Smile Sessions – A Considered Review
I *will*, as promised, have some non-Smile material up here later today, but I realised I’d never posted a considered view of The Smile Sessions, just my linkblog.
For disc one, which is what most casual listeners will care about, Mark Linett and Alan Boyd had to reconcile two irreconcilable objectives. Firstly, they had to make an album that was listenable to the people who would be buying just the one- or two-disc sets and expecting a great Beach Boys album. Second, they had to follow the template laid down by Brian Wilson Presents Smile, Brian Wilson’s 2004 re-recording.
This is problematic because Brian Wilson Presents Smile was much longer than an actual 1960s album would have been, and contained a lot of material that was never recorded in the 1960s. It had lead vocals on six songs – a third of the album – that never had vocals recorded in any form when Smile was originally recorded. It also had newly-composed linking material to segue between the more fragmentary tracks.
My own choice would have been to make a much tighter, ten or twelve-track, album for disc one, and not follow Wilson’s sequence at all. I’d probably have chosen a tracklist something like:
Our Prayer
Heroes & Villains
The Old Master Painter/You Are My Sunshine
CabinEssence
Wonderful
Child Is Father Of The Man
Surf’s Up
Vegetables
Wind Chimes
Fire
Love To Say DaDa
Good Vibrations
Everything else I would have made a bonus track – still available, still on the CD, but not part of the sequenced listening experience for the casual fan.
But I can see why they chose this route – the 2004 line-up is the closest thing to an actual finished Smile there can ever be, and was signed off on by Brian Wilson and Van Dyke Parks. Especially given Parks’ understandable refusal to be involved in this box set, that’s as good as you’re going to get.
And given those two conflicting choices, Linett and Boyd have done a remarkable job. By flying in bits of vocals from demos, or in some cases from other songs (the ‘child’ vocals added to Look from Child Is Father Of The Man and the vocals from the Smiley Smile version of Wind Chimes and Fall Breaks And Back To Winter), they have made these pieces sound far more finished than they ever have before.
It will still, frankly, be a bit of a slog for the typical non-fan listener to get through the third movement – always the weakest and least coherent, and far scrappier than the first two – but they’ve done a remarkably good job.
As for the music itself… Smile has five songs (Good Vibrations, Heroes & Villains, Cabinessence, Wonderful and Surf’s Up) which are the equal of any music ever made. It’s not hyperbole to place them with the best of Bach, or Stravinsky, or the Beatles or Duke Ellington. There are a couple of utterly lovely little mini-tracks too – You Are My Sunshine and Our Prayer – and Fire, which is not *quite* up to the level of those five, but is still a stunningly impressive piece of music.
The rest of the album can be split roughly into silly fun songs like Vegetables and Holidays and backing tracks that hint at greatness but are clearly unfinished (Do You Like Worms, Child Is Father Of The Man).
Possibly the best way to explain this is to compare it to the Beatles’ Abbey Road – a similar combination of repeated themes and motifs, big experimental pieces, and small silly fragments. Imagine if side one of Abbey Road was pretty much complete except for the vocals on I Want You, but the long medley on side two had never been completed, and had been reconstructed with Lennon’s demos for his songs, an instrumental version of Golden Slumbers/Carry That Weight/The End, and the live version of You Never Give Me Your Money where McCartney pretends to forget the words – and none of George Martin’s orchestrations had been recorded.
If you stack this semi-completed Smile up against something like that, it emerges far and away the better listening experience, and its high points, with the pristine Beach Boys voices of 1966 and 1967, are as beautiful as anything I’ve ever heard, but it’s not a finished album and really can’t be reviewed as such.
The sessions recordings that make up the rest of the box set are invaluable for anyone who is interested in the way music is made. Hearing Wilson guide the musicians and singers through take after take, subtly altering the music each time, and hearing the isolated parts, is a wonderful education. The bulk of that material had been available before on bootlegs, but never in sound quality anything like as good as this. Linett and Boyd have also done a great job of editing out the longeurs while still preserving the essence of the sessions – nobody really needs ten minutes of tuning, but it can be instructive to hear Wilson explain to Jim Gordon or Hal Blaine how to change their snare drum pattern. We get the latter, but not the former.
On sound quality – there have been some complaints on various message boards about some fairly minor problems with the sound (an increase in hiss on the choruses on Cabinessence, a click in Heroes & Villains, an electronic whine in Love To Say DaDa). I don’t want to dismiss these problems – they could affect some people’s listening experience – but most of them are *incredibly* minor, and won’t be audible to people listening on normal equipment with normal ears. I still can’t hear some of them, even knowing what I’m listening for (though I don’t have wonderful hearing).
The ones I can hear, though, are all on the original recordings, not things that have been newly introduced for this release. 1960s recordings were far noisier, and far more likely to contain bad edits, tape hiss, and background noises than anything recorded in the last couple of decades. Given that Linett and Boyd were working with materials of hugely varying quality, ranging from at one end professionally-recorded multitracks in good condition, to at the other rough mixes that had been mixed down to acetate and then left in people’s garages for decades, the overall quality is nothing short of miraculous.
The packaging for the box set is extraordinary, too – a beautiful box, with a 3D die-cut version of Frank Holmes’ original artwork, a double vinyl album in a reproduction of the original sleeve from the 60s, a copy of the photo booklet that would have been included with the original album, a sixty-page hardback book with interviews with almost everyone involved (no interviews with Parks or the session musicians, but everyone else, down to Brian Wilson’s ex-sister-in-law) and a complete sessionography detailing who played on what and which bits were used for the finished tracks.
The very nature of this project makes it hard to rate – the full 5-CD, 2-album, 2-single box is not something anyone but the most obsessive fan or scholar will ever want. But anyone who *does* want something like this will *really* want it.
The single or double CD sets should probably get, on an objective rating, four out of five stars for a casual listener – it contains some of the best music ever made, but it’s necessarily fragmented. Brian Wilson’s 2004 reconstruction, by comparison, would get a clear five on that basis.
But for collectors, Beach Boys obsessives, and anyone interested in the making of music, the box set is a clear five-star, best-release-of-the-year slab of pure joy. It sets a new standard for what an archival release should be, just as the best music on it set a new standard for what pop music should be.
Liveblogging The Smile Sessions
I’m writing this introductory material on the night of the thirtieth of October. If all goes well, I should be receiving my copy of The Smile Sessions tomorrow morning, the thirty-first. I’m going to hit ‘post’ on this introductory section at 8:30 AM, and then as soon as the box set arrives I’m going to start listening to it.
What order I listen depends on whether the new stylus for my record player arrives before or after the box, but my initial plan is to listen to the two singles, commenting after each side, then to the two vinyl albums, again commenting after each side, then listen to the CDs in order, reading the two books during the nineteen-song overlap between CD1 and the vinyl, commenting after each CD.
So right now, I’m going to talk a little about what we already know about this.
I’m already very familiar with a lot of the basic musical material here, through official releases, bootlegs and Brian Wilson’s solo reconstruction of the album (if anyone here still hasn’t heard that masterpiece, there’s a live performance here – the first half of the show isn’t especially worth your while, but the second half is the whole album performed note-perfect live). The interesting thing (apart from any totally new discovered stuff) about the completed album part of this will be the choices the producers have made.
Smile, you see, was not only never finished, it was recorded modularly – little sections, often no more than a few bars long, that were to be spliced together. That splicing was never done, and in some cases it’s unclear exactly which pieces belonged to which song, or what order they would have gone in.
Mark Linett and Alan Boyd, the producers of the box set, have chosen to more-or-less follow the tracklisting that Brian Wilson and Van Dyke Parks settled on when they completed the re-recorded version of Smile in 2004 (with the help of Darian Sahanaja and Paul Mertens).
In some ways, this is a worrying decision – many of the songs included on Brian Wilson Presents Smile were unfinished in the 60s, and had new lyrics and vocal parts added, which won’t be on the ‘finished album’ part of the new Smile release. This might well lead to people who’ve not heard this material before getting bored during what will seem on first listen to be longeurs. I’d have chosen a tighter ten- or twelve-track album, myself, and put the rest on as bonus tracks.
But on the other hand, it *is* how Brian Wilson and Van Dyke Parks chose to present the material when they completed it and re-recorded it. And it’s probably the ‘conservative’ decision, in that it doesn’t require Boyd or Linett to create their own running order, which would undoubtedly have every single Beach Boys fan in uproar. Deferring to the completed version is the sensible decision here.
It also makes me more curious how they’re going to sequence this – when Wilson, Parks and Sahanaja sequenced the 2004 version, they used newly-composed linking material by Paul Mertens, which highlighted repeated motifs in the music (for example his introduction to I’m In Great Shape, which repurposed the Cantina section from Heroes & Villains and showed it’s musical similarity to the song it was introducing). Without those, it will be *incredibly* difficult for them to make this work anything like as well as a listening experience.
However, I trust Boyd and Linett more than anyone else with this. Boyd produced the documentary and CD Endless Harmony, the CD version of which is the best Beach Boys rarities collection ever – so much so that it’s my standard recommendation for a first Beach Boys album – and he’s a fine musician himself, as well as being friendly with several of my friends. And Mark Linnet has worked with Wilson on all his studio and live recordings from the last twelve years (and his 1988 solo album), including the reworked Smile, and was also responsible for remastering all the Beach Boys’ music for CD, as well as co-producing the Good Vibrations box set (the definitive Beach Boys retrospective).
So these two are exactly the right people to do this. This is going to be as close to definitive as it’s possible to get, and while I’ll undoubtedly question some of their choices, I’m sure I’ll respect them all.
So now I’m off to bed. I’m going to hit post on this when I get up first thing in the morning, and then I’ll update after the first thing I listen to…
Update 1 It is now 11:38 AM. My box set was loaded onto a van in Rochdale at 9:33. It should be here any time now…
Update 11:49 The box set has arrived. My stylus hasn’t, yet, so it shall be CDs first.
Update 13:38 Wow.
First things first. This sounds extraordinary. None of this music, whether it’s been officially released or not, has ever sounded this clear.
Boyd and Linett have made the very wise decision not to go for historical authenticity, but to cobble together a Frankenstein creation from whatever’s at hand. For example, on the track Surf’s Up, they’ve used the original Smile backing track for the first half, taken Brian’s vocal from the piano demo and time-shifted it to make it fit the track, then added in Carl’s vocal from 1971 (and the backing vocals recorded at the same time) for the missing lines. It’s not ‘how it would have sounded’, but it’s the best possible job of making something listenable out of the materials at hand. Something like 95% of the music on the ‘finished album’ is from the Smile sessions, but the other 5% comes from Smiley Smile, 20/20 and Surf’s Up sessions. But that 5% *fits*
There are also constant little surprises – elements in the mix that I’ve never heard before. On the tag of You Were My Sunshine, for example, they edit in a piece of music we’ve always assumed was a Heroes & Villains session (I *think* the bit known as ‘False Barnyard’, but while I’ve always kept up enough with Smile scholarship to recognise all the music, I can’t remember all the labels that have been attached to different fragments) – but Mike Love is clearly singing fragments from You Were My Sunshine in the background!
These constant surprises – some on the original master tapes, others painstakingly created by Boyd and Linnet – make this music fresh again. I’m very familiar with the raw materials, but there are little snatches of never-bootlegged music, and decisions made in the mixing, that draw the attention back every time I start to think “Heard it before”.
One of the effects of this is to turn it from a Brian Wilson album into something that is definitely a *Beach Boys* album. There’s a lot more vocal on here than on the bootlegged versions – some flown in from other recordings, others just raised in the mix – but it’s gone from being a primarily-instrumental album to being one which sounds much more like the Beach Boys.
And it sounds *SO GOOD*. Mike Love’s vocals, in particular, are no longer buried – there’s a lot more bass in this mix than in any of the bootlegs. And my God that man could sing when he wanted to.
The third movement still has much less to offer than the first two, but having listened through the ‘finished album’, I can safely say that the only problems I have with it are very minor:
There’s a rough edit at the end of the tag of Vegetables, to stick on another section. It’s jarring and unpleasant and should have been left to fade with the tag.
Fire sounds somewhat toned down compared to some of the raw-sounding bootlegs.
And the additions to Good Vibrations, though tastefully done, seem almost blasphemous. They sound good, but Good Vibrations is the one part of Smile that was absolutely, undoubtedly, incontrovertibly *finished* at the time, and was a massive success. It should have been left as it was.
As for the bonus tracks – a lot of it’s stuff we’ve heard before, but the montage of backing vocals is still gorgeous. And the 1967 piano recording of Surf’s Up may be even better than the 1966 one. Beautiful, beautiful music.
As for other aspects, the packaging is beautiful. The book that comes with it is great, and I’m particularly glad that no punches are pulled when it comes to Mike Love – it’s made very clear that he had a problem with the lyrics and found them inappropriate, though he also says he enjoyed the music. I was also pleased to see a lot of my oldest friends thanked in the booklet, especially the thanks to the late Bob Hanes and Greg Larson, who would have loved this.
It’s incredibly disappointing, though, that Van Dyke Parks had no active participation in the booklet. Given that they managed to interview every other figure involved in any way – all the Beach Boys, Brian’s ex-wife, Brian’s ex-sister-in-law, Dean Torrence, Mark Volman, Uncle Tom Cobley And All – there should have been some way found of involving VDP. I have no idea who’s to blame for this omission, or what the politics behind it are, but *something* should have been done.
That’s taken me 32 minutes to write. I’m going to eat now, before starting on the other four discs…
Update 15:48
Disc two there’s less to say about. Almost all sessions for Heroes & Villains and the various other tracks that started as part of that song (I’m In Great Shape, Barnyard etc), most of this material won’t be new to anyone who’s heard the various bootlegs. That said, this is in at least two generations better sound quality than I’ve heard before, and they’ve done a great job of showing the way this material evolved in the studio, and the utter professionalism of all concerned.
Disc three next.
Update 17:43 While the highlights of disc two were mostly vocal, here the highlights are instrumental – the backing track for the first half of Surf’s Up, the tag of Cabinessence, with all its bouzouki, mandolin and banjo lines weaving in and out of each other, the piano and harpsichord parts on Wonderful. Much of this stuff has been heard before of course, but never in such quality.
Another thing that you notice as you go through this material in one big session is that themes, obsessions seem to emerge. Like people being inside musical instruments or equipment – we all remember George Fell Into His French Horn, but we also have Brian in the piano, Brian in the microphone… it reminds me curiously of the people living in the piano in Zappa’s Lumpy Gravy from a year or so later than this.
Unlike the first disc, I wouldn’t recommend discs two or three to anyone who isn’t as obsessed as I am with this music. But for those who are, they’re fascinating.
Update 19:08 Of the ‘sessions’ discs, disc four is probably the most interesting as a listening experience to the non-musician, because here, as well as sessions for Smile itself, we go into the stuff surrounding Smile. So we have sessions for You’re Welcome and With Me Tonight (two Smile leftovers), for Dennis and Carl’s contemporary attempts to make music like their brother, I Don’t Know and Tones/Tune X, for Three Blind Mice (actually an outtake from before Pet Sounds, but included on Smile bootlegs so often they presumably thought it had to be there) and for Cool, Cool Water (a post-Smile reworking of some Smile material) and we have Teeter Totter Love, a track Brian wrote and produced for photographer Jasper Dailey, who has an almost Wild Man Fisher quality to his vocals.
This makes it the most varied of the discs, and the one least concerned with repeated slightly different takes of small snippets.
It also has three ‘hidden’ extra tracks, including a totally different edit of Heroes & Villains, compiled entirely from sections that weren’t used in the main edit on disc one, with different verse and cantina vocals. Well worth listening to.
And now… to disc five. The last disc (unless my stylus arrives now, which is unlikely) and one composed entirely of one song… Good Vibrations.
Update 20:38
And so 12 hours after I hit publish on this, we come to an end.
Truth be told there’s little on disc five of this that will come as a surprise to anyone. There’s been more session material released for this track – both legitimately and otherwise – than for any other, and the main thing I noticed about this is that the sessions are far less edited down. Which, given how well I know this material, was disconcerting – “Wait, that’s not where he says ‘that really felt good, let’s hear it’” and so on.
But what we have here is essentially the ‘Good Vibrations (sessions)’ bits from the Good Vibrations box/Smiley Smile – Wild Honey CD/Hawthorne, CA CD/Pet Sounds Sessions box writ large. We hear attempts at the song from every existing session for it, of which there were many. We hear sections that don’t make it onto the final track, and we hear, slowly but surely, how Brian Wilson sculpted the perfect pop single out of what started as a couple of simple riffs.
Much like disc four, the disc ends with a Frankenstein version of Good Vibrations, with the alternate verse lyrics by Tony Asher going into the chorus from the Rarities version, then into a stereo version of the “I don’t know where but she sends me there” bit missing a few crucial vocal overdubs, then into the fuzz-bass/fast ‘hum-de-ah’ section. It’s interesting, but it’s not a patch on the single.
I’ve still not got my new stylus, so I can’t yet listen to the vinyl, but on the basis of the five CDs totalling more than six and a half hours of music, and the superb packaging, I’d say that while this isn’t something I could recommend to anyone who isn’t as obsessed with the Beach Boys as I am, anyone who’s even considering buying this box set will love it.
For some of you who aren’t, I’ll recommend the 2-CD version, but with the following caveat (which my regular readers, at least, will get) – Smile is the greatest album in the world in the same way that Evil Of The Daleks may be the best Doctor Who story. With Evil Of The Daleks we have one surviving episode, a soundtrack, a bit of film footage shot on set, a load of still photographs and a novelisation. From that, we can tell it was great, but you’re not going to convince anyone who only quite liked David Tennant. In the same way, The Smile Sessions, in whatever form, is a wonderful collection of all the evidence we need to show that had Smile been finishable in 1967, it would undoubtedly have been the best album released up to that point. But those of you who just want something nice to listen to should stick with Brian Wilson’s 2004 completed version.
Polished as it has been, this is still music that requires a great deal of work on the part of the listener. The amazing thing is, it repays that work.
The Smile that you send out returns to you.
Ends
While waiting for Smile, some contemporary albums on Spotify
My Smile Sessions box set is in the post right now. It should be arriving tomorrow. If, like me, you are getting incredibly excited for this box set’s release tomorrow, here’s a dozen or so albums from 1966 through 1968 that go well with the feel of Smile, or in some cases contrast well with it. All can be listened to free on Spotify.
First up, the Beach Boys’ own releases of 1967, Smiley Smile and Wild Honey.
These are often overlooked because they’re not Smile, but there are a number of incredible moments of beauty on them.
The Many Moods Of Murry Wilson, on the other hand, is much less good. But it’s interesting to note that while Brian couldn’t get his masterwork completed, his dad was able to release his own album the same year.
Song Cycle is what Van Dyke Parks did next after Smile, and is his most Smile-like material. Beautiful, baffling, utterly wonderful, this is unlike any other music Parks made later, and unlike anything anyone else did either.
Safe As Milk by Captain Beefheart may seem an odd choice, but at this time, when the boundary between pop music and countercultural rock was far more porous, and the unlikeliest people were having commercial success, Beefheart’s first album actually has a lot in common with the pop music of the time. There’s a definite L.A. *sound* at this time, and there’s a continuum from Zappa and Beefheart at the most extreme end to the Beach Boys and Monkees at the other end, with Love and the Doors somewhere in the middle.
How To Speak Hip by Del Close is a comedy album with which Brian Wilson was obsessed in 1966.
Odessa by the Bee Gees is actually from 1969, so outside this timeframe, but I include it because it’s another example of a resolutely ‘square’ vocal harmony group, with three brothers in, doing something utterly bizarre and uncommercial. Oddly, Black Sheep, Van Dyke Parks’ Smile parody written and recorded for the film Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story, sounds far more like Odessa than it does Smile.
Present Tense by Sagittarius is one of several collaborations under various names by Curt Boettcher and Brian Wilson’s old songwriting partner Gary Usher. My World Fell Down, the main single from this, is sung by Glen Campbell (who had toured as a Beach Boy) and Bruce Johnston (of the Beach Boys) and is possibly the best attempt at a Smile-alike I’ve ever heard. The album also features comedy interludes in some songs, performed by the Firesign Theatre – again, very like Wilson’s idea of doing an album full of humour.
The Pentangle by Pentangle is a bit of an odd one. In the mid-late 60s there was actually almost no back-and-forth influence between the LA musicians and their British contemporaries, apart from the huge names like the Beatles. But I think there’s something of the same spirit that animated Smile about this, with its marrying of older, ‘outdated’ forms of music (traditional folk in the case of Pentangle, vaudeville and Americana for Smile) with attempts to move popular music as a whole forward.
And likewise Gorilla by the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band mixes 1920s novelty songs, comedy bits, and up-to-the-moment progressive pop.
Da Capo by Love is half of the greatest album ever made (the side-long blues jam rather spoils it for me). Intense and paranoid, yet utterly beautiful, this has a lot of the childlike creepiness of Smile.
Head by the Monkees I’ve already discussed.
Feelin’ Groovy by Harper’s Bizarre combines harmonies that are, if anything, over-sweet, with songwriting by people like Paul Simon, Randy Newman, and Van Dyke Parks, the last of whom also arranged the album.
(Albums I would have included but which are not Spotifiable – Genuine Imitation Life Gazette by the Four Seasons, Absolutely Free by the Mothers Of Invention, Switched On Bach by Wendy Carlos, The Wichita Train Whistle Sings by Michael Nesmith, Carnival Of Sound by Jan & Dean, Place Vendôme by the Swingle Singers with the Modern Jazz Quartet, Walk Away Renee/Pretty Ballerina by the Left Banke)
The Beach Boys On CD: Smiley Smile/Wild Honey
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
Smiley Smile/Wild Honey
1967 was in many ways the most important turning point in the Beach Boys’ career. After Pet Sounds, the musical world was waiting on tenterhooks for the next Beach Boys album, Smile, a collaboration between Brian Wilson and Van Dyke Parks that would, according to Dennis Wilson, ‘make Pet Sounds stink’.
Due to a combination of intra-band tensions, legal problems between the band and Capitol records, and Brian Wilson’s worsening mental health, the album was never finished, though most of it has surfaced over the years on compilations, and Brian Wilson made a re-recorded, complete, version in 2004, with Parks’ assistance.
Instead, the band regrouped – initially without Johnston, who was disaffected enough to leave the band for a few months, and recorded a new album, Smiley Smile, based on the Smile material but featuring mostly just the Beach Boys themselves instrumentally.
This stripped-down, almost amateurish, sound, which continued in various forms for the two albums after this, was a critical and commercial flop. Where listeners had been promised a progressive, psychedelic masterpiece, they got stoned giggling, songs about vegetables, and something that sounded small and intimate at a time when everyone was expecting bigger, more flamboyant, recordings.
However, with the benefit of hindsight, these albums contain some of the band’s very best work.
Smiley Smile
Smiley Smile shares two things in common with The Beach Boys Love You, an album that came out ten years later – they are the only two Beach Boys albums to consist entirely of previously-unreleased Brian Wilson songs, and they are the two albums which most polarise Beach Boys fandom.
In general, the split for both is along age-related lines. Those under about forty-five, whose musical tastes were influenced by punk and post-punk indie music, tend to love both albums, and think of them as examples of raw, unvarnished genius. Those older than that see them as embarassing, shambolic messes. (There are, of course, exceptions on both sides).
I am thirty-two, and Smiley Smile and Love You are my two favourite Beach Boys albums.
Recorded almost entirely in Brian Wilson’s home studio, Smiley Smile is an astonishingly fragile, beautiful album, unlike anything I’ve ever heard in the history of popular music. Over extraordinarily bare instrumental tracks – often just a single Baldwin organ or one-note piano or bass part, with ambient noises and stoned laughter, and with a certain amount of studio trickery (mostly playing with tape speed), we have fragile, whimsical, half-thought-out but gorgeous melodies, sung with some of the greatest vocal performances of all time.
It’s minimalist, beautiful, fragile, gorgeous, at times hilariously funny, at times impenetrable. Although it was released as much through desperation as anything else, it’s probably the bravest album ever released by a major artist – the sudden shifts in style of a Dylan or Bowie are nothing compared to this.
This was also the first Beach Boys album to feature Carl Wilson’s voice more prominently than any other, and the first to have a credit of ‘produced by the Beach Boys’ rather than ‘produced by Brian Wilson’. Both of these are signs of things to come.
line-up
Brian Wilson, Carl Wilson, Dennis Wilson, Mike Love, Al Jardine, Bruce Johnston (tracks one, two and six only)
Heroes & Villains
According to legend (and where Smile is concerned there’s more legend than fact), on the first day Brian Wilson and Van Dyke Parks collaborated, they wrote four songs – Heroes & Villains, Wonderful, Cabinessence and Surf’s Up. If true, this may well have been the most productive day’s work in history – at least two of those four songs have a reasonable claim for the title of ‘greatest song ever written’.
Whether true or not, it is known that this song definitely was the first collaboration between the two, and it was to have been the centrepiece of the Smile album – its themes both lyrical (growing old and looking back at youth and forward to the youth of the next generation, the Old West, escape) and musical (the chorus theme recurs in the majority of the Smile music) would have tied the album together. And the song went through a huge number of reworkings in the studio, with many sections being recorded and discarded.
The version that was finally released as a single, consisting mostly of Smile recordings, is a masterpiece, though a more intellectual one than the Beach Boys’ earlier works – whereas Brian and his previous collaborators are or were primarily concerned with evoking emotion, Parks at this point was more interested in exploring ideas.
Starting off over a track based very closely on Phil Spector’s production of Save The Last Dance For Me for Ike and Tina Turner, the melody and chord sequence of the first two verses are almost moronically simple – a simple stepwise descent (scales, especially descending ones, show up over and over again in Smile) over a chord sequence of I, V-of-V and V.
But while Brian had obviously been thinking of Phil Spector when writing the music, Parks had been thinking of Marty Robbins and Western ballads, and so we have a torrent of punning syllables telling a story of the old west:
I’ve been in this town so long that back in the city I’ve been taken for lost and gone and unknown for a long, long time
Fell in love years ago with an innocent girl from the Spanish and Indian home of the heroes and villains
Once at night cotillion squared the fight and she was right in the rain of the bullets that eventually brought her down
But she’s still dancing in the night unafraid of what a dude’ll do in the town full of heroes and villains
Clever as it seems, some of this lyric loses a great deal out of the larger context of the Smile album – the ‘dude’ll do’ for example is meant to reference a cock crow, which would tie in to the song Barnyard (“Out in the barnyard, the chickens do their number”), and dancing, American Indians, and facing one’s fear would all recur in many of the other songs.
Brian sings these lines over a thumping bass and drum track with the rest of the band providing simple ‘ooh’ harmonies in the first verse, growing steadily more complex and contrapuntal before we go into the chorus.
The chorus to Heroes & Villains is yet another example of the musical idea that had been obsessing Brian for the previous two years and that dominated the unreleased Smile – a two-chord riff (similar intervals to the Good Vibrations chorus, but a tone lower, and with the first chord in the riff being minor rather than major) repeated, which then moves up a whole tone (as in both Good Vibrations and California Girls ). In many ways this chorus can be seen as the culmination of the previous two years’ work.
But whereas those songs had intricate, multi-layered orchestrations, the instrumentation on the chorus here is just a harpsichord playing a repeated figure, a Baldwin organ holding down a single note, and some hand percussion. Everything else on this astonishing section of music is the Beach Boys’ voices, and the fact that the track can sound so full with so little instrumentation shows how utterly unique they were as a vocal group – something that shines through throughout this album.
We then have a reprise of the verse material, largely wordless, before a fully a capella verse which again shows just how far the band had come vocally even in a year – compare the intricate, shimmering, layered contrapuntal motion here to the simple lines of, say, Sloop John B .
The next section, featuring vocals, Baldwin and harpsichord again (“my children were raised”) has the same melody as the verses, but a totally different chord sequence, the top of the chord (the ‘right hand’) alternating between C# and F# (the same kind of two-chord shuffle as in the Good Vibrations chorus) but with a bassline going up and down an ascending scale from C# to G# and back again. While they don’t sound similar, rehearsal takes of this show that it was clearly inspired by Mister Sandman by the Chordettes. (For those who are wondering, the backing vocals under this section are singing “boys and girls and boys and girls and…”)
And we finish with an a capella verse – the melody remaining the same but harmonised much more richly – followed by the chorus to fade.
While one of the best singles the band had ever released to this point, this ‘only’ reached number 12 in the US chart when it was released, and to all intents and purposes this is the song that marks the end of the Beach Boys as a commercial force in their own country.
Vegetables
This second Wilson/Parks collaboration couldn’t be more different – partly because some of Parks’ more idiosyncratic original lyrics weren’t used.
Over a backing track of just a bass, a blown jug, some sound effects and percussion created by crunching on vegetables, the band sing in unison a simple song about the joys of eating one’s greens. Then, at the end, we segue into a recording of the song from the Smile sessions – a cascade of overlapping vocals over just a piano (though again, it sounds far, far fuller than that), with Brian singing “I know that you’ll feel better when you send us in a letter and tell us the name of your favourite vegetable”.
This is so unlike everything else released at the time (though lyrically surprisingly similar to Frank Zappa’s roughly contemporaneous Call Any Vegetable ) that it’s unsurprising that listeners turned away in droves. Listening now, though, it still sounds fresh and interesting in a way that much of the more critically-acclaimed music of the time doesn’t.
Fall Breaks And Back To Winter (Woody Woodpecker Symphony)
A reworking of an instrumental recorded for Smile, Mrs O’Leary’s Cow (sometimes known as Fire) , whereas that track was full of sturm und drang, this is gentle and contemplative. Staying for the most part on one chord, we have some absurdly low organ bass going up and down a chromatic scale, while the band sing block-harmony ‘aahs’. There’s a feeling of nature about the track – what sounds like a harmonica playing excerpts from the Woody Woodpecker theme, and percussion sounding like a woodpecker’s beak on wood, while the bass vocals (presumably by Love, though with the tape slowed down) are reminiscent of a bullfrog.
She’s Goin’ Bald
Credited to Wilson/Love/Parks , Van Dyke Parks’ credit is because the earlier part of this song is based on a Smile track, He Gives Speeches, for which Parks wrote the lyrics. This is actually a wonderfully bizarre Wilson/Love comedy song.
Over a three-chord sequence ( I-ii-V7 in F) played on organ and bongos, the band sing a backing vocal part originally written for an unused section of Heroes and Villains, while Brian (with Mike answering him) tells a story of peeking in to the room of a woman whose hair is falling out. (Shades of Swift’s The Lady’s Dressing Room here). Quite why Love found this a laughing matter given that his own hairline was rapidly receding I don’t know.
We then have a section with a huge amount of tape speed-up – to the point that the band sound like they’re singing through helium – where to the tune of Get A Job by the Silhouettes, the band sing “what a blow” (apparently as a play on words – “blow” “job”).
Then, in a manner similar to the introductory narration of 1940s radio adventure serials or children’s adventure cartoons, we have a description of the woman’s actions “she made a bee-line to her room and grabbed all kinda juice/she started pouring it on her head and thought she’d grow it back”) over diminished chords on the piano, rising in a chromatic scale from Edim to Bdim.
And we end with a bluesy variant of the original three chord sequence (I7-II7-V in B\flat ), played on piano, bass and acoustic guitar (the first guitar to appear on this album) as the band sing “you’re too late, mama, ain’t nothin’ upside your head”. They’re all heart…
Little Pad
A gorgeous little song by Brian with almost no lyrics, this starts with the band giggling and singing the song in comedy voices, before breaking into some gorgeous hummed harmonies with Hawaiian guitar. We then alternate between Carl, backed by guitar, singing wordlessly, Carl backed by organ and clip-clop percussion singing single lines about wanting “a little pad in Hawaii”, and the band backed by piano and guitar humming.
The song’s a nothing, but it’s a gentle, heartfelt, beautiful vocal performance.
Good Vibrations
With Me Tonight
And here, for the first time since Summer Days, we have the return of the Fannie Mae riff. The song alternates between the band singing “on and on she go down be doo dah” to the same tune as, for example, “help me Rhonda, help help me Rhonda”, and wordlessly backing Carl as he sings “with me tonight, I know you’re with me tonight”.
Rather than being a fully constructed song, this is one of many little fragments of indescribable beauty scattered throughout the album. With just an organ, a bass and his family’s voices, Brian Wilson could conjure heart-stopping wonder out of the simplest ingredients.
Wind Chimes
Another utterly strange track that defies analysis in any conventional sense, this is one of the most beautifully strange pieces of music the band ever commited to vinyl. A Wilson/Parks song originally intended for Smile, the Smile version is a fairly standard pop song in structure, with a steady beat.
The Smiley Smile version, though, does everything in its power to get rid of the standard pulse of pop music. While it’s still (more or less) keeping to a regular beat, the backing track is just held chords on piano and organ, the titular wind chimes themselves, and free-tempo guitar, and the vocals (shared between Brian, Carl, Dennis and Mike) are sung in a free, off-tempo manner. The whole thing conspires to give the impression of random beauty, while not having a note out of place.
And then, just as the song ends, we have so far down in the mix it’s almost inaudible without turning the volume up all the way, one of the most glorious pieces of music in the band’s career – the band singing, as a round, the phrase “whispering winds set my wind chimes a tinklin’”. Exquisite.
Gettin’ Hungry
A Wilson/Love song, this one points the way forward to the R&B flavour of the Wild Honey album, but this kind of simplistic rock song doesn’t really work in the stripped-down Smiley Smile style, and it’s the one truly weak track on the album.
Someone must have disagreed, though, because the truly bizarre decision was made to release this as a single – and not even under the Beach Boys’ name but as by Brian Wilson and Mike Love. Unsurprisingly, it wasn’t a hit.
Love seems to have had a soft spot for the song, though, as he remade it in the late 70s with his side-project, Celebration.
Wonderful
Quite possibly the single most beautiful song ever written, Wonderful is another Wilson/Parks song, telling the story of a young girl who goes off and loses her virginity, and her innocence more generally, at a young age:
Farther down the path was a mystery,
Through the recess, the chalk and numbers
A boy bumped into her one, one, wonderful
before returning, older and wiser, to her parents:
She’ll return, in love with her liberty,
Never known as a non-believer
She’ll smile and thank God for one, one, wonderful
In many ways, this can be seen as a counterpart both of Caroline, No and of the Beatles’ She’s Leaving Home, but where those songs are judgemental either of the girl or of the parents, this song seeks reconciliation and forgiveness on both sides and suggests that innocence can actually be regained with experience. It’s a more mature, reflective song than the other two, great as they undoubtedly are.
Not only that, it manages this while having concern for the aesthetics of the lyric in a way that neither of those other songs do. Both the other songs treat words functionally, as a means of conveying a single piece of information. By contrast, Parks’ lyrics are carefully chosen to be beautiful themselves, independent of the meaning they carry. At this point Parks was almost certainly the most artistically advanced lyricist in the music industry.
And the music matches this. A variant of the Heroes & Villains melody, this relationship is far less audible on the Smiley Smile version than on the version recorded for Smile, thanks to the lack of backing vocals, but harmonically this is far closer to pieces like Caroline, No or Don’t Talk (Put Your Head On My Shoulder) than the harmonically simplistic material elsewhere on the album, with a chord change almost every beat.
Carl Wilson’s soft, beautiful vocal performance over a piano and organ is suddenly interrupted straight after the ‘boy bumping’ by a totally different piece of music. Here we have the sounds of a rather stoned party, with people saying things like “don’t think you’re God… vibrations” while Mike Love sings a lounge singer version of the Heroes & Villains melody over a piano, before we return to the main song. Often dismissed as an unwanted interruption, this new section actually manages to dramatise the situation surrounding our protagonist’s loss of innocence well.
If there was any justice in the world, this song would now be regarded as every bit the classic that God Only Knows is, as on every level that matters – musical and lyrical sophistication, beauty, the compassion that pours out of every syllable of the song – this is the superior of that song and almost every other I’ve heard.
Whistle In
And the album finishes with another simple, fragmentary vocal chant, written by Brian most notable for Mike’s bass vocal part.
Wild Honey
Whereas Smiley Smile had been an act of desperation, on Wild Honey, the band seem to have deliberately chosen to keep the stripped-down aesthetic they’d started on the previous album, but to turn it towards more conventional R&B-flavoured rock/pop music.
While it’s a less challenging listen than Smiley Smile, it also sounds like it was less challenging to record. While it has its moments, it’s the first Beach Boys album about which there’s nothing innovative, nothing new. Parts of it are half-arsed at best, and there’s a distinct feeling of “will this do?” hanging over all but a handful of the best tracks.
This is hardly surprising – Brian Wilson was starting his long process of withdrawal from the band in the wake of the Smile disaster, and the rest of the band weren’t yet ready to fill his shoes. While all but two of these songs are Wilson/Love collaborations, Carl Wilson’s description of this as “a very un-Brian album” is largely true.
Possibly this was understandable. In total this was the sixteenth album the band released in a little over five years. 1967 was to be the last year in which the band would release multiple studio albums, and the music improved because of it.
line-up
Brian Wilson, Carl Wilson, Dennis Wilson, Mike Love, Al Jardine, Bruce Johnston
Wild Honey
The album starts out strong with this great rocker, showcasing a soulful side of Carl Wilson’s voice that hadn’t been heard before (when I’ve played this track to people who aren’t familiar with it, nobody has guessed it’s a Beach Boys track – some have even guessed it’s Jack White singing). Based around a simple chord sequence (slightly similar to the other great Beach Boys attempt at R&B, Sail On, Sailor ), with a piano vamp and an electro-theremin part by Paul Tanner, this should have been a massive hit.
And had it been released a few months later, when every band was going ‘back to its roots’ and 50s nostalgia was starting to come in, it would have been. In the context of spring 1968, with Lady Madonna in the charts, Bill Haley charting again in the UK, and Elvis back on form with Guitar Man and U.S. Male, this would have made perfect sense. In October 1967, though, with San Francisco ( Flowers In Your Hair ), and King Midas In Reverse in the charts, this sounded like yesterday, not tomorrow, and accordingly only reached number 31 in the US and twenty-nine in the UK.
Aren’t You Glad
A rather lovely little poppy track that remained in the band’s setlist for a couple of years, this song, with its 6th chords, is the most harmonically interesting of the new songs on the album (though that’s not saying much). The lead vocal is shared between Mike, Brian and Carl.
Love’s verse vocal is one of his very best – he’s high in his tenor range here, but singing with hardly a hint of the nasality that usually plagues him in this range, and comfortably bouncing along on top of the music with a light touch he normally doesn’t have. And the two Carls on the chorus again show his newfound soul vocal skills.
On the other hand, on the bridge Brian is sounding notably thinner than he had even a year or so earlier, and seems to be straining for notes he would previously have reached with ease. It might be apathy, or it might be the first sign of the slow vocal deterioration that would set in rapidly by the mid-70s, but appears to have slowly started earlier.
I Was Made To Love Her
A creditable cover of Stevie Wonder’s then-current hit, this version cuts out the rather jarring “through thick and thin” section from the original (the band recorded this section too, but discarded it), and misses out Wonder’s harmonica part. This version swaps the original’s light fluidity for something a little heavier and clunkier (the bass on the track is clearly inferior to James Jamerson’s wonderful playing, so they’ve sensibly gone for power over finesse) but also showcases Carl Wilson’s talents as a vocal chameleon – his performance here sounds eerily like Wonder.
Country Air
The most Smiley Smile-esque of the tracks here, this is another one backed by organ and piano (though this time also with bass and drums) and alternating between wordless vocals and simple, repetitive lyrics chanted by the group. Melodically a rewrite of Da Doo Ron Ron, this is a far gentler, softer thing than that record, with a lovely falsetto flourish at the end of each chorus.
A Thing Or Two
I think it says everything that needs to be said about this song that I’ve listened to this album maybe once a month on average since I bought it sixteen years ago, meaning I must have heard this song a minimum two hundred times, yet when I looked through the tracklist I thought “which one’s that again?”
To all intents and purposes a rewrite of Gettin’ Hungry , it’s a more coherent, but more banal, performance and arrangement than that track, though Love and Carl Wilson do their best with the material.
Darlin’
A rewrite of Thinkin’ ‘Bout You, Baby , a song Brian and Mike had written for singer Sharon Marie some three years earlier, the astonishing thing about this is how well the same (or similar) musical material works both at expressing wistful longing in the original and lustful joy in this new version.
Originally offered by Brian to Redwood, the band that later became Three Dog Night, this is a joyous uptempo rocker whose augmented chords and major sevenths make it more harmonically sophisticated than the material around it, and it’s a production which has had some attention paid to it, again unlike the surrounding songs. Unfortunately the lyrics haven’t had quite the same attention paid to them – “I’m gonna love you every single night, because I think that you’re doggone outtasight” is a hard line to sing with any conviction. Fortunately, Carl Wilson more than manages.
Released as a single, this just scraped the top twenty in the US and reached number 11 in the UK. It remains in the setlist of the Beach Boys (and the members’ various post-1998 projects) to this day, being one of their best-loved late-60s singles.
I’d Love Just Once To See You
While this song is credited to Wilson/Love, I suspect it was just agreed to give both men joint credit for every song on the album, because this is as obvious an example of a Brian Wilson solo composition as I’ve ever heard.
This is the first of a series of slice-of-life songs that would become a minor thread running through the next few years of Brian’s work, where he would write a song that just described whatever he was thinking or doing at the time. Often these would be some of the best things he would produce.
This isn’t one of his best songs, but it is a fun, light song that manages to overcome its obviously impromptu nature by virtue of its childlike lightness of touch and honesty. And the punchline to the song is genuinely funny the first time you hear it.
Brian sings lead here, and sounds more engaged than on anything else on the album. He’s occasionally performed this live (notably on the Smile tours in 2004).
Here Comes The Night
Another Brian lead, and we’re back to the organ-led R&B feel again. Not the Them song of the same name, this is a rather by-the-numbers song which however manages the interesting trick of having the chorus apparently lose its tonal centre altogether – normally one would have a harmonically simple chorus while the verses are complex, but this has simple verses in C but a chorus whose chords are Cmin, A\flat 7 and F, which are chords that just should not go together.
Not one of the better songs on the album, this was nonetheless liked enough by the band that they remade it twelve years later in an ill-advised attempt to ‘go disco’.
Let The Wind Blow
A Wilson/Love song, apparently more by Love than Wilson, this is rightly regarded as a classic. Harmonically simplistic, this has a gorgeous melody which does have more of Love’s fingerprints than Wilson’s on it (compare to, say, Big Sur from the Holland album). The ‘arched’ backing vocals, going up and down the scale wordlessly, are definitely Wilson’s contribution, though, bearing a strong resemblance to motifs that show up throughout Smile.
This is also, astonishingly, the first waltz the band ever recorded (sections of Cabinessence, which had not yet been released, are also in waltz time, as was part of an unreleased version of Heroes & Villains, but this is the first time an entire song is in 3/4). And Brian, Carl and Mike all add great vocals.
But lyrically, the song has a central problem. The lyrics are all pleas, of the form “let X, let Y, but don’t let her go”. This is a familar form – e.g. Blue Suede Shoes (“you can knock me down, tread on my face, slander my name all over the place… but don’t you step on my blue suede shoes”).
But here, X and Y are all positive things – “let the bees make honey, let the poor find money, take away their sorrow, give them sunshine tomorrow, but don’t take her out of my life…”
This avails itself of only two possible interpretations – either Mike Love is such a misanthrope that he hates bees, helping the poor, sunshine and so on, and is only willing to tolerate them if the nameless woman remains with him, or he is the greediest person in the world and wants the moon on a stick.
Great track anyway though.
How She Boogalooed It
Easily the worst song on the album, this track still has an important historical status, as it’s the first original Beach Boys song (not counting surf instrumentals) that doesn’t have a Brian Wilson co-writing credit. Credited to Love, Johnston, Jardine and Carl Wilson,, with Jardine on lead vocals, this sounds like it was the result of a jam session with a couple of quick overdubs thrown on, and probably took slightly less time to write than it takes to listen to. All four co-writers would do better later.
Mama Says
Credited to Wilson and Love, this little vocal chant (the words “eat a lot, sleep a lot, brush ‘em like crazy/run a lot, do a lot, never be lazy” repeated over and over) is a snippet that was originally part of Vegetables, and was recorded as such for Smile.
CD Bonus Tracks
Heroes And Villains (Alternate Take)
Not quite an alternate take, despite the title, the first part of this is identical to the single version as a performance, though a slightly different mix. But where the single goes into the chorus, this skips both the chorus and the ‘la la la’ verse, and goes straight into the a capella wordless verse (in what sounds like the same performance, but with either a very different mix or a different recording of at least Love’s part).
We then move into a totally different piece of music – the ‘cantina’ section. This is a waltz time section, which returns to the dancing girl and the shooting from the first verse, over Western saloon-bar piano, with Brian and Mike trading off vocal lines, before ending with a jokey “You’re under arrest!”
We then go back to familiar territory, going into the “my children were raised” section as used in the single, but where the single version ends “healthy, wealthy and wise” before tailing off in ‘boys and girls and’ vocals, this has a sharp edit and becomes “healthy, wealthy and often wise”, with the piano coming in again on ‘often’.
We then have half a verse over the same backing track used for the first two verses – “at three score and five, I’m very much alive, I’ve still got the jive to survive with the heroes and villains” – before heavily echoed bass vocals and whistling are used to emulate the sound of a train picking up speed and going into the distance.
And to finish we have a vaguely cowboy-film sounding fade into the distance – pizzicato strings, acoustic guitar, harmonica, clip-clop percussion and wordless vocals in a variant of the verse musical material. In the entire song we haven’t heard what became the chorus of the finished version. This version is, if anything, slightly superior to the finished one, but it’s far less catchy and commercial.
Good Vibrations (Various Sessions)
This is a sequence of snippets from various sessions during the process of recording Good Vibrations, starting with the very first session and ending with a pieced together mostly-instrumental version of the track including a lot of unused sections, including an interesting fuzz-bass part and a gorgeous ‘hum de ah’ vocal harmony part.
Good Vibrations (Early Take)
This is the February 17th backing track with the February 18th guide vocal with Tony Asher’s lyrics, as discussed in more detail in the main Good Vibrations section.
You’re Welcome
The B-side of Heroes & Villains, this is a simple three-chord vocal chant with a ton of reverb, backed only with a glockenspiel and a bass drum, but is absolutely lovely.
Their Hearts Were Full Of Spring
Before the Wild Honey album was decided on, the Beach Boys (with Brian and minus Bruce) were going to release a live album called Lei’d In Hawaii, featuring Smiley Smile-esque arrangements. Unfortunately, the tapes were deemed unusable, even after a session of ‘as live’ re-recording. This recording is taken from the rehearsals for the live shows, and is an a capella recording of an old Four Freshmen song by Bobby Troup, which the group had already recorded with different lyrics as A Young Man Has Gone.
The song itself is a sentimental piece of nothing – it tries to encompass the lives of two people, but we’re given no actual information about them except that they married, eventually died, and ‘their hearts were full of spring’, so have no real reason to care. The band do an exceptional job of the vocals, but it’s not really worth a listen.
This song has been a staple of the band throughout its existence, from their first recordings through to today’s touring version of the band, and so many more recordings of it exist, with two more official releases still to go (on Live In London and the Good Vibrations: Thirty Years Of The Beach Boys box set), and comparing versions by different line-ups can be interesting in showing the strengths and weaknesses of various vocalists, but other than that this is immensely skippable.
Can’t Wait Too Long
In his liner notes for the Smiley Smile/Wild Honey twofer, David Leaf refers to this as the best piece of unreleased music in the Beach Boys’ vaults, which suggests that he’d not listened to very much of it. Which isn’t to say that this Wild Honey-era piece isn’t nice, but most of it’s just slight variations on a two-chord melodic idea originally sketched out during the Smile sessions. It’s nicely arranged, with good vocals in the few sections where there are vocals (though an alternate version of this showed up on the Good Vibrations: Thirty Years Of The Beach Boys box set with more vocals), but it’s nothing extraordinary. It does, however, at the end, feature a bass fade playing something very like the riff from Shortenin’ Bread – a riff which we’ll return to a lot in volumes two and three…
Spotify Playlist – Jake Thackray, Arthur Alexander, Incredible String Band, Dudley Moore
This week’s playlist doesn’t have a theme as such, but is just some music I like.
After an introductory snippet, we start with Anyone But You by The Mumps. The Mumps were a late 70s art-rock/punk band led by reality TV star Lance Loud (who takes lead on this) and musician Kristian Hoffman (who sings lead on the middle eight). In this form, this song sounds like a very rough demo for the version on Hoffman’s 2002 duets album &, possibly the best album of the last decade, which is near-identical to this but tighter and with Stew singing Lance Loud’s part (other people Hoffman duets with on the album include Darian Sahanaja, Van Dyke Parks, Russel Mael, Rufus Wainwright and El Vez). Unfortunately, Hoffman’s solo work is not yet on Spotify, but this will give some idea of how it sounds. But buy Hoffman’s album, seriously. Best album of the last ten years.
Where Have You Been All My Life? by Arthur Alexander is, shamefully, the only track by the great soul singer on Spotify (not only that, he’s not on eMusic either – a definite argument for the continued existence of CDs). Alexander is mostly known now for his influence on British bands like the Beatles (who covered many of his songs live) or the Stones, but he really deserves much more recognition.
I’ve had a minor obsession with the Threepenny Opera since LOEG: Century was released a few months ago, especially Pirate Jenny. I usually listen to the version by Nina Simone because she interprets the English version of the lyrics best, but Lotte Lenya singing it with Kurt Weill’s original orchestration is the definitive version in the original German.
Suzy Creamcheese by Teddy & His Patches is not, strangely, a cover of the Zappa song, but a totally different song, obviously inspired by the spoken bit and percussion jams at the end of Freak Out! but sounding far more like the Thirteenth Floor Elevators, with a bit of the Count Five thrown in. A marvellous garage rave-up.
Lady Lynda by The Beach Boys is included because I’ve always felt that Al Jardine was a horribly underrated vocalist – being in a band with Brian and Carl Wilson would let anyone get overlooked, but I actually think he was at least on their level, and while this song (a hit for the band in the UK, written by Jardine about his then-wife, based around Jesu, Joy Of Man’s Desiring) isn’t one of their best, it does really showcase his vocal abilities. In fact more than that – when the ‘live’ album and DVD this is from came out, it was claimed that there were no vocal overdbubs after the fact, in which case (as you can hear here) Jardine must be the only man in the world who can double-track himself live, while simultaneously singing a totally different backing vocal line – sometimes without even moving his lips…
Baby It’s You by The Shirelles is the first of two Bacharach songs on this playlist – in fact the backing track here is Bacharach’s home demo (as you can tell from the dropped-in solo, awkward and out of place). What always gets me about this song is the ‘cheat, cheat’ in the second verse. She knows that ‘what they say about you’ is true, but has chosen to forgive, but not to forget…
Little Miss Britten by Dudley Moore is Moore doing Little Miss Muffet in the style of Britten’s settings of folk songs for Peter Pears. Absolutely *cutting*. Moore never really got to develop his talent for musical comedy after choosing essentially to become Peter Cook’s straight man, but while these early pastiches are a little glib he could easily have become as good as Tom Lehrer or Flanders & Swann in his own right, rather than being the assistant to an even greater genius…
I Just Don’t Know What To Do With Myself by Dusty Springfield is another Bacharach/David song. This one has been covered by Elvis Costello (where I first heard the song) and The White Stripes, but this is the definitive version. I was reading someone (Bob Stanley quoted by Jonathan Calder, who I also just realised isn’t on my blogroll, something I will rectify forthwith) recently talking about how at the time, Dusty Springfield was only seen as one of a number of interchangeable vocalists like Cilla Black, Lulu or Sandy Shaw, but now she’s the only one who is still an influence on many, many new singers.
Ride The Wild Surf by Jan & Dean is a fairly formulaic J&D/Brian Wilson early surf song, appaling vocals and all (these records are a lot more dissonant than people remember), but I love the ‘gotta take that one last ride’ hook, the ‘ride ride ride’ at the end of the middle eight (with that throbbing bass staying on one note while the vocals go up and up) and especially the end of the track. Those elements are all things that either Wilson or Jan Berry (probably Wilson) almost certainly lifted from the Beatles (compare the end of every other Jan & Dean or Beach Boys single up to that point, with their fades, to the ‘one-two-three, one-two-three, CHORD!’ ending of both this and I Want To Hold Your Hand).
A Very Cellular Song by The Incredible String Band is a thirteen-minute multi-sectioned song with gospel and folk elements, featuring organ, harpsichord and crumhorn. The album this was on went top ten in 1967… (relistening to this recently, I was annoyed to discover that one of my own new songs bears too much resemblance to this – I’m rewriting it in my head at the moment).
Brother Gorilla (Le Gorille) by Jake Thackray is Thackray’s loose translation of Georges Brassens’ chanson. It actually sounds just like one of Thackray’s own songs – the only clue to it being a translation is the rather forced ‘swinging lissomely out of his cage’ and ‘the judge intoned with tranquility’, both of which have too many syllables for their lines. But how many other songwriters could manage to get ‘paleolithic’ into a song and have it scan? (Incidentally, a warning – this is a comedy song about a hanging judge being raped by a gorilla. Some of you might find it offensive or triggering).
Liebster Jesu, Wir Sind Hier by Dr Albert Schweitzer is, yes, that Albert Schweitzer. As well as his missionary, medical and theological work, for which he’s more widely known, he was also one of the world’s foremost interpreters of Bach on the organ in the early 20th century, even inventing several new mic-positioning techniques for recording Bach more accurately. While this has some surface noise, it’s still a lovely performance.
Wishing Well by The National Pep is one of a very small number of songs where I wrote the words as well as the music (Tilt rewrote two lines of this). In fact the song came to me, words and music, on the bus and I had to scribble it down and work out the chords later – I still can’t actually play it on the guitar, having written it without an instrument. (The last couple of lines were added later, as the bus stopped before I could finish writing, and I still don’t think they fit particularly well). Tilt and our engineer Steve managed to take my tinkly MIDI file (which Gavin R said sounded like the music from Super Mario Brothers when he heard it on its own) and Joe Meek it up enough to be usable (basically they played the MIDI file backwards through a good sampled harpsichord with reverb on it, then reversed the recording, plus a ton of other stuff), and Tilt and Laura Denison provided vocals.
C-H-I-C-K-E-N spells Chicken by The McGee Brothers is another song that some may find offensive – with good reason, as in its very first line it includes two racist epithets. Unfortunately, pre-war rural music like this (a song originally written, I believe, by the phenomenal banjo player Uncle Dave Macon) often has these elements – and I’m very grateful for Van Dyke Parks’ cover of this (unfortunately not on Spotify) for changing those lyrics while preserving the wonderful song itself.
Speaking of cover versions by Van Dyke Parks, Donovan’s Colours is a ragtime-ish instrumental version of Donovan’s 60s hit, with some lovely percussion and cello bits to it. Just gorgeous. Remind me to do several more blog posts about Parks at some point – he’s one of the unsung greats.
And Will You Remember Me by Janet Klein is a lovely little solo performance, just voice and ukulele.
This Week’s Spotify Playlist – Jake Thackray, Sparks, Bob Lind, Wild Man Fischer
For those of you who are uninterested in my increasingly recondite ramblings on comics, continuity, canon, quantum physics and Doctor Who, here’s some music…
Incidentally, I lose track of what I have and haven’t included in these, but I hope there’s always enough new stuff to keep people interested…
Come To The Sunshine by Harper’s Bizarre is one of Van Dyke Parks’ early songwriting/production works, and a little soft-pop classic.
Soulful Dress by Sugar Pie Desanto is a Chess R&B track from the early 60s, about dressing up before going out.
Vox Wah Wah Ad by The Electric Prunes is just what it says it is – the Electric Prunes demonstrating the proper use of the wah-wah pedal.
It’s A Hard Business by Wild Man Fischer and Rosemary Clooney is… wait a second… let me say that again… by Wild Man Fischer and Rosemary Clooney. Yes, that Wild Man Fischer and that Rosemary Clooney. The homeless schizophrenic outsider musician and the jazz singer who starred in White Christmas and was George Clooney’s aunt. What will I find on Spotify next – Perry Como Sings Jandek?
Mrs Toad’s Cookies by Klaatu is from the last album by the Canadian band, who were most famous for writing Calling Occupants Of Interplanetary Craft and for many people thinking they were the Beatles in disguise. I can *sort of* see the Beatles similarity here – especially McCartney – but to be honest it sounds like a collaboration between Jeff Lynne and Mike Batt. Which is no bad thing…
Wild Man Fischer and Rosemary Clooney?!
Ahem… Lighten Up, Morrissey by Sparks is a message I think we can all agree with…
Wagons West by The National Pep is another one by my own band, but again I do actually think it’s a good song. I wrote the music, my friend Tilt wrote the words. Tilt sings and plays drums, I play all the other instruments and Laura Denison also sings.
The Father, The Son And The Friendly Ghost by The Native Shrubs Of The Santa Monica Mountains is a soft-pop/bluegrass song about Casper The Friendly Ghost, Abraham Lincoln and Trotsky, a Beach Boys-esque waltz-time middle eight (with a tiny hint of Zappa in the changes in the end) contrasting with a common-time banjo-plucking verse.
Living In Sin by Janet Klein is another of her naughty covers of songs from the early part of the last century.
Wild Man Fischer and Rosemary Clooney?
Eleanor by Bob Lind is a great little track from someone who’s mostly only known for the one song Elusive Butterfly. This one’s very, very Lee Hazelwood.
Havana Moon by Chuck Berry is one of the earliest knock-offs of Louie Louie, performed solo by Berry on guitar and vocals.
Misty Roses by Colin Blunstone is one I’m sure I’ve included in a playlist before, but it’s also absolutely gorgeous. A Tim Hardin cover, with a fantastic string arrangement, this is one of those tracks that everyone should own.
Don’t Fear The Reaper by The Beautiful South is a cover version of the Blue Oyster Cult song. I used to live round the corner from Paul Heaton, and he used to go to our local pub on quiz nights, but after my sisters started coming and blatantly gawping at him he stopped going (unsure if it was coincidence…)
On Again! On Again! by Jake Thackray has the greatest opening line of any song – “I love a good bum on a woman, it makes my day/To me it is palpable proof of God’s existence a posteriori“. Anyone who can make bilingual puns in Latin while doing Carry On style humour is all right with me. This song got Thackray pegged as a misogynist by many, who couldn’t see that it was just possibly tongue in cheek (lines like “Please understand that I love and admire the frailer sex/and I honour them every bit as much as the next/misogynist” were probably not meant to be taken entirely seriously…)
And Go Back by Crabby Appleton is a great glammed-up powerpop track, produced I think by Curt Boettcher (it certainly sounds like his work – it sounds like his songwriting as well, actually)
WILD MAN FISCHER AND ROSEMARY CLOONEY?!
This Week’s Spotify Playlist… And Thank You For The #welovethenhs Response
That last post of mine threw me off my posting stride a bit, because of the sheer weight of response, by email, on Twitter, in the comments here and in the comments to Debi’s repost of it (where our one troll went to hang out – I apologise, Debi, for getting a bit too angry there with someone who is, after all, a fellow human being, albeit one who wants to condemn millions of other fellow human beings to death because she doesn’t like them…).
The response has been, frankly, ludicrous – I was even interviewed by the Wall Street Journal today in my lunch break (I are big media pundit! I am the new Iain Dale or something), which is frankly surreal, given the content of that last post – I would have thought “The NHS isn’t designed to deliberately kill old people” was as uncontroversial a statement as one could make. I wonder what other misconceptions about cherished national institutions I’ll have to try to dispel in international media. Maybe next week I’ll be telling Le Monde that Last Of The Summer Wine isn’t a paedophile ring but a whimsical Yorkshire comedy show…
Anyway, thank you to everyone who retweeted, commented or linked that post of mine, and now I’ll get back to the stuff I *meant* to be posting this week. Tomorrow there’ll be a post on comics and the day after the continuation of my guide to my blogroll, but for now here’s a playlist.
My Mom Is Tor Johnson’s Mom by The Native Shrubs Of The Santa Monica Mountains is a fantastic song that my friend Tilt linked me to last week. For those who don’t know, Tor Johnson was the bald wrestler who appeared in many Ed Wood films, most notably Plan 9 From Outer Space. This song reminds me of my friend Blake Jones, but for a reference other people might get, the closest I can imagine is if The Dukes Of Stratosphear had done a Frank Zappa pastiche…
Think Carefully For Victory by The National Pep is one of two songs by my own band I’m including here (yes, Spotify even has *us* on it now) because I think they genuinely fit. It’s a jangly pop song for which I wrote the music and Tilt the words. The lineup on this one (TNP has a *very* fluid membership) is me on guitars and keyboards, Tilt on vocals and drums, Gavin Robinson on mandolin (which we mixed too low, I think), Laura Denison on one line of vocal and Albert Freeman (of Wilful Missing) on some African instrument I forget the name of Đàn Bầu.
Save The Last Dance For Me by “Ike And” Tina Turner is a Phil Spector-produced, Jack Nitzsche arranged version of the Doc Pomus/Mort Shuman classic. Brian Wilson very obviously ripped off the backing track for this for Heroes & Villains.
Bicarbonate Of Chicken by Ivor Cutler is about ordering bicarbonate of chicken in a restaurant.
Just One Look by Doris Troy is better known, in Britain at least, for a vastly inferior version by the Hollies, but this is the original. This was actually originally a demo, but it was released unchanged and made the US top ten. In the intro, you can definitely hear the influence this record and others like it had on early reggae…
Through The Net by Glenn Tilbrook & The Fluffers is from Pandemonium Ensues, probably Tilbrook’s strongest album since East Side Story. This one’s very Kinksy.
Common People – Live by Pulp is a recording which always brings back memories for me, as I was at the Glastonbury where this was recorded, and saw Pulp quite by chance, having no intention to see them perform (I’d seen them on some late-night Channel 4 thing and dismissed them as crappy electropop based on a couple of minutes, and hadn’t heard this, which was a huge hit single at the time). But it was the most astonishing experience of my life. I’ve seen Pulp and Cocker solo live quite a few times since, and they’ve always been good, but at that gig Cocker was simply the most astonishingly charismatic performer I’ve ever seen, and every moment is etched in my brain fourteen years later. (Christ, fourteen years? That can’t be right, surely? 1995 was only a little while ago…). This recording was originally a b-side to the Mis-Shapes/Sorted For Es & Whizz CD single, but is now a bonus track on the reissued Different Class.
Baby Please Don’t Go by Big Joe Williams is another song that’s usually much better known in a beat-group cover version (the version by Them), but I prefer (just) the original, just vocal, sparse guitar and harmonica.
Beat Head by Candypants is included in this as part of my ongoing campaign to get Lisa Jenio recognised as one of the real greats in rock/pop music. I think this one might be about something naughty…
Hominy Grove by Van Dyke Parks is one of many great songs from Jump!, his album loosely based around the Uncle Remus stories.
Nasty Dan by Johnny Cash is another one from The Johnny Cash Children’s Album. I always liked Cash doing this sort of material at least as much as the dark ‘man in black’ stuff for which he’s better known.
Time Will Carry On by The Wackers is a nice bit of 70s harmony pop that, to me at least, stays just the right side of Bread or America.
I Got You Babe by Tiny Tim is Tiny Tim being both Sonny and Cher, accompanied by his ukulele.
Don’t Smoke In Bed by Peggy Lee is a song that, I’m ashamed to say, I first got to know from k.d. lang’s vastly inferior cover version. I could listen to Peggy Lee sing anything…
And Jaded by The National Pep is another of my collaborations with Tilt (I’d say the writing here is about 55/45 in his favour), and the closest I’ve ever come to realising the sound I hear in my head in a recording studio. It’s a shame that Tilt didn’t find our musical collaboration a particularly happy one, as I think the results were superb, if I do say so myself. On this, Tilt and Laura share the vocals, Tilt does drums, Blake Jones does the theremin and melodica on the tag, my wife Holly adds woodwinds, and I played guitar, all the keyboard parts, and ukulele (and mandolin? I know I had a mandolin in the studio but don’t remember recording a mandolin part, but I *think* I can hear one on one of the choruses). I’m very proud of this one, and I don’t think you’ll hear music like it anywhere else.
(As Tilt says in the comments “Blake Jones is just the BEST – http://www.myspace.com/trikeshop Buy his music, make him rich: http://www.cdbaby.com/cd/blakejones and http://www.cdbaby.com/cd/bjtts “)
Tomorrow, comics.
Spotify Playlist – The Boy Can’t Dance
This week’s Spotify playlist is not particularly themed or anything, and in fact was put together in two chunks – before and after I lost my net access. So it’s more varied than most, although overall more downbeat than usual.
Little Hands by Skip Spence is a song I discovered in Robert Plant’s quite gorgeous cover version a few years ago. This song – and the album it comes from – sounds like the missing link between Arthur Lee and Syd Barret, and is an obvious influence on people like Robyn Hitchcock.
The Girl Can’t Dance by Bunker Hill is my very favourite Little Richard soundalike record (yes, even better than Larry Williams or Don & Dewey). Hill doesn’t have Richard’s camp or falsetto, but the performance here is absolutely rabid. Wonderful stuff…
Appropriately, Holly was earlier watching a documentary on the Russians sending dogs into space. I say appropriately because I’d already included Russian Satellite by Mighty Sparrow in the list – a calypso song about how “I am very sorry for the poor little puppy in the Russian satellite”.
America by Van Dyke Parks is an arrangement of God Save The Queen (yes, yes I know he’s doing it as My Country ‘Tis Of Thee, but it’s our national anthem, not theirs) that makes the horrible dirge actually listenable, using elements of Japanese tonality and orchestration, from an album all about connections between the US and Japan.
Shortenin’ Bread by The Ready Men is a track I first heard on the CD version of Pebbles Vol 4 (the vinyl version has a very different tracklist – both are essentials for lovers of surf music) – a version of the old song done in the style of Surfin’ Bird with a blistering Dick Dale style surf guitar solo. Sublime.
Sarah Lee by Esquerita is a good example of the man whose visual style Little Richard stole completely. Musically, though, he’s closer to the New Orleans strolling R&B of Fats Domino or someone of that type. This is actually an astonishingly sloppy record, but it manages to work.
Solar System by The Beach Boys is a classic from The Beach Boys Love You, an album that I always describe as sounding like “Tom Waits singing Jonathan Richman lyrics, over a background by Bach, played on a Moog set on fart sounds”. This one would make a perfect kids song, and I’m quite surprised it’s never been covered on one of those “Rock songs for kids” type albums like They Might Be Giants make. The middle eight of this is just lovely.
September Gurls by Big Star is unfortunately not the studio version, which isn’t on Spotify, but is a very decent full-band demo which sounds almost identical except for the harmonies. One of the best pop songs ever written.
Rolling Sea by Eliza Carthy is from Rogues Gallery, a compilation of songs about pirates and sea shantys put together by the great Hal Wilner. Anyone who likes good music should check out the compilation, which features everyone from Jarvis Cocker to Richard Thompson to Van Dyke Parks.
Red Wine Promises by Victoria Williams is from an album of cover versions of the songs of Carthy’s late aunt Lal Waterson. Waterson was always an underrated songwriter because her family were so well known as interpreters of traditional song, but some of her stuff is as good as any of the better known songwriters of the British folk movement, and it’s nice to see her getting some recognition, albeit posthumous.
Rain Stops Play by The Duckworth Lewis Method is from the duo’s eponymous album – an album of songs all about cricket, from Neil Hannon and someone I’ve never heard of before. I think the album tries a little too hard to be ‘arch’ and ‘eccentric’ for its own good – it’s the album of people who desperately want to be like Vivian Stanshall or Ivor Cutler, but aren’t, quite. But still, being like Stanshall or Cutler is a laudable aim, and everything on there’s listenable, but I do think this is the best track.
Once I Had A Sweetheart by Pentangle is a lovely little version of the traditional folk song by one of the most interesting bands of the 60s. Also one of the best examples of Jacqui McShee showing what she brought to the band – listen to the way she’s double-tracking herself in very different voices.
Hard Time Killing Floor Blues by Skip James is the second song by a Skip here, but I presume everyone knows this one. But sometimes things become classics for good reason…
The Cruel Sea Captain by Bryan Ferry is absolutely shocking, because you couldn’t imagine a vocal performance further from Do The Strand or In Every Dream Home A Heartache than this wispy, ancient-sounding croak. A really astonishing performance, that almost makes me forgive him for being a fox-hunting aristocrat-suckup Tory arsehole.
The first part of Deserts by Edgard Varese is Varese writing far more conventionally than he usually did – this could almost be Stravinsky or someone of that type – rather than his more extreme atonal electronic music. Zappa fans will note that this was clearly the *koff* ‘inspiration’ for Semi-Fraudulent/Direct From Hollywood Overture from 200 Motels, and indeed to modern ears this sounds like film music, but it was one of Varese’s last major works.
And to finish we have One Track Mind by The Knickerbockers. The Knickerbockers were a one-hit-wonder band in the US whose hit, Lies was such a perfect Beatles soundalike that many people still think it *was* the Beatles (and Holly was surprised just now when I told her they were American). But in fact they were jobbing musicians from New Jersey – Buddy Randell, the singer/saxophone player, had previously been in The Royal Teens (who had a novelty hit with Short Shorts) and their drummer later briefly replaced Bill Medley in The Righteous Brothers – who just managed to sound like whatever was on the radio. One Track Mind is probably a better record than Lies, because it’s less slavishly Beatlesque, though still with very Lennon-sounding vocals. I also like the segue between Varese and this…
New Spotify Playlist – Messiaen, Johnny Cash, Dennis Wilson, Zappa, Sister Rosetta Tharpe…
OK, so I lied when I said I wouldn’t be posting for a while. It’s very boring without Holly around…
This week’s playlist is unthemed, but just based on stuff I’ve been listening to recently. More instrumental stuff than I normally have – I don’t know why that would be, except maybe that I’ve been a little non-verbal recently (the heat seems to have shut down the verbal reasoning parts of my brain).
We start with an excerpt from Messiaen’s Turangalila Symphony. I was reminded of this, an old favourite, today by a mention in About Time vol 3, which I’m in the middle of. I don’t have a great vocabulary for talking about art music, but I love this kind of stuff – experimental mid-20th century music (roughly from Stravinsky through Boulez), Americana and baroque (especially Bach and Handel) are the ‘classical’ styles that appeal to me, far more than classical music itself does…
The Dinosaur Song by Johnny Cash is from the Johnny Cash Children’s Album. No, really. This exists. I was as surprised as you. And this song is, indeed, Johnny Cash singing about dinosaurs. I have no idea what a ‘brontosaurus rex’ might be, but quibbles aside this is up there with Jonathan Richman’s I’m A Little Dinosaur and Four Tet’s Go Go Ninja Dinosaur as far as dinosaur songs go.
Fallin’ In Love by The Beach Boys is actually an early-70s solo single released as by ‘Dennis Wilson and Rumbo’ (Rumbo was a pseudonym for Darryl Dragon, later the Captain of The Captain And Tenneille). This has just been issued on CD for (I believe) the first time as a legitimate release, on Summer Love Songs, one of the fifteen-song-you-already-own-five-copies-of-plus-two-new-stereo-mixes CDs EMI release every year or so to snag completists. (This is doubly completist friendly, as it’s a different mix from that released on the single). The lyrics are risible – it’s a 70s Californian singer-songwriter singing about “my lady”, how could they not be? – but the music – Wilson doing Tim Hardin – is gorgeous, and it also contains what sounds like the earliest use of a drum machine I’ve ever heard.
Zing Went The Strings Of My Heart by Judy Garland is from her classic Carnegie Hall live album. I trust you know who Judy Garland was…
You Go To My Head by Rufus Wainwright is from his own live album, forty years on, where he covers track-for-track Garland’s earlier one.
Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey by Paul McCartney is from another whole-album remake – this time McCartney, under the pseudonym Percy “Thrills” Thrillington remade his own Ram (by far his best solo work, and possibly the best solo Beatles album) as instrumental muzak. Actually it’s almost as interesting as the original album, expecially in songs like this – in the original McCartney had sung in many , many different voices (he’s a far more versatile vocalist than people normally credit him for) doing call-and-response, and it’s fun listening to the way the instruments chosen for the different parts mimic the different voices he used on the original.
Vielako soitan banjoa? by Scandinavian Music Group is from a playlist a Twitter friend shared with me. I know nothing about it except that it has a banjo on it and the band are from Finland.
Baby Plays Around by Elvis Costello (no Attractions, despite the Spotify credit) is a song I was reminded of by Debi’s Being Human playlist, from my favourite Costello album, Spike. Co-written with his then-wife Cait O’Riordan (former bass player of the Pogues), this has a melody as good as (and reminiscent of) the best of Costello’s other writing partner of the time, Paul McCartney.
Melody Fair by The Bee Gees is from Odessa, a very, very strange album they made in the wake of Sgt Pepper. This is one of the more straightforward tracks. This sounds like the missing link between Paul McCartney and Syd Barret – seriously. The Bee Gees are one of those bands whose big hits obscure some very interesting, strange corners of their music…if you can ever get hold of a bootleg copy of Robin Gibb’s unreleased solo album Sing Slowly Sisters give it a listen – it’s as out-there as Arthur Lee.
Forty Cups Of Coffee by Ella Mae Morse is a great mid-tempo R&B track. There’ve been times when I’ve drunk thirty cups of coffee in a day, and even if her tolerance was greater than mine (and mine used to be pretty high before I made myself ill with overindulgence and cut back drastically), there’s no way she’d ‘want to hug and kiss ya and say I’m glad you’re still alive’ after forty cups – more likely she’d be having serious heart palpitations and suffering from paranoid delusions and a killer migraine. We need accuracy in our songs, dammit! She’s as bad as Cash…
Ride Into The Sun by The Velvet Underground is one of several songs from the Loaded era that are very, very different from the normal perception of the VU, and are much more interesting than the stuff that made them famous. I’d take this over any number of chugga-chugga look-at-me-I’m-so-cool-and-depressed distortion-fests…
King Kong by Jean-Luc Ponty is from the album of the same name, produced by Frank Zappa, where the world’s second-greatest French jazz violinist performed a selection of Zappa’s more fusiony pieces. The whole album’s worth a listen – somewhere between the jazz-rock of Hot Rats and the modern classical of The Yellow Shark in Zappa’s oeuvre, it’s also practically the only Zappa-related music on Spotify at present (so it’s a good job it’s in the top 10% or so of his work).
Count Five Or Six by Cornelius is one of those tracks that’s been co-opted by advertising, but if you listen to it without those associations it sounds like some strange collaboration between the White Stripes and the High Llamas, with lead vocals by a Speak-And-Spell machine.
This Train by Sister Rosetta Tharpe is a gospel classic. When listening to this, remember it was recorded long before the 50s rock & roll tracks it resembles. In that context, Sister Rosetta is clearly *inventing* rock guitar here – her licks are essentially the same ones that Scotty Moore would play on early Elvis records (they’re also almost identical to Chuck Berry, but Berry would play double-string rather than single-string lines, which would give a very different sound). And Sister Rosetta was playing like that from the *late 1930s* on.
And The All-Golden by Van Dyke Parks is probably the most ‘normal’ sounding track from his classic Song Cycle, another album you should listen to in its entirety.
This Week’s Spotify Playlist – The Beach Boys
Normally, when I do my spotify playlists, I put in a mix of tracks by different artists in different styles. Today’s playlist, on the other hand, is a little different, in that it’s entirely made up of the music of the Beach Boys.
The Beach Boys are one of my very favourite bands – possibly my very favourite, though there are several bands that could compete with them – but I’ve had great difficulty explaining the appeal to people. Individual Beach Boys albums are often patchy, some of the music I love by them is quite quirky, and people also associate them with their early hits.
So I’ve put together a playlist of music by them that I think would appeal to any music lover, that’s not too difficult to get into, but also isn’t Barbara Ann. If you’re a music-lover at all, and have never really checked out the Beach Boys, then please listen to this – it will open your eyes.
Meant For You from Friends is a gorgeous little thirty-second song by Brian Wilson and Mike Love that I think should open every compilation ever.
Surf”s Up from Surf’s Up is a song I’ve written about several times before, and which I consider possibly the greatest song ever written. Written in 1967 by Brian Wilson and Van Dyke Parks, and cobbled together in 1971 by Carl Wilson from fragments of Smile sessions and a 1967 solo Brian Wilson piano demo, with a new vocal by Carl over the first half of the track, this somehow managed to work superbly. If you can hear Brian singing “a choke of grief, heart hardened I, beyond belief a broken man too tough to cry” without choking up then you’ve a tougher heart than I.
It’s About Time from Sunflower is a fantastic 70s rocker, primarily written by Dennis Wilson, with band members Al Jardine and Carl WIlson and someone called Bob Burchmann. The lyrics are, as often with the Beach Boys in the 70s, pseudo-spiritual drivel, but the lead vocals (by Carl Wilson) and backing track are astounding – there’s a bootleg track that just isolates the percussion for this (played, I think, by the great Earl Palmer) and that’s great on its own.
Til I Die from Surf’s Up is possibly the saddest song ever written. Written by Brian Wilson, one of his few solo songwriting credits, the lyrics are almost haiku-like, but what gets me every time is the cheerfully-resigned way Brian sings “I’ve lost my way, hey hey hey” in a song that’s about crippling depression.
Busy Doin’ Nothin’ from Friends is another Brian Wilson solo song, but while it shares the childishly simple lyrics and fiendishly complex chords of the previous song, it’s the polar opposite in terms of mood – an uptempo, cheerful bossa nova with lyrics which include directions to his house.
Heroes & Villains from Smiley Smile is another song originally written for Smile – this, Surf’s Up, Cabinessence and Wonderful were supposedly written in one night, the first night Wilson and Parks ever wrote together – if this is true, then that must have been the most productive night’s work in songwriting history.
Please Let Me Wonder from The Beach Boys Today! is one of the earliest songs in this bunch, from late 1964, and is the first time in this playlist you’ll hear the theme that Brian Wilson keeps coming back to over and over, of being a weak man, aware of his own limitations, in love with someone unattainable and perfect but who somehow loves him anyway – many of these songs border on goddess-worship. Brian Wilson was originally credited as sole writer of this, but Mike Love won co-writer credit in a lawsuit in the 1990s.
Marcella from Carl & The Passions (So Tough) is a rewrite by then-manager Jack Rieley and songwriter Tandyn Almer of one of Brian Wilson’s songs, about a ‘masseuse’ of his acquaintance. Nicer than the original version, from ten years earlier, which had the chorus “All dressed up for school/ooh what a turn-on”…
Don’t Talk (Put Your Head On My Shoulder) from Pet Sounds may be the best love song ever written – it’s customary at this point to point out that the bass part under ‘listen to my heart beat’ sounds like a heartbeat, but I’d rather point out the little string section straight after that. Brian wrote the music and Tony Asher the lyrics.
This Whole World from Sunflower is another Brian Wilson solo composition, sung fantastically by Carl. This goes through more key changes in its under two minutes than many whole albums do…
All This Is That from Carl & The Passions (So Tough) is a gorgeous song written by the three least-talented songwriters from the original lineup of the band – Carl, Al and Mike. The lyrics are the usual early-70s meditative drivel – Mike writing about Transcendental Meditation – but the sound of the track is gorgeous, especially Carl’s soaring falsetto singing ‘jai guru dev’ over Mike’s low bass mumbling of the same words.
Don’t Worry Baby from Shut Down Vol 2 is another example of the goddess-worship (with lyrics by Roger Christian), and also an example of how you can tell the truly great bands because everyone knows their B-sides (this was the B-side to I Get Around). It’s also, even though it’s a guitar-based recording, a song that could only have been written by a piano player. Listen to the arrangement of the vocals on the choruses – the independently moving falsetto and bass lines, with the three-part block harmony in the middle. That’s what you’d do if you’re playing the piano – play the bass vocal part with the left hand (Wilson’s always played piano in a left-handed manner, with most of the interesting stuff going on in the bass parts), block out the chords with the right hand, and sing the falsetto part over the top. An example of how form can follow function even when you move away from the original tools.
Break Away, a non-album single now on the Friends/20/20 twofer CD, is at first listen just a cheery little pop song. When you listen more closely, it’s clearly the song of someone trying to overcome mental illness (“When I lay down on my bed/I hear voices in my head… And here’s the answer I found instead/found out it was in my head”). What makes it more disturbing is that ‘Reggie Dunbar’, Brian Wilson’s co-writer on this, was actually Murry Wilson, the father whose abuse contributed to Wilson’s illness.
Sail On, Sailor from Holland is a song with many writers, based around a demo by Brian Wilson and Van Dyke Parks. As close to soul as the Beach Boys ever get, Blondie Chaplin (a South African musician who was with the band for three albums) does a wonderful job on the vocals.
God Only Knows from Pet Sounds is a song you may well have heard before. Listen to it again anyway. This was another B-side incidentally. Lead vocals Carl Wilson, lyrics Tony Asher, music Brian Wilson.
Time To Get Alone from 20/20 is another Brian Wilson song, originally written for Redwood, the band that became Three Dog Night – the longing to get ‘away from the people’ is another recurring subject in Brian’s songwriting.
Guess I’m Dumb isn’t actually a Beach Boys song at all, but a song Brian Wilson wrote (with Russ Titelman) and produced for Glenn Campbell, who had toured with the Beach Boys for a few months in Brian’s place after Brian became too mentally unwell to tour, and who was a session musician on many of the band’s records (this was before he had his own huge hits). Wilson’s wife’s band The Honeys sing backing vocals, and the same backing musicians who played on most of Pet Sounds play on this.
And finally Wonderful from Smiley Smile is another song written for Smile. This is a gentle, organ-based remake with a rather bizarre middle section, and a stunning vocal from Carl Wilson. Written by Brian Wilson and Van Dyke Parks.
Please take a listen and let me know what you think…
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