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.
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.
New 8tracks playlist – Albums Of The Year 2010
I’ve now downloaded and listened to my penultimate eMusic set for the year, so given that I won’t have enough time to absorb next month’s in time to make a reasonable judgement, I thought I’d do my Albums Of The Year now. If nothing else doing it this year will give some googlejuice to the post, which will in turn hopefully bring some attention to these artists, many of whom are very obscure.
My criteria for this are simple – the album goes on here if either I’ve obsessed over it and listened to it repeatedly (even if I didn’t think it was very good at first) or if I’ve not listened to it as much but have listened enough to know it will one day be a favourite.
The only album to be released this year that I haven’t listened to but think I might include is Joanna Newsom’s new one. It’s not on eMusic, and I use that for pretty much all my new music these days. I’ll get it one day.
I’ve created an 8tracks.com playlist, containing my two favourite tracks from each of these albums (8tracks is a legit streaming service and pays royalties) here . Take a listen and let me know what you think, and if you like them I’ve included links to the eMusic pages for most of the albums.
EDIT Didn’t embed properly, but you can get to it here.
1) Kristian Hoffman – Fop (emusic link)
Kristian Hoffman’s last album, &, which I wrote about here, is a very strong candidate for best album of the last decade, and while I’m not sure Fop is of quite that quality, it’s definitely the album of the year.
Hoffman writes about religion, politics, sexuality and the intersections of the three from the perspective of a gay, liberal (in the USian sense) sceptic, but manages to avoid polemic – there’s nothing as strident and obvious as Dear God or Tramp The Dirt Down. Rather, he’s one of the most subtle, moving lyricists I know of.
Those two songs are not chosen at random though – Hoffman is a unique talent, but XTC and Elvis Costello are two of the reference points I would point to to give some idea of his music. The others, though, would be Queen, ELO, Sparks, The Kinks, 20s revivalists like Janet Klein, Rufus Wainwright, Candypants (and the rest of that LA powerpop set of musicians, especially the Wondermints), Corn Mo, Van Dyke Parks, Stephen Sondheim, Abbey Road era Beatles…
Basically if you like witty lyrics, a glam feel, a sense of fun, intricate arrangements and strong melodies, that manages to do bombast while still showing restraint where necessary, buy Fop – straight after you buy &.
The two songs I’ve chosen from Fop are Imaginary Friend, which starts out as a foxtrot with fairly accurate 20s-style instrumentation before going into a gigantic Queen big ballad chorus, about the solace that can be gained from religion even when the religion in question is controlled by people with less than benign motives. Hey Little Jesus on the other hand is a fantastic strutting rocker, a 50s pastiche melody (with more than a touch of Stupid Cupid to it) about the crucifixion, from the perspective of someone taunting Jesus, with a wonderful arrangement, far more subtle than it first sounds (a harpsichord, hammond organ and steel guitar solo, just for starters, and the string part is wonderfully detailed).
2) Blake Jones & The Trike Shop – The Underground Garden (emusic link)
Some might accuse me of bias here, because Blake is a friend of mine, and guested on my last EP. He’s also, though, a wonderfully talented songwriter and performer who gave the single most impressive live performance I’ve ever seen when he and the band played the Love Apple Cafe in Bradford to an audience of less than ten paying customers but still played an hour of everything from Zappa pastiche to a performance of Harlem Nocturne on the theremin. His songwriting is astounding, reminiscent of Brian Wilson, Paul McCartney and Harry Nilsson – but *ACTUALLY* reminiscent of them, not just copying their musical and lyrical tics in a pale imitation. Rather, he’s doing the same thing as them. While the two selections I’ve chosen here don’t show it, as well, his music is also remarkably varied, showing influences as varied as Dick Dale, Frank Zappa, old horror films and the Beach Boys, often in the same song.
Sing Along is my personal favourite of the songs on the new album – the lines “sometimes I wonder why my friends they all still play guitar/It’s not like they’re in line to be rock stars/There must be some kind of belief in a better world/Where we can strum and smile and get the girl” got to me especially. And Christmas Sale is a nice attack on the people who complain about the “War On Christmas” – “Your money don’t say feed the poor/And your courthouse won’t say blessed are the merciful/And your fences don’t say love your neighbour now/But you’re mad ’cause Macy’s won’t call it a Christmas sale…”
3) The Asphalt Orchestra – Asphalt Orchestra (emusic link)
The Asphalt Orchestra are a marching band from New York, but one that plays fiendishly complex jazz and art-rock covers. Their debut album features pieces by Stew & Heidi Rodewald, Charles Mingus, Bjork, Frank Zappa and Goran Bregović among others, and they just recorded a single with David Byrne. They make very good skronking noises indeed.
The two tracks I’ve chosen here are Zomby Woof, a cover of the Zappa track from Over-Nite Sensation, and Carlton, a specially composed piece by Stew & Heidi of the Negro Problem (which is how I first heard about them), which sounds like TV theme music, but in a good way (Tilt will know what I mean).
4) Imagined Village – Empire And Love (emusic link)
The Imagined Village are a ‘supergroup’ of sorts, a loose collective of musicians brought together by Simon Emerson of Afro-Celt Sound System in an attempt to reinterpret the English folk tradition in a way that incorporates elements of all the different cultures in the UK today – partly as a gigantic “fuck you” to Dickibegyourpardonnick Griffin, who tried to link traditional folk to the Bastard Nazi Party. (Incidentally, apparently Dickibegyourpardonnick is in hospital at the moment, with suspected kidney stones. Apparently they can be very painful…).
Their first album, a few years ago, was interesting but suffered from too many cooks – it featured Paul Weller, Billy Bragg, Benjamin Zephaniah… basically everyone who anyone who read the Guardian in the 80s likes, and so was a bit amorphous. This one, on the other hand, while still featuring a large backing band with English and Indian traditional instruments mixed with electronic music, limits the vocals to folkies Martin & Eliza Carthy and Chris Wood.
The two songs I’ve chosen here are Space Girl, an old Ewan MacColl song about the dangers of copping off with a spaceman, and Scarborough Fair.
5) Roky Erickson – True Love Cast Out All Evil (emusic)
This was the real surprise here. For those who don’t know, Roky Erickson was the leader of the Thirteenth Floor Elevators, a seminal mid-60s psych-rock group, but was arrested for marijuana possession, took an insanity plea, and unfortunately, because of the state of psychiatric medicine in the late 60s, became severely mentally ill. His music since then has had moments of power, but has been for the most part best judged as ‘outsider music’.
This new album, though… it’s still clearly the work of an ill man, but for the first time in decades he’s working with musicians who are sympathetic to his songs, and a producer who knows what he’s doing. The result is something close to Skip Spence’s Oar, The Beach Boys Love You, or Syd Barret’s early solo work, rather than to Wesley Willis or someone. Still the work of a fractured psyche, but one with the tools to express himself properly.
The two songs I’ve chosen are the first two from the album. Devotional Number One is deliberately recorded in the style of a field recording, and features the best vocals I’ve ever heard from Erickson. The organ coming in on the line “Jesus is not a hallucinogenic mushroom” sends shivers down my spine. Ain’t Blues Too Sad is a short alt-country song, and the difference in vocals is astounding – Erickson sounds like a totally different singer here, but an equally good one. And anyone with any knowledge of his personal history will be moved to tears by the line “Electricity hammered me through my head, til nothin’ at all is backward instead”.
This is raw, harsh music, borne out of immense torment, but still beautiful.
6) Al Jardine – A Postcard From California
I wrote about this here, but in brief this is a Beach Boys reunion album in all but name, featuring the full band on one track and Brian WIlson and David Marks on several, and better than any Beach Boys album since 1979′s LA (Light Album). That still doesn’t make it great, but it’s surprising what a grower this one is – a lovely, pleasant, relaxing album, that has absolutely no ambitions other than to be nice background music, but fulfils that ambition admirably.
The two tracks I’ve chosen are Looking Down The Coast, the most interesting song on the album, if overproduced – a miniature suite originally dating back to the late 70s, and a remake of Jardine’s old Beach Boys song California Saga, done as a duet with Neil Young, and also featuring Crosby & Stills, Jardine’s son Matt, and a sampled Brian Wilson. They’re probably the most representative tracks from the album, but the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.
7) Eliza Carthy & Norma Waterson – Gift (emusic)
Emusic lists this as being an Eliza Carthy solo album, but it’s definitely a mother-and-daughter collaboration – Emusic just seem to randomly label albums by the members of the Waterson/Carthy family, but that’s fine, because they’re all worth getting. Singer Norma Waterson and her daughter, vocalist/fiddler Eliza Carthy are two of the greatest interpreters of traditional English music alive, though they occasionally venture into other territory.
While this album is mostly folk, the two tracks I’ve chosen aren’t. The first is a medley of the 20s song Ukulele Lady and the old Amen Corner song If Paradise Is Half As Nice, while the second, Prairie Lullaby, is a solo vocal by Eliza Carthy backed by Martin Simpson on banjo. When I say this version stacks up well against the versions by Jimmie Rodgers and Mike Nesmith, you’ll know what high esteem I hold it in.
8) Brian Wilson – Brian Wilson Reimagines Gershwin
I wrote about this here and my opinion pretty much stands – this is a fundamentally flawed album. But it’s a fundamentally flawed album by one of the great creative forces of modern popular music, interpreting music by one of the greatest composers of the twentieth century.
Of the two tracks I’ve chosen here, I’ve Got Plenty O’ Nothin’ is a showcase for Paul Mertens, Wilson’s principal collaborator on the album, who provides the various lead harmonica parts. But the clanking, banjo-driven arrangement calls back both to Wilson’s own Smile and to the ‘hot jazz’ early arrangement of Rhapsody In Blue, and makes this easily the most successful track on the album. Someone To Watch Over Me, on the other hand, is the most ‘Wilsonesque’ track – while one can, again, question how much input he had into the arrangement (which sounds like someone trying to be Brian Wilson, rather than like Brian Wilson), the subject matter is so close to Wilson’s other work that this still sounds the most heartfelt track on the album.
9) Jeremy Messersmith – The Reluctant Graveyard (pay-what-you-like download)
I only discovered Messersmith this year, but my wife’s known about him for ages – he’s from her home state, Minnesota, and very popular on their NPR affiliate. He seems to be popular in ‘geek’ circles too – he seems to have done a song about Star Wars or something, and gets webcomic artists to design his T-shirts. Don’t let that put you off, though, there’s some genuinely good stuff here. Unfortunately, all the comparisons I can come up with are people like Elliot Smith or the Eels, and he’s not really very like that either. I don’t want to put people off, so just listen.
The two songs I’ve chosen here are John Dillinger’s Eyes, a Big Star-esque powerpop song about John Dillinger, and John The Determinist, a chamber-pop song about determinism, with a nice string backing (obviously going for an Eleanor Rigby feel).
10) Mark Bacino – Queen’s English (emusic)
This is actually the kind of music I criticised earlier, in that this album sounds exactly like a Harry Nilsson album. I could honestly believe that Bacino has never heard an album other than Pandemonium Shadow Show, Aerial Ballet and maybe, maybe, Nilsson sings Newman. Maybe.
But the music sounds so exactly like those albums that it’s hardly fair to criticise him for it – because I like Nilsson, and this really is like having another prime-era Nilsson album.
Of the two songs I’ve chosen here, Happy sounds like a Harry Nilsson song, while Middle Town is the least Nilssonesque song on the album, sounding closer to Squeeze or Marshall Crenshaw.
Bubbling under – Thom Hell – All Good Things (sounds like 70s soft rock crossed with the Beach Boys – for fans of ELO and LA-period BBs, but a little derivative) Heaven Is Whenever – The Hold Steady (they’re missing Franz Nicolay’s keyboards), Apples In Stereo – Travellers In Time And Space (sounds like every other Apples In Stereo album, which means it’s great but breaking no new ground). Belle & Sebastian Write About Love (sounds like every other Belle & Sebastian album, which means it’s pretty good but breaking no new ground)
Brian Wilson Reimagines Gershwin
So after my problems, I’ve finally downloaded Brian Wilson’s new album. After a few listens, I can safely say that this is without a doubt the second best solo album by a member of the Beach Boys to be released this year…
On paper, the combination of Brian Wilson and George Gershwin is a good one. Wilson has been obsessed with Gershwin’s Rhapsody In Blue since he was two, structuring his masterpiece Smile in imitation of it and often playing it on the piano while he works out other musical ideas. He’s also one of a tiny number of musicians since Gershwin’s death that one can realistically speak of as being in the same league musically – and the only one of those who might be interested in a project such as this.
And Gershwin is a composer who suits reinvention better than most. The versions of his songs with which most of us are familiar are themselves posthumous reinterpretations – Ella Fitzgerald or Miles’ Davis’ versions of Gershwin are radically different to the staid Broadway performances Gershwin himself would have heard, and Rhapsody In Blue, his masterpiece, is barely ever performed the way it was originally intended, as a jazz piece. (For those who want to hear that, archive.org have an MP3s of a performance with Gershwin on the piano, by Paul Whiteman and his band, from the day after it was premiered (part one , part two ). It’s a cut-down version, so it would fit on two sides of a 78, but it’s still far more alive than the stodgy, over-orchestrated versions one normally gets today. The same site also has a single-MP3 1927 recording by the same band, but that lacks energy compared to this).
But Brian Wilson is unfortunately not the singer he once was. When the first clips of this album became available, the usual fan cry went up “Wow! Brian is singing better than he has in years!” – this is the same thing people were saying in 1995, and 1998, and 2004, and,..
The fact is, Wilson is an elderly man with self-admitted brain damage, and he *sounds* like an elderly man with brain damage. There’s still plenty to enjoy in his vocals – he has a musical sensitivity and phrasing ability that are second to none – but he slurs his words and has occasional slight pitching problems, and whenever he gets to the top end of his range he screeches rather than sings. That’s normally OK – we make allowances because he’s Brian Wilson, and because his songs are so good – but if you’re recording, say, Love Is Here To Stay, then you’re placing yourself in a position where you’re asking for comparison with Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong, two of the greatest interpreters of popular song who ever lived. just for starters. And that’s not a comparison where Brian is going to come out best, much as I love the man (and Mr Wilson’s art at its best is so personal, so communicative, that it does inspire feelings of love for the man himself).
So much as Wilson’s fans may wish otherwise, this isn’t going to be a Rod Stewart Great American Songbook style crossover hit.
But putting the issue of lead vocals aside for a minute, there’s also the much more promising area of arrangements and production, and this is where the album has more to offer. A couple of years ago Wilson did a Christmas album which completely reinvented a lot of Christmas standards as fresh, exciting pieces, and I suspect the idea behind this album was to do the same with Gershwin. In that, Wilson has at least partly succeeded.
Before I get into a track-by-track analysis, however, I should deal with the question of authorship. In recent years Wilson has leaned a great deal on collaborators. In particular, three members of his band have taken on a great amount of the work he would have done in his commercial heyday – Darian Sahanaja has acted as ‘musical secretary’ and bandleader, Scott Bennett has written lyrics (and in at least one case appears to have written most of the music for a collaborative song as well), and Paul Mertens (Wilson’s woodwind player) has provided string arrangements. Of these, Mertens’ contributions are most easily identified – he has a distinctive sound to his arrangements which is utterly unlike anything Wilson used previously, resembling 1930s European music more than anything else, while fitting Wilson’s music perfectly – while Sahanaja’s are the most difficult (Sahanaja is both an extremely good songwriter and an accomplished pasticheur of Wilson’s style – he could probably write a convincing Brian Wilson album by himself).
However, Wilson himself is still in overall charge, and the other musicians definitely see themselves as working to fulfill his creative vision rather than their own. I suspect, from what I know of Wilson’s current working methods, the way it works is along the lines of Wilson sketching out an initial musical idea, some combination of band members going off and fleshing it out in rehearsal, and then Wilson fine-tuning the result. So no matter who else has had input, I would contend that these are Brian Wilson tracks. Just be aware that they may be Brian Wilson tracks in the way that Cootie Williams improvising a solo on a Billy Strayhorn song is a Duke Ellington track.
The album starts with Rhapsody In Blue (intro), a brief statement of the main theme of the Rhapsody sung as an a capella block harmony by multi-tracked Brians (with a woodwind underneath) going into a lovely Hollywood-style orchestration of the same melody. It feels very much like a curtain-raiser, and is very, very nice.
The Like In I Love You is the first big disappointment of the album. Wilson and Scott Bennett were given two ‘unfinished’ Gershwin songs to finish off. Unfortunately, this one was not as unfinished as the publicity suggests – originally written as Will You Remember Me? , it’s been recorded before, and the original was superior. Gershwin’s elegance is here turned into something along the lines of That’s What Friends Are For or a similar Bacharach-on-an-off-day 80s track, and while Scott Bennett is possibly, other than Van Dyke Parks, the most interesting lyricist Wilson has worked with, placing his lyrics up against Ira Gershwin does him no favours at all. He comes from a much looser tradition, where rhyme and scansion don’t have to be perfect so long as they express a feeling, but up against the delicate precision of Ira Gershwin, his work just sounds careless. Not an unpleasant track, but as is so often the case with collaborations (especially posthumous ones) it’s the lowest common denominator of the geniuses involved.
Summertime is much better – Wilson hollers a little at points, but the arrangement is slow, sinuous and sexy, with Mertens’ growling sax and Sahanaja’s little vibraphone touches working wonderfully against a string arrangement full of ‘cello vibrato, with Jeff Foskett and Taylor Mills providing high vocal harmonies. One could easily imagine this arrangement being used on, say, one of Ray Charles’ better jazz albums (like his duets with Betty Carter).
I Loves You Porgy is less successful. It’s a song that depends far too much on vocal nuance, and while Wilson *almost* rises to the challenge (he makes a surprisingly decent fist of the middle eight), it doesn’t quite come off. This goes in the interesting failure category. It’s also nice to see that Wilson, who for a long time was worried about seeming effeminate in his vocals, is now perfectly happy to sing from a woman’s point of view.
I Got Plenty O’ Nuttin’ on the other hand is just wonderful. Banjos, harmonica, bass harmonica, muted trumpet and xylophone all clank away on top while a swing-time pop track of the kind one would expect from Wilson plays underneath. This sounds like the more energetic, upbeat parts of Smile.
For It Ain’t Necessarily So we go back once again to an arrangement style that could have come from 50s jazz vocalists – I could hear this arrangement, other than the blues harmonica, working behind someone like Peggy Lee. And Wilson’s vocals here are the best so far on the album – he cracks and strains for the notes, but that gives it a bluesy edginess. Unfortunately the best arrangement touches (the banjo and Taylor Mills’ ‘bom bom’ vocals) come in the middle eight, which is the only where Wilson’s vocal is less than convincing. Paul Mertens again comes out with a great little string part on the fade – the strings on this album are possibly the best I’ve heard on a pop album since Colin Blunstone’s One Year. The drum sound on this track is great as well, with some great booming timpani.
‘S Wonderful is. It’s turned into a bossa nova, and while Wilson’s vocals aren’t his best, it’s almost impossible not to move to this one. Lovely flute solo from Mertens. This is probably the thinnest song on the album, but the arrangement is just sublime.
They Can’t Take That Away From Me on the other hand just doesn’t work. Done to a backing which is to all intents and purposes that of Little Saint Nick, with the backing vocals being a chant in the ‘football team singing along’ style, I can see what they were *trying* to do, but it doesn’t work. There’s one fun little touch – the “boogidy-boogidy-boogidy-boogidy-boogidy-boogidy-shoop” backing vocals in the middle eight – but it’s really very unimpressive.
Love Is Here To Stay is again a standard straight-from-the-fifties arrangement, and Wilson doesn’t do an especially good job with the vocals. This song has been done this way so many times that you have to have something very special for it to work. The instrumental break, with an almost subliminal theremin in the background giving it a Space-Age Bachelor Pad feel, works better than the vocal sections, but this isn’t that good.
I’ve Got A Crush On You is one of the more interesting reworkings here – this is turned into a perfect pastiche of 1950s doo-wop, all piano triplet chords a la Earth Angel, but then the guitar sound is… interestingly off. It’s reverbed as one would expect, but… not quite. And then the strings come in from a completely different idiom altogether. I’m not sure if this is a jumbled mess or something very clever, yet.
I Got Rhythm (which starts with another quote from Rhapsody In Blue – these have been peppered throughout the album), is another failure along the lines of They Can’t Take That Away From Me. It’s a surf-rock arrangement of the kind the person on the street would probably imagine if they were asked to imagine how Brian Wilson would approach the song, even down to Jeff Foskett singing chunks of the melody to Farmer’s Daughter (an early Beach Boys track) over the tag. The two most ‘Beach Boys’ sounding tracks are also the two least Brian Wilson sounding, at least to my ears.
Someone To Watch Over Me starts with yet another Rhapsody quote, this time ‘cello led. And *THIS* is the good stuff again. A simple arrangement based around harpsichord and acoustic guitar, this is nonetheless the best thing by far on the album. I never made the connection before, but this song of course sums up all the themes I identified in Wilson’s work in this piece I wrote for The High Hat. Possibly the nylon-string restatement of the melody on the fade is a tad overkill, but other than that there is nothing at all I can criticise about this track.
Nothing But Love, the second Wilson/Bennett/Gershwin track, works much better than The Like In I Love You, a chugalong rocker with some interesting chord changes. Oddly, the most ‘Brian sounding’ part here – the chords under “I asked her what’s timeless” – is *also* the most Gershwin sounding part. VERY far from what you’d expect from someone finishing a Gershwin track, but all the better for the lack of reverence. It’s spoiled though by easily the worst lead vocal on the album.
and then to finish we have another string and vocal fragment of Rhapsody In Blue (Reprise).
Overall, this album is somewhat less than the sum of its parts. There are magnificent sections – be they entire songs, or just fragments a couple of seconds long – but I doubt it’s an album I shall be returning to a huge amount. I’d say it’s a solid three-star effort (in comparison Wilson’s former bandmate Al Jardine’s album of earlier this year is a good three-and-a-half stars). Add a star on to that if, like me, you’re coming to this music knowing Wilson’s current limitations as a vocalist and with enough goodwill towards him to compensate for that. But knock a star off if you’re coming to this looking for something to sit in your CD rack next to Ella Sings Gershwin.
New Spotify Playlist(s) : The Beach Boys Covered
I *am* working on my Batman posts (and on PEP! 2 – which I had to put off slightly, because I realised that I could write an essay about Doctor Who that *also* served as an example of what a truly Liberal attitude towards copyright would look like, and tie the issue together much more nicely than it is at the moment). But today I had some important displacement activity to do, so I decided to try to create a Spotify playlist containing covers of every Beach Boys song (or the originals, where the Beach Boys did a cover version). (Note, for these purposes ‘every Beach Boys song’ only includes tracks on the twofer CDs (except Concert/Live In London and Party/Stack ‘O’ Tracks), Still Cruisin’ and Summer In Paradise. I wasn’t going to go looking for cover versions of Kokomo (Spanish version) or Happy Endings).
I couldn’t quite find every one, but I did manage to put together a seven-hour, 149-track playlist which you can find here.
However, because I know most people won’t want to listen to that, I’ve also put together a much shorter sampler playlist, 54 minutes long, which can be found here, and it’s this that I will be annotating here. However, go for the full playlist if you want to hear such curiosities as a band who only do Beach Boys songs in the style of the Ramones, a Norwegian ‘doom metal’ band covering a Bruce Johnston song, the bloke who covered the whole of side two of the Beach Boys Today! album on the ukulele (including the spoken word studio chatter track Bull Session With “Big Daddy”), Lulu duetting with Sting, the King’s Singers pretending to be ‘cellos, or a cover of Still Cruisin’ done for an exercise CD…
So here’s the short version.
Wonderful/Song For Children by Rufus Wainwright is a straight cover of the first half of the second movement of Smile, and one of the most beautiful things I’ve heard.
Ne Dis Pas by Souvenir is The Beach Boys’ Ticket To Ride knockoff Girl Don’t Tell Me reworked as breathy French pop, and exquisite.
Don’t Talk (Put Your Head On My Shoulder by Anne Sofie Von Otter is from an album Elvis Costello produced for von Otter, a classical singer, about a decade ago. At the time, Costello was interviewed saying that this song, originally from Pet Sounds is one that should be listened to every single day, and I can’t argue with him. This is an absolutely beautiful arrangement, only slightly inferior to the original (just because of the lack of the bass ‘heartbeat’).
Angel Come Home by Sal Valentino is the lead singer of the Beau Brummels reworking the Carl Wilson song from L.A. (Light Album) as Americana (or whatever we’re meant to call rockish country music that sounds more like Steve Earle or Mike Nesmith than Garth Brooks this week). More straightforward than the original, and an odd choice for a cover version.
Let’s Put Our Hearts Together by The Pearlfishers takes what was originally a duet and turns it into a solo piano ballad, making it much more plaintive and wistful, while still keeping all the eccentricity of the original.
Heroes & Villains by Geraint Watkins reworks the Smiley Smile track in the style of Louis Prima, scat singing and all. And is bloody fantastic.
The Warmth Of The Sun by Murry Wilson is by Brian, Carl & Dennis Wilson’s dad, and is from his muzak album The Many Moods Of Murry Wilson. I remember when you’d have to pay fifty quid and up for a vinyl copy of this album, but now you can have it piped into your home just like real muzak. Isn’t the internet brilliant?
Don’t Go Near The Water by Kirsty MacColl is actually a rather pretty cover version of what was originally a rather silly song by Mike Love and Al Jardine from Surf’s Up. If only she’d taken the advice in the title… Her harmonies on the tag are exquisite.
I Can Hear Music by Larry Lurex is a pre-Queen Freddie Mercury solo track, presumably an attempt to hop on the Gary Glitter bandwagon, though the music stays pretty close to the Spector original.
I’d Love Just Once To See You by The Elastic No-No Band is a very simple cover version of what was a very simple song to start with. I’ve always loved the melody of this one, and that lovely melody combined with the completely tossed-off lyrics has always somehow made it even better.
Wild Honey by Nazareth is the proto-metal band covering the Beach Boys’ attempt at R&B. It works better as a heavy metal song than you might expect (but then when I played the original for my mum a few years ago, she thought it was the White Stripes, so…)
On And On She Goes by Sandy Salisbury is a Curt Boettcher/Gary Usher reworking of what was originally a gentle ballad into an uptempo horn-driven track that is as influenced by Motown as by the Beach Boys.
MIster John B by Sylvie Vartan is odd, in that the lyric is reworked into French, but the English word Mister is stuck in for some reason. Other than that, it’s pretty faithful to the Beach Boys’ version.
Unlike Surfin’ USA by Melt Banana, a Japanese noise-rock band, whose version does settle down eventually into a fairly straight punk cover, but starts off wonderfully fragmented and distorted.
Disney Girls by Art Garfunkel is the polar opposite of that. Disney Girls is a song with which I have an uneasy relationship. I’m aware that it’s the single cheesiest song ever written (“She’s really swell, ’cause she likes church, bingo chances and old-time dances”), and that pretty much every time Bruce Johnston’s sung it other than on the original version he’s descended into lounge-singer hell. But for some reason, it still moves me far more than it theoretically should, and here Art Garfunkel gives one of his best vocal performances, his frail sincerity pushing the song well away from the elevator and into something close to genuine beauty.
Anna Lee, The Healer by The High Llamas takes this song, mostly by Mike Love, even further from its Louie Louie roots than the original version on Friends did, with the usual High Llamas combination of electronica and easy listening.
And finally A Day In The Life Of A Tree by Suzy And Maggie Roche is a cover of a song I’ve always loved (though no-one else does). Co-written by Brian Wilson and Jack Rieley, this environmentalist song is also clearly a metaphor for Wilson’s life at the time, and has one of his most gorgeous melodies. Jack Rieley’s original vocal was weak, and the song suffered by its placement on the Surf’s Up album (three Brian Wilson songs in a row were placed together, all with extended vocal rounds for their tags, and the other two were far better). This version is just lovely.
Playlist for Easter Monday
Since summer appears to have started, alas, this week’s spotify playlist is a little more upbeat and summery than previous ones, though I’ve still included a couple of blues tracks, just because. You can play this one from here . It’s fifteen tracks.
Oh My Love The Wackers is a cover of the Lennon solo track by the classic Canadian pop band. As you might expect from their name, the Wackers were very Beatles-influenced, and this track was a deliberate attempt to do the song as it would have sounded had the Abbey Road-era Beatles recorded it. Gorgeous little track.
Product by Glenn Tilbrook and the Fluffers is from the new album Pandemonium Ensues, which is musically the strongest thing Tilbrook has ever done, drawing from a far broader palette than he ever did in Squeeze (though lyrically he still misses Difford enormously). This one actually worked better live, where it sounded very Jobim-esque – here the John Barryisms in the chorus sound a little cliched. But there’s still some very interesting stuff going on here, and bassist Lucy Shaw’s vocals are great.
Riot In Cell Block #9 by The Robins (the band who later became the Coasters) was written by Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, and is an obvious precursor to their later Jailhouse Rock, but this is by far the better song.
As it’s Easter Monday, I thought I’d add in the best religious song ever written, the lovely Country Boy by Jake Thackray. Over a melody which is strongly reminiscent of Heroes & Villains, Thackray sings about Jesus’ ministry in the down-to-earth Yorkshire Catholic way he had – referring to a prostitute as “living her life between the scandalised fist and the beckoning finger” and a thief being crucified as “clinging to life with hands that had always been empty”. It’s an expression of a very humanistic Christianity, and is in its own way as great a religious artwork as Bach’s St Mathew Passion or the Sistine Chapel – that sounds an exaggeration, but I truly think it’s the case.
Give Me A Pig’s Foot And A Bottle Of Beer by Bessie Smith is there for pillock, who asked about this one last week, but also because it’s a great early blues track.
Surf’s Up by The Beach Boys is one of the two greatest songs ever written. Both, according to most sources, were written by the same two men, Brian WIlson and Van Dyke Parks, on the same night (the other is Wonderful, Rufus Wainwright’s version of which I linked the other week). If this had been released in 1966, as part of Smile, as intended, rather than five years later, it would have been as important a record as A Day In The Life. But it’s still a better one.
You’re No Good by The Swinging Blue Jeans is one of the best Merseybeat singles ever. I always think it a shame that the Swinging Blue Jeans are ignored while even The Searchers get some respect now – You’re No Good and their version of Don’t Make Me Over are classic pop singles I could listen to all day.
Directly From My Heart To You by Little Richard is a song I first learned from Frank Zappa’s cover version. In both versions it’s a wonderful piece of greasy blues. Why Little Richard isn’t absolutely worshipped, I don’t know – the man was one of the greatest vocalists who ever lived.
Someday Man by Paul Williams is a version by Williams of a song he wrote with composer Roger Nichols for the Monkees. Williams and Nichols are possibly the least cool songwriting team ever, having written Rainy Days and Mondays and Rainbow Connection, but this song, Trust and To Put Up With You are as good as soft pop gets. This one reminds me of Neil Diamond, but less smug.
Candombe by Los Shakers is what you get when an Argentinian band that started out as a clone of moptop-era Beatles goes psychedelic.
Sport (The Odd Boy) by The Bonzo Dog Band is a rare full collaboration between Neil Innes and Viv Stanshall, and manages to be hilarious, an accurate attack on British schooling *and* parenting, and musically unusual, combining cod-Elizabethan woodwind, waltz-time harpsichord and mass chanting.
Three Hours Past Midnight by Johnny Guitar Watson is one of the greatest electric blues records ever made. In particular, the guitar playing on here is pretty much the template for all Frank Zappa’s playing throughout his career.
I Want A Pony by Candypants is my favourite stompy pop song of all time. “Mom, I wanna be the king of pop/buy me fans, hurry up/I just wanna be a millionaire/You’d die and leave me money if you really cared/…I want a pony, I want a pony, I want a pony, I want a pony now!” Lisa Jenio is my favourite songwriter of the last few years, and I wish she’d release some more albums of her own material.
Say You Don’t Mind is not, as Spotify thinks, by The Zombies, but is actually a solo single by lead singer Colin Blunstone, a cover of a Denny Laine song. Blunstone is a great vocalist (and I’m looking forward an unreasonable amount to the Zombies’ Manchester gig next week) but what really makes this for me is the fact that they’ve chosen to back him with *only* a small string section, playing in a chamber music style. It turns what would otherwise have been an average 70s pop-rock singer-songwriter track into something very different. And that last note just blows me away every time.
And finally, Cups And Cakes by Spinal Tap is a wonderful gentle pisstake of English pastoral psychedelia, while fitting the genre perfectly.
Ten things I never want to read online again
Just a short list of things that annoy me beyond all reason:
1) “The Liberal Democrats need to get off the fence and say what their actual policies are”
Yep, because it’s not as if we’ve got tons of policy papers out there, or a simple pocket guide to our policies, is it?
2) “Ringo Starr was a terrible drummer”
Ringo got a reputation as a bad drummer because he didn’t lock in with the bass, as was the fashion in British recordings in the early 60s. That isn’t actually bad drumming, and anyone listening to him can tell that he was one of the most imaginative players of his time period. Just listen to Rain, Tomorrow Never Knows or Happiness Is A Warm Gun.
3) “Pet Sounds is the only good Beach Boys album, and other than that they only did crappy surf songs”
Anyone who says this gets their opinions from the music press and hasn’t bothered listening to any of their other albums. Whether you like them or not, for example, you can’t describe Carl & The Passions or Holland (spotify link) as ‘crappy surf songs’.
4) “New Doctor Who is much more sophisticated than the original series”
The original series was trying to do something rather different than the new series – it was working from a British set of TV conventions that are theatrical in origin, rather than an American, cinematic, set of conventions. This can make it difficult for those attuned to the modern style to watch. But that does *not* make it less sophisticated. In fact, on every level on which one can make a reasonable comparison (except effects – and with a few exceptions the old series was nowhere near as bad as its reputation suggests), the old series was vastly superior. Fewer plot holes (note I don’t say ‘no plot holes’), better performances from the leads, better characterisation, more memorable individual lines, and a more coherent worldview. The new series may be shiny, but it’s for the most part a soulless pastiche of the old series made by people who don’t understand it (or who do but fear their viewers wouldn’t – and I don’t know which would be worse).
5) “The free market would run healthcare more efficiently than the NHS”
I don’t believe this for a second, but assume it’s true for a second – as someone who’s seen my (American) wife collapse in the middle of the night, be delirious and unaware of her surroundings, but try to prevent me from ‘phoning an ambulance because her first thought was “We can’t afford it!”, and who’s seen friends in the US believe they have cancer but be unable to afford to have a checkup to find out, I’ll take a little bit of inefficiency over that any day.
6) “I’m buying [Comic X] to support the character, even though I’ve hated the last dozen issues”
The character doesn’t need your support – it’s a fictional character (see also people saying “Dick Grayson deserves a turn at being Batman”). All that you’re doing is encouraging bad comics to be produced.
7) “Grant Morrison’s comics are just weird for weirdness’ sake”
See the comments to this post for several people’s take on this view…
8) “Where are all the female political bloggers?”
here and here and here and here and here. And that’s just the ones on my blogroll.
9) “ZaNuLieBore”
Grow up. As far as I can tell, no critic of New Labour has ever used this ‘word’ – certainly I’ve never seen it. On the other hand, plenty of apologists for them use it as a way of dismissing the arguments of those they disagree with – “Yeah yeh, teh ZaNuLieBore is teh ev1l! We get it, go away.” Not only is this fatuous, but something about the ‘word’, the very look of it, makes me faintly queasy.
10) Any explicit search terms involving Nicola Bryant
Honestly, this really *isn’t* a fetish site for one-time Doctor Who companions.
Smile, Though Your Nose Is Running
Not able to write a new post today, as I’m not very well. However, my proposal for a book in the 33 1/3 series just got rejected today, and so I thought I’d post the proposal for anyone else to read. This is just C&P’d from the RTF file, so it might not be particularly well-formatted. Let me know what you think anyway:
The Beach Boys’ Smile has had a great deal written about it over the years, but most of this writing has told essentially the same story in a variety of ways : a young genius at the height of his powers tries to aim for something just beyond his reach, crashes and burns, and loses all his talent forever. The metaphor of Icarus is used, usually with some reference to the ‘bright California sun’. The only difference in these writings is who the scapegoat is for Smile’s non-release – is it Evil Drugs or is it Evil Mike Love?
I think there are far more interesting things to write about. I intend to try to track down the Platonic ideal of the Smile album, using three of the shadows it has cast in the real world as my map. I shall probably ask Van Dyke Parks, the primary lyricist on the album (with whom I am casually acquainted via email and who has been very forthcoming with information and advice in the past) and Darian Sahanaja, who helped put the completed 2004 version together (and with whom I share a number of acquaintances, though I don’t know him personally) to verify or clarify a few things, but this is going to be more a critical study than an examination of the process by which the album was made.
Smile as Brian Wilson intended it was never actually recorded, and has only ever existed in his head, but he made three separate attempts to get it out of there and into the real world, each with a different collaborator or collaborators. The first was in 1966, when he wrote and recorded the bulk of the material that was scrapped, with Van Dyke Parks. The second was in 1967, when he recorded a new album, Smiley Smile, as a full collaboration with the Beach Boys, with other band members contributing to the production and to the re-written songs, and the third was in 2004, when he returned to the material with Parks and with Darian Sahanaja and Paul Mertens of his new band, and finally released something that was close to his original conception.
Each of these is an attempt to work in collaboration with others to realise the same vision, and each is overlaid with the collaborators’ own worldview and artistic preoccupations. Parks added the wordplay and fascination with Americana that has been the hallmark of his work ever since. Smiley Smile added songs about Hawaii, emphasised the vocal harmonies, and simplified the instrumental arrangements to the point where they could be reproduced on stage by people who were great singers but barely competent instrumentalists, as the Beach Boys were at that point.
These collaborations can all be used to throw light on what Wilson’s true intention for the album was, but the most interesting one, and the one on which I will spend most time, is the 2004 album, as that’s a collaboration with himself, nearly forty years on; a collaboration across time that has never been tried before. Whole sections of the album take on a whole new meaning when sung by a man in his sixties, and great chunks of it now sound like he’s singing them to the young man he was in 1966, the young man with whom he’s co-written the new version.
But all three albums have a great deal of artistic merit, and I plan also to examine in detail the underrated Smiley Smile, which does after all contain two of the great singles of all time (Good Vibrations and Heroes And Villains) along with a gorgeous, minimalist version of Wonderful which I consider one of the greatest things in the history of recorded sound and Wind Chimes, which in its Smiley Smile version reminds me of some of Scott Walker’s most recent work, an atonal twisted nursery rhyme. Smiley Smile has been described as ‘space age acid casualty doo-wop’, and the description is an apt one. It is a stripped-down minimal masterpiece that’s always lived in the shadow of its unfinished predecessor but may be the most overlooked album of the sixties
So, taking these three attempts separately, we have three images of an ideal. The first image we have (the 1966 recordings) is a kaleidoscope – lots of tiny little fragments that can be mixed up into many beautiful forms, but which never cohere into something permanently. The second (Smiley Smile) is like looking at it in a funhouse mirror – you can recognise the shape, but some of it’s so distorted you have to laugh, and isn’t that a bit of something else entirely that’s somehow entered the picture? And the third is a painting from memory by a great artist of something he glimpsed once, decades earlier.
But what is it he glimpsed? Most people who’ve written about the album have spoken about themes like ‘Americana’ and ‘the Elements’. But while they’re there, and I will discuss them in the book to an extent, I believe they are extraneous to Wilson’s original conception. Neither have appeared in Wilson’s work to any great extent either before or since, and he has never spoken about either as being important to him. The ‘Americana’ theme almost certainly came from Parks (though Wilson willingly added this to the stew), as this is something that has obsessed Parks throughout his career (from albums like Discover America to the rewritten Bre’er Rabbit stories in Jump! to his most recent album of new material, Orange Crate Art, about a lost California of the past). The elements theme, on the other hand, seems to me to have been something imposed on the music afterward, possibly due to Wilson’s desire to impress his new ‘hip’ friends, and while the Americana theme is quite clearly present in songs such as Heroes & Villains and CabinEssence, the ‘elements’ songs like Barnyard and In Blue Hawaii have only the most notional connection to the classical elements.
So what is the theme of Smile? A clue comes from Wilson’s famous quote that Smile was intended as a ‘teenage symphony to God’. But a better description would be ‘teenage symphony to Goddess’. Throughout his career, Wilson has written about goddess figures. The women in his songs (and this is something that runs through no matter who his lyrical collaborators are, suggesting it’s something that’s very important to his work) are almost all perfect and loving, all-knowing and all-forgiving, taking pity on the male protagonists, who are all deeply flawed. There are only two really consistent themes that recur throughout Wilson’s work – this feeling of being an unworthy man being given unconditional love by a perfect woman, and a search for transcendence – a search to become more than the sinful man he knows himself to be.
This need for transcendence has shown up in different ways throughout Wilson’s career. In the early songs, it’s all about proving yourself, being a real man, and pushing yourself to the utmost (“You gotta be a little nuts/but show ‘em you got guts/Don’t back down from that wave”), with a constant restlessness, a need to move on (“I’m gettin’ bugged driving up and down the same old strip/I gotta find a new place where the kids are hip”). In later songs, such as Break Away, it becomes fighting against his mental illness, using “the part of me that cries to be free” to “break away to that better life/where no shackles ever hold me down”.
But in all these songs, hope for transcendence, for ‘that better life’, comes from effort from within – pushing yourself, transcending your own limits. For all that Wilson’s music is often melancholy, the only time he ever sounds truly despairing is in Til I Die, and in that song the lyrics (“I’m a cork in the ocean”, “I’m a rock in a landslide”, “I’m a leaf on a windy day”) suggest a resignation to fate, an inability (and even a lack of desire) to strive for something better.
So with these facts, and the phrase ‘teenage symphony to God’, we have the key to unlock the album that Wilson intended. In this interpretation, the journey from East Coast to West Coast that the album takes us on is an expression of Manifest Destiny – settlers had to move West the same way Wilson has to search for something greater than himself, because we must keep moving forward or die. And while things collapse and fall, hope is always in the young, because they have more of this pioneer spirit, having not been ground down by life – but that youth is something that can be regained. “At three score and five I’m very much alive/I’ve still got the jive to survive with the heroes and villains”.
Over and over again through this album, things die and are reborn – the civilisation in Surf’s Up collapses (“Columnated ruins domino”) but there’s a rebirth at the end (“Come about hard and join the young and often spring you gave”), but this falling and rising happens most often to a young woman – Wilson’s goddess figure. In Heroes & Villains it’s the dancer, Margarita, who’s shot down (“she was right in the rain of the bullets that eventually cut her down”) but who somehow still lives (“But she’s still dancing in the night”). In Wonderful, the death is metaphorical – a spiritual death (“all fall down and lost with her liberty, lost it all to an unbeliever”) that comes with loss of virginity/innocence/youth , but even this can be regained (“She’ll return in love with her liberty, just away from the non-believer, she’ll smile and thank God for wonderful”). This is the dying and rising Sun God (and what better band for Sun God worshippers than the Beach Boys, after all?) – but in the form of a young woman (there’s more than a hint here of the stories of Ishtar or Persephone).
This interpretation also makes sense of the inclusion of a snatch of I Wanna Be Around, the Johnny Mercer song, which sometimes bemuses fans. While the song’s original intent was cynical, in this context “I want to be around to pick up the pieces when someone breaks your heart” means just that – the emphasis not on the heartbreak, but on picking up the pieces, carrying on.
So in essence, the story of Smile is not the story of Icarus, but of Ishtar – the story of a goddess descending into the underworld and being stripped of everything, but then rising again and getting everything back.
In the book I will go into far more detail about the actual music, which is of course the most important thing, analysing the way Wilson recontextualises snippets of music from his childhood and teenage years (elements of Bach and Gershwin jostling with Marty Robbins, The Crows and You Are My Sunshine) and the way that most of the songs on the album are based around variations of a tiny number of musical themes, as well as talking more about Parks’ contribution. But the essence of the book will be to try to combine the pictures from the three versions of the album, and to see if I can get a clear picture of the masterpiece Brian Wilson saw for a moment back in 1966. If I can, I suspect the centre of the picture is a young girl – let’s call her Liberty – she’s singing to herself, and she knows that even though the sun will soon go down in the West, it will rise again in the East.
Why I Am Not A Fan…
I was going to post some more Batman/Final Crisis stuff now (I may do later), but looking through Google Reader briefly I came across pillock’s post on ‘the art-comix crowd‘, a response to some inanity that has been posted to the All-New All-Lobotomised Blogorama – now with 5000% more content about ‘geek demographic’ TV!
Apparently someone on there has been saying that (this is from Pillock’s paraphrasing) Kirby, Ditko, Morrison, Moore, and Spiegelman are all much the same sort of thing and all ‘overrated’ compared to giants of the form like, presumably, Ed Benes or Brian Bendis, and that people who say different are ‘art comics’ snobs.
Now, I like superhero comics. A LOT. I buy a lot of superhero comics, and wouldn’t spend the money I do on them were I not getting some enjoyment out of them. But while I can enjoy something like Trinity on some level, I accept that it is not as good a comic as Alice In Sunderland or Fate Of The Artist or Doonesbury or Calvin & Hobbes or Achewood or Ghost World or Jaka’s Story or Lost Girls. Not only do I not get as much enjoyment out of it as I do out of those things, it is just *not as good* by any critical standard I can think of.
And that’s the thing that makes me a ‘non-fan’ – applying critical standards. It doesn’t matter what they are – it’s the fact that they exist at all that seems to bother some people. The fact that someone can have an actual reason for liking what they like. And it’s not just (or even mostly) comics fans that this bothers. I remember someone on rec.music.beach-boys ten years or so ago used to have a .sig that read “there are *NO* bad Beach Boys songs”.
Really? None? Not ‘Loop De Loop Flip Flop Santa’s Got An Airplane’? Not the cover version of The Times They Are A-Changing where the band keep on shouting stupid comments? Those are precisely as good as God Only Knows, are they?
Of course not – because fandom isn’t about quality. It’s about brand names. Which is why we use the same word to describe people who follow sport teams as we do for people who follow bands, or TV shows, or whatever. I’ve had ‘you’re not a true fan!’ hurled at me by people over and over again, always for the same reasons – I’ve said Keepin’ The Summer Alive is not a very good album, or that nuWho is so different from the show I loved that it’s not something I bother to watch (Jennie gives a very good summary of why that is here ) – in other words I’ve used some discrimination. I’ve liked things because they contain qualities I like, rather than because they have the label ‘Beach Boys’ or ‘Doctor Who’ or ‘JLA’ on them.
So fine – I’m not a ‘true fan’. But I would argue that the ‘true fan’ – the person who praises everything, who takes the slightest criticism as a deathly insult, who thinks that the mere existence of some kind of critical standard is a slap in the face – is the reason for things like Star Trek: Enterprise or Mike Love’s solo album or Countdown or Monty Python’s Spamalot. If you can sell people any old shit so long as it has the brand name on, then there’s no incentive to actually try harder.
And if you’re thinking now that there’s a connection here between this post and Jennie’s recent post on Liberal Conspiracy, that there might be a political meaning here… well, you may think so. I couldn’t possibly comment…
Albums You Should Own – Xmas Present Edition
As we are now at the start of Advent I thought I’d supply a set of Christmas music that’s a little out of the ordinary. This is partly in memory of my friend Pete Fenelon, who died a month or so ago and did this last year – some of the tracks here were on his compilation.
I’m not a very Christmassey person, generally, but nor do I ever want to be a killjoy, and so there’s a tension in these songs between the traditional “Isn’t Christmas great?” and the non-traditional “Bah, humbug” – sometimes even in the individual song. I’ve tried where possible to choose songs that people won’t be familiar with – the whole point of this list is that much as I love Wizzard and Slade and the Ronettes and Bing Crosby, I expect to wish to massacre everyone in sight if I hear them from about a week from now. However, some of the songs will undoubtedly be familiar to some of you, if only because there’s a difference between what was a hit in the US and what in the UK.
Our Prayer by Dave Gregory, the former XTC guitarist, is a cover of (part of) a wordless a capella track by the Beach Boys, from Remoulds, an album he made of note-for-note cover versions of 60s pop songs. I’ve included it even though it’s not strictly a Christmas song because it’s got the right kind of feel for this, and also because it leads beautifully into…
It’s Cliched To Be Cynical At Christmas by Half Man Half Biscuit. While, as I said before, I’m not the most festive of people, I find this song a valuable reminder not to inflict my curmudgeonly misanthropy on everyone else, and at least try to get into ‘the festive spirit’. I also have it on good authority (from my friend Tilt, who interviewed him for his radio show) that this is in fact Father Christmas’ favourite Christmas record of all time.
Fairytale Of New York by The Pogues with Kirsty MacColl is a Christmas perennial over here, but I’ve been told it’s barely heard in the US, hence its inclusion here. This is a shame, as nothing is quite as cheery as the cognitive dissonance of walking round Tesco or Woolworths (RIP) and hearing “You’re a bum, you’re a punk, you’re an old slut on junk, lying there almost dead on that drip in that bed/You scumbag, you maggot, you cheap lousy faggot, happy Christmas me arse I pray God it’s our last” over the tannoy. There is a certain breed of tedious poseur who refers to this as ‘the only good Christmas song ever’ – while this is absolute nonsense, the song itself is quite beautiful, and far more romantic and life-affirming than the lyric I quoted suggests. Just a beautiful, gorgeous song.
Sugar Wassail is by Waterson:Carthy. The Waterson/Carthy clan have for nearly 50 years been at the forefront of traditional English folk music – pushing the music forward and incorporating new influences while stlll ensuring that the music they play is an honest representation of the traditions that inspire them, and also while being genuinely enjoyable music. This is from their album Holy Heathens and the Green Man, a collection of mostly winter/Christmas themed traditional music which can be downloaded from eMusic.
Joy To The World by Brian Wilson is a recording from his ‘second comeback’ ten years ago that was made available as a free download from his website, and more recently was included as a bonus track on his 2005 album What I Really Want For Christmas. You can tell that he hadn’t sung much for a few years – he’s neither got the purity of his youthful voice nor the assured but limited range of today – but this still sends shivers down my spine.
Remember Bethlehem by Jake Thackray is one of the first songs Thackray ever wrote – he actually wrote it as a carol for the school where he was teaching, and the finished studio version included a school choir. One of the things I love about Thackray’s music is his Yorkshire bluntness – even his religious music (and Thackray was a deeply religious man) has the same real world love of humanity with all its smells and warts as Chaucer or the York mystery plays. This is a demo version, from disc four of the wonderful Jake In A Box box set, which I reviewed here (still one of my favourite pieces of my own writing) if you want to know more about Jake…
I Want A Girl For Christmas by The Knickerbockers is just a fun bit of pop music from the band who did Lies, possibly the best Beatles soundalike record ever. Here, the lead singer is clearly still trying to be John Lennon, but the rest of the band can’t decide if they’re the Beach Boys or the Four Seasons. There’s a couple of wonderful little a capella breaks here. It’s not a great lost classic or anything, but it’s a nice song (it’s available on eMusic).
Christmas Card From A Hooker In Minneapolis by Tom Waits is one of the most depressing songs to feature Christmas as a subject, and very far from festive. On the other hand, it’s a great song, and also I include it because I’ll be spending at least part of the Christmas period in Minneapolis, en route to the tiny Minnesota town where my in-laws live… This is from Blue Valentines, one of the best of Waits’ early beatnik period, just before he went into his Beefheart-by-way-of-Kurt-Weill mode.
What Child Is This by Mahalia Jackson is just a stunning performance. I’m sure you’ve all heard it, but it’s wonderful anyway…
The Happiest Time Of The Year by Candypants is a Christmas single produced by Darian Sahanaja of the Wondermints, which has been available for download most years from Candypants’ MySpace page. Candypants are one of my very favourite bands of the moment, and I can’t wait for the new material Lisa is apparently working on.
Morning Christmas by Dennis Wilson is a typical piece of late Dennis Wilson, all bass harmonica, gruff vocals and ARP string synthesiser. Recorded for an aborted Beach Boys Christmas album in the late 70s, it was eventually released on the Beach Boys’ Ultimate Christmas CD in 1999. It’s very much of a piece with his brother’s Joy To The World, actually.
A Christmas Carol by Tom Lehrer is on because everyone needs a bit of Tom Lehrer. I was going to include I’m Spending Hanukkah In Santa Monica, but this is far better. It’s from the box set The Remains Of Tom Lehrer
Christmas Day by Squeeze is an interesting attempt at something that doesn’t quite come off, but is still worth a listen.
Tinsel and String by Neil Innes is a lovely, tongue-in-cheek take on the normal sort of Christmas music by one of the finest songwriters alive today. For those who don’t know, Innes was the principal songwriter with the Bonzo Dog Band, co-wrote several songs with the Monty Python team and appeared with them on stage and in their films, and was the songwriter for The Rutles, in which he played Ron Nasty. When he’s on form, he’s as good a songwriter as anyone, and if he’d stuck to ‘serious’ music and not indulged his tremendous comic talent he’d probably be regarded as another Paul McCartney or Ray Davies. This was downloaded from his website, which has tons of MP3s and RealAudio files of his work.
Christmas In Suburbia by Martin Newell is from the album The Greatest Living Englishman (which is available from eMusic), which was produced by Andy Partridge of XTC, who also played many of the instruments. As a result the album bears at least as much resemblance to Skylarking or the Dukes Of Stratosphear album (the instrumental figure here seems distantly related to the melody of Vanishing Girl) as it does to Newell’s work with the Cleaners From Venus – but that is, of course, no bad thing. I just wish Newell didn’t pronounce the ‘t’ in Christmas…
Jesus Christ by Big Star is one of those songs you should already own. But just in case, here it is… from the classic Sister Lovers.
Baby It’s Cold Outside by Ray Charles and Betty Carter (from the Ray Charles and Betty Carter album) is the only version of this song – don’t give me your Bing Crosbys or Dean Martins or Tom Joneses, this is the *only* version worth owning. Until recently, I never understood why this was a ‘Christmas’ song, but Brad Hicks put forward a good case in a two-part blog post that this was a ‘date rape Christmas carol’. Which it is, at least in some versions, but Betty Carter sounds far from unwilling here…
Lo, How A Rose E’er Blooming by Pete Seeger (from the album Traditional Christmas Carols, another one available from eMusic) is a lovely banjo-and-vocal version of the hymn.
In The Bleak Midwinter by Bert Jansch is included mostly because it follows very well from the previous track. I’m a big fan of Jansch, but the production on here is too wet, and the song doesn’t sound bleak enough. But it’s a nice version, and a good closer to the collection proper.
However, as you can fit a *little* more onto a CD, I’ve included two more tracks…
Santa Claus Has Got The AIDS This Year by Tiny Tim may be the most offensive track ever recorded – “He won’t be singing out ‘ho ho ho ho’/But he’ll be crying out ‘no, no, no, no!’” . When Tim realised how badly everyone had taken the song, he tried to claim it was about the slimming bar Ayds, but the lyrics (and the fact that the B-side of the single was called She Left Me WIth The Herpes) tell a different story.
And there’s a final little message from Andy Partridge, wishing everyone a psychedelic Christmas…
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