Monkee Music: The Birds, The Bees And The Monkees
A revised and improved version of this essay appears in my book Monkee Music, available as paperback, hardback, PDF, Kindle (US), Kindle (UK) and ePub (all DRM-free).
For this album, unlike any of the others under discussion, I’m afraid I have to discuss a lot of music which can not, at present, be legally acquired.
By late 1967, the Monkees were working to all intents and purposes as four solo artists, with only minimal involvement with each other’s work. And by the time The Birds, The Bees And The Monkees came to be released, each man had recorded almost a full album’s worth of material, which was cut down into one fairly strong single album, though some of the best tracks were left off.
Some of the tracks made their way onto future albums or onto compilations, but in 2010 Rhino Handmade released a comprehensive, exhaustive three-CD box set which showed the sheer depth of talent that went into making this album. And they made it a limited edition. So much of this music became unavailable within a month of two of release. Apparently Rhino Handmade don’t like money.
But if you can manage to obtain the music (I would of course never countenance the illegal downloading of music, and would suggest instead you purchase one of the vastly overpriced second-hand copies which occasionally come up for sale at a hundred pounds or more, and from which all of the money would go to a speculator and none to the artists or record label) you can see that The Birds, The Bees And The Monkees should have been the Monkees’ White Album.
The album released at the time, though, wasn’t as strong as its immediate predecessor. While Nesmith’s tracks, in particular, are outstanding, the album suffers from having far too many Davy Jones ‘Broadway rock’ tracks, and from the near-complete absence of Peter Tork (whose only contribution to the album as released is a piano part on Daydream Believer). It’s much as if the White Album had been cut down to a twelve-track album by someone with a vendetta against George Harrison tossing coins.
While the album’s production credit is to The Monkees (with the exception of the previously-released Daydream Believer, credited to Chip Douglas), in reality a variety of producers worked on the album, though usually employed as ‘arrangers’ to keep up the pretence, including Boyce and Hart, Shorty Rogers and Lester Sill, though band members did also produce their own tracks.
Dream World
Writers: David Jones & Steve Pitts
Lead Vocalist: Davy Jones
Other Monkees present: None
The album opens with the best of Jones’ Broadway-rock tracks, one of several songs written in collaboration with his friend Steve Pitts, apparently for submission for the Monkees’ forthcoming film.
The song seems to have been an attempt at writing in the pre-Beatles early-60s style of Jones’ pre-Monkees Colpix solo album, and has a whiff of Adam Faith about it, though the lyric is at times quite biting (“Always pretending that everything’s fine when it’s not/Why must you lie when you know that you’ll always get caught?”). However, Shorty Rogers’ arrangement, with its harpsichord part and horn solo, brings it up to date.
Still among the weaker tracks on the album, this is a pleasant enough opener.
Auntie’s Municipal Court
Writers: Michael Nesmith and Keith Allison
Lead Vocalist: Micky Dolenz
Other Monkees present: Michael Nesmith (guitar and backing vocals)
Nesmith’s first composition on the album, a jangly guitar-led country-psych song, is one of only two songs on the album that could legitimately be called a track by the Monkees, plural, rather than a Monkee singular, having as it does two band members on it – along with several of the band’s regular recent collaborators, like Harry Nilsson, Bill Chadwick and Eddie Hoh.
This is Nesmith at his most psychedelic, stringing together words almost without regard for meaning, in a vaguely skipping-rhyme rhythm (“fine man, crazy man, he can’t see/Sound of the sunset, sound of the sea”), rather than the precise, affecting choices of his earlier and later work. However, the country guitar-picking clearly grounds this in Nesmith’s comfort zone, at least until the psychedelic freak-out reverbed ending.
We Were Made for Each Other
Writers: Carole Bayer and George Fischoff
Lead Vocalist: Davy Jones
Other Monkees present: None
This is actually the Monkees’ third attempt at this track. The first version, recorded three months earlier, and available as a bonus track on the box set version of the album, is quite an interesting track, driven by fast picked banjo, though it’s missing a lead vocal.
The finished version, on the other hand, is horrible. It sounds like Jones’ voice has been sped up, making it sound ridiculously thin, and it’s just a wash of bad strings and tinkling harpsichord, over which Jones sings Bayer’s banal lyrics. The stereo version is moderately better than the mono version in this respect, with the rhythm section more to the fore, and the strings being used as colouring rather than the major feature of the track, but that just elevates it from terrible to bearable.
Tapioca Tundra
Writer: Michael Nesmith
Lead Vocalist: Michael Nesmith
Other Monkees present: None
Another of Nesmith’s forays into psychedelia, this is a surrealistic poem (“Silhouettes and figures stay/Close to what we had to say/And one more time a faded dream/Is saddened by the news”) over a vaguely Latin-inflected backing track (almost all played by Nesmith, apart from the drums by Eddie Hoh), a wash of acoustic guitars and hand percussion.
The music seems to show the influence of both the pre-rock country music Nesmith had been listening to recently (especially in the fingerpicked-and-whistled intro, but it shows up more consistently in the acoustic demo of this track, which could almost be Jimmie Rodgers at times, and doesn’t have the psychedelic effects on the intro) and of the newer hard rock music that was becoming popular.
In particular, the between-verses riff, although similar to a lot of the playing with suspended chords that the Byrds and the Searchers did in their early folk-rock songs (and the feel of this track is such that the first comparison that would spring to mind is the Byrds’ Feel A Whole Lot Better), is identical to that used by LA bands Love and The Leaves in their proto-punk versions of Hey Joe from 1966.
It also actually shows Nesmith self-plagiarising slightly, as the melody for the middle eight of this (“Sunshine, ragtime, blowing in the breeze…”) is near-identical to the middle eight of The Girl I Knew Somewhere (“Someway, somehow, the same thing was done…”).
There’s a very strange alternate mix of this with a double-tracked vocal, with one of the vocals emoting very differently to the performance used in the finished version, and with reverb drenched all over everything, but the finished version, with a filter on Nesmith’s single-tracked vocal, is one of the most interesting records the band ever made. Certainly, I can think of very few other surrealist garage-punk Latin country-psych tracks to have made the top forty.
Davy Jones has claimed in recent years that Nesmith got his songs regularly on the B-sides of the band’s singles, and that this made Nesmith far more money than the rest of the band, but in fact this was only the second of his songs to be released as a B-side (as the B-side of Valleri) and the first lead vocal he’d ever taken on either side of a single. Valleri was so popular that this reached number 34 in the US charts on the back of that success.
Daydream Believer
Writer: John Stewart
Lead Vocalist: Davy Jones
Other Monkees present: Micky Dolenz (backing vocals), Michael Nesmith (guitar), Peter Tork (piano)
In many ways, this is the last Monkees record. It’s certainly the last studio recording of an actual song to feature all four band members until 1996′s Justus reunion album. It’s also the last track produced by Chip Douglas to be released during the band’s career, though several of the bonus tracks on the CD versions of this album feature Douglas’ bass playing.
Written by John Stewart of the Kingston Trio, this became the band’s fifth consecutive gold single, and remains probably their most-loved track. Everything about the track is precisely right, from the audio verite at the beginning (“7a” “What number is this, Chip?”, “7A”, “OK, no need to get excited man, it’s ’cause I’m short, I know”), to Tork’s simple arrangement, to the oblique lyric.
The piano part and arrangement for this track turned out to be the only contribution Tork made to the finished album (several of his songs were considered for it, including the two that eventually made the Head soundtrack), but given that this record is such an absolute pop classic, one has to wonder what would have happened had the four members continued to work together, rather than drifting apart.
Incidentally, there was one lyrical change that was made by the band from Stewart’s demo – where he sang “now you know how funky I can be”, the word ‘funky’ was changed to ‘happy’, presumably because the idea of Davy Jones ever being funky was such an absurd one. In later recordings, Stewart himself changed the lyric of the last chorus, singing “and an old closet queen”.
This track was reissued in the 1980s, in a remixed version with a new drum part (full of gated reverb and ‘sonic power’) and handclaps. That version should be avoided at all costs.
Writing Wrongs
Writer: Michael Nesmith
Lead Vocalist: Michael Nesmith
Other Monkees present: None
And here we get to possibly the most controversial record in the Monkees’ ‘canon’.
There are two schools of thought about this track. One of them (which seems to be the one to which almost every Monkees fan belongs) thinks this is dreadful. The other (to which I, and very few others, belong) considers this possibly the best single track the Monkees ever recorded.
An epic at 5:05 (for the mono mix) or 5:09 (for the stereo), this is very much the Monkees’ equivalent of A Day In The Life or Surf’s Up. Nesmith here plays all the keyboard and guitar parts on what is easily his most ambitious Monkees track.
Starting with a two-chord tick-tock rhythm on piano, Nesmith comes in on vocals with his most impenetrable lyrics yet. Seemingly apocalyptic (“Did you know the water’s turning yellow?/Had you heard the sky was falling down?”) the lyrics seem to reference things that have some meaning at least to Nesmith (“Have you heard about Bill Chambers’ mother?”), while the piano keeps tick-tocking and an organ drones underneath.
Suddenly the piano changes to straight fours – “You have a way of making everything you say seem unreal…” – as the organ rises in volume. This, what we must consider the chorus, lasts for two lines, then we get eleven beats in 3/4 time, and a sudden stop.
We then enter the jazz freak-out section. Over latin flavoured drums and a single, briskly strummed, guitar chord, the piano starts playing around with a couple of three- and four-note scalar riffs, while the organ plays different variations of the same patterns.
The whole thing is almost wilfully difficult. There is a consistent pulse to the music, but each instrument is playing against that pulse, rather than with it, and against the other instruments. Were one to listen to this instrumental piece out of context, the first thought might be that it was by Sun Ra or someone rather than The Monkees.
After two minutes and ten seconds of this – the length of many normal Monkees songs – we return to a shortened version of the original musical material, with similarly oblique lyrics (“And I hope Bill Chambers’ mother’s better/Oh dear, the moon just disappeared”), and fades on a repeat of the instrumental section.
It’s a draining, exhausting piece of music, quite unlike anything else the band recorded, but quite astonishingly good.
I’ll Be Back Up On My Feet
Writers: Sandy Linzner and Denny Randell
Lead Vocalist: Micky Dolenz
Other Monkees present: None
This is a remake of a track that had originally been recorded during the More Of The Monkees sessions with Jeff Barry producing. This version is much better, being faster paced, and with a very interesting arrangement by Shorty Rogers, especially a bizarre sound in the bass register which comes from a percussion instrument called a quica which is unlike anything I’ve ever heard.
The song itself is not hugely impressive, though, being patterned after the kind of material with which Sandie Shaw was having some success at the time, a sort of cod-Bacharach without Bacharach’s harmonic or rhythmic unpredictability.
What is impressive, though, is the stylistic range of this album, where something like this could follow something like Writing Wrongs and have neither track sound more out of place than the other.
The Poster
Writers: David Jones & Steve Pitts
Lead Vocalist: Davy Jones
Other Monkees present: None
Easily the worst song on the album by a long way, this is Being For The Benefit Of Mr Kite as rewritten by a very literal-minded five-year-old with no sense of poetry or imagery, and sung slightly out of tune. Except not as interesting as that sounds.
Jones got the idea for this song from one Edith Sidebottom, a woman in her mid-eighties who had written a song that ended ‘and the circus is coming to town’. She later threatened to sue him, but he settled out of court.
P.O. Box 9847
Writers: Tommy Boyce and Bobby Hart
Lead Vocalist: Micky Dolenz
Other Monkees present: None
This is actually a cover of a track Boyce and Hart had previously released under their own names, as a B-side. Boyce and Hart’s original is actually rather better than the Monkees’ version.
This song came from an idea by Bob Rafelson, one of the producers of the Monkees’ TV show, about someone writing a classified ad. It’s actually one of Boyce and Hart’s cleverer songs, with each verse being a classified ad leading up to the chorus, which is just the title repeated, leading back into the verse with a different line each time, but all along the lines of “I’ve described me very poorly, better try again”.
Not only is it an extremely good song as a song, it also manages to work very cynically on the teenage girl listener. Each verse is slightly more grounded and realistic than the one previous, and it’s easy to imagine poor Micky trying vainly to describe himself, while only you – yes YOU teenage American girl – can really understand him.
Listening to Boyce and Hart’s original version, it’s very obviously inspired by John Lennon and George Harrison’s work on Revolver, but the two versions by the Monkees move further from that inspiration (though the piano part in the released version bears a family resemblance to the Taxman riff).
There are two very different versions of this song recorded by the Monkees (both based on the same basic take, but with very different overdubs). The more conventional of the two, driven by an eerie Bernard Herrman-esque string part, is the one that made it on to the album, but the other version, based around a Moog rather than the strings, is slightly better in my view. Either way, though, this is, other than Daydream Believer, the strongest non-Nesmith track on the album.
Magnolia Simms
Writers: Michael Nesmith
Lead Vocalist: Michael Nesmith
Other Monkees present: None
The most straightforward of Nesmith’s songs on the album, this is a note-perfect attempt at recapturing the feel of 1920s and 30s ‘old-time’ music, from a time when country music and jazz were much closer than people now think (see for example Jimmie Rodgers and Louis Armstrong recording together).
There was a brief fad for this kind of nostalgia at this time, more in Britain than in the US, with bands like the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band recording 1920s novelty songs, and even the Beatles would follow a few months later with Honey Pie, which, like this song, had added surface noise to replicate the sound of an old 78. Nesmith also has a filter on his vocal, to sound more like the 1920s singers who used a megaphone to be heard above their bands.
The stereo mix of this song, in fact, only plays in one channel, because the music it was emulating was in mono. However, the box set reissue of this album contains a true-stereo remix, without the noises.
This is Nesmith’s slightest piece on the album, but accessible and catchy, and shows his mastery of this style, both as a songwriter and a vocalist.
Valleri
Writers: Tommy Boyce and Bobby Hart
Lead Vocalist: Davy Jones
Other Monkees present: None
This is another remake of a song recorded earlier in the band’s career. In this case, the song had featured on the TV show, and was being played by DJs, but had never been released commercially.
The original version, produced by Boyce & Hart, was deemed unusable as all tracks now had to have a ‘produced by the Monkees’ credit. So Boyce & Hart were called back in to re-record it, as close as possible to the original recording, but had to give the Monkees credit for production.
The song itself has been called by Nesmith “The worst song I’ve ever heard in my life,” and there’s some truth to that assertion. Its genesis began when Boyce & Hart were asked by Kirshner if they had a girl’s-name song for the TV show, said ‘of course’, then wrote it in the car on the way to see him. As a result, the song just consists of four chords repeated over and over – a descending sequence by whole tones from I to V7 – with the most moronic possible lyrics (rhyming good with could and door with before, with the chorus just being the word “Valleri”).
However the production and arrangement are a truly impressive piece of turd-polishing, with a fuzz-guitar riff inspired by Satisfaction (though sounding more like Hungry Freaks, Daddy by the Mothers Of Invention), a Stax-esque horn section and blisteringly fast acoustic guitar playing from Louie Shelton. While the song may be dreadful, the record is a great piece of pop music.
This was the Monkees’ last top ten single in the US, peaking at number three and going gold. Perhaps not coincidentally, it was also the last single they released to feature in their TV show.
Zor and Zam
Writers: Bill & John Chadwick
Lead Vocalist: Micky Dolenz
Other Monkees present: None
A rather intense nursery-rhyme like song telling the story of two kingdoms preparing for a war that never happens because nobody showed up, this song is possibly best known for popularising the anti-war slogan “what if they gave a war and nobody came?”, a paraphrase by the Chadwicks of “Suppose they gave a war and no-one came?”, the title of a magazine article, which was itself a misremembering of a line from a poem by Carl Sandburg.
The line as used by the Monkees became one of the most powerful slogans of the Vietnam era, though few remembered where it had come from.
Bonus Tracks
Alvin
Writer: Nicholas Thorkelson
Lead Vocalist: Peter Tork
Other Monkees present: None
A charming 24-second a capella piece by Tork’s brother, about missing a pet alligator who’s been flushed down the toilet.
I’m Gonna Try
Writers: David Jones & Steve Pitts
Lead Vocalist: Davy Jones
Other Monkees present: None
Described (accurately) by Jones as ‘just a throwaway thing, really’ [FOOTNOTE: quote taken from Sandoval, p. 172], this harmlessly pleasant example of Jones’ ‘Broadway rock’ style would nonetheless have made a much better track than The Poster, which was recorded at the same time.
Lady’s Baby
Writer: Peter Tork
Lead Vocalist: Peter Tork
Other Monkees present: None
This simple ballad by Tork, which went unreleased until the 1990s, was his obsession at this period, taking twelve sessions to record, including musicians like Stephen Stills, Dewey Martin (the drummer from Buffalo Springfield) and Buddy Miles.
It’s odd it took so long, and went through so many versions (of which several are included on the box set version, and one more on a bonus single that came with the initial copies of the box set), as the basics of this simple song were in place from the start, and any of the multiple takes and mixes that have seen the light could easily have been released.
A nice, gentle song about being at peace with his then-girlfriend and her son, this is much better than much of the material that made it to the finished album, and it’s a shame Tork’s perfectionism drove him past a point of diminishing returns.
D.W. Washburn
Writers: Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller
Lead Vocalist: Micky Dolenz
Other Monkees present: None
This was the first Monkees song to be a flop, ‘only’ reaching number 19 on the US singles charts, thanks to being the first single the band released not to be featured on the TV show, and to The Coasters releasing a version almost simultaneously.
It’s a shame, because this is an enjoyable Dixieland pastiche in a style that was suiting the Monkees well at the time, being stylistically close to Cuddly Toy in its mixture of rather dark lyrics (from the point of view of a homeless alcoholic refusing the help of the Salvation Army) and upbeat music. And Leiber and Stoller were one of the most reliable songwriting teams of their age.
Nonetheless, while this was not a big hit (though still far more successful than any singles from the rest of their career), it’s still a great track, with the clanking banjo and Dolenz’s mannered vocal bringing the song to life beautifully.
It’s Nice to Be With You
Writers: Jerry Goldstein
Lead Vocalist: Davy Jones
Other Monkees present: None
Written by the co-writer of I Want Candy and My Boyfriend’s Back, this sappy ballad unfortunately has little of those tracks’ energy, being exactly what you imagine Davy Jones singing a song called It’s Nice To Be With You would sound like, with a plinky, over-orchestrated background. As the B-side of D.W. Washburn this scraped to number 51 in the US charts, but did better internationally.
Carlisle Wheeling
Writer: Michael Nesmith
Lead Vocalist: Michael Nesmith
Other Monkees present: Peter Tork (banjo)
Musically, this is almost a rewrite of Nine Times Blue, although lyrically it is very different, looking back with age at a happy romance that has almost but not quite dulled into complacency.
Nesmith was never very happy with this song, but nonetheless he attempted recording it several times – this version, a similar version during the Instant Replay sessions, a version on his big band instrumental album The Wichita Train Whistle Sings and a solo version in the early 70s.
It’s easy to see both why he was unhappy with it and why he tried to make it work. Melodically it’s quite beautiful, but lyrically the metaphors at times grow very strained. But then there are also moments of lyrical brilliance – “So forgive me my dear if I seem preoccupied/And if the razor edge of youth filled love is gone” is as good a couplet as Nesmith has ever written.
Rosemarie
Writer: Micky Dolenz
Lead Vocalist: Micky Dolenz
Other Monkees present: Peter Tork (acoustic guitar)
This horn-driven riffy soul track is as close to being funky as the Monkees ever got, and wouldn’t sound out of place on an early-70s blaxploitation film. There are three versions of this track, all with different lyrics. The version on the The Birds… box set is an early mix with no lyrics at all on the bridge, the version on the Missing Links CD has the most properly-thought-out lyrics, but the best version by far is the version released as a bonus track on Instant Replay.
That version has Dolenz singing gibberish lyrics and imitating various musical instruments vocally, and is just superb. But all the versions of this – all of which derive from the same basic track – are an intriguing look at a musical direction the Monkees never really took, but which Dolenz in particular was well suited for.
My Share of the Sidewalk
Writers: Michael Nesmith
Lead Vocalist: Davy Jones/Michael Nesmith
Other Monkees present: None
Lyrically, this is about as simplistic as Nesmith gets, but musically it’s more interesting. This is the most metrically irregular thing the Monkees ever released.
Starting with an intro of four bars of five/four, it then goes into a first verse which breaks down as two bars of seven/four, two of four/four and one more of seven/four. The second verse, while sounding similar, is actually six bars of four/four and one of seven/four. There’s then a vocal bridge of eight bars of twelve/eight, an instrumental break of four bars of twelve/eight, then the whole thing repeats from the start, then repeats again til end of verse two and fades on a repetition of the five/four intro.
What’s interesting about this as well is it shows what a difference each Monkee could make vocally. When Nesmith sings this, in a rough version without the full orchestration, it sounds like a cool jazz piece, like it could be sung by Mose Allison or someone. By contrast, when Jones sings it, it sounds like the kind of all-round family entertainment that could easily have been used on any variety show of the period.
And while I’ve sometimes been harsh on Jones’ vocals in this book, this shows that when he puts his mind to it he can do a remarkable job. He sings this in his ‘Broadway-rock’ style, but manages to navigate these horrendous changes (and some bad syllabics – the stresses to this lyric don’t fall at all well) without sounding like he’s even trying, as well as managing the rangey melody far better than Nesmith (who croaks his way through the high notes in what is, admittedly, a demo).
Little Red Rider
Writers: Michael Nesmith
Lead Vocalist: Michael Nesmith
Other Monkees present: None
There are two versions of this recorded as The Monkees. The version on the The Birds…box set is a simple acoustic demo, while the version on Missing Links vol 3 is a country-soul number that sounds a lot like the music Elvis Presley was making at the time, or the country-soul blend Dan Penn, Chips Moman and Spooner Oldham had come up with. An enjoyable track, it’s possibly more of a stylistic experiment than a proper song (though again, like Rose Marie, it’s interesting to see the soulful direction various band members were taking). Nesmith later rerecorded this with The First National Band on his first solo album, Magnetic South.
Ceiling in My Room
Writers: Don DeMieri, Robert Dick and David Jones
Lead Vocalist: Davy Jones
Other Monkees present: None
A dreadful, dreadful song, this is some kind of self-pitying cross between My Way (though of course this was before that horror was ever written) and It’s Nice To Be With You, with some inspiration from the Beach Boys’ In My Room, and with backing vocals that are more bellowed than sung. Abysmal.
Come On In
Writer: Jo Mapes
Lead Vocalist: Peter Tork
Other Monkees present: None
This song, in a sunshine pop version, was a hit for harmony-pop band The Association, but this is a drastically different arrangement. In fact, this track sounds like Lady’s Baby part two, having the same slow/fast tempo changes, and like that track features Stephen Stills and Lance Wakely on guitars, along with Dewey Martin.
A nice, gentle song performed by excellent musicians, with a heartfelt vocal, this is nothing mindblowingly special, but it’s a nice track. This kind of music would become incredibly popular a couple of years later, performed by people like Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, Jackson Browne or James Taylor, but by that point Tork had retired from music.
Tear the Top Right Off My Head
Writer: Peter Tork
Lead Vocalist: Peter Tork, Micky Dolenz
Other Monkees present: Micky Dolenz (backing vocals)
On the other hand, this kind of thing never became hugely popular, being as it is a novelty banjo-and-harmonica driven love song which occasionally turns into a hippy comedy hard rock number for a few bars.
There are a few versions of this track on the box set – Tork’s original vocal, a version with Dolenz singing which doesn’t really work, and a version (with Tork’s vocal) sped up to be about a tone faster, which comes together much better than the other versions, but this never quite works, though no matter how often I listen to it I can’t put my finger on why.
Merry Go Round
Writers: Peter Tork and Diane Hildebrand
Lead Vocalist: Peter Tork
Other Monkees present: None
Musically an interesting track, this mournful organ-and-piano driven waltz was recorded in a few different versions. Easily the best version is the solo acoustic version on this box set. The two fuller versions that have been released, here and on Missing Links Vol 3, both have interesting production choices, but are taken at too slow a speed for Tork’s comparatively weak voice, and then fatally damaged by Tork double-tracking himself sloppily. There’s an interesting idea in here, but other than the acoustic demo it’s not something you’d want to listen to regularly.
War Games
Writers: David Jones and Steve Pitts
Lead Vocalist: Davy Jones
Other Monkees present: Michael Nesmith (acoustic guitar, version one only)
Attentive readers will have noticed that I’m not the hugest fan of the songwriting talents of Jones and Pitts, and the two of them trying to write an anti-war protest song is about as poor as you’d expect.
But in fact, one of the two versions of this, the first version, works quite well. With a backing band led by Nesmith, the two-chord verse is slashed through at quite a fast pace, and the arrangement is a straight rip-off of 1965 Dylan, all Hammond organ and acoustic rhythm guitar.
Version two, though, is taken at a much slower speed, and mixes tinkly harpsichord with a marching band feel, to horrible effect.
Laurel And Hardy
Writers: Jan Berry and Roger Christian
Lead Vocalist: Davy Jones
Other Monkees present: None
This isn’t actually a Monkees track at all. It’s a Jan And Dean one, though neither Jan nor Dean appear.
To explain – Jan And Dean were a successful pop duo in the early and mid sixties, consisting of Jan Berry, who was a driven, unpleasant, ambitious man who wrote their hits (usually in collaboration with Roger Christian, Don Altfeld and/or Brian Wilson), produced them and sang on them, and Dean Torrence, a nice person everyone liked, who didn’t. [FOOTNOTE: This is probably an exaggeration. But the vocal parts Torrence took live were, often, performed in the studio by P.F. Sloan or, less frequently, Brian Wilson].
Jones was friendly with both of them, and when Berry was seriously brain-damaged in a car accident stepped in to help, spending a lot of time helping Berry re-learn basic life skills.
Both Jan and Dean, separately, decided to record new ‘Jan and Dean’ material to try to keep the brand alive, with Torrence’s solo concept album Save For A Rainy Day being released as a Jan And Dean album while Berry was still in hospital.
Berry responded with Carnival Of Sound , a psych-pop album that remained unreleased until 2010, and Jones assisted with some of the vocals, as Berry was at the time unable to sing.
This track, which is based on a sitar rendition of the Laurel And Hardy theme before going into more familiar Jan And Dean musical territory, was written by Berry with lyricist Roger Christian, who had co-written many of Berry’s previous hits as well as Beach Boys songs like Little Deuce Coupe and Don’t Worry Baby.
The track is very much in the novelty vein of albums like Jan And Dean Meet Batman, although this version, with Jones singing lead, doesn’t go so far in the novelty direction as the version, with a different lead vocalist, released on the Carnival Of Sound CD, which has a verse about Laurel And Hardy on a roller-coaster with the Maharishi.
Don’t Say Nothin’ Bad (About My Baby)
Writers: Gerry Goffin and Carole King
Lead Vocalist: Micky Dolenz
Other Monkees present: None
A generic twelve-bar rock-and-roll track, this sounds like the kind of thing that could have been a minor hit for Danny And The Juniors in 1958 or Shakin’ Stevens in 1981. It has absolutely no distinguishing features.
Shake ‘Em Up and Let ‘Em Roll
Writers: Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller
Lead Vocalist: Micky Dolenz
Other Monkees present: None
There are two different versions of this track, both identical but for the vocal take used. It’s a pleasant R&B number with an incongruously amusing trad jazz clarinet part, and in fact was recorded in 1970 as a single by Kenny Ball and his Jazzmen.
Astonishingly, though, this is the second time, after D.W. Washburn, that Dolenz would sing a Leiber/Stoller song very shortly after the Coasters recorded a version. In this case the Coasters’ version was recorded less than a fortnight before the Monkees’ version, and one has to wonder what they were thinking. Perhaps wisely, after the Coasters’ release had helped sink Washburn on the charts, this remained unreleased despite being a very pleasant, though outdated, song.
Changes
Writers: David Jones and Steve Pitts
Lead Vocalist: Davy Jones
Other Monkees present: None
A Jones/Pitts collaboration intended as a title track for the Monkees’ forthcoming film (later retitled Head), this is actually not half-bad. The arrangement is in the same sort of muscular soul-rock range as that of Little Red Rider, and while the song itself isn’t particularly good, this has a nice Dusty In Memphis feel to it.
I Wasn’t Born to Follow
Writers: Gerry Goffin and Carole King
Monkees present: None
An instrumental backing track of a country-rock (with harpsichord) song which had recently been released by The Byrds, no vocal was ever recorded for this.
The Party
Writers: David Jones and Steve Pitts
Lead Vocalist: Davy Jones
Other Monkees present: None
A very pleasant track, and one of the better Jones/Pitts collaborations, this has something of the feel of Changes about it, but a less impressive (and more string-dominated) arrangement. A minor piece, but enjoyable on its own terms.
I’m A Man
Writers: Barry Mann & Cynthia Weill
Monkees present: None
An unused backing track, produced by Chip Douglas in clear, blatant imitation of Phil Spector’s style, this is actually one of the better Spector imitations I’ve heard, though the instruments are much clearer and more separated than Spector’s usual style.
The Beach Boys On CD 3: Little Deuce Coupe/All Summer Long
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
The Beach Boys’ fourth album, Little Deuce Coupe, came out three weeks after their third, Surfer Girl. A concept album of sorts, based around cars, it included four songs from earlier albums. 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.
Little Deuce Coupe
band membership – Brian Wilson, Carl Wilson, Dennis Wilson, Mike Love, David Marks, Al Jardine (uncredited)
The last album to feature David Marks, before his disagreements with the Wilsons’ father Murry led him to leave to form his own band, Dave And The Marksmen, this nonetheless has the stronger harmonies that show that Al Jardine was firmly in place. A collection of car songs, it’s clearly a rush job, but it still has its moments. It is, though, far from essential – it was recorded in a single session, and sounds it.
Little Deuce Coupe
The same recording included on the Surfer Girl album
Ballad Of Ole’ Betsy
Another rewrite of The Surfer Moon/Your Summer Dream from the previous album, this is the best of these three attempts at what amounts to the same musical material, thanks to being the only one to feature full band vocals. This brings out the Four Freshmen influence more obviously, and other than a double tracking error on ‘she may be rusted iron’ the vocals are gorgeous, especially on the a capella tag.
The lyrics, by Roger Christian, are less impressive, anthropomorphising a car – “she was born in ’32, and was she ever pretty/she rode a freight train west, all the way from Detroit city” and so on. This manages to make them both over-sentimental mush about what is, after all, an inanimate object, while simultaneously seeming to objectify women in a rather disturbing way (“Betsy took some beatings, but she never once complained”…)
But if you listen for the vocals, and ignore both text and subtext, it works as a piece of music.
Be True To Your School is a musically uninteresting piece of boosterism by Love and Brian Wilson, bearing some slight musical resemblance to Hawaii (whose tag is reused at the end). I’m not the target audience for this track as I never had the American High School experience, and I’ve always loathed both sports and expressions of in-group solidarity (especially when they’re expressed in an aggressive manner – “we’ll be ready to fight, we’re gonna smash ‘em now”). If you’re the kind of person who likes that kind of thing, you might have a less jaded impression of this track.
Car Crazy Cutie is a reworking of a doo-wop track Brian had written for another band, The Survivors, a short while earlier, with new lyrics by Roger Christian about a beautiful girlfriend who is more interested in cars than the singer – “But when I talk of lovin’ man, some kisses and hugs/She says don’t you think we’d better clean and gap the plugs”. This is actually something of a theme on this album – the disconnect between appearance and actuality. Along with the fact that so much of the musical material is reused (either from rejected earlier songs, songs given to other people, or just sticking an old record on the album to fill up the gaps), there are some quite interesting collisions of form and content going on here. The album is about taking old junk and polishing it up to make it look good, but it still being less than perfect under the hood. The fact that they take the same attitude towards women as to cars and their songs is unfortunate, but probably to be expected given their ages (the band members ranged from fifteen to twenty-two) and the culture they were in.
The lack of success with this ‘cutie’ though is probably why Brian is the lead vocalist, as otherwise this Dion pastiche would have been a perfect vocal showcase for Dennis. But his swaggering persona would never have worked with the rejection in the last verse. This is still, however, by far the best new song on the album.
Cherry Cherry Coupe is a rewrite of the then-unreleased Land Ahoy by Brian and Roger Christian, and appears to be about a particularly good car. I say ‘appears to be’ because here we run into one of the problems in reviewing this album for a British person born in 1978 who doesn’t drive, in that a good chunk of the lyrics don’t seem to be in anything I’d recognise as English. I haven’t a clue what “My coupe’s tuck and roll underneath the hood” or “Chrome reversed rims with whitewall slicks” are. Are they a good thing? “Chopped nose and deck with louvers on the hood” ?
I take it these *are* good things, because “It’s the sharpest in the town and the envy of my group”, but for all I know this could be advocating the violent overthrow of the government and its replacement with a fascist dictatorship. That might be what a cellunoid system is…
That said, this is catchy enough, and one of the first times Mike Love is allowed to really impress with his bass range – his tenor lead here is merely passable, but on the choruses his bass rumbling of “My cherry coupe eats ‘em up coming off the line/And she really gets lost when she starts to whine” makes the song.
409
The track from the Surfin’ Safari album
Shut Down
The track from the Surfin’ USA album
Spirit Of America
It shows how desperate the Beach Boys were getting for material that this and Ballad Of Ole Betsy were included on the same album, despite having near-identical melodies. This Wilson/Christian song, with Brian Wilson on lead vocal, is about Craig Breedlove’s first world land speed record, which he had acheived four weeks to the day before the recording session for this album. Given the circumstances one wouldn’t expect a masterpiece, and the fact that the track is even competent says a lot for how good Brian Wilson was at this point.
It seems at times like I’m slating this album – and it really isn’t very good by any normal standards – but to record something this adequate in the time they were given is frankly astounding.
Our Car Club
The same recording included on the Surfer Girl album
No-Go Showboat
I think this is an attempt at a comedy song – I say I think, because again this is a Roger Christian lyric, which means the lyrics are full of things like “It really rates fine in the custom clan, with hand-formed panels, tuck-and-roll rear pan”. But I *think* it’s about a car which looks good but won’t go fast (“When it comes to speed, man, I’m just outa luck, I’m even shut down by the ice cream truck”).
A Young Man Is Gone
Bobby Troup’s maudlin Their Hearts Were Full Of Spring, a song recorded by the Four Freshmen, was one of the first things the Beach Boys ever recorded, and has remained in the band’s act to this day as an a capella showcase. It’s fascinating if you have access to enough live recordings to hear how the different voices entering and leaving the line-up over the years have affected the quality of the harmonies – to my mind the best version is the rehearsal recording from 1993 with only two original members of the band (Carl and Al) plus Bruce Johnston and Al’s son Matt.
This is their only official studio recording of the song, with new lyrics by Mike Love, here bemoaning the death of James Dean, and while the original lyrics were bad, these are, if anything, worse – “For this daring young star met his death while in his car/No one knows the reason why/Screaming tire, flashing fire, and gone was this young star/Oh how could they let him die”. However, the harmonies are exquisite, and the whole thing just about works because of that.
Custom Machine
The last song on this album is also by far the most interesting, although it falls into the category of ‘interesting failure’ – Custom Machine has quite a lot of playing around with keys and tonality, with the chorus seeming to go off into some nowhere between-keys land (on the line “I’ll let you look but don’t touch my custom machine”). However, it sounds arbitrary, rather than clever – an experiment that didn’t quite come off. The track still almost works, mostly down to the band’s enthusiasm and tightness – a tightness that’s even more surprising when you realise how little time they (and the session musicians augmenting them) had to rehearse and learn the song – you can hear someone whispering the next line to Mike Love during the instrumental break.
Originally credited as a solo Brian Wilson composition, this is one of the songs for which Mike Love won a co-writing credit in his 1990s lawsuit. To my ears, though, it sounds if anything like a Roger Christian lyric – Love’s lyrics usually have the virtue of being singable and in something approaching English, while lines like “A stereophonic speaker set with vibrasonic sound” just sit uncomfortably, having far too many syllables for their melody.
All Summer Long
band membership – Brian Wilson, Carl Wilson, Dennis Wilson, Mike Love, Al Jardine
While Shut Down Vol 2 had contained two of the best tracks the band would ever record, plus one of their biggest hits, All Summer Long is the point where the Beach Boys, spurred on by at last having some real competition, became important. This was the start of their four-album golden period (this, Today!, Summer Days… And Summer Nights! and Pet Sounds) where they were not only having huge hits but making huge artistic strides forward as well.
I once played a Beatles album for a relative who didn’t really know their work, and he said to me half-way through “No, I want to hear a proper album, not a collection of hits” – All Summer Long, more than any other Beach Boys album, feels like that. While only one track became an actual hit single, four of its eleven tracks were included on the Endless Summer compilation and pretty much every hits compilation and best-of since, while another, Little Honda, became a huge hit in a note-for-note cover version by the Hondells.
While it still has its share of filler (the Beach Boys never really became an ‘album band’ til they were almost commercially obsolete), this is the earliest Beach Boys album about which one can say it’s an essential album, rather than just having essential tracks.
I Get Around
You may have heard this one…
The Beach Boys’ first number one, this is the first of their singles to show signs of having been constructed as a record first and song second. If Mike Love (who won co-writing credit for this in 1993, before which it was credited as a Brian Wilson solo track) is telling the truth, in fact, when he claims to have come up with the “round, round, get around” hook, then he can probably lay claim to 90% of the record’s success.
But that other 10% is crucial, and is all down to the structure and production, which is stunningly sophisticated. First just listen to the way the instrumental track is carefully layered. We start with two low notes on the guitar – but then there is no instrumentation for the next four seconds. Going into the chorus, we can hear a guitar and bass (a fairly poor lead guitar part was recorded but is not audible in the final mix), both essentially doubling each other (a trick Brian had learned from Phil Spector), and a very interesting drum part courtesy of session player Hal Blaine. With almost no hi-hat or cymbal at all, the part on the record consists of just a kick drum every other beat and one fill two bars in, along with some *incredibly* fast brushwork.
Rather amazingly, this brushwork is the replacement for a harpsichord part – if one listens to the session recordings (not that I would ever advocate illegal downloading of course hem hem), the same part, in more or less the same range, is being played by the harpsichord (Blaine is playing semiquavers, while the harpsichord was playing quavers, but the audible pressing and release of the keys doubled it rhythmically),
In fact the drum part seems to be a construction after the fact rather than a live performance – the basic track for the song, before any overdubbing, features a far more conventional drum pattern, with fours on the kick drum, snare for emphasis every other beat (where the kick drum is on the record) and quavers on the hi-hat. It’s only *after* the basic track is done that the drums are re-recorded (although one can still *very* faintly hear leakage from the original hi-hat track used to keep time through the a capella sections).
We then have the verse, where while Mike Love’s singing we have two bars of just guitar and bass doubling each other in a stop-start rhythm (with a stray hi-hat beat to keep them in time) under the first line, before being joined by handclaps for the second line, before a two-bar instrumental break. This break *does* feature the harpsichord, but it’s overwhelmed by the hammond organ that’s added. This two-bar break (stretching the verse to an unusual ten bar length) contains musical material found nowhere else, but which Terry Melcher (of whom much more, sadly, later) would re-use as the main guitar riff for the Byrds’ version of Mister Tambourine Man (the backing track of which was based on this song’s B-side, Don’t Worry Baby).
We then go into a repeat of the chorus, instrumentally the same as the intro, which goes into a new, short section, the ‘get around round round ooh’ section, and again we can feel the tension building as through these rising oohs we add in the hammond organ, a lead guitar solo and, barely audible, three bass saxophone notes at crucial points. We’ve gone from a single voice and ptactically no instrumentation right up to a full wall of sound, and it’s been a natural progression, like a driver slowly pressing his foot down and taking you from 0 to 100 without ever really noticing the acceleration.
And the instrumental track isn’t even what we notice on this track, it’s those five part harmonies, and Brian Wilson’s falsetto soaring like it never had before. It’s the sense of restlessness coupled with braggadoccio – of someone who knows he’s absolutely mastered the pop single, and is itching to try something better (“I’m getting bugged driving up and down the same old strip, I gotta find a new place where the kids are hip”).
Were it not that that accolade truly belongs to a single the Beach Boys would release two years later, one could easily describe I Get Around as the perfect pop record.
All Summer Long
Anything was going to be a let-down after that opener, but truth be told I’ve never been a huge fan of this song even divorced from its context. While it’s interesting from a production standpoint (the xylophone part was an inspired move) and harmonically (it’s essentially a variant on the I-vi-ii-V progression, but replacing the minor sixth with a flattened third, a rather jazzy substitution, and then extending a lot of the chords with passing sixths and augmented fifths).
While this song’s use in American Graffitti kickstarted the band’s commercial revival in the mid-70s,I have to say I’ve always found it too saccharine.
And, though it’s hardly fair to judge it on this, the trade-off between the whistle and saxophone on the instrumental break can’t help but make any British people with a love of comedy think that someone’s playing a game of Swanee Kazoo.
This is another song for which Mike Love, who sings lead, sued and won co-writing credit.
Hushabye
The only actual cover on the album (though see Carl’s Big Chance) this is a fairly straight cover of a doo-wop song, originally recorded by the Mystics. Written by the great songwriting team of Doc Pomus and Mort Shuman (responsible for roughly seventeen trillion quadrillion of the great pop songs of the late 50s and early 60s) they were having a comparative off-day when they came up with this – other than the melodic referencing of Brahms’ Lullaby in the middle eight, this is a fairly standard doo-wop song. The performance and production here is absolutely exemplary – the harmonies are heavenly, the broken drum part and driving piano bass are the missing link between what Phil Spector was doing at the time and what the Beatles would be doing by the end of the year – but this is ‘only’ a very, very pleasant trifle. Brian sings lead, with Mike on the middle eight.
Little Honda
A Wilson/Love song for which there’s never been any credit dispute, this is one of those songs where you can see what an influence the band had on the Velvet Underground. From the throbbing low-range three-chord guitar to the held organ notes (a common thing in Brian Wilson’s arrangements, often filling in what would be another harmony part in the middle of the stack), to the monotone lead vocal melody, this is musically extremely close to songs like Foggy Notion, White Light/White Heat or I’m Waiting For The Man. There’s even a drone, courtesy of the hummed backing vocals in the verse.
Of course, the Velvet Underground rarely had lyrics like “It’s more fun than a barrel of monkeys, that two-wheel bike”, but frankly that’s the Velvets’ problem, not the Beach Boys’.
We’ll Run Away
A weak filler track, this is the last Brian Wilson/Gary Usher song to be recorded and released by the Beach Boys (though the two would collaborate again in the 80s on some material, most of which was unreleased, but some sneaked out as very obscure Brian Wilson solo tracks). A 12/8 ballad in the mould of Tears On My Pillow and similar 50s hits, this would have sounded dated even at the time – but Wilson and Usher were probably thinking of the string of Phil Spector songs about being too young to get married around this time (e.g. Not Too Young To Get Married by Bob. B. Soxx And The Blue Jeans, Why Don’t They Let Us Fall In Love by Veronica (Ronnie Spector) and especially So Young by Veronica, which the band would cover on their next studio album). However, all these songs had more energy and seemed more up-to-date.
There’s also an annoying bit of shoddy craftsmanship in that the second and third verses try to shove too many syllables into their first lines, forcing the band to come in slightly behind the beat after dropping out. This is especially noticeable at the start of the second verse (“They warned us that we can’t live on love forever”).
Brian’s voice is also in his weakest point here – right at the top of his head voice where it turns into falsetto. When his voice started to deteriorate a few years later it was this range that went first, and this is the only range he’s never really recovered. Here, it means he’s drifting between a slightly off-pitch high head voice and a slightly nasal low falsetto more or less at random, occasionally singing in different ‘voices’ in each of his double-tracked vocals.
Carl’s Big Chance
This is credited to Brian and Carl Wilson, but is in fact a filler instrumental whose backing track is clearly the vamp from Marvin Gaye’s Can I Get A Witness, over which Carl plays some fairly rudimentary lead guitar – strangely sounding closer to Chet Atkins (albeit Chet Atkins as played by a teenager) than to the surf sounds on previous albums. Pointless.
Wendy, another Wilson/Love lawsuit track, is a very strong opener for side two of the original album. Other than its stuttering opening, and the studio noise (most notably a cough) heard during the Hammond solo, there’s little to talk about here, but that’s not to say it’s not good – it’s an excellent song, performed well, with a great lead by Brian. It’s just that it’s not a song that’s improved by analysis – its good points are all obvious ones, and there’s little to dig into below the surface.
Do You Remember? is Brian Wilson’s tribute to the music he’d listened to growing up, and clearly based on At The Hop. Lasting barely a minute and a half (and that with an extended fade) there was clearly very little inspiration here.
What’s interesting about it (the only thing, really) is that this is rock nostalgia from before there was a ‘canon’ and official history of rock, as reported by someone who was a teenage music fan of the time. So in ‘the guys who gave us rock & roll’, along with Elvis, Little Richard and Chuck Berry we have the terminally uncool TV DJ Dick Clark and “Danny and the Juniors hit a groove, stuck as sharp as a knife”.
Girls On The Beach is a rewrite by Brian of Surfer Girl, but a much less pleasant one – where Surfer Girl was a romantic song of love for one individual, this is attempting to give the same romantic feeling to a song which is lyrically not all that far removed in attitude from Peaches by the Stranglers – “The girls on the beach are all within reach if you know what to do” and “we love to lie around girls with tans of golden brown”.
It’s not the sexist lyric itself that’s the problem with this song – it’s no worse in that respect than, say, California Girls – but it just doesn’t go with the warm, romantic closely-harmonised melody. There’s a cognitive dissonance there that there just isn’t in California Girls‘ leering swagger. Lead vocals are by Brian, with Dennis on the middle eight.
Drive In
Another lawsuit-credited Wilson/Love song, with Mike on lead vocals, this is a comedy song of sorts, about teenage life – the Drive-in is ‘a groovy place to talk and maybe watch the show’ when on a date, (“If you say you watch the movie you’re a couple o’ liars”), and how you shouldn’t “sneak your buddies in the trunk ’cause they might get caught…And they’d look kinda stupid gettin’ chased through the lot”. Love’s vocal carries this off with the appropriate humour (and a wonderfully goofy Smokey Bear impression on “remember only you can prevent forest fires”), and the track, while not wonderful, is a pleasant improvement after the last two songs.
Incidentally, the Spectoresque backing track, one of the fullest arrangements on the album, was originally recorded several months earlier at the same session as the Christmas single Little St Nick, and a version of the backing track with the Little St Nick lyrics was released on the Ultimate Christmas compilation in the nineties. There’s some debate about whether that version was intended as a joke, or whether two backing tracks were cut for the same lyric and the better one chosen. The presence of prominent sleigh bells on this leads me to suspect the latter.
Our Favourite Recording Sessions is filler. It’s the equivalent of a film ‘blooper reel’, containing various breakdown takes and studio arguments (though only the more family-friendly ones – nothing like the argument over who spat in whose mouth that broke out during vocal overdubs on Little Honda for example). While other tracks have been relatively weak, this is the only real evidence that the band were still under immense pressure to crank material out by the yard.
And after a relatively weak run of songs, the album finishes with one of the best tracks, Don’t Back Down. Written by Brian and (you guessed it) with a co-writing credit won by Mike in 1993, this is a reworking of Hawaii (with which the current touring ‘Beach Boys’ often perform this as a medley). It’s very easy to imagine that on the choruses Brian is singing about himself when he sings “You gotta be a little nuts/but show ‘em how you’ve got guts/Don’t back down from that wave”. Right now, Brian was feeling challenged by his rivalry with the Beatles (a rivalry which they had not yet noticed themselves, though they would by the next year), but soon the fear would start to take over…
This was the last surf song the Beach Boys would record for four years.
CD Bonus tracks
Be True To Your School (single version)
A rerecording of this song, released as a single, it takes whatever simplistic charm the album version had, and bludgeons it to death, then runs over it with a steamroller to make sure. It takes the basic template of the album track, and adds a guitar solo, a marching band, an instrumental break to the tune of On Wisconsin, a cheerleading team (performed by The Honeys, a vocal group featuring Brian Wilson’s fiancee, her sister and her cousin), a kitchen sink and Uncle Tom Cobbley and all.
All Dressed Up For School
This is absolutely astonishing. Between the opening Louie Louie riff with Mike Love’s wonderfully stupid doot-doot-doots and the closing Papa Oom Mow Mow bit, there are musical ideas here that would sustain many other bands for a lifetime – the verse melody was later recycled into two songs (I Just Got My Pay and Marcella), the chorus became a Honda commercial, the guitar solo seems to contain within it the seeds of the later hit Dance Dance Dance, part of the lyric was reused for The Little Girl I Once Knew, and a little bit of it at the end seems to point the way towards some of the Smile period Heroes & Villains vocal sessions. And it’s a rare lead vocal at this point for Carl Wilson.
So why wasn’t it released? With such a catchy chorus, you just can’t help singing along… “All dressed up for school/ooh what a turn on/she’s so fine/what a turn on/all dressed up for school”
Ah.
I see.
Moving swiftly on…
Little Honda (Alternate Take) is almost indistinguishable from the released version, except for the backing vocal arrangement – instead of singing “Honda Honda going faster faster” they sing “Go little Honda, faster little Honda”, and Brian’s falsetto is more prominent. The change was an improvement. The only other change (changing the word ‘champ’ to ‘matchless’) was less so.
Don’t Back Down (alternate take) is in many ways the most interesting of these bonus tracks, although musically the least listenable. It also provides quite a bit of justification for Mike Love’s claim to have had input on at least this song. The backing track is identical to the finished version – obviously they kept the instrumental track – and the main theme of the lyrics is similar, but everything else is different. The melody here is actually the one Brian used for a song for The Honeys, Hide Go Seek, some time earlier (you can hear that song at this youtube link – it’s far and away the best thing The Honeys ever did), and the lyrics are totally different. Obviously the original idea was to reuse an unsuccessful but good song from a side project, before it was reworked in the studio. Given the speed with which Love has been known to work (writing lyrics in taxi-cabs to recording sessions on occasion) it wouldn’t surprise me at all had he reworked the lyrics (though the new melody still has Brian’s fingerprints all over it).
Next up, we skip (for now) the Christmas and Concert albums (I’ll get to them eventually, but they’re not part of ‘the story of the Beach Boys’ artistic evolution’, just appendices) and get to The Beach Boys Today!, often regarded as the band’s best album…
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.
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