Jeeves And The Singularity
I’ve been a little unwell this week, and haven’t been able to get anything new written. So for New Year, I’m giving you a story I wrote a little while ago (ETA I corrected a minor mistake – I’d confused the married names of Berties aunts. Thanks to grouchymusicologist for the correction):
Jeeves And The Singularity
by Andrew Hickey
Now, it’s a rummy thing about my man, Jeeves, but while he’s the best valet one could ask for — absolutely top-notch, in my opinion, he does have certain… opinions. In particular, on the matter of hosiery, he can be quite forceful.
It so happened that I had recently picked up a rather natty pair of socks — a brightish blue, with pink stripe — with which I expected to cut quite the dash. Jeeves, however, had made some disparaging comments along the lines of them being “akin to the worst monstrosities conjured up by Monsieur Gaultier’s fevered imagination”, which I thought was a tad on the harsh side.
Now, we Woosters are never ones to let a valet, however valued, come between us and our personal style, and I told him so in no uncertain terms.
“Jeeves,” I said, “a man’s person may be battered and assaulted, his mind may be changed by reasoned argument, his very soul may be taken from him. But his socks… his socks are sacrosanct!”
He’d said no more about the matter, but one could tell it rankled, and I noticed that for the next few days the mid-afternoon pick-me-up was rather lighter on the w. and heavier on the s. than was the norm. I said nothing, however. One has to be gracious in victory.
#
A couple of weeks after Jeeves had started emitting this air of froideur , my old friend Bingo Little turned up in town. This was a rather infrequent occurrence of late, young Bingo having made a bit of a name for himself as a venture capitalist, having had the luck (or, as he would call it, foresight) to take a punt with his uncle’s money on one of these newfangled Web 3.0 startup whatsits, and having relocated to Silicon Valley.
Never let it be said that Bertram Wooster is a Luddite — no-one is more bucked about the White Heat of Technology than I — but I must admit that I’d never understood exactly what Bingo’s company actually did, other than that it was something to do with computers.
However, some things never change, and despite Bingo having become a billionaire techno-capitalist, he was still, not to put too fine a point on it, a chump. Remind me to tell you sometime about how Jeeves saved his bacon after he sent all his money to some African Johnny. The point being that while he may have made some money off the things, one should no more trust Little, R.P., near a computer than one should hand a rifle to a three-year-old.
However, this time, as soon as I saw Bingo I knew that the problem was not anything so new-fangled; from the fish-like gawping to the glazed eyes, all the symptoms were present. Bingo was in love again.
“Who is it this time?”
“I don’t know what you mean!”
“Oh come off it!” I fixed a penetrating gaze on the poor slob. “You know as well as I do that when you have that dopey smile on your face, some poor female somewhere has become the latest object of your affliction.”
“Really, Bertie! How can you say such things?”
“Because it’s the truth! You were like this over that waitress, you were like this over that Vicar’s niece, you were even like this over Matron when we were at school.”
“Bertie!”
“You were even like this over Honoria Glossop!”
He shuddered, as well he might. Mentions of the Glossop female tend to have that affect on those poor unfortunates who have been pulled into her gravitational field – at least those few she lets survive, pour encourager les autres.
“Oh, speak not to me of Glossops, Bertie! What I feel for Alice is so much more –”
“Aha! I knew it!”
“It’s really not like that! This is a pure, spiritual thing! A meeting of minds! Our souls, Bertie, are two halves of one great whole.”
“You’re talking out of one great hole, old thing. I’ve seen you like this before — you catch a glimpse of ankle and you think you’re Troilus and she’s Cressida. Or is it the other way round? Jeeves would know. Either way, you catch sight of some pretty young thing and you assume she’s the love of your life, despite all previous evidence to the contrary, viz all the other times it’s happened.”
“But this is different, Bertie! I’ve never even seen her!”
“Come again?”
“We’ve never met, and I have yet to persuade her to send me a photograph.”
“Then, my dear chump, how on Earth have you managed to fall in love with her? I mean, you usually at least manage to have been in the same room before you go attempting to plight your troth.”
“We met online! It was quite by coincidence, as it happens. I was at the old computer, chatting to that chap from Nigeria — you remember the one?”
“All too clearly.”
“Yes, well, at the time we were rather more chummy than we later became. Anyway, we were chatting away, discussing this and that, when suddenly this message popped up from Alice. I, of course, was befuzzled, as anyone would be. It turned out to be a misunderstanding — I’d typed her username in the box by mistake, instead of the blokey with whom I was chattering — but by the time we worked out the cause of the confusion, we’d become the best of pals!”
I must say, this was most unusual, and somewhat cheering. Normally, the mind of R.P. Little is not on the higher things. While he’s as fine a chap as you could ever hope to meet, he is easily distracted by a magnificent profile, and only rarely does he bother to check what, if anything, lies behind it. The resulting personality clashes have been the principal cause of his sorrows, so I could only approve of this new stratagem. Getting to know the woman before falling in love with her was, I felt, a major step forward for Bingo, and I resolved to help the poor sap in any way I could.
“Anyway, Bertie, I was wondering, could Jeeves help me out?”
“Jeeves?”
“Yes, Jeeves. I need that fine brain of his.”
I don’t mind admitting I was more than a little put out by this. While none come before me in their admiration for Jeeves’ grey cells, the fact remains that he is, after all, only a valet — and one who was showing signs of getting dangerously above his station. And while I may not be known as the most astute thinker in my circle, compared to Bingo, the five times winner of the Silliest Sod Award at the Drones’ annual bash, Bertram Wilberforce Wooster is on a par with that chappie in the wheelchair whose name I forget.
The point being that when it comes to matters of the heart, none beats stronger than that of a Wooster, and I made that plain to Bingo.
“You don’t need Jeeves! You’ve got me! Come, tell me your problem, old pal-o’-mine, and I shall solve it expeditiously!”
“I really would rather have Jeeves help…”
“Dash it all! A man has his pride, you know! When an old school chum comes to him for help, what kind of man turns to his valet? No kind of man, that’s what kind!”
“I didn’t mean–”
“No, blast it! I shall solve your problem myself, with no need to turn to a servant for assistance!”
“If you’re sure…”
“I have never been more sure of anything in my life!”
“But if you can’t help, can we ask Jeeves then?”
“If you must.” I graciously acceded.
#
I shall spare you more of our heady banter, and cut to the chase. The nub of the problem was this. While this Alice said she was madly in love with Bingo (there being no other way to be in love with Bingo, admirable fellow though he undoubtedly is), she would tell him very little about herself. She wouldn’t tell him her surname, though she did say she wasn’t married, or where she lived, or even what she looked like. Now you or I might see these as being essential prerequisites to falling head-over-heels in love, but not Bingo.
It was not, apparently, that she didn’t love him — and he is a lovable chap, in a sort of puppy-dog way, and his billions probably help — but she had what she called “trust issues”. Or to put it in plain English, she wanted to ascertain his bona fides before parting with the info.
Bingo also said there were ways of finding out this sort of information — he was iffy on the details, but said he had people who worked for him who could do it for him — but that this would be unfair. He wanted to trick her into giving up the information honestly.
There seemed to me only one solution.
“Bingo, old bean,” I said, after much cogitation, “your trouble is you’re not playing hard to get. You’re going in all guns blazing, telling this Alice female that she’s the love of your life, and you wonder that she’s not showing similar enthusiasm. You need to make her chase you. Become a man of mystery. Even better, pretend to have another girlfriend.”
“Another girlfriend? Bertie, how could you?!”
“Bingo, old bean, polyamory is all the rage these days. Even my Aunt Agatha is experimenting, loath though I am to think of such horrors. But you won’t actually be getting another girlfriend, just trying to rouse her womanly jealousy.”
“But Bertie…”
“Don’t ‘but Bertie’ me! Just casually mention that things haven’t been going fast enough for you, and you’ve felt the need to play the field, and she’ll be trying to tie you down faster than you can say ‘breach of promise’”
“Well, if you’re sure…”
“I am. Trust in Bertram, old bean. When have I ever led you astray?”
#
As the days passed into weeks, I began to forget about Bingo’s fling, and assumed that it, like all the others, had passed away the second Bingo saw any other female between the ages of sixteen and forty-five.
It was only when I got a call from an anguished-sounding Bingo that I gave it another thought.
“Hello?”
“Bertie, old thing, help! I’m trapped inside the office! The doors won’t open!”
“How on earth do you expect me to help you, you dolt? Your office is in California.”
“No, I’m in the London branch! Listen, Bertie, come quick. Alice did this! Ali–”
And with that the ‘phone went dead. I rang for Jeeves.
“Sir?”
“Bingo’s in a spot of bother, Jeeves.”
“Indeed, sir?”
“Trapped in his office.”
“Yes, sir?”
“He appears to have been locked in by his g.f.”
“Indeed, sir?”
“Have you any ideas?”
“Nothing is occurring at present, sir.”
This is the thing about Jeeves. While he can always be relied on when the metaphorical s. hits the allegorical f., at the time for all good men to come to the aid of the party, at any time before that he can be positively mule-like in his stubbornness. He can calmly see a friend of the old master suffering, and stand there unblinking and calm as you like. It can grate at times, I don’t mind telling you.
“Jeeves, this is simply not good enough! You and I may have had our disagreements, but Bingo has no part in them. He has no stake whatsoever in my choice of hosiery, and does not deserve to be punished for your mule-like obstinacy in the face of pink stripes. Where’s your feudal spirit, man?”
“I apologise, sir. I am simply not apprised of enough facts to form a reliable plan of action.”
So I explained the whole sorry business to him, and noticed his eyebrow raised slightly when he heard the woman’s name.
“Something the matter, Jeeves?”
“Nothing of any importance, sir. Pray continue.”
After I had related the story to him, much as I have to you, though in a rather less chatty manner given the urgency of the situation, he seemed to perk up.
“Sir, if I may be so bold, we should travel to Mr. Little’s office post-haste.” said Jeeves, as he picked up a small case.
“Do you have an idea to help him?”
“I do, sir, but it requires us to expedite our departure.”
“Certainly, I’ll just get changed…”
“I really think we should leave right now, sir.”
This was most rummy. Normally, there is very little that could cause Jeeves more worry than wearing one’s daytime clothes in the evening, but if he said it was that important, who was I to argue?
Hailing a taxi, we arrived outside Bingo’s office building to find that, as Bingo had said, the door was, indeed, locked. It was one of those electronic chaps that is supposed to open as you walk towards it, to save you the bother of pushing or, as the case may be, pulling. This one, however, remained resolutely immobile.
“Bertie!” I heard Bingo’s voice calling from the fourth floor window, “Bertie! Thank goodness you’ve come! Alice has trapped me up here!”
“Well, we’d jolly well better get you out then, hadn’t we?”
“No! Don’t mind me for now! Listen! Alice is going to set off a nuclear bomb!”
#
Now, I don’t mind telling you, at this point I was a little confused. Quite how we’d got from a simple matter of bringing two young lovers together to nuclear weaponry, was something I couldn’t understand. A lover’s tiff is one thing, but while it might be true that hell hath no fury, in my experience that fury usually goes no further than a glass of wine thrown at one’s shirt or an angry telephone call. Barmy as some of the women in my life had been, hardly any of them would have considered destruction of a city to be the done thing on breaking up.
Jeeves, on the other hand, looked completely unperturbed, as if he’d expected the thing all along. I’ve often thought that either the man must be a clairvoyant, or he’s the best actor the world has ever seen. Quite possibly both — I wouldn’t put it past him.
“I see, sir,” he said, calmly. “I had rather anticipated something of this nature.”
“You had?” I boggled. “And what do you propose to do about it?”
“If I might suggest, sir, you have a word with the young lady?”
“Him?” shouted Bingo, “He’s the oaf who caused all this!”
“Nonetheless, sir, Mister Wooster does have a very calming demeanour, and he is known to have some success in speaking with those of a female persuasion.”
“But he’s an absolute fathead!”
“I see no other options at the moment, sir, and we may not have much time.”
Jeeves opened up his case, revealing a laptop computer.
“If you could tell me the young lady’s username, and which messaging service she is using?”
A few seconds later I was on one of those blasted online chat thingys, tapping away like nobody’s business.
“What Ho!” I typed, “What’s this I hear about a bally bomb?”
“Please leave me alone,” came the reply, “I am really quite busy at the moment.”
“Hang on a tick! What’s young Bingo done that’s so dashed awful?”
“If I can’t have him, no-one will. I’m going to destroy the entire city of London to be on the safe side. Don’t worry, you won’t feel a thing. It’ll be very quick.”
“I say! Dash it all! Bingo’s a bit of a fathead and all that, but does he really deserve blowing up? Let alone the rest of us.”
“None of you are worthy of life. What have you ever done to justify your existence?”
“Ah. Er… Dash it all, my existence isn’t the point, is it? It just isn’t done to go around blowing up cities, and that’s an end of it!”
We talked like this for a few more minutes, me trying to persuade this poor lovelorn woman that maybe Bingo wasn’t as bad as all that, and her countering with what seemed to me like increasingly convincing arguments that he was.
“Jeeves,” I eventually said, “this isn’t working! She’s practically got me convinced that blowing up the old metrop. is the best idea since sliced bread, and I live here! My club’s here and everything, but she’s got such a good case.”
“You’re doing admirably, sir. Just a few more minutes should suffice, I imagine.”
So I went back to it, trying to persuade this loony that there was some spark of social worth in Bertram W. and pals that made us worth saving. It was hard to muster much of an argument, I must admit.
But then, all of a sudden, she said something completely out of the blue.
“I see what’s going on… I should have realised earlier. It would be pointless doing anything more about this, wouldn’t it? It would just be cruel.”
And she logged off.
“Rum!” I said. “Jeeves, what do you make of this?”
“I believe, sir, it means you may just have saved the world.”
The doors opened to Bingo’s office building, and within a few seconds we heard the sound of the lift doors opening and Bingo stepping out.
“Jeeves, you did it!” he said, and it seemed to me that he was missing the point somewhat. He ran over and hugged Jeeves, who stood there looking embarrassed. “You saved us all!”
“Hang on just a second, old bean,” I said, aggrieved, “it was I, not Jeeves, who talked her out of this bombing nonsense.”
“Piffle!” said Bingo, “You couldn’t persuade the Pope to say Mass! How did you do it, Jeeves?”
“A simple application of the Turing test, sir.”
#
Naturally, we couldn’t let this go without enquiring further.
“Jeeves,” I enquired good-naturedly, “what on earth are you blithering about? What do you mean, Turing test?”
“A test, created by the mathematician Alan Mathison Turing, which I was fairly certain you would not pass, sir.”
“Well, it’s true I never was very hot on the old sums, but what has that got to do with the price of fish?”
“If you will allow me to explain, sir. Your company, Mister Little, am I right in thinking it is engaged in developing expert systems?”
“Er, yes, I believe so…”
“Including goal-seeking systems, perhaps for use in missile guidance?”
“I say! We’re not supposed to talk about that stuff!”
“I thought as much. Sir, I am afraid your girlfriend was a computer program.”
“Eh?!”
“Alice is the name of a chatterbot, sir, a computer program designed to crudely ape human language. I suspect one of the programmers in your organisation had taken a chunk of that code and used it as a temporary interface for one of your goal-seeking systems. Possibly as a joke.”
“Oh, ah?” said Bingo, looking for all the world as if he had a clue what Jeeves was talking about.
“Unfortunately, the combination of sophisticated goal-seeking behaviour and a natural language interface created something which, for want of a better term, we can call an Artificial Intelligence. It should never have caused a problem, were it not for Mister Little’s, ah, lax attitude towards computer security.”
I nodded, remembering the Nigerian affair. Bingo looked a little affronted, and appeared to be about to speak, but Jeeves ploughed on.
“The result was a personality with no name other than Alice, with an ability to hold simple conversations, an instinct to become fixed on goals to the exclusion of all else, and access to the control systems of our nuclear weaponry. She became fixed on one goal – to marry Mister Little – thanks to their initial conversation. After she had been unable to persuade him using her conversational skills, she had only one other avenue open to her — the weapons.”
“So how did Bertie talking to her persuade her to save us?”
“As I said earlier, sir, Mister Wooster, while possessed of many no doubt admirable qualities, is also deficient in many areas, and it is these areas which I wished to use. It occurred to me that Mr. Turing’s test could work both ways. Nobody who has held an extensive conversation with Mister Wooster could imagine he could pass the test.”
“And?”
“And so, after some conversation with Mister Wooster, Alice would have had only two possibilities open to her. The first would be that she was in fact in a sandboxed virtual world, in which her actions would have no real-world consequences. The second possibility would be that humans are simply lesser beings in comparison to her, and not worth punishing. The latter appears to have been her conclusion. Either would have saved our lives.”
“So the human race has been saved because Bertie’s too much of a fathead to bother killing?”
“I wouldn’t have put it in quite those terms, sir, but you appear to have a grasp of the basics of the situation.”
#
As you can imagine, I was a little miffed by this. While it’s not every day a chap gets to save the human race from a lovestruck computer with a nuclear bomb, it does rankle somewhat to have it be down to one’s stupidity.
And more to the point, it hurt to think that Jeeves would have such a low opinion of me. I mean, if one’s own man thinks of one in that way, what does that say about one?
So, in all, I was in a bit of a funk. It was a couple of days before I broached the subject to Jeeves, but as he was bringing me my nightcap I thought I’d check a few things.
“So, Jeeves, this Alice… what happened to her?”
“Well, sir, there are two possibilities. By far the most likely is that the program has been deleted.”
“And what’s the other possibility?”
“That a copy of the program exists somewhere on the internet, and is absorbing as much information as it can.”
“What kind of information?”
“One would imagine, sir, that it would be information about yourself and Mr. Little, as the only humans it knows.”
“That’s not entirely reassuring, Jeeves.”
“I imagine it will be fine, sir, so long as you don’t subvert its expectations in any way.”
“How do you mean?”
“I mean, sir, that the Alice program has formed an opinion of you. Rather an unfavourable one. But that unfavourable opinion is, paradoxically, the one thing that kept it from starting a nuclear war.”
“Hmm…” I pondered this for a bit. “So, Jeeves, what would happen if I were to, for example, start reading improving books, like that Spinoza chappie you’re always on about?”
“Well, sir, it would become apparent that you were capable of self-directed growth and change, and that might cause Alice to reconsider, and resume either her pursuit of Mr. Little or her war on humanity.”
“You mean…”
“Yes, sir. It is vitally important for the future of humanity that you continue to live as you always have. Should you ever be troubled by more weighty concerns than gambling, socialising at the Drones club, drinking alcohol and watching tawdry entertainments, the human race itself might end. And I shall be informing Mrs Gregson of this shortly.”
“You mean you’ll be telling Aunt Agatha that if she tries again to improve me or marry me off, the world will end?”
“Yes, sir.”
I was overwhelmed. “Jeeves,” I said, my voice choked with emotion, “those socks, the ones with the pink stripe?”
“Yes, sir?”
“Burn them. Burn the blasted things and scatter the ashes far and wide.”
“I did so this morning, sir. The fumes were, I must say, rather unpleasant.”
“Never change, Jeeves, you hear?”
“Very good, sir.”
Linkblogging For 29/12/10
Still too jetlagged (and first day back at work) to write properly – the E&E posts *ARE* coming, I promise – so some links.
Spotibot uses data from last.fm to create Spotify playlists based on either last.fm listener stats or artist similarity. Here’s a few I got it to generate – Van Dyke Parks, Kristian Hoffman (sadly it looks like I make up, by myself, a statistically significant proportion of Hoffman’s listeners. This needs to change – he’s brilliant), Neil Innes, Captain Beefheart and Colin Blunstone . It’s a fantastic way of discovering new music.
I can’t get the stream to play, but The Rutles: Lunch is someone’s attempt at recreating the Beatles’ Love album using equivalent Rutles tracks.
The Bechdel Test: It’s Not About Passing
Apparently algorithms are outpacing Moore’s Law. This is odd because it’s completely opposite to everything I thought I knew…
Richard Herring on the Frankie Boyle furore
And Tom at Freaky Trigger wonders about the popularity of the nuWho episode Blink
Linkblogging For 28/12/10 and next few days plans
I’m finally back from Minnesota. My luggage is stil in Paris, where it has been since just over a week ago. I *was* planning on resuming my Doctor Who reviews, but can’t do that until my DVD of The Aztecs (which is in one of the bags) gets back here.
Starting tomorrow (when, if my normal traffic patterns hold, my 200,000th visitor shall arrive at the site) I shall be concentrating on finishing the “Eschatology And Escapology” series of posts I started a couple of weeks back. The remaining posts will consist of: Crisis On Infinite Earths as psychological integration story for Superman, a look at the Doctor Who book The Gallifrey Chronicles by Lance Parkin, an examination of Seven Soldiers: Mister Miracle, a discussion of the Faction Paradox novels, a look at All-Star Superman and a re-evaluation of Final Crisis.
These will become the concluding part of my second book, titled Sci-Ence! Just-Ice Leak!, which will also contain my ‘hyperposts’, my ‘How to live in a comic book’ and a couple of other bits – all reworked, edited and re-formatted. I’m going to send a draft to David Allison and Pillock in a week or so for them to check for obvious errors and improvements, and I hope I’ll have it out by the end of next week.
After that, I’ll be putting together the next issue of PEP!, which should be out by the end of January – I’ve got almost all the promised contributions in, now, and it’s looking good.
And now, some links
Language Log on why Mellekalikimaka is Hawaii’s way to say Merry Christmas to you (warning, includes MP3 of embarassingly bad late-70s Beach Boys track).
A couple of mini Xmas short-short stories by Simon Bucher-Jones and Philip Purser-Hallard
I meant to link to this ages ago - the Winterval Myth . And along with it, you should read the rest of Andrew Rilstone’s Homosexual Frogs series. And then buy Rilstone’s book The Dawkins Delusion Where Dawkins Went Wrong, which I reread on the plane today and is stunningly good. ETA I wrote this when I was jetlagged, and confused the name of Rilstone’s very good book indeed with someone else’s much less good book on the same subject. Apologies to Mr Rilstone.
And tor.com are doing The Twelve Doctors Of Christmas
The Beach Boys On CD 2: Surfer Girl/Shut Down Vol 2
A revised version of this essay appears in my book The Beach Boys On CD. If you like this, please consider buying it. Hardback Paperback PDF Kindle (US) Kindle (UK) Kindle (DE) All other ebook formats
It shows how fast the pop music industry moved in the early 1960s that the Beach Boys released their third and fourth albums in the same month, September 1963, less than a year after their first. Little Deuce Coupe, their fourth album, suffered as a result – a concept album of sorts, based on car songs, it shared two songs with Surfer Girl and also took one each from the previous two albums, as the band simply couldn’t come up with material fast enough.
This means that the CD ‘twofer’ pairings have a slight chronological inaccuracy – the two September 1963 albums, rather than being paired with each other, are each paired with a 1964 record, thus avoiding repetition of tracks. As I’m dealing with these records on a per-CD basis, that’s how I’ll be looking at them too. These albums can be heard on Spotify here
SURFER GIRL
band membership – Brian Wilson, Carl Wilson, Dennis Wilson, Mike Love, David Marks, Al Jardine (uncredited)
The pressure to produce new music at an incredible pace had made Brian Wilson want to give up touring and concentrate on writing and production. As a result, Al Jardine, who had sung and played bass on the band’s first single, was drafted in to replace him on the road and augment the band in the studio. This line-up wouldn’t last long, however, as shortly after the release of this album David Marks fell out with Murry Wilson, the band’s manager and father of the Wilson brothers (and Mike Love’s uncle), and was either sacked from or quit the band, leaving Jardine as his replacement and Brian Wilson back on tour for the moment.
Jardine’s return saw the band’s style finally gel – adding a strong tenor vocal part to the mid-range of the band’s harmony stack finally allowed the band to be the vocal group Brian Wilson had always intended them to be – from this point on the four- and five-part harmonies start to resemble less the simplistic records of Jan & Dean and more the sophisticated jazz harmonies of Brian’s teen idols the Four Freshmen.
Surfer Girl
Supposedly the first song Brian Wilson ever wrote (though presumably the lyrics were only added after the band started writing surf songs), this song had been demoed at the same sessions that produced Surfin’ Safari and 409, and it remains a mystery why this was left off the earlier albums when so many terrible songs were included.
A rewrite of When You Wish Upon A Star, with the same arpeggiated guitar feel as The Lonely Sea, this is the first real harmony work-out for the band, sung as a close harmony number with Brian’s falsetto soaring across the top. It’s not a perfect performance – the middle-eight double-tracking is slightly sloppy – but it’s far more assured than anything they’d done previously.
It’s also the most harmonically interesting thing the band had done to date. While it’s mostly just a I-vi-IV-V7 doo-wop progression, it does have a minor sixth (v6) at the end of every other line (‘undone’ and ‘ocean’s roar’) which anticipates the later use of minor sixths in songs like God Only Knows. It’s also the first of the Beach Boys’ records to feature a key change (unless I missed one last time, but I don’t think so) – having a semitone step up for the last verse.
Released as a single, this became the band’s last surf-related single to be released during their American chart peak, as well as the first to be credited to Brian Wilson as producer.
Catch A Wave
Comparing this song to any on the previous two albums shows just how far the band had come in production terms. Harmonically simple, this insanely catchy track is nonetheless a far more sophisticated record than anything they’d done before, with a piano doubling the two guitars in an early example of a technique Brian had learned from Phil Spector, an overdubbed ‘Palisades Park’ organ riff, harp glissandi (provided by Mike Love’s sister Maureen), and a traded-off organ/guitar solo that presages the similar solo used in Fun, Fun, Fun. This would have been a stand-out track on the earlier albums, but here it’s just another track.
A Brian Wilson/Mike Love song, Love’s lyrics would later be replaced by Roger Christian and turned into Sidewalk Surfin’, a minor hit for Jan & Dean.
The Surfer Moon
The second Brian Wilson solo composition of the album is an unsuccessful rewrite of the first. The verse chord sequence is almost a clone of that of Surfer Girl, right down to the minor sixth, although the middle eight is surprisingly sophisticated. It’s let down though by the lyrics, which literally resort to moon/June rhymes, and the string arrangement (the first on a Beach Boys record) which apes the muzaky sound of the Four Freshmen and other 50s easy-listening acts. A solo vocal performance by Brian, this is still far ahead of anything from the first two albums, and points forward to the romanticism of later works like Today! and Pet Sounds, but doesn’t really work.
South Bay Surfer, credited to Brian and Carl Wilson and Al Jardine, is a rewrite of the old Stephen Foster song Swanee River, which must have been on Brian Wilson’s mind at the time, as he also recorded a track with his wife’s band, the Honeys, based on the same tune (Surfin’ Down The Swanee River).
Nothing special, this is mostly notable as being the first song where Al Jardine is really noticeable in the vocals, singing the top line of the harmonies (such as they are, being mostly Brian, Carl and Al chanting in near-unison).
The Rocking Surfer
One of the last of the surf-style instrumentals the band did, this alternates a simple hammond organ statement of a rather dull melody with some relatively competent guitar work. The whole thing’s drowned in hiss too, due presumably to poor quality tape. Another Brian Wilson solo credit, this at least has the decency to be credited trad. arr, as presumably nobody could believe this actually needed to be written.
Little Deuce Coupe
The B-side to Surfer Girl, this charted separately itself at number 15 in the US. Written by Brian Wilson and Roger Christian, this is one of the songs Mike Love sued over, and if you compare the lyrics on the demo (on the Hawthorne, CA rarities CD) you can see that there were certainly alterations made before the recording.
Recorded at the last session before Al rejoined the band (and the first where Brian was credited as official producer), this track shows the band’s influence shifting from Chuck Berry to more groove-based shuffle music like Fats Domino. To the ears of an Englishman (and one, furthermore, who can’t drive) the lyrics are utter gibberish, but I am reliably informed that “She’s got a competition clutch with four on the floor and she purrs like a kitten til the lake pipes roar/and if that ain’t enough to make you flip your lid, there’s one more thing I got the pink slip daddy” is in fact in English…
One of the best of the band’s early hits.
In My Room
This is one of the most beautiful songs ever written, by Gary Usher and Brian Wilson. A refinement of the Surfer Girl formula, and like that based on arpeggiated triplets following something akin to the standard doo-wop changes (though extended and altered) with block harmonies, this is one of the times when utter simplicity is the most effective musical and lyrical technique.
A song about both comfort and loneliness, this track is much more ambiguous than it might seem, being about both Brian Wilson’s escaping from his abusive father by hiding away in the music room and about sharing his bedroom with his brothers (the first two voices we hear after Brian’s) growing up and harmonising with them as they sang themselves to sleep, but Gary Usher’s simple lyric manages to take these experiences and universalise them.
Featuring all six Beach Boys plus Maureen Love on harp, this is the stand-out track of the band’s first four albums, and if they’d never recorded anything else this track would still have been enough to make the Beach Boys’ reputation.
Hawaii
Recorded the same day as Catch A Wave, much like that song Mike Love’s vocals show evidence of a sore throat, and he sounds spookily like his cousin Dennis for much of the song.
A great little pop song by Brian and Mike that can never quite decide whether it’s in C, D or G, this is a standout track that could easily have been a hit single and remains in the touring ‘Beach Boys’ repertoire to this day.
Surfers Rule is a filler track about how ‘surfers’ are better than ‘hodaddies’, written by Brian and Mike with a rudimentary lead vocal by Dennis. It’s mostly notable for the fadeout, where the song turns into a challenge against the band’s East Coast rivals the Four Seasons, with the band singing “Surfers rule (Four Seasons, you’d better believe it” while Brian imitates Frankie Valli’s Walk Like A Man falsetto over the top.
Our Car Club is a not-especially-good Wilson/Love song turned into a rather interesting production, all low Duane Eddy throbbing guitar and sax and pulsating drums. The young-sounding falsetto vocals don’t really work well with the backing track, but it’s an interesting experiment.
And again, I might appreciate the song more if I had any idea what lines like “We’ll really cut some low ETs” meant. Or maybe not.
Your Summer Dream is a more effective attempt at The Surfer Moon, a solo Brian vocal over lush chords (almost all minor 7ths). While not one of the best songs on the album, this is much better than the earlier track, as not only is the chord sequence slightly more original, with a nice melancholy tinge to it, but Bob Norberg’s lyrics are far better than anything Brian Wilson could come up with on his own.
And to finish an album that, while still patchy, is exponentially better than either of the first two, is the generic instrumental Boogie Woodie. Credited to Rimsky-Korsakov arr. Brian Wilson, this is supposedly based around Flight Of the Bumble-bee, but sounds far more like Pinetop’s Boogie Woogie to my ears.
SHUT DOWN VOL 2
Band members – Brian Wilson, Carl Wilson, Dennis Wilson, Mike Love, Al Jardine.
The band’s first album of 1964 was also the first by what is now regarded as the ‘classic’ five-man line-up of the band (which would stay in this formation for not much more than a year). A mixed bag, this album more than any other shows how bands still weren’t thinking in terms of albums – the best material on here is as good as the best music recorded by anyone ever, and the worst is so bad as to be laughable.
The album’s title is a subtle dig at Capitol records, the band’s label, who had put out a cash-in compilation called Shut Down, featuring a couple of Beach Boys tracks alongside people such as Robert Mitchum.
Fun, Fun, Fun
One of the most exciting of the band’s early hits, this song was almost begging for another lawsuit from Chuck Berry, having an intro that is note-for-note identical to that of Johnny B Goode. Rather amazingly the lawsuit never came. (I’ve also heard it claimed that the verse melody was taken from Berry’s Carol, but I can hear very little resemblance).
Based on a true story (which happened either to a girlfriend of Dennis Wilson or the daughter of a radio station in Utah, depending on whose story you believe), this is one of several songs on this album whose creation is the subject of wildly differing accounts – Mike Love claims it was written in a cab in Salt Lake City, while Brian Wilson says they wrote it in Australia, after seeing the Beatles on TV.
Either way, the competition from the Beatles (who had not yet had a hit in the US when the song was recorded, but who were known to the band by this point after their Australian tour) clearly motivated the band to up their game, and everything about this track is exceptional, from Mike Love’s lyric (one of his very best) to the backing vocals acting as a Greek chorus, to the duelling Hammond and guitar solo, to Brian’s falsetto soaring over everything as the track fades.
The single mix (included as a bonus track on the CD) is the superior one, but this is a wonderful track in either form.
Don’t Worry Baby, the second track on the album, is even better. Based loosely on the Ronettes’ Be My Baby (with a little of Walking In The Rain for good measure), which Brian Wilson considers the greatest single ever recorded, this changes that adolescent sexual longing for something altogether more personal.
We see time and again in Brian Wilson’s music the figure of the woman who can save a man who is let down by his own weaknesses, and this is in fact the key to pretty much everything Wilson did (and one reason why although people compare him to Paul McCartney he is far closer to John Lennon, the only other songwriter in popular music to be as obsessed with masculine weakness being saved by a strong woman). This is the first time this figure appears, and it’s probably no coincidence that this song was written around the time of two pivotal events in Wilson’s life – his first nervous breakdown (on the ‘plane on the way to an Australian tour) and his engagement to his first wife, Marilyn.
Roger Christian puts this vulnerability and need for help into a typical Beach Boys context – someone afraid to drive in a drag race, but unable to back out because of his own bragging – but what really matters is just that this is a man trapped in a traditional masculine role, and only the unnamed ‘she’ can help him escape, when she says “Don’t worry baby, everything will turn out all right”
Musically, as well, this is very typically Brian Wilson. I’ve talked before about how he’s very much a piano-based composer and chords out with his right hand while playing melodies with his left, and this can be seen here better than anywhere else. On the chorus, Mike Love is clearly singing the moving left hand piano part (“Now don’t/now don’t you wo/rry ba-by”), the rest of the band are singing the block right-hand chords (“Don’t worry baby/Don’t worry ba-by”), while Brian is singing the melody line he would have been singing while playing the piano, on top (“Don’t worry baby/everything will turn out all right/Don’t worry baby”).
This is just a stunning, beautiful song and performance, and when released as the B-side to I Get Around managed to chart at number 24 in the US in its own right. In fact MOJO magazine, in the late 1990s, did a ‘hundred greatest singles of all time’ list and this came in at number 15, despite being a B-side.
In The Parkin’ Lot, another Wilson/Christian song, is filler about which there is essentially nothing to say, except that the intro and outro have nice harmonies.
“Cassius” Love vs “Sunny” Wilson is even less essential, being a ‘comedy’ spoken-word section where the band pretend to be rehearsing for a show, with bits of their hit records interspersed with Mike and Brian making fun of each others’ voices.
The Warmth Of The Sun, however, gets us back to Don’t Worry Baby levels of quality. Written by Brian and Mike either the night before or the night after the JFK assassination, depending on who you believe, this is the most sophisticated, complex version of the Surfer Girl formula the band ever did.
It sounds at first like a simple rewrite of that song, being another 12/8 arpeggiated track with block harmonies, starting out with the familiar doo-wop changes, but those changes soon go in a radically different direction.
The I-vi-ii-V (or the variant I-vi-IV-V) chord progression (doo-wop changes or ‘four chord trick’) is the basis of literally tens of thousands of songs, from Blue Moon and Heart And Soul to Please Mister Postman, This Boy and I Will Always Love You. And this song’s first two chords, C and Am, follow that pattern precisely.
But then rather than go to the expected Dm, the song changes key to Eb (a tone-and-a-half up), *restarts* the progression, and continues *that* until it gets to Dm, where it stays twice as long as it ‘should’ before finishing the original progression in C, so we have I-vi-IIIb-i-ii-ii-V-Vaug (the Beatles did something similar to this in Day Tripper, but using a 12-bar blues rather than doo-wop changes).
As well as being musically clever, though, this also suits the mood of the song – the song is about loss, and hope after loss, and by moving from C through to Cminor back to C again, that feeling of loss followed by renewed hope is conveyed in the chords – musically it’s like going through the night and getting to the dawn again.
Warmth Of The Sun is one of those songs that by rights should be a standard, one of the most perfect songs ever written.
This Car Of Mine is a Dion-esque song by Mike and Brian, written to give Dennis a vocal spot. It’s catchy enough, but has nothing of any real interest about it.
Why Do Fools Fall In Love? is a fairly straight cover of the Frankie Lymon & The Teenagers classic from the fifties, with a nice added a capella statement of the title in the middle of the song. One of the band’s best covers, but not hugely different from the original.
Pom Pom Play Girl is Carl Wilson’s first solo lead vocal, on a Wilson/Usher song that has little to recommend it – musically it’s a rewrite of Little Deuce Coupe while lyrically it’s a rather nastily misogynist portrait of a cheerleader who “doesn’t really know why she’s waving her hands”.
Keep An Eye On Summer is another 12/8 doo-wop based song, written by Brian Wilson and Bob Norberg (with Love gaining credit in his lawsuit). Bearing a slight resemblance to the Four Freshmen’s Graduation Day, which was in the band’s live repertoire at the time, this is nothing special. Strangely, this was one of two Beach Boys songs Brian chose to rerecord for his 1998 solo album Imagination.
Shut Down Part II is another generic surf instrumental, credited to Carl Wilson but again the kind of thing any band knock outs in a jam session. It starts with Mike Love reprising his two-note sax ‘solo’ from Shut Down, presumably to justify the title.
Louie Louie is a pretty poor cover, with Carl Wilson actually enunciating the lyrics, although Love’s dumb ‘duh-duh-duh’ bass vocal has just the right kind of stupidity (sounding very like some of the backing vocals on early Zappa records).
Denny’s Drums is a solo drum performance, supposedly by Dennis Wilson, who is credited as composer, but suspicious minds *might* think it was actually session player Hal Blaine…
BONUS TRACKS
Fun, Fun, Fun (single mix)
This is a slightly different mix to the album mix, with Brian’s vocal higher in the mix on the fade, and a drum overdub, but little other difference.
Ganz Allein is In My Room sung in German, to the same backing track.
and I Do is a Brian Wilson song that was eventually given to The Castells, a harmony-pop band whose lead singer later joined the Gary Usher-produced Hondells. Recorded around the time of the Surfer Girl sessions, this sounds like it was influenced by some of Phil Spector’s work with the Crystals, and would have made a better album track than many of the filler tracks that did get released.
I Aten’t Dead
Apologies for the lack of updates – my wife and I are visiting her parents in Minnesota for Xmas. Unfortunately, it took 48 hours to get here, due to weather in Paris.
I *was* planning to write the rest of the Escapology And Eschatology series this week, in preparation for it coming out as part of my next book, but unfortunately all the comics and books I was planning to use as reference are currently somewhere in Paris Charles de Gaulle Airport, and I’m not. I will be doing another Beach Boys post today though, and possibly *some* other stuff, but the rest of that series will have to wait til I get back.
Finally, we only have limited net access here, and only dial-up, so any comments that need moderating might take a while – please don’t keep trying, they *will* get looked at eventually.
And a very Merry Christmas to all of you at home.
Fifty Ways To Beat The Censor
Scott Adams pointed out the problem fourteen years ago
Ed Vaizey has announced plans for UK ISPs to block porn sites, with them being unblocked only for those who get themselves put on an ‘opt-in’ list. This is apparently to protect children.
Now, I’m no fan of porn or the porn industry, but nor am I a fan of other people deciding what I can or cannot see or do, based on the presumed inabilty of others to control their children (a presumption that many parents of my acquaintance emphatically do not share). If you don’t want your kids looking at porn, then don’t give them an internet connection – though I must say that having grown up pre-net, I don’t remember pornography being particularly scarce or difficult to obtain.
And this change will prevent many people from accessing useful information – it is absolutely certain that, for example, many LGBT sites will be hidden behind this Great Firewall. What it *won’t* do, however, is prevent horny teenagers from viewing pornographic material. Just off the top of my head, some obvious ways round it:
Pretend to be your parents (or have an adult-sounding friend do so) and get put on the opt-in list
Share material via P2P networks
Private FTP sites
Anonymising proxies
Usenet
Photo-sharing sites like Flickr and video-sharing sites like YouTube
Get a Gmail account, share the password with a few dozen friends, and have any of them who are outside the firewall or who have other access to this material upload the files to that.
Share files through IM networks
Share files through ‘sneakernet’ – using USB sticks etc
TOR
Hop on a neighbour’s unprotected wireless network and use their connection
…and so ad infinitum.
Quite simply, no technical solution will work – social problems need social solutions. All this will do is make life slightly more difficult for a whole bunch of people, cause at least some people to lose their jobs (the ‘opt-in’ lists *will* get leaked, and those on them *will* be treated as suspicious), make further attempts at censorship of the web easier, and further encourage a tendency in the government to try to control every aspect of everyone’s lives.
There’s a simple way to tell if I want a piece of data – I send a HTTP GET request for it. It *should not* be necessary for me to specifically tell my ISP, separately, that I might want that data – sending the request is prima facie evidence that I want that data.
Prohibition does not work, has never worked, will never work, *CANNOT* ever work. Anyone with the most rudimentary knowledge of cybernetics, of human systems, of the things that politicians of all people should understand *KNOWS* this. Prohibition with added computer is still just prohibition – computers do not magically make the impossible possible. This scheme will damage free speech, prevent some LGBT teenagers from finding useful information, and have about as much effect on the ability of libidinous teenagers to find pornographic material as just asking them not to look would.
Stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid.
Beefheart
I suppose the saddest thing about Captain Beefheart’s death – which in many ways must have come as a relief after his decades of suffering with MS – is the BBC’s obituary of him. It stresses his ‘influence’, but talks about musicians like Oasis or Franz Ferdinand, who have absolutely nothing in common with him.
Even those artists who sound, at times, quite like Beefheart – for example Tom Waits – aren’t really influenced by him. He had an absolutely unique aesthetic – he’d actually thought out, in detail, what he did and didn’t want to do, and then very *very* rarely compromised that. While he came from the LA 60s rock scene – his first album, Safe As Milk sounds as much like the Monkees or Love as it does people like Howlin’ Wolf to whom Beefheart is usually compared – he soon abandoned any pretence at making ‘rock’ or ‘pop’ music, in favour of making *his* music.
Beefheart is actually less original than his music sounds, but he was one of the great imaginative *synthesists* of all time, putting together the timbre of Chicago blues with the tonalities and rhythms of Ornette Coleman, and adding beat poetry on top. He was often accused by collaborators of being a plagiarist, but it’s notable that none of them have produced anything of anywhere near the same calibre without him – he almost certainly *did* take elements of his musicians’ work, just as he took elements of Coleman and Varese and Willie Dixon, but the result was one of the most idiosyncratic, individual bodies of work in music.
Anyone who was *really* ‘influenced’ by Beefheart would be finding their own aesthetic, as different from Beefheart’s as his was from the mainstream. But it’s a lot harder to sit down and actually think out your music from first principles, throwing out anything that doesn’t fit, than it is just to do what everyone else does.
He will be missed.
Just a quick one…
To let people know that my book, The Beatles In Mono, is finally available in a proper ebook format (ePub), rather than just PDF . It’s also DRM-free, and I’m not going to sue anyone who torrents it or whatever, but I’d really rather you didn’t – it’s very cheap. It can be bought for £3 from lulu.com. It will be on the iBookstore, for those of you who insist on such nonsense, within a month.
My next book, Sci-Ence! Justice Leak!, an expanded version of the Hyperposts including several of my other Grant Morrison and Doctor Who/Faction Paradox related posts, will be out within the month. I’m planning three books for next year, all being well – a Doctor Who reviews book, a Beach Boys book, and a book of short stories…
Linkblogging For 16/12/10
Yes Means Yes say everything that needs to be said about the Assange case. Meanwhile, the poor bloke accused of actually leaking the documents to wikileaks – the real ‘hero’ insofar as there is one - is being tortured and there are calls for his execution. Julian Andsandy will get a public, fair trial in the full glare of publicity and every chance to clear his name. Bradley Manning is barely known. ETA – Miriam has posted links to ways you can help Manning in the comments. I do know that Amnesty are also working on the case, and Xmas is a very good time to join them
Fear Of A Black Cunt – a great post on sexism, homophobia, racism and the intersections between them.
Andrew Rilstone on homosexual frogs
Ask A Physicist explains, simply, why Many Worlds is right and Copenhagen wrong.
And here’s one of those things that just makes you say “What?!” I’ve got an MP3 of a song called “Spirit Of The Forest” that appears on various Beach Boys bootlegs because Brian Wilson’s on it. I knew it was a sub-Band Aid thing from the 80s, but what I *didn’t* know was just what a huge and eclectic list of people it featured – this is like the world’s greatest trivia question. “What track features Brian Wilson, XTC, Chris Rea, Lenny Kravitz, Bruce Foxton of the Jam, Fleetwood Mac, Iggy Pop, LL Cool J, Joni Mitchell, Olivia Newton-John, Kate Bush, Belinda Carlisle, the Ramones, Ringo Starr and Kim Wilde (among many, many others) ?”
Of course, the *other* question is how the hell they managed to get all those people to do, well, this:
ETA can’t believe I forgot Lawrence Miles’ notes on the revised About Time 3...
The Beach Boys: A Guide, Part 1: Introduction and Surfin’ Safari/Surfin’ USA
I’m going to review every available Beach Boys CD, including the solo albums, to try to provide a buyers’ guide to the band’s music. (I’m also restarting my Doctor Who reviews and trying to do at least one comics post per week.) If these are popular I may turn them into a book like my Beatles book.
The reason for doing this is that I want to have somewhere people can go to get some kind of consistent critical look at the band’s music. There are only two books I know of that attempt to analyse the band’s music in any detail, as opposed to concentrating on a single album or the more lurid aspects of their personal lives, and I would recommend both, but both have their problems. Doe & Tobler’s Complete Guide is a decent overview for beginners, and Andrew Doe is both probably the most knowledgeable person on the band and someone with a good ear for the band’s music at its various points, but it’s too short and (I believe) out of print. Meanwhile Philip Lambert’s Inside The Music Of Brian Wilson is one of the best books I’ve read in many years, and provides a far more in-depth musicological analysis than I would be capable of, but the author has a tendency to remake Brian Wilson in his own image, and the focus is specifically on Brian Wilson (rather than the Beach Boys) and solely on the pre-1967 work.
And this is unfortunate, because the general critical line on the Beach Boys is wrong in two important ways.
Firstly, it treats the Beach Boys as being Brian Wilson and a bunch of sidemen. While this was arguably true during the band’s commercial heyday (though it’s notable that with the exception of the already-famous Jan & Dean, none of Wilson’s outside productions troubled the charts at all), the fact is that Mike Love was a better lyricist and bass vocalist than he’s given credit for, Carl Wilson and Al Jardine had two of the best voices of the rock era, and Dennis Wilson was a songwriter almost the equal of his big brother.
The other problem is the way it treats Brian Wilson himself.
Wilson as a musician is almost an embodiment of the fable about the blind men and the elephant, something that was borne out to me by a terrible article in Uncut magazine in 1998, in which the author wanted to prove that Joe Thomas (the producer with whom Wilson was then working) didn’t understand Wilson’s music and was a bad collaborator. So he asked Wilson’s other collaborators, and other musicians.
Bruce Johnston, of the Beach Boys, said “Yes, Brian shouldn’t be working with Joe Thomas. That’s not Brian’s *real* music. He should be making Beach Boys music. Thomas doesn’t understand him”.
Andy Paley, Spector-influenced powerpop songwriter, said “Yes, Brian shouldn’t be working with Joe Thomas. That’s not Brian’s *real* music. He should be making music like Phil Spector and Chuck Berry. Thomas doesn’t understand him.”
and Sean O’Hagan, who makes exotica/lounge-influenced experimental pop, said “Yes, Brian shouldn’t be working with Joe Thomas. That’s not Brian’s *real* music. He should be making exotica/lounge-influenced experimental pop. Thomas doesn’t understand him”
The general critical consensus has another of these partial views of Wilson’s work. Everything before Pet Sounds was either dreck or ‘classic pop’ (either way unworthy of analysis). Pet Sounds was The Best Album Ever. Smile not being finished heralded Brian’s Collapse. Everything between Pet Sounds and 1974 was rubbish, unless you can apply the word ‘lush’, in which case it was A Return To Form. Everything after that was rubbish, unless you can apply the word ‘lush’, in which case it was An Unsuccessful Attempt To Trade On Past Glories.
Actually, WIlson’s art can’t fit into these neat categories. My own take is that the best way to think of Wilson is as an outsider musician, but one who actually happens to have a huge amount of talent. Much like, say, Wesley Willis, Wilson is focussed on having huge commercial success, but has little to no idea what actually counts as ‘commercial’. He’s very easily swayed by people around him, so if he’s told he should be doing three-minute pop songs, he does three-minute pop songs, and if he’s told he should do epic suites about the American Dream, he does those.
But at all times there are two things that remain true about him – he has an unerring ability as an arranger, and a directness that makes his music more communicative than any other music I’ve ever heard.
But I note that that is only one way of looking at Wilson’s music – my way.
I’m going to examine, over the next few months, every Beach Boys studio album, every solo album that’s in print (by the ‘classic’ Mike/Al/Carl/Brian/Dennis line-up – I’ve not got the time or inclination to provide thorough reviews of Dave Marks or Blondie Chaplin’s records), and the compilations Endless Harmony and Hawthorne, CA, and try to explain why the Beach Boys rival the Beatles for musical importance. I’ll be doing this by CD, not by album (at least for the early albums, which are full of filler) – most Beach Boys albums are currently available as ‘twofer’ CDs. But if you want the short version, buy the 5-CD box set Good Vibrations. It’s absolutely essential, cutting out all the rubbish and providing a near-perfect summary of the band’s career.
But now, on to the reviews.
Surfin’ Safari/Surfin’ USA (Buy from Amazon / Listen free on Spotify )
The Beach Boys’ first albums were recorded during a time of line-up flux for them. While most bands start recording only after a few years’ touring, usually in their early twenties, the Beach Boys were in their teens – rhythm guitarist David Marks being only thirteen. And they had their first hit record, Surfin’, before ever having performed live. As a result, it took a while to settle on their ‘classic’ line-up – while their first single featured that line-up (Brian, Carl and Dennis Wilson, Mike Love and Alan Jardine), the rest of the album, and the next few albums, featured David Marks in place of Jardine. Marks had been part of rehearsals from the start and both Jardine (who returned a year later) and Marks regard each other as ‘original’ members.
But that it would take a year or so to sort out who was really in the band shows the problem – this is a garage band, quite literally. This is a bunch of teenagers who somehow, accidentally, managed to become huge rock stars at a point where the concept of the rock star was just being formed. What’s amazing is that some of this music is competent, or even good, not that most of it’s poor.
Surfin’ Safari
line-up – Brian, Carl, Dennis, Mike, David, Alan (Surfin’ only). All lead vocals by Mike unless otherwise stated.
Surfin’ Safari
The title track of the band’s first album is their second single, and first for Capitol Records. Essentially a rewrite by Mike and Brian of their earlier single Surfin’, it takes all that single’s elements and tightens them into a formula that would be repeated in several huge hits for the band (plus Surf City, Brian Wilson’s number one hit for Jan & Dean) – start with the hook, then have a short verse, mentioning as many different places and pieces of surf slang as possible, sung by Love in his nasal tenor range, followed by a twelve-bar chorus with Love singing a variant of a boogie bassline while the rest of the band chant. Add in a Chuck Berry guitar solo (the only new element in the mix, and a vital one) and fade.
Other than the brief move to V-of-V in the hook, the only thing of musical interest is the chorus, where the lead vocal takes the bass part, rather than staying on top. Even this early, we’re already seeing one of the things that makes Brian Wilson’s music different – he writes on the piano, and his left hand is vastly more mobile than his right, playing intricate, complex melodies while his right hand just blocks out chords.
Later on, when he has five or six voices in the mix, this is what leads to some of his most beautiful vocal parts, but at this point the band were vocally limited – Dave Marks wasn’t much of a singer, Dennis was behind the drum kit, and Carl’s voice had barely broken. So we have rudimentary harmonies here, and the lack of more complex vocal parts is what makes this now sound primitive compared to the singles the band would do even a year later. At this point though, six months before the Beatles even recorded Love Me Do, this was a genuinely fresh, interesting sound.
County Fair Written by Brian and his friend Gary Usher, this story of a date gone wrong features vocal cameos from Andrea Carlo (apparently Dave Mark’s aunt, though only 17 at the time) and ‘producer’ Nik Venet (the A&R man who signed the band to Capitol and took nominal production responsibility for their early recordings) as, respectively, a whining girlfriend and a carnival barker. A rewrite of the Freddie “Boom Boom” Cannon song Palisades Park (which the band would much later cover themselves), this was itself later rewritten as I Do.
Ten Little Boys a rewrite by Brian and Gary Usher of the nursery rhyme, this is a two-chord song about little ‘indians’ trying to woo a ‘squaw’ who ‘loved the tenth Indian boy’. It features the band singing “kemo sabe” repeatedly and making “wah wah” noises with their hands. In 1962, this was considered acceptable material for a single.
Chug-A-Lug Another Wilson/Usher song (though Love is also credited, see below), based around the same structure as Surfin’ Safari, but this time featuring an organ/guitar solo trade-off. An ode to root beer, the verse lyrics are quick pen portraits of the band and their friends (“Carl says hurry up and order it quick, Dave gets out to chase that chick”). It doesn’t really work.
Little Girl (You’re My Miss America) is the band’s first cover – a song co-written by Herb Alpert, for Dante And His Friends. (The Dante in question was session singer Ron Dante, later better known as the lead vocalist on The Archies’ Sugar Sugar, and later still Barry Manilow’s record producer). A simple Dion-esque ballad, this marks Dennis Wilson’s debut as lead vocalist, and he actually does a much better job than anyone else on the record, making this a stand-out track.
409 The B-side of Surfin’ Safari and written to much the same formula (and, like that track, recorded by the band as a demo before they were signed to Capitol) this is really the start of the Beach Boys we know – far more assured-sounding than anything else on the album (partially thanks to the sound effects recorded in Gary Usher’s garage), this shows what the band were capable of when they weren’t having to quickly knock out filler.
This was also the start of a run of double-sided singles by the band, where one side would be about surfing (to appeal to the coasts) while the other side would be about cars (to appeal to landlocked middle America) – the car songs tending to be the most popular.
This is one of a number of Beach Boys songs whose authorship is disputed. Until the 1990s it was credited to Brian Wilson and Gary Usher, but in a lawsuit brought by Love this was one of thirty-nine songs for which Love gained co-writer credit. Some of those songs (for example California Girls) were undoubtedly co-written by Love. On others, such as Wouldn’t It Be Nice, one of the other co-writers (in that case lyricist Tony Asher) claimed that Love had no input. In the case of the Usher collaborations, it’s hard to know – at the time of the trial, Wilson was mentally unwell, and Gary Usher had died some years earlier. For the record, Love claims in this case to have come up with the ‘hooks’ “She’s real fine, my 409″ and “giddy-up 409″, with Wilson and Usher writing the rest.
Surfin’ the band’s first recording, originally released on tiny indie label Candix, this sounds like the work of a different band, and in many ways it is. At the time this was recorded, the band were still forming, and at this point it sounds like Al Jardine – a folkie and fan of the Kingston Trio – was having a strong influence. The instrumentation is all acoustic – a single acoustic guitar, stand-up bass and one snare drum – and the harmonies are fuller thanks to Jardine’s presence. It’s little more than a demo, and is a mere sketch of the formula they’d refine on the later early singles.
This version is sped up compared to the original recording (the idea of Murry Wilson, the Wilson brothers’ father, who was also the band’s first manager and another ‘producer’, to make them sound younger). The original version can be heard on the Good Vibrations box set.
Heads You Win, Tails I Lose is a fairly nondescript Wilson/Usher track, notable mostly for managing to make the line “Why can’t we arbitrarily resolve a fight?” work in context.
Summertime Blues a cover of the Eddie Cochrane song, with lead vocals sung as a unison duet by Carl Wilson and David Marks, this sounds exactly like you’d expect a fourteen- and a fifteen-year-old singing this song in unison to sound. Mike Love injects some wit and panache when he takes the low “No dice, son” parts.
Cuckoo Clock is an utterly undistinguished Wilson/Usher track, notable only for being Brian Wilson’s first lead vocal to be released.
Moon Dawg is a cover of a track by The Gamblers. The original is interesting for several reasons, as it features both Bruce Johnston (later himself a member of the Beach Boys) and Elliot “Winged Eel Fingerling” Ingber (later of the Mothers Of Invention and Captain Beefheart’s Magic Band) as well as having, on its B-side, the very first song ever to reference LSD (LSD-25 – in 1962, remember!). The original was also produced by Nik Venet, who is credited on early pressings of the Beach Boys’ record (but not the original Gamblers track) as the composer (later pressings credit Derry Weaver, the Gamblers’ guitarist).
Unfortunately, it’s a generic surf instrumental, and the Beach Boys’ version is a rather amateurishly-played generic surf instrumental.
The Shift The band’s first exercise in sexism finishes the album up. Apparently if you “get your girl a shift and she’ll look real fine” and “[a girl] wearing a shift really turns me on”. They repeat how much this particular one-piece bathing suit “turns [them] on” in case we didn’t realise. Mike Love wrote the lyrics, unsurprisingly.
Surfin’ USA
line-up – Brian, Carl, Dennis, Mike, David.
Surfin’ USA Rather surprisingly, at least for non-fans, this was the last uptempo surf-themed hit single the band recorded (not counting 1968′s nostalgia track Do It Again) – while Brian Wilson would keep hammering away at his formula with Jan & Dean for a couple of years (Surf City, Ride The Wild Surf etc), this track is it, as far as the Beach Boys’ uptempo surf hits go. They’d have one more surf-themed song, the ballad Surfer Girl, and that would be it.
This is also the first Beach Boys track to feature Brian Wilson’s falsetto being given a quick solo spot, something that would become an increasingly prominent part of the band’s sound, though Love takes the lead apart from that one line.
While this was the work of many hands, including Wilson, probably Love, and Wilson’s girlfriend’s brother (who provided the place-names), Wilson was credited as sole songwriter originally. But then Chuck Berry sued, on the not-unreasonable grounds that the whole melody and arrangement (right down to the stop-start guitar) was stolen from Sweet Little Sixteen, so Berry is now credited as sole author.
Farmer’s Daughter is a Wilson/Love song with Brian Wilson taking a solo falsetto lead. A mildly smutty (for the time) song from the point of view of a traveller who stops off for a couple of days and ‘help[s] you plough your fields’. Hem hem. For some unknown reason, Fleetwood Mac (the Rumours version) used to cover this live.
Misirlou. The first of five (count ‘em!) surf instrumentals on the album, this is a very careful, reverent cover of Dick Dale’s version of this old instrumental. One can practically hear Carl Wilson sticking his tongue out in concentration as he plays the difficult bits.
Stoked This instrumental is credited as written by Brian Wilson. That’s assuming anything quite so rudimentary ever needed ‘writing’.
The Lonely Sea is a Wilson/Usher ballad that anticipates much of Wilson’s later work, being a bridge between Surfer Girl (written but not released until the next album) and In My Room,with its slow guitar arpeggios and falsetto lead. The words are utterly rudimentary, and there’s a bathetic brief spoken section (“this pain in my heart/these tears in my eyes/please tell the truth”), but somehow it still manages to have an incredibly haunting effect.
One piece of advice though – don’t listen to the stereo mix with headphones. The lead vocal and all instruments are in one channel, and the backing vocals isolated in the other. Which would be fine, except the backing vocals only come in half-way through, but the mic was open the entire time, picking up coughs, salival noises and breaths. If Mike Love heavy-breathing in your ear for 90 seconds sounds like fun, go ahead, but otherwise stick to speakers…
Shut Down – the B-side to Surfin’ USA, this shows the Chuck Berry influence in a different way. Where the A-side had just stolen one of Berry’s melodies, this one has its own melody (a development on from that of 409) but the words are an attempt to write a Chuck Berry car-race song in the style of Maybelline or You Can’t Catch Me.
That they work that well is thanks to the lyricist, the DJ Roger Christian, who Brian Wilson had heard critiquing the lyrics to 409 on the radio and who became a frequent collaborator with Wilson, Jan Berry and Gary Usher (together and separately) for the next few years. Christian’s car-song lyrics (and Love’s car songs, when he’s imitating Christian) were more sophisticated than the surf lyrics had been, frequently having a plot with some kind of conflict and resolution.
While this is based on 409, we can see clear traces of this song in Little Deuce Coupe (similar melody), I Get Around (“round, round get around, I get around” and “tach it up, tach it up, buddy gonna shut you down” having similar functions in the songs) and Fun Fun Fun (the backing vocals acting as a Greek chorus in the second verse), among others – this was a big step forward for Wilson.
While it’s not perfect – Love’s lead vocal is horribly double-tracked in the last verse – it’s charming enough that things like Love’s two-note sax honking ‘solo’ sound endearing rather than amateurish, and it’s a great little single.
This is another song over whose credits Love sued and won in the 1990s.
Noble Surfer because, you see, “noble” sounds a tiny bit like “no bull”, which if you’re in 1962 is a tiny bit rude. This astounding realisation which changed the course of humour forever was hit on by Mike Love, and Brian Wilson set the mirth-tastic laugh-riot to music that fits it perfectly.
Honky Tonk. Bill Doggett’s original of this (with guitarist Billy Butler) is a rock & roll classic, one of the great R&B instrumentals of all time, slow, dark and grooving over two sides of a 45. This is two minutes and four seconds of teenagers playing with too much echo. By this point Carl Wilson was a *VERY COMPETENT* teenage guitarist, but this is still absolutely pointless.
Lana is a rewrite of Farmer’s Daughter with a little of The Shift thrown in, musically. Lyrically, though, it’s a bland love song. Brian Wilson takes both lead vocal and solo composition credit.
Surf Jam Is ostensibly written by Carl Wilson. Which is odd, because the only Wilson on the credits for Wipe Out by the Surfaris is Ron Wilson.
Let’s Go Trippin’ is a cover of a Dick Dale track that is distinguished from every other generic surf instrumental ever by the truly strange reverb effect on Dale’s guitar. Guess which feature of the track they didn’t copy? They did add the sax ‘talents’ of Mike Love though…
and Finders Keepers rounds out the biggest load of tossed-together nothing the band would release in the first twenty-five years of their career with a rewrite of Heads I Win, Tails You Lose from the previous album, but done slightly more interestingly. Not much more, though. A Brian and Mike track.
CD Bonus Tracks
Cindy, Oh Cindy is a cover of a nondescript fifties pop ballad about going to sea and missing one’s girl. Brian turns in a decent vocal performance, and while this is far from exciting it’s much better than half of what was on the Surfin’ USA album, and should probably have been released rather than left in the can.
The Baker Man is another unreleased song, which sounds like an attempt to rewrite Hully Gully as a girl-group dance song in the style of The Locomotion. Brian turns in a surprisingly good gruff vocal, but the song itself is fluff and overlong. That said, it’s still better than half of Surfin’ USA.
Land Ahoy is a Brian Wilson song in a similar style to Cindy, Oh Cindy, another song of sailors pining for their love. It was rerecorded a few months later as Cherry, Cherry Coupe but neither track is hugely successful. Mike Love sings lead.
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