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…
Best of the Year post
I always have difficulty when it comes to thinking about ‘best of the year’ lists, which most people seem to have no trouble at all with. With the exception of monthly comics, I don’t tend to keep track of what’s ‘now’ and what isn’t, and I often end up discovering things five or ten years after they came out (I bought my first Cerebus phonebook on the day issue 300 came out, though I didn’t realise that til later). So while I’m constantly acquiring new music, it’s for a rather flexible definition of ‘new’ that can include this year (the Passing Strange soundtrack album, That Lucky Old Sun) a couple of years ago (L.E.O.’s Alpacas Orgling, one of my favourite albums of ‘this year’), or decades ago (a compilation of banjo tracks by Uncle Dave Macon), and I don’t really pay attention to which is which. Same goes for books.
So I’m going to do top 5 lists only (because to do a top 10 would be scraping the barrel) for gigs and comics – everything else I can’t be sure what year it came out.
Best Comics Of The Year:
1 All Star Superman #10 by Grant Morrison, Frank Quitely and Jamie Grant.
This may well be the best single issue of a superhero comic ever produced, and it’s certainly the best Superman single issue since Alan Moore’s couple of issues in the mid-80s (and may be better even than them). It encapsulates all the themes not only of this series but of everything Grant Morrison has been working towards in his career, and the script is complemented perfectly by Quitely’s art.
2 Judenhaas by Dave Sim
Sim is my pick for ‘greatest comic creator of all time’. I can think of people who are his equals – but not his betters – at the individual talents he has (Alan Moore as a writer, J.H. Williams as an artist, Todd Klein as a letterer), but nobody who can combine do everything as well as he could – to my mind he even beats both Eisner and Kirby in terms of quality of work.Judenhaas is only a minor work by him, in comparison with, say, Jaka’s Story or Melmoth, but minor Sim beats major everybody else most of the time. I’m uncomfortable with this work, it seems to be ‘Oscar-bait’ – the message that the Holocaust is bad is not a particularly original or insightful one – but it’s executed so well… it also seems completely at odds with Sim’s own expressed views on women, which again brings up the fascinating (in a train-wreck kind of way) question of how *that* artist could also be *that* person.
3 The Amazing Fantastic Mr Leotard by Eddie Campbell and Dan Best
Eddie Campbell, like Sim, is another comic creator whose work I will always buy sight-unseen, because he’s never let me down (though I still don’t have a lot of his early material). The Fate Of The Artist and his collaborations with Alan Moore are among my very favourite comics of all time. This one is a lovely Munchausen-esque, vaguely Fortean story about the nephew of the inventor of the leotard.
4 Achewood – The Great Outdoor Fight by Chris Onstad
A slim volume, but a good representation of a great period in the most artistically interesting webcomic out there.
5 Sandman – Dream Hunters by Neil Gaiman and P. Craig Russell
Not for Gaiman’s story, which, while competent, has been published before and is also the kind of stuff he can knock off in his sleep. But Russell’s artwork is just gorgeous – I don’t usually buy comics for the art, being more orally/aurally oriented than visually, but this stuff is stunning.
Bubbling under – Comic Book Comics, Batman, Final Crisis, and Glamourpuss
Best gigs of the year
1 Mike Love’s “Beach Boys” – Manchester Apollo
The touring ‘Beach Boys’ have come in for a lot of stick from a lot of people, not least myself , over the years, for doing boring ‘touring jukebox’ sets, often with shoddy musicianship. However, over the last few years they’ve got much better. Their tour in 2004 was superb, but this was phenomenal. Having replaced Mike Kowalski (the worst drummer I’ve ever seen live) with John Cowsill (who had formerly been the band’s second keyboardist) , and added in for the UK tour only Dave Marks (the rhythm guitarist with the Beach Boys on their first three albums) they sounded better and fuller than ever, and did a fifty-two song set, including not only all the hits, but tracks like Forever, Kiss Me Baby, Sail On Sailor and ‘Til I Die. The highlight of the set was a three-song mini acoustic set about Transcendental Meditation, believe it or not. Simply superb.
2 Leonard Cohen – Manchester Opera House
I’ve seen Laughing Len twice this year (once last week at the MEN arena and this one in July). This gig was a very odd experience – a friend of the family had just died, my in-laws (whose tastes run more to Peter, Paul and Mary and contemporary country radio) were visiting and came with us (as did my parents, but they’re both Cohen fans) and the whole thing felt very dreamlike. When my Dad said “Here’s someone you know” and I turned around and Jeremy Paxman was stood behind me in the queue for the bar, I felt like the next thing to happen would be my primary school headmaster riding in on a unicycle or something.
Cohen, surprisingly, has an immense stage presence, owing more to the crooners than to the folkie image he still has to an extent, and his voice has aged very well – huskier and mellower. It was more like watching Tony Bennett than any rock-era musician I’ve seen, and it was quite shocking to think he hadn’t toured in 15 years before that show. If you get a chance, go and see him, but I wish he’d stayed in the smaller venues – the arena gig was just as good, musically, but the MEN is a horrible venue.
3 Martin Carthy & Dave Swarbrick – The Lowry
Not much to say about this one. Either you like traditional folk music, in which case you know how special a gig this was, or you don’t, in which case you won’t care.
4 Mercy & Grand: The Tom Waits Project – The Lowry
This was a production put on by Opera North, with Gavin Bryars (the composer of Jesus Blood Never Failed Me Yet, Wait’s favourite record, and frequent Brian Eno collaborator) leading a ‘circus band’ (guitar, harmonium, tuba, double bass, woodwinds, accordion, violin, soprano singer if I recall) in a performance of Waits classics along with a couple of pieces by Kurt Weill, some Fellini film music and a couple of old English folk songs. To an extent it was Bryars remaking Waits in his own image – the song selection and choice of other music was clearly chosen to present Waits as part of a particular line of songwriters, and one could have done a very different but equally ‘true’ re-contextualising of Waits’ music by using songs by, say, Ray Charles, Captain Beefheart and Bruce Springsteen. Bryars clearly thinks of Waits in ‘art music’ terms, and that misses a lot of what makes Waits great. But having said that, the musicianship was superlative, Bryars’ arrangements were gorgeous and inventive, and you can’t go wrong with Tom Waits and a bit of Weill, can you?
5 Brian Wilson – Royal Albert Hall
It seems odd to be placing Brian Wilson at number five when Mike Love is at number one, but Wilson’s performance was more expensive, at a worse venue, shorter and had a much less interesting setlist. Since 2002, the interesting material has been steadily removed from Wilson’s sets, replaced by more and more of the earlier surf ‘n’ girls ‘n’ sun music. This isn’t so bad when (as in 2004 and 2007) he’s been premiering full albums of new material in order in the second set – the lighter, frothier, fun stuff sets off more difficult music like Smile very well – but it makes for a show which, while still excellent, is not as good as Brian and his band are clearly capable of.
Brian’s band are still the best I’ve ever seen, and it’s still BRIAN WILSON, and he’s still performing songs like God Only Knows and Heroes And Villains, and if I hadn’t seen this band do some of the very best shows I’ve ever seen in my life I’d have thought this was excellent. But it was like Brian and Mike had swapped setlists.
(Note for Americans – Brian’s US shows this year have been to promote That Lucky Old Sun and have included full performances of that album. None of the criticisms above apply to any show where that is the case…)
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