Brian Wilson, Van Dyke Parks and the Smile You Send Out – Part 3: Smile!
(Before I start – today’s Big Finish A Week will be delayed until tomorrow. I’d already got most of this post done, and I’ve been promising the Superman one for four days, and I’m incredibly busy today.)
I was there when Smile was announced.
After Orange Crate Art and I Just Wasn’t Made For These Times Brian Wilson continued to make an incredible artistic recovery. In 1996 he worked on two Beach Boys projects – one, an album of new material written by Wilson and Andy Paley, only had two songs completed before the Beach Boys’ squabbling killed the project, but the demos suggested a renewed creativity on Wilson’s part (though some have claimed that Paley had more input than Wilson to several of the best songs).
The second Beach Boys project he worked on in 1996 at least came out – but that’s about all you can say for it. Stars & Stripes Vol 1 was an album co-produced by Wilson and bemulleted fool Joe Thomas, where various country singers (of the terrible variety you get on country radio for the most part – Toby Keith, Lorrie Morgan, Kathy Troccoli) sang old Beach Boys hits. It wasn’t completely terrible – in fact Junior Brown’s 409 and Willie Nelson’s The Warmth Of The Sun were two of the best tracks the band had done in twenty years – but for the most part it was unlistenable dreck. It’s incredibly sad that it’s the last ever Beach Boys album – they deserve better than to be remembered like that.
However, for some reason Wilson continued to work with Joe Thomas, who seemed to be positioning Wilson for an ‘Adult Contemporary’ audience, and in 1998 they released Wilson’s second solo album of new material – Imagination. It was, frankly, awful. There were four very good tracks, and the rest… well, suffice it to say that it was considered appropriate for Brian Wilson to be collaborating with both Jimmy Buffet and Jim Peterik from Survivor (the band that did Eye Of The Tiger).
But that album had a remarkable effect – Brian Wilson, who hadn’t willingly toured in thirty years, started touring to promote it. And the band he put together was stunning – based around LA powerpop band the Wondermints, it also included Scott Bennett and Paul Mertens (two excellent session musicians who’d worked on Imagination), vocalist Taylor Mills, and Jeff Foskett, a singer who’d covered Brian’s parts on stage for the Beach Boys for many years. (There were a few other members, but that’s the core group – other people who’ve been in the band at one time or another include Todd Sucherman, Jim Hines, Bob Lizik, Andy Paley and Nelson Bragg.)
That band were astonishing – capable of reproducing every note of Wilson’s incredibly complex music, and almost all multi-instrumentalists (in a typical show Probyn Gregory of the Wondermints might play guitar, trumpet, french horn, tannerin and keyboards as well as singing). The first live shows the band did were revelatory – while Wilson was not in great voice (and Foskett ended up doubling most of his lines in those early shows, as Wilson would forget lines or miss notes so Foskett was a safety net), his enthusiasm was palpable, and the band were clearly the best possible collaborators he could have. The shows got longer and longer, and they added in more and more obscure material, until by 2002 they were doing the entire Pet Sounds album, six songs from Smile, obscure songs from Friends, Carl And The Passions and The Beach Boys Love You, songs like Til I Die and still doing a good selection of the hits as well. (Unfortunately, since 2004 the setlists have become less and less interesting, to the point where now Mike Love’s touring ‘Beach Boys’ do a significantly more interesting set). They released several live albums and DVDs, and in 2004 Brian released a new solo album, Gettin’ In Over My Head, which while far from perfect was a *good* album (mostly made up of songs from the unreleased Andy Paley collaboration or from his unreleased 1989 solo album Sweet Insanity, rerecorded with the new band).
But still nothing could prepare anyone for the day when in 2003 at a small gig (not a Brian Wilson gig) with about thirty or so people in attendance, Jeff Foskett announced that he’d been asked to put together a half-hour suite based on Smile for the band to perform the next year.
As it turned out, Foskett was exaggerating his own importance to the new work. It was Darian Sahanaja – the Wondermints’ keyboardist and the band’s musical director – rather than Foskett the frontman who was asked to piece together the new Smile. But, crucially, he didn’t do it alone. Acting as Wilson’s assistant, he merely helped Brian sequence the new piece.
Shortly after this, Van Dyke Parks was brought in to provide lyrics where they hadn’t been completed in 1967, and the project moved toward actually completing the promised album from nearly 40 years ago. In the later stages Wilson’s horn player Paul Mertens also added some very Parksian string arrangements that tied together different leitmotifs from throughout the album, creating links between songs and generally giving the project a feeling of cohesion.
While Brian very nearly didn’t go through with actually performing Smile, because it brought back so many memories of a very unhappy time in his life and was linked with many of his mental problems, when he did perform it it was near-unanimously hailed as a masterpiece (with a few exceptions among those who had spent decades of their own lives creating theories about what Smile ‘would have been’ – some of whom, being proved wrong, either decided they had wasted their lives or that the finished version was created by some evil conspiracy out to use Brian).
So, after all that anticipation, what was the Smile they completed?
The finished album was in three movements, patterned after the structure of Rhapsody In Blue ( a piece which Wilson has described as the soundtrack to his life). The first movement had few surprises – it started with Our Prayer, a brief pastiche of Bach’s choral music, before going into a snippet of Gee by The Crows, and then into an extended version of Heroes & Villains. This movement, which then ran through several short bits of songs that had all originally spun out of the Heroes & Villains melody, before ending up with CabinEssence, combined the story of one man’s life in the Old West with the story of the journey of European settlers across North America, going from Plymouth Rock and ending up at the Grand Coulee Dam.
The first movement was extremely good – featuring two of the best songs Wilson and Parks ever wrote, that’s unsurprising – but the third movement was merely quite good. Wilson has spoken of the third movement as being added later, separate from the original conception of the album, and it shows – it’s a collection of little snatches and songs that don’t really belong together, much like side two of Abbey Road. The core of it seems to be the material originally intended for the ‘Elements’ section of Smile, but other bits have been thrown in, seemingly more because they had to be fitted in than because they fit. Having said that, some parts are still stunning – the segue from Mrs O’ Leary’s Cow (Fire) into In Blue Hawaii (Water) is beautifully done. Using the ‘water chant’ recorded in 1967 (and used in the 1971 Beach Boys song Cool Cool Water), they added a new lead vocal line, singing in free tempo over the top:
Is it hot as hell in here or is it me?
It really is a mystery
If I die before I wake
I pray the Lord my soul to take my misery
I could really use a drop to drink
Somewhere in a placid pool and sink
Feel like I was really in the pink
It’s clever, it adds a whole new interesting layer to the music, and it works in context wonderfully.
But the thing that makes the album – the literal centrepiece and the part that turns it from a good album into possibly the best album ever released – is the second movement.
The second movement is bookended by the two best songs from Smile – which is to say, the two best songs ever written – Wonderful and Surf’s Up. Wonderful is a beautifully oblique story of a girl’s loss of virginity – and loss of innocence generally – with a melody that’s a third cousin of the melody for Heroes & Villains, and a story that’s not too unlike She’s Leaving Home:
Farther down the path was a mystery,
Through the recess, the chalk and numbers,
a boy bumped into her one, one, wonderful
But unlike the Beatles song, here the girl returns to her parents and is accepted by them:
All fall down and lost in the mystery
Lost it all to a non-believer
And all that’s left is a girl
Who’s loved by her mother and fatherShe’ll return in love with the mystery
Never known as a non-believer
She’ll sigh and thank God for one, one, wonderful
While Surf’s Up (the song I posted a video of in the first of these posts) is more oblique yet, a torrent of imagery that keeps nearly coalescing into meaning before going off again:
A diamond necklace played the pawn,
Hand in hand some drummed along
To a handsome man and batonThe music hall a costly bow
The music all is lost for now
To a muted trumpeter’s swanColumnated ruins domino
Canvas the town and brush the backdrop
Are you sleeping?
These two songs had been known for nearly forty years, though. The fact that the album featured extremely good performances of them didn’t matter – we already had several extremely good performances of them by either Wilson solo or the Beach Boys as a band to choose from.
What mattered was the end of Wonderful, where suddenly it segued into a song that had previously only been known as an instrumental, but is now known as Song For Children. With one line – “Maybe not one, maybe you too , are wondering, wondering who, wonderful you” – we went into unknown territory. The two songs that followed (Song For Children and Child Is Father Of The Man ) had been known as separate instrumentals, one with a brief chant for a chorus that was also used as the tag to Surf’s Up. In their 1960s incarnations, those songs were plink-plonk dull instrumentals with not much to them.
Suddenly, with the addition of lead vocals (and additional backing vocals, so that in Song For Children we have a ‘child is father of the son/sun’ to mirror the ‘father of the man’ later on) those songs worked as songs. Chuck Britz, the engineer on most of the Beach Boys’ 60s records, once spoke about how he’d heard some harmonies from the band that sounded terrible, and he’d told Brian so – Brian had immediately added the one extra vocal line, and it had sounded great, and Britz had never criticised his arrangements again. In the case of the middle of Smile, that process was repeated on a much bigger scale.
With the addition of the lead vocals, and sequenced correctly, these songs went from being forgettable bits of noodling into integral parts of a tightly-structured longer piece which is infinitely better than the sum of its parts – and like I said, the parts include probably the two best songs ever written. Hearing this piece for the first time, and knowing that I’d had access to more than 90% of the actual music in it before in pieces, once I got over the shock of how beautiful it was, I felt like Huxley reading Darwin – “How extremely stupid not to have thought of that!”
So by 2004, we knew that Brian had conquered his demons enough to complete an album he couldn’t complete in 1967. We knew he was still capable of putting those pieces together in extraordinary ways, and that he could fill in the gaps well. At the time, I thought Smile was going to be the capstone of his career, that he’d probably not do anything more – because how could he possibly top that? I assumed he was going to retire, and it was a good place to bow out.
Because how could he possibly follow that?
On LibDemmery
For those of you who are waiting for them, you can expect an influx of posts tonight/tomorrow. My local comic shop didn’t have any copies of Final Crisis: Superman Beyond , so I am venturing into the murky depths of Forbidden Planet. Pray for me. This means that that review will be tonight. I’ve also got the next piece on Brian Wilson halfway written, and I’ll be doing the usual Big Finish post tomorrow too.
But for now I want to talk about politics. Alix at The People’s Republic of Mortimer wrote a post yesterday which touched on some things I wanted to say about the Liberal Democrats.
I actually agree with almost everything she says – and yet I still think she’s wrong. For those of you who don’t follow this stuff, the Liberal Democrats (the party of which I am a member) recently put out a document called Make It Happen, full of pictures of Our Dear Leader looking as dishy as he can make himself, and full of very short sentences about it being ‘time for a change’.
Now, in this document, the phrase ‘ordinary families’ occurs to the point of obsession, and I absolutely agree with Ms Mortimer that the repetition of this phrase is both wildly irritating and smacks of illiberalism – what of the extraordinary? What of those who aren’t families at all?
I absolutely hate that kind of wording – I’m married, but I wouldn’t consider my wife and myself a ‘family’, we’re a couple, and I don’t think either of us would be less entitled to respect were we single – and it worries me, but I think on the whole it’s the right thing to be doing at the moment.
I didn’t vote for Nick Clegg, and I’m on the left of the party and not really keen on the Orange Bookers who currently have most of the power in the parliamentary party, some of whom seem quite eager to become a third Conservative party to go with the two we’ve already got [Edit April 2009 ignore that - I was talking crap], but one thing which almost persuaded me to vote for Clegg – and which I singled out at the time – is his ability to put liberal values into the language of the Mail and the Express without compromising those values.
I’ve argued for a while now that we need to be trying to get votes from the Tories, not from Labour, because the Tories are going to win the next election and Labour lose no matter what we do. Even did I not personally (slightly) prefer Labour to the Tories, I would still argue pragmatically that it is better for the party to have the Conservative majority be as small as possible, and so we should concentrate on winning seats in Tory marginals (the Labour marginals should fall to us anyway – they’re low-hanging fruit). If we can’t win the next election – and realistically we can’t – we can try to push for a hung parliament where we would be the balance of power.
Now, documents like Make It Happen, repulsive as I find the way they’re phrased, work perfectly for attracting Tory voters. I would like us to be able to reframe the terms of debate in this country, but right now the vast majority of people aren’t reading the Independent or Guardian – they’re reading the Mail or the Sun. If we can convince them to support liberal positions – without changing those positions, just the way they’re presented – then I think that’s a wholly good thing. Make It Happen doesn’t seem to have been aimed at me or Ms Mortimer – we’re already on-side.
It’s only if the change in rhetoric becomes a change in policy that we have to worry – and indeed I am worried about that – but the actual policies in the document make sense. I think we’ve already got most of the extraordinary on side – and with an activist base as full of bisexuals, transsexuals, poly people, goths and large men with beards as ours is, I don’t think it’s ever likely that they will not be catered to – we need to get the ordinary families on side too…
Linkblogging for 29/08/08
Hmph. Comics didn’t come out over here yesterday because of the Bank Holiday. I was looking forward to wearing 3D glasses on the bus home. Comic reviews tonight (and maybe more Beach Boys too).
In what little spare time I have, I play around with Inform 7, a programming language for creating text adventure games. Emily Short once again posts some interesting thoughts about using that language well…
Vote the Americawesome Party. A stegosaur with a cut-out guitar is much better than a donkey or elephant.
Bobsy at the Mindless Ones continues his use of the I Ching to divine the villain in the latest Batman storyline. (When did stories change from ‘lines’ to ‘arcs’, BTW? And are we ever going to have story-tangents?)
More on Morrison – a pretty good interview with him is up at IGN, while David at Vibrational Match continues his issue-by-issue look at The Filth, and Jog reviews the Superman comic I haven’t read yet.
Nice interview with Pierre Boulez here. I’ve always been meaning to get more into Boulez – I’ve got some of his piano works, but given he’s had a 60 year career, I really should have more…
Linkblogging for 28/08/08
I’m gearing up, 3D-glasses at the ready, to review Final Crisis: Superman Beyond tonight. In the meantime, some links…
Fred Van Lente interviewed by Comics Should Be Good – one of the very few times I’ve read an interview with a comics writer whose name isn’t Moore or Morrison where the questions asked are intelligent ones about which the writer can actually talk…
Eddie Campbell reviews Red Coloured Elegy, a Japanese graphic novel from 1970.
Gavin Burrows reviews Dark Knight
And that’s about it. It’s been quiet…
Brian Wilson, Van Dyke Parks and the Smile You Send Out – Part 2: Orange Crate Art Is A Place To Start
After 1967, Van Dyke Parks and Brian Wilson went their own ways, musically. Brian Wilson’s mental health continued to deteriorate, and his presence on Beach Boys albums became less and less. However, for the next seven years this wasn’t too much of a problem, musically. Brian would come up with a couple of great songs for every album, the rest of the band would dig up and finish off some Smile-era fragments, and the other band members would write a song or two each (Brian’s brother Dennis became a particularly strong songwriter at this time). The result was that the run of albums from 1967′s Smiley Smile through 1974′s The Beach Boys In Concert is as good a collection of music as you could hope to find – beautiful Brian Wilson songs like Sail On Sailor (actually his one collaboration with Van Dyke Parks in this period) Surf’s Up, ‘Til I Die or Busy Doin’ Nothing alongside non-Brian songs like All This Is That, Cuddle Up, The Trader and Disney Girls (1957).
However, while this period was an artistic success, it was a commercial disaster for the band. While these albums are without exception wonderful, they are almost unknown except among the hard-core fanbase of the band. Meanwhile, a compilation of their early surf-cars-and-girls hits, Endless Summer sold approximately a quintillion copies, leading to a lot of people turning up to a Beach Boys gig expecting to hear Be True To Your School and instead getting a lot of men with very long beards singing about transcendental meditation with jazz flute solos.
Clearly this could not last, and quickly the band turned into the nostalgia party band it became for the next thirty years – Hawaiian shirts, God Bless America and we’ll have fun fun fun til daddy takes the lawyers away. And part of that was, roughly every two years between 1975 and 1992, to declare “Brian is back!”, and wheeling out a quarter-baked album of songs by someone who obviously had neither the ability nor the interest to write a competent song any more. At worst, they would also drag the poor man (who had horrible stage-fright, as well as his other mental problems) on stage, where he would stare vacantly and pound random keys on his piano. During this time, the Beach Boys produced one good album – LA (Light Album) without Brian’s active involvement, more or less by accident, while Brian himself created two worthwhile albums – 1977′s The Beach Boys Love You (a solo album in all but name, and an absolute masterpiece – it sounds like Tom Waits singing Jonathan Richman songs, accompanied by J.S. Bach playing a Moog set on ‘fart sounds’) and 1988′s solo Brian Wilson (an album dominated by synths and terrible lyrics by Wilson’s abusive then-’therapist’, but with a few moments that make it worthwhile).
While this was going on, Van Dyke Parks’ career was going in a very different direction. While working as an executive for Warner Brothers for much of the early 1970s, he also pursued his own musical career. Over the 40 years since Smile, he’s worked with a staggering number of great musicians as a sideman or arranger – co-producing Randy Newman’s first album, playing keyboards for Ry Cooder, arranging for Joanna Newsom, and also working in the same capacity for everyone from Kinky Friedman’s Texas Jewboys to U2 by way of Little Feat and Harry Nilsson. He’s also been in demand as a soundtrack composer (often for kids’ films – he wrote the music for The Brave Little Toaster and The Barney Movie (though he apparently asked for his name to be taken off the soundtrack for that) as well as arranging Nilsson’s songs for Popeye).
But most importantly, he was making a series of strange, beautiful albums entirely unlike anything else in popular music. Starting with Song Cycle – essentially an attempt to do Smile on his own, Parks made a series of semi-concept albums, combining his own songs with those of people as diverse as Randy Newman, The Mighty Sparrow, Louis Gottschaulk and ‘Uncle Dave’ Macon, to create what I can only describe as an ‘internationalist Americana’.
Parks’ albums usually deal with some aspects of America or its culture, but often as seen from the outside – Tokyo Rose, for example, starts with an arrangement of My Country ‘Tis Of Thee (rassmfrassm mercns stealinouranthems harrumph) arranged for Japanese instruments. Jump is a reworking of the Bre’er Rabbit stories, while Discover America is actually almost all calypso music. Parks wears his influences on his sleeve – he’s very clearly an American composer, and his music mixes pre-rock popular music of the most ‘unsophisticated’ manner ( hillbilly, ragtime and acoustic blues) with the vocal style of an American Noel Coward and an arrangement sensibility that’s equal parts Golden Age Hollywood and mid-20th Century US art music (Gershwin and Ives are huge influences).
In 1995 Parks was working on a new album, to be titled Orange Crate Art, and this one was themed around California. So he got back in touch with Brian Wilson, and asked him to sing some vocals on the album.
Parks later admitted to essentially tricking Brian into recording the album (I’m afraid I can’t remember where I got this quote from, you’ll just have to trust me), getting him to record vocals one song at a time for Van Dyke’s new album, until half-way through the project “Brian asked me ‘whose album is this?’ and I said ‘It’s our album, Brian’”.
Although no-one knew at the time, this time Brian really *was* back. He was simultaneously working on I Just Wasn’t Made For These Times, essentially an ‘Unplugged’ album, done as the soundtrack to Don Was’ documentary of the same name, and that’s a worthy album, but Orange Crate Art is a great one.
Brian’s vocals on the album take a lot of getting used to – and I didn’t really grow to love Orange Crate Art until I heard Van Dyke Parks perform some of the songs live, and later purchased Parks’ wonderful Moonlighting: Live At The Ash Grove, because Wilson’s vocals initially put me off – but the songs are just sublime, perfectly crafted gems, the kind of song that sounds like the kind they don’t write any more, except that they never did.
Orange Crate Art is a grown-up album, an album full of nostalgia, but from the perspective of a man who’s fundamentally content with his life. It’s playful, and joyous, but its emotions are civilised, restrained ones. It’s a mature album, a kind one.
(Parenthetically, it seems like the kind of album Evelyn Smythe would like , to reference my Doctor Who post from a couple of weeks back).
The album looks back to an imaginary Golden Age California – a California of orange groves and childhood holidays in Monterey. Parks’ music often feels rooted to me in Roosevelt-era New Deal liberalism and optimism, and this album seems to hearken back to the late 1930s, just before Wilson and Parks themselves were born:
Wasn’t so long ago
That every year your family would rent a house from June to Labor Day
Summer In MontereyNone of us wore no clothes
In Monterey our feet were bare, our shorts were all we’d ever wear
And I would jump for joy that you were there
It’s set in a Golden Age, and like all Golden Ages it’s not anything like any real place or time that ever existed. But this mythical California (which owes more to Steinbeck than to Frankie and Annette) is the kind of place that deserves celebration – from the songs the Garden Of Eden must be somewhere on the US west coast – somewhere between Monterey and San Francisco.
I’m not going to examine the album in greater detail, because it’s so much of a piece, and what I have to say about it is far more about the emotions it arouses in me than about the clever things Parks does with the violin line or whatever. But it’s an album which I adore, and which I can listen to at any time and feel good about life.
The album ends with an instrumental version of a lullaby by Gershwin, and that’s a fitting conclusion to this piece too – because the next post in this series (in a day or two) will look at the next time Wilson and Parks collaborated, on an album about childhood and America and California, an album that had Gershwin as a primary touchstone.
On Smile.
Linkblogging for 24/08/08
Firstly, and obviously most importantly, the final round of voting for miss SB’s Very Prestigious (And Entirely Serious) Blog Of The Year Award is now open. As my wife was knocked out in the last round (and I didn’t make the shortlists, though I was nominated for best fandom blog… *sniff*… nobody likes me…) you should all go and vote for InnerBrat, because she deserves to win and because the poll needs to get more votes than Iain Dale’s Less Prestigious And More Ridiculous Similar Awards…
Via Lynne Featherstone , the Liberal Democrats have created a Facebook group for women who want their say in the party’s policies towards women. As I am not on Facebook (I do antisocial networking instead – I email random people and tell them to fuck off. Far more rewarding) and am not a woman, this is of no use to me directly, but as a high number of people reading this blog are politically-engaged women I thought I should pass it along.
Jog, as always, has good points about the latest issue of Grant Morrison’s Batman.
Homicides due to mental illness have been decreasing for more than 30 years, even as other homicides rise. Remember this next time you read a story in the news about ‘escaped mental patients’ or suchlike. Prejudice against people with mental illnesses is one of the few socially acceptable forms of prejudice for even ‘liberal’ people (the only more acceptable one I can think of is against transgender people, off the top of my head) and it stinks. (Via Bruce Schneier
Cosmic Variance talk about the use of complex numbers in scoring for the Olympics.
And for those of you for whom Flash is not a problem, there are previews of every track on That Lucky Old Sun at the USAToday site. No idea if these are full tracks or just clips…
A Big Finish A Week 4 – Master
To mark their fourth anniversary doing Doctor Who audios, and their 50th audio adventure, Big Finish created a special multi-Doctor adventure, called Zagreus, featuring for the first (and so far only) time all four of their audio Doctors in the same story. To lead up to this, CDs 47, 48 and 49 had a shared theme.
Titled Omega, Davros and Master, each one featured a different Doctor, in a story with no companions and dealing with the Doctor’s relationship with one of his long-term recurring villains. Each story also revealed for the first time something of the motivation behind the villain in question.
Omega was a pretty good story, with Peter Davison turning in an extremely good performance as a calm centre in a chaotic storm of events; while Davros was great fun, essentially just Colin Baker and Terry Molloy constantly trying to top each other for hammiest performance of all time (but in a good way).
Master on the other hand…
The Seventh Doctor, as played by Sylvester McCoy, causes the most fan argument of any of the Doctors, partly because his characterisation changed more, in a shorter space of time, than any of the others. In his first series, McCoy’s Doctor was a buffoon – playing the spoons, madly mixing his metaphors, fighting giant Bertie Basset men and hanging around with Bonnie Langford.
However, largely due to script editor Andrew Cartmel, this changed quite suddenly. The Doctor was first given an ‘edgy’ companion (the risible Ace), and then given ‘story arcs’ and a Mysterious Past which was built up until the series was abruptly cancelled.
While this was in theory a reasonable idea, in practice the quality of the series varied wildly at this time, from excellent stories like Remembrance Of The Daleks, to utter cack like Silver Nemesis. But what made it fail more often than it succeeded was the quality of the performances. Sophie Aldred’s Ace was so bad that criticising the performance seems pointless, while Sylvester McCoy, who is a reasonable light comic actor (presumably why he was chosen for the lighter Doctor he initially portrayed) is utterly hopeless at darkness and menace and ambiguity and all the other things his Doctor was meant to be.
However, after the series was put out of its misery, many of the writers for the series continued writing Doctor Who novels for Virgin Books and later the BBC. Being written by many of the same writers, these largely continued the trend in which the series had been going. I’ve read very few of these, because they came out during my time away from Doctor Who fandom, but while I’ve been told by many people whose opinions I respect that they’re rather good, the overall impression I get from the descriptions of the plots is of a bunch of slightly-less-clever-than-they-think Sixth Formers writing incredibly convoluted continuity-wank, ‘explaining’ aspects of the Doctor’s past that never needed explaining, and carrying out arguments with each other in their books, to a very small audience of hardcore fans (anyone who sees parallels with the way comics went in the same period, go to the front of the class).
But like I say, I’ve not read the books, so I’m only talking about a perception I’ve got from others’ discussion of them.
But that’s where the problem came in for Big Finish. With the Fifth and Sixth Doctor adventures, they could reasonably assume all the listeners had seen most of the TV shows in which those characters appeared, and they had to fit the stories in between those episodes anyway. There was no real need to think about what ‘canon’ meant – the audios are clearly based around the TV show.
With the Seventh Doctor, things were very different – the books were perceived by many fans as ‘the official continuation of the TV show’, but at the same time had not been read by many of the potential audience and were for the most part out of print. What to do?
The answer, obviously, was split the difference. Take the characterisation of the Doctor as presented in the books, assume that the books, or something like them, had happened, but not actually make any explicit reference to their events for the most part.
However, some of the stories follow up on the books more explicitly, and whenever this happens the results are pretty uniformly awful. Joseph Lidster’s Master is a case in point.
The worst thing about Master is that its first half is as good as anything Big Finish ever did – almost a textbook example of how to do small-scale character-driven Gothic horror. Isolated by a storm, some old friends come together to celebrate the ‘birthday’ of their good friend Dr John Smith, who appeared ten years ago that night, horribly scarred and amnesiac. In the years since he’s become a pillar of the community, saving hundreds of lives, and he’s admired by everyone.
However, things are not all rosy – there’s a serial killer on the loose in the area, who’s been killing prostitutes, who might in some way be connected with the ghost that supposedly haunts the house – the ghost of the builder of the house, who himself killed a woman he believed to be a prostitute. The descendant of the ghost – a local philanthropist who, while snobbish, genuinely tries to help the poor, is visiting the house, along with her husband, the over-authoritarian and mildly misogynistic local Inspector, who’s been investigating the murders. The husband appears to have his eye on the scullery maid, and who is this mysterious stranger, The Doctor, who’s just turned up? And why does Dr Smith have such a fascination with the concept of evil?
From that setup, anyone can see how the story should (and, indeed, for the most part, does) go. Dr Smith is a red herring – the murders are being commited by the Inspector, who’s jealous that his wife loves Dr Smith – but in discovering this, Dr Smith regains his memory and remembers that he is the Master, the Doctor’s deadliest enemy…
If this sounds familiar, by the way, it might be because Russel Davies used something similar for the 2007 series of nuWho, with Derek Jacobi playing the oblivious Master. The new TV series has quite a history of taking inspiration from the books or audios – most of the best episodes of the show have been based on one or the other – but only this once has the TV series unequivocally bettered its inspiration. And that’s because Davies essentially just tells the story of the Master realising his own true identity, and becoming evil once again, which is a perfectly reasonable story to tell.
But in this story, after all the work has gone into setting up a good Gothic chiller cum Agatha Christie whodunnit, the whole thing unravels in the last act with some of the most utterly stupid plotting of… well, of any story ever.
First, the housemaid reveals herself to be Death personified, and exposits all the stuff the actual plot’s been building to in a few seconds. This is merely stupid.
Then, it is revealed that the reason the Master has no memory is that the Doctor has made a deal with Death to let the Master live the life of a good man for ten years, at which point the Doctor would kill him. This is very stupid, but still not the stupidest thing ever.
Then it is revealed that the Doctor did this because the Doctor and the Master used to be friends at school, until the Master accidentally killed a bully who was beating the Doctor up, and the two hid the body. At that moment the Master became evil, and the Doctor dedicated his life to saving him. This is really very, very stupid indeed, and it commits every single possible mistake it’s possible to make when writing serial fiction, but what the hell…
Then it’s revealed that it wasn’t the Master who had killed the bully at all. It was the Doctor, and he should have turned evil. Instead, for good and adequate reasons, Death visited this tiny child and offered him a deal – let your best friend take on all the guilt and remorse for this killing, and go on to be a genocidal mass-murderer enslaved by the spirit of Death, and in return you’ll get to not feel guilty about it. And littleDoctor said yes!
Those of you who are comic fans, who thought plot details like Superboy turning evil for no reason and punching time to make Robin come back from the dead as a badass antihero were stupid, look at that last paragraph and weep. The Master became The Master because when they were kids the Doctor killed someone and then made a deal with Death that it would all be the Master’s fault instead. Words can’t express what a wretched, stupid concept this is…
For all the problems with the new series (and there are many – I’ve not watched the last series and intend never to watch it again, for reasons that will become increasingly apparent as this series of reviews progresses) it doesn’t make this particular mistake – it doesn’t hamhandedly ‘deconstruct’ characters in such a way that they can’t be put back together again and then pat itself on the back for being so clever.
The one thing you can say about this ending is that it’s never been referred to ever again – it’s not damaged the rest of the series in the way that this kind of mistake so often does – but it’s *so* appalingly bad that it wrecks what up to then was a relatively good story. Anyone looking for a textbook example of what not to do when writing a story with continuing characters – or for a perfect example of the difference between bad fanfic and competent writing – should listen to the last disc of Master. But only once…
I am a diver, a long-lined survivor
I’ve been lucky enough to get a needledrop of Brian Wilson’s That Lucky Old Sun (which is available on vinyl but no other format yet – I’d normally buy the vinyl, but the CD comes with a live DVD which will be the best way to experience this).
I’m absolutely *aching* to write a review of this, because it’s so good. I’m not going to until the CD/DVD comes out (I’m still going to do it as the last of a four-part series), but this is an album you need to run out and buy straight away.
And no-one who’s ever heard any of Brian’s solo records will believe this, but his voice sounds good. I mean, really good. Not good-for-Brian-considering. Just good. His voice hasn’t sounded this full and strong since at least 1972.
I am amazed, and astonished, and thankful, that someone who only a few years ago was dismissed by everyone as being a washed-up brain-damaged casualty whose best days were thirty years in the past has managed to… words can’t describe this… it’s like all the years between 1966 and 2004 have been cut out of time and replaced – this is the album that after Pet Sounds came out, you might have predicted he’d be making in 2008.
It’s not perfect – what is? – but it’s an album that until I saw him perform it live last year I would never have believed could ever happen, and it’s *even better on the record*.
(I’m going to post about Orange Crate Art later today or tomorrow – I’m posting about Master in an hour or two, just polishing that post – Smile 2004 next week, and I’ll review this the week after).
But this album… it’s like an artifact from another world. Wow.
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