The Beach Boys

The Interlochen Chorale, which is like the varsity singing team, was giving a performance. Because Michigan is buried under snow for so long, people need to do a little something to blow off steam, and the mid-winter chorale concert was just such an event. Rather than the very serious attitude that was usually displayed towards pursuits creative, this concert was to be a light-hearted affair. Bob was angling for a serious solo, and was deeply crushed when he didn’t get it. What he did get, however, was the scat solo from PDQ Bach’s My Bonnie Lass She Smelleth. Not a particularly well known piece (it is discouraging how few people even know who PDQ Bach is), My Bonnie Lass She Smelleth is a take-off on old (or, should I say, olde) English madrigals. Hysterically funny (although, as is typical for PDQ, the more you know about classical music, the funnier it is), the last verse twists into an outrageous jazz scat solo, before the possessed singer gains his composure and returns to the group. Bob was bummed that he was assigned the “funny” solo, but I assured him, knowing the piece as I did, that he would bring the house down. Which is precisely what happened. It was a great concert, light-hearted and enjoyable, but still technically demanding. They chose repertoire from all over the place, including one of the most intricate four-part harmony showpieces of recent times, the Beach Boys’ I Get Around.

The Beach Boys first #1 hit, I Get Around marks the turning point in the band’s direction. Although still about the fun in the sun with girls and cars ethos that first propelled them – and surf music in general – into the limelight, I Get Around is a remarkable blend of brilliant songwriting, an astonishingly refined arrangement, and beautiful production. Even the lyrics, which on the surface push the carefree California beach lifestyle, show a budding disillusionment with that very lifestyle (and, symbolically, with the style of music that made the Boys famous and was beginning to make songwriter Brian Wilson feel hemmed in).

Continuing their fruitful blend of old time rock and roll guitar riffs à la Chuck Berry with lush four-part vocal harmonies courtesy of Brian Wilson’s infatuation with vocal groups such as the Four Freshmen, I Get Around is a truly surreal song, but so assured are the Boys on it that you don’t even notice. It wasn’t until I heard an out-take of the instrumental track behind the blindingly beautiful singing that I realized how strange the song was. But somehow, it all comes together into the quintessential pop single.

For years the Beatles and the Beach Boys played an exhilarating game of one-upmanship, in which we were all the winners. They used to listen closely to each other’s albums and gain inspiration and determination from each bold step the other took. As the Beach Boys’ songs moved away from a simple (but effective) formula and became more personal and stretched the accepted boundaries of instrumentation and arrangement, the Beatles sat up and took notice. This lead to one of the pivotal albums in their catalogue and the point at which many identify as a quantum step forward in their maturation, the album that divided the early Fab Four from their older, wiser, mythical musical avatar personas, Revolver. This album reportedly blew the mind of Brian Wilson, the creative force behind the Beach Boys (no matter what his bitter father Murray has to say about it – there’s a great tape of them trying to record Help Me Rhonda while a drunken Murray harasses them from the control booth. “Yes, Brian,” he slurs patronizingly, “I’m a genius too”). Brian had retired from touring – replaced by Glen Campbell (?) – and while the boys were on an extended tour, he dug deep into his soul and came up with the songs and arrangements for what became the pinacle for The Beach Boys – and, many say, popular music of the time – the legendary Pet Sounds.

This album must’ve terrified Paul McCartney. The confessional tone, the unusual harmonies, the mature subject matters, and the brilliant orchestrations suddenly raised the bar on popular music dramatically. Paul gathered the lads around him, they retired from the road, and, as a response, they started working on what many feel to be the greatest single album in the history of popular music, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.

While the Beatles holed up at Abbey Road studios, fueling rampant speculation, Brian began recording songs for the next album. The album got longer and longer and the songs got stranger and stranger. The other Beach Boys were getting worried and still Brian kept tearing into his muse. The executives at Capitol, who were in the enviable position of having both The Beatles and The Beach Boys on their roster, got more and more nervous. The album grew to include 20-some songs as Brian obsessively followed his inspiration into deeply uncharted territory, into unknown waters simply marked, “here there be dragons”. Obsessive and paranoid, fueled by marijuana and LSD, Brian compulsively worked and reworked the material for this album. At one point, he spent six months working on one song, the song that would become the gloriously gorgeous epitome of everything the Beach Boys represented, the sublime Good Vibrations. Eventually, it got to be too much for those that held the financial reins and the Beach Boys were taken away from Brian Wilson. His grand masterpiece, the album to be simply titled Smile, was shelved, and Brian Wilson went with it. On the eve of the release of Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Heart’s Club Band, Brian suffered a nervous breakdown, and he disappeared from the world for years after that. Beach Boy believers considered Smile to be the true cross and over the years bootleg relics have slipped out and arguments rage about which versions of which songs were meant for the album and in what order they were supposed to appear.

Pet Sounds is the high water mark of The Beach Boys, the biggest wave they were able to safely surf to shore before the Smile tsunami wiped them out. Although they continue to perform to this day, they have almost completely stopped writing new material and rely on their canon of hits written in the 1960s and representing the white flight dream of surf, sun, cars, and girls that the California mythos promised.

As a group, they never got the respect they deserve in this country. Brian Wilson was a musical genius of almost unparalleled ability, but the American public tends to dismiss his songs as so much teen surf music. America is much more enamored of The Beatles. And just the opposite seems to be the case in England. The Beatles are great and all that, but The Beach Boys, now there’s a band! In fact, in a recent issue of the popular (and largely credible) British music magazine Mojo listing the 50 greatest albums of all time and extensive reasoning for the choices, Pet Sounds sits squarely on top of the list at number one. That would never happen in the States – in fact, it didn’t. In VH-1’s recent countdown of the top 50 albums of rock ’n’ roll, Pet Sounds clocks in at number 3, right below Nirvana’s Nevermind (way too high on the list, if you ask me and just about anybody else), and, you guessed it, Revolver at number one.

I must confess, for all the hype and for the clear genius Wilson showed on some of his tracks, I really don’t get the whole Pet Sounds thing. It has a couple of exceptional tracks (most notably the sublime Wouldn’t It be Nice), but it’s really not that good of an album. I don’t get what all the fuss is about. But then, I also don’t think Sgt. Pepper is that good either – like Pet Sounds, there are a few spectacular tracks, and plenty of inconsequential filler.

The story of the Beach Boys and their troubled leader has become one of the central stories in the rock and roll canon. Recently, Brian Wilson has returned to the music business that gave him so much happiness and caused him so much grief. He appears as a guest on a number of recent albums by such varied musicians as Ringo Starr, Ryuichi Sakamoto, and Nancy Sinatra. He released an album, Orange Crate Art, with his Smile songwriting partner, the inscrutable Van Dyke Parks, but his second solo release, provisionally titled Sweet Insanity, was rejected by his label.

Wilson recently staged a couple of concerts in London in which he played the album that was to be Smile straight through in order, 25 years after it punched a hole in his life that nobody thought he’d recover from. The concerts were a gigantic success, with (largely British) reviewers falling over themselves to praise his genius and foresight and courage. Shortly therafter, a newly recorded version of Smile was released to rapturous critical praise, and it cracked the top 20 on its debut week. After the tortuous path walked by Wilson, it appears as though he may finally have found his way home.