Playlist for Easter Monday
Since summer appears to have started, alas, this week’s spotify playlist is a little more upbeat and summery than previous ones, though I’ve still included a couple of blues tracks, just because. You can play this one from here . It’s fifteen tracks.
Oh My Love The Wackers is a cover of the Lennon solo track by the classic Canadian pop band. As you might expect from their name, the Wackers were very Beatles-influenced, and this track was a deliberate attempt to do the song as it would have sounded had the Abbey Road-era Beatles recorded it. Gorgeous little track.
Product by Glenn Tilbrook and the Fluffers is from the new album Pandemonium Ensues, which is musically the strongest thing Tilbrook has ever done, drawing from a far broader palette than he ever did in Squeeze (though lyrically he still misses Difford enormously). This one actually worked better live, where it sounded very Jobim-esque – here the John Barryisms in the chorus sound a little cliched. But there’s still some very interesting stuff going on here, and bassist Lucy Shaw’s vocals are great.
Riot In Cell Block #9 by The Robins (the band who later became the Coasters) was written by Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, and is an obvious precursor to their later Jailhouse Rock, but this is by far the better song.
As it’s Easter Monday, I thought I’d add in the best religious song ever written, the lovely Country Boy by Jake Thackray. Over a melody which is strongly reminiscent of Heroes & Villains, Thackray sings about Jesus’ ministry in the down-to-earth Yorkshire Catholic way he had – referring to a prostitute as “living her life between the scandalised fist and the beckoning finger” and a thief being crucified as “clinging to life with hands that had always been empty”. It’s an expression of a very humanistic Christianity, and is in its own way as great a religious artwork as Bach’s St Mathew Passion or the Sistine Chapel – that sounds an exaggeration, but I truly think it’s the case.
Give Me A Pig’s Foot And A Bottle Of Beer by Bessie Smith is there for pillock, who asked about this one last week, but also because it’s a great early blues track.
Surf’s Up by The Beach Boys is one of the two greatest songs ever written. Both, according to most sources, were written by the same two men, Brian WIlson and Van Dyke Parks, on the same night (the other is Wonderful, Rufus Wainwright’s version of which I linked the other week). If this had been released in 1966, as part of Smile, as intended, rather than five years later, it would have been as important a record as A Day In The Life. But it’s still a better one.
You’re No Good by The Swinging Blue Jeans is one of the best Merseybeat singles ever. I always think it a shame that the Swinging Blue Jeans are ignored while even The Searchers get some respect now – You’re No Good and their version of Don’t Make Me Over are classic pop singles I could listen to all day.
Directly From My Heart To You by Little Richard is a song I first learned from Frank Zappa’s cover version. In both versions it’s a wonderful piece of greasy blues. Why Little Richard isn’t absolutely worshipped, I don’t know – the man was one of the greatest vocalists who ever lived.
Someday Man by Paul Williams is a version by Williams of a song he wrote with composer Roger Nichols for the Monkees. Williams and Nichols are possibly the least cool songwriting team ever, having written Rainy Days and Mondays and Rainbow Connection, but this song, Trust and To Put Up With You are as good as soft pop gets. This one reminds me of Neil Diamond, but less smug.
Candombe by Los Shakers is what you get when an Argentinian band that started out as a clone of moptop-era Beatles goes psychedelic.
Sport (The Odd Boy) by The Bonzo Dog Band is a rare full collaboration between Neil Innes and Viv Stanshall, and manages to be hilarious, an accurate attack on British schooling *and* parenting, and musically unusual, combining cod-Elizabethan woodwind, waltz-time harpsichord and mass chanting.
Three Hours Past Midnight by Johnny Guitar Watson is one of the greatest electric blues records ever made. In particular, the guitar playing on here is pretty much the template for all Frank Zappa’s playing throughout his career.
I Want A Pony by Candypants is my favourite stompy pop song of all time. “Mom, I wanna be the king of pop/buy me fans, hurry up/I just wanna be a millionaire/You’d die and leave me money if you really cared/…I want a pony, I want a pony, I want a pony, I want a pony now!” Lisa Jenio is my favourite songwriter of the last few years, and I wish she’d release some more albums of her own material.
Say You Don’t Mind is not, as Spotify thinks, by The Zombies, but is actually a solo single by lead singer Colin Blunstone, a cover of a Denny Laine song. Blunstone is a great vocalist (and I’m looking forward an unreasonable amount to the Zombies’ Manchester gig next week) but what really makes this for me is the fact that they’ve chosen to back him with *only* a small string section, playing in a chamber music style. It turns what would otherwise have been an average 70s pop-rock singer-songwriter track into something very different. And that last note just blows me away every time.
And finally, Cups And Cakes by Spinal Tap is a wonderful gentle pisstake of English pastoral psychedelia, while fitting the genre perfectly.
Smile, Though Your Nose Is Running
Not able to write a new post today, as I’m not very well. However, my proposal for a book in the 33 1/3 series just got rejected today, and so I thought I’d post the proposal for anyone else to read. This is just C&P’d from the RTF file, so it might not be particularly well-formatted. Let me know what you think anyway:
The Beach Boys’ Smile has had a great deal written about it over the years, but most of this writing has told essentially the same story in a variety of ways : a young genius at the height of his powers tries to aim for something just beyond his reach, crashes and burns, and loses all his talent forever. The metaphor of Icarus is used, usually with some reference to the ‘bright California sun’. The only difference in these writings is who the scapegoat is for Smile’s non-release – is it Evil Drugs or is it Evil Mike Love?
I think there are far more interesting things to write about. I intend to try to track down the Platonic ideal of the Smile album, using three of the shadows it has cast in the real world as my map. I shall probably ask Van Dyke Parks, the primary lyricist on the album (with whom I am casually acquainted via email and who has been very forthcoming with information and advice in the past) and Darian Sahanaja, who helped put the completed 2004 version together (and with whom I share a number of acquaintances, though I don’t know him personally) to verify or clarify a few things, but this is going to be more a critical study than an examination of the process by which the album was made.
Smile as Brian Wilson intended it was never actually recorded, and has only ever existed in his head, but he made three separate attempts to get it out of there and into the real world, each with a different collaborator or collaborators. The first was in 1966, when he wrote and recorded the bulk of the material that was scrapped, with Van Dyke Parks. The second was in 1967, when he recorded a new album, Smiley Smile, as a full collaboration with the Beach Boys, with other band members contributing to the production and to the re-written songs, and the third was in 2004, when he returned to the material with Parks and with Darian Sahanaja and Paul Mertens of his new band, and finally released something that was close to his original conception.
Each of these is an attempt to work in collaboration with others to realise the same vision, and each is overlaid with the collaborators’ own worldview and artistic preoccupations. Parks added the wordplay and fascination with Americana that has been the hallmark of his work ever since. Smiley Smile added songs about Hawaii, emphasised the vocal harmonies, and simplified the instrumental arrangements to the point where they could be reproduced on stage by people who were great singers but barely competent instrumentalists, as the Beach Boys were at that point.
These collaborations can all be used to throw light on what Wilson’s true intention for the album was, but the most interesting one, and the one on which I will spend most time, is the 2004 album, as that’s a collaboration with himself, nearly forty years on; a collaboration across time that has never been tried before. Whole sections of the album take on a whole new meaning when sung by a man in his sixties, and great chunks of it now sound like he’s singing them to the young man he was in 1966, the young man with whom he’s co-written the new version.
But all three albums have a great deal of artistic merit, and I plan also to examine in detail the underrated Smiley Smile, which does after all contain two of the great singles of all time (Good Vibrations and Heroes And Villains) along with a gorgeous, minimalist version of Wonderful which I consider one of the greatest things in the history of recorded sound and Wind Chimes, which in its Smiley Smile version reminds me of some of Scott Walker’s most recent work, an atonal twisted nursery rhyme. Smiley Smile has been described as ‘space age acid casualty doo-wop’, and the description is an apt one. It is a stripped-down minimal masterpiece that’s always lived in the shadow of its unfinished predecessor but may be the most overlooked album of the sixties
So, taking these three attempts separately, we have three images of an ideal. The first image we have (the 1966 recordings) is a kaleidoscope – lots of tiny little fragments that can be mixed up into many beautiful forms, but which never cohere into something permanently. The second (Smiley Smile) is like looking at it in a funhouse mirror – you can recognise the shape, but some of it’s so distorted you have to laugh, and isn’t that a bit of something else entirely that’s somehow entered the picture? And the third is a painting from memory by a great artist of something he glimpsed once, decades earlier.
But what is it he glimpsed? Most people who’ve written about the album have spoken about themes like ‘Americana’ and ‘the Elements’. But while they’re there, and I will discuss them in the book to an extent, I believe they are extraneous to Wilson’s original conception. Neither have appeared in Wilson’s work to any great extent either before or since, and he has never spoken about either as being important to him. The ‘Americana’ theme almost certainly came from Parks (though Wilson willingly added this to the stew), as this is something that has obsessed Parks throughout his career (from albums like Discover America to the rewritten Bre’er Rabbit stories in Jump! to his most recent album of new material, Orange Crate Art, about a lost California of the past). The elements theme, on the other hand, seems to me to have been something imposed on the music afterward, possibly due to Wilson’s desire to impress his new ‘hip’ friends, and while the Americana theme is quite clearly present in songs such as Heroes & Villains and CabinEssence, the ‘elements’ songs like Barnyard and In Blue Hawaii have only the most notional connection to the classical elements.
So what is the theme of Smile? A clue comes from Wilson’s famous quote that Smile was intended as a ‘teenage symphony to God’. But a better description would be ‘teenage symphony to Goddess’. Throughout his career, Wilson has written about goddess figures. The women in his songs (and this is something that runs through no matter who his lyrical collaborators are, suggesting it’s something that’s very important to his work) are almost all perfect and loving, all-knowing and all-forgiving, taking pity on the male protagonists, who are all deeply flawed. There are only two really consistent themes that recur throughout Wilson’s work – this feeling of being an unworthy man being given unconditional love by a perfect woman, and a search for transcendence – a search to become more than the sinful man he knows himself to be.
This need for transcendence has shown up in different ways throughout Wilson’s career. In the early songs, it’s all about proving yourself, being a real man, and pushing yourself to the utmost (“You gotta be a little nuts/but show ‘em you got guts/Don’t back down from that wave”), with a constant restlessness, a need to move on (“I’m gettin’ bugged driving up and down the same old strip/I gotta find a new place where the kids are hip”). In later songs, such as Break Away, it becomes fighting against his mental illness, using “the part of me that cries to be free” to “break away to that better life/where no shackles ever hold me down”.
But in all these songs, hope for transcendence, for ‘that better life’, comes from effort from within – pushing yourself, transcending your own limits. For all that Wilson’s music is often melancholy, the only time he ever sounds truly despairing is in Til I Die, and in that song the lyrics (“I’m a cork in the ocean”, “I’m a rock in a landslide”, “I’m a leaf on a windy day”) suggest a resignation to fate, an inability (and even a lack of desire) to strive for something better.
So with these facts, and the phrase ‘teenage symphony to God’, we have the key to unlock the album that Wilson intended. In this interpretation, the journey from East Coast to West Coast that the album takes us on is an expression of Manifest Destiny – settlers had to move West the same way Wilson has to search for something greater than himself, because we must keep moving forward or die. And while things collapse and fall, hope is always in the young, because they have more of this pioneer spirit, having not been ground down by life – but that youth is something that can be regained. “At three score and five I’m very much alive/I’ve still got the jive to survive with the heroes and villains”.
Over and over again through this album, things die and are reborn – the civilisation in Surf’s Up collapses (“Columnated ruins domino”) but there’s a rebirth at the end (“Come about hard and join the young and often spring you gave”), but this falling and rising happens most often to a young woman – Wilson’s goddess figure. In Heroes & Villains it’s the dancer, Margarita, who’s shot down (“she was right in the rain of the bullets that eventually cut her down”) but who somehow still lives (“But she’s still dancing in the night”). In Wonderful, the death is metaphorical – a spiritual death (“all fall down and lost with her liberty, lost it all to an unbeliever”) that comes with loss of virginity/innocence/youth , but even this can be regained (“She’ll return in love with her liberty, just away from the non-believer, she’ll smile and thank God for wonderful”). This is the dying and rising Sun God (and what better band for Sun God worshippers than the Beach Boys, after all?) – but in the form of a young woman (there’s more than a hint here of the stories of Ishtar or Persephone).
This interpretation also makes sense of the inclusion of a snatch of I Wanna Be Around, the Johnny Mercer song, which sometimes bemuses fans. While the song’s original intent was cynical, in this context “I want to be around to pick up the pieces when someone breaks your heart” means just that – the emphasis not on the heartbreak, but on picking up the pieces, carrying on.
So in essence, the story of Smile is not the story of Icarus, but of Ishtar – the story of a goddess descending into the underworld and being stripped of everything, but then rising again and getting everything back.
In the book I will go into far more detail about the actual music, which is of course the most important thing, analysing the way Wilson recontextualises snippets of music from his childhood and teenage years (elements of Bach and Gershwin jostling with Marty Robbins, The Crows and You Are My Sunshine) and the way that most of the songs on the album are based around variations of a tiny number of musical themes, as well as talking more about Parks’ contribution. But the essence of the book will be to try to combine the pictures from the three versions of the album, and to see if I can get a clear picture of the masterpiece Brian Wilson saw for a moment back in 1966. If I can, I suspect the centre of the picture is a young girl – let’s call her Liberty – she’s singing to herself, and she knows that even though the sun will soon go down in the West, it will rise again in the East.
Albums You Should Own – “&” by Kristian Hoffman
Sorry for the lack of posts recently – I’ve had a touch of post-viral depression. I *will* spend all next week posting about Batman along with my usual posts though. (The couple of weeks after will be light again though as I’ll be visiting the in-laws in the land of dial-up). So expect two posts tomorrow – Batman and Big Finish.
& by Kristian Hoffman is one of those albums that everyone who hears it loves, but which flies under the radar. On the very few occasions I’ve spoken about it to anyone who’s heard it, they’ve always said “Wow, I love that album, but I don’t know anyone else who’s heard it!”
Hoffman is someone who’s been on the fringes of success for decades – he was in the obscure art-punk band the Mumps in the 70s, and since then has worked with everyone from Rufus Wainwright to Carolyn Edwards – and &, his third ‘solo’ album, is actually an album of duets that pulls collaborators from throughout the world of interesting music. Hoffman’s style is closest to the glam-punk of 70s Sparks, but he also has elements of powerpop, prog-pop of the ELO/Wings variety and a healthy helping of pre-rock pop. Possibly the easiest way to describe his music is to imagine Sondheim or Cole Porter as produced by Jeff Lynne, and while & is his third album it feels in many ways like a first album – it’s a collection of songs written over several decades, Anyone But You, for one, dating back to the 1970s.
The list of collaborators on the album could easily double as a list of the most interesting still-working musicians alive in 2002 (when the album was released) – Stew, Darian Sahanaja of the Wondermints, Russel Mael of Sparks, Van Dyke Parks, Rufus Wainwright – combined with some choices that one could see as being chosen for camp value ( Maria McKee, El Vez (“The Mexican Elvis”), Paul ‘Pee Wee Herman’ Rubens) but who actually all turn in performances every bit as good as the more critically acclaimed performers.
From the opening “Gimme Some Lovin’” riff of Devil May Care, with Hoffman affecting an almost Dylanesque nasal voice (very different from the rest of the album) doubled by Russel Mael’s vibrato falsetto and backed by crunchy Big Star guitars, it’s obvious that this is going to be a musically interesting album, but it’s when that song gets to the middle eight that Hofmann’s real songwriting strengths start to show, with the line “Some postulate reward if you should mortify the flesh”.
Hoffman is one of the most articulate lyricists I’ve heard in years, with a huge working vocabulary and a wicked sense of humour. The album is just full of quotable lines – “Devil may care but I am disinclined to lend belief/to any square who spends his time bemoaning just how brief it is”, “It’s like a hideous chorus by the post-Mary Wilson Supremes”, “We sensed by scent that this brief sentiment was overripe”, “No sex in heaven – where do I sign?”, “This passion play was engineered, but when the mutant sheep appeared,”.
I’m more of a music person than a lyric person, so when even *I* am quoting huge chunks of the lyrics you know they’re special, but the music more than matches them. Get It RIght This Time, for example, has a first verse that could come from one of Noel Coward’s better musicals, all sparse strings and elegance, before going into a big musical-theatre chorus. The second verse then duplicates the arrangement of the first, but with Abba-esque piano, before we have two instrumental variations of the melody, one a perfect baroque pastiche, all piccolo trumpet and harpsichord, the other shredding 80s hair-metal guitar, before a return to the chorus and a final “Little Help From My Friends” tag. But none of this is in quotes, it just feels like the natural place for the music to go.
The album’s full of things like that, and even the less musically ambitious material is still well worth a listen. Anyone But You, with Stew and Heidi of the Negro Problem, for example, is one of only four or five guitar-based pop songs recorded in the last decade to be worth a damn.
And while the album is nothing so gauche as a ‘concept album’ (except in the sense that every song is a collaboration) there are themes that recur over and over again. Religion comes up in almost every song – obviously in song titles like God If Any Only Knows, No Sex In Heaven and Devil May Care, but also in lines like “Scarecrow, those who seek metaphor compare/Scarecrow, that other man left hanging there/But it seems to me/That comes too easily” and the whole of Anyone But You. There’s also a carnality to the lyrics, and an examination of sexuality and what sexuality means in modern life, and especially what it means to be gay – Scarecrow, the song just quoted, is about the murder of Mathew Shephard, a gay man murdered in Wyoming by homophobic fuckwits ten years ago, and is a haunting counterbalance to the more upbeat lines like “gonna put the ‘oo’ in the human condition” that predominate.
The best song by far is the ballad Sex In Heaven, one of the best ballads I’ve heard in years, whose lyrics deserve quoting in full:
It’s heaven sent, this miracle soprano you employ
That makes an angel of a boy, earthbound.
My soul took wing upon the sound.
I guess I still can’t face the implications of this gift.
There’s something pagan in the lift — airborne.
And why should soul from flesh be torn?That’s what it costs to buy a note so pure and high
and so divine: no sex in heaven.
The bottom line: no sex in heaven. Where do I sign?Then came the man whose eyes professed the love that we had sought;
a love that’s never to be caught or held.
Some ancient pact can’t be dispelled. What’s the surprise?
The storied sacrifice is often told: that this perfection must be cold,
and hard — where once we joined by scalpel scarred.What gimpy God aflame with jealous rage decreed that you
Like him must be unwhole; allowed to yearn?
But if the need that you profess is once returned,
You slap it down! (If I should ask, and I always ask.)I guess I still can’t help the sickened impulse to admire
the score that this castrati choir translates
that soothes as it emasculates.
What amazes me about this album is that it’s one of the *very* few albums I’ve heard in recent years where *everything* is well-crafted. The songs are absolutely superb – they remind me of Elvis Costello at his best or a less grating Randy Newman, oblique and intelligent with lines echoing and commenting on each other (for example in Revert To Type there’s a line about “the island of Dr Morose”, which is quite a good pun in itself, but is also an echo of the ‘mutant sheep’ earlier in the song), the arrangements are imaginative, ranging over almost every form of popular music from Sparks to Cole Porter to the Beach Boys, and the performances are stunning (my favourite is Stew’s full-throated roar on Anyone But You, but there’s not a bad performance on there).
& can be bought on CD and MP3 from CDBaby, or downloaded from eMusic. His first two solo albums, and a compilation of the Mumps’ 70s recordings, are also available from the same sources and well worth getting, but this is his masterpiece. He’s apparently also working on an album produced by Nick Walusko from the Wondermints, which I can’t wait to hear…
Brian Wilson, Van Dyke Parks and The Smile You Send Out – Part Four: That Lucky Old Sun
After Smile was finally completed and released, I expected Brian Wilson to settle back into a comfortable retirement with occasional one-off shows – having completed a record that took him 37 years, it would have been only right. And at first, this seemed likely. His touring settled down into a routine of ‘greatest hits’ shows, and his only release for the next few years was a very nice but hardly ground-breaking album of Christmas songs.
But then, last year he was commissioned to create a new suite for the re-opening of the Royal Festival Hall (the venue where he’d performed his first UK shows and where he’d premiered Smile. For the core of this, he took eight songs he’d written with his touring keyboard player, Scott Bennett, co-wrote one new song with Van Dyke Parks, and got Parks to write narratives linking sequences. With Darian Sahanaja and Paul Mertens reprising their roles as assistant arrangers, the result is one of Brian’s most collaborative – but also most personal – works.
I’ve written about the result before – both straight after seeing the first live performance of the resulting work, and after obtaining copies of the demos – but today I finally got a copy of the actual CD, so I can hear the completed work the way it was meant to be heard.
The first thing I want to say is that in my previous writing about That Lucky Old Sun I have rather minimised Scott Bennett’s importance – when I wrote those pieces, we didn’t have any songwriting credits for the new material, so I had no way of knowing who wrote what, and given that Bennett was the only unknown quantity while Wilson and Parks are two of my all-time favourite songwriters, it seemed reasonable to credit Wilson and Parks with much of the better material. However, it turns out that Bennett wrote or co-wrote some of the best lyrics on the album, and he definitely should get a lot of the credit. In fact, there’s a lot of wordplay in these songs – some of which I’d wrongly credited to Parks, and more that I didn’t even notice until seeing the lyrics in print – that makes me consider Bennett the second-best lyricist ever to work with Wilson (just after Parks, and ahead of Tony Asher and Mike Love). I’m a lot more interested in hearing Bennett’s solo work after this.
Having said that, this is a Brian Wilson album – and it’s a Brian Wilson album that fits in with his other work with Van Dyke Parks – you really can listen to Orange Crate Art, Smile and That Lucky Old Sun as three parts of a trilogy.
It’s a mature work – and it looks back a lot at Wilson’s earlier work – but it’s the work of someone who’s got a new lease of life. It’s the most exciting music I can imagine hearing from someone Wilson’s age (the last time I said that, several people pointed to Scott Walker, but while his latest music is by far the best stuff I’ve heard from him, it doesn’t have that visceral thrill. This is an old man making music with the spirit of someone a third of his age). In fact, according to the electronic press kit which comes on the bonus DVD with the CD, it seems that the more down-tempo elements of the album were added at quite a late stage because people listening to the music felt it was ‘too poppy’. Personally, I think the ballads are for the most part the weakest things on the album.
The references to Wilson’s older work that do turn up tend to be friendly nods to the past, too, rather than just ‘remember this older song? Wasn’t that great?’ It’s a subtle distinction, but a real one.
In discussing the album track by track, I’m going to ignore Van Dyke Parks’ narratives. This doesn’t mean they’re unimportant – on the contrary, they hold the album together and turn what would otherwise have been a merely good record into a great one- but they’re not very distinct things in themselves and not very susceptible to review.
One more thing to note before I start in on the track-by-track analysis – many people say, with every new Brian Wilson release “Wow! Brian is really back this time, not like all the other times I said he was back. His voice sounds better than in decades!”, and this has become like the boy who cried wolf – there’s only so many times anyone will buy a mediocre album that’s been hyped up by obsessive fans before they assume the artist in question has permanently lost it.
For the record, I have never before said that a new Brian Wilson album of new material was anything more than ‘pretty good’. Other than Orange Crate Art and Smile, both of which are special cases, Brian Wilson hasn’t released a new album that even approached greatness in my lifetime, much as I’ve been hoping otherwise for the last thirteen years.
So when I rave about this album, it really is because it is *that good*. And when I say that Wilson’s voice is the best it’s been in decades (partly because for once he’s singing within his current range rather than trying to hit notes he stopped being able to reach in his late twenties, but also because he’s actually engaged with the material) I mean it (he’s still not a great singer in any conventional sense, but his voice reminds me of Leonard Cohen or someone now, getting a lot of expression from a limited instrument).
The album starts with the title track, That Lucky Old Sun, an abridged version of the old standard, reharmonised by Wilson and with a gorgeous orchestral arrangement by Paul Mertens which brings out the song’s similarities to Ol’ Man River. It’s funny, but this is a song I’d never really noticed before Brian Wilson brought it to my attention, even though I own versions by Johnny Cash, Ray Charles, Jerry Lee Lewis, Louis Armstrong and probably half a dozen other singers. It’s a great song but not one I’d really picked up on.
Morning Beat, the first song proper, also brings in many of the themes that will recur throughout the album. I was slightly worried when this started at the premiere, because it starts out like Brian on autopilot – the opening “maumamayama Glory Hallelujah” is a backing vocal line he’s been talking about using since the mid-1970s and the riff is clearly yet another variant on Shortenin’ Bread, a riff that’s obsessed him even longer than that.
But a minute or so into the song it becomes clear how different this album’s going to be from much of the sub-par material that’s characterised Brian’s output since the late 70s, because this song is filled with ideas. Normally, Wilson’s solo songs have had one single melodic idea, not especially well developed, but on this album there are several different melodies in each song – and usually each one of the ideas is good enough to build an entire song around itself. In this case, the song starts out as a Shortenin’ Bread based rocker, but then a new section (“I’m listening to the morning beat”) comes in, at the same tempo but going off in all sorts of odd directions, before returning to the normal verse.
But then the song takes a complete left turn, going from guitar rocker to clip-clop percussion and orchestra, in a middle eight that references Kurt Weill’s September Song, before going back into the verse again, and then ending with an abbreviated version of the “I’m listening” section, this time done as staccato punches rather than played straight through. And all this in just two minutes and fifty four seconds.
On previous albums, Wilson has sounded like every song has been a struggle against writer’s block – every idea must be stretched as far as it can go in case he never gets another one. This album, though, has him throwing out ideas with the profligacy of a twenty-year-old, confident that however many he sticks in there, there are plenty more where that came from. (It’s odd that this isn’t usually the pattern with older artists – one would have thought that as the pressure of time became more obvious, it would seem more necessary to get as much done as possible).
The lyrics, meanwhile, are serviceable by themselves, but do, seemingly casually, manage to introduce pretty much every recurring concept for the rest of the album. Other than the sun and the idea of rolling round heaven (both brought up in the title track), this introduces California and specifically LA, the night/day cycle, stars of both the celestial and celebrity kind, sleeping and waking, the sea, rhythm, beats, diamonds, distance, smog and clear air – all of which will recur over and again.
After a narrative section, we go into Good Kind Of Love, the only song Wilson wrote entirely by himself on the album, and God it’s beautiful. Lyrically (and very slightly melodically) it’s reminiscent of Friends Of Mine by the Zombies. Mertens’ orchestration is the star here – he’s an unsung hero of Wilson’s recent work, writing parts that are nothing like anything that appears on any Beach Boys record, sounding more like mid-twentieth century European concert music, but make perfect sense with Wilson’s chords. Unfortunately, one of my favourite parts of the orchestration – a nice little woodwind countermelody – appears to have been removed between the live performances and the eventual recording (either that or it’s been buried in the mix – I’m not listening on great speakers).
But this is one of those Brian Wilson songs like Soulful Old Man Sunshine or This Whole World that’s almost impossible to describe in terms of normal song structure, having a melody that twists and turns continually so there’s a smooth flow through the track but you suddenly realise after a few seconds that it sounds nothing like it did just a moment before, going through very slow free-tempo sections, upbeat Spector/Motown-esque sleighbell choruses and more, with skittering strings and mooing horns. It’s just wonderful, and I defy anyone to listen to it without a big grin on their face.
Forever My Surfer Girl is one of the weaker songs on the album – it actually sounds like it could have come off a later Beach Boys album, sounding like someone trying to sound like Brian Wilson by reproducing his tics – all Be My Baby drums and descending bass – along with referencing his past a little too heavily. It’s also one of the few places on the album that Wilson tries to hit notes he really can’t hit any more, sounding frankly bad on the second line of the choruses.
But even here there’s several different musical ideas – the main verse/chorus, a very nice middle eight, and a short repeated piano part that I *know* comes from something else I can’t place (in my head it’s part of a song on Orange Crate Art, but I can’t place it precisely even after listening to the entire album to see if I could hear that part). It’s not a great song, but it’s decent and pleasant.
(I’d probably also feel slightly more positive about the song were it not for the fact that I wrote an essay ‘proving’ that Wilson’s music is all about goddess-worship before the premiere of the suite, but it wasn’t published until afterward – and in the meantime Wilson was on stage singing “a goddess became my song”, rendering my point moot).
After this comes my personal favourite song of the album – Live Let Live. Originally written for the film An Arctic Tale, it’s been reworked here with new lyrics by Van Dyke Parks, dealing with the smallness of humanity and with a ‘save the whales’ message that actually works, rather than being heavy-handed moralising. A gorgeous little waltz, I don’t know what it is about this song that makes me love it so much, but all I can say is that when I hear the line “I got a notion we come from the ocean and God almighty had his hands on the water” my heart literally stops on the ‘God almighty’ (amusing, since the song, like so much of this album, talks about fast heartbeats).
The music to the chorus line (“Live let live not die”) is the same as that for Sail On Sailor (“Sail on sail on Sailor”), but even given the rather downbeat nature of the lyrics it communicates a hope and love of life where the previous song was more about struggling on pointlessly.
On any other Brian Wilson album post-Love You, this song would have overshadowed the rest of the album to such a ludicrous extent that the rest of the album would have been rendered unlistenable. Here it’s ‘only’ the best song on the album.
Mexican Girl, which follows, has been described rather harshly by David Quantick as ‘the most generic song ever written about Mexico or a girl’. There’s a grain of truth in that, but it’s also interesting just because this kind of music is very far from anything Wilson’s done before, all mariachi horns and Spanish guitar. There’s also a couple of fun lines in there – “you cast a net on the day we met” and “hey bonita muchacha, let me know that I gotcha”. It’s far from the best thing on the album, but it’s fun and funny and catchy.
California Role is, I am assured, a pun on a type of sushi (tying up with the ‘perfect for fish’ lines in Live Let Live) as well as the ‘rolling around heaven’ that keeps coming up throughout the album. The lyrics have quite a cynical bite to them :
Every girl’s the next Marilyn
Every guy, Errol Flynn
Sometimes you’ve got to edit your dreams
And find a spotlight behind the scenes
Here in California, man I gotta warn ya,
Find a California role
But there’s also a sympathy in there – “You broke your hand punching the clock so you could heal your heart” and “If you miss your shot it doesn’t mean you won’t reach your goal”. And the uptempo cheeriness of the music takes much of the sting out of the lyrics (as does the filter on Scott Bennett’s voice when he sings the lead on the first two verses before Brian takes over – it lends a distance to the lyrics). This is another standout track – so far, the album has alternated the truly excellent with the merely pretty good.
However, the next song, Oxygen To The Brain is another of the better songs on the album. The opening ‘Open up, open up, open your eyes’ melody is one of Brian’s classic little nursery rhyme melodies, like the tag of Wind Chimes. It then alternates between slower, short verses about how bad Brian’s life used to be and long, fast choruses urging the listener to make the most of life and get ‘oxygen to the brain’. The lyric sounds like it’s mostly Brian’s work – he’s written many songs with the same theme – but the line ‘skip the vices versus get to the refrain’ with its multiple puns and its commentary on the structure of the song itself is far too clever for someone as non-verbal as Wilson, and must be the work of Bennett (it’s possibly my favourite single line in the entire album, but I love puns probably a little too much).
Ending with a reprise of the ‘open your eyes’ start, the song then goes into Can’t Wait Too Long a short note-for-note remake of a snippet of a longer Beach Boys track (recorded in 1967 but unreleased until 1990). This works well enough on the CD, but worked better when performed live – at this point various bits of footage of Brian and his two brothers (Carl and Dennis, the guitarist and drummer respectively of the Beach Boys, both of whom died young) were projected overhead while the band sang the only lyrics in this snippet – “Been too long” – and I’m sure that pretty much everyone there was in tears as I was.
After this comes Midnight’s Another Day. When this song was first released on Wilson’s website, before the first performance, I wasn’t at all impressed, primarily because the scansion was all wrong, but even without that it just didn’t really appeal.
I now see that I was completely wrong. While the scansion’s still out (I suspect because Bennett fell so in love with one of his puns – “When there’s no morning without ‘u’” – that he let it go in even though it didn’t fit the rest of the verses), I can forgive that for the way the bridge builds up from just piano and organ on the line “all those voices, all those memories” to what sounds like every single instrument in the world on “all these people make me feel so alone”. It sends shivers down my spine.
I must have had tin ears when I first heard this. In context, and with the orchestration, it’s beautiful. It’s far from the best thing on the album, but it might be the most emotionally resonant.
On the other hand, the appeal of Going Home still mostly eludes me. For some reason even the few negative reviews of this album have picked on this as the standout track – people have spoken about this track as Brian’s best in decades. While it’s a fun track – it references back to Morning Beat with its Shortenin’ Bread riff, and it also includes the ‘rock, roll’ backing vocals Brian’s been trying to find a place for for thirty years (he used them in things like his unreleased version of Proud Mary), and best of all it has harmonica by the great session player Tommy Morgan – it’s *just* a fun track, a leftover from Brian’s sessions with Andy Paley from the mid-90s, given new lyrics. Even so, it’s hard not to smile when the instruments drop out and the band sing, almost a capella:
At twenty-five I turned out the light
Cause I couldn’t handle the glare in my tired eyes
But now I’m back drawing shades of kind blue skies
It’s a fun little song, and I’m glad it’s there, and it’s *great* live, but it’s not the best thing on the album.
Unfortunately, the closer, Southern California, is the weakest thing by far on the album. Which doesn’t mean it’s bad – it’s pleasant enough – but for an album whose other songs vary between ‘very good’ and ‘masterpiece’, ending on ‘not bad’ is a bit of a disappointment. To make matters worse, in the original live performances and demos, the song ended with a nice little fragment of vocal melody that came out of nowhere. Here that little fragment has been expanded into an entire new section of the song, and loses a lot of its appeal. The song ends up sounding scarily like the work of Bruce Johnston (Brian’s colleague in the Beach Boys, who has written the occasional nice song like Disney Girls (1957) but who also wrote I Write The Songs). The last “maumamayama Glory Hallelujah” is majestic though, and a perfect ending to the album. (It’s not the actual ending – there’s a tiny fragment stuck on at the end of the band singing ‘working in the sun all day’ – but it’s the real ending).
This is an astonishing, beautiful album that is much better than the sum of its parts. It’s amazing that at sixty-five Brian Wilson is finally starting to realise the potential he showed when he was twenty-three. I can only imagine what he’ll do next…
Brian Wilson, Van Dyke Parks and the Smile You Send Out – Part 3: Smile!
(Before I start – today’s Big Finish A Week will be delayed until tomorrow. I’d already got most of this post done, and I’ve been promising the Superman one for four days, and I’m incredibly busy today.)
I was there when Smile was announced.
After Orange Crate Art and I Just Wasn’t Made For These Times Brian Wilson continued to make an incredible artistic recovery. In 1996 he worked on two Beach Boys projects – one, an album of new material written by Wilson and Andy Paley, only had two songs completed before the Beach Boys’ squabbling killed the project, but the demos suggested a renewed creativity on Wilson’s part (though some have claimed that Paley had more input than Wilson to several of the best songs).
The second Beach Boys project he worked on in 1996 at least came out – but that’s about all you can say for it. Stars & Stripes Vol 1 was an album co-produced by Wilson and bemulleted fool Joe Thomas, where various country singers (of the terrible variety you get on country radio for the most part – Toby Keith, Lorrie Morgan, Kathy Troccoli) sang old Beach Boys hits. It wasn’t completely terrible – in fact Junior Brown’s 409 and Willie Nelson’s The Warmth Of The Sun were two of the best tracks the band had done in twenty years – but for the most part it was unlistenable dreck. It’s incredibly sad that it’s the last ever Beach Boys album – they deserve better than to be remembered like that.
However, for some reason Wilson continued to work with Joe Thomas, who seemed to be positioning Wilson for an ‘Adult Contemporary’ audience, and in 1998 they released Wilson’s second solo album of new material – Imagination. It was, frankly, awful. There were four very good tracks, and the rest… well, suffice it to say that it was considered appropriate for Brian Wilson to be collaborating with both Jimmy Buffet and Jim Peterik from Survivor (the band that did Eye Of The Tiger).
But that album had a remarkable effect – Brian Wilson, who hadn’t willingly toured in thirty years, started touring to promote it. And the band he put together was stunning – based around LA powerpop band the Wondermints, it also included Scott Bennett and Paul Mertens (two excellent session musicians who’d worked on Imagination), vocalist Taylor Mills, and Jeff Foskett, a singer who’d covered Brian’s parts on stage for the Beach Boys for many years. (There were a few other members, but that’s the core group – other people who’ve been in the band at one time or another include Todd Sucherman, Jim Hines, Bob Lizik, Andy Paley and Nelson Bragg.)
That band were astonishing – capable of reproducing every note of Wilson’s incredibly complex music, and almost all multi-instrumentalists (in a typical show Probyn Gregory of the Wondermints might play guitar, trumpet, french horn, tannerin and keyboards as well as singing). The first live shows the band did were revelatory – while Wilson was not in great voice (and Foskett ended up doubling most of his lines in those early shows, as Wilson would forget lines or miss notes so Foskett was a safety net), his enthusiasm was palpable, and the band were clearly the best possible collaborators he could have. The shows got longer and longer, and they added in more and more obscure material, until by 2002 they were doing the entire Pet Sounds album, six songs from Smile, obscure songs from Friends, Carl And The Passions and The Beach Boys Love You, songs like Til I Die and still doing a good selection of the hits as well. (Unfortunately, since 2004 the setlists have become less and less interesting, to the point where now Mike Love’s touring ‘Beach Boys’ do a significantly more interesting set). They released several live albums and DVDs, and in 2004 Brian released a new solo album, Gettin’ In Over My Head, which while far from perfect was a *good* album (mostly made up of songs from the unreleased Andy Paley collaboration or from his unreleased 1989 solo album Sweet Insanity, rerecorded with the new band).
But still nothing could prepare anyone for the day when in 2003 at a small gig (not a Brian Wilson gig) with about thirty or so people in attendance, Jeff Foskett announced that he’d been asked to put together a half-hour suite based on Smile for the band to perform the next year.
As it turned out, Foskett was exaggerating his own importance to the new work. It was Darian Sahanaja – the Wondermints’ keyboardist and the band’s musical director – rather than Foskett the frontman who was asked to piece together the new Smile. But, crucially, he didn’t do it alone. Acting as Wilson’s assistant, he merely helped Brian sequence the new piece.
Shortly after this, Van Dyke Parks was brought in to provide lyrics where they hadn’t been completed in 1967, and the project moved toward actually completing the promised album from nearly 40 years ago. In the later stages Wilson’s horn player Paul Mertens also added some very Parksian string arrangements that tied together different leitmotifs from throughout the album, creating links between songs and generally giving the project a feeling of cohesion.
While Brian very nearly didn’t go through with actually performing Smile, because it brought back so many memories of a very unhappy time in his life and was linked with many of his mental problems, when he did perform it it was near-unanimously hailed as a masterpiece (with a few exceptions among those who had spent decades of their own lives creating theories about what Smile ‘would have been’ – some of whom, being proved wrong, either decided they had wasted their lives or that the finished version was created by some evil conspiracy out to use Brian).
So, after all that anticipation, what was the Smile they completed?
The finished album was in three movements, patterned after the structure of Rhapsody In Blue ( a piece which Wilson has described as the soundtrack to his life). The first movement had few surprises – it started with Our Prayer, a brief pastiche of Bach’s choral music, before going into a snippet of Gee by The Crows, and then into an extended version of Heroes & Villains. This movement, which then ran through several short bits of songs that had all originally spun out of the Heroes & Villains melody, before ending up with CabinEssence, combined the story of one man’s life in the Old West with the story of the journey of European settlers across North America, going from Plymouth Rock and ending up at the Grand Coulee Dam.
The first movement was extremely good – featuring two of the best songs Wilson and Parks ever wrote, that’s unsurprising – but the third movement was merely quite good. Wilson has spoken of the third movement as being added later, separate from the original conception of the album, and it shows – it’s a collection of little snatches and songs that don’t really belong together, much like side two of Abbey Road. The core of it seems to be the material originally intended for the ‘Elements’ section of Smile, but other bits have been thrown in, seemingly more because they had to be fitted in than because they fit. Having said that, some parts are still stunning – the segue from Mrs O’ Leary’s Cow (Fire) into In Blue Hawaii (Water) is beautifully done. Using the ‘water chant’ recorded in 1967 (and used in the 1971 Beach Boys song Cool Cool Water), they added a new lead vocal line, singing in free tempo over the top:
Is it hot as hell in here or is it me?
It really is a mystery
If I die before I wake
I pray the Lord my soul to take my misery
I could really use a drop to drink
Somewhere in a placid pool and sink
Feel like I was really in the pink
It’s clever, it adds a whole new interesting layer to the music, and it works in context wonderfully.
But the thing that makes the album – the literal centrepiece and the part that turns it from a good album into possibly the best album ever released – is the second movement.
The second movement is bookended by the two best songs from Smile – which is to say, the two best songs ever written – Wonderful and Surf’s Up. Wonderful is a beautifully oblique story of a girl’s loss of virginity – and loss of innocence generally – with a melody that’s a third cousin of the melody for Heroes & Villains, and a story that’s not too unlike She’s Leaving Home:
Farther down the path was a mystery,
Through the recess, the chalk and numbers,
a boy bumped into her one, one, wonderful
But unlike the Beatles song, here the girl returns to her parents and is accepted by them:
All fall down and lost in the mystery
Lost it all to a non-believer
And all that’s left is a girl
Who’s loved by her mother and fatherShe’ll return in love with the mystery
Never known as a non-believer
She’ll sigh and thank God for one, one, wonderful
While Surf’s Up (the song I posted a video of in the first of these posts) is more oblique yet, a torrent of imagery that keeps nearly coalescing into meaning before going off again:
A diamond necklace played the pawn,
Hand in hand some drummed along
To a handsome man and batonThe music hall a costly bow
The music all is lost for now
To a muted trumpeter’s swanColumnated ruins domino
Canvas the town and brush the backdrop
Are you sleeping?
These two songs had been known for nearly forty years, though. The fact that the album featured extremely good performances of them didn’t matter – we already had several extremely good performances of them by either Wilson solo or the Beach Boys as a band to choose from.
What mattered was the end of Wonderful, where suddenly it segued into a song that had previously only been known as an instrumental, but is now known as Song For Children. With one line – “Maybe not one, maybe you too , are wondering, wondering who, wonderful you” – we went into unknown territory. The two songs that followed (Song For Children and Child Is Father Of The Man ) had been known as separate instrumentals, one with a brief chant for a chorus that was also used as the tag to Surf’s Up. In their 1960s incarnations, those songs were plink-plonk dull instrumentals with not much to them.
Suddenly, with the addition of lead vocals (and additional backing vocals, so that in Song For Children we have a ‘child is father of the son/sun’ to mirror the ‘father of the man’ later on) those songs worked as songs. Chuck Britz, the engineer on most of the Beach Boys’ 60s records, once spoke about how he’d heard some harmonies from the band that sounded terrible, and he’d told Brian so – Brian had immediately added the one extra vocal line, and it had sounded great, and Britz had never criticised his arrangements again. In the case of the middle of Smile, that process was repeated on a much bigger scale.
With the addition of the lead vocals, and sequenced correctly, these songs went from being forgettable bits of noodling into integral parts of a tightly-structured longer piece which is infinitely better than the sum of its parts – and like I said, the parts include probably the two best songs ever written. Hearing this piece for the first time, and knowing that I’d had access to more than 90% of the actual music in it before in pieces, once I got over the shock of how beautiful it was, I felt like Huxley reading Darwin – “How extremely stupid not to have thought of that!”
So by 2004, we knew that Brian had conquered his demons enough to complete an album he couldn’t complete in 1967. We knew he was still capable of putting those pieces together in extraordinary ways, and that he could fill in the gaps well. At the time, I thought Smile was going to be the capstone of his career, that he’d probably not do anything more – because how could he possibly top that? I assumed he was going to retire, and it was a good place to bow out.
Because how could he possibly follow that?
Brian Wilson, Van Dyke Parks and the Smile You Send Out – Part 2: Orange Crate Art Is A Place To Start
After 1967, Van Dyke Parks and Brian Wilson went their own ways, musically. Brian Wilson’s mental health continued to deteriorate, and his presence on Beach Boys albums became less and less. However, for the next seven years this wasn’t too much of a problem, musically. Brian would come up with a couple of great songs for every album, the rest of the band would dig up and finish off some Smile-era fragments, and the other band members would write a song or two each (Brian’s brother Dennis became a particularly strong songwriter at this time). The result was that the run of albums from 1967′s Smiley Smile through 1974′s The Beach Boys In Concert is as good a collection of music as you could hope to find – beautiful Brian Wilson songs like Sail On Sailor (actually his one collaboration with Van Dyke Parks in this period) Surf’s Up, ‘Til I Die or Busy Doin’ Nothing alongside non-Brian songs like All This Is That, Cuddle Up, The Trader and Disney Girls (1957).
However, while this period was an artistic success, it was a commercial disaster for the band. While these albums are without exception wonderful, they are almost unknown except among the hard-core fanbase of the band. Meanwhile, a compilation of their early surf-cars-and-girls hits, Endless Summer sold approximately a quintillion copies, leading to a lot of people turning up to a Beach Boys gig expecting to hear Be True To Your School and instead getting a lot of men with very long beards singing about transcendental meditation with jazz flute solos.
Clearly this could not last, and quickly the band turned into the nostalgia party band it became for the next thirty years – Hawaiian shirts, God Bless America and we’ll have fun fun fun til daddy takes the lawyers away. And part of that was, roughly every two years between 1975 and 1992, to declare “Brian is back!”, and wheeling out a quarter-baked album of songs by someone who obviously had neither the ability nor the interest to write a competent song any more. At worst, they would also drag the poor man (who had horrible stage-fright, as well as his other mental problems) on stage, where he would stare vacantly and pound random keys on his piano. During this time, the Beach Boys produced one good album – LA (Light Album) without Brian’s active involvement, more or less by accident, while Brian himself created two worthwhile albums – 1977′s The Beach Boys Love You (a solo album in all but name, and an absolute masterpiece – it sounds like Tom Waits singing Jonathan Richman songs, accompanied by J.S. Bach playing a Moog set on ‘fart sounds’) and 1988′s solo Brian Wilson (an album dominated by synths and terrible lyrics by Wilson’s abusive then-’therapist’, but with a few moments that make it worthwhile).
While this was going on, Van Dyke Parks’ career was going in a very different direction. While working as an executive for Warner Brothers for much of the early 1970s, he also pursued his own musical career. Over the 40 years since Smile, he’s worked with a staggering number of great musicians as a sideman or arranger – co-producing Randy Newman’s first album, playing keyboards for Ry Cooder, arranging for Joanna Newsom, and also working in the same capacity for everyone from Kinky Friedman’s Texas Jewboys to U2 by way of Little Feat and Harry Nilsson. He’s also been in demand as a soundtrack composer (often for kids’ films – he wrote the music for The Brave Little Toaster and The Barney Movie (though he apparently asked for his name to be taken off the soundtrack for that) as well as arranging Nilsson’s songs for Popeye).
But most importantly, he was making a series of strange, beautiful albums entirely unlike anything else in popular music. Starting with Song Cycle – essentially an attempt to do Smile on his own, Parks made a series of semi-concept albums, combining his own songs with those of people as diverse as Randy Newman, The Mighty Sparrow, Louis Gottschaulk and ‘Uncle Dave’ Macon, to create what I can only describe as an ‘internationalist Americana’.
Parks’ albums usually deal with some aspects of America or its culture, but often as seen from the outside – Tokyo Rose, for example, starts with an arrangement of My Country ‘Tis Of Thee (rassmfrassm mercns stealinouranthems harrumph) arranged for Japanese instruments. Jump is a reworking of the Bre’er Rabbit stories, while Discover America is actually almost all calypso music. Parks wears his influences on his sleeve – he’s very clearly an American composer, and his music mixes pre-rock popular music of the most ‘unsophisticated’ manner ( hillbilly, ragtime and acoustic blues) with the vocal style of an American Noel Coward and an arrangement sensibility that’s equal parts Golden Age Hollywood and mid-20th Century US art music (Gershwin and Ives are huge influences).
In 1995 Parks was working on a new album, to be titled Orange Crate Art, and this one was themed around California. So he got back in touch with Brian Wilson, and asked him to sing some vocals on the album.
Parks later admitted to essentially tricking Brian into recording the album (I’m afraid I can’t remember where I got this quote from, you’ll just have to trust me), getting him to record vocals one song at a time for Van Dyke’s new album, until half-way through the project “Brian asked me ‘whose album is this?’ and I said ‘It’s our album, Brian’”.
Although no-one knew at the time, this time Brian really *was* back. He was simultaneously working on I Just Wasn’t Made For These Times, essentially an ‘Unplugged’ album, done as the soundtrack to Don Was’ documentary of the same name, and that’s a worthy album, but Orange Crate Art is a great one.
Brian’s vocals on the album take a lot of getting used to – and I didn’t really grow to love Orange Crate Art until I heard Van Dyke Parks perform some of the songs live, and later purchased Parks’ wonderful Moonlighting: Live At The Ash Grove, because Wilson’s vocals initially put me off – but the songs are just sublime, perfectly crafted gems, the kind of song that sounds like the kind they don’t write any more, except that they never did.
Orange Crate Art is a grown-up album, an album full of nostalgia, but from the perspective of a man who’s fundamentally content with his life. It’s playful, and joyous, but its emotions are civilised, restrained ones. It’s a mature album, a kind one.
(Parenthetically, it seems like the kind of album Evelyn Smythe would like , to reference my Doctor Who post from a couple of weeks back).
The album looks back to an imaginary Golden Age California – a California of orange groves and childhood holidays in Monterey. Parks’ music often feels rooted to me in Roosevelt-era New Deal liberalism and optimism, and this album seems to hearken back to the late 1930s, just before Wilson and Parks themselves were born:
Wasn’t so long ago
That every year your family would rent a house from June to Labor Day
Summer In MontereyNone of us wore no clothes
In Monterey our feet were bare, our shorts were all we’d ever wear
And I would jump for joy that you were there
It’s set in a Golden Age, and like all Golden Ages it’s not anything like any real place or time that ever existed. But this mythical California (which owes more to Steinbeck than to Frankie and Annette) is the kind of place that deserves celebration – from the songs the Garden Of Eden must be somewhere on the US west coast – somewhere between Monterey and San Francisco.
I’m not going to examine the album in greater detail, because it’s so much of a piece, and what I have to say about it is far more about the emotions it arouses in me than about the clever things Parks does with the violin line or whatever. But it’s an album which I adore, and which I can listen to at any time and feel good about life.
The album ends with an instrumental version of a lullaby by Gershwin, and that’s a fitting conclusion to this piece too – because the next post in this series (in a day or two) will look at the next time Wilson and Parks collaborated, on an album about childhood and America and California, an album that had Gershwin as a primary touchstone.
On Smile.
Brian Wilson, Van Dyke Parks and The Smile That You Send Out – Part 1: Dumb Angel to Smiley
In a few weeks, Brian Wilson will be releasing his new album, That Lucky Old Sun. It’s one I’m looking forward to more than I have any album in years. A collaboration with his keyboard player Scott Bennett and his old collaborator Van Dyke Parks, both the live performance of the piece I saw last year and the demo versions I’ve been lucky enough to get hold of suggest it’ll be one of Wilson’s best works.
It’s best seen as part of a trilogy with two other Wilson/Parks collaborations (both of which have also had other collaborators – and Scott Bennett may have contributed more than Parks to That Lucky Old Sun, in fact – but it’s thematically linked), so I’m going to try to put it – and those other albums – in context. This week I’m going to write about the failed Smile experiment of the late 1960s, and about Smiley Smile. Next week I’m going to write about Orange Crate Art. The week after, I’ll be discussing the remade and completed Smile from 2004, and then I’ll be reviewing the new album on the day of its release. This first post will be the weakest of the four – I’m telling you this so I can tell you the later things.
Before I go any further, though… I don’t normally do embedded videos – they’re a pain to those using feed readers, they often require the use of non-free software, and I just don’t like them. But there are a lot of preconceptions about the Beach Boys’ music out there – either “Pet Sounds is the only good thing they ever did” or “they’re just a crappy surfing band” or “I heard Pet Sounds and it’s overrated so they were just as useless as I always thought” or whatever. So here’s a song from Smile. If you like the song, or at least find it interesting, read further. Otherwise, you probably won’t be interested in anything that follows in this or the next three posts.
That song was written and mostly recorded in 1967 for the aborted Smile album (some vocals were added in 1971 when the track was pulled out of the vaults and released). Smile (originally titled Dumb Angel) was going to be the follow-up to Pet Sounds, the album we are all supposed to think is the Best Album Ever. I wouldn’t actually put it even in my top five Beach Boys albums, but it is a stunning artistic achievement.
Smile was going to top Pet Sounds, but it would have very little relationship to it. Smile was musically essentially a series of variations on the melody of Heroes & Villains, with lyrics to be provided by Van Dyke Parks, a songwriter who was himself every bit as good as Brian.
Only four Wilson/Parks songs were recorded in anything like a finished state for Smile – all songs that they claim to have written in the first writing session they had together. Those songs – Wonderful, Surf’s Up, Heroes & Villains and CabinEssence – contain to my mind possibly the two best songs ever written (Wonderful and Surf’s Up) and two extremely good ones (Heroes & Villains and CabinEssence). The rest of the songs recorded for Smile either had inconsequential lyrics by Brian ( Wind Chimes, Vegetables (credited to Wilson/Parks but the original lyrics were very different)) no lyrics at all (Fire, Prayer) or never had their lyrics recorded (most of the rest).
The album became a legend, mostly because of the quality of those four completed Wilson/Parks songs, but was never released. Bits of it trickled out over the years on later albums, or on the band’s box set, but the album itself was never completed. There are many reasons for this – members of the band didn’t like the music, Brian was having problems with his mental health, the band were suing their record label.
My own hypothesis for the main cause is that Brian felt he was being pushed into making a record different from the one he had envisaged. Brian Wilson has always created music for the heart, rather than the head – his music is all about communicating emotion. I’m going to quote some bits here from a longer article I wrote last year, because this stuff is very relevant to what will come along:
“Even the most cursory critical listen to Wilson’s body of work shows the same themes, both musical and lyrical, occurring time and again over the forty-five years he’s been writing. Far from being an aberration, Pet Sounds is just one more iteration by Wilson of the themes that have haunted him throughout his life and work.”
“Wilson’s music is almost a private language, made up of allusions to other music. A lot of this is the music of his childhood — he will appropriate wholesale the melody of “Baa Baa Black Sheep” for a song like “And Your Dream Comes True”, or the structure of “Rhapsody in Blue” for Smile — but occasionally it will be more recent — Switched On Bach or Sail Away. More than anything else though, he comes back over and over to “Shortenin’ Bread” and “Be My Baby”; those two songs appear in mutated form throughout his career.”
“Remember, also, that this is a composer for whom the epiphanic and the bathetic are often the same. On his first acid trip, Wilson heard music he’d never been able to conceive before — and wrote “California Girls.” And yet, bad as that song is (although the faults in it are almost all down to the smug, leering Mike Love lyric), listen to the harmonies under the line “I dig a French bikini on Hawaiian island dolls.” That backing vocal part, in isolation, is as close to perfect as anyone has ever come with the mere human voice. But it wouldn’t exist without the appalling, near-monotonous, lead part.”
“The real recurring theme in Wilson’s work is an attitude towards women that comes close to goddess-worship. Over and over again, throughout his career, his songs take the point of view of a weak, imperfect man who loves and is loved by a woman he knows is too good for him.He even believes that the only reason she’s with him in the first place is because he’s tricked her. But more often, he knows that she understands him and accepts him, even with his faults”
“In his best work, be it full albums like Friends, The Beach Boys Love You or Smile, or odd tracks on otherwise terrible albums like “Happy Days” (on 1998’s Imagination) or “My Diane” (on 1978’s MIU Album), Brian Wilson’s work is the sound of a man opening his soul absolutely, with all the simplicity and complexity that entails. “
Van Dyke Parks, on the other hand, is an equally talented songwriter but with a completely different (and complementary) set of skills. Parks is a very intellectual songwriter, and also a very American one. He has a deep love and knowledge of American pre-rock music, whether Gottschaulk , Gershwin or old blues records, and it comes out in his own songs (which are often repurposings of bits of other people’s material). While Brian Wilson was in direct competition with the Beatles, Van Dyke Parks is like Randy Newman’s antimatter universe double – optimistic where Newman is cynical, happy where Newman is sad, but with a remarkably similar skillset.
The two blended perfectly, but a lot of the hangers-on around Wilson appear to have misunderstood what they were doing (not surprising, since Wilson may well be the least articulate person ever to have been called a genius), and if you look at the articles at the time about the album, the music they’re describing bears little relation to what was actually recorded. I suspect ideas that turn up late in the Smile recording sessions – like a suite based around the four classical elements – which have no parallels in either Wilson or Parks’ other work and are notably less focussed than the earlier songs, were created to try to make the album Brian’s new cool friends wanted, rather than the album he’d intended.
The early songs Wilson and Parks worked on together combined Parks’ wish to create a new vision of a progressive America rooted in its own history with the emotional core of Brian’s music. They’re about childhood, loss of innocence, looking back at youth from a perspective of age, and rebirth after disaster. With the exception of CabinEssence, they all have the same ‘arc’ – starting from a position of power, losing something valuable, and then looking back on the loss from a more mature position, with hope for the future. The musical quotes throughout the album, the repeated motif of the Heroes & Villains melody, all point to a very consistent vision for the album, which was abandoned without quite realising it long before the album itself was scrapped.
In the end, possibly the best explanation for what happened to Smile is Brian’s own – “it was inappropriate music for us to be making”.
But the loss of Smile wasn’t a wholly negative thing. In particular, in its place came the remarkable, and woefully underrated, Smiley Smile. Smiley Smile was a mixture of Smile recordings (Good Vibrations, Heroes & Villains), rerecordings of some Smile songs (Vegetables, Wonderful, Wind Chimes) and new songs made up from fragments and half-thought-out Smile ideas. And it’s incredible. It’s been described as ‘space-age acid casualty doo-wop music’ and that description sums it up perfectly. Obviously made under the influence – several songs contain moments where band members stifle laughs or giggle – the accompaniment is stripped down to the bare minimum, often just an organ or bass. The lyrics are nonsensical, but the vocals are extraordinary – some of the best ever committed to record – and the effect is rather like taking a stained glass window, smashing it, and using the pieces in a kaleidoscope.
Little, empty, half-formed songs with very little instrumentation (inadvertantly creating the same effect I wrote about in my recent Final Crisis post), sung angelically, Smiley Smile is as strange as some of Scott Walker’s recent music – like Walker, it makes me think “Where did that come from? How could a human being think of that?” – but has a warmth and feeling of love that is absent from Walker’s harsh challenges.
The album that never was and never could have been meant that the beautiful, strange, remarkable album that was released is still ignored more than forty years on. But like the cover says, the smile that you send out comes back to you.
Next week, I’ll skip forward 28 years, and talk about Orange Crate Art…
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