boys touring member Jeffrey Foskett. Foskett’s profound relationship with the band is also commemorated by a full-sized Hobie longboard created for the Smile Sessions reissue that’s signed by the band, as well as in-house Beach Boys gifts to Foskett that include a 1966 “Good Vibrations” Platinum sales award and a Gold sales award for the band’s magnum opus Pet Sounds.
On the Fab Four front, Heritage continues to dominate the category with a handful of lots that synthesize the Beatles’ astonishing run. Included is a 1963 band-signed UK first-pressing record sleeve for Please Please Me.
“This is a fantastic vintage album cover for the British Parlophone Records edition of the Beatles’ first LP, autographed beautifully on the reverse by the band members in large, bold script written in fountain pen,” says Garry Shrum, Heritage’s Director of Entertainment & Music Memorabilia. “The band appeared on the ABC TV variety show Big Night Out and signed it for a fan while filming a comedy skit for the show. Most collectors would be hard-pressed to name a Beatles item more desirable than a signed version of their groundbreaking first UK album.”
Other Beatles rarities in the event include an unused ticket to the band’s 1965 Shea Stadium concert and a compact promotional jukebox release of their second album (Capitol took advantage of the Beatles’ popularity by issuing this six-song jukebox EP). A 1966 first-state stereo Butcher Cover is also here (aka Yesterday and Today’s infamously nixed album cover) in very good condition. And speaking of the aforementioned Apple Records – it fell under the umbrella of Apple Corps Ltd, which released via its London boutique limited editions like this 1967 Apple watch designed by Richard Loftus and produced by Old England. The shop closed after a short run and a handful of the watches were retained by Apple and given as gifts to Beatles associates.
CHRISTINA REES is a staff writer at Intelligent Collector.