Put on your thigh-high wading boots, you are going to need them as you go slish-sloshing through the syrupy-sweet thick squelchy saccharine prose of tPut on your thigh-high wading boots, you are going to need them as you go slish-sloshing through the syrupy-sweet thick squelchy saccharine prose of this hefty volume (sample chapter title : “Beautiful Dreams and Beautiful Dreamer”) to find anything resembling a book about Brian Wilson. I count myself a big Brian fan but by the end of this almost endless book I was begging for less love and more mercy. But David Leaf just doesn’t stop talking. For example there’s a 20 page chapter all about one of those insufferable rock star royalty shindigs called The All-Star Tribute to Brian Wilson. Twenty pages on cringey showbiz fluff, who gives a rat’s ass about that. But when Brian rejoins the Beach Boys and creates a late almost-masterpiece for their 50th anniversary called That’s Why God Made the Radio, David Leaf is strangely silent. Perhaps he had nothing to do with it & so couldn’t bask in the reflected glory.
Because the problem with this deformed beast of a book is that young 25 year old David came to LA to write a fanboy book about his hero Brian and did so in 1978 (this is the first 268 pages of the present expanded edition, and this part is not too bad) and then, much to his perpetual joy, became an actual genuine friend of Brian, and showed up in many Brian-related projects from the 80s to the present day in one role or another. All objectivity was thrown out of the window.
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David’s self-declared mission during his entire life has been to demonstrate the great genius of Brian Wilson and if possible to free Brian from the evil forces that held him back. These being the other Beach Boys at times, the men in suits, the friendly neighbourhood drug pushers and of course that capering devil Dr Eugene Landy.
David Leaf seems to think that he himself discovered that Brian was a genius and no one noticed before David jumped around yelling that Brian wrote & produced all the Beach Boys’ music. But everyone always knew this. We didn’t need David to tell us.
Brian is a tremendous character and psychologically a remarkable case – a very tall big man with (originally) a very high singing voice who always talks like a very scared child – in every interview he will tell you how something or other really scares him – and of course the source of this never-ending misery is very simple, it was his abusive father Murray. And then the abusive music industry. There’s no doubt his story is compelling, with its downward near-death spirals into obesity and drugs then the rescue performed by Landy and his cult-of-one 24-hour imprisonment, then the dramatic rescue from the rescuer (!) and then the wholly unexpected and delightful lifting up into the heavens like some great soaring bird when Brian completes Smile and starts touring and everything ends with cherubs and nightingales and flights of angels singing Don’t Worry Baby. I couldn’t be more pleased for big Brian. He’s 80 years old. Like Keith Richards he proves that the human body can put up with a lot. So David Leaf has a great subject. What this book needed was a non-starstruck editor.
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So I can’t recommend this book. David Leaf writes great sleeve notes for all the Beach Boy brilliant reissues but the 2nd half of this huge book is just hagiography, with David proudly telling us on every other page how immensely proud he is to be Brian’s very bestest friend.
There are a handful of excellent comedy moments inamongst the fulsome praise, like when Brian visited the Vatican City in 2005 :
Finally the five of us were reunited and entered Capella Sistina together; Brian was moved in a way we hadn’t seen him before. Humbled, perhaps. Great art does that to great artists. But, as Ray remembers, “We didn’t stay long. Brian took it all in very quickly. Then it was time to eat.”
David Leaf seems to have several day jobs and currently is a professor at the UCLA’s Herb Alpert School of Music. He says about his students :
My goal is for them to understand that they can achieve their dream, whatever it might be.
Just like David achieved his. :
No more on the outside looking in, here in 2022, I’m on the inside (p437)
Second volume from affable Andrew finds him raving about the controversial Love You album and having to plough his way through solo crud from Mike LovSecond volume from affable Andrew finds him raving about the controversial Love You album and having to plough his way through solo crud from Mike Love :
OK, I suppose I have to get it over with.. Mike Love's solo album is awfully, appallingly, unreasonably terrible... it's a vile, nasty thing. And the problem is, by saying this I know it will encourage people to listen to it. Don't.
But that's the completist's nightmare. I salute you, Andrew. ...more
I sometimes wonder if the album's long-term elevated reputation is really the result of a lot of sensitive On page 84 Tom is contemplating Pet Sounds:
I sometimes wonder if the album's long-term elevated reputation is really the result of a lot of sensitive old white men like me rising to positions of influence and power.
It's a good question. In 20 years or so, all these old white sensitive guys will be dead or in a home somewhere and the new management will have taken over the lists of Greatest Albums Ever. May we then see Pet Sounds around the 97 mark, rather than either No 1 or No 2? Yes we will. But does that have anything to do with the intrinsic greatness of Pet Sounds? No, not at all. It's not just that these greatest ever movies/songs/albums/novels lists are rubbish, even though all of them are quite sincere. It's that I'm not sure if people can listen to the past, watch the past, read the past, as the past speeds away in the rear view.
We now have around 100 years of recorded popular music. That's a lot to cope with.
All the great music of the past will be overwhelmed by the great music of the future. (You may not think it's great, I may not think it's great, but they will.) So you will have to be a real geek in the year 2050 to be listening to stuff recorded in the year 2019 never mind the 1960s.
I can't prove this but I believe the only novels written before 1950 read by people who aren't doing an Eng Lit course are by Jane Austen. Maybe occasionally Wuthering Heights gets a look in. Otherwise, forget it. Maybe in 2050 a couple of Beatles tunes will be the Jane Austen of popular music. Maybe not even that. And also, maybe none of this is anything to squawk about given that by 2050 people will have a lot more pressing matters than what was the greatest ever pop album. Imminent environmental catastrophe, for one....more
Number of surfing songs recorded by the Beach Boys : 7 Number of car songs recorded by the Beach Boys : 12
All theirHere’s two numbers nobody mentions :
Number of surfing songs recorded by the Beach Boys : 7 Number of car songs recorded by the Beach Boys : 12
All their other 300-plus songs were about different subjects, like vegetables, little birds, air and water pollution, steamboats, feet, trees and suchlike; also girls, some in bikinis and on beaches and some not. Also being lonely. A lot of those.
It’s always nice to meet a fellow Beach Boys obsessive, and you have to be very obsessed to go to the trouble of describing exactly what is terrible about every terrible track the BBs recorded between 1985 and 2012 (the Lost Years) as Rick Swan does here. Page after page of slagging off the Beach Boys! Well, you know, they do deserve it.
But such is the perversity of the human condition that I found a lot of the time Rick just didn’t appreciate the BBs in the right way. If Rick was a James Joyce fan he would say that Ulysses was pretty good but way too long, middle chapters should have been cut out, and Mike Love should not have sung the Naucicaa part as Carl would have done a better job.
He hates the car songs
The lyrics unfortunately consist of a tired rehash of an auto parts inventory (Little Deuce Coupe)
You can almost hear the band yawning as they run down a list that includes the shiny tires, fancy door handles, and other automotive junk (Cherry Cherry Coupe)
They proceed to jabber about fancy seats, groovy tires, and other fabulous spare parts (Custom Machine)
But I myself love those car lyrics. They’re pure street poetry!
Chrome reversed rims with whitewall slicks And it turns a quarter mile in one oh six Door handles are off but you know I'll never miss 'em They open when I want with the solenoid system
PROBLEMS PROBLEMS
The Beach Boys have the most horrible discography. Their early albums are stuffed with 70% filler (and they were only 25 minutes long anyway); their later albums stuffed with whimsy and eccentricity ; and everything from the 1980s onwards is an embarrassment. Along the way they have released shedloads of outtakes, tracks without vocals, vocals without tracks, rehearsals, fragments, afterthoughts, fragmentary afterthoughts, half-songs and unearthed best-forgotten nonsense.
Overarching all this are the two behemoths of the Brian brain, Pet Sounds and Smile, with attendant psychodrama (I’m melting I’m melting!) and periods of year-long bedrest and industrial strength drug intake.
There’s no embarrassment being a Beatle fan – you can even wave Yellow Submarine away – but every other moment in the Beach Boys saga is stomach churning, from Murray Wilson to Charles Manson to Eugene Landy, father figures to make the God of the Old Testament a preferable alternative.
So yeah, the Beach Boys are a tough sell and it’s great to meet a fellow fan. Thanks, Rick. I enjoyed all your grumpiness. Your remarkably diligent grumpiness, I should say....more
Those fascinated by pop history wonder how things would have changed if Brian had been able to complete Smile in early 1967. My argument is : hardly aThose fascinated by pop history wonder how things would have changed if Brian had been able to complete Smile in early 1967. My argument is : hardly at all. Smile would have been hailed as a Great Pop Masterpiece by all the critics who would have droned on about it for the rest of the year but your rank and file Beach Boy fans would have stayed away in droves. It would not have sold a million, would not have been number 1 anywhere. Far too rich and strange! (Look how they didn’t embrace Pet Sounds to their bosoms.) And not just strange in 1967 – still strange today. Nothing else like it. If Smile had been released Brian would have seen his two greatest works fail (in his terms), and this would have been followed fairly quickly by the Beatles’ massive success with Sgt Pepper (not nearly as challenging as Smile*). And anyway, the question would have been : after Smile, what next? Can’t top that. So I think you would still have got the ten year big Brian fade-away which happened between 1967 and 1977 when he briefly came back with another peculiar album (Beach Boys Love You).
*Sample Sgt Pepper lyric: "We hope you will enjoy the show"
Sample Smile lyric :
"A blind class aristocracy. Back through the opera glass you see the pit and the pendulum drawn."
*
Johnny Morgan, a British author who writes books about football mostly, makes a fair attempt to guide us through the tedious saga of the Beach Boys. The music was always pretty, as the story of the band was perpetually ugly. Abusive father, mental illness, massive drug taking, early death, lawsuits galore, decades of terrible albums, it’s a well known litany of suffering amidst insane wealth. As a fan, for me the great music justifies everything.
Lots of great photos in this book but also some odd errors (see p89 for “Girl don’t tell me you ride”!!), an obsession with The Monkees and the phrase “teenage symphony”, and a tiresome habit of repeating information we have just read in the main text in the individual album reviews. Also a really annoying habit of slagging off lyrics I think are really poignant – on When I Grow Up to be a Man :
The dumbness of the lyrics… communicating all the emotional depth of a 14-year-old
And later
For all of Brian’s unusual and experimental soundscaping, the banality of the lyrics, rooted as they are in teen pop cliché, adds a strangeness to Pet Sounds that is perhaps not intentional
When Brian starts singing about vegetables the following year Johnny dismisses that stuff as “pseudo-psychedelic ramblings” so it seems Brian could not win with this guy.
This coffee table book is pure fan fodder but the fans will have to have it. It’s a fine life if you don’t weaken.
Andrew Hickey is the hardcore Beach Boy fan all other hardcore Beach Boy fans would want to be stuck in a lift with for five hours. I am not Andrew HiAndrew Hickey is the hardcore Beach Boy fan all other hardcore Beach Boy fans would want to be stuck in a lift with for five hours. I am not Andrew Hickey, but I could have been. I took a wrong path somewhere.
But Andrew, what's up with that cover? It's not.... good!
Brian Wilson was one of nine brothers but his father Murray was extremely abusive and so by the time he was a teenager there were only two others leftBrian Wilson was one of nine brothers but his father Murray was extremely abusive and so by the time he was a teenager there were only two others left, Dennis and Carl. For self defense reasons they therefore formed a group and because he could handle a baseball bat and was skilled at taekwondo they asked cousin Mike Love to join. While waiting for the next attack from Murray they would while away the long hours harmonizing old Four Freshman numbers. Eventually Mike and Brian began to make up songs, which of course were all about their own concerns. One early song went
If everybody had a shotgun across the USA There’d be no more creeps like Murray in Californi-ay
From their self-contained Hawthorne compound the Wilson/Love group would make midnight forays for food and ammo, and they would also make contact with other survivor groups such as the one run by Charles Manson in nearby Redondo Beach. There was some talk of merging the two groups but Manson insisted he should play lead guitar and he only knew two chords. In this he was 15 years ahead of his time.
One day the news reached the Wilson/Love compound that Murray Wilson was dead. So at last the boys were free to roam during the day. They could look at girls and buy sunglasses. They discovered that singing in perfect four part harmony was a good way to get more sunglasses. All they needed now was a record contract. As the Wilsons and Mike Love were all tall and handsome they decided to recruit Al Jardine, who was their window cleaner at the time, so that future audiences would have a point of comparison on stage.
Mike Love was the first to realise that pop songs had up til then completely ignored a major Californian teenage obsession, so he began to write songs about the current craze of abseiling. Soon his nasal tones could be heard from every transistor radio :
Abseil is the only way, the only way for me now ab Ab Come on and abseil bah dip didit abseil bah dip didit ...more
He rambles, he repeats, he backtracks, there’s almost nothing here that you didn’t know if you were any kind oREVIVED REVIEW
HAPPY 80TH BIRTHDAY BRIAN!
He rambles, he repeats, he backtracks, there’s almost nothing here that you didn’t know if you were any kind of Brian Wilson fan, but as usual, he gets to you, and his voice in this book becomes almost hypnotic. He’s such a figure of hope, this big looming bear of a man with the formerly very high falsetto, this frightened, terrorized adult child who created the bravest, most soaring and most avant-garde pop masterwork in 1966 then crashed and burned so badly his musical name is surely Icarus. If he can climb through such mental wreckage and still be with us and still find love in his heart, then I’m sure you and I can do it too.
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This is a mental illness memoir, the prose version of some of his solo songs such as "Water Builds Up" :
So many times I've had that hopeless feeling And no kind of booze or medicine helped at all I'm drowning in too many contradictions I'm about to lose all my self control
Or "Where has Love Been"
I’ve been places I can barely talk about Sunny days that died away in tears Tumbling like a leaf out on the sea of doubt I’ve seen nights that seem to last for years
Or the ghoulish "Thank You" from the unreleased Sweet Insanity album
Feelin' shut out, no one cared Not my mother, not my brother Crazy beatings by my father A-ooh a-ooh
I should declare myself : I’m a fan. All right, probably not a revelation. I wouldn’t say I treasure every note he wrote, because no one could, but about half of it is divine. Pet Sounds and Smile are divine, but so are all the little two minute bits and pieces like When I Grow Up (To Be a Man), Little Pad, Girls on the Beach, Country Air, Wake the World, Til I Die, It’s Trying to Say, Still I Dream of It, The Night was so Young, Melt Away, There’s so Many…. there’s so many. But this is a review of the book, not the music.
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Occasionally Brian comes out with a zinger
We were one of the biggest things going. And then we were one of the biggest things gone.
I love that one! And
I was a survivor. I tried to survive every day. Lots of that came from my dad. People might say that he was one of the things I had to survive.
Quite so…. But also, this memoir is stuffed with amazing nuggets of sublime banality. You read this stuff and your brain registers it 30 seconds later and you have to go back and reread, muttering what the hell did he just sayyyyy????? Some top favourite examples:
I was just sitting in my bedroom watching the tv set. I don’t mean I was watching a show or anything. It was just the set. I liked thinking about all the things that used to be on it.
I love watching Eyewitness News. The content is not very good but the newscasters are pleasant to watch. They have nice personalities. They also give you the weather.
My daughter Carnie cooks. Once on Father’s Day she called and asked me what I wanted. I really wanted cheesecake, but I told her she couldn’t make it because of my diet. I asked her to make macaroni and cheese instead.
When we walked in I went right to the counter and ordered a large pizza. The pizza came out of the oven, and I picked up the biggest slice and bit into it. It was hot, but it was great. “This is the best goddamn pizza I ever had,” I said.
We went to the Beverly Glen Deli. That’s where I like to go. I have been going there for at least 15 years. They have a big diner menu with lots of choices and everything is good.
Brian fans will immediately connect this stuff with songs like "Busy Doin’ Nothin’" from 1968 – all together now:
I get a lot of thoughts in the morning I write 'em all down If it wasn't for that I'd forget 'em in a while
And you can’t miss the part where he wants to phone his friend:
And lately I've been thinking about a good friend I'd like to see more of. I think I'll make a call
I wrote her number down but I lost it So I searched through my pocket book I couldn't find it So I sat and concentrated on the number And slowly it came to me so I dialed it And I let it ring a few times There was no answer So I let it ring a little more Still no answer So I hung up the telephone Got some paper and sharpened up a pencil And wrote a letter to my friend
All to a lovely bossa nova melody.
Non-Brian fans can skip this book and instead watch Love and Mercy, the biopic, which dramatizes two contrasting parts to Brian’s life – 1966 and the recording of Pet Sounds (Brian played by Paul Dano); and then the tangled tale of 1986 when Brian was in the 24-hours-a-day care of Dr Eugene Landy – in this section Brian is played by John Cusack. At first I didn’t want to see this movie, the idea of it was creepy. But then I did and it’s a knockout. Totally recommended. Brian fans will know that this memoir will not be winning any Nobel Prize for Literature any time soon but this is Brian in his seemingly unedited ineffableness, babbling on and on about cheesecake, records, Phil Spector, brothers, psychiatrists, marriages, daughters, fathers, songs, harmonies, loss, defeat, rediscovery, joy and love and the Four Freshmen.
The grisly irony of Smile is that it descended into general frowning unhappiness in early 1967 as Brian Wilson realised he had no idea what he was doi The grisly irony of Smile is that it descended into general frowning unhappiness in early 1967 as Brian Wilson realised he had no idea what he was doing with his modularity run rampant and everyone thought he’d gone round the bend; the tiresomeness of Smile is that it has such an anguished yet hopeful back story (and lo! it was completed by Big Brian 37 years later, proving that autumn is just as nice as spring and it’s never too late to have a fling - throw away your walking frames and shimmy like your sister Kate etc etc). The irony and the tiresomeness tempt all the music critics to jaw on about all this cultural portentousness and fill up their volumes with tales of Mephistopheles Mike Love, Beelzebub Murray Wilson, Lucifer Phil Spector and the other damned detestable devils who tormented the poor adult child genius Brian Wilson and made him eat many burgers. This present teeny tome is the worst and most aggravating of the Smilefests I have come across. Its only redeeming quality is the the inconspicuous distance between the back and front covers. Mr Sanchez chooses to pay almost no attention to the music of Smile itself, which funnily enough, I hoped was going to loom large in a book about Smile. Fortunately the beauty and thrill of Smile itself can never be dimmed by the piles of smilery like this. The music is utterly wonderful and this book is extremely not required. ...more
Rock and pop from a formal aesthetic point of view are (is?) extremely confusing – it's ephemeral yet it adheres and sustains throughout all our livesRock and pop from a formal aesthetic point of view are (is?) extremely confusing – it's ephemeral yet it adheres and sustains throughout all our lives, these throwaway songs will never be thrown away; it's low art yet so much of it is as flamboyantly recherche and hierophantic as any piece by Stockhausen; it's convivial, collaborative, corporate and corpulent; and it's also anguished, solitary, honest, lyrical and original.
Brian Wilson and his jolly but mostly not-so-jolly Beach persons personify the Janus nature of the thing. Professor Kirk Curnutt's book is a great munchy rumination on all things Brian and is a must-read for anyone whose daddy has taken their set of keys away.
FAT MAN ICARUS – THE MYTH OF BRIAN
There is always a myth which may or may not be the truth but always contains A truth. The myths of Michael Jackson, Elvis and Brian Wilson are all versions of Icarus. They flew too high, the sun melted their wings, they shouldn't have flown so high, but they were so beautiful when they were up there, we all loved it, and look how they crashed. So the Icarus myth is one of self-destruction caused by overweening artistic ambition – the artist believes himself to be the equal of the Gods, who then smite him. I'm not so sure how the details pan out with Michael and Elvis but the myth works well for Brian. He battled through many obstacles, and almost achieved his supreme artistic vision but collapsed while doing it.
I am a proponent of the "One Brian – Two Beach Boys" theory, which does sound like something Chairman Mao would have come up with. Brian wrote hits between 63 and 66 and then started to write weird stuff. He deconstructed songs into art fragments. There were vegetables and wind chimes. You know all that. Brian was trying to escape from the beach. They kept dragging his ass back.
First his dad tried to control his music. Brian fired his dad. Then Mike Love (The Dark Lord of Don't Fuck With The Formula as KC describes him!) tried to scupper the avant stuff. Mike was in cahoots with Capitol Records, who likewise hated anything that didn't sound like Top Five. So there was Brian in 1966 alone except for a bag of dope and a handful of acid tabs, fighting off these grim conservative forces with a sharpened tape recorder. By sheer force of will he held them all at bay, corralled everyone into the studio to create The Masterpiece, then oh the irony, he couldn't remember how The Masterpiece was supposed to go – he'd had the Vision but he couldn't quite remember it. The gods had smote him. Or actually, more banally, he had a second mental breakdown and didn't recover for thirty years.
CRAZY BEATINGS BY MY FATHER – AOOOH, AOOOH *
This review could be very long because Professor Curnutt crams such a lot into 156 elegant, goodnatured and only sometimes too technical pages. I will note a few of the interesting areas covered :
The whiteness of the Beach Boys – this is apparently, for some, a bad thing. They weren't funky. They were square. This is an argument thrown out by people who have no problem ascribing racial characteristics to art.
The assumption that the Beach Boys are 'too white' reflects a cultural need to define whiteness as inauthentic
– (p90) – which comes from the pervasive white liberal guilt we are all familiar with.
Brian wrote a lot of very short songs - but that's okay. Perhaps length = significance to some, but not to Brian fans. The challenge is to find a model for developing a structural rationale that doesn't perpetuate pejorative connotations of brevity says the professor in one of his more jawbreaking remarks.
Brian the feminised man : his voice, for a start. Although physically a big guy his voice was always very high, his falsetto pronounced. He was participating in the grand tradition of pop castrati, from yodelling cowboys through the glories of doowop and the ubergruppendoowopper Frankie Valli. His beautiful melancholia is an audio version of the swooning junkies and soulful vampires of anti-macho alt.masculinity. Brian as antidote to the rock-star love-god – the bathrobe years. As a symbol, the bathrobe signifies more than Brian's hermitic history. In a broader sense, it marks an unusual de-emphasis of the body's primacy in rock iconography. (p139)
The auteur theory in popular music – Brian is regarded as the ultimate auteur in pop. The Cahier du Cinema theorists of the 50s wanted to read the collaborative art of films as novels, and the auteurists of pop want to read pop songs as poems, as if they are crafted by a single vision. Which is reasonable with your singer-songwriters like Dylan or Tom Waits. But Brian has mostly used other people to write his lyrics – Tony Asher for Pet Sounds, Van Dyke Parks for Smile, and many others including Mike Love. Who, then, is the author of a song like God Only Knows? Is the music 90% of it?
Fandom – Recent studies of fan cultures of various pop icons ameliorate what was once viewed as pathology into an act of creative self-fashioning. –phew, thanks, prof!
A FIGURE SO IMMOBILE
Prof Curnutt concludes with a description of an average Brian Wilson live show :
Non-fans are struck not only by the lack of spectacle and showmanship but by the absence of presence : sitting on a stool behind an electric keyboard he rarely touches, his face inscrutable in its impassivity, reading stilted stage patter from a teleprompter, the star of the show barely even moves… he seems the least engaged if not the least comfortable of anyone in the hall… frequent attendees have grown to anticipate with humor the evening's most spontaneous gesture, the moment when he checks his wristwatch
***
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* from "Thank You" (unreleased! lyrics by Brian Wilson)
I have Beach Boys OCD and I know you probably don't care about them at all so I'll make this short. What we have here is a 313 page magazine article iI have Beach Boys OCD and I know you probably don't care about them at all so I'll make this short. What we have here is a 313 page magazine article in which fifty people are interviewed in less-than-rigorous conditions and allowed to get away with mumbled inanities and endless rock-gush which are then printed up here for our delectation and delight.
Zooey Deschanel
I especially like the guitar at the beginning
Mike Kowalski :
Every time Carl would call me, I'd be there if I could and then I'd go do something else.
Blondie Chaplin:
You're either awake or you're sleeping.
I disagree with Blondie Chaplin. When I was reading this I was mainly in a state between wakefulness and sleeping which i believe is called dozing.
PS :
I saw the Beach Boys in their current 50 year tour glory on TV - my God, it looked like the Brezhnev-era Communist politburo - all these really extremely old guys lined up and the hand-picked audience appluding whatever they said or did. It did creep me out quite a lot. They did a version of Do it Again, mostly without oxygen tanks.
*
AN EARLIER TASTELESS REMARK
Fifty Shades of the Beach Boys! Yeah! But only one of them has been in bondage - big Brian - first to his dad, the egregious Murray, then to his record company, then to his drugs and hamburgers, then to his psychiatrist the even egregier "Dr" Eugene Landy, which all led to him writing a song called It's Not Easy Being Me which is nothing like Kokomo at all.
This is a self-published labour of love assessment of everything the Beach Boys issued up to 1969 and it's always a pleasant thing to be able to give This is a self-published labour of love assessment of everything the Beach Boys issued up to 1969 and it's always a pleasant thing to be able to give a good review to one of these projects. All three volumes are excellent.
Another fan did the exact same track by track appreciation - The Beach Boys : All the Songs by Rick Swan. Rick is the (hilarious) bad cop to Andrew Hickey’s pleasant and reasonable good cop but both are great company and for BB fans, both are recommended.
It’s true that Andrew can get on your nerves sometimes. He’s not in love with the hardcore car fetish songs… on Cherry Cherry Coupe
One of the problems in reviewing this album for a British person born in 1978 who doesn't drive is that a good chunk of the lyrics don't seem to be in anything I'd recognise as English
But there is nothing wrong with these lyrics at all. In fact they’re great :
Chrome reversed rims with whitewall slicks And it turns a quarter mile in one oh six Door handles are off but you know I'll never miss 'em They open when I want with the solenoid system
Andrew can exhibit signs of extreme geekiness - on Kiss Me Baby
Then on the bridge, after Brian's line, we get him singing in his normal nasal head voice, again double-tracked, but this time so closely I had to listen to the a capella mix four times to decide if it was double-tracked or just reverb.
But that’s kinda fun.
ACCELERATED EVOLUTION IN THE 1960s
Songs about surfers were okay for Californians but there are no coastlines in Ohio or London so songs about car obsession was better. If kids don't have a car they want one. But when I categorised and counted these early songs I saw that they did only eleven surf songs (and that includes The Lonely Sea and The Surfer Moon which just take place on a beach with Brian feeling down in the dumps and there is no mention of walking the nose or twenty footers like a ton of lead), and there are but twelve car songs. By 1964 the surf and the cars were out, things had moved fast.
But the collective memory of cars and surf stayed indelibly burned in the brains of the entire human race for the next 60 years however. Or maybe it was just lazy journalists churning out the same stuff about the BBs for 50 years.
After surf and cars came nervous breakdowns and existential crises, towering self-doubt and crushing misery, and the whole BBs thing got even more interesting.
The Smile album is a sacred object figuring in literature and certain rock traditions and said to possess miraculous powers. The quesFrom Rockipedia :
The Smile album is a sacred object figuring in literature and certain rock traditions and said to possess miraculous powers. The quest for the Smile album makes up an important segment of the Saga of Brian Wilson, appearing first in works by Domenic Priore.
The Smile album legend development has been traced in detail by cultural historians: it first came together in the form of written articles in the later 1960s, and then vinyl bootleg recordings. The early Smile folk tales centred on Van Dyke Parks, acid, mental illness and Mike Love. Wilson and Smile were woven into the more general counter-cultural myths - Monterey pop Festival, Beatles-as-avatars, Haight-Ashbury and smoked bananas.
So - it's finally here. And it's worth a listen. Even (especially) if you know Brian's own 2004 version. One of the enduring ideas about Smile was that IF ONLY it had been completed and released just ahead of Sgt Pepper it would have fundamentally changed the orbits of the major planets, and that Charles manson would have heard it and become a real nice guy, and there would have been no heavy metal, ever.
This is all a bit dubious. I think Smile was so utterly in its own bubble of psychedelic nostalgia (Ray Bradbury on mushrooms) that the rest of the Western world would have blinked, goggled and moved carefully around it.
**
All Brian fans are waiting with big eyes and lolling tongues like old surf dogs near the door and listening with doglike ears for any slight sounds of the postman who any day now may be bringing them the deluxe box set of Smile released only a mere 76 years after Brian collapsed in the midst of it all back in the days when when you were seriously mentally ill everyone just thought you were high or being a wacky pop genius.
It matters not that the Brian fans have already got most - if not all - of this stuff already on the Sea of Tunes bootlegs which came out years ago.
Or that a goodly chunk of Smile has already been officially released in dribs and drabs.
It matters also not that in 2004 Brian himself finished and recorded Smile & so we have Smile in all its summery rictus and have been listening to it for seven years and know it backwards.
What does matter is that the original Smile stuff will be officially released.
Brian's version is stunningly beautiful, but he was 62 years of age when he finished it and his voice is wizened. Also, the lovely 2004 version is recorded in high definition blu ray ultrabrite 4D trilby hat 5 trigabytes-per-bagel sensurroundsound, and back in 1967 they just had tape recorders, but they were all 23 years old so they sounded like boy angels on drugs.
I intend to sneak in a review of this Smile box when it arrives.
I mean to say
Over and over the crow cries uncover the cornfield
One of those many books on popular music that tell you in greater or lesser detail what you're hearing when you listen to this or that track like you One of those many books on popular music that tell you in greater or lesser detail what you're hearing when you listen to this or that track like you didn't know and you had to be told like back in the 19th Century some white explorer would come to your village and tell you where you live because up until then you hadn't got a clue and you'd be saying to each other where are we? where are we?...more
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