Linkblogging for 17/09/08
Chris Bird is bored in a West Wing sort of way.
The Mavericking Maverick Mavericks More – I could actually see Frank Miller writing this…
Brad Hicks has some thoughts on when the current economic crisis is going to end. I suspect he’s far too optimistic, but I hope not.
Abhay is still reading Secret Invasion for some reason.
Liberal Conspiracy say ‘we’ need to take on the Tories better, but of course ‘we’ seems to mean the Labour party…
And autism and Aspergers appear linked with melatonin deficiency, which doesn’t surprise me at all…
A Big Finish A Week 7: Storm Warning
Sorry about the lack of posts recently. It’s been a very, very hard week for me…
Paul McGann is almost certainly the best actor, by quite a large margin, ever to have played the part of the Doctor on TV (Eccleston comes close, but it’s arguable as to whether he was playing the same character). However, he only ever got to make one appearance.
In 1996, seven years after the end of the original series and nine years before the start of the new one (and three years before the start of the Big Finish audios), a TV Movie called Doctor Who (aka Doctor Who: The Movie and The Enemy Within) was made as a joint production by Fox and the BBC, an attempted pilot for an eventual new series which never happened. The film itself was a mess, and the seres was dropped, but one of the best things about it was the casting of Paul McGann as the star.
McGann’s Doctor is a unique take on the character, gentler and more softly-spoken than previous versions, owing most in the performance to Peter Davison’s Doctor, but showing elements of all his predecessors – it’s a studied, nuanced performance – and so when he agreed to start doing Eighth Doctor audio adventures for Big Finish, even those fans who hadn’t enjoyed the film were eager to see how he’d do in that format.
To be honest, though, McGann’s Doctor is my least favourite of the audio Doctors, precisely because his audios (grouped in ‘seasons’ until 2005, rather than interspersed among the other Doctors’ stories) are a ‘continuation’ of the TV series rather than fitting in between the previous episodes. This led the writers regularly to write story arcs, have Major Changes After Which Things Will Never Be The Same, and all the other enemies of comprehensibility that comic fans have had to put up with. The audios rapidly became not good stories in themselves but a means to drop pieces of information about the larger plot, reaching a nadir with the incomprehensible and interminable series of stories where the Doctor is trapped in a universe without time.
Throughout, though, McGann manages to hold things together with a performance that is so note-perfect that the stories still feel like Doctor Who stories. But the writers make it difficult for him.
His first audio adventure, Storm Warning, is actually one of his better ones in that it’s comprehensible as a story in itself (even though it’s also the springboard for much of what followed). The basic plotline seems remarkably similar to the second part of the very first Big Finish story, The Sirens Of Time (which I previously reviewed here). In both, the Doctor, travelling alone, ends up stuck on a British vessel, then has to pretend to be a German spy (though in Sirens he pretends this to the Germans), gets involved in a famous disaster and meets up with a young woman who he teams up with. There are many more minor differences as well, suggesting the plot was inspired by the earlier story.
The main problem with the story is the first part, which for large chunks consists of the Doctor narrating primarily visual events, talking to himself. Even McGann can’t make great huge chunks of exposition sound convincing merely by adding “I must stop talking to myself”.
Things liven up slightly with the addition of Charlotte (Charley) Pollard, an ‘Edwardian adventuress’ as she refers to herself (rather inaccurately, as she was born in 1912 and so the king for her entire life up to that point would have been George V – at least on our Earth, the ‘Whoniverse’ earth may differ I suppose…). One of the more interesting of the Big Finish companions (she’s no Evelyn but she’s miles better than Hex or C’rizz), she’s a rather posh teenager who’s far more adventurous than her social class would normally allow (when the Doctor meets her she’s stowed away on board an airship disguised as a male crew member in order to get to Indonesia) and in some ways actually reminds me of Ace, but crossed with the female members of the Famous Five (pretty much equal parts Ann and George actually).
The whole story is more or less a rousing Boy’s Own adventure, with airships, secret conspiracies, German spies, aliens (the relatively well-thought-out Triskele, who do have the major stumbling block of being one of those aliens who’ve left traces of themselves on Earth that no-one ever picked up on, in this case the triskelion symbol *do you see?* – that kind of thing worked with Douglas Adams’ Krikkitmen, but it’s a major blow to suspension of disbelief in something ostensibly serious) and stowaways – it’s a very, very British story as well. One suspects this was a deliberate attempt to placate those fans who thought that the TV Movie was ‘too American’ (although the elements they picked up on as being ‘too American’ – the possible romance for the Doctor, the terrible acting from the Master, the plot holes half-covered by technobabble and the reliance on special effects – were precisely those that the new series has aped, suggesting that bad television knows no national boundaries).
On the whole, Storm Warning is best described as serviceable – there’s not much to say about the story that’s particularly good, but nor is it especially terrible. McGann does an absoutely superb job as the Doctor, but is let down by a fairy weak script – but the script is not unforgivable, either. It’s a mildly promising start to McGann’s Doctor Who audio career.
Unfortunately, it may also be the best audio McGann ever took part in. Without the formula which kept the other Doctors’ audios in check (though they’re always best when they strain against it) the McGanns tended to sink into the worst kind of self-indulgent fanwank. But McGann’s performance gives us a clue what a real re-invention of the Doctor for a new century should have been…
Geoff Johns – Not Really All That Bad?
My wife, Holly, came home the other week with my comics (she sometimes goes to the comic shop for me if I’m working and she isn’t) and said “I really enjoyed that Final Crisis one.”
This surprised me, because Holly hasn’t been hugely impressed with Final Crisis so far, even though she likes Grant Morrison – but also because Final Crisis wasn’t out that week. But Final Crisis: Legion Of Three Worlds was, and it was that that she had read. And she was right – it was good. Not great, but a very solid, entertaining comic. And, amazingly for something I’d expected to be incomprehensible continuity-porn, accessible to new readers.
It was then that I realised that I actually like Geoff Johns. That was a hard realisation for me to come to, because it went against everything I believed about comics.
Until relatively recently I would have named Geoff Johns as the writer doing most damage to comics. Not the worst writer, but writing terrible comics that were everything that holds the medium back. In 2004 and 2005 I read a few issues of his Flash and JSA and found them to be just awful – tedious grimungritty stuff with villains doing drugs and saying naughty swears to show how grown-up they were, combined with an overawed reverence for the mid-80s work of Roy Thomas and Marv Wolfman, which Johns seemed for some reason to consider worth slavishly emulating.
In short, they were simultaneously so continuity-obsessed that only those with a PhD in DC Comics history could possibly understand them, soapily melodramatic, utterly convinced of the specialness of tedious twelfth-string superheroes and ‘legacy characters’ like the thirtieth Rex The Wonder Dog or whatever, overly obsessed with dismemberment, and so ‘decompressed’ that there might be an actual event in a single ‘arc’ if you were lucky.
This opinion was confirmed for me by the couple of issues of Green Lantern: Rebirth I read, as well as by Infinite Crisis which was just terrible. At that point, the name ‘Geoff Johns’ was one that I had an almost Pavlovian reaction to – my views on him were probably similar to Dave Sim’s on Hilary Clinton.
However, as the more attentive and eagle-eyed of the readers of this blog may have spotted, I have a similar reaction, but in reverse, to Grant Morrison, who I consider easily the most interesting creator working in mainstream comics, and who I would probably put in a ‘top ten all time comic creators’ list. So when it was announced the two were going to collaborate on 52, I nearly split in half with the pain of deciding whether to buy it or not, but the presence of Mark Waid and Keith Giffen, both of whose work I have often enjoyed (though rarely loved) swung it for me.
52 was by turns fascinating, wonderful, dreadful and hilarious. RIght from the start it was fairly obvious who was writing which parts, who had come up with which concepts, and how the collaboration worked. And as I’d predicted beforehand, the parts Johns wrote were on the whole the weakest – the Luthor/Everyman/Infinity Inc/Steel plot and the Black Adam bits. (I still think the best thing to come out of 52 though was Ralph Dibny’s blog). But they weren’t terrible, merely weaker than the surrounding material. And I remember reading that a couple of individual lines I enjoyed were Johns’.
At the same time, I was picking up his collaboration with Kurt Busiek on the Superman titles, Up, Up And Away, because I was planning on reading Busiek’s solo run on Superman which was immediately going to follow it. And it was really good – just exciting, funny, good superhero comics, much denser and eventful than the norm. I put this down to Busiek, who I’ve always quite liked, but I was now of the opinion that Johns wasn’t necessarily a terrible writer so long as he was collaborating with someone else.
I still dropped Action Comics as soon as Johns began writing it with Richard Donner, though, but picked it up when Busiek started doing his fill-ins as Johns and Donner’s story went completely off the rails and for about a year Busiek was writing both Superman titles. I still think Busiek deserves more respect than he’s got for the way he handled a whole host of problems with the Superman line, none of which appear to have been of his making, and turned out reliably good Superman stories week in, week out. But when Busiek’s fill-ins stopped appearing and Johns came back to the title, it remained on my pull list out of inertia, and was actually quite good.
I also picked up the first issue of Booster Gold out of curiosity, because I always liked the character, the concept of the series appealed to me, and it was following up one of my favourite parts of 52. And it was fun!. Not great art or anything, and obviously still hopelessly mired in DC continuity, but having fun with it.
And now, reading the (pretty good) Final Crisis: Legion Of Three Worlds and the (not all that good, but certainly not terrible) Final Crisis: Rogues Revenge, I have reluctantly to come to the conclusion that Geoff Johns has, over the last couple of years, become a good, competent writer of entertaining superhero comics. I’m not the only one who’s had this change of heart, too – a number of people I read who’d previously dismissed him seem to be coming round to the same viewpoint.
That doesn’t mean I’m going to rush out and buy everything he writes or anything, but it’s one of the only cases I can think of where someone who was successful and not very good has actually bothered to improve – normally if someone as awful as Johns was a few years ago becomes a success, they coast or get steadily worse until they turn into Rob Liefeld. It’s even possible that if Johns keeps improving, he’ll go from being ‘quite good’ to being positively interesting. I can only imagine it’s the positive influence from Grant Morrison, who seems to have taken Johns under his wing just as he once did with Mark Millar, but with notably better results.
I still wouldn’t recommend Johns’ work as anything other than light entertainment, and not even especially original light entertainment – I won’t rush out to buy any of the titles he writes that I don’t already read. And I’ve written in the past about how one of the real problems in comics is our continued acceptance of the merely competent and OK. But I think he should be given a lot of credit for becoming competent and OK…
Linkblogging for 11/09/08
Sorry I’ve not posted for a couple of days – life gets in the way sometimes. Proper update tonight.
Mark Steel has a fair and moderate solution to the one-off ‘windfall energy tax’ idea – “The government tells us it wouldn’t make sense to impose a one-off tax on the energy companies, as this would be a short-term measure that fails to address the long-term problem. And, to be fair, there’s a logic to this. So, a decent compromise that might get round this difficulty would be to impose a tax on the pigs EVERY year, or if that still didn’t sort it, every week – or maybe every 25 minutes.”
Christopher Bird is still making Magic cards about the US election.
Andrew Rilstone looks at news values.
Fred Clark talks about Sarah Palin and honesty.
And Jennie Rigg talks about some myths about Doctor Who fandom.
Linkblogging for 09/09/08
Not much here today – I’m still working through a backlog of feeds from my computer breaking:
Jennie Rigg writes briefly about the differences between being Liberal and Left and whether you can be both. I’m planning my own response to this in a day or two, so this is mostly for reference.
Chris Bird posts Forty reasons he will always love comics in pictorial form.
Fred Clark writes about Bearing false witness.
Big Finish have their first UNIT story available for free download – no idea if it’s any good or not, but probably worth a try.
And Andrew Rilstone writes about being sportsmanlike while somehow managing to avoid quoting Sport (The Odd Boy) by the Bonzo Dog Band – a temptation I wouldn’t have been able to resist.
A Big Finish A Week 6 : I, Davros
I’m not usually a big fan of the concept of ‘extended universe’ stories. These are stories where fans desperate for more of the thing they love will desperately buy entire series of novels about what happened to the third stormtrooper on the left in Star Wars when he was sent to hospital after being hit by Luke Skywalker’s lightsabre, and how he had an affair with a beautiful Wookie nurse, or comic series about the adventures of Spock’s third cousin’s best friend.
These things are rather distinct from the ‘shared universes’ of DC and Marvel comics, in that they serve to close rather than open up imaginative possibilities. ‘Extended universe’ stories are add-ons to a single main ‘canon’ – they’re usually (all exceptions duly noted) attempts to replicate the feel of the original story or stories, but without the lead character that made them interesting. Even when these things are ‘official’, they never really work – all the Star Trek series post-Next Generation are ‘extended universe’ and far more concerned with Ferengi internal politics or the social structure of the Borg than with anything else – rather than seeking out new life and new civilisations, they were more concerned with examining the minutiae of life-forms we’d already seen many times.
The DC and Marvel shared universes, however, seem to be more organic – the characters in them were all (or mostly) created to function as separate ‘story engines’. Superman, the Flash or Green Lantern don’t depend for their existence on being part of ‘the DC Universe’ – but on the other hand, knowing that Sgt Rock, John Constantine, Dream, Detective Chimp, The Forever People, Plastic Man, Adam Strange, Etrigan the Demon, Batman and Krypto the Superdog are all part of the same ‘world’ enriches all their stories – rather than being a bolted-on extension to a single core narrative, the DC Universe (especially – the Marvel Universe was created more intentonally) seems to be more like a hologram created by the overlap and interference of all these different independent narratives (there’s a reason the concept of Hypertime first appeared in DC Comics).
Having said that, I don’t dismiss the idea of ‘extended universe’ stories entirely, and Doctor Who has a richer extended universe than most – bizarrely, given that the primary appeal of the series (to me at least) is its lead character – the perfect combination of Sherlock Holmes and Groucho Marx in one body, The Doctor is to my mind one of the great creations of all time. But there are audio series about Gallifreyan politics (which I actually listened to – it was OK), Cybermen, Daleks and so on, and there are also two ranges of novels based on characters from Doctor Who *novels* (rather than the TV show) – the Bernice Summerfield and Faction Paradox stories. I’m informed these are quite good, but I have only so much time in my life, and I strongly suspect that on my deathbed my greatest regret will not be that I never got round to reading a series of novels about a pagan archaeology professor who once met the Seventh Doctor.
But having just purchased the Davros box set, which includes the four-part I, Davros, I thought I’d give that one a go. I think Davros is a terribly underrated character – the conventional wisdom among Doctor Who fans seems to be that he was a great character in Genesis Of The Daleks but useless in pretty much everything after that, but I think Revelation and Remembrance hold up very well (I’ve not rewatched Resurrection since it was first broadcast when I was five, but I have fond memories of it and plan to watch it tonight). And while Terry Molloy, who played him throughout the eighties and in the audio adventures, is an appaling old ham, there’s a sense of both fun and menace in his performance that I like. Michael Wisher’s original Davros was pure menace and nothing else, while Molloy’s Davros is both menacing and ridiculous, but I’ve always found that a little of the ridiculous fits Doctor Who rather well. Davros is equal parts Mengele and Strangelove, and as such should seem ridiculous – right up until the point you realise that this ridiculous ranting man intends to destroy your entire species.
I, Davros is very consciously modeled on I, Claudius, and tells the story of Davros’ life from the age of 18 until the creation of his first Dalek, a few months before Genesis Of The Daleks. Unfortunately, the I, Claudius parallel causes one of the biggest problems with the series. At least three times in the audio series (Time Of The Daleks, Flip-Flop and The Last) we have seen female leaders who are absolutely insane and end up causing the deaths of many of their species, all of a similar type. They are probably taking this from the TV show, which had ‘Helen A’ in The Happiness Patrol as a very similar character type. At that time it could be taken as a none-too-subtle attack on the eminently attackable Margaret Thatcher (maysherotinhell). Nearly twenty years after Thatcher lost power, however, it starts to look like misogyny.
(Note, I am *not* suggesting that the people behind Big Finish, collectively or individually, are misogynist – just that their portrayal of women can be problematic).
Davros’ mother, Calcula, while obviously based on Claudius’ mother Livia (or at least the version of her that was created by Robert Graves and reimagined by the BBC) , and with quite a lot of the stereotypical stage mother to her characterisation, fits into this type more than is comfortable. She’s a one-dimensional character, only concerned with her own advancement and that of her son, and with no other character traits.
The character of Davros is fleshed out much more – especially his Oedipal relationship with his mother – and it’s strongly implied that he might be gay, although he also seems to have feelings for his colleague Shan (though not enough that he won’t have her killed, partly out of pique, partly out of ambition, and partly out of jealousy). This inconsistency might be down to the fact that the four episodes have a total of five writers (all working from a plot outline by producer Gary Russel), but it might just be down to the fact that real people *are* inconsistent.
But the aspect that comes out most is Davros’ huge survival drive, and his desire for self-preservation (and as a byproduct the preservation of his race). It’s interesting to compare Davros with Darkseid – the two characters are both intent on remaking the universe in their own image, and exterminating every other form of life, so they can survive forever; their villainy comes from their near-infinite survival drive.
The difference between the two of course is that Darkseid already is a god, while Davros is trying to make himself into one, both by creating his own new lifeforms and by altering his own body. (In this context it’s interesting to compare my thoughts on Darkseid, and to remember that the more Davros tries to perfect himself, the more he degenerates, from the healthy teenage boy we see at the start of I, Davros, through the hideously disfigured, disabled adult of Genesis Of The Daleks, to the ranting disembodied head of Remembrance Of The Daleks.)
Both Davros and Darkseid of course were created by men with very vivid memories of World War II – they’re both Hitler-figures – and whether deliberately or not Davros’ family background mirrors that of Hitler, with a domineering father who died while he was still young and a mother who thinks too highly of him. In fact Davros is surprisingly well fleshed-out throughout this series – he feels like a real person, albeit one whose only motives are scientific curiosity and self-preservation and whose only emotion (rarely displayed) is anger.
The plot, of course, is utterly predictable in its broad outlines – first Davros’ mother kills anyone who stands in her way or in the way of her son in their rise up to the top of the political ladder, then when she dies Davros experiments on her body and continues killing anyone who opposes him, however mildly, while performing the experiments that lead to the creation of the Daleks.
The story could have been better done – in particular, it would have been relatively easy to make the story have more connection to real-world issues. Davros orders all babies in the Kaled city to be handed over to the government for genetic experimentation in order to save the Kaleds from the environmental devastation of war by turning them into Daleks – one could, for example, with a few subtle changes make this parallel the question of to what extent government interference in reproductive freedom would be acceptable in order to prevent the environmental damage caused by overpopulation. As it is, these scenes are merely an echo of an echo – Nazi eugenic experiments after a game of Chinese whispers over several decades.
Ultimately, I, Davros is closer in feel to the Star Wars prequels than to I, Claudius – and feels similarly inessential. But it’s still an entertaining way to spend a few hours, and if you buy the Davros box set (and you really should, if you like Doctor Who at all) you should definitely take the time to listen to it.
Next week’s Big Finish A Week will be another actual Doctor Who story though – probably Storm Warning
Linkblogging for 07/09/08
As you will have noticed from the long post yesterday, my computer problems are now (pray God) over. The laptop I got just over a week ago broke within a few days, so I got another refurb as a replacement. In another case of fate playing silly buggers with me, this was the day after I made my post talking about how Free Software is now very usable for absolutely everyone and doesn’t give you the kind of problems that you had before, so *of course* the laptop turned out to have a soundcard that isn’t supported under GNU/Linux. I ended up having to recompile ALSA from source in order to get any sound on it at all and the headphones still don’t work and the sound is a bit tinny. So if you like Free Software, don’t buy a Toshiba Satellite.
On the other hand, whatever you like, you should buy the Davros boxset from Big Finish, especially if you’re one of those who come here for A Big Finish A Week. I just got mine in the post on Friday, and it’s fantastic. They’re currently on sale, which is why I’m linking them now, and so for forty quid you can get every post-Tom Baker Dalek TV show (Genesis of the Daleks, Destiny of the Daleks, Resurrection of the Daleks, Revelation of the Daleks and Remembrance of the Daleks), plus all their DVD special features (an entire disc of them in the case of Genesis) plus all three Big Finish Doctor Who audios featuring Davros, plus the four-part Big Finish non-Doctor series I, Davros, telling the life story of Davros before he met the Doctor, plus an exclusive Davros audio not on anything else and a documentary film about Davros.
For forty quid you get nearly ten hours of Doctor Who episodes, plus more than thirteen hours of audio adventure, plus God knows how much in terms of documentaries, deleted scenes, commentary and so on. If you ever got terrified as a five-year-old by Terry Molloy’s closed-over eyes and withered arm, this is for you. Highly recommended.
The Mindless Ones have yet another excellent post (I should just set up an RSS feed from them here, I link to them so often), this time amypoodle talking about Perry Bible Fellowship, the Mindless Ones’ own excellent single-panel feature Terminus and whether newspaper-strip type comics have to be funny.
It’s been a bad week for British comedy again, as not only did Geoffrey Perkins die, but also the great Ken Campbell, whose death I missed hearing about for a few days due to my lack of net access. I only saw Campbell live once, at a tribute to Robert Anton Wilson last year where he performed with Coldcut, Alan Moore and Bill Drummond. Again I’ll break my rule about embedding YouTube videos:
Campbell was one of those people whose influence vastly outweighed his public visibility, and comedy, theatre, science fiction and forteana would all be unrecognisable today without his work. Holly and I watched him on the Secret Policeman’s Ball DVD yesterday, ordering a midget (the great David Rappaport) to chain up a near-naked Sylvester McCoy, and I got a tiny bit tearful. But anyway – I was going to link to Mark Borkowski, who said all this rather better than I could.
Gavin Burrows talks interestingly about hipsters and geeks (there’s a reason I never use the g word myself, even though I’d fit by most people’s standards – like he says, it’s defined by consumption).
Sadly, No! point out exactly who John McCain classes as rich – and who he doesn’t.
All that talk about copyright extensions being ‘for the artists’? The average performer is likely to get 50 cents (euro) per year out of it.
And something I never thought I’d see actually happen – Cliff RIchard has effectively outed himself and is calling for the Church to recognise gay marriage. Of course, if he hadn’t spent much of his career campaigning with the likes of Mary Whitehouse for a return to the Middle Ages, maybe they already would…
Brian Wilson, Van Dyke Parks and The Smile You Send Out – Part Four: That Lucky Old Sun
After Smile was finally completed and released, I expected Brian Wilson to settle back into a comfortable retirement with occasional one-off shows – having completed a record that took him 37 years, it would have been only right. And at first, this seemed likely. His touring settled down into a routine of ‘greatest hits’ shows, and his only release for the next few years was a very nice but hardly ground-breaking album of Christmas songs.
But then, last year he was commissioned to create a new suite for the re-opening of the Royal Festival Hall (the venue where he’d performed his first UK shows and where he’d premiered Smile. For the core of this, he took eight songs he’d written with his touring keyboard player, Scott Bennett, co-wrote one new song with Van Dyke Parks, and got Parks to write narratives linking sequences. With Darian Sahanaja and Paul Mertens reprising their roles as assistant arrangers, the result is one of Brian’s most collaborative – but also most personal – works.
I’ve written about the result before – both straight after seeing the first live performance of the resulting work, and after obtaining copies of the demos – but today I finally got a copy of the actual CD, so I can hear the completed work the way it was meant to be heard.
The first thing I want to say is that in my previous writing about That Lucky Old Sun I have rather minimised Scott Bennett’s importance – when I wrote those pieces, we didn’t have any songwriting credits for the new material, so I had no way of knowing who wrote what, and given that Bennett was the only unknown quantity while Wilson and Parks are two of my all-time favourite songwriters, it seemed reasonable to credit Wilson and Parks with much of the better material. However, it turns out that Bennett wrote or co-wrote some of the best lyrics on the album, and he definitely should get a lot of the credit. In fact, there’s a lot of wordplay in these songs – some of which I’d wrongly credited to Parks, and more that I didn’t even notice until seeing the lyrics in print – that makes me consider Bennett the second-best lyricist ever to work with Wilson (just after Parks, and ahead of Tony Asher and Mike Love). I’m a lot more interested in hearing Bennett’s solo work after this.
Having said that, this is a Brian Wilson album – and it’s a Brian Wilson album that fits in with his other work with Van Dyke Parks – you really can listen to Orange Crate Art, Smile and That Lucky Old Sun as three parts of a trilogy.
It’s a mature work – and it looks back a lot at Wilson’s earlier work – but it’s the work of someone who’s got a new lease of life. It’s the most exciting music I can imagine hearing from someone Wilson’s age (the last time I said that, several people pointed to Scott Walker, but while his latest music is by far the best stuff I’ve heard from him, it doesn’t have that visceral thrill. This is an old man making music with the spirit of someone a third of his age). In fact, according to the electronic press kit which comes on the bonus DVD with the CD, it seems that the more down-tempo elements of the album were added at quite a late stage because people listening to the music felt it was ‘too poppy’. Personally, I think the ballads are for the most part the weakest things on the album.
The references to Wilson’s older work that do turn up tend to be friendly nods to the past, too, rather than just ‘remember this older song? Wasn’t that great?’ It’s a subtle distinction, but a real one.
In discussing the album track by track, I’m going to ignore Van Dyke Parks’ narratives. This doesn’t mean they’re unimportant – on the contrary, they hold the album together and turn what would otherwise have been a merely good record into a great one- but they’re not very distinct things in themselves and not very susceptible to review.
One more thing to note before I start in on the track-by-track analysis – many people say, with every new Brian Wilson release “Wow! Brian is really back this time, not like all the other times I said he was back. His voice sounds better than in decades!”, and this has become like the boy who cried wolf – there’s only so many times anyone will buy a mediocre album that’s been hyped up by obsessive fans before they assume the artist in question has permanently lost it.
For the record, I have never before said that a new Brian Wilson album of new material was anything more than ‘pretty good’. Other than Orange Crate Art and Smile, both of which are special cases, Brian Wilson hasn’t released a new album that even approached greatness in my lifetime, much as I’ve been hoping otherwise for the last thirteen years.
So when I rave about this album, it really is because it is *that good*. And when I say that Wilson’s voice is the best it’s been in decades (partly because for once he’s singing within his current range rather than trying to hit notes he stopped being able to reach in his late twenties, but also because he’s actually engaged with the material) I mean it (he’s still not a great singer in any conventional sense, but his voice reminds me of Leonard Cohen or someone now, getting a lot of expression from a limited instrument).
The album starts with the title track, That Lucky Old Sun, an abridged version of the old standard, reharmonised by Wilson and with a gorgeous orchestral arrangement by Paul Mertens which brings out the song’s similarities to Ol’ Man River. It’s funny, but this is a song I’d never really noticed before Brian Wilson brought it to my attention, even though I own versions by Johnny Cash, Ray Charles, Jerry Lee Lewis, Louis Armstrong and probably half a dozen other singers. It’s a great song but not one I’d really picked up on.
Morning Beat, the first song proper, also brings in many of the themes that will recur throughout the album. I was slightly worried when this started at the premiere, because it starts out like Brian on autopilot – the opening “maumamayama Glory Hallelujah” is a backing vocal line he’s been talking about using since the mid-1970s and the riff is clearly yet another variant on Shortenin’ Bread, a riff that’s obsessed him even longer than that.
But a minute or so into the song it becomes clear how different this album’s going to be from much of the sub-par material that’s characterised Brian’s output since the late 70s, because this song is filled with ideas. Normally, Wilson’s solo songs have had one single melodic idea, not especially well developed, but on this album there are several different melodies in each song – and usually each one of the ideas is good enough to build an entire song around itself. In this case, the song starts out as a Shortenin’ Bread based rocker, but then a new section (“I’m listening to the morning beat”) comes in, at the same tempo but going off in all sorts of odd directions, before returning to the normal verse.
But then the song takes a complete left turn, going from guitar rocker to clip-clop percussion and orchestra, in a middle eight that references Kurt Weill’s September Song, before going back into the verse again, and then ending with an abbreviated version of the “I’m listening” section, this time done as staccato punches rather than played straight through. And all this in just two minutes and fifty four seconds.
On previous albums, Wilson has sounded like every song has been a struggle against writer’s block – every idea must be stretched as far as it can go in case he never gets another one. This album, though, has him throwing out ideas with the profligacy of a twenty-year-old, confident that however many he sticks in there, there are plenty more where that came from. (It’s odd that this isn’t usually the pattern with older artists – one would have thought that as the pressure of time became more obvious, it would seem more necessary to get as much done as possible).
The lyrics, meanwhile, are serviceable by themselves, but do, seemingly casually, manage to introduce pretty much every recurring concept for the rest of the album. Other than the sun and the idea of rolling round heaven (both brought up in the title track), this introduces California and specifically LA, the night/day cycle, stars of both the celestial and celebrity kind, sleeping and waking, the sea, rhythm, beats, diamonds, distance, smog and clear air – all of which will recur over and again.
After a narrative section, we go into Good Kind Of Love, the only song Wilson wrote entirely by himself on the album, and God it’s beautiful. Lyrically (and very slightly melodically) it’s reminiscent of Friends Of Mine by the Zombies. Mertens’ orchestration is the star here – he’s an unsung hero of Wilson’s recent work, writing parts that are nothing like anything that appears on any Beach Boys record, sounding more like mid-twentieth century European concert music, but make perfect sense with Wilson’s chords. Unfortunately, one of my favourite parts of the orchestration – a nice little woodwind countermelody – appears to have been removed between the live performances and the eventual recording (either that or it’s been buried in the mix – I’m not listening on great speakers).
But this is one of those Brian Wilson songs like Soulful Old Man Sunshine or This Whole World that’s almost impossible to describe in terms of normal song structure, having a melody that twists and turns continually so there’s a smooth flow through the track but you suddenly realise after a few seconds that it sounds nothing like it did just a moment before, going through very slow free-tempo sections, upbeat Spector/Motown-esque sleighbell choruses and more, with skittering strings and mooing horns. It’s just wonderful, and I defy anyone to listen to it without a big grin on their face.
Forever My Surfer Girl is one of the weaker songs on the album – it actually sounds like it could have come off a later Beach Boys album, sounding like someone trying to sound like Brian Wilson by reproducing his tics – all Be My Baby drums and descending bass – along with referencing his past a little too heavily. It’s also one of the few places on the album that Wilson tries to hit notes he really can’t hit any more, sounding frankly bad on the second line of the choruses.
But even here there’s several different musical ideas – the main verse/chorus, a very nice middle eight, and a short repeated piano part that I *know* comes from something else I can’t place (in my head it’s part of a song on Orange Crate Art, but I can’t place it precisely even after listening to the entire album to see if I could hear that part). It’s not a great song, but it’s decent and pleasant.
(I’d probably also feel slightly more positive about the song were it not for the fact that I wrote an essay ‘proving’ that Wilson’s music is all about goddess-worship before the premiere of the suite, but it wasn’t published until afterward – and in the meantime Wilson was on stage singing “a goddess became my song”, rendering my point moot).
After this comes my personal favourite song of the album – Live Let Live. Originally written for the film An Arctic Tale, it’s been reworked here with new lyrics by Van Dyke Parks, dealing with the smallness of humanity and with a ‘save the whales’ message that actually works, rather than being heavy-handed moralising. A gorgeous little waltz, I don’t know what it is about this song that makes me love it so much, but all I can say is that when I hear the line “I got a notion we come from the ocean and God almighty had his hands on the water” my heart literally stops on the ‘God almighty’ (amusing, since the song, like so much of this album, talks about fast heartbeats).
The music to the chorus line (“Live let live not die”) is the same as that for Sail On Sailor (“Sail on sail on Sailor”), but even given the rather downbeat nature of the lyrics it communicates a hope and love of life where the previous song was more about struggling on pointlessly.
On any other Brian Wilson album post-Love You, this song would have overshadowed the rest of the album to such a ludicrous extent that the rest of the album would have been rendered unlistenable. Here it’s ‘only’ the best song on the album.
Mexican Girl, which follows, has been described rather harshly by David Quantick as ‘the most generic song ever written about Mexico or a girl’. There’s a grain of truth in that, but it’s also interesting just because this kind of music is very far from anything Wilson’s done before, all mariachi horns and Spanish guitar. There’s also a couple of fun lines in there – “you cast a net on the day we met” and “hey bonita muchacha, let me know that I gotcha”. It’s far from the best thing on the album, but it’s fun and funny and catchy.
California Role is, I am assured, a pun on a type of sushi (tying up with the ‘perfect for fish’ lines in Live Let Live) as well as the ‘rolling around heaven’ that keeps coming up throughout the album. The lyrics have quite a cynical bite to them :
Every girl’s the next Marilyn
Every guy, Errol Flynn
Sometimes you’ve got to edit your dreams
And find a spotlight behind the scenes
Here in California, man I gotta warn ya,
Find a California role
But there’s also a sympathy in there – “You broke your hand punching the clock so you could heal your heart” and “If you miss your shot it doesn’t mean you won’t reach your goal”. And the uptempo cheeriness of the music takes much of the sting out of the lyrics (as does the filter on Scott Bennett’s voice when he sings the lead on the first two verses before Brian takes over – it lends a distance to the lyrics). This is another standout track – so far, the album has alternated the truly excellent with the merely pretty good.
However, the next song, Oxygen To The Brain is another of the better songs on the album. The opening ‘Open up, open up, open your eyes’ melody is one of Brian’s classic little nursery rhyme melodies, like the tag of Wind Chimes. It then alternates between slower, short verses about how bad Brian’s life used to be and long, fast choruses urging the listener to make the most of life and get ‘oxygen to the brain’. The lyric sounds like it’s mostly Brian’s work – he’s written many songs with the same theme – but the line ‘skip the vices versus get to the refrain’ with its multiple puns and its commentary on the structure of the song itself is far too clever for someone as non-verbal as Wilson, and must be the work of Bennett (it’s possibly my favourite single line in the entire album, but I love puns probably a little too much).
Ending with a reprise of the ‘open your eyes’ start, the song then goes into Can’t Wait Too Long a short note-for-note remake of a snippet of a longer Beach Boys track (recorded in 1967 but unreleased until 1990). This works well enough on the CD, but worked better when performed live – at this point various bits of footage of Brian and his two brothers (Carl and Dennis, the guitarist and drummer respectively of the Beach Boys, both of whom died young) were projected overhead while the band sang the only lyrics in this snippet – “Been too long” – and I’m sure that pretty much everyone there was in tears as I was.
After this comes Midnight’s Another Day. When this song was first released on Wilson’s website, before the first performance, I wasn’t at all impressed, primarily because the scansion was all wrong, but even without that it just didn’t really appeal.
I now see that I was completely wrong. While the scansion’s still out (I suspect because Bennett fell so in love with one of his puns – “When there’s no morning without ‘u’” – that he let it go in even though it didn’t fit the rest of the verses), I can forgive that for the way the bridge builds up from just piano and organ on the line “all those voices, all those memories” to what sounds like every single instrument in the world on “all these people make me feel so alone”. It sends shivers down my spine.
I must have had tin ears when I first heard this. In context, and with the orchestration, it’s beautiful. It’s far from the best thing on the album, but it might be the most emotionally resonant.
On the other hand, the appeal of Going Home still mostly eludes me. For some reason even the few negative reviews of this album have picked on this as the standout track – people have spoken about this track as Brian’s best in decades. While it’s a fun track – it references back to Morning Beat with its Shortenin’ Bread riff, and it also includes the ‘rock, roll’ backing vocals Brian’s been trying to find a place for for thirty years (he used them in things like his unreleased version of Proud Mary), and best of all it has harmonica by the great session player Tommy Morgan – it’s *just* a fun track, a leftover from Brian’s sessions with Andy Paley from the mid-90s, given new lyrics. Even so, it’s hard not to smile when the instruments drop out and the band sing, almost a capella:
At twenty-five I turned out the light
Cause I couldn’t handle the glare in my tired eyes
But now I’m back drawing shades of kind blue skies
It’s a fun little song, and I’m glad it’s there, and it’s *great* live, but it’s not the best thing on the album.
Unfortunately, the closer, Southern California, is the weakest thing by far on the album. Which doesn’t mean it’s bad – it’s pleasant enough – but for an album whose other songs vary between ‘very good’ and ‘masterpiece’, ending on ‘not bad’ is a bit of a disappointment. To make matters worse, in the original live performances and demos, the song ended with a nice little fragment of vocal melody that came out of nowhere. Here that little fragment has been expanded into an entire new section of the song, and loses a lot of its appeal. The song ends up sounding scarily like the work of Bruce Johnston (Brian’s colleague in the Beach Boys, who has written the occasional nice song like Disney Girls (1957) but who also wrote I Write The Songs). The last “maumamayama Glory Hallelujah” is majestic though, and a perfect ending to the album. (It’s not the actual ending – there’s a tiny fragment stuck on at the end of the band singing ‘working in the sun all day’ – but it’s the real ending).
This is an astonishing, beautiful album that is much better than the sum of its parts. It’s amazing that at sixty-five Brian Wilson is finally starting to realise the potential he showed when he was twenty-three. I can only imagine what he’ll do next…
Apologies for lack of posting
My new laptop broke after only a couple of days, and I’ve spent all evening today setting up its replacement. Proper posting resumes tomorrow.
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