Proper posting resumes shortly
The /etc directory on my computer somehow got corrupted yesterday, and I had to do a clean reinstall, losing much (though thankfully not quite all) of the stuff I’ve been working on for my course (I back up /home, but I don’t back up /var, and I was doing web stuff, and while I had everything in separate partitions, they were ext4 and I could only find an old install disk that didn’t recognise anything newer than ext3). So I’ve had to spend today setting my computer back up, and will be spending the rest of the day frantically trying to get the work redone (I got an extension on Monday… to today).
Doctor Who And Batman Week Day 3: Seven Quick CD Reviews
A few weeks back, the Daily Torygraph had a week of giveaways of Doctor Who CDs. I didn’t get them because I refuse to buy that wretched snotrag of a paper, but they have recently announced an offer to get rid of their back stock, and are selling all seven CDs for ‘P&P only’ – although thirteen quid seems a lot for P&P.
However, less than two quid per CD is a great deal, and so I picked these up.
Mission To The Unknown (by Terry Nation, narrated by Peter Purves ) is a Dalek story from the first Doctor’s era. I won’t go into great detail about it here, as I plan to review the story in full when I get to it in a few months, but this was a single-episode story which was the only Doctor Who story not to feature the Doctor – though it set up a later story, The Daleks’ Master Plan.
As the story was burned, the only way to experience it is to listen to off-air audio-tape recordings made at the time, with linking narration by Peter Purves, who does a decent job. The story itself, intended by Nation as a backdoor pilot for a Dalek spin-off series, is genial hokum about Agent Marc Cory of the Special Space Service fighting deadly Varga plants. Taken for what it is – 45-year-old children’s adventure TV – it’s fun, though hardly at the same level as the first couple of Dalek stories. But before listening, forget everything you know about astronomy, as neither Nation nor David Whittaker (the script editor) knew the difference between a galaxy, a solar system and a constellation, so at one point you get several galaxies teaming up to try to take over the Earth.
Genesis Of The Daleks (by Terry Nation, starring Tom Baker, Elisabeth Sladen, Ian Marter, Michael Wisher, Peter Miles et al)
This was the first Doctor Who story to get any kind of repeatable home release. In the days before videos, this, an album containing a one-hour abridgement of the two-and-a-half-hour TV story’s soundtrack, with linking narration by Tom Baker, was the first time people could buy a Doctor Who story that had been on TV.
It’s obviously less necessary now that you can buy the whole thing on a double-DVD set with documentaries, commentaries, outtakes and so on, but it still has a nostalgic appeal to many Who fans, which is why it’s still available on CD.
Listening to the abridgement, a few things become clear.
Firstly, the TV show depended hugely on David Maloney’s visual sense. Without his Bergman rip-offs and the sense of oppression his visuals give, the story is much more the Typical Terry Nation script than it appears when watching it. And the abridgement does the plot few favours. It cuts out all the nonsense ‘perils’ that Nation stuck in more or less at random – the landmines, the giant clams and so on – but without those distractions, you can see that the plot makes absolutely no sense whatsoever.
But everything changes whenever Michael Wisher and Tom Baker get to do their thing (either together or separately). There’s a rumour that Baker and Wisher substantially rewrote their dialogue together in rehearsals, recasting some of it into iambic pentameter to make it more Shakespearean . Certainly, at crucial moments, this is *NOT* Terry Nation dialogue – this is a script that has been worked on by diverse hands, including Terrance Dicks and, most crucially, Robert Holmes.
Even in this cut-down form, then, the set pieces (“to hold in my hand…” , “Have I the right?”) still have an immense power, and this is still a fantastic story. In what should have been a fairly conventional Dalek story, someone (presumably Holmes) managed to sneak in a morality play straight out of Dostoevsky, but written for eight year-olds. And even without the Bergmanisms and gas masks, that’s pretty special.
Exploration Earth (by Bernard Venables, starring Tom Baker, Elisabeth Sladen and John Westbrook)
This is a trifle, a little over twenty minutes long, that doesn’t really deserve its own CD. Originally broadcast for schools’ radio, it’s an educational programme trying to tell the story of the Earth’s creation, using the Doctor Who characters to provide a dramatic framework. Sarah Jane is completely out of chaacter as Generic Companion (“Doctor, I’m scared”) though Lis Sladen still does wonders with some awful dialogue. A historical curio, not really made for repeat listening.
Slipback (by Eric Saward, starring Colin Baker and Nicola Bryant)
Or the Blitch-Blikers Buide to the Balaxy. During the show’s ‘gap year’ in 1985, BBC Radio4 commissioned a serial in six fifteen-minute parts for their children’s strand, Pirate Radio 4, starring the then-current Doctor/companion team and written by the show’s then-script editor Eric Saward.
While in his scripts for TV Saward seems obsessed with trying to be like Robert Holmes but with more violence, when writing for the radio he seems instinctively to have turned to another former Who writer/script-editor, Douglas Adams, and as a result you could play any of the scenes in this that don’t feature the Doctor to anyone and they’d think it was a bit they’d forgotten from the second Hitch-Hiker’s Guide To The Galaxy radio series.
Saward’s attempts at humour aren’t great – he’s someone who’s clearly more at home writing action-movie wisecracking than actual wit – but the cast is fantastic, featuring voices that anyone who has ever listened to Radio 4 will recognise instantly, like Valentine Dyall and Nick Revell. And while the plot makes no sense, the fifteen-minute-episode format means it keeps moving quickly.
Incidentally, the computer voice in this, which is supposed to sound like an ‘airheaded bimbo’, sounds suspiciously like an impersonation of Sandra Dickinson, who played Trillian in the TV (but not the radio) version of Hitch-Hiker’s. Dickinson was then married to Peter Davison, and had apparently not been hugely popular among the production staff of Doctor Who. I wonder if this was a slight dig at her…
Pest Control (by Peter Anghelides, read by David Tennant)
This is a two-disc audiobook (as opposed to radio play), and is *much* better than I expected. I loathe Tennant’s Doctor, but here, reading in his own accent, he gives a masterful performance. I still find his Doctor irritating (and from the voice and characterisation of Donna Noble I was very correct to not watch the fourth RTD series, or I would have smashed whatever I was watching it on), but he does more and better acting in the two-and-a-half hours of this audiobook than in the entirety of his TV career as the Doctor, providing a range of distinctively-voiced, subtly-characterised characters.
The story itself is a fairly standard Doctor Who plot – in fact as a plot it’s far more the kind of thing one would expect from Saward than Saward’s own story is – about a war between the Earth and a bunch of aliens, but then the Earth soldiers are being turned into giant insects, and then a killer robot turns up… you know the kind of thing.
It’s a routine, formula story, but it’s an *extremely well executed* routine, formula story, and as such would fit far better with the Moffat series than the Davies series to which it is a coda. And I’ll give it a lot more leeway for being formulaic than the TV series, because as an audiobook the production costs of this consist of little more than the cost of a microphone and a cup of tea, while the TV series cost several million quid. The expectations are correspondingly lower.
This was actually the big surprise for me, and easily the most enjoyable of these as a pure listening experience, and that’s coming from someone who loathes Tennant as the Doctor.
And I will love Anghelides forever, because unlike the people at Big Finish, he uses the word DISORIENT! NOT DISORIENTATE! DISORIENT! THE PROPER ACTUAL WORD! NOT THE ILLITERATE NEOLOGISM. I know disorientate is now in dictionaries, and I hate linguistic prescriptivism as much as anyone, but that’s always been one of my bugbears. Mr Anghelides repeatedly using the proper word made me very happy.
The Runaway Train by Oli Smith, read by Matt Smith
I only listened to this today, and I remember nearly nothing about it, except that Matt Smith can’t do American or Scottish accents, and Smith’s voice is a lot less tolerable than Tennant’s when doing a dramatic reading. There’s some stuff about the future-Doctor setting things up in the past to happen to him in the present, but other than that I couldn’t tell you anything about it. It all just turned into “bleh bleh bleh bleh” between the headphones and my eardrums.
Overall, this is a very mixed bag, but for thirteen quid it’s worth it for Genesis and Pest Control alone. Then you’ve got a couple of fun-but-silly children’s programmes (Slipback and Mission) and a couple of duds, but everything is at least worth a listen. Possibly even The Runaway Train…
Oh and
Those waiting for PEP! 2, I should have proof PDFs for the authors in about a week, and it’ll be available soon after. I’ve been monstrously busy…
Doctor Who And Batman Week Day 2: Batman 700
I’m a couple of weeks late with my review of this one, so most of what there is to be said about it has been said elsewhere by other people. But there are a couple of things that I don’t *think* anyone else has touched upon.
A couple of years ago, on his register-to-read, only-posted-to-twice blog, Grant Morrison wrote:
Back home, have a bath then watch the end of DOCTOR WHO which Kristan taped for me while I was away. More wonderful, inspirational pop art pulp madness, and what intrigues me most are the numerous, absolutely coincidental, similarities to my comic FINAL CRISIS (the machine made of worlds, the conquered Earth with its network of freedom fighters linked by a secret communications system, the reality-wiping weapon, the frantic scene changes, etc etc) which leads me to believe that creative people, particularly those writing or recording with a mass or populist audience in mind, have all begun to tell a very similar, very post-9/11 (call it ‘post Cycle 23’) story
So in that light, it’s quite interesting to note that Batman 700, released after the last two episodes of Doctor Who were recorded but before they were shown, has all our hero’s deadliest enemies team up against him to place him in a trap which, were it successful, would have the effect of writing both him and them out of existence altogether, but is saved by what annoying nuWho fans would refer to as ‘wibbly wobbly timey wimey’ and people who can speak English would call a loop in causality.
Now this actually works a lot better in the Batman story than in the Doctor Who one, because of the nature of the fictional universe the two characters inhabit. Doctor Who has always emphasised Free Will above all – the idea that You Too Can Make A Difference! – but that making a difference can sometimes have unintended consequences. The kind of fixed time one would need for a causality loop might be how time ‘works’ in the Doctor Who ‘universe’ (although it’s not even how it works consistently in those episodes), but it *shouldn’t* be Metaphorically, it’s all wrong (Though I have a handwave for that that would take three posts to explain, which I may go into at some point in the future).
Batman, on the other hand, clearly inhabits a universe which is equal parts Calvinist, Raymond Chandler and Gothic Horror The universe is a hard, bad place and nothing you can do can make a difference, but you have to try anyway to be morally pure amid the filth… in that kind of universe predestination and a total lack of free will make storytelling sense.
In fact we need it really, because otherwise the very first time Batman gets an inkling of the possibility of time travel he’s compelled to go back in time and save his parents. Here, he says to Robin “there was never a choice. We are what we are and we can’t change what happened.”
In the Batman universe, everyone has a set character. Change, either of the past or the future, is impossible. Batman will always be Batman, the Joker will never be rehabilitated, and the universe is as fixed, stony and grim as Batman’s face.
(Incidentally, I like that Morrison has made the Person Who Was Wrong On The Internet in this Teatime Brutality post I’ve referenced a bunch of times already even more wrong by specifically bringing Batman 666 into continuity with a time travel story).
Neither the Batrman nor Doctor Who causality loops are paradoxical, BTW. The universe can tolerate, briefly, the creation of matter/energy/information out of nothing so long as it’s annihilated again in fairly short order, and there’s nothing in the laws of physics that prevents time-reversed causality. In fact many situations would *force* time-reversed causality -if there’s a boundary condition on a process in the future, then one can just as truly say that the future state of the process caused the past one as vice versa.
Of course, Morrison being Morrison, this story encapsulates his entire run. Much like Return Of Bruce Wayne it’s a story told in several time periods, with big jumps but in chronological order, with Batman in every time period, involving time travel, drawn by several artist. Much like his Batman run, those artists range from the sublime (Quitely) to the less-so (Tony Daniel).
There’s recently been some discussion around comics blogs, with people like David Brothers and Sean Witzke (both of whose blogs I enjoy immensely) arguing that for a comic to be good it has to have good art. As a reaction to the comics blogosphere’s over-emphasis on words (an over-emphasis I share, as verbally-oriented as I am), I agree with the sentiment, but I disagree with it as a factual statement.
To make an analogy, songs have both music and lyrics. And I can enjoy the Beach Boys singing “Gonna love you every single night because I think that you’re doggone outtasight” or “Well oh my oh gosh oh gee” because the music underneath it is sublime, just as I can enjoy a melody-free Woody Guthrie talking blues with great lyrics. I would, of course, *rather* have both, but so long as the lesser half of the combination reaches some minimal base level of competence, I can still enjoy it for the other half.
But Morrison’s Batman – both this issue and the entire run – really is the perfect evidence for Brothers and Witzke’s claim. Morrison has worked during the last few years of Batman stories with some of the best artists and storytellers ever to work in comics, people like Frank Quitely, J.H. Williams III, Cameron Stewart and Frazer Irving. Those collaborations have been some of the best Batman comics ever made – funny and clever, with gorgeous art and clear storytelling that can be followed with no effort but rewards repeated rereading.
But put him with mediocre journeymen like most of the rest of his collaborators, and instead we get an unlikeable, unreadable mess, with important details obscured or not drawn at all, lapses in panel-to-panel continuity, and storytelling that actively fights the reader’s comprehension.
I still enjoy Morrison’s Batman work, because the good stuff is *SO* good, but I’m someone who actually prefers flawed-but-interesting to perfect. There’s no reason at all why DC’s most successful character, written by their best writer, should have had a succession of artists who’d be best-suited to continuing learning their craft on third-tier titles like Outsiders, and I hope we have far more artists of the calibre of those who’ve worked on his Batman & Robin run so far (excepting Tan) and far fewer mediocrities.
Tomorrow – Doctor Who
Doctor Who And Batman Week Day 1: NuNuWho
So I’m a couple of weeks behind in my blogging now, thanks to some rather bad health problems due to stress, and I’m aware I’ve got quite a bit of stuff to write about. So I hereby declare the next seven days to be Doctor Who And Batman week, with the plan being to do posts on NuNuWho, Batman 700, the seven ‘free’ Doctor Who CDs that the Daily Torygraph gave away, Return Of Bruce Wayne 4, Marco Polo and the issue of Batman & Robin that comes out tomorrow, in that order.
I think I’m actually going to be able to find a surprising amount in common between these things, to the point that I’m seeing this more as one very long piece than seven shorter ones. Let’s see if that works.
The most recent series of Doctor Who has been weirdly polarising. It’s appropriate, in fact, that it ran over the election and coalition formation, because much like the coalition it’s led to people finding themselves violently disagreeing with those they previously agreed with, and praising the opinions of those they despised. Andrew Rilstone, for example, who detested pretty much everything from the last two or three years of RTDWho, has been absolutely gushing in his praise. Lawrence Miles, on the other hand, who held similar, though much more strongly-expressed, opinions, has judged the new series as being probably the worst thing in human history (on the basis of half-watching one episode and a personal dislike of Steven Moffat, the head writer).
I actually find myself agreeing with both of them, for reasons that are, to me at least, rather interesting.
Because the interesting thing about this series is how all the criticisms that most people were making of the RTD era turn out to be bunkum – the plots here don’t make any more sense than they did during RTD’s time, there’s an overemphasis on Daleks, the companion is the most specialest person in the whole history of ever, ludicrously-high-stakes finale – in fact the whole thing could almost have been written as a parody of the worst excesses of Davies’ era. But none of *these* things mattered, because Moffat, unlike Davies, understands story structure – the plot to the weeping angel two-parter made no sense at all on any level *when looked at as a whole*, but every individual idea followed neatly and yet surprisingly from the idea before.
(That wasn’t the case with every episode – some were incredibly predictable – but it was the case more often than not).
The main thing Moffat did was to take the series away from soap-operatics and frame the same kind of stories instead as fairy tales (signalled by someone every five seconds saying “Oh, it’s just like a fairy-tale”. I never said Moffat was subtle), and within that fairy tale world, the rules could change, but never unfairly.
At least until the last episode, where the time-travel paradox was the kind of idea that Christopher Bidmead dismisses as first-draft writing. It was not only a cop-out, but it was one which was a) avoidable (one shot of the Doctor dropping the sonic screwdriver as he’s dragged towards the Pandorica and you’ve got your get-out), b) less dramatic than an obvious alternative (Rory has to try to figure out how to work it, nearly deranged with grief, because he knows the Doctor’s Amy’s only hope), and most importantly gives it the Superman: The Movie problem – we now know that any time the Doctor’s in an impossible situation, future-Doctor can just come and rescue him. It destroys tension in any future episode where we remember this.
And it was very enjoyable for what it was. A friend of mine said ‘Rilstone being positive about newestWho makes it sound worse than when he disliked it – it sounds like it’s finally become a puddle of “lovely, mad, beautiful, loveliness and special niceness”‘, but I think that’s misreading Rilstone’s reviews, and it’s *certainly* misreading the show, which has been far less sentimentalised than Davies’ excrescence. The new-new series is harder and more obviously cynical (I thought the RTD show was cynical as hell, but hidden under mountains of schmaltz, which have mostly been scraped away in the new show).
There is still a greasy residue smeared all over everything, of course – romantic love is still the highest ideal to which anyone can possibly aspire, and it’s perfectly acceptable to punch someone if they suggest that in a choice between saving your girlfriend from certain death, and saving the entire universe from being retroactively wiped from existence, the latter might be more important. But this is par for the course in modern TV, and something we just need to tolerate.
More worrying for me is the characterisation of the Doctor, where we see how this series is the half-way house between the RTD series and something interesting (in a glass-half-full or half-empty way, the RTD series was a glass full of urine, while the new series is the same glass, with the urine emptied out, given a good rinsing, and with a decent wine poured in – a definite improvement, but you’d still be cautious about drinking it, and there might be an aftertaste). The Doctor in the RTD series, at least once Tennant took the part, wasn’t a character at all, just a set of tics pulled together by Tennant in an increasingly-desperate attempt to paper over the cracks in the scripts. The scripts this year have a character in them who one assumes is what they were *trying* to do in the Tennant years – certainly some of the speech patterns (the more annoying ones) are the same – but is an actual character.
Unfortunately, rather than ‘eccentric’, this character is ‘whacky’ – where the Doctor should be three parts Sherlock Holmes to one part each Einstein and Groucho Marx, the Eleventh Doctor is Ralph Malph or Mork. This is better than no character at all, but significantly worse than the ‘real’ Doctor.
But my real problem with the new series has been its innate conservatism. This is something that was already there in the RTD years, but for all his faults (and by God did he have faults), Davies would at least try to make the show *different* – Love & Monsters is a fairly horrible piece of television, but it wasn’t something that Doctor Who had ever done before.
Moffat has taken what Davies did, streamlined it, made it even more formulaic, and added a basic level of competence that is far above what was there in Davies’ time. He’s making a solidly entertaining program. But he’s doing *nothing new*.
In the discussion I always point to, in the mid-1990s, Moffat said of Who “I’d rather see them do something limited than something crap.”
Which is as absolutely, utterly, totally wrong as one can get – even if he wasn’t, in the process, dismissing the work of Bob Holmes, a far better writer than Moffat has any hope of ever being.
Several of Moffat’s criticisms of the old show in that article actually ring true. Despite what some of the more vociferous fans may say, Doctor Who was never ‘the best programme on television’. It was often very good indeed (and equally often a pile of old tat), but during the 26 years Doctor Who was on, British TV also produced I, Claudius, Boys From The Blackstuff, Not Only… But Also, Life On Earth, The Ascent Of Man, The Beiderbecke Affair, Q, The Prisoner, Face To Face and many more. Objectively, as television, Doctor Who rarely if ever rose to those heights.
But while it was not the ‘best’ programme on TV, it was and remains my favourite. And one of the main reasons for that is that when it was at its best – when it felt most ‘like Doctor Who’ – it was a show that *tried different things*. Stories like, say, An Unearthly Child, The Aztecs, The Mind Robber, The War Games, Vengeance On Varos, Logopolis or Delta And The Bannermen might not all have been great, but they were all *DIFFERENT*. A show can’t go from the high of Caves Of Androzani to the low of The Twin Dilemma *in a single week* without doing something interesting. That variability which kept Doctor Who from attaining the perfection of Fawlty Towers also made it worth watching even at its worst.
Moffat’s series has none of that. The best episodes (the first two, the first episode of the weeping angel two-parter and the two-part finale – in other words all bar one of Moffat’s episodes) have had me on the edge of my seat, desperate to see the next week’s episode, and wanting to watch them again. But when I’ve come to *actually* watch them again, there’s nothing there – it’s amazingly well-made, but it’s well-made *product*, with few real ideas. Expecting this show to be innovative, different or thought-provoking is a bit like expecting those things of your new iPad. That’s not what it’s *for* any more.
And that makes me sad, but if what you’re after from your TV is pretty people saying witty things in exciting situations, then you’re really not going to find a better example than the current series of Doctor Who. And that’s really not meant as a backhanded compliment – the new show does what it does extraordinarily well. Compared to the Davies series, this is a staggeringly huge improvement. But it isn’t the series I loved. That’s OK – the Pertwee UNIT series bore practically no relationship to The Romans or The Time Meddler, either. But it could be so much more than it is…
Al Jardine: A Postcard From California
This isn’t a Proper Blog Post as such – I know I now owe people two Batman and two Doctor Who posts for next week. However, Manchester University’s computer science website is down, which means I can’t get any of my (due in on Monday) coursework done. So to try to overcome the horrible panic and tension I’m now feeling, I thought I’d pick up Al Jardine’s solo album, A Postcard From California, released a couple of days ago, and thankfully not (as originally stated in the press release) ‘iTunes exclusive’. I thought I’d ‘liveblog’ my first listen.
A bit of background first. For those who don’t know, Al Jardine is ‘the quiet one’ in the Beach Boys. The only one of the five ‘classic’ members not to be a blood relation, he played rhythm guitar and sang harmony vocals, and was the lead vocalist on Help Me, Rhonda, but not on many of the band’s other US hits (he did however sing lead on the UK hits Breakaway (joint lead with Carl Wilson), Then I Kissed Her, Cottonfields and Lady Lynda, the latter of which he also wrote).
Until now, he was the only member of the band not to have released a solo record – a shame, because while he was never the most talented of songwriters, he has a strong voice (he’s far and away the best singer of the surviving Beach Boys) and has an interesting musical sensibility – he is far more influenced by folk and country than the rest of the band (he was the one who suggested the folk songs Sloop John B and Cottonfields be added to the band’s repertoire). However, he’s a slow worker – this album was started not long after he was sacked from the band (after Carl Wilson’s death in 1998 the Beach Boys broke up, and Mike Love licensed the name to tour along with Bruce Johnston and most of their backing band, but without Jardine), and contains songs which he started working on in the late 1970s.
It’s also not very ‘solo’ – it has a huge range of guests including all the surviving other Beach Boys (and the late Carl Wilson, who recorded parts of one song in sessions in the 1980s), Flea from the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Steve Miller, David Crosby, Neil Young, and Alec Baldwin. That Jardine managed to get such a bizarre-but-stellar lineup of guest stars is testament to the fundamental niceness of the man (someone I’ve rarely heard a bad word spoken about).
The songs aren’t exactly ‘solo’ either – there are remakes of three old Beach Boys tracks here, Help Me, Rhonda, California Saga (one of Jardine’s few solo songwriting credits), and Honkin’ Down The Highway (a Brian Wilson song with Jardine lead from the underrated Beach Boys Love You album), along with California Feelin’ (a Brian Wilson/Steve Kalinich song originally recorded by the Beach Boys but never released by them, and eventually released as a Brian Wilson solo track a few years back).
Now I’ve said that (and my wife said she likes this bit, where I’m not playing the music…), my thoughts as I listen for the first time:
A Postcard From California
Melodically, the verse is quite similar to Brian Wilson’s unreleased Christmas Time, and quite pleasant, with acoustic guitars. But the chorus is far less good – the melody is *absolutely* stolen from some big 70s AOR hit. I can’t think of which one, because I keep thinking City Of New Orleans, which is similar but not the one he’s stolen from. (My wife says it’s “The Eagles or some shit like that”, and I agree it’s something *LIKE* them, but not actually them).
A duet with Glen Campbell, who used to be in the Beach Boys for six months and played as a session musician on many of their records, Campbell unfortunately shows his age here – when you think of what a great vocalist he used to be, and realise that he and Jardine are about the same age, it’s shocking, because Jardine here sounds half his age.
The verses are pleasant, but the chorus is Jimmy Buffet hell.
California Feelin’
I’ve never rated this song very much (more because of Steve Kalinich’s not-very-good lyrics than anything else), but of the three versions I’ve heard of the song, this is by far the best, Jardine sounding like he means the song (unlike Carl Wilson) and staying in tune (unlike Brian Wilson). There’s some lounge-singerism (sounds like a Bruce Johnston production) , but this is actually quite nice.
Looking Down The Coast
This is a song that was originally a much-bootlegged late-70s Beach Boys track. I believe it was co-written with Brian Wilson (I don’t have access to the liner notes, having only bought this as MP3s) who sang co-lead on the original version, who used some musical elements from it in his 1988 song Baby Let Your Hair Grow Long.
The production on this one is nowhere near as good as the Beach Boys version – in general this album sounds like it’s about 20 years old, with far too much 80s guitar and reverb – but the song itself, an epic with many different sections, even though only 3:46 long, is the most musically-interesting thing Jardine ever did, much like his and Love’s California Saga from the Holland album, but tightened up and more thought-through.
Jardine’s vocals so far have been uniformly excellent. It’s a shame he didn’t have a really good producer to work with him.
Don’t Fight The Sea
This will be the draw for many people buying this album, as it’s almost certainly the last-ever Beach Boys track. Originally intended for the same late-1970s album as Looking Down The Coast (a concept album about the environment and California, much like this one has turned out to be), Carl Wilson and Bruce Johnston recorded vocals for it in the 1980s, with Brian Wilson and Mike Love adding vocals more recently (Love apparently recorded his bass vocal part on a minidisc in his hotel room while on tour).
This would have been a highlight of the last two Beach Boys albums, but that says more about those albums than about this – this would have fit all too well on those albums, with its horrible 80s production. But still, hearing Brian, Mike, Carl, Al and Bruce all together, however artificially, will make any Beach Boys fan happy.
This song, incidentally, was a co-write with Terry Jacks, which says it all…
Tide Pool Interlude
This is weird – Jardine has taken the piano part from the unreleased 4/4 version of Mike Love’s song Big Sur and turned it into an instrumental track, over which Alec Baldwin is reciting a poem by Steve Kalinich, about California.
Kalinich is very friendly with a lot of my friends, so I won’t say anything *too* bad about him, but if he learned rhyming and scansion he *would* make a great Hallmark card writer…
Campfire Scene
This is just a brief introduction to the new song – Crosby, Stills, Jardine and Young singing the chorus over a banjo backing. Actually gorgeous, but only a few seconds and not really a separate track.
A California Saga
This is a remake of Jardine’s California Saga (On My Way To Sunny Cal-I-Fornia) from the Beach Boys’ 1973 album Holland. Featuring Crosby, Stills and Young, and with a joint lead vocal by Young, this is *REALLY GOOD*. It’s a very close remake of the original (down to flying in a sampled Brian Wilson vocal on the first line, which he sang on the original), but out of the context of that album, where it wasn’t an especially standout track, it’s apparent just what a well-written song this is – if Neil Young had tried to write California Girls, this is what he would have come up with.
Even the last verse now works. Originally, this verse sounded like a past-it band trying and failing to be hip, singing about Country Joe and festivals, but now the track is a gathering of old men singing together, and the lyric is put into the past tense, it just sounds warmly nostalgic.
The best track by far of the album so far.
Help Me, Rhonda
Everyone knows this song, but this version (featuring Steve Miller and members of the Steve Miller Band, plus Flea on bass) is quite a fun version of the track, turning the song into a harmonica-led bar-band blues. However, it does show again how badly Jardine’s contemporaries’ voices have aged – so far Neil Young’s the only one whose vocal has stood up in comparison. Jardine was always the clean-living one of the Beach Boys, but listening to this goes to show just how well his voice has aged.
This sounds like it was fun to play, but I didn’t really need another version of this song to be honest (I could put together a full CD of versions of this I’ve got already).
San Simeon
This is the fsecond ‘new’ song on the album (for a definition of ‘new’ which includes ‘playing the intro to Don’t Worry Baby and having that be the intro to your song). A quite pleasant Latin-flavoured track, which features guest vocalists who (by a process of elimination given the list of people on the album) must be two of the band America, it sounds like a 70s soft pop track, and is easily-forgotten, but pleasant enough.
Drivin’
A duet with Brian Wilson, and again featuring the members of America on backing vocals, this is a swing-time track that sounds like an obvious attempt to write tracks like Little Deuce Coupe, but again with a very 80s-sounding production, but some quite interesting bluesy touches in the arrangement. It could have done without the obvious references to America songs in the lyrics though. And the line about BP thrown in at the end must have been a real last-minute change.
Honkin’ Down The Highway
Featuring Brian Wilson on backing vocals, this is quite close to the original arrangement from The Beach Boys Love You (and almost identical to the way the Beach Boys played it live). I’ve always loved that song, and while this is an inferior remake, it’s still fun. Some nice baritone sax honking from Richie Canata, as well.
And I just heard the ending – the line “way with girls”, my favourite part of the melody, suddenly turned into a vast a capella choir and then the song stopping dead. Not sure if I like it or not, but certainly interesting.
And I Always Will
This is an MOR ballad with a tiny bit of a touch of Gershwin and a bit of Jimmy Webb to it, and a relatively restrained (for this kind of thing) orchestral arrangement.
So that’s finished.
Some googling later, I find that the *verse* to A Postcard From California is, of course, a total rip-off from Rhinestone Cowboy (hence, presumably, Glan Campbell’s appearance), even more than it’s like the Brian Wilson track I mentioned (which is obviously equally ‘influenced’ by the same song, now I think about it). I’m still trying to figure out where he got the melody for the chorus though – it’s not City Of New Orleans, Hotel California or Dance The Night Away (by the Mavericks), but it *is* another song of that type.
So after listening to this once, my overall impression?
It’s actually pretty good.
It’s not great, far from it, but I’d put it as an above-average Beach Boys solo album. Nowhere near as good as Smile or That Lucky Old Sun but infinitely preferable to Imagination or Mike or Carl’s solo albums. None of the new songs are especially interesting – and, as you may have gathered, they’re very far from original – but there’s not a single *bad* song on there, and the overall effect is quite pleasant.
It’s a more cohesive album than you might expect given the long recording time and diverse sources as well. It’s essentially a Californian travelogue, a celebration of the beauty of California’s nature, with secondary themes of worry about the environment and enjoying driving around.
It’s an album I’ll probably play half-a-dozen times over the next month, then occasionally stumble over when a track comes on shuffle when I’m playing MP3s and think “Oh yeah, I liked that!”. Which, given the low expectations one goes into when someone of Jardine’s generation records new music, is quite high praise.
If you like CSNY, or late period Willie Nelson, or Jimmy Webb, then it’s probably worth checking this out. It’s nowhere near that good, but it’s that kind of thing. For Beach Boys fans, imagine California Saga stretched to an entire album.
If you just want to check out a couple of tracks, I recommend California Saga and California Feelin’.
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