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 Spotify Playlist – Messiaen, Johnny Cash, Dennis Wilson, Zappa, Sister Rosetta Tharpe…
OK, so I lied when I said I wouldn’t be posting for a while. It’s very boring without Holly around…
This week’s playlist is unthemed, but just based on stuff I’ve been listening to recently. More instrumental stuff than I normally have – I don’t know why that would be, except maybe that I’ve been a little non-verbal recently (the heat seems to have shut down the verbal reasoning parts of my brain).
We start with an excerpt from Messiaen’s Turangalila Symphony. I was reminded of this, an old favourite, today by a mention in About Time vol 3, which I’m in the middle of. I don’t have a great vocabulary for talking about art music, but I love this kind of stuff – experimental mid-20th century music (roughly from Stravinsky through Boulez), Americana and baroque (especially Bach and Handel) are the ‘classical’ styles that appeal to me, far more than classical music itself does…
The Dinosaur Song by Johnny Cash is from the Johnny Cash Children’s Album. No, really. This exists. I was as surprised as you. And this song is, indeed, Johnny Cash singing about dinosaurs. I have no idea what a ‘brontosaurus rex’ might be, but quibbles aside this is up there with Jonathan Richman’s I’m A Little Dinosaur and Four Tet’s Go Go Ninja Dinosaur as far as dinosaur songs go.
Fallin’ In Love by The Beach Boys is actually an early-70s solo single released as by ‘Dennis Wilson and Rumbo’ (Rumbo was a pseudonym for Darryl Dragon, later the Captain of The Captain And Tenneille). This has just been issued on CD for (I believe) the first time as a legitimate release, on Summer Love Songs, one of the fifteen-song-you-already-own-five-copies-of-plus-two-new-stereo-mixes CDs EMI release every year or so to snag completists. (This is doubly completist friendly, as it’s a different mix from that released on the single). The lyrics are risible – it’s a 70s Californian singer-songwriter singing about “my lady”, how could they not be? – but the music – Wilson doing Tim Hardin – is gorgeous, and it also contains what sounds like the earliest use of a drum machine I’ve ever heard.
Zing Went The Strings Of My Heart by Judy Garland is from her classic Carnegie Hall live album. I trust you know who Judy Garland was…
You Go To My Head by Rufus Wainwright is from his own live album, forty years on, where he covers track-for-track Garland’s earlier one.
Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey by Paul McCartney is from another whole-album remake – this time McCartney, under the pseudonym Percy “Thrills” Thrillington remade his own Ram (by far his best solo work, and possibly the best solo Beatles album) as instrumental muzak. Actually it’s almost as interesting as the original album, expecially in songs like this – in the original McCartney had sung in many , many different voices (he’s a far more versatile vocalist than people normally credit him for) doing call-and-response, and it’s fun listening to the way the instruments chosen for the different parts mimic the different voices he used on the original.
Vielako soitan banjoa? by Scandinavian Music Group is from a playlist a Twitter friend shared with me. I know nothing about it except that it has a banjo on it and the band are from Finland.
Baby Plays Around by Elvis Costello (no Attractions, despite the Spotify credit) is a song I was reminded of by Debi’s Being Human playlist, from my favourite Costello album, Spike. Co-written with his then-wife Cait O’Riordan (former bass player of the Pogues), this has a melody as good as (and reminiscent of) the best of Costello’s other writing partner of the time, Paul McCartney.
Melody Fair by The Bee Gees is from Odessa, a very, very strange album they made in the wake of Sgt Pepper. This is one of the more straightforward tracks. This sounds like the missing link between Paul McCartney and Syd Barret – seriously. The Bee Gees are one of those bands whose big hits obscure some very interesting, strange corners of their music…if you can ever get hold of a bootleg copy of Robin Gibb’s unreleased solo album Sing Slowly Sisters give it a listen – it’s as out-there as Arthur Lee.
Forty Cups Of Coffee by Ella Mae Morse is a great mid-tempo R&B track. There’ve been times when I’ve drunk thirty cups of coffee in a day, and even if her tolerance was greater than mine (and mine used to be pretty high before I made myself ill with overindulgence and cut back drastically), there’s no way she’d ‘want to hug and kiss ya and say I’m glad you’re still alive’ after forty cups – more likely she’d be having serious heart palpitations and suffering from paranoid delusions and a killer migraine. We need accuracy in our songs, dammit! She’s as bad as Cash…
Ride Into The Sun by The Velvet Underground is one of several songs from the Loaded era that are very, very different from the normal perception of the VU, and are much more interesting than the stuff that made them famous. I’d take this over any number of chugga-chugga look-at-me-I’m-so-cool-and-depressed distortion-fests…
King Kong by Jean-Luc Ponty is from the album of the same name, produced by Frank Zappa, where the world’s second-greatest French jazz violinist performed a selection of Zappa’s more fusiony pieces. The whole album’s worth a listen – somewhere between the jazz-rock of Hot Rats and the modern classical of The Yellow Shark in Zappa’s oeuvre, it’s also practically the only Zappa-related music on Spotify at present (so it’s a good job it’s in the top 10% or so of his work).
Count Five Or Six by Cornelius is one of those tracks that’s been co-opted by advertising, but if you listen to it without those associations it sounds like some strange collaboration between the White Stripes and the High Llamas, with lead vocals by a Speak-And-Spell machine.
This Train by Sister Rosetta Tharpe is a gospel classic. When listening to this, remember it was recorded long before the 50s rock & roll tracks it resembles. In that context, Sister Rosetta is clearly *inventing* rock guitar here – her licks are essentially the same ones that Scotty Moore would play on early Elvis records (they’re also almost identical to Chuck Berry, but Berry would play double-string rather than single-string lines, which would give a very different sound). And Sister Rosetta was playing like that from the *late 1930s* on.
And The All-Golden by Van Dyke Parks is probably the most ‘normal’ sounding track from his classic Song Cycle, another album you should listen to in its entirety.
This Week’s Spotify Playlist – The Beach Boys
Normally, when I do my spotify playlists, I put in a mix of tracks by different artists in different styles. Today’s playlist, on the other hand, is a little different, in that it’s entirely made up of the music of the Beach Boys.
The Beach Boys are one of my very favourite bands – possibly my very favourite, though there are several bands that could compete with them – but I’ve had great difficulty explaining the appeal to people. Individual Beach Boys albums are often patchy, some of the music I love by them is quite quirky, and people also associate them with their early hits.
So I’ve put together a playlist of music by them that I think would appeal to any music lover, that’s not too difficult to get into, but also isn’t Barbara Ann. If you’re a music-lover at all, and have never really checked out the Beach Boys, then please listen to this – it will open your eyes.
Meant For You from Friends is a gorgeous little thirty-second song by Brian Wilson and Mike Love that I think should open every compilation ever.
Surf”s Up from Surf’s Up is a song I’ve written about several times before, and which I consider possibly the greatest song ever written. Written in 1967 by Brian Wilson and Van Dyke Parks, and cobbled together in 1971 by Carl Wilson from fragments of Smile sessions and a 1967 solo Brian Wilson piano demo, with a new vocal by Carl over the first half of the track, this somehow managed to work superbly. If you can hear Brian singing “a choke of grief, heart hardened I, beyond belief a broken man too tough to cry” without choking up then you’ve a tougher heart than I.
It’s About Time from Sunflower is a fantastic 70s rocker, primarily written by Dennis Wilson, with band members Al Jardine and Carl WIlson and someone called Bob Burchmann. The lyrics are, as often with the Beach Boys in the 70s, pseudo-spiritual drivel, but the lead vocals (by Carl Wilson) and backing track are astounding – there’s a bootleg track that just isolates the percussion for this (played, I think, by the great Earl Palmer) and that’s great on its own.
Til I Die from Surf’s Up is possibly the saddest song ever written. Written by Brian Wilson, one of his few solo songwriting credits, the lyrics are almost haiku-like, but what gets me every time is the cheerfully-resigned way Brian sings “I’ve lost my way, hey hey hey” in a song that’s about crippling depression.
Busy Doin’ Nothin’ from Friends is another Brian Wilson solo song, but while it shares the childishly simple lyrics and fiendishly complex chords of the previous song, it’s the polar opposite in terms of mood – an uptempo, cheerful bossa nova with lyrics which include directions to his house.
Heroes & Villains from Smiley Smile is another song originally written for Smile – this, Surf’s Up, Cabinessence and Wonderful were supposedly written in one night, the first night Wilson and Parks ever wrote together – if this is true, then that must have been the most productive night’s work in songwriting history.
Please Let Me Wonder from The Beach Boys Today! is one of the earliest songs in this bunch, from late 1964, and is the first time in this playlist you’ll hear the theme that Brian Wilson keeps coming back to over and over, of being a weak man, aware of his own limitations, in love with someone unattainable and perfect but who somehow loves him anyway – many of these songs border on goddess-worship. Brian Wilson was originally credited as sole writer of this, but Mike Love won co-writer credit in a lawsuit in the 1990s.
Marcella from Carl & The Passions (So Tough) is a rewrite by then-manager Jack Rieley and songwriter Tandyn Almer of one of Brian Wilson’s songs, about a ‘masseuse’ of his acquaintance. Nicer than the original version, from ten years earlier, which had the chorus “All dressed up for school/ooh what a turn-on”…
Don’t Talk (Put Your Head On My Shoulder) from Pet Sounds may be the best love song ever written – it’s customary at this point to point out that the bass part under ‘listen to my heart beat’ sounds like a heartbeat, but I’d rather point out the little string section straight after that. Brian wrote the music and Tony Asher the lyrics.
This Whole World from Sunflower is another Brian Wilson solo composition, sung fantastically by Carl. This goes through more key changes in its under two minutes than many whole albums do…
All This Is That from Carl & The Passions (So Tough) is a gorgeous song written by the three least-talented songwriters from the original lineup of the band – Carl, Al and Mike. The lyrics are the usual early-70s meditative drivel – Mike writing about Transcendental Meditation – but the sound of the track is gorgeous, especially Carl’s soaring falsetto singing ‘jai guru dev’ over Mike’s low bass mumbling of the same words.
Don’t Worry Baby from Shut Down Vol 2 is another example of the goddess-worship (with lyrics by Roger Christian), and also an example of how you can tell the truly great bands because everyone knows their B-sides (this was the B-side to I Get Around). It’s also, even though it’s a guitar-based recording, a song that could only have been written by a piano player. Listen to the arrangement of the vocals on the choruses – the independently moving falsetto and bass lines, with the three-part block harmony in the middle. That’s what you’d do if you’re playing the piano – play the bass vocal part with the left hand (Wilson’s always played piano in a left-handed manner, with most of the interesting stuff going on in the bass parts), block out the chords with the right hand, and sing the falsetto part over the top. An example of how form can follow function even when you move away from the original tools.
Break Away, a non-album single now on the Friends/20/20 twofer CD, is at first listen just a cheery little pop song. When you listen more closely, it’s clearly the song of someone trying to overcome mental illness (“When I lay down on my bed/I hear voices in my head… And here’s the answer I found instead/found out it was in my head”). What makes it more disturbing is that ‘Reggie Dunbar’, Brian Wilson’s co-writer on this, was actually Murry Wilson, the father whose abuse contributed to Wilson’s illness.
Sail On, Sailor from Holland is a song with many writers, based around a demo by Brian Wilson and Van Dyke Parks. As close to soul as the Beach Boys ever get, Blondie Chaplin (a South African musician who was with the band for three albums) does a wonderful job on the vocals.
God Only Knows from Pet Sounds is a song you may well have heard before. Listen to it again anyway. This was another B-side incidentally. Lead vocals Carl Wilson, lyrics Tony Asher, music Brian Wilson.
Time To Get Alone from 20/20 is another Brian Wilson song, originally written for Redwood, the band that became Three Dog Night – the longing to get ‘away from the people’ is another recurring subject in Brian’s songwriting.
Guess I’m Dumb isn’t actually a Beach Boys song at all, but a song Brian Wilson wrote (with Russ Titelman) and produced for Glenn Campbell, who had toured with the Beach Boys for a few months in Brian’s place after Brian became too mentally unwell to tour, and who was a session musician on many of the band’s records (this was before he had his own huge hits). Wilson’s wife’s band The Honeys sing backing vocals, and the same backing musicians who played on most of Pet Sounds play on this.
And finally Wonderful from Smiley Smile is another song written for Smile. This is a gentle, organ-based remake with a rather bizarre middle section, and a stunning vocal from Carl Wilson. Written by Brian Wilson and Van Dyke Parks.
Please take a listen and let me know what you think…
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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