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Posts Tagged ‘Beach Boys’

Brian Wilson, the Beach Boys, James Watt, Hawthorne High, and the OCS oil and gas program

Posted in energy policy, Offshore Energy - General, Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , on June 13, 2025| Leave a Comment »

“the greatest song ever written” ~ Paul McCartney

Brian Wilson, the music genius who passed away this week, was indirectly connected (sort of) to the OCS oil and gas program.

In 1983, Secretary of the Interior James Watt, whose overzealous approach to offshore oil and gas leasing galvanized opposition, bizarrely banned the Beach Boys from performing at the National Mall 4th of July concert. This stunned Nancy Reagan and almost everyone else in Washington. The Washington Post reported, “a ban on apple pie couldn’t have brought a stronger reaction.”

Congressman George Miller, who later restored the OCS civil penalties program, dropped the names of Beach Boys songs while commenting on the House floor:

‘I was sitting ‘in my room’ ‘all summer long’ saying, “‘Do you remem- ber,’ Mr. Watt, ‘Do you remember’ those ‘Good Vibrations’ from the ‘Fourth of July’ when all we did was ‘dance, dance, dance,’ ‘all summer long’ to the Beach Boys in the ‘spirit of Americas?”” Miller said according to Congressional records. “But ‘help me, Ronald, help, help me Ronald,’ ‘don’t let him run wild.’ And if you cannot do it alone, get help from ‘Barbara Ann.'”

The White House gave Watt a plaster foot with a hole as a symbolic gesture of his mistake. The Beach Boys returned to the National Mall the following, playing in front of a crowd of more than half a million people.

The Beach Boys had another indirect connection to the OCS program in that they attended Hawthorne High with Glenn Shackell, one of our top engineers. Glenn served in Vietnam, studied petroleum engineering at USC, and had an outstanding career in our Pacific Region office. He has an encyclopedic knowledge of oil and gas operations in the Pacific.

Here is a video of Brian Wilson returning to Hawthorne High:

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RIP James Watt

Posted in energy policy, Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on June 9, 2023| 1 Comment »

Per an announcement by his family, former Secretary of the Interior James Watt passed away on May 27. The Washington Post provides a good overview of his tenure at DOI during the Reagan administration.

Watt was an outspoken and controversial figure. His aggressive mineral leasing policies proved not to be in the best long-term interest of the OCS program. As their principal target, Watt became an unintended fundraiser for opponents of energy development.

Watt’s indirect Beach Boys ban, which didn’t sit well with Ronald and Nancy Reagan, was perhaps his best remembered faux pas. Per the WP:

He did not explicitly mention the Beach Boys, but they had performed at previous July 4 events, and the group became the focus of outrage over Mr. Watt’s pronouncement. President Reagan called the interior secretary to the Oval Office and presented him with a plaster foot bearing a bullet hole to humorously — but unambiguously — convey the message that he had shot himself in the foot.

Watt’s hideous and insensitive comment about the composition of the Linowes Commission seemed to be the final straw, and he resigned shortly after he made those comments. The “cripple” in that remark happened to be someone I knew, a highly regarded mineral economist named Richard Gordon who was one of my favorite graduate school professors.

Lots of James Watt jokes circulated during his tenure. One that I found amusing went something like this: James loved baseball and dreamed of someday standing in center field at Yankee Stadium ….. drilling for oil 😀.

RIP Secretary Watt.

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