Pop culture roundup: Brian Wilson and Jeff Beck; Stan Lynde; Neil Innes; Orson Welles

Legendary guitarist Jeff Beck, who has been recording with Brian Wilson, will also join the Beach Boys' mastermind on tour this fall, USA Today reports.

Talking to Beck about Wilson makes clear the latter's profound impact on already-accomplished musicians looking for a new direction in the '60s.

"I needed musical help around 1966, and (the Wilson-helmed Beach Boys masterpiece) Pet Sounds was dressing on a wound for me with all its amazing melodies," says Beck. "I was floored by it. So were The Beatles. It was outrageously adventurous stuff for the ear."

Beck was predisposed to like Beach Boys fare, which often celebrates what remains his passion: building and driving hot rods. "I'd hear that music and it would be an escape from the humdrum life," he says.

Wilson's new album has "the flavor of Pet Sounds," says Beck. "Once you hear it, you'll be whistling the songs for the rest of your life." Wilson says fans can expect "very mellow sounds, soft and sweet."

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Cartoonist Stan Lynde, creator of the "Rick O'Shay" and "Latigo" comic strips, passed away this week at 81.

"Rick O'Shay" began in 1958 and ran for 20 years with an average daily readership of about 15 million people.

 In 1979, he launched another comic strip, "Latigo," which ran through 1983. Lynde died Tuesday in Helena, where he lived with his wife.

 Myron Stanford "Stan" Lynde was born in Billings in 1931 and was raised on a cattle and sheep ranch on Montana's Crow Indian Reservation. His mother gave him crayons and paper and taught him to draw to keep her young son occupied, said Lynde's sister, Lorretta.

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Read a great, funny interview with former Bonzo Dog Band member, Rutle and Monty Python collaborator Neil Innes.

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Footage from a lost, pre-"Citizen Kane" film directed by Orson Welles has turned up in Italy.

The 40 minutes of footage [was] intended to be shown with “Too Much Johnson,” a revival of an 1894 farce that Welles intended to bring to Broadway for the 1938 season of his Mercury Theater.

The cast of “Too Much Johnson” included several members of his Mercury troupe: Joseph Cotten, Arlene Francis, Howard Smith, Edgar Barrier, Mary Wickes and Welles’s wife at the time, Virginia Nicholson, billed under her stage name, Anna Stafford. The music was composed by Paul Bowles (who later wrote “The Sheltering Sky”); legend has it that an aspiring comedian named Judith Tuvim, later Judy Holliday, was one of the extras.

 

...Welles never quite finished editing the large amount of footage he shot for “Too Much Johnson,” and when the show folded out of town, after a disastrous preview in Stony Creek, Conn., he set the film aside and forgot about it.