Keith Badman’s Definitive Diary quotes Carl Wilson’s own comment about the album after the fact, describing it as

“a bunt rather than a grand slam” and [he] says that it all but destroys the group’s reputation for forward thinking pop.

This is quite an odd comment from one of the albums participants – and producers: where every Beach Boys album released prior to Smiley Smile bears the credit ‘Produced by Brian Wilson’,  Smiley Smile was the first album ‘Produced by The Beach Boys’

As mentioned elsewhere, upon release, an otherwise sympathetic UK music press called it

undoubtedly the worst album ever released by The Beach Boys

and Nick Kent says, in his NME Last Beach Movie Beach Boys retrospective from 1975, that it

must still rate as about the all-time strangest album ever to be released by a major rock band; certainly no one could begin to work out what it could possibly ‘signify’ at the time of its public initiation

Until the appearance of the first Smile bootleg in the mid-eighties, however, Smiley Smile was the largest body of related music from 1967 (aside from Our Prayer, Cabinessence and Surf’s Up, released in 1969 and 1971) – and it’s a pretty small (and pretty artless) ‘large body of work’: with a meagre 27 minutes running-time, and 7 minutes of that being the previously-released (and hugely successful) Good Vibrations, plus Heroes and Villains (its less-successful follow-up), as an album, it’s kind of over before it has begun.

And, where its predecessor Pet Sounds ends with the conscious sequencing of Caroline No‘s conclusive melancholy (and in contrast to the joyous anticipation of the opener Wouldn’t It be Nice), and then the sound of dogs barking and a train passing, Smiley Smile has a track (it’s barely a song, at a minute long) called Whistle In (hear it here), which does little, goes nowhere, and then fades out.

For all the discussion about Smile‘s track sequence, Smiley Smile‘s running order doesn’t appear to ever have been debated or considered. But where real and fictional Brian Wilsons were arguing excitably for an intrinsic consistency to the pop album format:

Brian (right, to Nik Venet of Capitol Records): I wanna do an album like this (holding Rubber Soul), where the whole thing is a GAS! All good stuff like a THEME you know? 45 singles, that’s over, this is where it’s AT man!     

(from here)

Brian : Yeah? Well I’m trying to make the greatest rock and roll album ever made…
Mike : With barking dogs and…pounding spoons and…(exasperated) love songs to God?!?

(from here)

this aesthetic was abandoned along with Smile. Smiley Smile is the template for another type of Beach Boys album: making do, and with whatever.

But it had another function as well.

Why would a musical group, acclaimed for advancing pop music, and taking listeners along on the trip (Good Vibrations could be considered one of the best pop records of the 1960s) rather than leaving them behind (it was also the group’s most successful single), suddenly – and quite consciously – ‘all but destroy [their own] reputation for forward thinking pop’?

There are three quotes from Brian Wilson, contemporary with Smile (one would have to presume, as they are neither dated nor attributed), used as illustration in the 2011 Smile Sessions book. They look really pretty as large graphics. Each appear to have been transcribed by Brian Wilson especially for the 2011 release, and each was presumably selected (but almost certainly not by Brian himself) because of their applicability to Smile.

This is one of them

which is a real odd quote to use.

Having planned to use the above when this was all started in September 2011, sourced from its original context (a Derek Taylor-penned article from late ’66, and reprinted in Look! Listen! Vibrate! Smile!, p. 72-75), and with the intention of corroborating that this stated aesthetic was no longer applicable by the time Smiley Smile was recorded, my original argument was somewhat scuppered by its use in The Smile Sessions. Oh well. But doesn’t it look good?

There were so many published interviews with Brian Wilson during 66/67 – why this particular quote?

Is the use of these words, in 2011 (everybody knows, of course, that Brian didn’t ‘put out’ Smile in 1967), and in this context, meant to suggest that Brian didn’t ‘respect’ Smile at the time, and hence it was his decision not to release it? The 2012 Beach Boys have a new prospective biographer (some smartarsery from me about him here) that claims that Brian Wilson himself ‘killed Smile – absolutely’.

Interesting.

Enough people have said enough about Smiley Smile, and I don’t plan on considering the album track by track. Some people rate it, and it also has its apologists – despite the band’s own reservations about their work on it.

One significant, and quite audible factor worth mentioning in passing is its aura of stoned torpor and self-amusement. This is Drugs (and drugged) Music. Little Pad, the last track on Side One, is a really pretty Hawaiian-themed piece – but is prefaced with pot-smoking fools, laughing rather than singing…and it’s this I-remember-my-first-joint-everything-is-funny thing that dated many 60s records real quick.

I will be discussing drugs in a later post – but I’m with Julian Cope, who argued (once, somewhere) that ‘skinning up isn’t taking drugs’. Mike Love claims to be vehemently anti-drugs, but, listening to this, if he’s straight (and straight-faced)…Peter Ames Carlin recounts an incident backstage in 1987, where Mike Love

down[ed] a procession of Heinekens, which he poured carefully into a tall soda cup between visits from admirers. Asked to pose for a picture, the self-proclaimed teetotaller would make sure to hide his beer behind his back.

(Catch A Wave, p.250)

but I’m with this guy on the merits (and strength) of that particular brand of alcoholic beverage. I will not judge Mike here either. And, chronologically, it’s worth bearing in mind that Smiley Smile was recorded prior to Mike’s own personal spiritual epiphany, in the company of The Beatles

meeting the Maharishi in India:

Mike: I think that meditation, as opposed to drugs – and the result of promiscuous drugtaking is pretty evident in the lives of people that have done that – has given me a way to relax. My first thought during my first meditation was, first of all that it was so simple, that anyone could do it, and second of all it was so deeply relaxing that if everybody did it, it would be an entirely different world. My trip with the Beatles in early ’68 was one of the most fascinating time periods of my life.

(from here)

Let us talk, instead, about music.

Before bootlegs, this track would have been very familiar to any Smile scholar:

Gettin’ Hungry (Wilson/Love)

Recorded July 14th 1967 (as Capitol Master #58037), and released as the first Beach Boys-related single after Heroes and Villains – but credited to ‘Brian Wilson & Mike Love’. US release August 28th 1967, UK release September 1967; chart position: none.

Listen.

Even if Smiley Smile were a worthwhile Smile-surrogate, and even if its enforced minimalism was an artistic choice, rather than the manifestation of a severely-constrained creativity, Gettin’ Hungry doesn’t fit well here at all. As Track 9 of Smiley Smile, it is sequenced between Wind Chimes and Wonderful (rerecorded Smile songs). As session sheets log it as the last track recorded for the album, it was therefore sequenced consciously – someone decided it belonged on this album, and placed it where it is.

As a 27 minute-long album, and its new material (minus Heroes & Villains and Good Vibrations) barely a side’s worth of music, filler was obviously needed to fill out the filler that follows the singles that start each side. But Gettin’ Hungry is a real barrel-scraping. Musically, it’s little more than  a nasty organ riff; lyrically, it speaks for itself:

i wake up in the mornin’
just to work all through the day
that sun can get so hot
that you can sweat your strength away
and ooooohhhhhhhh come the night time

gettin’ hungry
hungry for my kind o’ woman
i’m gettin’ hungry
soon i gotta find me a woman
i’m gettin’ hungry
searchin’ for a pretty girl

but i still get up in the mornin’
though it’s so hard all day long
if it weren’t for the love of a woman
i don’t think i’d continue on
and oooohhhhh come the night time

gettin’ hungry
hungry for my kind o’ woman
i’m gettin’ hungry
soon i gotta find me a woman
i’m gettin’ hungry
searchin’ for a pretty girl

i’m gettin’ hungry
hungry for my kind of woman

hungry
hungry for my kind o’ woman
i’m gettin’ hungry
soon i gotta find me a woman
i’m gettin’ hungry
searchin’ for a pretty girl

(from here – with a note that, ‘if you find some error in the lyrics, would you please submit your corrections’ – I have found some error, but it isn’t with the transcription…)

It’s ‘hard all day long‘?

(from here)

When compiling faked-Smile cassette compilations (most of Smiley Smile, plus Our Prayer, Cabinessence and Surf’s Up), and especially for curious friends, I would always leave off Gettin’ Hungry. It has no merit whatsoever. In the context of an argument for Brian Wilson working to advance pop music in 1966/7, its inclusion would only further undermine what was, with the evidence then available, a shaky thesis anyway.

It’s quite difficult to find anyone online that cares enough about Gettin’ Hungry to make a case for it – this track seems to be as ignored as it deserves to be. But it’s still there, stuck between the inferior versions of Wind Chimes and Wonderful; without it, Side Two of Smiley Smile flows rather better, as Wind Chimes‘ ‘whispering winds’ fade is followed by Wonderful‘s ‘she belongs there left with her liberty’. So why was it ever included – never mind released as a dead-duck single – and worse, as a ‘collaboration’ between Brian Wilson and Mike Love?

One could have safely presumed that Gettin’ Hungry, dire and worthless as it has always been, would disappear into The Beach Boys’ catalogue of forgotten songs. But Mike Love’s (largely uncelebrated) Celebration ‘project’ rerecorded it as the opening track of their 1979 album (on Mike Nesmith’s Pacific Arts label). The song regains the apostrophised ‘g’ abbreviated on the original recording; this recording, made 12 years after it originally failed to reach the pop charts, was also released as the B-side of  the band’s Starbaby single, from the same album:

(image from here)

And what was originally credited as a Wilson/Love composition becomes Love/Wilson here – so it’s safe to assume that this song has always been Mike Love’s work.

The melody, as rerecorded by ‘Celebration’, bears little resemblance to the 1967 recording (in fact Celebration’s tune seems borrowed from something else – can’t put my finger on what exactly, but neither version sounds anything like a Brian Wilson tune). No youtube link, but take it on trust, it’s not worth hearing for anything other than comparative curiosity.

I may be out on a limb in declaring Gettin’ Hungry to be an absolute abnegation of everything Smile would have been; but had it been paired with She’s Goin’ Bald, Mike Love’s other significant compositional contribution to Smiley Smile, and released as that other Brother single, pop history would have, encapsulated on 7″ vinyl (and as a follow up to Good Vibrations and Heroes and Villains), Smile‘s antithesis – as concocted by Brian and Van Dyke’s nemesis.

And while I believe that there are fans who still rate She’s Goin’ Bald, and attribute it as a genuine Brian Wilson production, I think that this is an error, a mishearing, and a (deliberately-cultivated) misreading.

She’s Goin’ Bald (Wilson/Parks/Love)

While Gettin’ Hungry is an ‘original’ ‘composition’, its more evil twin, She’s Goin’ Bald, does have some basis in the discarded Smile recordings, as a short (and simplistic) tune called He Gives Speeches, recorded August or September 1966, with lyrics by Van Dyke Parks. Widely bootlegged, it was also included as a bonus track with all versions of The Smile Sessions. It may never have been intended as part of Smile, but The Smile Sessionography has little info that could shed more light upon it. There are other recordings with as little documentation, and I’ll get to another in a bit. Bear with me.

He Gives Speeches (hear a version here – though this sounds slower than it should be) has a brief lyric, and, like most of Van Dyke’s work for Smile, without its authors commentary, it remains obscure:

he gives speeches he gives speeches
but they put him back in bed
where he wrote his satire
he gives speeches
always reaches
out a lot led him to discover

silken hair more silken hair
fell on his face
and no wind was blowing
stepped across the golden fields and
saw that she was soon trailing after

she was nice and didn’t fight
he fell into her friendly persuasion
late that night while by a streetlight
little hands shadowed on the ceiling

Who is ‘he’, who is ‘she’? We will probably never know. But the ‘silken hair’ that falls on his face is a lovely little line, suggesting intimacy, and intimating romance…it’s like a more sensual Don’t Talk (Put Your Head On My Shoulder).

She’s Goin’ Bald uses the same basic tune (hear it here) , but Mike Love’s happenin’ rewrite uses one line of Van Dyke’s original lyric as a springboard for a very different kind of affair:

silken hair, more silken hair
fell on her face and no wind was blowin’
(she’s goin’ bald)

silken hair, more silken hair
lay near her pillbox down at her feet
(she’d been on a trip)

i peeked in and when i saw she’d
lost her hair i thought i would keel
(she’s goin’ bald)

when she saw her shining forehead
didn’t stop she swooned to the ground
(really flipped her wig)

laughed so hard i
blew my mind
i blew my cool
i blew myself over

oh oh oh oh oh oh
sha na na, sha na na na na na na na na
what a blow
sha na na, sha na na

(as tape increases in speed for some reason. Then suddenly)

she drew her comb across her scalp
and brushed what she had left
i tried to salvage what i could
and threw it in a sack
she made a b-line to her room
and grabbed all kind o’ juice
she started pourin’ it on her head
and thought it’d grow it back
ah ha haaaaaa

you’re too late mama
ain’t nothin’ upside your head
no more no more no more no more

upside your head

too late mama
ain’t nothin’ upside your head
no more no more no more no more

upside your head

you’re too late mama
ain’t nothin’ upside your head
no more no more no more no more
(what about it, dude?)

‘What does this MEAN?’

Brian Wilson seems to bear the brunt of the criticism of Smiley Smile‘s half-arsed misfiring of what Smile might have been – as if there were a sudden lessening of his power to create – but, despite She’s Goin’ Bald‘s ‘modular’ composition (as a composite of four separate recorded parts), musically, it doesn’t add anything to its original Smile-era template than a pointless production quirk; the tape speed gimmick is quite mindbending, but there is almost nothing comparable on any Smile session. And where effects are used on those recordings, they seem crucial to the structure of the song. Here it’s just  ‘weird for the sake of it’. The Beach Boys Definitive Diary notes about its recording (on July 5th 1967) that

Jim Lockert continues as engineer…and later recalls that on ‘She’s Goin’ Bald’ they decided to feature “the sound of a tape being rewound in an echo chamber at full speed”

(For the 10th of July ’67 Wind Chimes re-record, ‘despite the setbacks with Smile, tapes of today’s session reveal that when the mood takes him, Brian is still actively in control’. As the original Wind Chimes was one of the earliest Smile recordings, and where the only instrumental contribution by a Beach Boy other than Brian was Carl’s fingersnaps, yeah, you would think he’d want control over that one…although ‘control’ is an interesting word.)

Despite its vaguely ‘trippy’ sound, She’s Goin’ Bald is an anti-hip, anti-drugs song. And a particularly dumb one at that:

silken hair, more silken hair
lay near her pillbox down at her feet
(she’d been on a trip)

Lyrically, there are some very un-Brian Wilson-esque aspects at work here.

It has kinda ‘hipspeak’ referents (she’d been on a trip, really flipped her wig, i blew my mind, i blew my cool, ain’t nothin’ upside your head – what about it, dude?). But who, in 1967, was writing songs about how bad (psychedelic) drugs were? There was a lot of bad psychedelic music at the time – and some of it in the pop mainstream (David Crosby wrote the execrable Mind Gardens (don’t listen to it here) for The Byrds’ Younger Than Yesterday album, and got himself kicked out of the band, his absence filled by a horse on the followup album’s sleeve). But, after Brian’s well-publicised experiments with acid, why on God’s Earth would The Beach Boys’ composer/arranger/producer/former leader, who wrote the symphonic introduction to California Girls after his first LSD trip, indulge something with as hokey a ‘message’ as this?

Another of the Brian Wilson quotes included in The Smile Sessions book is

which is a real odd quote to use.

It’s a response to the word DOOR, as part of this Melody Maker questionnaire from October 8 1966 (reprinted on p.45 of Look! Listen! Vibrate! Smile!):

This ‘door’ (as any fule kno) is one of Huxley’s Doors of Perception, and LSD was the key; this same key (again, as everybody knows) was a crucial impetus in the creation of Smile. In Tom Nolan’s article for Lost Angeles WEST Magazine, entitled The Frenzied Frontier Of Pop Music (published November 27 1967, LLVS p. 164-8 – but presumably conducted prior to May 1967)

Brian Wilson explains. “About a year ago I had what I consider a very religious experience. I took LSD, a full dose of LSD, and later, another time, I took a smaller dose. And I learned a lot of things, like patience, understanding. I can’t teach you, or tell you, what I learned from taking it. But I consider it a very religious experience”.

He’d never take it again, he says, because that would be pointless, wouldn’t it? And the people that take it all the time, the acid heads, he can’t go along with that. Like all those people – Timothy Leary and all – they talk a lot, but they don’t really create, you know?

There is a retrospective misperception of Smile-era Brian an acid-guzzling idiot (savant or otherwise)

(meanwhile)

Posh TOTP Presenter: Mike, tell us about the Beach Boy’s groovy new sound.
Mike: Well, you know our collaborator Brian Wilson, he’s always experimenting…

but Nolan and the Melody Maker present what seems in retrospect a far more measured (and articulate) Brian Wilson.

And, to quote Brian again, more and more kids were thinking love and peace and friendship…but one of his bandmates wasn’t.

So why would Van Dyke Park’s ‘fallen silken hair’ imagery be transmuted into something so absurd? Who is ‘she’ here? And who is laughing at her, cos her hair has fallen out? This is a very unfortunate state of affairs – who would find this kind of thing funny? I’m sure that Mike Love knows what schadenfreude means – and it’s an attitude that is substantially at odds with ‘love and peace and friendship’ – as well as ‘patience, understanding’…what is Pet Sounds but an exploration of emotion and compassion? Isn’t this part of what has kept it fresh for nearly 50 years?

Yeah, I’m not an idiot, and I know the scenario in She’s Goin’ Bald isn’t real – it didn’t happen; it’s throwaway. It’s meant to be throwaway (and helped the band throw away Smile, along with their artistic reputation).

But what kind of mind could think up such a thing? There’s a small cruelty at work here: who would find fun in another person’s misfortune? Mike Love himself was goin’ bald at the time, and, post 1972, I do not know of a single photograph of the man without some kind of head-dress, in order to disguise the fact that he ain’t got nothin’ upside his head. But no one is laughing at him. That would be quite unkind.

And what a crazy scenario – acid makes your hair fall out? Who would have thought? Oh, hang on…

So, apart from eerily-prefiguring the plot of a bad horror film from 1978, what is She’s Goin’ Bald (or Gettin’ Hungry) actually for? Smile remained incomplete and unreleased – but, using Brian Wilson’s own criteria (‘I don’t put out anything I don’t respect’), who felt proud of these recordings, deeming them both intrinsic to an album by a band (once) lead by a producer who wanted to make records  ‘where the whole thing is a GAS! All good stuff’? 

Both songs are so transparently worthless (and much as I am prepared to entertainment arguments that counter this opinion, make your case a fucking robust one if you want to add a long comment to this post) – so why select Gettin’ Hungry as a single (this was a Brother Record, not a Capitol single), and released without The Beach Boys’ name? And stick it between two Smile songs on the album? This sequencing has a real jarring effect; is that what it was designed to do?

I have a lot of time for ‘weird’ music. But little time for ‘weird for the sake of it’. The latter is usually concocted by musicians and artists that have little or no comprehension of the value of the avant garde. And what Brian Wilson and Van Dyke Parks were aspiring towards with Smile (as I have tried to argue elsewhere – and my argument isn’t an original one) was to create something new.

Pop music was not considered an ‘art form’ in 1966; but after the end of 1967, everyone recording as part of the ‘rock revolution’ started considering themselves Artists; rock (and often pop as well) has retained this position ever since. Musicians and songwriters, post-67, refined their craft into Art – and, for all the merits of anything that came out of Los Angeles studios post-Monterey, it also spawned an incredible amount of self-regarding shit. Even some of what has since become ‘canonic’ (you know, all your ‘classic albums’) was often pretty solipsistic – the West Coast ‘singer/songwriter’ has a whole bunch to answer for…

And consumers of popular music have been living in the wake of this ‘artistic revolution’ ever since – as exploited by the record companies that bankrolled it all in the first place. Everything in pop and rock is now worthy of a Deluxe Legacy Edition – Ozzy Osbourne? Big Audio Dynamite? Billy Joel? REO fucking Speedwagon?!? They all created a legacy.

Some genuine innovations have been disregarded (or even forgotten) since, especially where they do not fit the Rock Revolution Rubric. Do you own a copy of Les Paul’s startling (and aptly-named) The New Sound album from 1950? Never heard of it? Find it on Spotify – staggering stuff: technical innovation exercised as entertainment. It sounds maybe weirder now than it did then – which says a great deal about the purported ‘progress’ of progressive musics…listen to its opening track Brazil here. And hearing Les Paul’s version of Cole Porter’s What Is This Thing Called Love from a shellac 78 (as originally released)

is as jarring as the modern wax-cylinder recordings that open Deathprod’s Imaginary Songs From Tristan Da Cunha – music this advanced could surely never have existed on an archaic analogue format.

But She’s Goin’ Bald‘s weirdness is a deeply-conservative (and pointedly-sardonic) parody of the musical tropes of the time it was recorded. The original He Gives Speeches seems to have had have no place on Smile – so why not rerecord it, as originally conceived, for Smiley Smile? With Me Tonight, Wind Chimes, Wonderful survive intact, at least to some degree.

When Mike Love was interviewed for the Mojo 60s’ Smile special (published in June 2011, an excerpt is here), and asked

Mojo: What are your feelings about the Smiley Smile album?

Love: It was a reaction.

A reaction by whom?

One of the more startling surprises on the 2011 Smile Sessions release was a recording of Surf’s Up from ‘Fall 1967′ – no other specifics are given, or seem available; I’m told that it

it was found on the end of a tape that was mostly used for another track (Let The Wind Blow? Can’t remember but that one’s in my mind), and that Brian actually did three run-throughs of the song in a row, so clearly intended it *for* something. Other than that, nothing’s been made public about it outside what’s in the box set liner notes. (info from Andrew Hickey)

This solo version of one of Smile‘s key tracks, Brian Wilson accompanying himself on ‘detuned grand piano’, should not really exist, as Smile‘s abandonment was also presumably a personal severance – all those Beach Boys self-perpetuated retrospective histories suggest that Smile‘s music became a kind of ‘no go area’ for Brian Wilson. So why record Surf’s Up during sessions for Wild Honey, the album the band made as ‘music for Brian to cool out to’?

With the hindsight of 45 years, this recording cannot sound anything but sad, poignant…the musical primitivism of Smiley Smile (and Wild Honey) is often used as an argument that this was all Brian Wilson was capable of, after his post-Smile ‘breakdown’. Like he not only couldn’t reached those peaks any more, he also chose not to. This recording says otherwise. It’s a revelation.

In Wouldn’t It Be Nice: My Own Story, Brian Wilson (as mediated by Todd Gold) says that, once Smile was abandoned,

after smoking a joint, I played a tape of Surf’s Up. Its beauty nearly destroyed me. When it finished,  I nearly destroyed the tape.

(Wouldn’t It Be Nice p.166).

Maybe it’s this 1967 recording that is being referred to. And before anyone comments again about assigning any value to this ‘fake book‘, it’s worth considering what personal details appear there and nowhere else, the above being one example; and from Smile Is Done, a 1997 discussion between Paul Williams and David Anderle (who was working with The Beach Boys at the time):

DAVID: There’s a few little things in [Wouldn't It Be Nice] about things that went on with him and I that are so dead on, so sharp, the memory
PAUL (Williams): He didn’t write the book, but that’s another story
DAVID: But those stories had to come from somewhere.

(reprinted in Williams’ How Deep Is The Ocean, p.194)

There doesn’t appear to be any information about why the 1967 version was recorded, and it’s never been bootlegged – but is it really likely that it was for The Beach Boys, considering how they felt about the song, and how one Beach Boy felt about its lyricist? And if Brian recorded Surf’s Up as a solo piece, maybe it was just a home-recorded momento mori, or a personal reminder of what was lost.

But who can really know?

The Smile Sessions‘ various versions of Surf’s Up (apart from this post-66 discovery) reveal the song to be the least realised of all of Smile tracks – and Cabin Essence the closest to what it was supposed to be. Even if Smile were left unreleased, had Cabin Essence‘s vocals been completed (and it took only a couple of days in 1968 to finish the version as released on 20/20), and Surf’s Up‘s sessions were concluded in the time between Inside Pop‘s broadcast in April and Smiley Smile‘s completion in August of ’67, record-buyers would have bought the album for Surf’s Up alone; its pre-publicity via Inside Pop’s broadcast would have guaranteed sales (Janis Ian’s Society’s Child was released in 1966, but only actually reached the charts in ’67 after its inclusion in the same CBS News broadcast). Smiley Smile was initially perceived as Smile, as anticipated:

and would have been bought as such – until people got it home and actually listened to it…

One can only imagine what Brian and Van Dyke envisaged for Surf’s Up. No one will ever know. But the Alan Boyd and Mark Linett 2011 composite, on Disc 1 of The Smile Sessions, suggests, in just the first minute and a half, what the song could have been. The interplay between Brian and Carl’s vocals is spine-tingling; this digital juxtaposition of Brian’s 1966 lead and Carl’s 1971 vocals, combined with the full studio arrangement, is vindication of a quarter-century of hope for a completed Smile, and only now possible with digital technology (or the skills of someone like John Oswald); the loss of the ‘second movement’s instrumental track (a couple of session tapes are logged as ‘missing’), and thus the use of the 1971 amalgam as the basis for the rest of the reconstruction (in the absence of any other reference recording), is in stark contrast to the lightness of this version’s composite intro.

Smile‘s speculators enjoy a ‘what if?’ – try this one out: imagine, just for a moment, a different Beach Boys, a version of the band that shouted down Mike Love in December 1966.

When Mike demanded Van Dyke explain the lyrics for Surf’s Up, Dennis threatened Mike in response (their conflicts are well-documented), and was supported by his little brother Carl – who in turn defended his big brother Brian; and if Wilson family outsiders Al Jardine (in a successful pop group for 5 years – but there is still dental school, should this all fall apart), and Bruce Johnston (a young pop craftsman – rather than an artist – who is kinda impressed by this weird new music that Brian is writing with Van Dyke Parks), who wanted to stay on the right side of the band, just so they can keep being the band…if it looked like the pro-Surf’s Up/Cabin Essence camp might defeat its opposition, Mike Love might have been outnumbered, 4 to 1.

The Smile Sessions notes reproduces illustrative quotes about Smile from now-departed Beach Boys:

Dennis: In my opinion, it makes Pet Sounds stink – that’s how good it is

Carl: Personally I loved it

and Carl’s full comment (from Don Was’ 1995 Brian Wilson documentary) was

I know there’s been a lot written, and maybe said about Michael not liking the Smile music…I think his main problem, as I recall, was that the lyrics were not relateable…they were SO artistic, and to him they were airy-fairy…just too abstract. Personally, I loved it.

In our universe, somehow, Mike Love won this argument – and he has since become the embodiment of The Beach Boys, a Registered Trademark.

Van Dyke Parks says, in David Leaf’s Beautiful Dreamer SMiLE film from 2004:

Brian made it clear to me that he wanted to do something without restraint or apology, or explanation to the rest of the group. And um (pauses) he honestly felt that I was a big enough guy to handle the door. There’s no question of that.

I wasn’t a big enough guy.

and

I think it’s time for proper respect given to absolute authority, and that should be given to an artist. And if there’s any artist who deserves that, in my mind, at the very point I turned tail and walked away from the project, it was Brian Wilson. But it was not within my power to bring that to him.

And that is a great regret.

and his regret is genuine: he really cares about Brian, to this day.

But it obviously wasn’t his responsibility to stand up to defend his lyrics, and to defend Brian Wilson. Firstly, he was employed by Brian Wilson. Secondly, he was 22 years old for fuck’s sake; but he’s nearly 70 now, and he is still being asked about Smile. His responses have been cautious: in October 2011, ‘you must forgive me. I have no comment on Smile. I’m so sorry’ (from here); more recently he is a little more forthcoming, in as he ‘answers the general inquisition (viz “author” Mike Eder et al) on the Beach Boys’ reunion and Smile‘.

Prior to this more ‘general inquisition’, he has even been quizzed by Mike Love himself :

Parks recalls he saw Love one final time when Melcher called him to Monterey to play synthesizer on the Beach Boys’ final album, recorded without Brian, 1992′s dreadful Summer in Paradise…When he got there, Love was meditating in Melcher’s living room. “For the first time in 30 years, he was able to ask me directly, once again, ‘What do those lyrics — Over and over the crow flies, uncover the cornfield — mean?’” Parks said about that meeting in ’95. “And I was  able to tell him, once again, ‘I don’t know.’ I have no idea what those words mean. I was perhaps thinking of Van Gogh’s wheat field or an idealized agrarian environment. Maybe I meant nothing, but I was trying to follow Brian Wilson’s vision at that time.”

Even if this much-reported conflict in December 1966 were resolved more amicably, Smile might still not have been released in 1967 – but, following this divergent timeline, there might not have been a the need for a huge box set in 2011, with a sticker that declares Smile as

And we might have had a ‘legacy edition’ more along the lines of The Basement Tapes, many years ago…because a more unified Beach Boys could have capitalised on the attention that Surf’s Up (one solitary song) received after Inside Pop was broadcast in April 1967. Their songwriter/composer/arranger/leader, and his curious collaborator

(amazing pic taken from Smile Sessions book)

might even have worked out an interim Beach Boys compositional unit, supplemented by a live Beach Boys, had Brian gotten some support…even with this nominal variation on Smile-history, and even with an unchanged Wild Honey and Friends as successors, The Beach Boys artistic reputation might have been something more than the ‘record industry albatross’ the band had become by 1969.

Yeah, it’s easy to speculate – as I say, that’s what Smile became in the eyes, ears and imagination of collectors of Smile-era outtakes. As Danny Hutton (of Redwood/Three Dog Night) says (in conversation with Richard Henderson, in the latter’s 33 1/3 Song Cycle book)

I mean everything you can write about [Smile] – and every fantasy that people have had about it – has been written.

Maybe. But even if there were still only a Smiley Smile instead of a Smile – but one with Cabin Essence and Surf’s Up, replacing Gettin’ Hungry and She’s Goin’ Bald (and ending sides one and two respectively), created under this temporary (and rather urgent) compromise (pressure from Capitol for a new Beach Boys album was intense), commercially (but also critically) this Smiley Smile might still have been perceived as an appropriate followup to Pet Sounds: an album at least partly consistent with the innovations of Good Vibrations.

Any album with Good Vibrations, Heroes and Villains (in any version), Cabin Essence and Surf’s Up could have contained proofs that The Beach Boys were a creative entity, rather than an entertainment machine – even with all that stoner filler. ‘Creativity’ was very fashionable (and quite successful) in 1967. This Smiley Smile variation would have been far more ‘in tune’ with the times.

And even without a completed Surf’s Up, but instead a solo rendition like the Fall ’67 discovery as Side Two’s final track (rather than the inconsequential Whistle In), imagine how different this album would sound.

Cue the tracks up as a playlist, try it out:

(excuse sloppy photoshoppery, I just wondered what it would look like)

In the Melody Maker October ’66 quiz above, and in response to ALBUM, Brian Wilson says

our next album will be better than “Pet Sounds”. It will be as much an improvement over “Sounds” as that was over “Summer Days”

It wasn’t – but the tracklist above would have been a step closer to that aim.

But, of course, it didn’t happen like that, and Smiley Smile, Gettin’ Hungry, Wild Honey, and then everything else that followed (that most anybody who has read this far knows only too well already), and as Brian Wilson essentially retreated from creating innovative music.

Or did he? There is Cool Cool Water from ’67 (bastardised into another hotchpotch by musical labourers for 1970′s Sunflower), Can’t Wait/Been Way Too Long (unfinished and unreleased until the CD reissue of Smiley Smile/Wild Honey in 1990) – and that errant Surf’s Up…what else might there have been that has since been lost, along with Surf’s Up‘s Second Movement?

If Brian Wilson was still trying to make music that was new, however sporadically, what – or rather who – held him back? And why?

Can someone please send me a script of the broadcast of President Obama’s announcement from end of last year? I feel so embarrassed – but I somehow must have missed it.

and is followed by another

no this is real and will happen around Oct 13th 2010…

Did it happen? Have I missed it? Or is this article’s unqualifiable claims all fake?

Maybe this forthcoming Beach Boys book I Can Hear Music is likewise a hoax:

Author Mike Eder reveals his dream project on The Beach Boys…[Eder] feels the entire Beach Boys story hasn’t been told with balance, and each individual member (aside from Brian) has still not been given due respect. As an honest portrayal of the band and their music, I Can Hear Music is sure to be a sought-after publication when it sees release.

Let us assume that Mike Eder and his forthcoming book to be real:

What was the genesis of your upcoming book, I Can Hear Music?

I felt The Beach Boys story hadn’t been told with balance. I first thought of this in 1994 actually when I was 18. I knew Brian had not stayed in bed for years at a time; I knew he did great work after Smile.  This was not made clear by the many books and movies up to that time.

Are you sure about this? As an author, with a working thesis formulated nearly twenty years ago, your research yielded nothing more than the usual tired tropes of rock gossip? And you feel that, post-Smile, Brian did ‘great work’?

Do go on:

Brian Wilson had a unique gift and in The Beach Boys he had a special vehicle.  Anybody who was around them that has said different at the time or now had their own political reasons to further the “Brian and the five a-holes” view that so many seem to need to latch onto. 

Perhaps it’s more exciting to have real “Heroes and Villains”, but really these falsehoods are what tore the band apart later on. How this happened my book will explain.

So Brian killed Smile?

Absolutely.  Maybe he got bored, or maybe the lawsuit with Capitol meant he had to hold the album back long enough to have moved on. There are a million things you could suppose.

Van Dyke Parks’ wavering commitment didn’t help.  Many people side with Parks, but the fact that he didn’t stick around once he got offered a solo album is a big factor in this.

It wasn’t malicious of Parks, but I have a feeling Brian was never completely sold on everything Van Dyke did himself. Perhaps Van Dyke didn’t need to convince Mike Love as much as Brian Wilson.  

Brian was in on the mocking Lei’d In Hawaii session [an unreleased “live-in-the-studio” recording from September 1967] where Mike Love overdubbed a self-deprecating dialogue onto “Heroes and Villains,” so what does that tell you? 

Putting aside Brian Wilson’s ‘special vehicle’ (is this for navigating the space/time continuum?) – Mr. Eder, what does this self-deprecating dialogue tell you? Should I hold out for this revisionist opus, or might I query a point or two here? I may? Then I shall.

The ‘mocking Lei’d In Hawaii session‘ he refers to is transcribed here, and is discussed here, so I’m not going to reiterate all of this again. My issue is with this biographer’s rhetorical claim that the meaning of this seeming self-mockery is self-evident. This track was never officially released, and is only available on bootlegs; it was first heard in 1994, on the Vigotone Lei’d in Hawaii release, and the studio recordings were ‘discovered shortly before the 1990 reissue campaign’ (from here) – and were thus presumably unknown until then.  These studio recordings were made for a faked ‘live’ album, but were discarded as unusable. If one single recording, released without context,  is being used as part of his thesis’ main argument, how valid would this ‘rebalance’  be without it?

I will concede to rigorous research, on any topic (including Exopolitics, Disclosure, and life on mars) – I cannot but admire experts. But I’ve (presumably) read most of the Beach Boys books Mike Eder has read, watched all of the films, heard all of the recordings – and, in this ‘either/or’ paradigm he argues,  I suppose I ‘side with Parks‘…however, in real research, there are no ‘sides’, only fact. I’ve read enough Examiner articles about Exopolitics to have realised that, however convincing the arguments and statements of Salla, Webre, Basiago etc. might seem, without proof, it can only ever be taken as speculative. At best. Read here about Laura Eisenhower’s teleportation trips to Mars – amazing stuff; if true, it could revise humanity’s understanding of the universe we live in, as well as the Military-Industrial Complex that her great-grandfather’s final speech as President of the USA warned against. Mike Love claims Brian wrote the dialogue for the Lei’d Heroes and Villains; but as this story has changed over time, without proof (if it’s scripted, where is the script?), it has the same aura of unreason as these teleportation tales.

Revisionism, on any subject, should always be accommodated, however uncomfortable it might be, if a) it’s necessary, and b) it is supported by data, rather than just supposition and anecdote.

It is not clear where Eder is gonna dig that hasn’t already been stripmined for ‘proofs’, on either side of either argument. If, as he claims,  ‘I have a feeling Brian was never completely sold on everything Van Dyke did himself’, what does he have that will support this ‘feeling’? And why does Mr. Parks himself address Eder personally, in the title of a brief piece on the Bananastan site, as he ‘answers the general inquisition (viz “author” Mike Eder et al) on the Beach Boys’ reunion and Smile‘? Van Dyke Parks was there, and he disagrees. What makes  this “author” feel he knows better?

‘Perhaps it’s more exciting to have real “Heroes and Villains”‘. Exciting? You think? I feel nothing resembling ‘excitement’ when considering all of this. Being a ‘fan’ of this music (and often an apologist for it) can get quite quite depressing, if not heartbreaking…but to see and hear Mike Love’s own personal vendetta against Van Dyke Parks being restated again and again says way more about the former than it does the latter. Why does Mike Love care so much, when Parks says in the link above

I’m ready to move on. The windshield is larger than the rear-view mirror.

Mr. Eder, what does that tell you?

With a Beach Boys reunion now underway, a book like I Can Hear Music will maybe appeal to a new Beach Boys audience. Its central argument would be an apposite accompaniment to this 50 year old band’s tour and album; let us discard our redundant library of outmoded research, biography, interviews and criticism by the likes of Dominic Priore, David Leaf, Timothy White, Peter Ames Carlin, Paul Williams, Kingsley Abbott, Brad Elliott, Nick Kent…and embrace yet another fucking Rock History Year Zero!

I am sure that Mike Eder’s work will be welcomed by this reanimated Beach Boys, and we should expect to see I Can Hear Music as an Amazon recommended purchase (with a cover quote from Mike Love) alongside the 2012 Joe Thomas-produced Celebration album (and do check out Buddy Love’s Joe Thomas‘ musical credentials; if there is fan-excitement about a new Beach Boys album, and despite Brian’s Thomas-produced Imagination album from 1998, then fans will forgive and forget. Preorder your copy of I Can Hear Music now!).

As I say, I hold no authority on any of this other than having spent a quarter-century pondering ‘what ifs’ and possibilities – but at no point could I have imagined the question ‘So Brian killed Smile?‘ being asked – nor this categorical response

Absolutely.  Maybe he got bored…there are a million things you could suppose.

There are indeed. I would like to suppose that all of this Examiner exopolitical-hooey were true; I’m willing to accept that it might be. With evidence. I’m also willing to accept that new evidence about the real role of Mike Love in the Beach Boys saga may yet be disclosed, and that ‘these falsehoods are what tore the band apart later on‘. But, as a friend says in defence of Mike Eder, after reading these interviews,

you have to admire the man’s sheer dogged refusal to believe tiny, insignificant things like… proof or fact, bless him

and also, about Eder’s professional CV

did you read the first page of his article? the one where he reveals his first published work was for “the three stooges” journal? i hope it was peer reviewed…

But as I Can Hear Music is presumably not yet complete, it could instigate as great a paradigm shift in the Beach Boys fan community as Obama’s still-forthcoming Disclosure speech could have upon The Planet Earth.

How this happened my book will explain.

With the Mayan calendar predicting 2012 as a year of great change upon the Earth, maybe everything we know (as Beach Boys fans or as normal human beings) is actually wrong.

I want to believe.

(thanks to Michael Leddy for the VDP link, and, as always, The Common Swings)

Max Headroom:  Great reunions are a Grammy™ tradition – just in the past decade this show has brought back together legends like Simon and Garfunkel and The Police. This year we thought ‘wouldn’t it be nice’ to reunite the band that brought this whole world The California Dream, and Endless Harmony™. From their earliest surf rock hits, to the groundbreaking Pet Sounds album, to the famously-ambitious Smile Sessions, this band changed music history for ever with their ‘good vibrations’.

Here to kick off our celebration™ of The Beach Boys, please welcome – Maroon 5!

Maroon 5: do you love me do you surfer girl

Maroon 5 Guy: ladies and gentlemen – Foster The People!

Foster The People: wouldn’t it be nice if we were older

Max Headroom: How could you not love those songs! And now here’s something you don’t see every day, or even every decade – on behalf of music lovers all over the world I am so thrilled that this great band is back together to do it again™ for their 50th Anniversary™…ladies and gentlemen, here to spread some ‘good vibrations’ as only they can do it, The Beach Boys!

The Beach Boys™: i i love the colorful clothes she wears

And so on.

Maroon 5 and Foster And Allen join the band onstage:

Brian Wilson retains a dignified position at the piano throughout:

Appreciative audience members are shown:

It ends.

And echoes this comparable celebration from 25 years earlier.

For anyone who has read all of this so far, it would be over-emphasising a point to suggest that this ‘reunion’ is not in any way pleasing – I speak as a Brian Wilson (but not The Beach Boys™) ‘fan’, and I have been writing as one throughout. And if I haven’t already said (or at least suggested) here just how redundant an exercise in self-celebration this is going to become, this very public return should speak for itself.

Maybe it’s just me that feels this to be something nobody (bar Mike Love) actually needs…and you can read a way more measured response to this performance here.

However, if WordPress page hits and search terms are any indication of a post-Grammys™ enthusiasm for ‘good vibrations’ , the extra traffic these blog postings got after Sunday’s show suggests that this half-centenary Celebration™ (to be followed by the album of the same name) might yet have an audience larger than just the expected legion of ‘aging fans’.

One search term that brought a reader here a few weeks ago says it better than I could:

(although it only later occurred to me what they might actually have been searching for…).

Unless something interesting (musically or otherwise), unexpected (good or bad), or off-script (and the introduction quoted above bears all the hallmarks of a Beach Boys Corp. co-write) occurs between now and the end of the upcoming 50-date tour, no further comment shall be made here about this 2012 reunion. Bar one more observation to follow.

As Zooey Deschanel (as first and most useful search hit) says here,

I have the utmost respect for true critics and writers who devote themselves to analyzing and appreciating art; this is NOT who I am talking about. Often the content of comments sections goes something like this (in Mad Libs form):

SouPerP1mp69: I hate (name of an artist/celebrity not in room)! He/she is (unflattering adjective) and (unflattering adjective) and someone should tell her/him that he/she should stop (verb/name of profession)-ing.

And so, if I don’t have anything nice to say, maybe I shouldn’t be saying anything at all.

However, I would imagine that Mike Love was quite upset about Whitney Houston’s sudden (if not exactly unexpected) death – and the shadow it cast over the ‘good vibrations’ planned for this show…

A haphazard and indeterminate series of posts about The Beach Boys’ Smile album; unfinished and unreleased in 1966 and 67, Smile was finally made available, as The SMiLE Sessions, in November 2011.

As an unexpected (and possibly not-unrelated) follow-up to Smile‘s release, The Beach Boys have reformed, and there are a few posts that relate to the band’s 50 year anniversary ‘celebration’.

Observations made, questions asked (and any conclusions reached) come from 25 years of listening – plus reading and watching anything that related to The Beach Boys, Brian Wilson, Van Dyke Parks and Smile. This quarter-century personal distraction was never meant to be ‘research’.

Page will be updated as new posts are added.

Prooimion  (15 September 2011)

Simulacra and Palimpsests  (20 September 2011)

a note about sources  (21 September 2011)

20/20′s Vision? (22 September 2011)

Summer Dreams – The Story of the Beach Boys (TV Movie, 1990) (1 October 2011)

A Smile-Collector’s Fakebox (1 October 2011)

Smile Sessions Taster (Linett 2011 mixes) (4 October 2011)

The Beach Boys – An American Family (TV Movie Special, 2000)  (5 October 2011)

Brian Wilson – Songwriter 1962-1969 (2DVD, 2010)  (6 October 2011)

The Beach Boys – An American Band (1984)  (12 October 2011)

Good Vibrations – 30 Years of The Beach Boys (CD box set, 1993)  (12 October 2011)

I Just Wasn’t Made For These Times (1995)  (13 October 2011)

Endless Harmony (1998)  (13 October 2011)

a question never known to exist  (15 October 2011)

‘Smile’ – My First 25 Years : some comments so far  (18 October 2011)

Finishing ‘Smile’?  (25 October 2011)

‘Nobody’s Ghoul’ (1963)  (25 October 2011)

Fictions – ‘Grace Of My Heart’, ‘Glimpses’  (27 October 2011)

Dematerialisation and Rematerialisation  (27 October 2011)

Cabin Essence, lost and found…  (28 October 2011)

Cabinessence, uncovering the cornfield…  (31 October 2011)

Unleash the Love (1967 – 2011)  (1 November 2011)

Brian Wilson Presents SMiLE (2004)  (2 November 2011)

‘SMiLE’ – the next 25 years : ‘The SMiLE Sessions’ box  (3 November 2011)

Mike Love & Sunnydown Snuff  (9 November 2011)

The Beach Boys 25 Years Together (TV, 1987)  (14 November 2011)

summarising Smile on video  (23 November 2011)

some more sources  (24 November 2011)

Inside Pop – The Rock Revolution (1967)  (4 January 2012)

Inside Pop – some comments  (10 January 2012)

50 Years of The Beach Boys: Don’t Do It Again  (15 January 2012)

Van Dyke Parks, “damnedest thing I’ve ever heard”  (18 January 2012)

50 Years of The Beach Boys : The Grammy Awards 2012  (14 February 2012)

50 Years of The Beach Boys : What Do I Want To Believe? (19 February 2012)

He’s Goin’ Bald & Gettin’ Hungry (22 February 2012)

However, finally, there is an overview of one part of Van Dyke’s career, prior to and post-1967 – this was released in September 2011:

(on Bananastan CD and gatefold vinyl – digital as well, but fuck that, get the vinyl)

And this was released in May 2011, the first in a series of six 7″ singles:

(cover artwork “Towers” by Art Spiegelman)

Listen to Wall Street:

Play it while reading on. If you haven’t heard a Van Dyke Parks composition before, start with something contemporary.

Michael Leddy, in ”imaginary liner notes” written about the songs (on the Bananastan site), says of this release:

‘Wall Street’ is a 9/11 song, beginning with the biz-talk and chatter of a workday (“Drop me off at Walk Don’t Walk”) before turning to ash, blood, and confetti, and the indelible image of a man and woman holding hands as they fall to the pavement. Yes, that happened, and this song remembers.

and

‘Money Is King’ picks up where ‘Wall Street’ ends, with an A major chord. Adding a dense and varied string arrangement to a melody by the Growling Tiger (Trinidadian calypsonian Neville Marcano), Parks tells some transcultural truths about the lives of the rich and the poor. The rich man? “He can commit murder and get off free, And live in the governor’s company.” What about the poor? “But if you are poor, the people tell you ‘Shoo!’ And a dog is better than you.”

There’s a good interview about ‘The Van Dyke Parks Singles Club’ here – but all interviews he does are usually entertaining:

Speaking to MOJO from his home in Pasadena, Califronia, Parks, in his inimitably cinematic style, talks of his loathing for the CD, his love of sleeve art, the courage of the pioneering musician and the not-so-small matter of the soon-to-be released Smile Sessions.

A few comments that follow the Mojo interview offer dissenting voices, somehow irked by this ‘inimitably cinematic style’ (‘Damn, he’s a pompous fart’ and ‘What a horribly pompous man’) – and they get some solid support:

I agree this man is pompous. Let the punishment fit the crime. I say stone the evil doer.

Posted by Van Dyke Parks at 5:52 PM GMT 23/05/2011

In the sleevenotes for Arrangements, Van Dyke Parks says

Here’s Volume One, dating from my earliest studio adventures in the ’60s. Come To The Sunshine was the first such arrangement. It was written about my dad and his band ‘The White Swan Serenaders’ (who played at the White Swan Hotel in Punxsutawny, PA.) This single on MGM gave me my first real adventure at the dawn of multitrack recording (although it was done in just 3 takes). Throughout, you’ll hear what I learned about arranging. Bear in mind I went on to scratch out my own hard-scrabble life as an underpaid arranger, yet able to propel three offspring through their collegiate careers. They learned enough to avoid my occupational mistakes, pursuing other careers. Volume Two will be a different matter, with an exponential craft improvement on my part. Still, this must be my confession, as a review of my past work may offer great instruction to others who move the recorded arts beyond my wildest dreams. Clearly, my best work lies ahead. – Van Dyke Parks, Pasadena, CA, March ’11.

Arrangements is a great introduction to Van Dyke Parks – but so is any Van Dyke Parks record. Depending upon taste and tolerance, any song/track/arrangement/performance should make an impression. If, for instance, had his 1969 single The Eagle And Me been granted radio play, even in the late 60s, it might have stopped listeners dead…play it from this youtube link when Wall Street ends.

One of the most exciting anticipatory pleasures of any official Smile Sessions release was that, finally, Van Dyke Parks would be given the space to talk about his role, and about his lyrics (having often shrugged off discussion of the latter, due maybe to Mike Love’s various verbal reiterations of the ‘acid alliteration’ attack). And, so, finally, in the The Smile Sessions book, Van Dyke Parks says…well actually, he doesn’t say anything at all. From the Mojo interview above (from May 2011):

When somebody mentions Smile, what’s the first thing that pops into your head?

Crows over a cornfield [a reference to the Parks-penned line in Smile's Cabinessence]. I hear the box set is going to be absolutely beautiful. It will be very comforting to see that it’s finally commercially available.

By October, however, in the eMusic Q&A mentioned in comments here,

On Smile, what was your contribution beyond the lyrics?

You must forgive me. I have no comment on Smile. I’m so sorry.

Though Van Dyke’s voice is absent in The Smile Sessions book, Tom Nolan (identified as “the author, most recently, of Artie Shaw, King of the Clarinet: His Life and Times“) speaks for him:

But what about the lyrics? What are they saying? What’s it all mean?…Van Dyke Parks took to answering questions about meaning with phrases like “I have no idea” or “It doesn’t mean anything”.

Nolan then quotes Brian Wilson’s own explication of Surf’s Up from Jules Siegel’s Goodbye Surfing, Hello God article, but with a caveat:

of course it’s not required that your mental movie follow even a co-creator’s script.

No, of course it isn’t.

Mike Love offers some further observations in his own Smile Sessions essay. The emphasis is mine:

the lyrics on some things were not my cup of tea, and the term I came up with to describe some of those lyrics was “acid illiteration“.

Has Brian and Van Dyke’s most notorious antagonist been misquoted all these years? Mike’s objections to Smile‘s lyrics (and the lyricist he neglects to name) coins a neologism that might be worthy of Van Dyke Parks himself (were it not so inherently perjorative); what was understood verbally as ‘alliteration’ takes on a whole new meaning in print. Mike Love also observes, about his own lyrics, that “I am not sure that “excitations” is really a word frequently used in the English language”.  So here are two surprising illustrations of his own personal pleasure in verbal and lyrical wordplay, plus his perception that there was an illiteracy that undermined ‘the Smile project’.

 Astonishing.

However ‘pompous’ anyone might find this ‘cinematic style’, you’ve gotta be some kind of complete fucking ignoramous (musical or otherwise) to regard Van Dyke Parks as lacking an artistic literacy. No, I mean, really. Come on. You’re joking. Surely.

Most people seem to have come to Van Dyke Parks through Smile, and to Smile through The Beach Boys; being the contrary twat I was twenty five years ago, I became interested in The Beach Boys via Van Dyke Parks (all here). Before discovering Cabinessence, but after noticing his name for the first time, I bought his most recent album Jump!, came straight home, and put it on the turntable straight away – and in the company of two close friends, who both normally trusted my musical choices. One was curious; the other: “what the HELL is this?!?”

I wasn’t sure myself, lifted the needle before its overture was over, put the album back in its sleeve, and listened to the rest of it later. In private. It was a long time before I got any grip on what I had bought.

An ad for Van Dyke’s third album, The Clang of the Yankee Reaper, in a 1975 Rolling Stone, says it all way better than I could:

The Clang of the Yankee Reaper was likewise as baffling to me (Pachelbel’s Cannon in D as some kind of crazy ’70s TV cop theme?), as was Discover America, for different reasons – although its opening track, wherein The Mighty Sparrow sings on a crackly record about an older lady (‘she could be me granny’) ‘walking round at night with de face like Jack Palance” is immediate and hilarious, it becomes confusing very quickly. The sleevenotes, ‘a Periodical of Carifta Co. and Warner Bros Records, Volume 1 No.2′, didn’t really help much.

Paradoxically, Song Cycle was his only album that made any immediate sense on first listen,

if only because a) it was a crazy 60s record, and b) it was Van Dyke Parks’ first released work after Smile was abandoned. It felt a little closer to Smile than, say, Smiley Smile.

Song Cycle deserves an entire essay of its own. Usefully there is a very good one already:

There is probably more that could be written (it’s a small book, hence the small pic, more an essay than a full ‘study’), but would need an audience familiar enough with 1968′s Song Cycle to care. The 33 1/3 blog has a ‘league table‘ of their publications’ sales in 2010: Neutral Milk Hotel and Celine Dion hold the top spots; Van Dyke Parks is number 74 – of 74. Reader interest suggests that an audience for anything more extensive doesn’t exist, not just yet…

Specific details about Song Cycle‘s recording process show what Van Dyke learnt from working with Brian Wilson during the Smile sessions, but his approach in the studio seemed much more ‘experimental’ than Brian Wilson:

The album’s producer, Lenny Waronker, recalls hustling from studio to studio, both he and Parks carrying armloads of multi-track tape boxes. As he put it, “we weren’t crazed over a particular studio’s sound. We were just looking for tape recorders, going anywhere we could grab studio time”.

Brian Wilson always sounds surer of what he wants right away on Smile sessions; Van Dyke (with Doug and Bruce Botnick) used no end of gimmicks and effects throughout Song Cycle. Bruce Botnick, as engineer, invented ‘the Farkle’:

I took splicing tape I think or masking tape – very thin – and would fold it so like it was a fan, lots of blades sticking out, and wrap it around and tape it to the capstan of the tape machine, so as it was going round it had these fins all the way around it and what it would do is cause the capstan to bounce.

This is the effect heard on the harp in the introduction to The All Golden. The most basic of free VST chorus plugins could get a similar effect now. But probably not the same.

There are various levels of incomprehensible craziness throughout Song Cycle – but, like the Best Brian Wilson music, you keep discovering it anew. With Song Cycle, the realisation that there were songs took a while. Richard Henderson’s book mentions that, like Smile (as Dumb Angel), Song Cycle had a ‘working title’, of Looney Tunes.

Van Dyke, in a 1996 interview in Paul Zollo’s Songwriters On Songwriting, says about his own albums ‘I have a small output. My best work, and my least conspicuous, has been in the service of other records‘. The Arrangements compilation is (hopefully) the first of a series of this ‘service’. Jim O’Rourke persisted for years in trying to persuade Van Dyke Parks to release his earlier work as a compilation (for O’Rourke’s Mokai label, which also re-released Fennesz’s amazing cover of Pet Sounds‘ Don’t Talk in 1999). Arrangements Volume 1 is as close as that will get, and excludes both his first single Number Nine (an extraordinarily-camp ‘sunshine pop’ take on Beethoven’s Ode To Joy), plus

(from The 1969 Warner/Reprise Songbook sampler, hear it)

Come To The Sunshine is here purely to illustrate his ‘earliest studio adventures in the ’60s…this single on MGM gave me my first real adventure at the dawn of multitrack recording…throughout, you’ll hear what I learned about arranging‘.

Arrangements Volume 1 also has One Meat Ball from Ry Cooder’s first album, which, I suppose, might be considered a ‘typical’ Van Dyke Parks String Arrangement: all the musicians sound drunk, the arrangement lurches along ahead of and behind the beat, swells, stops, starts, but somehow it all makes sense…this is crazy music. Damnedest thing I’ve ever heard.

Van Dyke Parks has done a few interviews to promote Arrangements (which is self-released) – here is an hour-long ‘fireside chat’, as useful a career overview as one might need. If anyone reads this, and only knows Van Dyke because of his Smile lyrics, this podcast might broaden an understanding of one of America’s most interesting musicians/composers/arrangers currently still working; comes with illustrative audio, including Spike Jones’ Cocktails For Two alongside some of his own work, plus a raucous Come To The Sunshine by The Esso Trinidad Steel Band.

While still trying to get to grips with Jump!, Victoria Williams released her debut album Happy Come Home.

She’s more well-known for being diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 1993, without health insurance, and the celebrity Sweet Relief tribute/benefit album/concerts/fund (to assist with her medical costs); not sure how many other people rate Happy Come Home, separate from her illness.

Victoria Williams has a voice that can immediately polarise listeners (in the same way that Robbie Basho and Joanna Newsom can empty rooms), and you could mistake her for some ‘kooky’ girl singer, if you didn’t actually listen. The entire album is wonderful – and Shoes, Main Road and TC have Van Dyke Parks arrangements.

There is maybe a poignancy to these tracks for post-1993 listeners, exercabated by a knowledge of Victoria Williams’ illness…dunno. But TC has its own poignancy, which is heightened by how Van Dyke’s strings accompany her spoken and sung voice:

I think I’ll go for a walk out in the woods,
not sure just where
might go see if TC’s there.
The dew had not yet left the yard,
diamonds in the grass.
A wealthy girl and all
took all my good friends
(whistles) “here Booger, here Rex!”
Way across the field they come – here they come. Here they are.

The ‘accompaniment’ walks out with Victoria; the dogs arrive; words, phrases and TC himself (who is now ‘just a memory’) are illustrated by the arrangement:

(Victoria knocks on door)
‘Miss Gibson, is TC here?’
(Victoria speaks Miss Gibson’s response)
‘Well he’s out back, honey’ (Victoria runs out back)

Van Dyke’s strings trot along out back with Victoria. She recalls TC’s younger days; and then, when TC was older,

his friends,
these animals that come around,
and he feeds them at twilight.
TC’s got many a story to tell,
with the dancing light in his eyes -
he plays ukelele:
‘You are my sunshine, my only sunshine…’
(strings play a fragment of You Are My Sunshine)
‘O my darling, O my darling, O my darling
(a fragment of Clementine)…T – C.’

And so on. There is so much movement, humour and sadness in the words of this song, but there is as much, if not more, in the arrangement itself. Like the best Carl Stalling Looney Tunes soundtracks, it is as if there is an arrangers’ universal vocabulary, a literacy which can convey joy, pathos, movement, with just an encapsulated phrase; Shoes and Main Road do the same things, with different stories and in different ways, but using that same vocabulary.

I have no idea how any of this works. Damnedest thing I’ve ever heard. And my feelings about TC are maybe not shared by too many other people (though I hope they are). As a series of personal reminiscences, and set to a musical accompaniment that is almost alive in its responsiveness, it’s still one of the most perfect things I have ever heard. Up there with Cabinessence.

You can see a DA Pennebaker film about Victoria Williams and Happy Come Home here (in four parts – 2, 3, 4 here) -  Shoes and TC are in part 2, live versions intercut with the recordings; Main Road is in part 3.

Van Dyke Parks also contributed an arrangement to U2′s Rattle and Hum in 1988. On the album (and in the accompanying documentary),

the band explores American roots music, and incorporates elements of blues-rock, folk rock, and gospel in their sound. The motion picture was filmed primarily in the United States in late 1987 during the Joshua Tree Tour and it features their experiences with American music. (Wikipedia)

I watched the whole of fucking Rattle and Hum, assuming that U2′s choice of Van Dyke was because he was part of their ‘exploration’ of ‘American roots music’, and, similar to their fetishising of BB King, ‘the angel of harlem’ et al, Van Dyke would be treated with a similar reverence. All I Want Is You plays over the end titles. No Van Dyke Parks footage.

This turgid two-chord dirge (and series of lyrical platitudes – ‘from the cradle to the grave’ indeed…)  gets interesting after about 2 minutes, as Van Dyke’s strings come in, but then Bono starts singing again…skip to 4:40 for the best bit. I imagine there is not a lot an arranger could do with such dull chords…Van Dyke, when asked about this years later, said he thought he was going to be working with The B-52s.

This is a rare example of work with an incompatible artist – and, while work is work, and bills do need to be paid, the kind of people who choose to use Van Dyke Parks (as player or arranger) often make interesting music themselves. Wikipedia’s list of Work For Other Artists is extensive. Of these, I have albums by Tim Buckley, Randy Newman, Harry Nilsson, The Beau Brummels, Little Feat, Ry Cooder, Joanna Newsom, The Everly Brothers…I bought records by Sam Phillips, Peter Case and Silverchair, plus Happy Come Home and the first Rufus Wainwright album, solely because he was involved in some capacity.

His name on a sleeve isn’t an immediate recommendation, but it does suggest that this might be an interesting album, and it rarely isn’t. U2 excepted. Randy Newman claims that, as U2 visited poor black Southern states of the US, people came out to welcome them with open arms, saying “thank you for the gift of your music”.

yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah!

Another personal favourite arrangment is the choral vocal for Jennifer Warnes’ Leonard Cohen cover A Singer Must Die

(Len’s draft sleeve for Famous Blue Raincoat – The Songs of Leonard Cohen, 1987)

but it isn’t even on youtube, although other tracks from Famous Blue Raincoat are. Its arrangement (with Bill Ginn) is a creepy all-vocal ensemble – and, as ‘the ladies go moist, as the judge has no choice, a singer must die, for the lie in his voice‘, the arrangement accompanies the vocal lead, as Greek chorus, judge, jury, executioner – and lubricious ladies…

Always modest about his own albums, their sales were often as modest – Tokyo Rose (from 1989, which came and went very quickly)

concerns the intersection between Japanese and American cultures, particularly as reflected in the competitive “Trade War” of the 1980s. The intersection between the two cultures is nowhere more obvious than in the album’s first song, “America,” an adaptation of “America the Beautiful” with numerous pentatonic shifts characteristic of Japanese music, played on a combination of standard Western instruments and traditional Japanese instruments, such as the biwa and the koto.

This might sound like a offputtingly-serious record; however, this is its composer on the back cover:

Watch a performance of America live in Japan, by Van Dyke Parks & The Discover America Ensemble:

The Beach Boys left Capitol Records in late 1969 for a new contract with Warner Brothers (the same label that released the loss-making Song Cycle):

November 1969

Two years and seven months after leaving The Beach Boys camp, Van Dyke Parks…re-enters the scene.  to assist with the group’s signing. Parks tells Scott Keller in 1973: “I was working at Warner Brothers’ Records at the time…in A&R. The Beach Boys were at a very low point in their career…they ended up at Warner Brothers because I personally begged [WB boss] Mo Ostin to sign them…I’d pressured Mo to sign the beleaguered Beach Boys to the label, in spite of industry-wide reservations about the group’s ability to deliver. They were considered a problem at that time. They were an industry albatross, simply because there were so many egos involved. Everyone at the label just wanted Brian Wilson to come over and write some songs.

(Murry Wilson, The Beach Boys’ father, ex-manager, and custodian of their publishing, sold The Beach Boys’ song copyrights outright the same week. Not the best timing.)

‘Brian Wilson’: (with back to camera, to Nik Venet of Capitol Records) I’m writing a Teenage Symphony To God, Van Dyke is helping.
‘Van Dyke’: You see, The Beach Boys are this pan-patrotic kind of trans-presidential vibe, they’re Americana personified, and that gives us a platform to bring a kinda Mark Twain irony thing into rock and roll.

This is from The Beach Boys – An American Family, a US  TV drama from 2000, which uses ‘published texts’ for its dialogue (and thus its claims of veracity). That blond guy is ‘Van Dyke’, who is some kind of showy fop, at least in the eyes of the filmmakers: verbally ostentatious, musically precocious, egotistical (and possibly homosexual)…but the examples used to support this character assassination could only convince the most cretinous of partisan viewers. There is neither verbal nor musical dexterity on show here, just the lowest of lowbrow suspicion and loathing of intellect.

And here, the substance of Van Dyke and Mo Ostin’s defence of The Beach Boys, despite their being ‘an industry albatross’, somehow gets transmuted into dialogue that ridicules the support offered, when no other label would touch them.

Van Dyke has, however, stayed supportive of The Beach Boys, and despite his (well-documented) treatment during Smile – maybe because he was ultimately trying to help Brian Wilson himself. He has appeared on a few Beach Boys recordings since 1967, on the Surf’s Up album in 1971 (although he doesn’t seem to have been involved in the recreation of the title track, despite co-writing the song); and as one of many authors of Sail On Sailor, from the Holland album:

Tuesday September 10th 1972

[The Beach Boys] submit the completed master of Holland to executives at Warner/Reprise…the group feel confident that they have a strong album, and a November 5th release date is tentatively set. But they are aghast when the company rejects the disc. Warner/Reprise want a hit single but says they cannot hear one…the group is forced to drop the weakest track, We Got Love…and replace it with a song with hit potential.

Van Dyke Parks once again enters the scene and reminds Brian of the song they composed (allegedly with Ray Kennedy and Tandyn Almer) around May 15th.

From a 1975 interview Van Dyke says

I came up with that lyric when I was working with Brian, as well as the musical pitches those words reside on. I did nothing with that tape until I saw the Beach Boys’ crisis at the company where I was working, earning $350 a week. Well, they recorded the song, and it was a hit. And I’m glad that everyone the came out of their little rooms to claim co-writing credit on that song. But I never questioned it, just as I never questioned the various claims on the residuals.

On my CBS Nice Price 80s CD copy, four people contributed to Sail On Sailor, but Van Dyke Parks doesn’t even get a writing credit:

so he would have gotten fuck all in royalties for that reissue.

“Many years later, when [producer] Terry Melcher wanted to take the song ‘Kokomo’ to the tropical islands, he called me and wanted to use my Rolodex, so to speak. So, I brought some great musician friends — people who’d played with Sinatra, Fitzgerald, Cecil Taylor — to play with me on that session. I was paid well for my work, although it was a nonunion session — no hospitalization, no dental, nothing extra if it went commercial. The Beach Boys, after all, were Republicans — unions weren’t something to mention to them. We weren’t dealing with Studs Terkel. We were dealing with Bruce Johnston and Mike Love, who’d become the entity known as the Beach Boys. Of course, the song went to number one, and Mike Love always made a very big deal out of the fact that it was made without Brian Wilson. And that was always very alarming to me because beyond the Beach Boys’ beautiful music, my allegiance has always been to Brian Wilson, who hired me years ago and told me he’d give me 50 percent of anything we wrote together. He said that speaking from his throne at a time when I was nobody. Isn’t that the sign of a marvelous person?”

Parks recalls he saw Love one final time when Melcher called him to Monterey to play synthesizer on the Beach Boys’ final album, recorded without Brian, 1992′s dreadful Summer in Paradise. A neighbor offered to fly the musician to Monterey in his one-engine plane if Parks agreed to cover gas and other expenses. When he got there, Love was meditating in Melcher’s living room. “For the first time in 30 years, he was able to ask me directly, once again, ‘What do those lyrics — Over and over the crow flies, uncover the cornfield — mean?’” Parks said about that meeting in ’95. “And I was  able to tell him, once again, ‘I don’t know.’ I have no idea what those words mean. I was perhaps thinking of Van Gogh’s wheat field or an idealized agrarian environment. Maybe I meant nothing, but I was trying to follow Brian Wilson’s vision at that time.” Parks says Love asked if he could fly back to L.A. in the plane with him. “We had a nice chat and he insisted that he wanted to split the cost of the flight with me, so he gave me a card with his number on it. The next morning, I called to discover it was a disconnected number. And that was the last time I saw Mike Love.”

(originally from the New York Times, April 6, 2000 – quoted here)

Mike Love has offered reassurances (here):

Now why do you want to talk to ME about that? I like Van Dyke Parks

But there does seem to be a unwavering animosity from Beach Boys Inc. towards the man. It seems like Van Dyke himself should be the person bearing the grudge – and quite justifiably so. Mike Love might never forgive Brian Wilson and Van Dyke Parks for Smile, but this sole artistic infraction happened nearly a half-century ago.

Mike Love is, after all, the guy that brought the term ‘acid illteracy’ into print in 2011. One would think, with that particular literary success, he could finally let lie a long-past professional disagreement, as a 25 year old (and with a 22 year old). It’s difficult to conceive of a grievance worth maintaining for that long – somebody would need to kill to prompt that in me. But I am not Mike Love. And I wasn’t there.

While writing all the above, this turned up in the post:

Published in 1999, Palm Desert, A Book by Rudy VanderLans Based on Lyrics and Music by Van Dyke Parks

grew out of a simple packaging design for an audio CD containing four loose adaptations of one of Parks’ musical compositions. The initial design, however, quickly outgrew its jewel case confinement as the mix of photography, two essays, music and review begged for a more spacious book format. The point of departure was “Palm Desert”, a track on Parks’ 1968 debut album Song Cycle, one of my all-time favourite records, and a mythical release of impressive proportions itself. While perhaps not his best album, Song Cycle left a lasting impression on me. Simultaneously otherworldly yet oddly faniliar, its musical compositions are timeless, or perhaps froma specific time impossible to define.

It’s kind of an ‘art book about Van Dyke Parks’ – but a proper book, not the art-platitude drivel contained within the ‘exhibition in lieu of a gallery’ that is Brian Wilson: An Art Book, derided here. The accompanying CD is incidental (didn’t hear anything much that caught my ear unfortunately); but, had I read Rudy VanderLans’ Foreword before writing most of the above, I needn’t have bothered, as this makes a much more concise case for Van Dyke Parks, post-Smile:

Ironically, to a large music contingent, Van Dyke Parks is best known for his collaboration on Brian Wilson’s  never released Smile album, which perhaps solidified Parks’ mythical status more than anything, and which is how he ended up in the aforementioned video [this clip]. Without intending to take anything away from these brilliant collaborations, (Wilson was at the absolutely top of his creativity), the Smile sessions tend to unjustly overshadow Van Dyke Parks’ other accomplishments. His long and prolific career incudes six solo albums, numerous movie scores, children’s books, and uncounted credits as a session musician, lyricist, producer and arranger for a host of fellow musicians both past and present.

Gavin Bryars reviewed Palm Desert (in 2009) here;

This curious and quite elegant little book…represents a fan’s homage to one of the finest minds operating on the margins of contemporary music, via a series of photographs and essays, two of which are by other hands. The author’s introductory essay is quite touching and his photographs combine the precision and obliqueness of their source material. Like his subject, Vanderlans is an outsider looking quizzically at the idiosyncrasies and mythologies of California

Richard Henderson (in his 33 1/3 Song Cycle essay) elaborates:

Weird but true: during the last couple of decades, the impression is deeply received that European and Japanese audiences appreciate Parks’ solo work more than his own compatriots do. All of his writing has struck me as American to the bone, so much so that I’d assumed it to be indecipherable by foreign audiences. So when a Dutch street orchestra performs “Jack Palance”, the calypso tune personalized by Parks on his second album, or when Parks is accosted repeatedly on the streets of Tokyo by fans…I’m glad for him…but it’s all the more bewildering for me.

I’m English, so I fit within the above – and, to me, so much of Van Dyke’s work seems to be ‘about’ America, historically, musically, whatever…his Smile lyrics were the beginning of a career-long elaboration upon the US, while also conveying ‘transcultural truths’ ; Wall Street is its 21st Century manifestation. If his music were just a series of signs and ciphers, it would only work as ‘art music’ – but if this is ‘rock music’, or even pop music, if it’s not fun to listen, it fails.

1968′s Song Cycle could not have happened without the possibilities that Sgt. Pepper’s release (and popularity) in 1967 brought to this nascent new music; if 1966/7′s rate of artistic development was any indicator of American music’s future, pop music’s vocabularies should have expanded exponentially between ’67 and ’68. Song Cycle‘s commercial failure seems inevitable in retrospect (it’s a crazy album, on every level), but I’m sure its composer expected an audience as advanced as the music on the record.

That popular music (the popular stuff, the records in the pop charts) atrophied into rock’s basic archetypes so quickly (they’re all in 1967′s Inside Pop), and all still exist as templates half a century later, must surely surprise more musicians than just Van Dyke Parks…

But this is becoming Rock History Reductionism again, and if this seems like an oversimplification…well, of course it fucking is. Much as it might be nice to rewrite the history of rock music, this is just some guy going on about why Van Dyke Parks makes music that is often the damnedest thing he’s ever heard, inside and outside pop.

By the 1980s, when I first heard Van Dyke Parks, he

operates on fringe of popular music, with low profile, many credits, layered sounds, eccentric image

(says Donald Clarke’s eccentric 1988 Penguin Encyclopedia of Popular Music)

and, now, as pop music audiences came to expect less and less of music, and got what they expected, one of the most consistently-interesting figures of modern American music arrives in 2011, without a record contract, self-releasing his own new music. Like Harry Partch and his Gate 5 label, Sun Ra and Saturn, The Residents on Ralph, or Jandek On Corwood.

I could go on: not even mentioned Ys by Joanna Newsom (but you can hear Monkey & Bear in the Fireside Chat), or Diorama by Silverchair (no really), or An Invitation with Inara George – an Amazon reviewer says about the latter

the main accompaniment is Van Dyke Parks and his string arrangements. I wont argue with anyone who likes them, but I have to be blunt about my own reaction: the orchestral parts are busy, harmonically dense, the rhythms lope, flit, and lurch uncomfortably without a steady beat, and they basically just dance all over the place, with unrelenting hyperactivity. Not only are the arrangements hyperactive, they seem dynamically constricted. There is a want of pianissimo and fortissimo. Furries of notes and chord changes cannot substitute for dynamic contrasts between loud and soft to add life and drama to the music. I guess this is a factor that doesn’t concern Van Dyke Parks.

Watch a clip of Inara singing Tell Me That You Love Me from the album, with Van Dyke at the joanna (no strings ‘dancing all over the place’); hear Rough Design from An Invitation, featuring the offending orchestral parts. ‘Busy, harmonically dense, the rhythms lope, flit, and lurch uncomfortably without a steady beat, and they basically just dance all over the place, with unrelenting hyperactivity‘. And this is a problem?

According to recent interviews, he will be working with a US dubstep guy called Skrillex…whatever this turns out to be, there will be neither Fat Boys nor Smart Girls involved. It may be the damnedest thing Skrillex’s audience has ever heard (and if they are as ignorant of The Aphex Twin as Skrillex’s messageboard seems to suggest, they will probably shit their sagging pants when they hear it).

Gavin Bryars says that

There are several books that need writing on Van Dyke Parks and [Palm Desert] may well be one of them (provided it is not the only one!). The range of his work and the diversity of his career is astonishing. Vanderlans refers to most of his achievements, though he misses what is perhaps one of the most strikingly oblique: the brilliant cameo appearance in David Lynch’s Twin Peaks. Now that could have pointed the author in a few other directions….

(Oh yeah, he was in Twin Peaks as well. Forgot about that.)

And one day there might be a book (or a film, or better yet both) about Van Dyke Parks, which treats Smile in the same way that David Leaf’s Beautiful Dreamer film treats The Beach Boys: as the precursor to a long and fascinating musical life, creating timeless music. The start of something.

Oh wait, Brian Wilson didn’t get that luxury.

Although Wilson/Parks’ own creative career as co-composers was cut short in 1967, and despite attempts by The Corporation to write Van Dyke Parks out of Brian Wilson’s greatest work, he just won’t go away – kind of like Smile for The Beach Boys. And I’m sure that ‘Mike Love, who’d become [with Bruce Johnston] the entity known as the Beach Boys’, if he could, would just wish away Van Dyke Parks forever…

Mike was interviewed in December 2004′s Mojo about Smile, and his forthcoming (and still unreleased) solo album. Here he tries out something new: the postulation of a brand new paradigm. Asked about Smile, he responds

I thought it was some brilliant stuff…the Fire tapes for instance…

Maybe no one noticed; maybe it worked: maybe Mike Love got away with it, and has successfully set the record straight.

But wait – Feb 2005′s Mojo letters page has the following response:

I read in your excellent journal (in Bill Holdship’s charmed article) a quote from Mike Love “…when they say that I didn’t like Pet Sounds or it was partly my fault that Smile didn’t come out. Then I have to draw the line.”

I appreciate all Mr. Love has done to perform Brian Wilson’s music through the ages, but I just have to draw the line at his revisionism. In 1967, Mike Love was disparaging about Pet Sounds. Closer to home, he was antagonistic toward Brian and me in our efforts during the production of Smile. (Brian recently attributed this simply to mere jealousy.) It may not help the rehabilitation of Mr Love’s career to state that his attitude in ’67 was at odds with his present remarks. Alas/alack, it’s too true.

In spite of any constructive contributions Love could have made to change the face of Smile in ’67 (he made none), his open hostility was the deciding factor in the delay of Smile. I can forgive but won’t forget this, in light of the time it cost Wilson in his work.

As Brian recently pointed out, this is a time for healing. Yet I must add, it’s also a time for learning the real beauty of truth. Truth is Beauty, as John Keats once observed. Truly.

Van Dyke Parks, via e-mail

 Van Dyke Parks has been a continuing catalyst for Brian Wilson.

The Orange Crate Art album from 1996 is co-credited to Brian and Van Dyke, but Brian Wilson only performed the vocals for Van Dyke’s compositions; Pete Ames Carlin in Catch A Wave says

 Brian dragged his feet into Van Dyke’s first session, interrupting the start of his first take to ask an excrutiatingly simple question: “Wait a minute. What am I even doing here?” Van Dyke hit the talk button without missing a beat. “You’re here because I can’t stand the sound of my own voice!” Brian thought about that for a second, nodded his head, and stepped up to the microphone. “Well that makes sense! okay, take one!”

In Paul Zollo’s Big Book Of Songwriters On Songwriting mentioned above, Van Dyke says

As I worked on the record [Orange Crate Art], I thought about [Brian's] reputation and trying to protect it and nurture it, as I was trying to, of course, build my own by doing it.

and also that

I’m happy with the record [Orange Crate Art]. And I think it’s the most distinct work I’ve managed in a thirty year career in avocational record production. But, it to me was important for one reason: it renewed my relationship with Brian Wilson. It helped bring new events  to the relationship and the promise of working again. And that’s why I did it. So I achieved my objective. Everything but sales.

This renewed relationship leads, eventually, forwards and backwards in time, to Brian Wilson Presents SMiLE, and then The Smile Sessions.

‘Timelessness’ is a term that gets overused in relation to music, especially by people that think that musical time began with either Elvis or Sgt. Pepper. If one definition of musical timelessness might be a longevity uncoloured by nostalgia, Song Cycle, as a distinct product of the late 1960s, still sounds like nothing else, then or now. It retains that same ‘what the fuck am I listening to?’ as Les Paul’s New Sound, or 20/20‘s Cabinessence. It has stayed new.

In Philip K. Dick’s 1966 novel The Crack In Space,

Softly [Tito Cravelli] played one of the cloud chamber pieces by the great mid-twentieth century composer, Harry Partch. The instrument, called by Partch ‘the spoils of war‘, consisted of cloud chambers, a rasper, a modernized musical saw, and artliiery shell casings suspended so as to resonate, each at a different frequency. And as a ground bass accompanying the spoils of war instrument, one of Partch’s hollow bamboo marimba-like inventions tapped out an intricate rhythm. It was a piece very popular these days with the public.

Maybe Song Cycle is pop music’s Sgt Pepper in PKD’s 2080 CE.

In the Songwriters On Songwriting interview, Van Dyke Parks says about his own writing,

I’m not trying to do anything novel. I’m trying to do what good songs have forever done. Songs should outlive their writers. They should stand the test of time. Some songs you hear the first time, and you know that they haven’t stood that test.

and I felt the latter when I heard most of The Beach Boy’s post-Smile output for the first time: what will this music mean in 50 years, when it’s so immediately anachronistic in its own time?

The ‘timelessness’ of Song Cycle is maybe proven by the fact that, 25 years after first hearing it, and being baffled by it, I could now whistle the entire album from start to finish…this album, like all of Van Dyke Parks’ music that followed it, seems to use some weird kind of ‘immediacy’: over time it makes more and more sense, until unexpected chord changes seem the only way each composition could work. His 1969 single The Eagle And Me (as mentioned above) now sounds like one of the catchiest tunes I know, and I’m whistling 2011′s Wall Street more and more – until I reach the line about ‘ash in the air, confetti all covered in blood‘, and remember what this song is about…

And, for one final perspective, The Common Swings volunteered the following in an email:

one of the things i like about VDP’s music is that sometimes it’s like a mad painting that you look at for hours and can’t quite fathom. and then it snaps together suddenly – there’s a painting by Rex Whistler in a Welsh country house called Plas Newydd:


it looks nice doesn’t it? but when you stand in one position it suddenly becomes apparent the whole thing is one elaborate optical illusion which seems like the wall disappears and the room is actually on the coast. it’s gorgeous and doesn’t distract from your initial view of it. it just makes *sense* more. and that’s what VDP is like to me. it’s a wonderful, crazy noise that sometimes shifts together to make *sense*. but that *sense* isn’t what makes it so great in the end either.

But enough of this. I could go on, and I have. I’ve even encouraged other people to join in. Time to stop.

Points:

(a) Van Dyke Parks, post-67, has made a bunch of timeless, or out-of-time records – music which reflects the time that it was made, but will still be listened to as long as there is equipment to play it.

(b) But his contribution, 45 years ago, to the creativity that is contained by the 5CDs of The Smile Sessions, is still presented by The Beach Boys Inc., as random, meaningless, a product of drug consumption – acid illiteration.

In the light of the literacy Van Dyke Parks has demonstrated over the past 50 years – verbally, lyrically, musically, thematically, historically – does this really seem likely?

A future post (and with an eye to fairness and balance) will deal with Mike Love’s music, including his inscrutable (and commercially unavailable) solo work.

(thanks to The Common Swings Library for the Mojos, and to Michael Leddy, for the correct attribution of his “imaginary liner notes” for Wall Street & Money Is King)

Dunno what they did for their 20th (was it 10 Years Of Harmony?), but their quarter century, once experienced, isn’t easily forgotten.

And, uncharacteristically, 30 Years of The Beach Boys was an anniversary Beach Boys Inc. also shared with their fans. The Good Vibrations box was the first official release of half an hour of Smile music.

35 years? Maybe it was this:

(Not sure how to characterise Des O’Connor to non-UK readers, so I won’t try. But both Des and The Quo speak for themselves in this top telly snippet)

And 2011 was The Beach Boys’ half-centenary anniversary.

50 Years of The Beach Boys. Imagine. And on the basis of their quarter-century, imagine how undignified it could have been…

But what could be more appropriate, more ennobling, than the momentous release of the 5CD, 2LP, 2×7″ box set of The Smile Sessions.

There could be no better marker of why The Beach Boys still matter musically, in a century where they were otherwise strangers to the pop charts.

Finally, Brian Wilson’s greatest work has an official release; the many bootleg permutations that have been released in the last 25 years are rendered (mostly) redundant; and The Corporation’s perceived stigma of Smile is wiped clean of the shame, disgust and embarressment it never lost in the eyes of surviving board members.

And, while Brian Wilson had little personal involvement in the compiling of the 2011 Smile, only the blind, deaf, dumb or stupid would still see 1967′s unfulfilled promise as an aberration.

Brian Wilson’s own solo career since 1999 has vindicated, absolutely, the faith that fans of his music have maintained (you know, all the great Beach Boys records, rather than all the shit ones) through the groups direst fortunes, and direst recordings: Kokomo, Wipeout, Summer In Paradise – most everything since 1976 (15 Big Ones being succeeded by another 23 Irrelevant And Inappropriate Ones)…and, even more so now, as there is a deluxe Smile Sessions box set.

But there are also these:

and of course the two catalysts for all of this

and

There are even inessential Brian albums, like Gettin’ In Over My Head (mostly a mopping-up exercise cursed by the presence of celebrity guests) and Pet Sounds Live (sonically a shadow of the live performances it captures). And then there are live DVDs, plus the Beautiful Dreamer 2DVD set, where all that stuff that the Corporation tried to negate in Endless Harmony, An American Band, and crazy fictions like An American Family, is finally given the attention it deserves.

‘The Beach Boys’ haven’t released much over the same time period. But of course, they have always been a highly successful live attraction. And, according to wikipedia, they will release an album, called simply Celebration, in 2012.

That all of these releases since 1999 are credited to Brian Wilson, however, makes them Beach Boys Music by default. Dennis Wilson said in 1966 ‘we’re just his messengers’, and Brian himself said in 1968 (emphasis mine):

And then, from there, I began to learn the art of production and the art of making background music, which became kind of settling around in 1964 and all of the sudden I found my self in the studio taking hours and hours just going through, you know, track experiences, you know, and all of the sudden the two (things?) you know came together, the vocal and the track and all, and all of the sudden I began to realise that it was all just one art, it was all one thing you know?

And I didn’t seperate voices and instruments anymore, and I no longer thought of, well, track and vocals, it was just one thing, you know… (from here)

Brian Wilson’s solo albums are records that The Beach Boys, as older gentlemen, should have been making, were they not so desperate to impress upon every successive decade the identity Brian created for them in the 1960s . The group, as a vocal ensemble, was always Brian Wilson’s main instrument. And he wrote his most complex vocal music specifically for that instrument. In ‘serious’ musics, when a composer writes a piece with a specific player in mind, this is a compliment, a privilege.

All of these Brian solo records (like 1988′s Brian Wilson) feature that same 5-or-6 part blend – the performers follow their parts, as scored by the composer. Or Brian layers his own voice to achieve the same blend. And when the instrumentation complements the vocals, until it becomes ‘just one thing‘, In The Key Of Disney, Reimagines Gershwin or That Lucky Old Sun end up sounding like dream-Beach Boys records. Listening to That Lucky Old Sun, with spoken narratives written by Van Dyke Parks, and where a snippet of Can’t Wait Too Long creeps in suddenly, it seems bizarre to consider that, somewhere in the world, there is a band called The Beach Boys that still represent what they once were, in one brief time-window, between 1961 and 1965.

So why the fuck is this happening?

And, more importantly, who the fuck is it for?

The National Enquirer, the esteemed US publication this article originates from, thinks it is for ‘the group’s legion of aging fans’.

A comment here grasps the perspective of these blog posts fairly well:

I know you will be utterly against the recently announced reunion, while I’m cautiously optimistic…because every decision regarding Brian’s career I’ve worried about since 1999 has ended up being good for him so I trust his management now

I’m all for optimism, and hope…but am I alone in considering Brian Wilson and any version of The Beach Boys after 1988 (or earlier) as utterly separate entities? Brian has appeared on jaw-droppingly awful Beach Boys recordings since ’88, but his function seems more like that of a mascot; Mike Love has been their ‘leader’ for 20 years or so, and their spokesperson – and is the one original member with the most to lose, should Beach Boys Corp cease trading.

You’ve heard his solo records? No? There is a still-unreleased trilogy of Love-themed albums (First Love, Country Love and Unleash The Love) that no record company seems brave enough to touch. Too underground for the mainstream maybe. And wikipedia is succinct about his one ‘overground’ album:

In 1981, he released a solo album, Looking Back With Love. Consisting mostly of cover versions, the album was neither critically nor commercially successful.

(As an aside, and out of fair play, I plan to give The Love Quartet a ‘close reading’ in a later post, time allowing.)

Without the Beach Boys brand, Mike Love could team up with some other bunch of older rockers, revive the ‘supergroup’ maybe…are you an older rocker? Want Mike Love in your band? What, he doesn’t play an instrument? Has a limited vocal range? Didn”t write The Beach Boys’ music? That’s probably a ‘no’ then…

And it’s Mike Love that had the most to lose with any acknowledgement that, ultimately, Smile was The Beach Boys’ peak, instead of the start of their complicit decline into mediocrity and self-parody. That Brian Wilson spent most of the last 40-odd years attempting to extricate himself from their grip – even if it was through self-neglect and self-destruction – while still volunteering compositional gifts to the group, more often than not rebuffed (1967′s Cool Cool Water and Can’t Wait Too Long specifically – compositions rather than hit songs) as ‘not appropriate’ for The Beach Boys – or smaller contributions, such as his sudden appearance in the studio for the end of 1971′s Surf’s Up:

Brian…has been listening to the recording of the song as the sounds come through through the floor into his bedroom direcly above the studio.

Dishevelled, with his stomach hanging out over his striped pajama bottoms, Brian comes bursting into the studio, excitedly proclaiming that they should stop the mix and add just one more part to the ending. A microphone is hastily set up in the studio along with the headphones and Brian arranges the Child is Father of the Man coda. It is almost as if it was always in Brian’s mind from the songs’s conception, forgotten until now.

(from the Definitive Diary, mid-June/early July 1971)

Or his spontaneous addition to the otherwise Brianless pomposity of the California Saga on Holland in ’72):

Al {Jardine] tells Scott Keller [in 1974] “We came down to the studio [in Holland] to do a mix-down so [Brian] could get home. Then suddenly, [he] came in and said ‘Give me a microphone’. He walked straight in. I hadn’t seen him for a month. He walked up to the microphone and started singing ‘I’m on my way to sunny Californ-i-a’. He then left the microphone and walked out. That’s my favourite part of the whole record. Brian was apparently homesick too.”

(ibid., Sat June 3rd to Wed Aug 2nd 1972)

or, for Sail On Sailor:

Brian refused to attend the recording sessions, but he did listen in on the telephone for a while and, as Ricky Fataar recalled in interviews at the time, suggested a guitar part that echoed the rhythm of an “SOS” Morse code distress call, while also fitting perfectly with the song’s chugging beat and Blondie [Chaplin]‘s fiery lead vocal.

(from Peter Ames Carlin’s Catch A Wave, p.185)

Each of these small emebellishments were offered to assist his (floundering) bandmates. These seem the actions of a loyal and considerate man.

And Brian Wilson’s involvement in this 2012 reunion (a 50 date tour, and the promise of a new Beach Boys album) may well be another example of this good spirit. Because without Brian onstage, this reunion would have little currency in 2012. The Enquirer piece above quotes Brian:

I  miss the boys.

Really?

The Beach Boys career, before and after Smile, is pretty well documented. And, for every ‘official version’ of their history (usually via self-aggrandising filmic hagiography, some here), there are published accounts from journalists, biographers and hacks. And none of these can ignore The Beach Boys’ (seemingly) endless acrimony. It’s often stark reading. Lawsuits feature heavily, especially in the 1990s.

Brian Wilson’s own involvement in legal proceedings often seems defensive, or some part of him or his music is the winner’s trophy. Mike Love is often the instigator. But can it really be as manichean as this? This cannot surely be a case of Good v. Evil, or Love and hate – however Mike Love haters decide to read these various court cases, can it really be that simplistic?

And The Beach Boys’ legal wranglings are very much at odds with the imaginary ‘endless harmony’ they can’t stop harping on about. Where is it?

This is the Introduction to The Beach Boys – In Their Own Words, from 1994 (this is from the bit that isn’t their words, obviously):

Few groups in the history of rock have washed their dirty laundry in public as enthusiastically as The Beach Boys. If Mike wasn’t criticising Brian and Dennis for their errant ways, then Dennis was telling Mike to go take a hike, and while Brian was up to his neck in sand and dope, Carl was simply wishing everyone would stop bickering and get on with it, while poor little Al just shrugged his shoulders and shut up like he was told. And along came Bruce who took his cue and waded in like the best of them.

But, ultimately, positivity and harmony last forever; negativity and dissonance will die an ugly death.

And this positivity and harmony is on Brian Wilson’s solo records, and in Brian Wilson’s live performances. It’s in the music, and the people who help him make the music – his band, Darian Sahanaja, Paul Mertens, Jeffrey Foskett…and Van Dyke Parks, who has held true to Brian Wilson for 45 years, because of how well Brian treated him (and despite Mike Love’s unrelenting resentment). While Brian Wilson must hold major shares in the fortunes of The Corporation, his solo career appears distinctly separate from it.

The performing arm of Beach Boys Corp is Mike Love’s ‘The Beach Boys’, which features himself, Bruce Johnston, and, more recently, David Marks, plus some other people.

And presumably the administrative arm of Beach Boys Corp mediates their various lawsuits – all seemingly-instigated by one of the Corp’s major stakeholders, if not its Director:

(a) According to Keith Badman, ‘in 1994 a federal jury decides that Mike Love has been unfairly deprived of his due credit on some 35 Beach Boys songs…Mike is awarded $5 million plus future royalties’. This was a lawsuit in response to Brian Wilson winning back his own song copyrights in 1992, after being sold against his wishes in 1969 by Mike’s Uncle Murry. Brian got $10 million, but half eventually went to Mike.

(b) Also, ‘during January 2000, Brother Records wins a temporary injunction, preventing Al [Jardine] from using the “Beach Boys” name’. Court proceedings, including appeals by Al, drag on through 2004. Mike eventually wins, and becomes ‘The Beach Boys’.

And, most bizarrely,

(c) Mike Love sued Brian Wilson because this

(Exhibit A)

was given away free (in 2005) to readers of Britain’s Mail On Sunday (the weekend bumper version of The Daily Mail). This E! Online story, entitled Beach Boys Feud Feud Feud summarises 2005′s case. A headline for a Rolling Stone item summarises 2007′s outcome:

Beach Boys’ Brian Wilson Finally Defeats One of Mike Love’s Dubious Lawsuits

This endless disharmony of ridiculous litigation – all of it ultimately revolving around Mike Love’s claims upon the Beach Boys legacy – is widely known, and has been widely reported.

However, the National Enquirer says

they recently put aside their differences to once again sing to us the praises of California Girls and take us on Surfin’ Safari and to Kokomo

How was all of  this resolved so amicably?

The author of the blog comment quoted above also says that,

having seen Mike, Bruce and David in 2008 they actually seem to have realised the worth of their more interesting music forty years after everyone else did.

What changed their minds about the music? Was it maybe the attention and the success that Brian Wilson’s own live shows have gotten, playing Pet Sounds and SMiLE, plus songs never previously played live by The Beach Boys?

Beach Boys fans, and specifically fans of the live touring Beach Boys, and especially those with some sense of anticipation (rather than a more instinctive trepidation) about this upcoming reunion, may read what I write here, and feel slighted by the sniffy tone. But no offense is meant, by any of this, to any of these people.

However, that Mike, Brian and Al have ‘recently put aside their differences‘ in order to bring a 50 Years of The Beach Boys Anniversary Celebration to the world – along with a collective commitment to a 50 date tour, plus reunion recordings – seems like a miraculous event. Were these seeming-irreconcilables reconciled quickly and easily, and amicably, over something as simple as a Corporation boardroom conciliatory coffee?

A closer look at the specifics of the Mail On Sunday lawsuit reveals that Mike Love’s seemingly-ridiculous case against Brian Wilson might not just be a fear that photographers stole his soul when they appropriated his likeness. It’s a bit more complex than that.

You can see Exhibit A above. The E! Online article says that

The suit, filed in federal court in Los Angeles, alleges that the promotional blitz by Wilson “shamelessly misappropriated Mike Love’s songs, likeness, and the Beach Boys trademark, as well as the Smile album itself,” per court papers obtained by City News Service.

This is a description of Exhibit A:

As part of the promotion for Smile, the British newspaper Mail on Sunday distributed a compact disc (CD) with its newspaper. Approximately 2.6 million copies of the newspaper with the CD were distributed, mainly in the United Kingdom and Ireland. Approximately 425 copies of the newspaper were also distributed in the United States, including 18 in California, but these copies were without the accompanying CD.

The CD consisted of Wilson’s solo versions of Beach Boys songs along with some of his other solo work. It also included two videos of live performances by Wilson’s band. The CD was entitled “Good Vibrations” and featured Brian Wilson on the cover. There were also three smaller photos of The Beach Boys on the cover, which included a picture of Mike Love, another founding member of The Beach Boys. The front page of the newspaper advertised the CD and included a picture of the CD’s cover. (from here).

The offending  images are: a post-67 Beach Boys, minus Bruce (Mike is the one not smiling); a Pendleton-beshirted early pic, with David Marks instead of Al (Mike is the one not smiling); and a 1966 Beach Boys, minus Brian, who was probably too busy recording to dick around in a dinghy. Mike is the one not smiling.

To best understand these lawsuits (there were multiple claims, and many defendents), locate the legal summaries, and especially the dismissals of various appeals: search for ‘Love v. Associated Newspapers Ltd’, or better yet ‘Love v. Sanctuary Records Group, Inc’ – the latter might be dense with legalese, but it’s also hilarious…I didn’t imagine that legal reporters had a sense of humour (and I’m not gonna link or quote because it’s behind a paywall which miraculously disappears if you switch off Javascript).

But the Case Survey of Love v. Sanctuary Records Group, Ltd. outlines some of the claims:

Mike Love had acquired the rights to use the Beach Boys trademark in live performances in a settlement from earlier litigation. Love continued to tour as The Beach Boys with a varying lineup, playing hundreds of shows a year. He was concerned that Wilson’s return to touring and recording would negatively affect the ticket sales for his own group’s live performances. In response to the English promotion, Love sued a variety of parties involved with the promotion campaign. Love sued Wilson; Associated Newspapers Limited (“ANL”), the publisher of “Mail on Sunday”; BigTime.tv, a British company that licensed and recorded the CD; Sanctuary Records Group, Ltd., the entity that owned the rights to the Brian Wilson recordings, as well as Sanctuary Records Group NY, Sanctuary Music Management, Inc., and Sanctuary Music Production, Inc (“the Sanctuary defendants”); and several other parties.

Of course the above dates from the dismissal of the appeal; as reported by Rolling Stone, when the trial started,

Melinda Wilson, Brian’s wife, says, “After Mike’s [initial] deposition, he turned to his cousin Brian and said, ‘you better start writing a real big hit because you’re going to have to write me a real big check.” she says.

But

in fact, it was Love’s own deposition testimony that played a role in bringing down his case. The decision repeatedly quotes Love’s own statements from deposition…

and reading the 2010 case dismissal summaries, Mike failed on technicalities and inconsistencies (such as claiming that someone had bought Exhibit A on ebay ‘in error’, thinking it was by The Beach Boys – and then the disgruntled shopper was revealed as a close associate of Mike Love’s lawyer).

But reading more closely (and if I read it right), it wasn’t necessarily laughed out of court…I mean, it was, pretty much – but there’s other stuff as well. US law is a very complicated thing – and one technicality that tripped Mike’s case up was pursuing California’s ‘common law right of publicity’ against a UK publication, which is obviously not covered by California law. I’m no lawyer, but I could have told him that. It would have been applicable, had the Mail On Sunday mass-imported the offending issue to the US – but only 18 copies reached California, and all minus Exhibit A.

I took Mike Love to be a Daily Mail subscriber, and assume his own copy arrived in the post; had he favoured The Sunday Times over Britain’s top Tory rag, he would have gotten this covermount CD-ROM in early 2004:

(Exhibit B)

which appropriates his image, associates it with SMiLE, but uses no versions of his songs – and thus contains nothing that ‘would negatively affect the ticket sales for his own group’s live performances’. Cos no Mike Love-lead ‘The Beach Boys’ is going to perform Surf’s Up, or Cabin Essence. They’re not, are they?

And, if this is the amount of legal activity prompted by a free CD of previously released material, how many lawyers were involved in the preparation of The Smile Sessions?

Looking at all of this methodically, however, none of these legal shennanigans seem driven by Smile-fear. And this is confirmed in the 2011 Smile Sessions book, where Mike says about Brian

I have seen where he has said that I didn’t like the SMiLE album. Others have said that it didn’t come out because I was against it. First of all, it was not my decision nor was I asked  or involved in the decision  to shelve the album.

To Brian, I would say that the tracks, the instrumental parts of The SMiLE Sessions, are some of the most amazing recordings…

Mike Love has no issue with Smile, never did. And, thus, the Mail On Sunday lawsuit had nothing to do with Smile.

Van Dyke Parks has also had nothing to do with Smile, or rather The Smile Sessions. He does respond to Mike’s change of mind about Smile though, in a Guardian interview (with Brian Wilson) from June 2011,

when finally he stops laughing. “I’m just incredulous. I can’t believe that he’s an enthusiast. I wouldn’t condemn him if it took him some time to come to that conclusion. I’ll just say that they have an expression in Texas that goes along with such a delayed reaction and that is: he’s a little slow out of the shoot. All hat and no cowboy,” he says, before dissolving into laughter again

However, by October 2011, in the eMusic Q&A mentioned in comments here, when Van Dyke is asked about his contribution to Smile, he responds

You must forgive me. I have no comment on Smile. I’m so sorry.

What changed?

I don’t have answers to these questions. And a Beach Boys reunion will happen in 2012, as an historical event – it promises to be momentous. Or is at least planned to be.

But. as The National Enquirer makes clear (Carl and Dennis’ photos have DEAD next to them), Brian Wilson’s instrument is missing a few voices. And, when I saw this Smile Sessions youtube video, I was quite taken aback when this guy flashes up at 1:10:

Not being funny like, but I didn’t recognise him. And, unless he had a cold when this was shot, this guy doesn’t sound much like Mike Love either. And there seems to be some sort of restriction around the mouth, inhibiting movement and expressiveness. These things are useful in a live music performance.

I’ll stick with the band that performs Brian Wilson compositions in collaboration with their composer, over any ‘we’re together again and Brian’s back again’ campaign-driven ‘The Beach Boys’ band, even if Brian is onstage. He’s in the Wipe Out video (helpfully captioned by its uploader as ‘The most ridiculous thing I’ve ever seen‘), and he shares the stage with Des and The Quo – but The Smile Sessions was still released, and none of this corporate self-celebration can negate that fact.

Van Dyke Parks did, eventually, comment on The Smile Sessions (and I’m so grateful to Andrew Hickey for finding this):  in a jpeg of handwritten responses to open-ended questions, Van Dyke Parks Eschews the First World in the BULLETT Questionaire; to the typeset People often ask me what I opening, Van Dyke handwrites think about The Beach Box new box-set of “Smile”, then continues from and I tell them with how happy I am to see the lads finally eat that crow over the cornfield.

This momentous anniversary for ‘The Beach Boys’ will maybe mean little to Brian Wilson; The Smile Sessions is released, he made all those other dignified solo albums, played Pet Sounds, and then a version of Smile live, and with a band finally capable of playing his music as it was written to be heard.

And, when The Beach Boys Centenary comes around, in 2061, and there is a US national holiday (Brian Douglas Wilson Day), it probably won’t be 2012′s Fiftieth Anniversary Concerts that will be celebrated, but instead the music Brian Wilson made in the late 60s of the last century, and which was finally released the year before this ‘celebration’.

But what do I know?

Here’s a video of the 50 year old Beach Boys, with the opening track from the same album that ended with Our Prayer and Cabinessence – it’s Do It Again! Again. Nostalgia for nostalgia.

I’ll just leave this here – embedded, but I haven’t watched it myself yet. Will get round it I’m sure. Make you own mind up.

Video might disappear, as the uploader doesn’t sound official, captioning it

The fucking Beach Boys are back!!!

Which were my sentiments really.

next

In order to properly appreciate Inside Pop – The Rock Revolution, and its significance in the Smile saga, it takes a kind of mental time-travel – and this is a useful trans-temporal handbook:

Paul Williams was/is the editor of Crawdaddy! (“America’s earliest rock magazine”), and, at the age of 18,

first got high on marijuana…with Brian Wilson of The Beach Boys, in late December 1966….and heard wonderful, mysterious, unearthly music when he played Smile sessions acetates for me.

How Deep Is The Ocean reprints all of Williams’ significant writings about Brian Wilson and The Beach Boys, from snippets of early Crawdaddy! news items (Dec ’66/Jan ’67: “The next Beach Boys album is now named Smile; nearly all the songs were written by Brian in collboration with Van Dyke Parks, organist on many Beach Boys and Byrds tracks”) through to a 1997 conversation (Smile Is Done, with David Anderle). Via Williams’ various writings, plus his previous conversations with Anderle post-Smile (alongside Jules Siegel’s Goodbye Surfing, Hello God, and journalism by Tom Nolan, Nick Kent etc., most of which is reprinted in Back To The Beach), Smile-lore as we know it became what it is now: Williams and Siegel heard Smile as it was being recorded, along with David Oppenheim, the writer and producer of Inside Pop.

The solo Brian recording of Surf’s Up, as heard on the Good Vibrations box in 1993 (and which was the core of the 1971 ‘official’ reconstruction), was

recorded for the first time in December [1966] in Columbia Records’ Studio A for a CBS-TV pop music documentary. Earlier in the evening the film crew had covered a Beach Boys vocal session which had gone very badly (from Siegel’s Goodbye Surfing, Hello God)

(The unsatisfactory vocal session was for Wonderful backing vocals, according to The Smile Sessions sessionography. What the issue was with this session isn’t made clear, and isn’t included on the 2011 release; film footage obviously existed at one time, as Inside Pop outtakes, although it has never been located, despite efforts. Certain Beach Boys may never want it to surface…)

David Oppenheim spent some time around Brian Wilson, prior to the filming of Surf’s Up at Brian Wilson’s home, on the 17th of December 1966; and Oppenheim is presumably making his own assessment of Brian, as ‘one of today’s most important pop musicians’, on the basis of what he had seen and heard from Smile sessions.

Watching CBS News’ window into ‘the ferment that characterises todays pop music scene’ (via the 21st century’s most popular time-portal) is a very curious experience. It’s a real surprise how well-constructed its various arguments actually are: the prospect of an ‘establishment’ figure like Bernstein discussing the merits of low-culture could have been similar to the meeting between Hans Keller and Barrett’s Pink Floyd on the BBC (and if you’ve not seen this Year Zero marker before, it’s here – Keller might come across as pompous and supercilious, and, to Floyd fans, the guy’s an idiot – but he isn’t). But here Bernstein is offering a real insight for his CBS News viewers – and at a crucial moment in the development of what is now Western culture’s predominant artistic medium:

Now what does all this mean?

I think it’s all part of a historic revolution, one that has been going on for 50 years – only now these young people have gotten control of a mass medium, the phonograph record. And the music on the records, with its noise and its cool messages, may make us uneasy. But we must take it seriously, as both a symptom and a generator of this revolution. We must listen to it, and to its makers, this new breed of young people with long hair and fanciful clothing.

And when Inside Pop is cited as the source for the solo Surf’s Up clip, Bernstein’s overall thesis rarely gets a mention. Dominic Priore uses the above quotation in his 2011 Smile Sessions essay The (Original) Teenage Symphony To God; but the clip itself, when presented in Beach Boys official narratives (An American Band, Endless Harmony etc.), removes Oppenheim’s opening and closing comments – the Smile segment in An American Band replaces the latter with

Van Dyke Parks: (loudly on voiceover) SURF’S UP. WAS THE FIRST SONG THAT BRIAN AND I WROTE. FOR THE SMILE ALBUM.

(It wasn’t – and Van Dyke’s comment sounds more like a tape composite: compare his stilted statement with what follows). Erasing Oppenheim’s observations also removes the identification of Brian Wilson as the ‘Leader of The Beach Boys’.

The Beach Boys’ capitalised on Surf’s Up‘s notoriety (by concocting the title track for their 1971 album) in order to give an otherwise uncommercial and focus-free collection of songs a much-needed selling point. Album sessions had not been endlessly harmonious:

(January through early April 1971) Beach Boys manager Jack Rieley tells Scott Keller in 1974: “Carl and I began to write…Mike Love, Al Jardine and Bruce Johnston began to get irritable about it all. There was a long meeting during which they tried to force me to march into [Warners boss] Mo Ostin’s office and sell him on their 1969 track ‘Loop De Loop’. I refused and Brian, Dennis and Carl backed me up. Love, sensing that I might be on to something by rejecting their ‘string-of-hits’ crap as out of date, suddenly came up with ‘Student Demonstration Time’, which had Carl and I blushing with embarressment and which thoroughly disgusted Dennis. Then Jardine demanded that his track ‘Take A Load Off Your Feet’ should go on the album”. Etc. (from Keith Badman’s Definitive Diary)

Of the title track itself,

(mid June through early July 1971) …shortly before the new recordings are set to begin, Brian changes his mind about revisiting the song…generally Brian stays away from the song, presumably because of the negative memories associated with the Smile era…

Had it not been featured in Inside Pop in ’67, Surf’s Up would never have augmented the Reprise-rejected Landlocked album in ’71; we would probably only know the song via bootlegs (sharing a similiar status to Do You Like Worms, Love To Say Dada etc) – and thus a revelation in 1993, rather than the desperate approximation everyone knows from the early 70s.

It’s also interesting to consider the company Brian Wilson shares in Inside Pop.

Leonard Bernstein’s segment highlights Janis Ian‘s Society’s Child, but also acknowledges The Beatles, The Association, The Left Banke, Bob Dylan, I’m A Believer, and Paint It Black. Interestingly, Bernstein doesn’t mention either The Beach Boys or Brian Wilson – which could be explained by Pet Sounds‘ (relative) lack of commercial success (and promotional support from Capitol Records) in the US. But it’s possible to find everything Bernstein highlights as ‘real inventions’ on Pet Sounds, and even more so in Smile – of Good Day Sunshine, Bernstein says

What a way to fade out: in a new key, a shifting meter, a sudden new counterpoint…but that’s The Beatles, always unpredictable, a little more inventive than most

which must surely (unwittingly) acknowledge God Only Knows‘ influence upon that track, and, by extension, Pet Sounds‘ influence upon Revolver (released in August 1966).

There is also the issue of familiarity for a 21st century viewer.

Mr. Tambourine Man and Turn Turn Turn were released in 1965, Paint It Black, Pretty Ballerina, Along Came Mary and I’m A Believer were all hits in 1966, and Society’s Child only became a hit after Bernstein eulogised it. For a modern rock music consumer, with any grasp of phonographic history, all of these songs (bar Society’s Child) should be very familiar indeed. But Inside Pop‘s audience might never have heard them before – remember that this is a CBS News broadcast about

the gap – the aching gap – between the two generations. We of the middle ages trying to understand, the young ones trying to explain

Therefore, rather than an anachronistic snapshot of the beginnings of rock music as an artform, Inside Pop is actually a ‘primary source’: for the roots of what has become the late 20th/early 21st century’s predominant cultural product, and in understanding the ‘pop music scene’ that Smile would have been released into.

Although Bernstein features throughout the first third of the broadcast, the rest of Inside Pop is the work of David Oppenheim. And Oppenheim seems to have spent some time with his subjects, and as a conscious effort to understand.

The UFO were actually called The UFOs (or The Unidentified Flying Objects) , and Inside Pop seems to have been their moment. There is a youtube clip here that has both a brief performance (from ‘hippie exploitation flick’, The Love-Ins, says the youtube uploader) plus excerpts from their Oppenheim interview. There is also a press clipping here.

Frank Cook was never ‘The Leader of Canned Heat‘ – Bob Hite or Al Wilson would have rightly disputed this (Cook was their drummer for a brief period), but he may have convinced Oppenheim otherwise – he is opinionated and antagonistic in conversation, while still saying almost nothing of worth. According to wikipedia,

[in 1967] Canned Heat also began to garner their notoriety as “the bad boys of rock” for being jailed in Denver, Colorado after a Denver Police informant provided enough evidence for their arrest for drugs (an incident recalled in their song ‘My Crime’)…after the Denver incident, Frank Cook was replaced with Fito de la Parra

which suggests that Cook may have had more than a little involvement in ‘the Denver incident’. Guy seems a bit of dick here:

Frank Cook : my band Canned Heat, what we’re trying to do is, tell OUR story. And in telling our story, having people understand where we’re at, and what we’re trying to do

which, for anyone familiar with Canned Heat’s derivation from older blues sources, seems a little rich…Stephen Calt’s book I’d Rather Be the Devil: Skip James and the Blues has James as utterly dismissive of the calibre of the benefactors of his ‘rediscovery’ (being Calt, John Fahey and Al Wilson amongst others), white college-boy nerds – and Cook looks and sounds the part here.

Everybody else comes across better, even if, in retrospect, they might seem somewhat naive…but that is bringing a post-1966/7 perspective to bear on what must have (briefly) seemed like the coming of a New Society.

The Gentle Soul recorded one album; while it might now have the status of a ‘lost psych-folk classic’ (and even the deleted Sundazed 2003 reissue is in demand), it was ignored at the time. And, to my ears anyway, it’s pretty lightweight stuff – there were many better albums released in 1967. But an audience for these ‘lost’ albums holds it dear.

The fact of these musicians’ lack of commercial success in 1966/67 does not in any way negate what they say. In some ways their perspectives become more valid: they want to be a part of this ‘new thing’ – and not necessarily for commercial gain.

Tim Buckley left ‘protest songs’ (along with pop music, and everybody else) behind, starting with the release of 1969′s Happy Sad album, and made some truly innovative music, specifically Side One of Lorca (for Elektra) and Starsailor (for Zappa’s Straight label). But audience indifference meant that his astonishing band were never widely seen or heard until the DVD of My Fleeting House was released in 2007.

The Byrds are heard only in passing, although Jim (pre-Roger; more about this later) McGuinn seems almost gleeful in anticipation of a societal shift, that might yet come via the ‘rock revolution’.

And Frank Zappa, typically, seems both the most cynical (especially about the ‘drug revolution’), and the most forward-looking

a lot of the kids that are walking around the streets with long hair, a lot of the kids that you see from time to time – and retch over – are gonna be running your government for you

and

after they stop taking drugs, and stop kidding themselves with their, er, fantasies, and they’d straighten up a little bit (pauses), grab themselves a little sense of responsibility, I think everything will turn out all right. That is if they aren’t killed off systematically beforehand

Certain mindsets might argue that some of them were ‘killed off systematically‘ (and usually at the age of 27), but that’s a crank can of worms for a whole other corner of the internet. Brian Wilson and Van Dyke Parks were also gleeful ‘guerrillas’ in this psychotropic revolt…

In the world of pop success, Inside Pop feaures Herman’s Hermits, who had some hits in the US at the height of Anglophilia (and by over-Englishing themselves with songs they never released as singles in the UK – possibly for fear of derision) – wikipedia says that

in 1965 and 1966, the group rivalled The Beatles on the charts and was the top-selling pop act in the US in 1965. On The Beatles Anthology video, there is a brief interview with a young girl in the audience attending The Beatles’ second appearance at Shea Stadium. When asked why The Beatles did not sell out the venue this time, she replied that they were not as popular anymore and that she preferred Herman’s Hermits.

Graham Nash went on to far greater success, after leaving The Hollies in 1968, to form Crosby Stills and Nash. And Graham Gouldman was part of 10CC, who acknowledge the profound influence The Beach Boys had on them.

And, of course, Brian Wilson, as ‘leader of the famous Beach Boys’, went on to…well, his role in Inside Pop is in many ways comparable to the now-obscure UFO(s): after this, nothing – or certainly nothing worthy of Oppenheim’s attention. Despite the acknowledgement of Brian Wilson as ‘one of today’s most important pop musicians’, Brian retained this commanding role for less than two months: on June 11th 1967, The Beach Boys held the 5th session for Smiley Smile, and the first in Brian’s ‘home studio’; the next Beach Boys release was no longer a product of this leadership. Everybody knows where it all went next:

Sept/Oct 1967: Smiley Smile…is not the same album as the much anticipated Smile. The latter was to be a full collaboration with Van Dyke Parks, and would hve included Surf’s Up…What happened to it? The gap between conception and realization was too great, and nothing satisfied Brian by the time he’d worked it out and gotten it on tape…Smile is the one that got away. (excerpted from Crawdaddy! news item, reprinted in How Deep Is The Ocean)

Had Smile been released in 1967, it would probably have been bought by the differing audiences for The Gentle Soul and Herman’s Hermits. It would have vindicated the faith of David Oppenheim and Paul Williams; John Hartmann‘s comment in Inside Pop is more prescient even than Zappa’s:

oh I think the West Coast of the United States is going to breathe an EXPLOSION of poetry and music – it is going to lead the way for the American youth.

It did. But, try as The Beach Boys might, they would never be a part of this explosion.

The influence of the West Coast of The United States on popular music was absolute – the rock ‘list mind’, with its Greatest Albums Ever Made, usually ends up looking like variations upon this, Mojo Magazine‘s own list from 1995. Of this hundred, 20 or so are products of the West Coast, and many of these were made during, or not long after the ‘Rock Revolution’ Inside Pop is investigating.

Barney Hoskyns’ Hotel California: Singer-songwriters and Cocaine Cowboys in the L.A. Canyons 1967-1976 observes how many of these singer-songwriters and ‘cocaine cowboys’ originated from one LA venue, The Troubadour. And Inside Pop‘s subjects seem equally as interconnected: Van Dyke Parks, as session player, worked with Zappa (briefly), Tim Buckley (on his first album), The Gentle Soul (keyboard player), The Byrds (on Fifth Dimension), and Brian Wilson (obviously). LA may have ‘lead the way for the American youth‘, but, inevitably, ‘the kids that are gonna BECOME ADULTS’ (says Graham Nash) ‘running your government for you’ (says Zappa) became the ‘establishment’. Musically, this was part of what punk was for…but this is not the place for a reductionist potted history of something anybody who may have read thus far knows already. Rock history is deadly dull. Music history, on the other hand…

The Beach Boys, as a significant musical entity, ceased to matter to The American Youth after the release of Smiley Smile, after their non-appearance at Monterey, etcetera etctera etcetera. Even Student Demonstration Time in 1971 failed to persuade the younger people that they weren’t irrelevant. Strangely.

But most any LA bands or artist that ‘mattered’ in 66/67 either split up, got shit real quick, died – or went on to massive worldwide success, and slept on a huge pile of money with many beautiful ladies. Music, ethics, revolution, it all got kinda swept away once people like Clive Davis (of Columbia Records) started waving wads of cash at Monterey’s unsigned artists.

Is there a point to all of these disconnected observations? This endless stating of the obvious? There is. Three points.

Bear with me.

Bernstein says ‘now these young people have gotten control of a mass medium, the phonograph record’ – and, while he discusses songs, and by extension the 45RPM single, if Inside Pop were made six months later, he would be talking about albums.

In How Deep Is The Ocean, Paul Williams reprints a piece from the December 1967 Crawdaddy! called Outlaw Blues, ostensibly about the Beach Boys Party! album. Like most of Williams’ 60s writings, it has a weird prescience, but one comment is especially interesting:

During 1967 rock music, thanks to Beatles Doors Airplane etc., greatly expanded its audience to the point where two-thirds of the people buying any records at all were buying rock albums.

The ‘rock list mind’ would have you believe that ‘rock albums’ were all anyone ever bought. It all started in 1967 – everything else before that was just ‘tuning up’ (to paraphrase an ignorant historian). And ‘rock history’ now dominates any consideration of music history. The 12″ vinyl album became the predominate format for music distribution, but, more importantly, the predominate musical artform. And even lists that exclude this Greatest Ever canon is still a reaction to that canon; any Year Zero white popular music movement (punk, post-punk, rave, whatever) is (at least in part) a reaction against what was seeded by ‘the ferment’ of 66/67.

This is an interesting book:

While Dylan and Janis Joplin are pictured on the front cover collage, popular music, as perceived by post-1967 consumers, begins on page 714, with rock and roll; rock music starts on page 799. Who are all these other people? Well it’s obvious who some of them are, and that’s Leonard Bernstein at bottom left. But, these days, of what relevance are pages 1 to 713? Didn’t this all get swept away by The Beatles, Sgt Pepper, and The Rock Revolution?

In the Preface to Alex Ross’ The Rest Is Noise: Listening To The Twentieth Century, in talking about modern (classical) composition, he says that

people are sometimes surprised to learn that composers are still writing [music] at all.

And, later, he talks about ‘a teleological tale, a goal-obsessed narrative full of great leaps forward’ – he is discussing ‘histories of music since 1900′, but could as easily be writing about the history of popular recorded music since the introduction of the long-playing record (by Columbia in 1948), and as perceived from our current vantage point:

When the concept of progress assumes exaggerated importance, many works are struck from the historical record on the grounds that they have nothing new to say. These pieces often happen to be those that have found a broader public…

Bernstein, when talking about Good Day Sunshine, says

You see, just one sudden bar of 3 among all those fours. We never used to find that in pop music. It’s new.

and it’s The New that rock music keeps thinking it fucking invented. It didn’t.

Example: The Beatles were the first pop musicians to use backwards tape. Ask “Mr Music” – he’ll tell you that it was on either Rain or Revolution. However, Ferrante and Teicher used backward tape (and to amazing effect) on a version of The Lady Is A Tramp, a track on their Dynamic Twin Pianos album, in 1960

It’s a small point, and, if one wanted to counter it as moot, qualifiers such as ‘first single’, ‘first hit record’ etc. could be used – but all this succeeds in doing is, eventually, to keep that credit for innovation with The Beatles. Ferrante and Teicher were making popular music – but the wrong kind of popular music for a post-Sgt Pepper audience.

Bernstein argues for a ‘newness’ in The Beatles that is actually way more technical – but it could also be argued that The Beatles got their 3/4 innovations, the use of rounds etc. from Pet Sounds. And I would be surprised if Les Paul’s catalogue of startling pop records (from the late 1940s onwards) doesn’t contain some backwards tape quirks…

But who cares about Les Paul and Mary Ford, or Ferrante and Teicher? Not the canonical ‘rock mind’.

A whole bunch of rock music’s innovations are actually rediscoveries – but rock’s historical revisionism holds that ‘it’ (whatever ‘it’ might be) all began with Sgt Pepper.

David Toop, in his A Grin Without A Cat article about The Smile Sessions (from November 2011′s Wire Magazine). observes that

buried within [SMiLE's] musical legacy are so many contradictory templates: Frank Sinatra, The Lettermen, The Four Freshmen, Martin Denny, Patti Page, Chuck Berry, Spike Jones, Nelson Riddle, Jackie Gleason, Phil Spector, Bob Dylan, The Penguins, The Mills Brothers

In Jorge Luis Borges‘ essay Kafka And His Precursors (in Labyrinths) the author says that ‘at first I had considered [Kafka] to be as singular as the phoenix of rhetorical praise’ ie. Franz Kafka has no literary precedents; but ‘I came to think I could recognize his voice, or his practices, in texts from diverse literatures and periods’, and proceeds to delineate a few. Borges’ conclusions are interesting:

If I am not mistaken, the heterogeneous pieces I have enumerated resemble Kafka; if I am not mistaken, not all of them resemble each other. The second fact is the more significant.

What do any of the recording artists mentioned by David Toop above have in common? Not that much. But where might they all meet? In Smile. What Smile could have been would have been NEW – but it was also as a synthesis of as much of America’s history (musical and societal) as Brian and Van Dyke could cram onto two sides of a vinyl LP. Intentionally or unconsciously, via Wilson/Parks’ musical influences, or via their shared immersion in America’s history, and America’s musical life.

That’s Point One.

What was Point Two? Oh yeah.

Inside Pop prophetically showcases the seeds of (at least) the next ten years of what rock music would become: guitars, pop, rock, singer-songwriters, the personal and the social, societal revolution and artistic innovation…a change. A 21st century viewer can see in Inside Pop (if they look past its dated veneer) a bunch of templates of what was to follow.

But while Surf’s Up, ‘a new song – too complex to get all of first time around [that] could come only out of the ferment that characterises todays pop music scene’, is also new – it’s also a synthesis of all of these other templates: it’s pop, rock, it’s a personal expression and a social one, touching upon societal revolution (‘surf’s up!’), while not being any one of any of these (and there is no rock guitar)…and, as, session sheets indicate, it was composed as ‘movements’. Surf’s Up was always conceived of as a new type of pop song composition. Being placed at the culmination of Inside Pop was not arbitrary.

And Smile, and Surf’s Up as example, could have been another template.

And Point Three?

If, as Paul Williams points out in Outlaw Blues, ‘two-thirds of the people buying any records at all were buying rock albums’, what were they buying before The Rock Revolution? Was the record-buying public sitting around waiting for ‘Beatles Doors Airplane etc.’ albums? Maybe. But maybe not…

Smile‘s possible lack of potential chart appeal is often retrospectively considered, and especially against the innovations of Sgt Pepper. Would Smile have been a hit album, if it were released as intended, dense with all of that cranky and obtuse stuff?

If you trawl back through America’s popular music history, amongst the stuff Bernstein says ‘this pop generation has rejected’,

that old chromatic sound…the sound of an older, slicker generation…the old-fashioned sound of the cocktail lounge

you can find some real crazy music, and crazy (and innovative) music, bought by adults, in quantity…Brian Wilson’s characterising of the (unreleased, original) Heroes & Villains single “as a three minute musical comedy” was more in keeping with an older use of the single format (whether at 78 or 45) as an entertainment. When Frank Zappa asked (rhetorically) ‘does humor belong in music?’, a lot of listeners would have answered with a resounding NO (I’ve asked this question to a bunch of knowledgeable people, and this is often their response). Rock music, in its seriousness, eradicated forever the value of this kind of musical entertainment.

In Don Was’ 1995 documentary I Just Wasn’t Made For These Times, Brian Wilson says that

There’s a very distinguished writer named Arthur Koestler, and, after a lot of careful research and study and all that in his life he discovered that the human mind is broken up into three categories: first is Humour, second is science, which he calls Discovery, and the third is Art. Now, the one thing that really blew me out about that book was that the first rule of ego is humour – in other words, when people get together, they’re more apt to want to be funny, out of INSTINCT and EGO, than they are artistic or scientific…you know, like, intellectual.

‘That book’ is Koestler’s The Act Of Creation, cited as key to an understanding of Smile‘s intention by Bill Tobelman in his Zen Interpretation of Smile. And what Brian Wilson seemed to want to convey, through Smile, was a function for humour in music: to take that idea of an old-fashioned ‘entertainment’, and to utilise it for some of the same hopes and aims as the other Inside Pop interviewees: to facilitate a change.

As a pop record, Smile‘s immediacy would have been ‘serious’ and humorous, light and ‘heavy’, all at the same time. This was also new.

Brian Wilson and Van Dyke Parks were developing a brand new type of music.

I could go on forever…so, two final things to ponder:

1: Rock History seems to consider the ‘rock revolution’ as both necessary, and an inevitability. However, in Paul Williams’ 1967 Outlaw Blues piece, he repeatedly mentions coincidence. And while he notes that,

during the summer of 1967, by some awesome coincidence, the size and interests of the buying audience coincided nicely with the quantity and quality of rock albums newly available to them..But already in December 1967 the difficulties are apparent. For one thing, there are quite a number of good groups making records, and they all expect a slice of the pie.

There might already be too many albums, and not enough audience.

Rock music is the first good music in quite a while to achieve a mass acceptance. It is also one of the few really worthy side-effects of of the current state of mass media in the Western world. Because many rock musicians, rock producers, rock etcetera do not appreciate the significance of this, we are in serious danger of blowing the whole bit.

Within nine months of Inside Pop‘s broadcast, Crawdaddy! worries that rock music risks losing everything that Oppenheim’s documentary promised. And maybe it already had – but rock’s ever-expanding audience never noticed.

Dominic Priore’s Look! Listen! Vibrate! Smile! reprints an hilarious (and undated, but presumably from the 1980s) mini-essay, which confirms Wiliams’ concerns (on p.220 of the Last Gasp edition). And while I don’t necessarily agree with what the author thinks rock & roll should be, I’m sympathetic to the sentiment:

We’re never going to recover. That’s all there is to it. No matter how hard we try, rock & roll will never be as cool as it was before The Beatles put out the Sgt. Pepper album and ruined everything…what bothers me is the influence it had on the rest of the pop world and how it was responsible for what is now known as progressive rock. Let’s face it. The whole problem began when ordinary teen groups started thinking they were artists with something to say…Imagine, if you will, a world without Genesis, Yes (talk about ivory tower bullshit. Those guys probably ride unicorns to the studio), or Roger Dean album covers!

I could go on forever…[but] the next time you hear Phil Collins, Rush or Bauhaus, stop and thank The Beatles.

And 2: what do you suppose The Beach Boys thought when this flashed up on their TV screen, as they watched Inside Pop after their show at Westchester County Center, in White Plains, NY:

You think they felt proud?

(thanks to The Common Swings for many useful comments)

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Brian Wilson’s solo performance of Surf’s Up (filmed on Saturday the 17th of December, 1966) has been seen in a few different Beach Boys documentaries over the years, and these variations have been on youtube for a good while.

Here’s one. Here’s another.

Remarkably (or not, in this ‘on demand’ future), the entire Inside Pop documentary was also on youtube for a time. It’s from a low-grade video copy, and looks like a transmission from another era – which, of course, it is.

However, since writing this original post (in October 2011), the youtube videos have disappeared:

which rather buggered up the bulk of this post, being Inside Pop – The Rock Revolution in six embedded parts – and the documentary’s significance in the Smile saga as self-evident, solely by viewing it in its entiretity. This is what comes of leeching others’ content and trying to pass it off as one’s own ‘discovery’…

So, this is a screengrab/transcription version, as per the other videos covered here so far – and despite deciding ‘that’s it’ here. A commentary will follow.

As this is a serious program (a topical broadcast about social issues, rather than a music documentary per se), a lot of the shots are well-lit but static; there are only so many times you need to see a screengrab of Bernstein at the piano. And, as a great deal of the program is made up of quick edits and montages of various talking heads, It is what is said – and to whom – that is of the greatest interest. Bernstein occupies the first third of the broadcast, with David Oppenheim conducting and narrating the rest. Oppenheim is heard, but is not seen on camera – he leaves it to the interviewees to say their piece.

OK. So: if you care about such things, consider Surf’s Up in the context it was seen and heard by viewers at the time.

It’s Tuesday, April the 25th, 1967, 10PM.

You’re sat in your most comfortable chair in front of the TV. You think you know where your children are, and what they are doing – but you don’t really understand them, or their music. But you can trust CBS News, and you can trust Leonard Bernstein.

Leonard Bernstein: you see you’re supposed to say – to me – ‘you represent everything I hate’

Tandyn Almer (of The Association): – but that’s not true -
Bernstein: I’m supposed to say to you ‘you represent everything I don’t understand…but so far I understand everything you’ve said, and so far you say you trust me
Tandyn Almer: – you shouldn’t look down on a whole group of people because I’m some of them y’know…

Bernstein: well in addition to the age I represent – I represent, um, the bourgeouis family man, I represent an institution, like the New York Philharmonic which I am the head of -

Tandyn Almer: – I understand

Leonard lights Tandyn’s cigarette.

Bernstein: (continung) I represent the ‘establishment’ if you wish – in a way I hate that word, and I don’t like to think of myself that way – but that’s something you would naturally rebel against
Tandyn Almer: (nodding) yes
Leonard Bernstein: but I don’t find you rebelling against me – I would like to..I want you to HIT me, to tell me -

David Oppenheim: (on voiceover as they continue talking) this is David Oppenheim for CBS News. What this broadcast is about is the gap – the aching gap – between the two generations. We of the middle ages trying to understand, the young ones trying to explain

Oppenheim (voiceover): Tonight these young ones are pop musicians – on tour,

long distance information give me memphis tennessee

Oppenheim (voiceover): singing their own songs,

surfs up aboard a tidal wave come about hard

Oppenheim (voiceover): and just explaining

Tandyn Almer: we aren’t just going to accept what’s laid down for you by the older generation

A Sunset Strip Guy: we WANT to have the adults around, we just don’t want them to constantly tell us what to do

Graham Nash (of The Hollies): (emphatically) pop singers get through to MILLIONS of people, I really mean millions
Peter Noone (‘Herman’): (out of shot) what kind of people? You don’t get through to adults
Graham Nash: they get through to the kids that are gonna BECOME ADULTS

Frank Zappa: a lot of the kids that are walking around the streets with long hair, a lot of the kids that you see from time to time – and retch over – are gonna be running your government for you

David Oppenheim: (on voiceover as duet is played) music is the key to all of this, and so, the first part of this broadcast is a look at the songs themselves, both the notes and the words.

For this phase, here’s Leonard Bernstein.

Leonard Bernstein: (at the piano) For a long time now I’ve been fascinated by this strange and compelling scene called ‘pop music’ – I say strange, because it’s unlike any scene I can think of in the history of ALL music. It’s completely of, by and for the kids. And by kids I mean anyone from 8 years old to 25. They write the songs, they sing them, own them, record them – they also buy the records, create the market, they set the fashions in the music, in dress, in dance, in hairstyle, lingo, social attitudes.

And I say compelling, because it shows no sign of abatement – the fads change, the groups change, but the songs keep coming, increasingly odd, defiant and free.

This music raises lots of questions – but right now, for openers, here are the two that concern me most. One, why do adults resent it so? And two, why do I like it?

Announcer: (as The Byrds’ Turn Turn Turn plays) CBS NEWS presents, IN COLOR, Inside Pop – The Rock Revolution, brought to you by

(Turn Turn Turn fades out in background, as Leonard Bernstein listens)

Leonard Bernstein: I came to these songs naturally through my children, but I have a sneaky feeling I would have heard and responded to them anyway – after all they are part of music, which is my world, and a part that is so pervasive as to be almost inescapable.

Many parents do try to escape this music, and even forbid it, on the grounds that it is noisy, untelligible, or morally corruptive. I have neither escaped nor forbidden it, neither as a musician or as a father. I think this music has something terribly important to tell us adults, and we would be wise not to behave like ostriches about it.

Besides, as I said, I LIKE it! Of course what I like is maybe 5 per cent of the whole output, which pours over this country like the two oceans from both coasts. And it’s mostly trash. But that good 5 percent is SO exciting and vital – and may I say significant – that it claims the attention of every thinking person.

Ok, lets get down to some specific songs, to the music itself. Here is a cheery bit by The Beatles.

(plays a tape of the end of Good Day Sunshine, while nodding his head at the piano)

(stopping tape) Now that’s not just cheery, it’s also very unorthodox. For one thing, it suddenly, if you noticed, leaves out a beat, so that an ordinary 4 beat measure becomes a 3 beat measure. Listen.

(plays it again, counting “1-2-3-4, 1-2-THREE” and so on)

You see, just one sudden bar of 3 among all those fours. We never used to find that in pop music. It’s new.

And then just as suddenly there was that arbitrary change of key:

(plays and sings) good day sunshine GOOD day sunshine

It’s sort of tart, pungent. Then there was that odd little cannon at the end, a sort of round:

(plays the tape again, pointing as the round recurs)

What a way to fade out: in a new key, a shifting meter, a sudden new counterpoint…but that’s The Beatles, always unpredictable, a little more inventive than most. You know a remarkable song of theirs called She Said? Well in that song, which goes nicely along in four, again there’s a sneaky switch to three quarter time, only this time it’s not just for one bar, but for a whole passage

(plays and sings) when i was a boy everything was righ-hight

Did you get it? If not, listen again to The Beatles this time:

(plays She Said from the tape machine while counting beats)

And we’re back again safely in the old four beat.

Now the point I want to make is that such oddities as this are not just tricks or showoff devices. In terms of pop music’s ‘Basic English’ so to speak, they are real inventions. And it’s not only The Beatles that make these inventions. For instance there’s a group known as the Left Banke that has a tune called Pretty Ballerina. This tune is built not in the usual major or minor scale, but in a combination of the Lydian and Mixolydian modes – imagine that!

(plays Pretty Ballerina on the piano)

…comes out with a sort of Turkish or Greek sound:

(sings) i had a date with a pretty ballerina her hair so brilliant that it hurt my eyes (hear it here)

Rather unusual wouldn’t you say? And even so commonplace a number as The Monkees’ recent hit I’m A Believer has one noteworthy musical twist: it’s going along in the standard gospel-shouting tradition:

(plays and sings) then i saw her face now i’m a believer

and now suddenly here’s:

(sings) i’m a believer i couldn’t leave her if i tried

what a place to end on – a totally unexpected chord! Now I know you may say “well, what’s so great about that chord? It’s ordinary – we’ve had much more sophisticated and adventurous harmonies in pop music of the thirties, what about Gershwin? What about Duke Ellington, Sophisticated Lady? with those rich chromatic parallel seventh chords?”

(plays Sophisticated Lady)

Yes. But that’s the whole point: this pop generation has rejected that old chromatic sound as TOO sophisticated, the sound of an older, slicker generation…the old-fashioned sound of the cocktail lounge

(plays it again)

This new music is much more primitive than its harmonic language, it relies more on the simple triads:

(plays simple triads)

the basic harmony of folk music – never forget that this music employs a highly limited musical vocabulary – limited melodically, rhythmically and harmonically. But within that restricted language, all these new adventures are simply extrraordinary. Only think of the sheer originality of a Beatles tune, like this one, which again uses only the elementary resources of pop music:

i was alone i took i ride i didn’t know what i would find there

Well that could almost be by Schumann, it’s so expansive and romantic:

(plays Got To Get You Into My Life at the piano)

and notice how the range of the melody has been expanded – most pop tumes of the past have been restricted to the range of an octave or so:

(illustrates on the piano)

owing to the limitations of pop singers’ vocal ranges. But not so any more – our pop generation reaches and spreads itself, grasping at the unattainable, and this is one of the things I like most about it: the straining tenderness of those high untrained young voices.

(the tape machine plays Dylan’s Mr Tambourine Man): in a jingle jangle morning

that’s Bob Dylan, and here’s a group called The Association:

then along comes mary

and, as always, The Beatles:

she loves you and you know you should be glad oooooh

Now of course, whereas I might call that ‘a straining after falsetto dreams of glory’, you may call it nothing but a breakdown in gender, the same androgynous phenomenon of the pop scene that produces boys with long hair and ruffled shirts…and you may be right. But, back to the music.

What else do i like about it? I like the eclecticism of it, its freedom to absorb any and all musical styles and elements, like old blues:

(plays clip of Tommy James And The Shondells from tape machine): my baby does the hanky panky

or a high Bach trumpet:

(tape plays Penny Lane’s high Bach trumpet)

or a harpsichord:

(tape plays harpsichord intro to Janis Ian’s Society’s Child)

or even a string quartet:

ah look at all the lonely people

(stopping the tape) Curious.

Then I like the international and interracial way it ranges over the world, borrowing from ragas of Hindu music:

(he grooves to the intro to The Beatles’ Love You To)

or borrowing from the sensuality of Arab cafe music:

i see a red light and i want to paint it black

Then I like some of the new sounds, purely as sound, that are coming out of pop music: the arresting impact of a consort of amplified guitars:

1234 well she was just…

Then I like the astonishing force of those hyped-up basslines:

(tape plays the intro to The Associations’ Along Came Mary)

and the outrageous cool of that inhuman electric organ:

(tape plays the organ ending of Society’s Child)

Now. Don’t get me wrong. I said I liked SOME of those sounds; there’s a good deal I don’t like, and wouldn’t dream of defending. I don’t like volume for its own sake, or the way words are often drowned out by drums and amplifiers. I don’t like the amateur quality of some of the writing, the out-of-tune singing. This music can be coarse, faddish, or a victim of its own sameness.

And yet when it’s good, it’s irresistible – after all, there are pros and cons to everything, especially in a popular art. And the cons are well-enough publicised; we’re here to examine the pros.

And we’re in luck, because I’ve managed to find one song that incorporates so many of thse pros that we can enjoy them all at once, the marvellous song called Society’s Child – written, astonishingly enough, by a 15 year old girl, named Janis Ian. This tune is very well known among the followers of pop music, but you may not have heard it, since it’s been withheld by most of the radio stations, for reasons unknown to me, although probably having to do with its subject matter, which is, as you’ll see, somewhat controversial…but apart from the words, Society’s Child contains many of the musical joys we’ve talked about, and some we haven’t – like fascinating sounds, both natural and electronic, like a strange use of harpsichord, and that cool nasty electric organ. There are astonishing key changes, and even tempo changes; ambiguous cadences, unequal phrase lengths – the works!

And we’re even luckier to have Janis Ian herself here to sing it for us. Listen hard to Society’s Child (he closes his eyes in order to listen hard).

Janis Ian performs Society’s Child, with the recorded arrangement as backing (hear it here):

come to my door baby
face is clean and shining black as night
my mother went to answer you know
that you looked so fine

now i could understand your tears and your shame
she called you boy instead of your name
when she wouldn’t let you inside
when she turned and said
‘but honey he’s not our kind’

she says i can’t see you any more baby
can’t see you anymore

walk me down to school baby
everybody’s acting deaf and dumb
until they turn and say ‘why don’t you stick to your own kind?’

my teachers all laugh, the smirking stares

cutting deep down in our affairs
preachers of equality
think they believe it then why won’t they just let us be?

they say I can’t see you anymore baby
can’t see you anymore

one of these days I’m gonna stop my listening
gonna raise my head up high
one of these days I’m gonna raise up my glistening wings and fly
but that day will have to wait for a while
baby I’m only society’s child
when we’re older things may change
but for now this is the way they must remain

they say i can’t see you anymore baby
can’t see you anymore
no i don’t want to see you anymore baby

(the song ends with a sassy organ retort)

Leonard Bernstein: it kills me, that sassy retort of the organ at the end. That voice, those words, that key change

(Bernstein plays and sings) but for now this is the way they must remain…they say i can’t see you anymore baby

Leonard Bernstein: Oh Janis, how did you write such a thing at the age of 15? You’re a great creature. I think that’s quite a remarkable job for a girl your age, and I congratulate you on what I’m sure is going to be a brilliant career

Janis Ian: Thank you!

Leonard Bernstein: thank you so much for coming to see us (he kisses her hand)

Janis Ian: thank you for inviting me

Janis walks out of shot

Leonard Bernstein: So it would seem that the kids of our pop generation have a lot to say. Actually what Janis has written is a short social document – not a satire, not a protest, just a picture of a social trap. Of course underneath it IS the spirit of protest, which undelies so many of these pop songs – the implication is, and strongly, that this not at all the way things ought to be; just as The Beatles on Paperback Writer implies in its satirical way all the corruption of our lives…their anti-hero, the paperback writer, has written a book he’s trying to sell and sings:

(spoken) it’s a thousand words give or take a few, I’ll be writing more in a week or two. I can make it longer if you like the style, i can change it round (sings) but i wanna be a paperback writer

In other words: prostitution – I’ll do anything to sell that book. The implication is clear.

In fact the message in the lyrics of most of those songs IS delivered by implication. This is one of our teenagers’ strongest weapons. It amounts to almost a private language. but this use of implication introduces another effect as well, something bordering on poetry: many of the lyrics, in their oblique allusions and way-out metaphors, are beginning to sound like REAL poems. And, protected by this armour of poetry, our young lyricist can say just about anything they care to, and they do care – they care about civil rights, about sexual freeedom, about peace; they talk about alienation, mysticism, drugs – the lyrics of Bob Dylan alone would make a bombshell of a book of social criticism…you know those ominous lines of his, “something is happening, and you don’t know what it is, do you, Mr Jones?”

And you know who Mr Jones is don’t you? Us.

And the lyric of Along Comes Mary, I have been informed by its author, 22 year old Tandyn Almer, is not about a girl named Mary at all, but about ‘mary jane’ , which is a literal translation of mari-juana. And a staggering piece of verse it is (hear it here).

And Paul Simon of Garfunkel fame says, among other things, i touch no one and no one touches me, i am a rock, i am an island. Formidable stuff, isn’t it?

But mostly they talk about love, as all songwriters have since time began – only this time its either a cool kind of love, or a frankly sexual love, or – and this is most important – universal love, a mystic, oriental concept, that is presumably attainable through meditation, or withdrawal from ‘the establishment’, or most readily, through drugs.

Now what does all this mean?

I think it’s all part of a historic revolution, one that has been going on for 50 years – only now these young people have gotten control of a mass medium, the phonograph record. And the music on the records, with its noise and its cool messages, may make us uneasy. But we must take it seriously, as both a symptom and a generator of this revolution. We must listen to it, and to its makers, this new breed of young people with long hair and fanciful clothing.

And the rest of this program will be devoted to just that: getting to know them, seeing them in action, hearing their thoughts…and perhaps by learning about them, we can learn something about our own future.

Announcer: Inside Pop – The Rock Revolution will continue after this message

BREAK FOR COMMERCIALS

Announcer: Inside Pop – The Rock Revolution continues

A  live clip of Tim Buckley performing No Man Can Find The War is shown (hear the Goodbye & Hello recording here)

…orders fly like bullet stream
drums and cannons laugh aloud
whistles come from ashen shroud
leaders damn the world and roar
but no man can find the war..

(see a montage of both Tim Buckley excerpts from Inside Pop, with narration, here)

David Oppenheim (over the clip of Tim): most of us have been raised in the tradition of Tin Pan Alley, where the songs, beautiful or not, were meant to amuse or beguile – but that’s all. They were embllishments on life. What these young people seem to say is that their music ISN’T just decorative – it comes right out of their world. And whatever is working ON today’s youth is working OUT in their music.

And the crucible is Los Angeles.

John Hartmann (manager): oh I think the West Coast of the United States is going to breathe an EXPLOSION of poetry and music – it is going to lead the way for the American youth

Oppenheim (over a montage of clips of Jim McGuinn and Frank Zappa): Lead the American youth where? Let’s ask the musicians on the LA scene:

Frank Cook (of Canned Heat): my band Canned Heat, what we’re trying to do is, tell OUR story. And in telling our story, having people understand where we’re at, and what we’re trying to do

Pam Polland (of The Gentle Soul): we are unusual in the scene that we come out and say God – like, we know a lot of groups that are working basically towards the same thing, but they use, ah, they use a different language.
Frank Cook: we want love – by the content of, y’know, almost all songs being about love

Pam Polland: that’s what all my songs are for now, for praising of love – love is so beautiful, and I would like everybody to believe in it as much as I do
David Oppenheim: (to Frank Cook) songs have always been about love
Frank Cook: ah but it hasn’t had the importance that it has now, because now hate cannot destroy just the people that are hating, but everybody, the whole world
Oppenheim (interviewing): are you saying the love that the old songs are talking about, or are you talking about some kind of different love?

Ann Sternberg (of The UFO): the love that used to be ‘woe woe i lost my baby’ (someone speaks over her)…and now it’s , um, let’s love each other

Diane Tribuno (of The UFO): Universal love – we love EVERYONE, including people who on a personal level you dislike, but love them anyway
Oppenheim: and do you think your music, the two of you, the two groups, that you, as musicians, are working towrds this goal of universal love, for everybody?

Ann Sternberg: that’s right, yes
Oppenheim: we’ve been talking now for about a half hour or so, and I still don’t understand the difference between the generations, I don’t know what you really want to accomplish – you talk about love, and it comes through your music, but I don’t know how it gets there in your music, I don’t know what it’s doing…and you talk about standing there and giving love from the stage, but everybody does that…

Frank Cook: but if we could tell you verbally, there would be no need for the music , would there?
Oppenheim: well I wanna see you struggling to tell me, even though you can’t get it into words!
Diane Tribuno: it’s to confront you with the issue, which displeases you, whatever it may be, and you wanna respond to it…and you can go round and you can yell and scream and make noise – or you can write a song and tell people how you feel, and maybe hope that they feel the same way you do, they’ll do something about it…and it’s your contribution
Oppenheim: well is anyone listening to your songs, and getting what you’re trying to tell them from them?

Lisa Kindred (of The UFO): maybe not the first time around, maybe it takes a while

Ann Sternberg: if they hear it twelve times on the radio they’ll start humming it and singing it, and at some point, they’re gonna listen to the words they’re singing
Oppenheim: but I still don’t get it from what you’re telling me. You’ve gotta tell me better.
Frank Cook: but what do you wanna GET?
Oppenheim: I want to get what the difference of these generations is…
Frank Cook: (aggressively) but I TOLD you the basic difference is that now the world can be destroyed, for the first time in history the world CAN be destroyed – and like THAT’S the thing
Oppenheim: can you do it just with music?
Lisa Kindred: we will try, very hard
Ann Sternberg: we won’t do it just with music, but you find other means to supplement music
Oppenheim:is anyone in this room trying to do something besides what they’re doing with their music? Or is the music enough?
Ann Sternberg: no I think they’re going beyond that – the whole Sunset Strip Freedom Movement

David Oppenheim (on voiceover): Next to universal love, freedom is their main concern

Frank Cook: it’s freedom. That’s what we want. That’s what we haven’t been able to get. And people all through the ages haven’t been able to get freedom

Oppenheim (voiceover): their definition of freedom is a special one. Paul Robbins, writer, and a close observer of the scene:

Paul Robbins: and they expect their society – the FREE one – the free society to back ‘em up, and say ‘groovy swing – as long as you hurt no one, swing’

Oppenheim (voiceover): do anything you want, just don’t hurt anyone. And they mean it.

Unnnamed girl: people should be able to wear their hair the way they want
Another girl: people should be able to do anything they want
First girl: – do with their bodies what they want and sell ‘em if they want to!

Paul Robbins: ‘WHAT ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT?!? I can’t go in there because I have different colored skin…I have long hair, I have funny clothes on…what has that got to do with – does that make you so uptight that you have to rap my head on it?!?’

Lorry Stanton (of The UFO): we don’t judge them by that. Because it doesn’t matter…it’s not what matters, what matters is the person inside, the FEELINGS of the person inside. Not what they look like. But what they DO. What they’re doing with themselves, what they’re do with their time

Jim McGuinn: I think we’re out to break down those barriers, that we see to be arbitraty, the big fences that have been dug – the walls WILL crumble if you hit ‘em hard enough. And we’re out there hittin’ ‘em. We’re cutting them subtly, we’re cutting them with laser beams, dynamite, we’re doing other things – we’re cutting them with emotions, which are stronger than fists. And we’re geting mass emotions involved…I’m very happy about it yeah, I like it, there’s some sort of guerilla warfare, psychological warfare going on y’know.

And i feel like a guerilla. I feel good.

David Oppenheim (on voiceover): but out here on LA’s Sunset Strip, it’s NOT guerilla warfare and it’s not psychological either

It’s the real thing

Some old Sunset Strip crazy guy: and here he is walking on the street communicating WITH HIS PEERS, and the cops say ‘you can’t do it GET OFF the street’

Oppenheim (voiceover): every weekend hundreds of kids, lots of them long-hairs, pour on to one plush mile of Sunset Boulevard called The Strip, they make the scene, to dance, and to hear the rock music.

Suddenly the authorities tried to clear them out.

The kids reacted by demonstrating and the fight was on. This crisis brought the fans together, emotion made it easy for them to talk, and we tried to find out if there was a leading connection between what the musicians were telling us, and what their audience here on the Strip would say.

a montage of clips of Sunset Strip youth follows:

why is it they can put down our music – they say it’s bad, I mean they say it’s a bunch of noise, turn down the noise…but is it really noise? Do they ever listen to the words?

you know like they say they don’t listen to the words – and what are the words? The words are talking about love, they’re talking about freedom, about peace…

the kids that like music y’know, they gotta have some place to go, they don’t have a lot of dough, so they come to places like ????, but what can you do, they close them all down, what can you do except stay out on the street?

you’re standing there, you’re loitering because you don’t have any money! Because you don’t have a job, you don’t have a direction, you’re not doing anything, you’re not a part of the Super Society, which is called America

just because we’re not going along with society, like everyone esle, everybody does the same thing and lives their own lives – all they want you to do is grow up and get an education, raise children and DIE.

well I think they got as much right here as anyone – they dress different and got long hair, people think they’re second-rate citizens, which is not true. And when you start telling them they can’t do something, that’s when they’re gonna try to prove they can. It’s like, if you tell some colored guy he’s not gonna move into your neighbourhood, he’s gonna prove he can move here, because it’s a free country

Paul Robbins: you see we’ve given these kids a dream, which somebody gave to us, and it’s called The American Dream. And we want nothing to do with it, except to talk about it. We don’t WANT IT.

Frank Zappa: I think that, er…there’s a revolution brewing…and it’s gonna be a sloppy one, unless something is done to get us organised in a hurry

David Oppenheim (on voiceover, over a clip of screaming girls): This ISN’T social protest. What you are looking at now is just plain showbusiness. And to understand this ‘rock revolution’, in the round, better to realise that mostly, kids aren’t swept up by anything more than the throb of a new beat they like, or the look of a new personality they love.

And Herman’s Hermits are a perfect example of what’s happening at this uncomplicated level. ‘Hermann’ is rich, charming, very English, and very old: nineteen.

A montage of US town tour clips is shown over a live clip of Herman’s Hermits covering Chuck Berry’s Memphis

Oppenheim (voiceover): On the surface, this may resemble an old showbusiness tour.

But something else is going on now.

For the first time, kids are the heroes of kids. More importantly, young people have so much money these days, that youth, by itself, has become a whole market.

Influence over this powerful new youth is what gives pop music musicians the sense that their ideas are important.

But they’re still kids.

Another top English group, The Hollies, travelling with The Hermits, and opening the show.

And if you ever thought the words of rock songs were hard to get, listen to these – it may be getting easier:

The Hollies perform a live version of Bus Stop (hear the 45 version here):

bus stop wet day she’s there i say
please share my umbrella
bus stop bus goes she stays love grows
under my umbrella

all that summer we enjoyed it
wind and rain and shine
that umbrella we employed it
by august she was mine

every morning i would see her waiting at the stop
sometimes she’d shopped and she would show me what she bought
other people stared as if we were both quite insane
someday my name and hers are going to be the same

that’s the way the whole thing started
silly but it’s true
thinkin’ of a sweet romance
beginning in a queue

came the sun the ice was melting
no more sheltering now
nice to think that that umbrella
led me to a vow

Oppenheim (over Graham Nash’s McGuinnesque solo): After the concert, the inevitable bull session – and even the showbiziest of today’s young musicians know something is going on besides just entertainment:

Graham Nash: I think that pop musicians of today’s generation are in a fantastic posit- they could rule the world, man!
David Oppenheim (interviewing): and how does music fit into this?

Graham Nash: music is the whole, the whole thing man!
Oppenheim: an expression?
Graham Nash: it’s an expression of the younger generation – Paul Simon, John Sebastian and John Phillips and people like this – and Donovan, ESPECIALLY Donovan – have got this great universal love, man. Today, because the kids are so tolerant, they really want to understand what people are trying to say, then they’ll go with Donovan 99% of the way. Because what he’s trying to put over is best for everybody. It’ll stop – what Donovan is trying to put over will stop wars DEAD.

Peter Noone (‘Herman’): (hesitantly) I believe that you’re right about Donovan saying that love is a great thing -

Graham Nash: (interrupting) now we have the power, we have the tolerance, we can go in front of the television camera, we can go on the air, and we can say, with definition, that Hitler was wrong – that Rockwell is wrong, that people who hate negroes are wrong, right? And we can get up there and shout it to the world, Pete!
Peter Noone: but I don’t want – (Nash repeats himself, talking over Pete)
Graham Nash: – we can shout it to the world, so why don’t we do more of it?!? That’s what I’m saying! We can stop world wars before they ever started

Peter Noone I disagree. I don’t believe -
Graham Nash: (talking over him) you know who starts the wars? People that are over 40.
Peter Noone: Yeah people -
Graham Nash: – no, people who are too old to realise that love rules the world.

Oppenheim (voiceover): This song won’t stop war, but it won’t start any either. And much of the new music is like this – as conventional as it is pleasing. ‘Herman’ sings his first big hit, Mrs Brown You’ve Got A Lovely Daughter

A music hall-styled performance of Mrs Brown follows, intercut with closeups of audience members, predominantly girls in their early teens:

‘Herman’: let’s have everyone clap – above your heads so I can see them!

The audience clap along

‘Herman’ (addressing a part of the audience): ‘ey youse over there!

Audience members sing along with Mrs Brown You’ve Got A  Lovely Daughter (hear the 45 version here)

Girls scream in appreciation when the song ends

Oppenheim (voiceover): These sweet young girls are ringers for their own mothers with Sinatra. But their world is a very different one. And in a moment, we’ll go on to consider some of the differences, in music and in words.

Announcer: Inside Pop – The Rock Revolution will continue after this message

BREAK FOR COMMERCIALS

Announcer: Inside Pop – The Rock Revolution continues

More Hermans Hermits tour footage is shown

Peter Noone & others (singing along with the radio): where did the good times go

Oppenheim (voiceover): A recent hit by Herman and his Hermits, East West, about the dubious joys of tours like this one:

…over the ocean perpetual motion traveling around
no rest singing and playing night out and day in
doing the rounds
what a great life it must seem

swell joints everything classy nothing that’s passe only the best
lush girls ogling and eying crying and sighing
this is success
what a great life it must seem

but when I hear young voices singing out
the bells at home come ringing out

(The camera focuses on a young girl mouthing the words as it is performed)

mum dad all round the fire in festive attire
keeping the day
aunts kids all the relations congratulations
this is success
what a great life it must seem

but when I hear young voices singing out
the bells at home come ringing out

when I feel all alone
and I long for my home

Graham Gouldman (composer of East West & Bus Stop): I mean, my parents would probably think that the idea of going to the moon was absolutely preposterous – but to us it’s like, it’s gonna happen tomorrow – it’s commonplace. Therefore your own mind is broadened -

Graham Nash: – but why, Graham? Why is your mind much broader than your father’s? I’m not saying it’s because – (talks above Graham as he responds)
Gouldman: – because things that weren’t possible to my father are gonna happen today, and tomorrow.

Oppenheim (voiceover, as the conversation continues): They feel that their generation is really different from ours, and that difference can be attributed to certain objective facts of life on earth today. Facts like (a montage of interview clips follows):

Jim McGuinn: electronic revolution – everybody’s becoming more well-informed

Ann Sternberg: …more well-read. Better educated

Lisa Kindred: a lot of it is that the kids today aren’t gonna accept what’s laid down for them by the older generation.

A Sunset Strip Guy we’ve seen more at our age

Graham Nash: communication is THE thing

John Hartmann: the death of of Jack Kennedy, it lead American youth away from the establishment

Paul Robbins: 25 or under is 52%. That’s a lot of people

Ann Sternberg: a lot of people are aware that they have power

Frank Cook: things like overkill

John Hartmann: they grew up with a fear of the bomb

Oppenheim (voiceover): These facts and attitudes might produce in anothet time a political creature. But the thrust of their thinking is inward:

Rick Stanley (of The Gentle Soul): a person has only one right(?) and that’s to look within himself, for the truth, because that’s where it is

Oppenheim (voiceover): what ways do they have to look inside?

Rick Stanley: the first and best one is meditation

Oppenheim (voiceover): but they think there is another method

Jim McGuinn: the drug revolution is just coming about, and they are gonna be a lot of heads rolling from it

Girl: y’know there’s a lot of dope going on – it’s a bad word to use but it’s true

Jim McGuinn: I think these drugs WILL enhance their consciousness, and make them perhaps more loving or more understanding of the universe, more understanding of life

Oppenheim (voiceover): innerness, mysticism and love are THEIR alternatives to political action:

Paul Robbins: of course no political answer could work – Communism had a chance, and it’s turning into the same set of beans that capitalism is. It’s not political, it’s personal. It’s inward. It’s inner illumination. It’s inner peace. And inner harmony. That’s why the interest in the East.

Oppenheim (voiceover): so they feel change is in the air anyway:

Pam Polland: revolution can just mean evolvement. There doesn’t have to be any trauma or any fighting or any anger, or any aggression. It will just all happen, if everybody would sit back, and take it easy (she smiles)

Oppenheim (voiceover): The idea is to love us into submission:

Lorry Stanton: well I guess if I just have one thing to say, I’d say what’s most important, which is I guess, I love you

Oppenheim (interviewing): do you think this feeling is spreading in this country?

Pam Polland: ferociously!

Oppenheim (over a montage of clips of interviewees): As they see it, our society, while apparently healthy, and certainly bountiful, is in a deep crisis of values. They are hoping for a return to the human-centred community they feel modern life has moved away from. And they think that they, and other people like them, are forming a model upon which that society might be constructed:

hung velvet overtaken me

dim chandelier awaken me

to a song dissolved in the dawn

the music hall a costly bow

the music all is lost for now

to a muted trumpeter’s swan – columnated ruins domino

Oppenheim (over canvass the town and brush the backdrop are you sleeping brother john): here is a new song – too complex to get all of first time around. It could come only out of the ferment that characterises todays pop music scene. Brian Wilson, leader of the famous Beach Boys, and one of today’s most important pop musicians, sings his own Surf’s Up:

dove nested towers the hour was
strike the street quicksilver moon
carriage across the fog
two-step to lamp lights cellar tune
the laughs come hard in auld lang syne

the glass was raised the fired-roast
the fullness of the wine the dim last toasting
while at port adieu or die

a choke of grief heart hardened i
beyond belief a broken man too tough to cry

surf’s up
aboard a tidal wave
come about hard and join
the young and often spring you gave
i heard the word
wonderful thing
 a children’s song

Oppenheim (over Brian Wilson’s solo falsetto): poetic, beautiful even in its obscurity, Surf’s Up is one aspect of new things happening in pop music today. As such, it is a symbol of the change many of these young musicians see in our future.

Paul Robbins: it’s gotta be that way. They’ll win. They’ll win, and because we’re wrong. And we’re so wrong that we can’t even kid ourselves any more. And after going through some decades of not even being able to kid ourselves, at last, we cannot kid our kids. And there are the seeds of a new culture. Fomented by rock and roill and its passion – its simple passion – that’s all. No meaning – just feel.

Frank Zappa: after they stop taking drugs, and stop kidding themselves with their, er, fantasies, and they’d straighten up a little bit (pauses), grab themselves a little sense of responsibility, I think everything will turn out all right. That is if they aren’t killed off systematically beforehand

Cuts back to clip of Tim Buckley:

…is the war inside your mind?
humans weep at human death
all the talkers lose their breath
movies paint a chaos tale
singers see and poets wail
all the world knows the score
but no man can find the war…

Oppenheim (over the clip of Tim): and that’s the pop music scene today. Serious and silly, sweet and grandiose. All coming out of the kids themselves. They are trying hard. But whatever young people do, they tend to overdo – the jury is still out on their social ideas, but the verdict on their music is in: a great deal of it is good.

Announcer: Inside Pop – The Rock Revolution, was brought to you by General Telephone & Electronics – G T & E, and its family of companies

The credits roll over a clip of Graham Nash onstage with The Hollies, singing The Times They Are Changing; as they sing, girls in the audience scream:

…come mothers and fathers
throughout the land
and don’t criticize
what you can’t understand
your sons and your daughters
are beyond your command
your old road is
rapidly aging
please get out of the new one
if you can’t lend your hand
for the times they are a-changing…

Announcer (as The Hollies are faded out): Inside Pop – The Rock Revolution was produced and edited under the supervision of CBS News.

A month after Inside Pop‘s transmission, The Beatles release their new, groundbreaking studio album Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.

Smiley Smile, as a surrogate for the much-anticipated new Beach Boys album, is released nearly 5 months later, on 18th September 1967 – and without Surf’s Up.

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If I am to understand the enigma of Mike Love, this may be a great help.

An Amazon reviewer says ‘Enjoyable if you like Wilson’. Ah. OK. Also:

I found this book to be interesting and objective. The author is quite clearly a fan of the Beach boys and Wilson himself and chose to analyse many songs and albums. That did not interest me but did not make me throw away the book either. My favourite part is that mike comes out looking like a proper tight git.

I am assuming the latter is corroborated by fact rather than conjecture. We’ll see.

And then, found at local market:

The Beach Boys Annual, with dustjacket intact! A handy replacement for the well-worn copy mentioned here. Two quid. See how David Marks on the front morphs into Al Jardine on the back:

From the same stall, for half the price, and of much greater significance:

I cannot believe that I have written all of this so far without Back To The Beach. Damn I feel so ignorant.

But not as ignorant as the dolts that put this together:

which features Maximum Brian Wilson & the Beach Boys, ‘a CD audio-biog’ (running time 55mins, and available separately – a reviewer says ‘I’d rate it NO STARS if the system would allow it, fans avoid and pass the word on’). It ‘includes the true story of the original Smile album’. This ‘true story’ regurgitates all the same bollocks, delivered by some disengaged female voiceover artist…what are CDs like this for? Who are they for? The blind? Narrative is written by a Tim Footman, who is a worthless fucking hack prolific popular music biographer. The musical accompaniment throughout is some fake french 60s Library Music. No Beach Boys – but it does have a free poster of the band. I must find some space for it.

The poster would be of no use to its partially-sighted purchaser – who may already have slit their own throat after a hour of the above shite…but wait, there is another disc, featuring ‘over an hour of interviews’ – it’s all audio pilfered from other sources, including 11 minutes from I Wasn’t Made For These Times. No dates or credits are given, so I am guessing that the mid-70s TV chat show interview is from The Mike Douglas Show, recorded on Tuesday the 23rd of November 1976 (and broadcast December the 8th). Here Brian, without Beach Boys, talks openly (and lucidly) about drugs. Says some interesting stuff. I will mention it later.

This show was recorded the same week as another Brian Wilson solo appearance, on Saturday Night Live (Friday 26th):

Because of the delayed transmission of The Mike Douglas Show, this..becomes Brian’s first solo American TV appearance since Inside Pop…Other members of The Beach Boys…are angry they are not invited onto this prestigious show, but [SNL Producer] Michaels is adamant that Brian should appear alone.

Do not buy this CD. I didn’t. I’ll sell you mine. No, that would be bad form, as it was a gift.

Right, to Peter Ames Carlin’s ‘definitive account of Brian Wilson’s expansive genius and consuming madness’…

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That’s it for these video transcriptions. This last took way too long to finish (and a while to recover from) – but if I have saved anyone from the toxicity, ennui, self-delusion and self-love that so permeates these official Beach Boys narratives (bar Summer Dreams, which is unofficial, and a hoot), maybe some good may come of all this. While the self-sacrifice (and personal suffering) has been great, there was so much to see, and too much to miss. An American Family alone is a gift that just keeps giving…

I’ve only addressed Beach Boys docu-dramas that were familiar, either owned, taped or watched over the past quarter century. None was ever meant to be a ‘close reading’, but the process of screengrabbing and transcribing finds a focus on details that otherwise slip past unnoticed. Beach Boys Inc., and its reiterative historical revisionism, repeatedly and consistently damns Smile as an aberration; these are just a few specific illustrations.

Even Pet Sounds barely gets an acknowledgement at the Waikiki Beach Party. Mike Love’s introduction to God Only Knows (as ‘one of the favourites of the songs that Brian wrote’, as opposed to one of his favourites) is delivered carefully, thanks to the mandatory cue cards – a single misplaced word could confuse McCartney’s opinion with Mike’s own, which remains non-committal.

He may never forgive Brian Wilson for fucking up the formula. And all Beach Boys-sanctioned films always, eventually, come back to this point.

Summer Dreams – The Story of the Beach Boys (TV Movie, 1990)

This is Brian Wilson:

This is Mike Love:

These are Beach Boys:

This, to the filmmakers, is what Smile was about, a non-musical and utterly artless tape collage playing on a reel-to-reel:

This guy is a kind of Van Dyke Parks:

This is Brian Wilson, weeks after abandoning Smile:

The Beach Boys – An American Family (TV Movie Special, 2000)

This is Brian Wilson:

This is Mike Love:

This is ‘Van Dyke’:

These are Beach Boys:

This, to the filmmakers, is what Smile was about:

This is Brian Wilson, months after abandoning Smile:

The Beach Boys – An American Band (1984)

This is an authorised documentary.

This is Brian Wilson:

This is Mike Love:

This guy is Van Dyke Parks:

These are Beach Boys:

This, to the filmmakers, is what Smile was about:

This is Carl talking about Brian Wilson abandoning Smile:

Carl: Brian ran into all kinds of problems on Smile, he just couldn’t find the right direction to finish it, and then after all that hard work the album was abandoned. Brian withdrew from public life completely. We were supposed to headline the Monterey Pop Festival, but at the last minute Brian backed out. Monterey was a turning point in rock and roll, overnight the whole scene changed, and we felt as if we’d been passed by.

Endless Harmony (1998)

This is an authorised documentary.

This is Brian Wilson:

This is Mike Love:

This is Van Dyke Parks (beaming in his contribution from 1976):

These are Beach Boys:

This, to the filmmakers, is what Smile was about:

Mike: Now why do you want to talk to ME about that? I like Van Dyke Parks? (as an insert) – he’s a NICE PERSON – but, I asked him once, ‘Van Dyke, what does that lyric mean?’ and he says ‘I don’t know! I haven’t a clue!’ And I said ‘Exactly!’

This is Mike talking about Brian Wilson abandoning Smile:

Mike: Heroes And The Villains is a very powerful track, very dynamic. That was the last of the super-dynamism from Brian I think. That was 1967.

The Beach Boys 25 Years Together (TV, 1987)

This is an authorised concert film.

This is Brian Wilson (c.1987):

This is Brian Wilson (c.1966):

This is Mike Love:

There was never any kind of Van Dyke Parks.

These are Beach Boys:

This, to the filmmakers, is what Smile was about:

And these are The Beach Boys’ fans:

I couldn’t find my own VHS version of A Celebration in Waikiki, taped off the TV some time in the nineties, so had to depend upon a youtube uploader. The youtube version has excised Brian Wilson’s solo Spirit of Rock and Roll, as if it were never performed. An exercise: likewise remove every other trace of Brian Wilson’s presence on Waikiki on the 12th of December 1986, and you have glimpses of a different timeline, while losing barely another five minutes of the show.

Had Brian Wilson left The Beach Boys in 1967 (taking Smile and Van Dyke Parks with him), and The Boys limped into the 70s and 80s with only their egos to support them, this joyless document of their doggedness against the odds wouldn’t have differed much. There would be no Sail On Sailor; there might even be a little less self-congratulation – maybe even some humility. But maybe not.

The Beach Boys feel that anniversaries (and self-aggrandisements) are important, and, strangely, there seems to be a 50 year anniversary ‘reunion’ album planned for 2012. With The Smile Sessions as the crown jewels of their Golden Jubilee, what could possibly be gained from this? When there is Pet Sounds Live, Brian Wilson Presents SMiLE, That Lucky Old Sun, Reimagines Gershwin, Songs In The Key Of Disney and The Smile Sessions, does Brian Wilson really need the Beach Boys brand to reaffirm itself, yet again? No? And if not, then who does? The fans? Are there people who really dream of Mike Love and Brian Wilson sharing a studio (or even a stage) again?

And what is actually being celebrated on Waikiki Beach? Certainly not The Beach Boys back catalogue, nor Brian Wilson as its author: of 29 songs perfomed in this show, 5 have fuck all to do with The Beach Boys; 7 are cover versions; 12 Beach Boys ‘classics’ are performed, but only 4 in versions faithful to the originals; a couple are parodied; a few become the soundtrack to some form of theatre. Only 2 of the songs performed are from the 1970s; of 4 from the 1980s, only one is an original composition. The band’s core repertoire is from the first 5 years of their 25th anniversary.

It is, however, a celebration of one thing: GIRLS. In the company of The Beach Boys, everybody loves girls. Mike Love exhibits the same middle-aged male concupiscence as Benny Hill, and his ‘blue’ UK successor Roy ‘Chubby’ Brown. But take a look at Benny and Roy; they will never actually get an attractive woman to have sex with them. Because their braggadocio is the fucking joke. They are comedians; Mike seems, for want of any better term, serious.

Maybe I’m missing a hidden level of sexual self-deprecation here in Waikiki. But look again at The Beach Boys, then look over these swimsuited lovelies:

Without meaning any disrespect, would any of the women above willingly reciprocate the lust that Mike Love projects? If his tumescence were more visible under his towel, maybe ‘the joke’ might be more obvious. And this rampant heterosexuality becomes almost defensive in its overstatement (‘We LOVE girls!!! Don’t you love girls as much as we love girls?!?’), as Brian Wilson’s ‘teenage symphony to God’ is negated and polluted by ‘teenage kicks‘ (as exercised by middle-aged men). Exactly whose ‘school’ is Mike being true to, as teenage cheerleaders display their underwear alongside him?

It doesn’t get much grimmer than this. And it’s this – all of this – that comes to mind when most people consider The Beach Boys. Do not delude yourself otherwise. And this is how Beach Boys™ chose to be perceived in 1987 – the cue cards just ensured accuracy.

The closest I’ve ever been to a Beach Boys live concert was spotting Bruce Johnston buying newspapers at Percivals Bookshop, a glance out of a bus window on an otherwise miserable Manchester day; The Beach Boys were at G-Mex the night before, and Bruce was wearing a similar shorts-and-shirt combo to this outfit (and here his cheeky look is worthy of The Lad Himself):

Despite the inconguity (it was Manchester, he was in a Hawaiian shirt) and my amusement (it was pissing down, he was wearing shorts, and he was Bruce Johnston),  there was no concomitant feeling that I was near The Beach Boys, or nearer to Smile. So I cannot comment on The Beach Boys live act, then or now. Are they currently lead by a priapic (or Viagra-charged) 70-year old in a towel, goading ‘the girls’ with his manhood?

Don’t answer; I don’t want to know. None of this has anything to do with what is interesting about The Beach Boys.

Let us put aside all of that frightful unpleasantness, and take a look at the Special Guest Stars.

Glen Campbell had a 6 month live association with The Beach Boys, and a flop (but fantastic) Brian Wilson-produced single. Here he performs a Jimmy Webb song.

Belinda Carlisle released Band Of Gold as a single in 1986. The Beach Boys had no involvement.

Ray Charles does the best performance of the show. Brian is visibly enthused.

Patrick Duffy, other than sharing the ocean with surfers while he swam from Atlantis, has no connection with The Beach Boys. But his euphemism for male sexual arousal (‘who can look at [insert image of girl here] and NOT hear a Beach Boys song coming on?‘) could have been a corker in Carry On Surfing. I would watch that. Here is Mike Love (with babe); Bernard Bresslaw is Brian Wilson.

The Everly Brothers are always The Everly Brothers.

The Fabulous Thunderbirds had their only US Top 40 hit in 1987; other than sharing the same planet as The Beach Boys at the same time, they have no connection.

Jeffrey Osborne, ‘after scoring two more substantial R&B hits in the early 1990s…would be absent from the charts for the remainder of the decade.’ Which he has in common with The Beach Boys.

Paul Shaffer was on TV at the time. He famously plays keyboards.

Three Dog Night have their own place in The Beach Boys saga.

Joe Piscopo made an album in 1985, New Jersey, that features Hal Wilner, Terry Adams and John Zorn, as well as one great joke – Wipe Out (the Surfaris original, not the Fat Boys cover) as a Music Minus One track, for drums. It’s funny. But he isn’t funny here. Nothing is funny here. (As an aside, imagine a Beach Boys Music Minus One: you contribute Mike Love’s backing vocals…)

And Gloria Loring?

In 1986, Loring scored a #2 Pop and #1 Adult Contemporary hit record in the United States with Friends and Lovers, with Carl Anderson (also a #1 Country hit in 1986 for Eddie Rabbitt and Juice Newton under the title “Both to Each Other”). Loring originally performed “Friends and Lovers” on Days of Our Lives dating back more than a year before the track finally hit the charts. Her performance of the song generated the largest mail response of any song in NBC daytime history. First recorded as a duet with Anderson (who would himself appear on Days of Our Lives to sing the song with Loring) in 1985, the single would have to wait an entire year before its eventual 1986 release, due to legal hassles. Loring left Days that same year and made sporadic film and television appearances over the next few decades…Friends and Lovers was her only major hit single.

“like sand through the hourglass, so are the days of our lives”

Days of Our Lives is a US soap opera. Since it began in the 1960s, there have been many unbelievable plot twists and turns. Characters regularly change roles, identities and actors; psychology and motivation is often baffling and contradictory. International espionage, satanic possession, regular returns from the grave, impossible gadgetry and time-travel patents are just a few of its simpler complications. And throughout all of this there is deceit, duplicity, jealousy, bitter rivalry and family betrayals.

The script is often laughable and unbelievable, and plotlines would not stand up to any critical scrutiny – but frankly improbable events and explanations are taken at face value by its fans, because this is part of the endless saga’s appeal. And, as with most melodramas, viewers are aware that, ultimately, it is all a fiction.

The Beach Boys™ and its universe (band and supporters) sometimes seems less capable of making this distinction. There are plot flaws, continuity errors, and uncharacteristic actions and statements from actors throughout The Beach Boys Drama. But, where one could imagine life in Salem continuing when Days Of Our Lives is offscreen, in reality its actors go back to their real lives. The Beach Boys’ California Saga carries on offstage – and may be as dark and as stark as the weirdest of Days plots.

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