The Radiant Radish.

eden ahbez & Brian Wilson.

Hello, it’s Sunday morning and the sun is shining again. I’m going to do some seed planting and garden tidying later. At the moment I am having a cup of tea and listening to the Beach Boys album from 1967 called Smiley Smile. It is an album that was salvaged from the recording of the abandoned Smile project of Brian Wilson. Smiley Smile was a flop by Beach Boy standards when it was first released but it is now regarded by many including me as a minor masterpiece. I’ll tell you why I was reminded of it today.

Last week at the fabulous Robert Plant concert that we went to in Bath, Robert sang a song called Nature Boy. It was one of the highlights of the evening for me. Robert said that there was an interesting story about the writer of the song. 

eden Ahbez & Nat King Cole.

I had heard the song before, it was a big hit in 1948 for Nat King Cole and has been recorded by many other great singers as well, including Frank Sinatra & Ella Fitzgerald. I have been reading about the writer of the song who called himself eden ahbez. (He didn’t use capital letters because he thought only the words God and Infinity should be capitalised). He was born in 1908 and died in 1995 and his lifestyle in California was influential in the hippie movement. He was known to friends simply as ahbe. Living a bucolic life from at least the 1940s, he wore sandals and shoulder-length hair and beard, and white robes. He camped out below the first L in the Hollywood Sign above Los Angeles and studied Oriental mysticism. He slept outdoors with his family and ate vegetables, fruits, and nuts. He claimed to live on three dollars per week. He could be described as a proto-hippy and was decades ahead of his time. 

eden ahbez & his family.

I always thought that the hippies grew out of the Beatniks and were a 60’s phenomenon, but in fact they can be traced back to Germany in the 19^th century. eden ahbez was influenced by the Lebensreform ("life reform”) movement of the late 19th-century and early 20th-century Germany and Switzerland that propagated a back-to-nature lifestyle, emphasizing among others health food/raw food/organic food, nudism, sexual liberation, alternative medicine, and religious reform and at the same time abstention from alcohol, tobacco, drugs, and vaccines. The subject of Nature Boy was one of his best friends who was known as Gypsy Boots. Gypsy Boots (August 19, 1915 – August 8, 2004), born Robert Bootzin, who was an American fitness pioneer, actor and writer. He is credited with laying the foundation for the acceptance by mainstream America of "alternative" lifestyles such as yoga and health food. His books Barefeet and Good Things to Eat and the memoir The Gypsy in Me gained him a cult following.

So, what has this got to do with Brian Wilson and Smiley Smile? Well, when I was looking up eden ahbez I came across a photo of him with Brian Wilson. As a fan of Brian’s since 1964 I was delighted to see this photo. It was taken when eden ahbez attended the sessions for Smile. “What was he doing there?”, I asked myself. I wondered if he might have influenced Brian in some way. There is a song on Smiley Smile called Vegetables. You can hear it below if you want. It is a very simple, charming and unpretentious song. When eden ahbez first arrived in California in 1941 he began playing piano in the Eutropheon, a small health food store and raw food restaurant on Laurel Canyon Boulevard. Brian Wilson became obsessed with health foods himself around the time of the Smile recordings (coincidence?) and opened a health food shop in West Hollywood. called The Radiant Radish. It closed after about two years because Brian had no business sense. While it was open though he could often be seen in there dressed in his bath-robe looking at all the various products.

Anyway, I don’t know if eden ahbez influenced Brian or not, but I have enjoyed reading about him and his lifestyle and especially enjoyed listening to Smiley Smile on this sunny Sunday morning. Now for the garden! See you later.