The Zombies, Lowry 20th May
It’s odd to be thinking, coming out of a Zombies gig, about the songs they didn’t get round to.
Odd because the Zombies, in their original incarnation, didn’t even record enough songs to fill two CDs. Between 1964 and 1968 they released a decent album (Begin Here), a great album (Odessey And Oracle) and a handful of fantastic non-album singles. You’d think this wouldn’t be enough material to fill up a two-hour show.
But while the Zombies split up in 1968, the various members continued working together in various line-ups over the years, so for example Rod Argent and Chris White produced Colin Blunstone’s early solo albums, which were often backed by Argent (Rod Argent’s prog band) which White wrote for.
So when Colin Blunstone (the lead singer of the band) and Rod Argent (the keyboard player and one of the two principal songwriters) got back together again in 2000 and started touring as The Zombies, they didn’t just include Zombies material in their sets. Their sets instead are a history of both men’s entire careers, stretching from the R&B covers the band did prior to their stardom, through their early beat group hits and Odessey And Oracle, and into their post-Zombies careers.
What this means is that a show by Argent and Blunstone (backed by Jim Rodford, who is Argent’s cousin and was bass-player in Argent before going on to join the Kinks in the late 70s, on bass, Rodford’s son Steve on drums, and Tom Toomey on guitar) ranges through an extraordinary range of musical styles. There are very, very few groups who could cope with the level of stylistic variation needed to pull off a cover of Solomon Burke’s Can’t Nobody Love You and Argent’s ponderous stadium rock anthem God Gave Rock And Roll To You in the same set, but when you add in that the set also includes a jazz-waltz version of Summertime, Old And Wise — a song that Colin Blunstone originally sang with the Alan Parsons Project in the 80s, and the gorgeous delicate ballad A Rose For Emily, it seems positively ridiculous.
And so, amazingly, there wasn’t space for all their best songs. There was no Misty Roses, for example, and no The Way I Feel Inside, and while there were four songs from 2011′s Breathe Out, Breathe In, there was nothing from their 2001 or 2004 albums. There was no Friends Of Mine, Is This The Dream or I Remember When I Loved Her.
But what there was was a wonderful rush of sunshine pop, R&B, and 60s beat music, with occasional detours into blokeish stadium rock. The stylistic diversity works, though, because of the musicianship of everyone on stage, but particularly Colin Blunstone.
Blunstone has possibly the best voice of his generation, and unlike almost all his peers he’s managed to keep it intact — his voice is if anything stronger than it was in the mid-60s. And he knows how to use it — he is a great singer (a very different thing from having a great voice).
And he sings with such conviction that somehow a thudding stadium rock song like Argent’s Hold Your Head Up sounds like it fits with I Don’t Believe In Miracles (one of the greatest and most underrated songs of all time).
But none of it would matter if the songs weren’t so great. While I’m no fan of the Argent stadium songs, they do work wonderfully in a live performance. And as for the rest… the Zombies’ mid-60s catalogue may have been small, but it was perfectly formed. Can anyone think of a better set of songs than I Want Her She Wants Me, This Could Be Our Year, A Rose For Emily, Care Of Cell 44 and She’s Not There? When you add in the singles from that period — not all of them great songs, but all great singles — like Tell Her No, I Love You and Whenever You’re Ready, you end up with a setlist that is the equal of great contemporaries like the Beach Boys or the Monkees, despite those bands having released many, many more records than the Zombies ever did.
My only criticism of this show is that it was a tour in support of a new live album, Live In The UK. That’s not a problem in itself, but it is when of the ten songs on the live album, nine are on Live At Metropolis Studios, London, which came out last year. And on Odessey And Oracle Revisited, their live CD/DVD from 2008. And eight are on Live At The Bloomsbury Theatre , their 2007 live CD/DVD.
Releasing so many live albums in such a short period of time, with essentially the same repertoire on each, seems a little exploitative. Perhaps if they want to sell CD mementoes of their shows (understandably since that is no doubt where a good chunk of their income comes from), they should do what Squeeze did on their recent tour and have ‘instant’ CDs of each night’s show available at the end of the show.
But none of that’s really important — after all, you don’t have to buy the live CD. (I didn’t, though I did buy Blunstone’s Live At The BBC collection from the 90s…). These are wonderful musicians, performing wonderful music. Rod Argent, when talking to the audience, seems strangely defensive — having to say over and over that various music magazines put Odessey And Oracle in their best albums lists, or that Dave Grohl or Paul Weller or whoever like different songs. He shouldn’t feel like he needs to tell us those things. Just listening to the music is enough.
The Magic Band: Band On The Wall, Manchester, 7th March
As is always the case when seeing great bands from the 60s these days, the five men who make up the Magic Band that came on stage at the Band On The Wall on Thursday never played together before last year, so it’s probably best to start this brief review by saying who they are.
The lead guitarist, Eric Klerks, and drummer, Craig Bunch, are new members, though they played the parts accurately and well.
Three of them, though, were veterans of the classic Beefheart band, and looked it. Denny “Feelers Rebo” Walley, on rhythm guitar, resplendent in a sequined jacket, played with the band in 1975 and 76, after being hired away from Frank Zappa. Rockette Morton, on bass, looks like a cross between Father Christmas and everyone’s favourite English teacher, and played on four of the best albums ever between 1969 and 1974 and also on Unconditionally Guaranteed. And John “Drumbo” French, here taking the lead vocal spot but also playing soprano sax, guitar, harmonica and drums, was in and out of the band over the years, first joining just in time for their first album in 1966 and leaving for the last time in 1980. On Thursday he looked like Anton LaVey in cargo pants, though since French is a born-again Christian that might not be a comparison he’d approve of.
In fact, Beefheart-listeners have often noted a curious thing about the times French was in the band, which is that they coincide almost entirely with the times Beefheart and the Magic Band actually made good records. This coincidence makes more sense when you realise the way Beefheart worked, which is that he would sit down at a piano (which he could barely play) and hammer out his musical ideas, which would then be transcribed and arranged by French. While Beefheart was the creative genius of the band, French in his role as musical director was as important to the success of albums like Trout Mask Replica and Bat Chain Puller as, say, George Martin was to the Beatles’ work.
For those who aren’t familiar with the music of Captain Beefheart And His Magic Band, it’s some of the most wonderful, inventive music ever created, mixing the timbre of Chicago blues with the tonality and rhythms of free jazz, and adding beat poetry over the top. Most listeners seem to think the result is a godawful racket, but a large minority, including myself, think it among the best music we’ve ever heard.
And this band did a superb job. Understandably, the setlist was geared around the albums which best captured their artistic intentions — Trout Mask Replica, Clear Spot and Bat Chain Puller — with very little from the early recordings they did for Buddah records (which I personally like, as they sound like a cross between Howlin’ Wolf and the Monkees), although they did perform Gimme Dat Harp Boy and Electricity from those earlier albums. Rather less unfortunately, they also missed out the ‘tragic band’ albums Unconditionally Guaranteed and Bluejeans And Moonbeams.
This was the kind of intimate gig where the band are close enough to the audience that before the gig Rockette Morton had a conversation with me about how much better my beard is than his, but it was absolutely packed full of nerdy white men. I find it rather unfortunate that my tastes seem to be shared mostly by men, but as with most gigs I go to, at least 85% of the audience was made up of men over the age of thirty-five, and in one of three subgroups (fat and bearded, skinny and bespectacled, jeans and grey ponytail). This is doubly unfortunate as this is not a demographic noted for its ability to move to music with grace, and seeing several hundred malcoordinated men attempting to ‘dance’ to the intricate polyrhythms of this music was a hilarious sight. At one point, French started clapping in the air, and the whole audience joined in. Within seconds of him dropping his hands, the audience were clapping seven different distinct rhythms…
But this band are as good a live band as you’ll ever see. French is a fantastic frontman and singer — he actually sounds very, *very* like Beefheart. He doesn’t have Beefheart’s range or control, but nor does anyone else, and if you were to listen to a recording of him you’d think it was Beefheart on a less-than-great day. That sounds like damning with faint praise, but it really isn’t — *no-one* is as good as Beefheart, and that he sounds that close, on material I’m so familiar with, is a minor miracle.
And indeed, it was great to be in an audience full of people who knew and loved this music as much as I did. The single best moment was when, two songs in, Eric Klerks broke a string. While he was restringing his guitar, French did an impromptu a capella performance of Orange Claw Hammer, and most of the audience sang along. I never in my life thought I’d be in a crowd full of people all singing “Come little one with yer little ole dimpled fingers gimme one ‘n I’ll buy you uh cherry phosphate/Take you down t’ the foamin’ brine ‘n water ‘n show you the wooden tits on the Goddess with the pole out full sail/That tempted away yer peg legged father”. It’s certainly a unique experience.
There’s a certain amount of progginess to the band — Rockette Morton gets to do a whole song as a bass solo, and there’s a drum duet which starts off with Bunch playing a solo, then French joining him on the same kit and moving across into Bunch’s stool while both keep playing, French playing solo for a while, then Bunch moving back in from the other side and taking over again. But that kind of excess makes the show all the better — these aren’t men who are concerned in the slightest about seeming cool or ‘authentic’, but rather they just want to make their music.
For me, the highlight of the show was Rockette Morton’s bass playing. Morton seems rather ignored by the audience, because French is the frontman while Walley is known to audiences in the North-West of England from his regular performances with Liverpudlian Zappa tribute band The Muffin Men. But this is music that’s simultaneously incredibly complex, with people often playing in three or four different time signatures simultaneously, and surprisingly funky. The bass player is always a crucial element in keeping a band together, and for music like this the slightest timing discrepancy could be fatal, but Morton is quite possibly the best bass player I’ve ever heard live (and I’ve heard quite a few good ones).
This isn’t music for everyone, but if you like the Magic Band’s music at all I can’t recommend them highly enough.
(Also, on their merchandise stalls they have copies of French’s 2010 book Beefheart Through The Eyes Of Magic. I picked one up and from the first few chapters I’d say it was an essential book for anyone who likes the music of Beefheart or Zappa, or even who likes any Southern Californian music from the late 50s through the 70s.)
None of the show I saw has yet made it to YouTube, but here’s Electricity from Preston a couple of nights earlier. The Magic Band are still touring — go and see them if you can.
OK… that was Electricity when I pasted the link in, but it seems to have turned into Click-Clack overnight. Oh well. Both great tracks.
The Song Ends… But The Beauty Of It Must Never Fade
(Thanks to Andrew Rilstone for reminding me of the Jack Kirby quote that’s titled this).
February 6 is the anniversary of the deaths of two of my favourite creative artists. The first, Jack Kirby, lived a relatively long life, but not long enough — he revolutionised an art-form several times over, and created or co-created more great comic characters than any five other people. Darkseid, Captain America, Kamandi, The Incredible Hulk, Etrigan the Demon, The Fantastic Four, The Challengers Of The Unknown, The New Gods, The X-Men, Mister Miracle, OMAC, Iron Man, Kamandi, The Silver Surfer, The Eternals, Thor… to create even *one* of these would have been enough to make Kirby one of the greats. To come up with all of them is truly spectacular.
And that’s not even counting the fact that he, along with Joe Simon, made sure there was a comics industry at all in the 1950s by inventing the romance comics genre, without which the industry would have collapsed.
But all that pales next to two things — firstly, that all his work, throughout his life, from Captain America punching Hitler in the jaw through to the fight to stop Darkseid from having the anti-life equation, is about the fight between freedom and fascism, and he always comes down on the side of liberty. I’ve written more about that here, and here, and here, and in great chunks of a couple of my books.
The second, and possibly most important, is that he was just *such a bloody good artist*. Just look at this:
or this:
Exactly.
And four years to the day after Kirby died, so did Carl Wilson.
Carl Wilson wasn’t the creative giant that Kirby was — he wrote a handful of very good songs, and was a far better record producer than people give him credit for, but he didn’t have that fizzing energy, the outpouring of ideas, that Kirby did.
What he was, though, was one of the great interpreters of popular song of all time, with an almost Sinatra-esque ability to sell a song, along with a voice that I would kill for.
He was only 17 when he played the lead guitar on Fun Fun Fun, only 19 when he sang lead on God Only Knows and Good Vibrations. His vocals on Surf’s Up, or the entire Wild Honey album, or All This Is That, are as good as any vocal ever recorded. He was also by all accounts the most stable person in the Beach Boys, the mediating presence that managed to hold the band together for thirty-six years. They split up very shortly after his death at the ridiculously young age of fifty-one.
At times during the last fifteen or so of those years he could get lazy, as he was asked to sing material that was utterly beneath his vast talent, and he couldn’t quite hide his contempt for some of it. But when he had something worth singing, he was as good as ever.
Below is an MP3 from what I think is the last recording of him — a partial audience recording of a concert from August 2, 1997. Three weeks after this show, he had to give up touring, and six months later he was dead. At the time of this show he was so ill from the lung and brain cancer that killed him that he had to remain seated throughout the show, and take oxygen between songs. But when he sang this song, he always managed to stand up, to give the song the respect it deserved. Just listen to this…
The Beach Boys On CD: The Beach Boys Love You
The follow-up to 15 Big Ones may well be the most controversial album the band ever did, with fans almost evenly divided between those who love it and those who hate it. In a recent (totally unscientific) poll on one fan forum, Love You made the top ten both of fans’ favourite and least favourite albums.
And there’s a good reason for this. Love You is, quite simply, unlike anything else ever recorded, not just by the Beach Boys but by anyone. It’s almost impossible to get across to people who haven’t heard it just how unlike anything else any major band has ever done this is. Possibly the best way to explain the album’s sound is by a hypothetical:
Imagine playing J.S. Bach a Phil Spector album, then telling him “you have an hour to write as many songs that sound like that as possible”, and locking him in a room with Jonathan Richman as a lyricist. Then take those songs and give them to Tom Waits to record, but with the only instruments allowed being a Moog with its settings stuck on “fart sound” and a single snare drum.
While the result wouldn’t exactly be The Beach Boys Love You, it would probably be close enough on a first approximation. It’s an album where the vast majority of the instrumentation is played by Brian, and is as rudimentary as that implies. Given its release in 1977, it would actually be the only sensible response by a major band to punk, were there any evidence that Brian Wilson had ever heard a punk record at this point — as it is, we have to see it as just convergent evolution. This seems to be the cause of the great split in Beach Boys fandom over this album. Very roughly, anyone who became a Beach Boys fan before punk despises this album, anyone who grew up listening to punk and post-punk music seems to get it instinctively.
This is one of only two Beach Boys albums to be made up entirely of previously-unreleased Brian Wilson songs (the other being Smiley Smile) and is as personal a statement as Pet Sounds, Smile or Smiley Smile. And I am absolutely in the camp for whom this is one of the pillars on which the Beach Boys’ artistic reputation rests. Certainly this is the last album by the group that anyone could possibly argue was great — and there are only two after this that one could reasonably argue are even listenable (though the band’s members would make plenty of good music solo).
It’s not an easy listen, though. It’s bare, minimalist, raspy and human. Apparently Carl Wilson did a lot to sweeten the album before its release (he’s credited as ‘mixdown producer’, with Brian Wilson credited as ‘producer’, but supposedly he did a lot more than that implies), which just makes one wonder what on Earth this could have sounded like before the sweetening.
One thing that must be addressed before we get to the album proper, though, is the claim by some that the people who like this album do so because they’re fetishising mental illness, and that the album itself is ‘a product of mental illness’. This is nonsense.
The album isn’t “a product of mental illness” — it’s a product of an artist who happened to be living with a mental illness. Yes, it wouldn’t be the same if Brian had been mentally better, but likewise none of his music would have been the same if he’d been able to hear in both ears, and we don’t call Pet Sounds “a product of physical disability”.
Just having a mental illness doesn’t make one magically able to make music of the quality of Love You — I worked for several years on a psychiatric ward, and several of the people on that ward fancied themselves musicians, so I can tell you that from personal experience. Conversely, having a mental illness doesn’t suddenly remove all talent, intelligence and humour from someone who has those things when they’re well.
The narrative that mental illness is in some way romantic or confers mystical talent upon those who have it is definitely a pernicious one that needs to be fought. But just as pernicious is the opposite myth — that because someone has bipolar disorder, or schizophrenia, or whatever, they instantly become unable to do anything or make any rational decision. People with mental illnesses can be capable of creating great art — even great art that stems from their illness. Or should we dismiss Van Gogh and William Blake, too?
No, Love You wouldn’t be the same album if Brian Wilson hadn’t been suffering from a mental illness at the time — but that’s a good thing. Not a good thing that he was ill, but a good thing that while ill he was able to create great art. Personally, I think we need more art from people with mental illnesses — they’re marginalised, and their opinions and thoughts more or less ignored or mocked, in this society.
But this isn’t something that has to be treated as outsider music and listened to as one would listen to Wesley Willis. This is an album that had a rave review on its release from Patti Smith, that Peter Buck considers one of the greatest ever and that, most importantly, Brian Wilson himself often says is his favourite by the band. This is a strange, but beautiful, work by one of the greatest songwriters ever.
To those who have ears, let them hear.
line-up
Brian Wilson, Carl Wilson, Dennis Wilson, Al Jardine, Mike Love, Bruce Johnston (uncredited)
Let Us Go On This Way
Songwriter: Brian Wilson and Mike Love
Lead vocalist: Carl Wilson and Mike Love
And the album starts as it means to go on — with a riff almost identical to that of Gimme Some Lovin’ played on a cheap-sounding electric organ and a Moog bass, while a single snare drum thwacks on the off-beat and Carl Wilson grunts.
This is pop-R&B for the post-punk age, the Spencer Davis Group in a world where the drum-kit and the electric guitar had never been invented. Over a simple, grunting riff played on a farting Moog, stabbing chords on an organ, Jay Miglori’s baritone sax and a solitary snare drum, Carl Wilson soul-shouts “To get you babe I went through the wringer/Ain’t gonna let you slip through my fingers”. The verse is simplicity itself, but then for the chorus line we get something totally different — all the instruments drop out, replaced by a piano, and the two-chord riffs we’ve had so far are replaced by seven chords in three bars, as the ecstatic harmonies come in — “God, please let us go on this way”.
To those who’ve been following the band’s career, this can’t help but be a reminder of the last time the Beach Boys invoked the deity in this way — the similarly gospel-infused He Come Down — but while the harmonies here work in the same way, here they’re shattered voices. The Wilson brothers at this point had destroyed their voices with a combination of cocaine, alcohol and smoking, though Carl’s voice remained comparatively unravaged, and so here rather than the ethereal beauty of even a few years ago, we have what sounds like ancient, weary old men, their voices cracked and shattered, even though when this was recorded all the band were under thirty-five.
But the significant word here, as Patti Smith correctly noted in her review for Hit Parader [FOOTNOTE Which can currently be read at http://www.smileysmile.net/uncanny/index.php/the-beach-boys-love-you-october-1977-hit-parader-selection-by-patti-smith], isn’t “God” but “please”, which she called “the catchword of Love You” but which could equally be called the catchword of Brian Wilson’s entire career. This is a pleading album, and I can’t really put it better than Smith did:
they are pleading w/ the same urgency as the boy in the back seat to the girl in 1963. please it won’t hurt. please. come to me/give to me/tell me/listen to me…[orthography as in the original]
Then after another verse we get the middle eight, and Mike Love’s sole songwriting contribution to the album (apparently he wrote only these lyrics, not those for the rest of the track). And suddenly we’re back in the world of Holland, with Love’s obsessions with telepathy and levitation coming to the fore again. “Seems we have extra sensory perception…now we can fly”. It even sounds different from the rest of the track — the single snare drum thwack has been replaced with a single thump on a tom.
The track builds cleverly, from the single Moog bass under Carl’s vocal at the beginning, to a mass of Moog, organ, sax and chanting Beach Men by the end, but throughout it there is a propulsive energy that had been missing from everything the band had recorded, no matter how good, since about 1971.
A staggeringly good opener.
Roller Skating Child
Songwriter: Brian Wilson
Lead vocalist: Mike Love, Al Jardine and Carl Wilson
“And we’ll make sweet lovin’ when the sun goes down/We’ll even do more when her mama’s not around/Well, oh my, oh gosh, oh gee/She really sets chills inside of me”.
This is one of the comparatively weaker tracks on the album, sounding in fact like a rewrite of the previous track (the verse riff is essentially the same but a tone up), but less inspired, with handclaps and some rudimentary blues guitar attempting to liven it up. Even so, lyrics like the chorus lines quoted above, or “we do it holding hands, it’s so cold I go brrr”, are quintessentially Brian Wilson.
This is probably the most “Beach Boys” sounding track on the album, with Mike Love taking the lead in his nasal tenor, but still the greatest moment is the end, when out of nowhere comes a quick G-flat – A-flat – B-flat rise that’s reminiscent of the chorus to Sail On Sailor, and Brian sings, in his ravaged “low and manly” voice but with the innocence and enthusiasm of a five-year-old, “Roller…skating…CHI-ILD!”
It’s the real entry of the voice that will define much of the album.
Mona
Songwriter: Brian Wilson
Lead vocalist: Dennis Wilson
The Beach Boys Love You, like many records where Brian Wilson has had control, is structured in a way that seems strange to modern ears but made sense at the time. When the Beach Boys were first starting out, in the very early 60s, the convention was that albums would have two sides that were different in style. Side one would be “for the kids” and be R&B or rock style tunes, while side two would be “good music” “for the grown-ups” — orchestrated, sweetened ballads. This was the convention to the point where I actually own a Ray Charles album from the early 1960s whose liner notes feel the need to explain that they’d chosen to mix the two styles up rather than do it the conventional way.
And this is how Brian Wilson structured many (though not all) of his albums. It’s most obvious on The Beach Boys’ Christmas Album, but it’s also there on The Beach Boys Today and (to a slightly lesser extent) Summer Days…And Summer Nights! — a side of mostly uptempo rockers, and a side of more sophisticated, more complex, ballads.
So here we get the third uptempo track in a row, and the most fully fleshed-out. This has a full wall-of-sound style production, with massed backing vocals, multiple saxophones, and even drum fills (unusual for this album). Over a four-chord doo-wop progression, a badly double-tracked Dennis Wilson, his voice so damaged he can barely enunciates, shouts lyrics like “Come on, listen to Da Doo Ron Ron now, listen to Be My Baby, I know you’re gonna love Phil Spector” and “Will you, will you will you will you just kiss me/When you leave me won’t you just miss me?” (See what Smith meant about “please”?)
This is a man in his thirties singing a song about the concerns of a boy in his teens, in the voice of a man in his eighties, and if you can listen to it without a huge grin on your face I pity you.
Johnny Carson
Songwriter: Brian Wilson
Lead vocalist: Mike Love and Carl Wilson
Johnny Carson starts off with a verse that sounds almost like the kind of louche Weimar cabaret song that Scott Walker or someone of that ilk might cover, low piano chords and Moog in a minor key, with no other instrumentation, while the singer sings in a low baritone, being almost mocked by the answering chorus.
Except that that singer is Mike Love, and the words he’s singing are “He sits behind his microphone/(Joh-nny Car-son!)/He speaks in such a manly tone/(Joh-nny! Car-son!)”
This is the make-or-break song for this album — at this point either you just decide to go with it and accept that, yes, this is going to be a song about how great Johnny Carson is, and how “every night at eleven-thirty he’s so funny”, where the instrumental break consists of four bars of just a stabbed Cm chord, played on organ and piano, on the on-beat, followed by four more bars alternating between B-flat and E-flat, and where there is a single cymbal crash that is almost the only use of cymbal in the entire album, or you turn the album off and give up on it.
As the song ends with another doo-wop progression, over which the band chants “Who’s the man that we admire?/Johnny Carson is a real live wire”, only those who are willing to listen with an open mind are left, as the album starts to get really good.
Good Time
Songwriter: Brian Wilson and Al Jardine
Lead vocalist: Brian Wilson
This song is often considered to not fit on the rest of the album — it was originally recorded during the Sunflower sessions in 1970, apart from one “Hey!” at the end that Brian added in 1977, and features a much fuller arrangement than anything else on the album, including strings and horns, as well as having Brian’s very different 1970 voice in the lead.
It’s also the only song that had had any kind of release before this, having been released as a track by American Spring (a vocal group consisting of Brian Wilson’s wife Marilyn and sister-in-law Diane) with the same backing track but slightly revised lyrics (including a vocal part on the instrumental break — “Hey baby, turn up the radio/The DJ just said he’s playing our favourite song/talk to me”). That version is actually in many ways the better mix, having some instrumental parts missing from the Love You mix, and sounding overall much clearer.
Despite all the differences — the orchestration, the simpler structure, Brian’s voice — this does still fit on the album, simply because of the eccentric sense of joy in the track. There’s no other album in the world where a line like “My girlfriend Penny, she’s kinda skinny/And so she keeps her falsies on” would fit.
Honkin’ Down The Highway
Songwriter: Brian Wilson
Lead vocalist: Al Jardine
The only single from the album was this utterly joyous country-rocker. One of the fuller productions on the album, this harks back to the band’s early days of singing about cars and girls, but with a mixture of sophistication and naivety that is utterly astonishing.
On the one hand, you’ve got Brian and Dennis bellowing “honk honk, honking down the highway”, and the fact that Al is singing about “honking down the gosh-darn highway”, but on the other you’ve got astonishing musical moments like the bridge, where a song that has been in E major throughout the verse diverts into a minor key, but only so the song can build up from Bm7 through Em7 and F#m7 before triumphantly going to G major and then to B major, the fifth of the original key — taking us from a minor version of the chord to a major one through a continuous lift that is just about the most joyous thing ever committed to record, especially when combined with Al singing over the top “I guess I got a way…WITH…GIRLS!” in his magnificent, rich voice.
And this is the thing that makes Brian Wilson so special as a songwriter — the combination of an utterly unmediated emotional expression with a peerless musical intelligence and craft. This is the music that an enthusiastic child would make, making up a song about the first thing that came into her head — if that child was at one and the same time someone with decades of songwriting craft.
No-one else can do this.
Al Jardine re-recorded this song on his 2010 album A Postcard From California, with Brian Wilson adding backing vocals, but this is still the superior version.
Ding Dang
Songwriter: Brian Wilson and Roger McGuinn
Lead vocalist: Mike Love
A very silly song indeed, running slightly less than a minute long, all on one chord, with the band singing “Ding, dang, dang, Whoo!, ding and a ding dong” while Mike sings “I love a girl/I love her so madly/I treat her so fine/But she treats me so badly” over and over. This took two people to write.
This is Brian Wilson’s favourite song from the album.
Solar System
Songwriter: Brian Wilson
Lead vocalist: Brian Wilson
Side two opens with a wonderful waltz-time ballad, layers of synths under Brian’s ‘low and manly’ voice as he sings a song about the planets that seems aimed at children.
Harmonically, this is the most interesting thing so far — the verse/chorus seems to start in G or D, but soon moves to A, before going to F for the chorus, but then ending on a D chord. It’s one of the most harmonically mobile things Brian had done in years, and it’s absolutely gorgeous. The middle eight, meanwhile, seems to stick mostly to the key of E minor, but with a Cm7 chord that doesn’t neatly fit into any of the other keys.
Lyrically, the song is a look at all the planets in the solar system (except Uranus) and the moon, from a childish point of view — “If Mars had life on it/I might find my wife on it”, along with mentions of various other celestial bodies (“Then there’s the Milky Way/That’s where the angels play”).
It’s absolutely lovely, and for all the criticism Brian’s gruff 1977 voice gets, I have to say that I find the vocals on this track fit perfectly — he was still a great singer, even if he didn’t have a ‘beautiful’ voice. The harmonies on the chorus, with Brian multi-tracked, straining for the high notes he would once have hit easily, are lovely.
The Night Was So Young
Songwriter: Brian Wilson
Lead vocalist: Carl Wilson
By common agreement, this is by far the best song on the album, and for once the consensus isn’t wrong. This is the most fully-produced track on the album — and it sounds like a lot of that production is the work of Carl Wilson, as there are probably more guitars on this one track than on the entire rest of the album, with at least three clearly audible parts (a barely-there rhythm part, a vaguely “Hawaiian” sounding two-note repeated phrase mixed high, and a double-tracked lead part played on the bass strings and mixed low). It also has the most conventional drum part, to the point of actually having a little hi-hat work (one of the little-remarked quirks of Brian Wilson’s production is that he rarely uses cymbals of any kind on his recordings, preferring to use hand percussion to play those parts).
Carl Wilson turns in the best vocal performance of the album, a quite extraordinary effort. Listening to “Why she has to hide/She’s passing it by, she won’t even try/To make this love go where it should” you could believe this was Brian’s old trick of passing vocal lines between different vocalists, but they’re all Carl. In fact, it sounds like the only vocals on this track at all are massed Brians in the harmony stack and Carl on lead.
The song itself is a lovely, simple one, with a vaguely Latin or Hawaiian feel thanks to all the major 7ths and 6ths, and with simplistic but effective lyrics that perfectly express the emotion of being awake at night thinking about a love you can’t have. Absolutely beautiful.
This is the only Love You song that Brian Wilson has included in his solo sets when performing live, playing it in 2002.
I’ll Bet He’s Nice
Songwriter: Brian Wilson
Lead vocalist: Dennis Wilson, Brian Wilson and Carl Wilson
Another absolutely stunning song. The simplest way to describe how good this is is to say there’s a bootleg tape, quite widely available, of Brian demoing several Love You era songs for his bandmates. Their reactions to songs like Mona are…not hugely enthused. But when he plays this one, there are astonished noises and “woo-hoos” in the middle eight, Mike Love starts singing along with the choruses, and Love says at the end “Man, that knocked me out, that was a motherfucker.”
[Note to self -- check that this line was actually in that place before releasing the book version of this, as the tape has been edited quite a bit].
A lovely song built on layers of synths, with the only other instrument audible being a tambourine low in the mix in the left channel, this is an absolutely heartbreaking little song — “I’ll bet he’s twice/As nice as me and it makes me cry/Please don’t tell me if it’s true/Because I’m still in love with you”.
It would be an absolutely perfectly constructed song, in fact, were it not for the middle eight lyrics, which are sung from the point of view of a lover afraid his love will leave, rather than one who has already been left.
This track also features a prominent vocal cameo from former and future Beach Boy Bruce Johnston, who sings the multitracked “Well it’s you…” harmonies in the left channel on the fade.
Let’s Put Our Hearts Together
Songwriter: Brian Wilson
Lead vocalist: Brian Wilson and Marilyn Wilson
A simple duet, again built on layer upon layer of synth sounds, this is one of the less complex songs on the second side, rarely venturing far from its home key and staying for much of the song on two chords.
There’s an appealing sweetness to this, and it would take a heart of stone not to be affected at least a little by Brian earnestly singing lines like “maybe I’ll come up with some idea and you’d think that I was clever”, but Marilyn Wilson was never a particularly good singer, and giving her lines where she has to sing a melisma that stretches the single word “good” into six notes over four beats is, frankly, cruel.
I Wanna Pick You Up
Songwriter: Brian Wilson
Lead vocalist: Dennis Wilson and Brian Wilson
A rather sweet, charming song sung to one of Brian’s children, who were at this point old enough to be going to school — “I love to pick you up, ’cause you’re still a baby to me”, this is an innocent little song about loving and caring for one’s children. There’s a subsection of Beach Boys fandom which likes to infer a sexual double-meaning to this song (mostly because of the line “pat her on her butt/she’s going to sleep, be quiet”), but while some of the other songs Brian was writing around this time have some disturbing aspects to it, this is as innocent a song as it gets.
The song is not one of the best on the album (Darian Sahanaja, later musical director of Brian Wilson’s backing band, released a solo version of the song with Pet Sounds style orchestration in the mid-90s, and it doesn’t really hold up under the weight), but like the whole album it manages to communicate an honest emotion, in a direct way, and it’s an emotion that is very rarely dealt with in rock or pop music. And the harmonies at the end are exquisite, with Love’s held bass note about as deep as he’s ever sung, while Dennis sings “little baby go to sleep”.
A minor piece, but a nice one.
Airplane
Songwriter: Brian Wilson
Lead vocalist: Mike Love, Carl Wilson and Brian Wilson
One of the very best things on the album, here lyric and music work perfectly together, as the tiny drifts in chord in the verses, from Gmaj7 to G7 to Cmaj7 to Am7 to D7, always keeping several notes in place from one chord to the next, perfectly capture the feeling of floating along above the clouds, thinking about arriving home.
It’s a hard song to analyse, because it’s just so direct and affecting. Love turns in a remarkably good vocal for him in this range (it’s right at the top of his tenor range, where he’s normally most nasal). But it’s a great one. After the two verses, we get a new section — “Airplane, airplane”, bringing in a hint of Gm to go with the G major key established in the rest of the song, but only so that on the “carry me back to her side” line we can have the rising Sail On Sailor Eflat-F-G sequence. This repeats and then we get Brian singing, almost a descending scale, “down down, on the ground, can’t wait to see her face”, again evoking perfectly in sound the feeling of a slow descent.
And then there’s the tag, where over a two-chord R&B vamp, Brian and Carl engage in a joyous call and response — “I can’t wait (can’t wait) to see (her face)”. This makes up nearly a quarter of the song, and frankly I’d have been just as happy if it had gone on for another five minutes, just hearing the two brothers playing off each other vocally, Carl growling and Brian singing “I can’t wa-hay-hait”. There’s nothing musically clever going on here, just two people singing with such infectious joy that the listener can’t help but smile.
Love Is A Woman
Songwriter: Brian Wilson
Lead vocalist: Brian Wilson, Mike Love and Al Jardine
And then finally we get to the song that most people use to dismiss the album. This is, frankly, a bit of a failure — a doo-wop song with lines like “Love is a woman/so tell her she smells good tonight” and “One two three/She’s fallen in love with me/Four five six/She fell for all my tricks”, this has the same childish eccentricity as most of the rest of the album, but doesn’t have the imagination to go along with it, and to make matters worse there’s just enough sweetening added to the mix (multiple saxophones and what sounds like a flute) to make it sound cluttered, while still sounding amateurish.
You can’t expect every song to be a classic, and this is the only one on the album that is less than wonderful, but it seems strange that it was sequenced as the last song on the album. The band — or at least Brian — seemed to like it though, and it was kept in their live set for a while, while Brian chose to perform it on a rare solo TV appearance around this time.
I am entirely prepared to accept that I’m missing something with this song, and that in two or three years something will click, and I’ll realise it’s a great work of genius, because the rest of this album is so unbelievably good that I’m willing to see any failure in it as a failure in me. But for now, I have to say that this is an imperfect ending to an otherwise perfect album.
The Beach Boys On CD: 15 Big Ones
The years between 1972, when Holland was released, and 1976, when this album came out, were the most important in the Beach Boys’ career. It’s no lie to say that the band on this album is utterly unrecognisable as the one which, a handful of years earlier, had been recording extended suites with flutes and spoken poetry segments.
The reasons for this change are far too complex to be covered in full in a book like this, which is devoted to the music more than the personalities, but a huge number of factors converged to change the band permanently, and not for the better. Firstly, both Blondie Chaplin and Ricky Fataar quit the group, and Jack Rieley stopped managing them, and thus also stopped collaborating with the Wilson brothers as a lyricist.
On top of this, Murry Wilson, the Wilson brothers’ father and the band’s early manager, died of a heart attack. The loss of their father caused the already-vulnerable Brian Wilson to descend into his worst ever period of depression (this period is the source of the urban legends about Wilson spending years at a time in bed), while Dennis Wilson’s substance abuse and alcohol problems became even worse.
But at the same time, the band had suddenly become, for the first time in a decade, the most popular band in America. The OPEC crisis in 1973 had precipitated a wave of nostalgia for the late 1950s and early 1960s in American culture, and with this came a reappraisal of the band’s early surf and car material. All Summer Long was used on the soundtrack of the hit film American Graffiti, and a rather shoddily-packaged double hits collection, Endless Summer, went to number one in 1974, spent three years on the charts and sold three million copies. A follow-up, Spirit Of America, went top ten and gold despite having few hits on it. The Beach Boys went from playing mid-sized college venues to headlining stadium gigs.
All this meant that there was a huge appetite for new Beach Boys material — but only if it came from Brian Wilson, and was in the same mould as the early hits. After intensive therapy with the controversial therapist Eugene Landy (who will show up much more in volume three), Wilson was ‘well enough’ to return to the studio and produce a new album, and to rejoin the touring band.
15 Big Ones was released with a massive publicity campaign, based around the phrase “Brian’s Back”, and became the band’s first top ten album in a decade, as well as spawning two hit singles. But many were shocked by what they heard. The album was a mix of new material and 50s covers, and Carl and Dennis Wilson as good as disowned it before it even came out, saying that they had believed the plan was to record the oldies as a warm-up before doing a full album of new material.
The arrangements were idiosyncratic, with much use of Moog, but the vocals were what shocked listeners the most. Brian and Dennis’ voices had been almost destroyed by alcohol and drug abuse, with Brian having lost his falsetto (though there is some doubt as to whether this was a deliberate decision on his part, as he wanted to sound more manly), while Dennis’ vocals were a husky rasp, sounding like nothing so much as Tom Waits. The harmonies on the album are sloppy, ragged, and often off-key.
There’s still much to like about 15 Big Ones, but as with many Beach Boys records to come, there’s a lot of music that sounds truly terrible, too. And the question then becomes how one interprets this music, as a listener. Is it a genius doing something too clever for the listener to get? A genius trying and failing to do something clever? A mentally ill man incapable of coherent work? An act of rebellion from someone being forced to work with a band he no longer cared about? A subtle musical joke?
At different times, the conclusion I come to comes out different ways, and I suspect that the true answer has elements of all the above in it. But the fact remains that in 1976, all the Beach Boys had to do to cement their artistic reputation, and re-establish themselves commercially, was to release something even vaguely competent. They didn’t manage to do it, and it would be thirty-six years before they released another top ten album.
line-up
Brian Wilson, Carl Wilson, Dennis Wilson, Al Jardine, Mike Love, Ricky Fataar (uncredited), Bruce Johnston (uncredited)
Rock And Roll Music
Songwriter: Chuck Berry
Lead vocalist: Mike Love
The album’s opening track, and lead-off single, sums up the whole project in a nutshell. It’s a cover of the Chuck Berry classic, with an inventive backing track largely played by Brian Wilson, but given a curiously flat mix, and with an unimaginative “rock, roll, rockin’ and roll” backing vocal chant that has none of Wilson’s normal flair for vocal arrangements. And over this, Mike Love sounds like almost a parody of himself. Recording a song by Chuck Berry (and one which had a famous cover version by the Beatles, to boot) invites comparison with some of the greatest vocalists of the rock era. Love’s vocal is neither as witty as Berry’s nor as exuberant as John Lennon’s, just a flat statement, and we’re left wondering why anyone would want to dance with him.
The superior (though still not very good) single mix of this track went to number 5 in the US charts, more because of the immense affection the band were held in at this time than because of any redeeming qualities in the record itself, making it the band’s biggest hit since Good Vibrations a decade before.
It’s OK
Songwriter: Brian Wilson and Mike Love
Lead vocalist: Mike Love and Dennis Wilson
The second single on the album, and the first original, actually dates from 1974, and was recorded with Ricky Fataar on drums (most songs on this album actually feature Dennis Wilson on drums, the first where that was the case for some years), along with members of Roy Wood’s band Wizzard on saxophone [FOOTNOTE Wood has talked about being invited to the session because Brian Wilson admired Wood's Beach Boys-esque doo-wop pastiche Forever, a hit for him in the previous year. He's spoken in interviews about having sung on at least one track with the band, singing at the same mic as Brian and Carl. Whether his vocals are somewhere in the mix here is, however, hard to ascertain, and it may be that they were wiped or that he sang on a different, as yet unreleased, track.] .
Essentially a return to the feel of Do It Again, this was the first ‘fun in the sun’ Beach Boys song to be released since that song eight years earlier, and it’s enjoyable enough, but there’s a sense of diminishing returns here, with its “in the sum-sum-summertime” chant and banal lyrics. The track mostly works because of the saxophone line and Dennis Wilson’s gloriously goofy bass vocals, but it’s a creative dead end. As a single, this went to number 29 in the US charts. The song remained in the band’s live setlist for the next two years, and has been a regular in the set of Mike Love’s touring Beach Boys in recent years.
Had To Phone Ya
Songwriter: Brian Wilson, Mike Love and Diane Rovell
Lead vocalist: Carl Wilson, Brian Wilson, Dennis Wilson, Al Jardine, Mike Love
The first really strong track on the album is this one, originally written for and recorded by (American) Spring, a vocal group consisting of Brian Wilson’s wife Marilyn (who sings backing vocals here) and her sister Diane (credited as a co-writer of the song).
The song is a miniature, only two minutes eleven seconds long, but has a typically Wilsonesque chord sequence, full of major ninths and sixths, and a wonderful section (starting with the line “it lifts my spirits…”) where the melody climbs as the bassline steadily descends underneath.
The arrangement, too, is outstanding, with interjections from clarinets having much the same function that the Moogs in Wilson’s other arrangements of the time do, and with every band member getting a couple of lines of lead vocal in turn, ending with Brian’s new ‘low and manly’ voice, singing “come on, come on and answer the phone” (and a very buried Marilyn saying “Hi Brian” right as the song fades out).
While Brian’s beautiful voice had been more-or-less destroyed, and would never really return, his gruff vocals here still show a musicality, and an emotional honesty, that makes them equally as good in their way as his earlier performances — the artistry is still there.
This is only a minor track, but is a lovely one.
Chapel Of Love
Songwriter: Jeff Barry, Ellie Greenwich and Phil Spector
Lead vocalist: Brian Wilson
And here we get to one of the tracks that it’s almost impossible to judge, except possibly as outsider music. This is a cover of a track Wilson admired enormously, but with a wildly eccentric arrangement — cymbals playing triplets, when Wilson normally avoided them, a bank of saxophones droning, stabs from an ARP string synthesiser, and Moog bass. Then over this Brian Wilson sings what sounds like a serious attempt at the lead in his low, gruff voice, with Love doing a competent job on the bass vocals — but Wilson then screeches answering vocal parts, sounding like a small child doing a joke voice. Is this an experiment that didn’t quite work out? Is it a joke? Is it just Wilson being enormously lazy? There’s no possible way to tell. It’s not actually unlistenable, in its own strange way, but its qualities are…orthogonal to those one normally looks for in music.
An alternative mix of this exists which is slightly less eccentric, with some additional backing vocals, but that mix makes it no clearer what the intent of the track was.
Everyone’s In Love With You
Songwriter: Mike Love
Lead vocalist: Mike Love
This track is a much more conventional one than anything on the album up to this point, and the explanation lies in the credits — while Brian Wilson is still credited as producer, Love is credited as arranger, and Darryl Dragon [FOOTNOTE the Beach Boys' former touring keyboardist, then having success with his wife, Toni Tennile, as The Captain And Tennile. Tennile sings the high vocals on this track.] as vocal arranger.
This is Love in mellow mode, much like on Big Sur, as he sings to someone who is loved by everyone, but who “can’t give your love to only one” — the person in question being the Maharishi, though this is not made explicit in the lyric. The backing is very, very loosely inspired by Bach, probably via Procol Harum, as the track has more than a little of the feel of Whiter Shade Of Pale about it, and jazz musician Charles Lloyd (a fellow follower of the Maharishi, and a member of the Beach Boys’ touring band at this point) provides some nice flute.
This song is clearly important to Love, as he rerecorded it in 1978 (for his unreleased solo country album Country Love) and again in 2004 (for his unreleased album which at various times went under the name Unleash The Love and Mike Love Not War) and regularly includes it in sets by the touring Beach Boys. However, it was less popular with the public — when released as the third single from the album, it failed to reach the charts.
Talk To Me
Songwriter: Joe Seneca/Bob Crewe, Frank C. Slay Jr. and Frederick A. Picariello
Lead vocalist: Carl Wilson
Another track where it’s literally impossible to understand what Brian Wilson could have been thinking. The bulk of the song is a rather plodding cover of Talk To Me, a fairly nondescript 12/8 R&B ballad, originally recorded by Little Willie John, and it’s passable enough, though Carl Wilson sounds quite bored. But then, for no discernible reason, at the end of the middle eight, the song is interrupted by ten bars of the uptempo rocker Tallahassee Lassie, a minor hit for Freddie “Boom Boom” Cannon, which is in a different key, tempo, and time signature, and whose lyrics have no connection with those of the earlier song. After these ten bars, the original song is resumed. It sounds for all the world like a mistake, and many people listening in this download age will assume they have a corrupted file, but it’s totally deliberate.
That Same Song
Songwriter: Brian Wilson and Mike Love
Lead vocalist: Brian Wilson
And suddenly we get an absolutely joyous gospel-flavoured track, with an enthusiastically gruff Brian turning in one of his best vocal performances of the album, as he tracks the evolution of music from Gregorian chant to rock and roll. It’s utterly simple — for much of the track it’s just Brian on piano and organ and Dennis tapping a cymbal, while Brian and the band sing, although there are occasional passages with more instruments (most notably saxophone, provided here as on much of the album by old Wrecking Crew stalwarts Steve Douglas and Jay Migliori) — but the vocal performance is filled with such irrepressible joy that one can’t help but be swept up by it.
T.M. Song
Songwriter: Brian Wilson
Lead vocalist: Al Jardine
Easily the most “Brian” song on the album, this ode to transcendental meditation has more inventiveness in seventy-four seconds than most of the rest of the album has in total. Starting with twenty seconds of scripted arguing, reminiscent of some of the attempts at comedy on the band’s very earliest recordings, ending with Al saying “phew, it’s time for me to meditate”, we then have two fairly straightforward verses, describing the effects of meditation, before going into a middle section that almost defies description, with a melody line wandering all over the place while the track speeds up and slows down under the line “sometimes it goes real fast and other times it goes real slow”. There’s then yet another eight-bar section, an uptempo tag which tells you “transcendental meditation really works for me good/more much more than I thought it would”.
The track manages to remind one simultaneously of the jokey material on the earliest albums and of both Smiley Smile and Friends, and so probably should have been the kind of thing people who wanted Brian to be “back” were expecting. But it wasn’t.
Palisades Park
Songwriter: Chuck Barris
Lead vocalist: Carl Wilson
Side two opens with the second Freddie “Boom Boom” Cannon cover of the album, this time of a song written by Chuck Barris [FOOTNOTE A TV gameshow producer, who created The Newlywed Game and The Dating Game (for UK readers, these are the shows that were remade as Mr. And Mrs. and Blind Date), and who later became the presenter of The Gong Show. His autobiography, Confessions Of A Dangerous Mind, also claims that he was a CIA assassin who killed thirty-three people, though the CIA have denied this.].
The original version of this had been a huge influence on the band, to the extent that Brian Wilson had more-or-less blatantly ripped it off twice, for County Fair and Amusement Parks USA, and this seems a far more respectful take on the song than many of the other covers. It’s also the only track on the album where all the instrumentation is played by old Wrecking Crew members — almost every other track has instrumentation provided by the Wilson brothers, touring guitarists Ed Carter and Billy Hinsche, and then session players only augmenting the band for instruments like saxophone, but here the old gang are all back together.
The track is a fairly straight take on the song, with the only new addition being the “run run running, now the rides are running” backing vocals, replacing an organ part from the original, and Carl Wilson gives the vocal his all. The song itself is not especially inspired, but the track is fun.
Susie Cincinnati
Songwriter: Al Jardine
Lead vocalist: Al Jardine
This track of Jardine’s actually dates back to January 1970, and so features Bruce Johnston on backing vocals. It had actually been released twice before, as the B-side to both Add Some Music and to the 1974 single Child Of Winter, in two different mono mixes, and the stereo version on the album is apparently those two mono mixes synced together.
One of the most enjoyable, catchiest things Jardine has ever written, this is a simple four-chord rocker (with a key change for the last verse), with incredibly silly lyrics about a taxi driver in Cincinnati (whose “looks aren’t exactly a plus/but it doesn’t matter to us”). It’s an absolutely ridiculous song, but it knows it’s ridiculous, and Jardine sings it with such enthusiasm it’s impossible not to grin, especially when Brian Wilson’s harmonica impersonates a car horn. The song became a B-side yet again when it was released on the flip of Everyone’s In Love With You.
A Casual Look
Songwriter: Ed Wells
Lead vocalist: Mike Love and Al Jardine
A straight cover of a minor doo-wop record, originally by The Six Teens, with the gender swapped in the verse lyrics. The track’s not bad, except for some utterly horrific nasal vocals by Love on the first verse. Jardine almost rescues it with a wonderful performance on the second verse, but by then the damage has been done.
Blueberry Hill
Songwriter: Vincent Rose and Al Lewis
Lead vocalist: Mike Love
This cover of the old standard works really well for the first verse, with just string bass, clip-clop percussion, and Love’s vocal, and it sounds like we might be in for something very special. But then a whole wall of sound comes in (this is another track that features mostly Wrecking Crew members, though Brian and Carl Wilson and Bruce Johnston contribute instrumentally) and overwhelms Love’s voice, to no real purpose.
Back Home
Songwriter: Brian Wilson
Lead vocalist: Brian Wilson
Given that the theme of the album is looking back at the past (the fifteen “big ones” of the album title refers both to the number of songs on the album and to the length of time since the band’s first recordings), it makes sense for them to dig up a song that dated back to the earliest days of the band’s career.
This simple four-chord country song, with much the same feel as some of Brian Wilson’s work with Gary Usher (notably Sacramento and That’s Just The Way I Feel) was first attempted by the band in 1963, and then again in 1970 in a version with totally different lyrics. This version mostly reverts to the 1963 version, though it replaces its middle eight with a simple chant of “Back home, I’ll spend my summer, back home”, and the track mostly gets by on the enthusiasm of Brian Wilson’s croaky lead vocals. It’s not a great song, but it’s an enjoyable performance, and remained in the band’s setlist for a couple of years. Brian Wilson also included this in his sets on his first ever solo tour, in 1999.
In The Still Of The Night
Songwriter: Fred Parris
Lead vocalist: Dennis Wilson
An almost note-for-note identical cover version of the 1950s doo-wop song, originally a hit for The Five Satins. The only notable difference is the lead vocal, where the silky, beautiful vocal of the original is replaced by Dennis Wilson’s wounded bellow. While not sounding as ravaged here as he did in later years, his voice is clearly raspy, and he’s already started slurring his words slightly. Brian Wilson plays everything except the drums (played by Dennis) and contributes what may be his last really good falsetto on the tag, where he sounds huskier than previously, but still capable of hitting the notes and with a fragile tone that is in some ways an improvement on the perfection of his 60s work.
Just Once In My Life
Songwriter: Gerry Goffin, Carole King and Phil Spector
Lead vocalist: Carl Wilson and Brian Wilson
And the album ends with a real reunion, with both Ricky Fataar (on percussion) and Bruce Johnston (on backing vocals) rejoining their old band for this cover of the Righteous Brothers’ classic.
The original on which this was based was an attempt at following up You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feeling with something written to the same formula, and was an absolute masterpiece. Wisely, here the band stick almost exactly to the template of the original, capturing most of the crucial elements of Jack Nitzsche’s magnificent arrangement, but they make a few subtle changes, notably swapping lines between verses to give the lyric a better through-line (in the original “I’ve given up on schemes…” was in the second verse, while “there’s just one little dream…” was in the first).
Carl Wilson takes the verses and the middle section here, turning in by far his best performance on the album, going from a gentle, placid start with “There’s a lot of things I want…” to a hopeless but still kind “that old pot of gold ain’t so easy to find…” to almost screaming on “I can’t give you the world, but I’ll work hard for you girl”, to begging on “do this for me, baby”. The range he displays here is just extraordinary.
Brian, meanwhile, takes the choruses, and here his broken, wounded voice works perfectly, as he sings “just once in my life, let me hold onto a good thing I’ve found”. It’s an extraordinarily moving performance.
It doesn’t quite beat the original, which is one of the greatest singles ever recorded, but it comes close enough that it’s not a ridiculous comparison, and at the end of an album which even the most charitable listener would have to concede was patchy, it provides, at last, some proof that this once-great band still had the potential for greatness inside them.
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