Sci-Ence! Justice Leak!

And here we come to the last album that will be dealt with in this volume. The story that’s played out over the thirteen years covered in this book is of the battle between two factions of the Beach Boys — on the one hand Carl and Dennis Wilson, pushing for greater artistic progress, and on the other Mike Love and Al Jardine, allied more by their dislike of the Wilsons’ drug- and alcohol-fuelled lifestyles than anything else. Each faction was trying to gain influence over Brian Wilson, and each had allies, but the two factions had been balanced for most of that time, though by this point things were shifting as Carl Wilson had cleaned up the worst excesses of his lifestyle.

Youngblood, Carl Wilson’s second solo album, came out in February 1983, and was the last album to be released before that balance shifted, horribly, with the death by drowning of Dennis Wilson in December that year.

From that point on, the Beach Boys would be following, pretty much exclusively, the vision of Mike Love. Some interesting things have resulted, as we will see in volume three, but the tension between the two factions of the band was over, for good.

So Youngblood is the last album to have been created when the Beach Boys were still the band dealt with in this volume, and it’s a strange one. It’s almost as mediocre as Carl Wilson, but not quite — if nothing else, it’s better sequenced, and the addition of a handful of cover versions gives the album some much-needed energy.

But also, the album benefits from the production of Jeff “Skunk” Baxter, and the combination of Wilson’s live band (who had toured with him during his solo tour in 1981, though he was now back with the Beach Boys) with the session musicians, like Nicky Hopkins and Vinnie Colaiuta, who Baxter was used to working with.

The result is an album that is far more listenable than its predecessor, but is still lacking in ambition — a bunch of very talented people making music that is, ultimately, pointless.

All songs by Carl Wilson and Myrna Smith-Schilling except where noted.

What More Can I Say?

And the album starts as it means to go on, with a song that is essentially as unimaginative as any of those on Carl Wilson, but performed with far more energy and enthusiasm than any of the tracks on that album. The track speeds through as fast as possible, distracting the listener with the rush of the tempo and Baxter’s twiddly, ultra-fast guitar playing, but the production — which is much, much better than anything on the previous album — doesn’t cover up the dullness of the underlying material.

She’s Mine

This is, frankly, the most unpleasant thing ever recorded by a member of the Beach Boys. The lyrics are misogynist as hell — “Don’t ask her she’s mine/She’ll tell you different but she ain’t free”, while the backing track is horrible 80s AOR that could be Survivor, Journey or a million other terrible bands.

The lowpoint — not just of the song, but of Carl Wilson’s entire career — is the second chorus, where he sings — of someone who is supposed to be his girlfriend, mark you, and of whom he’s said earlier “let me supply all the love she needs” — “that bitch can’t help it if she can’t be true”.

“That bitch”.

No more need be said really. This is a song from the point-of-view of a controlling, dominating man who thinks his partner is a “bitch”. Not sung with any Randy Newman style ironic unreliable narration, but with a cock-rocking swagger.

Abysmal.

Givin’ You Up
Songwriters: Carl Wilson, Myrna Smith-Schilling and Jerry Schilling

Jerry Schilling gets a co-writing credit for this, according to Billy Hinsche’s liner notes for the 2010 CD reissue, because he suggested to Carl the idea of “a love affair unselfishly ending and nobody is to blame”. Myrna Smith-Schilling wrote the lyrics, and was apparently unaware that she was writing about the end of her own marriage with Schilling.

In fact, while Schilling’s original idea was to have the affair end “unselfishly”, it’s hard to imagine a more revoltingly egocentric, self-serving song than this — “I gotta admit you were there when I needed, still there’s something I gotta find”, “I’ve outgrown your love”, “In order to find me I’m givin’ you up”. Possibly it’s just the context, coming after the last song, but this sounds almost psychopathically narcissistic.

That said, Wilson sings the song as well as ever.

This was released in a slightly different edit as the B-side to What You Do To Me, and the single edit is a bonus track on the CD reissue.

One More Night Alone
Songwriter: Billy Hinsche

Easily the best track on the album, this was written by Carl’s ex-brother-in-law Billy Hinsche, the Beach Boys’ touring keyboardist.

A slow “big ballad”, it’s based around Hinsche’s electric piano part, and like many piano composers he uses a much richer harmonic vocabulary than guitarists, so the first line of the song has the progression C-Fmaj7-Dm7-Bm7/E-E7/G# — a descending pattern where each chord removes the highest note from the one before while adding notes on the bottom — and then the second line (Am-Am7/G-Fmaj7-F6) does more or less the same in the relative minor. This isn’t particularly clever or original, but it is more interesting than the bulk of the album.

And given decent material, Carl Wilson really shines, turning in his best vocal on the album, starting with an almost-whispered first verse, singing the second in full voice, and straining at the emotional peak on the middle eight.

The song’s far from perfect — the lyrics show signs of rhyming dictionary abuse, the middle eight’s not very well thought out, and there’s a lounge sax solo — but compared to everything before it on the album, this is revelatory. This is what should have been the minimum standard for a Carl Wilson solo album, and it’s pretty shameful it took until the fourth song to reach that standard, but we’re there now.

Billy Hinsche later released a solo version of this on his live CD Bay Of Plenty.

Rockin’ All Over The World
Songwriter: John Fogerty

A straight cover of the Creedence Clearwater Revival original, this adds nothing to what was never an especially original song. If you like three-chord rock songs about rockin’, that rock, then you’ll like this. I don’t, although Nicky Hopkins’ piano solo lifts the track slightly.

What You Do To Me
Songwriters: John and Johanna Hall

This track was the only single from the album, and is a note-for-note cover version of a vaguely Latin-flavoured track from the John Hall Band (led by John Hall, a former member of rock band Orleans, and a Democratic Congressman from 2006 to 2011). The backing track is so similar, in fact, that it sounds closer to a different mix of the same track than to a new recording, though it isn’t.

While there’s nothing of substance to the song, which is just three chords and lyrics like “What you do to me/Feels so heavenly”, the track has an energy to it, though it’s not wonderfully suited to Wilson’s voice.

The single reached number 72 on the US charts, and number 20 in the Adult Contemporary Billboard charts, and stayed in the Beach Boys’ live set for a short while.

Young Blood
Songwriters: Doc Pomus, Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller

One of the most interesting tracks on the album, this is a cover version of an old R&B hit by the Coasters, which had also been recorded by, among others, the Beatles and Leon Russel.

However, while the Coasters’ original plays the song for laughs, here Wilson teases out the creepy, stalkerish undertone of the lyrics — something that isn’t hard to do with lines like “I tried to follow her all the way home/Then things were bad, I met her dad/He said ‘You’d better leave my daughter alone’”. But slowing down the track and emphasising the horns gives it a sinister edge, and then adding in the voice of Barbara Reilly, treated to sound like she’s on the telephone, saying “Who is this?” and getting no response, gives the song a whole different feeling.

Easily the best actual song on the album, this is also the one that has had the most thought given it by far.

Of The Times

This is just nasty. A galumphing AOR track that wouldn’t have been out of place as an album track by Survivor or Foreigner, this is an utterly mediocre song with a straight quiet verse/loud bombastic chorus, along with a screeching solo by Jeff “Skunk” Baxter instead of a middle eight, but what kills it are the lyrics.

This is an attempt at non-specific social comment, and as with all non-specific social comment by big 80s rock stars, its message is ultimately inhuman. The verses talk to someone who is concerned about “the state that the world is in” and that “the dollar won’t buy all the things you need”, but then the choruses say “But who else can you blame for the state of your mentality/If you’re just a part of the times?”

The last couple of verses offer newage (not a typo, rhymes with sewage) platitudes about how positive thinking will allow you to change the future, but fundamentally this is a vile bit of victim-blaming. If someone’s struggling with poverty, then being told by a multi-millionaire that it’s their own fault and that it’d get better if they just think positive thoughts really doesn’t help.

Too Early To Tell
Songwriters: Carl Wilson, Myrna Smith-Schilling and John Daly

More utterly generic rawk, this time a track written as the show opener for Wilson’s solo shows. A duet with Smith-Schilling, there is literally nothing notable about this track, which has lyrics like “It’s time to rock and roll and let it all come out, that’s what it’s all about”. Lots of twiddly fast guitar attempts to cover up a lack of an interesting song.

Even though I’ve only written three sentences about this track, I’ve probably still spent more time writing about it than its composers did writing it.

If I Could Talk To Love

Easily the best of the originals on the album, this is a gentle ballad which unfortunately turns into a power ballad half-way through, but it has more harmonic imagination than any of the other originals on the album, with some nice playing around with major and minor versions of the same chords giving the song a harmonic ambiguity lacking in any of the other originals on either of Wilson’s two solo albums.

The song shows off his voice to better effect than anything else on the album, has a relatively restrained arrangement (at least until the drums kick in at 2:18, bringing 80s ‘sonic power’ along with them), and a very nice, understated, flugelhorn solo by Lee Thomberg that’s far more effective than any of the squealy, twiddly, Skunk Baxter solos on previous tracks.

One might also wonder if, given that this album was written and recorded around the time that Carl Wilson resigned himself to the Beach Boys grinding out the hits and being a nostalgia band, there might be a not-especially-well-hidden subtext in lines like “I put myself into your hands/From this moment on, I make no demands/And if one could talk to love, I’d say/Have it your way, love, have it your way”…

Time

Not the same song as Dennis’ solo song of the same name, this is a three-chord chugging boogie that Billy Hinsche compares, in the liner notes to the CD reissue, to Status Quo. It’s an accurate comparison, but he sees it as a good thing whereas I don’t. After the slow intro, It’s all fast quaver chords on the piano in a rough approximation of Jerry Lee Lewis, but without any of the excitement or danger that one would find in Lewis’ music. A mediocre, forgettable end to a mediocre, forgettable album.