Page 45 – LIFE

Billy Joel: Just The Way He Is

September 5, 2022August 31, 2022 by Bill Syken

The following is excerpted from LIFE’s new special tribute issue Billy Joel: 50 Years of the Piano Man, available at newsstands and online:

For decades, the principal narrative of Billy Joel’s career has revolved around the fact that in the mid-1990s, at the height of one of the most fruitful and accomplished runs of songwriting in popular music history, he stopped recording new songs. Joel’s final contemporary album, 1993’s River of Dreams (its intentionally prophetic final track is titled “Famous Last Words”), reached No. 1 on the Billboard charts, received four Grammy nominations, and went quintuple platinum. Joel walked away at his peak. Jim Brown leaving the NFL. Steve Martin abandoning stand-up. Garbo renouncing the screen.

Music, though, has a particular virtue. You can’t retell the same jokes indefinitely, nor write the same book twice, nor reenact the very same roles. But you can play the same songs—and exactly the same is what most audiences want—over and over, and people will come to hear them. That’s especially true when the songs are as superb and sturdy as Billy Joel’s are. He performs 25 live shows a year, sometimes more. In 2022, Joel was recognized for having played his 80th consecutive monthly gig (with a pause for COVID, of course) at Madison Square Garden. The show sells out each month, with every decent seat gone within hours of on-sale, and at each show the crowd sings along with every word of every song. A banner with his name and the number 80 was raised to the Garden rafters to hang beside the retired jerseys of great Rangers and Knicks. Madison Square Garden refers to itself as the world’s most famous arena, and Billy Joel is the house band.

Perhaps because he is so beloved and because his old songs have so successfully stood the test of time, and because he is absurdly wealthy and getting wealthier, Joel has expressed no regrets about his career choice. His legion of fans, and his many admiring music industry collaborators, might look at Joel’s 12 albums—an extraordinarily deep 121-song catalog of ballads, bangers, meditations, and mood-enhancers that includes 33 hits and twice that many crowd pleasers—and feel there must still be music left to write. Not Joel. “I thought I’d had my say,” he told Stephen Colbert on The Late Show in 2017. “I just said, ‘Okay, shut up now.’” He still loves writing music, he says, and continues to compose, largely for himself, and mainly classical piano pieces (post–River of Dreams, in 2001, he released a collection of classical compositions, Fantasies & Delusions), but he has never considered a return to pop songwriting. “Elton John says you should put out more albums,” Colbert said during the Late Show sit-down. “Yes, well,” said Joel, “I told him he should put out less.”

Joel’s appeal isn’t complicated: He wrote exceptionally tasteful melodies and sings with an exceptionally resonant voice. He plays a robust and mellifluous piano. He tells stories. His writing leans toward the upbeat, but not incessantly. Joel’s love songs tend to be adoring paeans. They’re often self-deprecating and sometimes come with a dose of carpe diem (“Only the Good Die Young” could be renamed “To His Coy Catholic Mistress”). Conquests are rare. Listeners don’t hear about him laying a divorcée in New York City.

Joel has been openly lovelorn, not only through his lyrics but also in his life. While reporting a piece on Joel for the New York Times in 2002, Chuck Klosterman discovered that his then-single subject was wholly preoccupied by an absence of meaningful romance. “I find myself in the peculiar position of trying to make Billy Joel feel better,” Klosterman wrote. Joel has been married four times (for a total of 30 years and counting) and has three daughters, including two with his current wife, Alexis Roderick. The girls are ages seven and five. Joel is 73. At his daughters’ school, “people think I’m my kids’ grandfather,” Joel has said, thus affording the sweet and marginally plausible suggestion that not everyone around the neighborhood knows who he is.

He is without movie-star looks, and also without pretension or obvious affect. Minimal shtick, maximum relatability. John, with whom Joel has performed dozens of sold-out stadium shows, rose to fame leaping about in fun-house sunglasses, white feathers, and nipple-baring sequined jumpsuits. Joel during his ascent came on stage in blue jeans or slacks, maybe a sport coat, sat down at the piano, and played some killer songs for you. That’s how he does it today. He has lived as a star without shedding his blue-collar, only-human vibe. Not too cool, not too slick. Joel’s nine-year marriage to Christie Brinkley had a revenge-of-the-nerds, Say Anything quality—look who landed an uptown girl!

Joel mines his life for material, which has stamped his storytelling with a clear sense of place. From his first album (Cold Spring Harbor) to his last, local touchstones, drawn from Joel’s New York matrix, bring forth the universal. You may or may not remember those nights hanging out at the Village Green, and you may have never ridden the Staten Island Ferry or cruised the Miracle Mile, but the ideas of them—grounding allusions during times of change—echo everywhere. There was a Brenda and Eddie in your high school class. You know just what it means to be a big man on Mulberry Street.

Still, New York. In addition to his residency at the Garden, Joel played the final concerts at Shea Stadium in 2008. He performed the last show at Long Island’s old Nassau Coliseum in 2015, and the first show when the new Coliseum opened in 2017. (There’s a banner with his name on it hanging from those rafters too.) Back in 1990, Joel was the first rock performer to play Yankee Stadium. He delivered a 23-song set, and the fact that he includes 17 of those songs in his tour repertoire today is not to say that the absence of newly written material determines the makeup of his current shows. Summer 2022 performances by the Rolling Stones and Paul McCartney, as examples, consisted almost entirely of songs written in the 1970s. The folks of many ages who packed stadiums to see Sir Paul were not, with all due respect, there to hear his 2018 ditty “Come On to Me.” They came for “Hey Jude.”

Thousands of devoted fans have attended scores of Joel’s shows. (He’s generated more than $450 million in ticket sales since 2014.) The true faithful tend to be boomers and Gen Xers, though they often have millennial and Gen Z children by their side, and the kids know the words too. They all arrive at Madison Square Garden, with their mutual experience and their respective similarities, to sway and stomp in the aisles, to respond to the familiar cues and to follow the familiar tunes. And for two and half hours with Billy Joel, that’s all there is. He’s their home.

Here is a selection of photos from LIFE’s new special tribute issue Billy Joel: 50 Years of the Piano Man.

Kevin Mazur/WireImage/Getty

Billy Joel performed at Royal Albert Hall in London, 1979.

Gus Stewart/Redferns/Getty

Billy Joel in 1974, the year after he had released his first album for Columbia Records.

Photo by Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images

Billy Joel in 1977 with longtime band members (left to right) Liberty DeVitto, Doug Stegmeyer and Billy Canata.

Michael Ochs Archives/Getty

High-energy live shows like this 1977 performance in New York City have long been an essential aspect of Billy Joel’s appeal.

Michael Putland/Hulton/Getty

In 1978 Billy Joel relaxed during a flight from Austin to Dallas while on tour with his album 52nd Street.

Wally McNamee/Corbis Historical/Getty Images

The gold records were starting to pile up when Billy Joel posed for this portrait at home in 1978.

Michael Putland/Hulton/Getty Images

Billy Joel and his first wife Elizabeth, who was also his manager, at their home in Oyster Bay, Long Island, 1978.

Dick Kraus/Newsday RM/Getty

In 1983 Billy Joel and second wife Christie Brinkley performed on the set of the music video for his song “Uptown Girl.”

Vinnie Zuffante/Michael Ochs Archives/Getty

Billy Joel performed in the music video for “A Matter of Trust,” off his record The Bridge, in 1986.

DMI/The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Howard University: “Every Signal Told Students We Could Be Anything”

August 1, 2024August 25, 2022 by Bill Syken

In 2018 Chadwick Boseman, the star of the Marvel movie Black Panther, delivered a commencement address at Howard University, which he said he had also heard called “Wakanda University,” a reference to the superhero’s African homeland. In his speech the Howard alum credited his education at the historically Black school with instilling in him the standards to steer clear of acting roles that perpetuated negative stereotypes. “I stand here today knowing that my Howard University education prepared me to play Jackie Robinson, James Brown, Thurgood Marshall and T’Challa,” the Class of 2000 member told a new generation of students.

Thurgood Marshall deserves special notice on that list of Boseman’s roles because the former U.S. Supreme Court justice was also a fellow Howard alum. He is among the many notable names on a list of graduates that includes Nobel Prize-winning author Toni Morrison, former U.N. Ambassador Andrew Young, journalist Ta-Nehisi Coates and also Kamala Harris, who has served as Vice President under Joe Biden and who is now campaigning to become President.

In her memoir The Truths We Hold: An American Journey, Harris said that going to Howard was so significant for her because “Every signal told students we could be anything.”

LIFE magazine’s photo essay on Howard University in 1946 captured the very thing Harris talked about—the sense that the students there could do anything. In its Nov. 18, 1946 issue, LIFE took its readers on a tour of of the Washington D.C. campus, which it hailed as “America’s center of Negro learning.”

Documenting the world of Howard was legendary LIFE staff photographer Alfred Eisenstaedt. His photos are wide-ranging, showing students in the classroom, in athletic competition and at leisure, sporting the latest fashions. Eisenstaedt paid special attention to the medical school, which the story touted as a jewel of the university and which remains a highly respected program today. He also showed a meeting of the Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority that Vice President Harris would pledge to in the 1980s, when she was a student.

Howard, founded in 1867, after the end of the Civil War, is named after Oliver O. Howard, a white Union general and proponent of Black education who served as the school’s’ first president.

LIFE concluded its story about Howard by saying that the school’s greatest assets were “its 12,400 alumni, who have installed themselves in positions of authority and respect throughout the nation.” If it was the case in 1946, it is even more true today, as Howard’s trailblazing graduates continue to change the world.

Howard University medical students observed a gall-bladder operation in the amphitheater of Freedman’s Hospital, 1946.

Alfred Eisenstaedt/LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Charles Drew, head of the surgery department at Howard’s medical school, organized and directed the first blood bank for the American Red Cross.

Alfred Eisenstaedt/LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Students filled prescriptions in the pharmacy school at Howard University, 1946

Alfred Eisenstaedt/LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Sophmores worked in a laboratory in the pharmacy school at Howard University, 1946.

Alfred Eisenstaedt/LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Drama students at Howard University, 1946.

Alfred Eisenstaedt/LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Students in the library reading room at Howard University, 1946.

Alfred Eisenstaedt/LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Instructor Gloria Hixon conducted a zoology class at Howard University, 1946.

Alfred Eisenstaedt/LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Alain Leroy Locke, a Harvard graduate and Rhodes scholar, taught philosophy at Howard University, 1946.

Alfred Eisenstaedt/LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Mordecai Wyatt Johnson, the first Black president of Howard, in his office in 1946, when he had been at the job for 20 years.

Alfred Eisenstaedt/LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Sophmore Bill Tolea (center) and other members of the Howard University football team, 1946.

Alfred Eisenstaedt/LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

A scene from a football game between Howard University and Shaw College. 1946.

Alfred Eisenstaedt/LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

A scene from a parade during football game between Howard University and Shaw College, 1946.

Alfred Eisenstaedt/LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Fans at a Howard University football game, 1946.

Alfred Eisenstaedt/LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

A women’s golf practice at Howard University, 1946.

Alfred Eisenstaedt/LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Howard University students at a luncheonette off campus, 1946.

Alfred Eisenstaedt/LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Howard University students, 1946.

Alfred Eisenstaedt/LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Two female students, one in trousers and a coat and the other in pleated skirt and sweater, on the campus of Howard University, Washington DC, 1946.

Alfred Eisenstaedt/LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Howard University students, 1946.

Alfred Eisenstaedt/LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

A meeting of the Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority at Howard University in 1946; Vice President Kamala Harris pledged that sorority when she was a student at Howard in the 1980s.

Alfred Eisenstaedt/LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Students on campus of Howard University, 1946.

Alfred Eisenstaedt/LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Mother Teresa: The Portrait of Christian Charity

August 23, 2022August 18, 2022 by Bill Syken

The following is from the introduction of LIFE’s new special tribute issue Mother Teresa: Her Life and Her Mission. It’s out on the 25th anniversary of her passing and is available at newsstands and online:

In living memory, she is a wizened, weathered figure draped in a simple white sari trimmed in blue, so stooped from long years of hard labor that she seemed smaller than her listed height of five feet. But this was no “little old lady,” no frail object of patronizing sympathy. Far from it. She was rugged, tough as nails, and to the end of her 87 profoundly consequential years on earth in 1997 bore an undimmed glow. That rutted olive-toned face, etched with the sorrows and cares of a suffering humanity, would illuminate in a mesmerizing smile, radiating a spirit, passion, and magnetism that moved nations and generations.

She was, of course, Mother Teresa—winner of the Nobel Prize for Peace, canonized Saint Teresa of Kolkata in 2016. A Roman Catholic nun, she founded the Missionaries of Charity, a religious order that has served the desperately impoverished, the sick, and the dying, among other marginalized groups, since 1950. Twenty-five years after Mother Teresa’s death, the order numbers nearly 5,000 missionary sisters spread over more than 600 locations in more than 130 countries, not to mention an army of priests and lay volunteers who pitch in around the world. “Thanks to her work with the ‘poorest of the poor,’ as she put it,” notes Father James Martin, S.C., a Jesuit priest who collaborated with the Missionaries of Charity in Jamaica, “Mother Teresa became a kind of shorthand for Christian charity in the 20th century.”

She was an unlikely international icon—an overused term, perhaps, but surely apt in her case. Born Agnes Bojaxhiu in 1910 to a bourgeois Albanian businessman and his wife in Skopje, now the capital of North Macedonia, she was bright and pious—like her mother, from whom she learned generosity to the less fortunate—but seemingly an otherwise unremarkable girl. Early on, though, Agnes did feel an unusually strong call to religious service, rooted in deep devotion to Jesus Christ, along with a fascination with missionary work in India that intensified in adolescence. At 18, after some anguished deliberation, she joined the Loreto order, Dublin-based nuns with a team of sisters working in Kolkata (the city then called Calcutta). Taking the name Teresa, she bravely left her beloved home and family for good.

For two decades Teresa taught school while bringing supplies and solace to Kolkata’s slums, working in total obscurity—indeed, you’d be hard-pressed to find a photograph of her taken in the 1930s or ’40s. The story might well have ended there. But in September 1946 she experienced a strange epiphany—a direct call from Jesus, she said—to start an entirely new religious order, one that would minister to society’s forgotten men, women, and children, the abject, the diseased, those living and dying in the streets while others looked away.

With relentless zeal, Mother Teresa pressed the church hierarchy—and finally won approval to launch her order, known as the Missionaries of Charity. She required of her sisters only what she demanded of herself, a vow “to devote themselves out of abnegation to the care of the needy who, crushed by want and destitution, live in conditions unworthy of human dignity.” The expressed purpose of the order was to serve the poor by living among them, sharing in their experience, treating each tortured soul with kindness—and, even in the direst circumstances, exuding good cheer. “Let every action of mine,” she often said, “be something beautiful for God.”

To a privileged Westerner who recoils at a dirty public restroom or a homeless person on the subway, Mother Teresa’s idea of beauty might be unimaginable. She and her sisters got right down in it, wiping up excrement, cleaning maggots out of indigents’ open sores, caressing broken bodies as they took their last breaths. In the early days, the sisters would roam the city begging for money and food, for themselves as well as their wretched clientele. “There were times during the first three or four months,” Navin Chawla, one of Mother Teresa’s biographers told Time, “when she’d be humiliated, and tears would be streaming down her cheeks.”

But the fervent girl from Skopje kept at it, attracting followers and patrons, growing her order exponentially. Mother Teresa started hospices so the terminally ill could die “a beautiful death”; with little, if any, regard for their own safety and health, she and her missionaries cared for the blind and disabled, orphaned children and abandoned aged, alcoholics, drug addicts, and prostitutes looking to turn their lives around. Over the decades, she rushed to aid victims of epidemics, famines, and disasters, both natural and manmade, all over the world—including regions reduced to rubble by war.

What makes Mother Teresa’s accomplishments all the more remarkable is that, while harboring a fierce love of Jesus, she spent the latter half of her life wondering if those feelings were unrequited. Private writings—published after her death in Come Be My Light, a 2007 book by Father Brian Kolodiejchuk, who had been assigned to make the case for Mother Teresa’s sainthood—revealed a persistent sense that God had abandoned her. And yet she never wavered from her life’s work, which at times required the skills of a diplomat, general, or CEO. “Along with her faith, Mother Teresa brought a remarkable capacity for hard work, an ability to inspire people—not just her sisters, but Christians around the world—and a great talent for organization,” says Father Martin. “She was also no fool when it came to fundraising and enlisting people’s support, all on behalf of the poor. She was as ‘gentle as a dove and as wise as a serpent,’ again, for the poor and the sick whom she served. And if that sounds cagey, it shouldn’t: It’s what Jesus asked of his disciples in the Gospel of Matthew.”

She drew her share of criticism. She was a hard-line religious conservative, vehemently against abortion and contraception (hardly surprising for a Catholic nun), and held extremely traditional views on the role of women. At times, she accepted donations from questionable sources, and conditions in some of her facilities were found wanting. But these are minority opinions, and Mother Teresa’s reputation remains secure. In 1985, AIDS was still very much a disease with unknown implications. Many were dying, and the illness was highly stigmatized. That year, Mother Teresa opened a 14-bed hospice for terminally ill AIDS patients in Greenwich Village. She carried on her mission through some of modern history’s most tumultuous decades, roiled by political and social upheaval, stained by cataclysmic wars both hot and cold. She was one of the culture’s few constants, her persona as unvarying as her wardrobe. And though she was constantly showered with accolades, she never lost her essential humility and humanity.

It’s tempting to imagine Mother Teresa in recent years, as the world grappled with a global health crisis, European cities were turned to rubble, and other calamities unfolded. No doubt the intrepid nun would be right in the thick of things. In an era upended by technology, would she post inspirational memes on Twitter? Earn the exalted title of influencer?

This much is clear: In the quarter century since masses of mourners watched Mother Teresa’s body borne through the streets of Kolkata, no one has come close to filling her battered, famously ill-fitting sandals.

Here is a selection of images from LIFE’s new special tribute issue, 25 years later: Mother Teresa: Her Life and Her Mission.

Michael Collopy

Agnes Bojaxhiu, the future Mother Teresa, circa 1920, with her parents and brother on her day of confirmation.

Photo by Vittoriano Rastelli/Corbis via Getty Images

Famines had made life in Kolkata so dire in 1943 that corpse removal trucks like this one would travel the streets to remove the dead.

Bettmann/Getty Images

Mother Teresa, a Roman Catholic nun and founder of a religious order knows as the MIssionaries of Charity, at a hospice for the destitute and dying in Kolkata, 1969.

Terry Fincher/Hulton Archive/Getty Images

Mother Teresa in Belfast, Northern Ireland, where she had come to start a mission in 1971.

Peter Kemp/AP/Shutterstock

Mother Teresa in Beirut in 1982, with one of the 37 mentally handicapped children who were being moved from a hospital that had been bombed to a Missionaries of Charity school there.

Alexis Duclos/AP/Shutterstock

Mother Teresa at a pro-life rally in Canada, 1988.

Bernard Weil/Toronto Star via Gerry Images

Pope John Paul II visited the hospice founded by Mother Teresa in Kolkata, 1986.

Francois Lochon/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images

In 1995 Mother Teresa celebrated in Kolkata after nuns completed their ten years of training to join her order.

Linda Schaefer/Moment Editorial/Getty Images

Here’s Some Old-Time Texas Football For You

August 23, 2022August 16, 2022 by Bill Syken

The photos from the practices of the St. Mary’s Rattlers don’t look like your ordinary football photos, and there’s a reason for that. A few of them really.

The photos were taken by legendary LIFE photographer Alfred Eisenstaedt back in 1939, so the passage of time is certainly an issue. But even for football photos of that era, the look is unusually antique. The sparseness of the San Antonio setting also adds to their distinctive feel. But another factor is the unique background of the St. Mary’s squad.

LIFE visited St. Mary’s at a time when the football program was on the rise, and also on the rebound from extinction. The school has disbanded football from 1931 to 1935 during the depths of the Great Depression, and the team made its return largely thanks to entirely to the entrepreneurial spirit of a local oilman named John “Mose” Sims. Simms instigated the team’s return, and his role might be described as a hybrid between a coach, athletic director and booster gone wild. According to the school’s history of the team, “Simms would negotiate a deal with the University where he would field football and basketball teams in return for tuition, dormitory space and books for players.”

Sims also had the instincts of a showman, and it was his idea to dress the team in gaudy red-white-and-blue uniforms in honor of the Texas state flag, even though the school’s colors were blue and gold. (The team’s return in 1936 coincided with the Texas centennial). His attention-getting tactics clearly worked on the editors of LIFE, which devoted a couple pages on St. Mary’s in its Oct. 14, 1939 issue, right a feature on Alabama in a section on college football. The story, headlined “St. Mary’s of Texas Knows How to Round Up a Good Team” played to the image of the rugged Texan cowboy by showing Simms recruiting a steer-wrestler. (The story writer, lacking a crystal ball, did not mention what would become the most historic aspect of St. Mary’s football, which is that one of the programs early coaches was future president Dwight D. Eisenhower).

While LIFE declared that the school was “well on its way to becoming a national power,” the St. Mary’s football program did not last. Simms’ time with the team ended after the 1940 season, and while the Rattlers gave it another go in 1941, football ended with the start of World War II. Today the University competes in 12 sports, but football is not one of them.

The ephemeral nature of the program only adds to the particular mystique of Eisenstaedt’s photos. Instead of being part of a continuum—Alabama football, then and now—they represent a specific time and place, one where the uniforms were flamboyant, the landscape was sparse, and the athletes were young and lean. These pictures are what it would look like if you were trying to capture the essence of the sport of football when it was a lanky teenager, just starting to come into itself.

St. Mary’s football practice, San Antonio, 1939.

Alfred Eisenstaedt/LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

St. Mary’s football team, San Antonio, 1939.

Alfred Eisenstaedt/LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

John Simms, the coach and creator of St. Mary’s football in the 1930s.

Alfred Eisenstaedt/LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Henry Tutor, a St. Mary’s football player, worked as cowboy on home cattle ranch in Texas, 1939.

Alfred Eisenstaedt/LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

St. Mary’s football practice, San Antonio, 1939.

Alfred Eisenstaedt/LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

St. Mary’s Football Team, San Antonio

Alfred Eisenstaedt/LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Saint Mary’s football team practice, San Antonio, 1939.

Alfred Eisenstaedt/LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Saint Mary’s Football Team

Alfred Eisenstaedt/LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Saint Mary’s football team practice, San Antonio, 1939.

Alfred Eisenstaedt/LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

St. Mary’s football team practice, San Antonio, 1939.

Alfred Eisenstaedt/LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

St. Mary’s football practice, San Antonio, 1939.

Alfred Eisenstaedt/LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

The Saint Mary’s football team lived in an unfinished qymnasium, 1939.

Alfred Eisenstaedt/LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

The team bus for St. Mary’s football, 1939.

Alfred Eisenstaedt/LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

The Saint Mary’s team bus parked outside the school, San Antonio, 1939.

Alfred Eisenstaedt/LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

The Beach Boys: From Surf Stardom to Musical Revolution

August 11, 2022 by Bill Syken

The following is adapted from the introduction to LIFE’s newly released special issue The Beach Boys: The Music, The Life, The Good Vibrations, available at newsstands and online:

The year was 1963, and the Beach Boys were already making waves with hits such as “Surfin'” and “Surfin’ U.S.A.”

Then one day Brian Wilson, the band’s co-founder and leading visionary, was driving when he screeched his car to the side of the road and cranked the volume on his AM radio.

Crackling through the static came Ronnie Spector’s voice, dripping in echo atop a lush dream of overlaid pianos, horns, castanets, and strings. She was singing, “Be my little baby, say you’ll be my darling, be my baby now.”

Sitting behind the wheel, Brian, then 21 years old, locked into a tune like never before.

“I went, ‘My, god, wait a minute, no way!’” he remembered. “It was like getting your mind revamped. It’s like, once you’ve heard that record, you’re a fan forever.”

The Ronettes’ “Be My Baby,” released in August 1963, epitomized the grandeur and aspirations of a handful of young pop-music auteurs. Ronnie sang, with equal parts sweetness and smokiness, a song written to capture the blooming age of the teenager. Phil Spector produced it to eclipse that age. In the decades ahead, the song would influence artists as diverse as Bob Seger and Lana Del Rey. But first, and most important, it cast its spell on Brian Wilson.

When “Be My Baby” came out, the Beach Boys were already stars. Brian, along with brothers Dennis and Carl, cousin Mike Love, and neighborhood pal Al Jardine were providing the soundtrack to a national surf craze. The pop classics they had put on the radio would already have been enough to make a mark on music history.

But when Brian heard “Be My Baby,” it pushed the Beach Boys to redraw the boundaries of their music, and of rock and roll. Spector’s sound inspired Brian’s lavish productions and layered harmonies with his bandmates. In a few short years, they would graduate to songs that contained symphonies and albums organized by master plan. They were on their way to creating their masterpiece album Pet Sounds and singles such as “Good Vibrations” that would expand the possibilities of what popular music could be. Their art and craft would in turn influence the Beatles, the Who, Pink Floyd, and countless others.

Through the decades, the Beach Boys would flourish and flounder and face moments of tragedy and strife. They would also be appreciated, finally, as architects of innovation and experimentation, as well as the creators of many awesome pop hooks. It’s a story with more layers than music fans would have expected when they accepted that first invitation to come on a surfin’ safari with the Beach Boys.

The story is from LIFE’s new special issue The Beach Boys: The Music, The Life, The Good Vibrations. Here are a selection of photos from that issue.

Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images

The Beach Boys joined Capitol Records for their first major-label deal in 1962. The group then included (left to right): Brian Wilson, Carl Wilson, Dennis Wilson, David Marks and Mike Love. Marks briefly performed with the group until he was replaced with the return of founding member Al Jardine..

Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images

The Beach Boys posed with a Corvette in their first photo session since Al Jardine returned to the band in Novermber 1963. From left to right: Brian Wilson, Jardine, Dennis Wilson, Carl Wilson, and Mike Love.

Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images

The Beach Boys (Brian Wilson, Mike Love, Dennis Wilson, Al Jardine and Carl Wilson) posed with Ed Sullivan after performing on his variety show in 1964.

Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images

The Beach Boys performed on The Andy Williams Show in 1965.

Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images

The Beach Boys in 1975, as the band headed into a turbulent period in which Brian Wilson would struggle with psychological demons and Mike Love would assert control over the group.

RB/Redferns/Getty Images

This 1990s version of the Beach Boys featured Al Jardine, Carl Wilson, Bruce Johnston, Brian Wilson and Mike Love.

L. Cohen/WireImage/Getty Images

Brian Wilson performed in 2006, during the ceremony for his induction into the UK Music Hall of Fame.

Samir Hussein/Getty Images

There’s Quaint, and Then There’s a Story on Phone-Obsessed Teens from 1956

August 23, 2022August 10, 2022 by Bill Syken

In 2022 teenagers spending an average of seven hours a day engaged with their screens. There’s plenty of reason to wonder why this is ruinous—addictive algorithms, the highs and lows of being liked or ignored on social media, and so on.

But a LIFE photo essay from 1956 shows that while the power of the cellphone is new, the phenomenon of teenagers being addicted to phones goes back to the days of the rotary dial.

In 1956 LIFE staff photographer Grey Villet shot a photo essay documenting the teenage obsession with telephones. The subject was timely back them because the 1950s were the decade in which in became landlines became more common than not in American homes. Then as now, teenagers loved to use phones to connect with their friends.

Villet’s essay never ran in the magazine, so we don’t know much about the people in the story, including where they lived or their exact age. But Villet shot enough pictures of them away from home to confirm that they were high school students.

The details of their lives are secondary, though, to the landline era that Villet captured so vividly.

There’s the picture of a teenaged girl running down the stairs after her little brother has answered the phone. The photo captures the particular panic of a personal call being intercepted by a nosy sibling in the same home.

Another picture shows mother trying to wrest the receiver from a daughter who has been tying up the line. And another of a brother popping into her room, presumably checking to see when she will be done.

But Villet’s piece de resistance is a photo sequence of a teenage girl in her room, going through physical contortions over the course of a long phone conversation. She is on her back, then flipped over, legs akimbo. And then she slides halfway off the bed, and then all the way down to her floor. If George Balanchine had choreographed a ballet titled “Teenage Girl Talks on Phone, 1956” this is what it would look like.

That was all decades ago, and now the percentage of households with landline only is in the low single digits. Since 2014 households with only cellphones became the most common sort.

The most hilariously dated aspect of Villet’s 1956 essay is not the sight of an entire household sharing a phone that performs no additional functions. It’s the photos that Villet took of the kids outside the house. We see them at a basketball game, trying on a dress at a store, and at a school dance. It’s not clear exactly what the point of those shots was meant to be back then, but what stands out now is that these kids are enjoying all kinds of activities without a cellphone in sight.