Beach Boys

Capn's Note: The dates and other facts listed above are highly approximate and should be considered such. The Beach Boys were such a porous group that albums and tours could go by without any involvement from Brian or Dennis, so figuring out when they were or weren't 'in the band' is futile. I'm not even going to approach attempting to track the erratic movements the more marginal sidemembers listed above. The Beach Boys story becomes MUCH less easy to follow after the release of their last real studio album in 1985, splitting into multiple factions with reappearances by old sidemen. Let it be known that the only people you should care anything about are listed above.

The Beach Boys major importance to the world of rock music didn't come with Brian Wilson's mid-Sixties creative blossoming and subsequent Chernobyl meltdown, it came when they were a bunch of cover-by candy-striped, flat-topped teenagers with a bag of stolen Five Freshmen harmonies and Chuck Berry licks, and it's this that makes the Beach Boys one of the most important American bands of all time. See, there's a certain America that old folks like my parents like to remember, a prosperous, clean-cut, bleech-wite place where the only concerns for a young whippersnapper was how fast his car was and who he was going to take to the prom. There was no mention of impending nuclear holocaust or crushing racism, and no one raised a peep that maybe you shouldn't grow up to be exactly like your parents, buy a little house, a huge car, and get a little tipsy once a year at the Fourth of July picnic while your perfect little kids torture bullfrogs with lit M-80's bought from the kindly Chink outside of town. 'Oldies' radio, and the Beach Boys in particular, represent a fantastical self-delusion that infects most Americans, but especially the post-war pre-hippie generation that happened to be born after all the shit had already come down in this century (i.e., two world wars, a depression, and the criminalization of marijuana and over-the-counter morphine) when their elders were happy just not having to be scratching and clawing for their very survival for once. They like to believe that for one shining moment, the problems that always seem so prescient today (drugs, alcoholism, violence, crime, family disintegration, and the proliferation of horrible cop-drama shows) just didn't exist. No one even imagined they could happen, and it's just the rotten kids who came later with their shroom-popping long hair and Commie pinko Peter, Paul, and Mary albums that screwed everything up. Since folks finally could enjoy themselves, they lavished their kids with material goods, and why not? America was the richest, most powerful nation in the world for the first time. Ride down in your Chevy Behemoth that got 3.5 mpg to the corner Tastee Freez with your best girl to get a 5 cent lemonade and talk with your buddies about how the football team's gonna do at state. That was the correct behavior for any young, well bred Capitalist Warrior, and any deviation from the norm was to be excised like a cancerous mole.

But who actually lived like that in the 1950's and early 1960's? A whole fuckload fewer people than the people who grew up then like to believe. But the Beach Boys and their contemporaries fed the public the bullshit they craved. Forget the beautiful but overrated Pet Sounds for a minute...believe it or not, the Beach Boys created a minor revolution with the insular singles about surfing they released between 1961 and 1965. The truth is that music for young people had pretty much died and rotted away as of 1959 when white people realized they weren't quite ready to see black people get loose on television. In the first part of the decade, the spectre of leering, sweating, dangerous 'rock 'n' roll' black monsters (and similarly inclined redneck white dudes) singing lasciviously to impressionable young white girls while wiggling their lower parts had been killed off by a few well-placed arrests (Chuck Berry), scandals (Jerry Lee Lewis, payola), and interventions both Federal (Elvis) and Spiritual (Little Richard). To fill the vacuum, the knee-jerk music world had been inundated by miniature little castrated Frank Sinatra derivatives like Frankie Avalon and fucking Fabian who were the equivalent of a polite gloved handshake compared to the raw, animalistic fuck session of the late 50's rock 'n' roll era. And believe it or not, this kind of wussy crooner music was every bit as popular as those rock 'n' roll records had been...but, thank Christ, there were difficulties. The main problem was that you couldn't dance to that shit, and teenage guys couldn't relate to the Hallmark card lyrics when all they wanted was to get their hand under Mary Anne's sweater and feel her Marylin Monroe torpedo-tits. There was a musical void that needed to be filled, and in 1961 the Beach Boys were perfect for it.

The Boys were America's first wobbly, tentative, beigest steps back into the world of rock music after several years away, and without their preparatory work, I doubt rock music would've ever taken hold the way it did a few years later with the Beatles and what-have-you. They made rock 'n' roll music (under the guise of 'surf music') that spoke to fun-obsessed teenagers, which was easy because they were fun-obsessed teenagers themselves (except for Brian, who was a music-obsessed teenager who was strangely apt at writing convincing songs about things he didn't he didn't much care or know anything about). The three brothers (Brian, Carl, and Dennis Wilson), their jock cousin (Mike Love), and neighbor (Al Jardine) were clean enough to pass on television but beaty enough to make the kids wiggle, and best of all the success of their beach-bum theme led to a bunch of movies that featured lots of skin, especially for that prudish, sex-starved generation. They created a series of irresistible, sunny hits that ruled AM radio for years, even remaining viable enough to compete with the Beatles for some time.

The fact that all their songs were written by their shy bass player brother Brian was noteworthy enough to gain them lots of press, but it was Brian's neuroses and ambitions that really set him apart. The Wilsons' dad, Murry, was a tyrannical, abusive taskmaster who ruled the group like a Baghdad prison colony, riding Brian especially hard. It seems Murry was a failed songwriter himself, and saw his son's success as a threat. The all-smiles public persona of the band began to show cracks as Brian tiptoed out of his pigeonhole to write songs like 'In My Room', a testament to self-imposed isolation that gave a peek into the young man's persona, one that had become fractured by his father's abuse and the oddities of too much fame and too much pressure. Brian's only public concessions to his problems were that he suddenly steadfastly refused to tour, and had some massive freak-outs when they pressured him into doing it. The band finally relented after an especially dark episode, letting Brian stay in the studio, keeping the golden eggs coming while they toured, got drunk, and screwed early 60's-style groupies. His isolation from the stifling influence of his unimaginative bandmates and asshole father led him to explore the burgeoning LA scene, where he met David Crosby and began smoking weed on a daily basis. Brian the pothead became more and more independent of his band and, best of all, his father. Not just experiencing the usual mind-opening effects of regular drug use like everyone else, Brian became fixated on the competition he faced from the Beatles and, especially, Phil Spector, about whom he began an obsession that probably had as much pure negative impact on his fragile psyche as his father did. He felt he had to beat them at their own game, and threw himself into his work. Brian began to write songs that had nothing to do with the usual Beach Boys themes, entering into uncharted areas like religion, relationships, and self-doubt. When the band came back from their nth tour, ready to record the next 'Surfin' USA' and Brian played them demos of stuff like 'Caroline, No', they freaked. Not only had he written songs that featured weird, intricate arrangements of string sections and bass clarinets much more prominently than guitars and organs, he was fucking with the thematic formula that had made them Number Two in the record-buying world. He was threatening their commercial survival with a bunch of wussy songs about feeling sad and confused. This time, they grudgingly let him have his way, and Pet Sounds was born. A zillion words have been written about this album, so I won't contribute to the diarrhea here (just wait for the review, tho), but the final effect was that Brian had done it...he'd created an album that, while commercially so-so, had established the Beach Boys, more than the Beatles, Stones, or Byrds, as the musical revolutionaries of 1966. He'd also ratcheted up the pressure to top himself to impossible heights...he spent six months and some hundred thousand dollars erratically recording, re-recording, and re-re-recording his next single, 'Good Vibrations', an attempt to make the perfect pop song (the final product, the Beach Boys' last truly massive smash hit, came damned close), and immediately followed it by an attempt at making the perfect rock album. It was during the making of the Pet Sounds followup, dubbed Smile, when Brian came completely unglued. He'd been working and obsessing constantly for over a year and a half, gobbling enough acid to trip out the Eastern Seaboard, and the cracked glass that was his mind simply shattered. His songs had gone from sublime to bizarre, compounded by his friendship with oddball lyricist Van Dyke Parks. The band reacted with violent confusion, and work on the album ground to a halt. Stories detailing Brian's breakdown during this period, from the sandbox he had installed in his house for his piano to sit in to the truly demonic recording sessions for 'Fire', abound. The end result was that as of Smiley Smile, a weird record of Smile-session outtakes and singles, Brian became a bit player in his own band and pretty marginal as a human being.

The rest of the band had to pick up the pieces, and while they had been sitting around grousing to Brian about how weird Smile was, the musical world had shifted under their feet. Kids didn't give a shit about surfing anymore, and without Brian to lead the way, their commercial fortunes continued to deteriorate. Strangely, the other members began to take up the songwriting slack, and though they never did recapture anything close to their mid-60's commercial or artistic peak, they were able to keep a certain level of self-respect as they adjusted to their new status as musical outsiders. Of course, none of their late-60's or early 70's records sold worth a damn, and they relied on its nostalgic live shows to keep the dough rolling in. By the mid-Seventies, a greatest hits collection (Endless Summer) had perked up interest in the band, and they attempted a full-on comeback with Brian in tow. Brian's condition had worsened in the previous years to the point at which he didn't leave his closet full of coke, fried steaks, and porn for months and years at a time. They dragged him out of his house (literally), brushed his grossly obese body off, and set him in front of a piano. By this time, however, it was a tossup as to who was the craziest person in the band, as Dennis had become a drunken coke fiend and Mike Love had morphed from a girl-crazy megalomaniacal bully into a Maharishi-crazy megalomaniacal bully. Brian gamely put on a goofy smile and contributed some tracks to their next two albums, entitled 15 Big Ones (which, confusingly, wasn't a Greatest Hits) and The Beach Boys Love You. Brian may have been 'back' ('physically present' was more accurate) but the rest of the band was busting apart at the seams. They released a series of Mike Love dominated records throughout the late 70's that were so lame they killed off all the lingering comeback spirit created by Loves You, and by 1980, Carl and Dennis had either quit (the former) or been fired (the latter). Brian, still transmitting from the planet Zambar, didn't last much beyond a few years at touring and was soon back sucking down cocaine and meat like a sperm whale while hiding from Phil Spector and Mike Love's sadistic relatives in his coat closet. Dennis, long hanging on his last thread, finally checked out in 1983 through the most ironic death available...the former Beach Boy, abandoned by everyone except for Brian, was found drowned. The band went into nostalgia-band cruise control for awhile in the 1980's, stooping so low as to enlist the help of fucking John Stamos on drums for an appearance on hot baby chick show Full House, as well as a few live dates. Brian finally began to recover with the help of his unethical-but-effective therapist, and in the process, finally cut the last cords to his old band. The Mike Love Beach Boys scored one last big hit in 1987 with the retarded 'Kokomo' from the Tom Cruise movie Cocktail, watched in horror as Love made an ass out of himself at their Rock 'n' Roll Hall Of Fame induction, then faded into a neverending series of state fairs, promo deals for the likes of Sonic hamburgers, and pricey, repackaged compilations of forty-year-old material. Carl Wilson died in the late 1990's after boring himself to death, Al Jardine quit the Boys to go touring with something called the 'Beach Boys Family' (a band so closely linked to Charles Manson should not go around calling themselves a 'Family'!), and Brian Wilson has somehow come out of it all as the most stable, commercially viable, and healthy Boy left, performing solo concerts of his old material to rapturous disciples.

The Beach Boys, for all their fascinatingly sordid history, really aren't that interesting of a band to me. They're beloved by their devotees because of their identification with Wilson as a 'tortured soul' who fought for his artistic integrity and went nuts in the process, and have some of that 'forgotten gem' quality about some of their post-heyday work that critics love to harp on about. These guys were so uncool for so long that they've become cool again, and even shitsandwiches like L.A. (Light Album) have their devoted fans. There seems to be a group of people who like them simply because Brian was a nutcase, and another who seems to think each and everything the band put out in the Sixties is some sort of message from the Savior, and others who worship at the chubby altar of Carl or only want to hear Al Jardine's songs. Right. There's also people in the world that hammer nails through their schlongs, and I hear a large percentage of them are Beach Boys fans, too.

Seriously, though, all of the Beach Boys' great work came out between 1964 and 1967 when Brian was at his peak operating condition, and everything else you really need could probably fit on a couple of well-selected CD's. They never rocked, never really made anything that totally went against their grain (even weird shit like Smile still primarily relied on their vocal harmonies and not, say, their breakdancing abilities). During their peak, this band was thrust forward by Brian's songwriting and inventive arrangements (and later, his pioneering studio wizardry) and their vocal harmonies. The harmonies are where it's at with these people - none of them were particularly great musicians, but they could outsing damn near all of their doo-wop heroes, and I have to admit that even Mike Love was a great fit as lead singer despite his nasally delivery. Really, though, this is a band that represented their time and place, and once that time was passed they became nothing more than a nostalgia trip. That's how most people should take them...with a few well-chosen albums and a couple of hit packages. For people interested in digging a little deeper, the Beach Boys story seems like a bunch of dead ends that a fanatic could spend a lifetime chasing down, but most people should just steer clear of. F'r instance, the whole neverending Smile hoody-hoo seems like a big waste of time to me (if it were really all that great, people other than fucking Beach Boys fanatics would have some idea of what it sounds like), and I think their 70's work pretty much deserves to remain obscure. As for the Eighties, well, let's just say that no one came out of that decade in much better artistic condition than Dennis did. And he was a corpse. Sometimes the little girls do understand, and when they stopped screaming their heads off, it was probably prime time that this band pack up their surfboards and head back to Cali. They didn't, and now I have to pay for it (heh heh...).

The Beach Boys, in their own way, have influenced pretty much everybody simply because their music has become part of the very fabric of a generation every bit as much as the Beatles and probably quite a bit more than Dylan. Most people who grew up in the Sixties weren't longhaired potheads...they were buttoned-down squares who liked cars and girls, and the Beach Boys were their poster boys. Any serious discussion of the 1960's completely misses the boat if it doesn't include these dudes (and also misses the boat if it dismisses the early singles and only talks about Pet Sounds for fifteen fucking pages), and their embodiment of an America that everybody wanted to believe was true.

Lost and Found (1961-2) - Sundazed 1991

Wotta way to start off a massive series of reviews - dozens and dozens of albums and I get to review a bunch of studio outtakes and screw-up tracks before I even get to slap a bored-ass B-minus onto Surfin' USA. Fanatics'll no doubt love this, getting to hear the band in all their teenage zitfaced glory, doing cut after cut of boring, lifeless songs like 'Surfin' and 'Luau'. The band's early work was meant to be entirely disposable - as long as you hear it in it's rightful place, either on a side of a 45 or as part of a dozen or so album tracks, 2 minutes of three-chord whitebread doo-wop is nicely digestible, and even more easily forgettable. Put version after version of these same songs and run them one after another and you get a frightfully good opportunity to see exactly how lacking they really are. Everyone's so freaked to have a broomhandle shoved halfway up their colon by an enraged Murry Wilson that they play and sing all their parts extremely close to the vest. If that bass plays anything but the root note through almost 40 minutes of this tripe, I'll be a hooters titty. And still they fuck up...these guys go out of tune more often than Keith Richards in a sauna with a balsawood guitar, and you most certainly can't blame the tricky harmonies for it, neither.

You don't need this unless you already have Smile Sessions and Pet Sounds Sessions and love to hear this kind of business...even the 'studio chat' is nothing more than the engineer telling the band what he wants to hear next - no fights, crying, public breakdowns, or primordial versions of 'Kokomo'....nothing. Buy it if you really have nothing better to do.

Capn's Final Word: Demos are meant to be thrown away, doncha know? I say they coulda remained lost.

Surfin' Safari - Capitol 1962

I know I shouldn't be analyzing the Beach Boys by what happened musically years after this was recorded, but the simple truth is that these first three or four Beach Boys records simply aren't very good in the grand scheme of things. Of course, these guys were like 16 years old and had to have Murry Wilson drive them around in the neighborhood station wagon and all that (though age didn't stop young Mike Love from having fathered, like, 3 kids with as many different women by the time he was 18), and Brian was still stuck taking directions from idiotic studio engineers who didn't know Rock from a horseapple, but still...this stuff is so square it renders me impotent just listening to it. The big hit was 'Surfin' Safari', the first ever teen anthem of the 1960's. It's effortless and laid back rockin', probably because it used more than a few parts chopped off 'Sweet Little Sixteen', but that's neither here nor there. 'Sixteen' is so funny and well-performed it makes 'Surfari' look like a toddler banging on a toy piano with a GI Joe figure, but this is still darned good. Brian's first-ever songwriting attempt, 'Surfin', though, is stiffer than Jack Nicholson in the last scene of the Shining, and never in my life have I heard of the 'Surfin' Stomp' dance craze. Perhaps it has something to do with killing off all the soul in the universe and saying lines that sound like 'My surfing nuts are rising'. Heh The other hit is also their first car song, '409', which was later co-opted for a car ad about the highly toxic cleaning agent of the same name. Brian, who didn't really know anything about anything outside of Four Freshmen singles and cheeseburgers, had his gearhead buddy write all the words, which are a helluva lot better than their later songs which were so full of idiotic hot-rod lingo they resembled a Chilton manual.

God, these are the good songs. Listen, they just weren't ready for prime time yet, and no one other that Murray 'Fuckass' Wilson expected them to be. Imagine what idiotic bullshit they sing about otherwise. Admitting to a crack-esque addiciton to root beer ('Chug-a-lug'). Making fun of Native Americans ('Ten Little Indians'). Conflict resolution ('Heads I Win, Tails You Lose'). Listen, unless you were born a Menonite or spent the last 10 years in a cardboard box, this stuff is so innocent and naive it's going to strike you as near-pathological. Did they really flip a coin to see who would win a fight? Good Christ, what is this, Mormon Planet? Gimme a good sucker-punch anyday over this crazed Boy Scout liberalism. And what the fuck with that root beer shit? I mean, hell, if that song were about pounding Schlitzes and sharpening straight razors outside the bowling alley, I'd be all for it. But a dude who Forrest Gumps at the fair like a rat in a cocaine experiment is just laughable. There's a couple of decent Dick Dale-derived surf rockers at the end, and I'm not against the cute little ballad ('Little Miss America'), and the Beach Boys actually covered 'Summertime Blues' before everybody else (including Napalm Death, the fat, dark-haired Indigo Girl that looks like a short-order cook, Wesley Willis, and the George Gershwin Orchestra Featuring G. G. Allin on Lead Anus) took a stab at it and it died a sad, prolonged death.

Hell, why should any twenty-five minute album warrant damn near three hundred words of pointless criticism that could be boiled down to 'These guys sound so young and arrow straight it's hard to take them seriously'? I've reviewed Yes epics longer than this in about two well-pruned sentences, but I go on and on about some stupid root beer song that Brian probably wrote during a bathroom break at the studio in a last-ditch attempt to make the album LP length. I guess I just can't limit my words in that way, though...it's a shame, really.

Capn's Final Word: Like teenagers writing and recording their very first original songs ever. Exactly like that.

Click Here to Fill Out the Handy Dandy Reader Comment Form

Your Name: K.J. Foxx Your Rating: C- Any Short Comments?: Hey, it's me! The wierd-ass who gave TYR an A!!!! Anyways, just wanted to mention that I think you have your surfin' songs confused... <b>Surfin' USA</b> is the 'Sweet little Sixteen' ripoff... that would come with the next album... Surfin' Safari sounds nothing like the aforementioned Chuck Berry song...unless you're hearing something I'm not... and for giving TYR a D+, I guess you usually do hear things I don't... As for the rest of the album? I HATE Early Beach boys music, regardless of whether they are the 'real' representation of the boys...(and you're right, they are. Their best music came when they pretty much became a Brian Wilson solo act.... although their 70's catalogue is criminally underrated.) Give me something like 'Friends', where Brian may be fried but Dennis Wilson starts showing us some real talent (not his laughable attempts at drumming we see here) and Mike Love actually singing WITHIN his range... Good luck on the rest of the reviews, you've got a Looooooooonnnnnngggg way to go!

Surfin' USA- Capitol 1963

Just like if you were to watch the first few episodes of the daring mid-80's CBS Vietnam action-drama Tour of Duty, you might be led to believe that by listening to the first few tracks of Surfin' USA, that you'll be in store for a major jump in quality for the ol' Bee-yatch Boyz from their lackadaisical debut. Well, you've been wrong before and I'm sure you'll be wrong again, Mr. Attorney General. The gorgeous, soaring harmonies of 'Farmer's Daughter' and the blitzed-out Chuck Berry bop of 'Surfin USA' are this band's first unqualified classics. They'd done Chucky-boy to death before, but this time around they actually play like they give a fuck that Berryisms are supposed to rock, and little touches like the way Mike's voice grits up when he's pulling up into the chorus or the boogie-woogie Farfisa/twang-tar split solo add just the right ornamentation to make this thing a bit more than the single next door. 'Farmer's Daughter' is simply stunning, enough to make you think that Carl's ragged cover of Dick Dale's tremelo-plucking masterwork 'Misrilu' is actually pretty rad when closer listens belie the fact that he's so unpracticed that he hits bum notes at least half a dozen times and he's double tracked and slap-backed to cover up some of his more heinous mistakes. What, were they having to sell blood to afford their studio time, or what? Couldn't they send him off in a corner to practice for an hour or two, get him a double milkshake and let him take another stab at it? Aw well...as long as the kick-ass surfin'-girls vocal tracks make a reappearance, I'm willing to forgive anything.

'Stoked'? Another ragged guitar instrumental that tries lamely to steal a bit of the Venture's twangalicious thunder? Arrgghh!!! Carl's guitar tone is decent, and the rhythm section doesn't fuck it up or anything, but this track does very little for a man who relishes both the Rolling Stones instrumental 'Stoned' (not to mention the instrumental 'Now I've Got a Witness' from England's Newest Hitmakers) and Million Dollar Weekend by the 'tures. God knows how I'll feel about the dozen or so Shadows records I've got and have never heard, but I'm sure 'Stoked' isn't going to be in my final Top 5, let's just leave it at that. Carl's just not the kind of guitarist that should be relied upon to carry a big section of the album, you know?

Vocals. This band is about vocals. And just when I think this album has gone to the birds, the first few minutes of 'The Lonely Sea' come along and cool me down like the dark side of the pillow. I can do without the 'incantation' spoken word cheezoid section, but the rest is creamy goodness.

Car songs. 'Shut Down' isn't their best, but again it beats the living Pauly Shore out of '409', with it's staccato shag, and even includes some of the most hilariously out-of-tune Mike Love sax-honking outside their live album for some comic relief.

Lame songs that mispronounce 'Noble Surfer' so it sounds like 'No bull! Surf Her!', like suddenly we've transported ourselves to a University of Oklahoma frat party circa fall 1995 and some unsuspecting young freshman coed has just passed out naked in the pool? You gotta be shittin' me, bone slice dawg G!

Godawful track, but then so is 'Honky Tonk', the THIRD instrumental on the album. Jesus, Brian, your friends go off to the Army or something and can't give you any more drag-racin' lingo to steal lines from? What's with all the stupid jam tracks? I know what's with them...Dennis plays the same goddamn drum pattern on each one! How about that for a reason to live, eh? So's your highschool dropout drum-amateur can get a few more runthroughs of Trapset Fundamentals Number 12, 16, and 23? Jesus, I may be smoking crack, but there's even another instrumental on Surfin USA, this one called 'Surf Jam', and it's actually good. Honkin' saxes and guitar overdubs! It's, you know, suspenseful and stuff, like Greg Brady doesn't know that the amulet around his neck is actually cursed, and that he's likely to get thrown from his surfboard and totally ruin any of the Brady girls' chances of losing their virginity to a large, drunken Polynesian pimp while Carol and Mike are away at the luau both admiring the male fire-dancer's tight, well-formed buttocks. Anyway, enough homoeroticism in one sentence already...I'm beginning to wonder if I ought to be exfoliating or not. Anyway, the guitar playing is like 10 times better than anything else on the record. Still, four instrumentals in thirty minutes is a pretty stupid production choice. I could be wrong, and in fact I'm sure I am wrong, because there's actually FIVE MOTHERFUCK CHRIST BALLS DICK WHORE SNOT BUBBLE INSTRUMENTALS ON THIS ALBUM!!! HOLY FART NOSTRILS! THIS IS THE WORST ALBUM PLANNING SINCE FIONA APPLE STUCK THAT MORONIC, PRETENTIOUS, ENDLESS TITLE ON HER SECOND ALBUM THAT NOBODY BOUGHT!! AND, OF COURSE, DARE TO BE STUPID BY WEIRD AL YANKOVIC THAT TOTALLY TOOK HIS PROMISING CAREER AS A KNACK COVER BAND WITH A TASTE FOR ACCORDION HORNINESS AND THREW IT STRAIGHT UP (Dan Rather)'S POOPER!!

Okay, I just can't get over it. Five instrumentals in twenty-five minutes is a horrible decision that set this band back to pre-debut levels of competency and wipes out whatever advances in songwriting and instrumental prowess they'd made in the meantime. This album goes from being a potential breakthrough to just another filler-loaded label ripoff like those that would plague this band throughout the decade. Get the title track on a compilation and hopefully find 'Farmer's Daughter' on a boxed set somewhere.

Capn's Final Word: Even if they're just about cars, girls, and surfing, you gotta sing 'em! Without it, they're just more demo tapes!

Click Here to Fill Out the Handy Dandy Reader Comment Form

Surfer Girl - Capitol 1963

'Surfer Girl', I'll admit it, makes me want to put my head down on the shoulder of some dreamy, sandy-haired stud of a high school football player. Not some icky lineman, but maybe a hunk of a cornerback or something, just nuzzle my face into his letter jacket and smell his manliness and wish he would take me away from the crowd around the bonfire, back behind the bleachers where he'll tell me about how fast his car is, and maybe if he looks at me just right I'll let him put his hand on my breast for a minute, over my cardigan, of course...

Shit, was that in my 'outside' voice? That goddamn thing's been getting me in trouble ever since I decided to tell Hillary Rodham Clinton I saw her husband biting through chicks brastraps at the Coyote Ugly bar in Austin, Texas and drinking Prairie Fires out of their cleavage until he passed out on the UT Ladies Golf Team bus wearing only a lobster bib and a 'I Had My 21st Birthday At Brothers' baseball cap. I don't even care who knows it, because 'Surfer Girl' is as pretty as a set of tits and twice as warm, about as close to surfer love-nirvana as a set of five eunuchs will ever be able to get. Hell, count this as Brian's first ballad masterpiece, and though it still owes more than a smidge to doo-woppy soul like the Platters than to any original vision, it shows a subtlety that the first two albums never knew. Granted, it's goddamned difficult to be subtle when you're twiddling your guitar at a bazillion miles an hour like Les Paul having an epileptic fit, but that's the danger of the territory. Luckily, we're saved from the Venture disease this time around, but unfortunately the pendulum done swung too far the other way...now the vocals choke out the music until it's almost completely gone. Listen to 'Catch A Wave', which even has some cool harps 'n' shit to keep it interesting instrumentally, but they're so inexplicably low in the mix you have to jam the headphone speaker into your ear so hard your skull begins to creak under the pressure just to hear it. The same goes for the orchestras on the ballds 'Surfer Moon' (One of Brian's first compositions along with 'Surfin'...this ain't no 'Surfer Girl', but it's sure better than fucking 'Surfin', which makes surfing sound about as interesting as having a conversation with Hilary Rodham Clinton) and the gently plucked guitars on 'In My Room', which I guess I'm supposed to make a big deal out of because it's the first Beach Boys song that's not about cars, girls, surfing, or scat porn, except for 'Chug-a-lug' and 'Ten Little Indians', but those are such retarded song no one remembers them except for me anyway. Whateverhoo, 'In My Room' is only like 10 seconds long anyway, but I guess it's just as gorgeous as 'Surfer Girl' except for the fact that it's just Brian venting a few of his psychoses and finishing up with more questions than answers...who exactly does he tell his secrets to? If he's locked out his fears, I'm assuming he's locked out everyone else too, so is there someone there in his head with him? Is that why he's not afraid even when he's alone, because he's NOT ACTUALLY ALONE? Heh...nope, he's just a kid with some various self-esteem and Daddy issues, and instead of screwing chicks like Mike or hiding under his bed and eating pie like Carl or being extremely boring like Al, he writes songs that lots of people enjoyed, and the pressure started to build. But we'll talk more of that later. Right now he was still young and easily influenced, and willing to put out half-assed albums like this one.

Okay, so I lied for like the zillionth time this review...there's an instrumental, called 'Rocking Surfer', and if you think that's an original title just wait til you hear the music, it'll kill you! But for anyone who isn't so naive, it's a piece of shit that only reinforces my conviction that, 'Surf Jam' aside, these guys have as much business doing instrumentals as Mike Love has giving spiritual advice to people. Otherwise, we're back in the same groove we'll see repeated over and over and over again before Brian finally bursts through the ceiling and starts making the records he was built to make. The filler all sounds like stuff we've heard on the first two albums, the covers aren't close in quality to their more mature originals, and there isn't much of a more graphic example of the Beach Boys' teenage cluelessness than the comatose 'Our Car Club'. I suppose this one's better than Surfin USA, since they didn't waste all that time on Carl's showoff tracks, and the ballads are sure good...but I'm not convinced yet.

Capn's Final Word: Brian learns to ballad, but not to challenge the band's ideas of what an album should be like.

Click Here to Fill Out the Handy Dandy Reader Comment Form

Little Deuce Coupe - Capitol 1963.

Singling out cars from girls and surfing makes for a concept album that's 90% compilation and about 20% good. I suppose if you're a real-life motorhead you'll dig Encyclopedia Hotroddica songs like 'Little Deuce Coupe', which runs down his car's mods like a fucking Speed channel special (Updated lyrics courtesy of the Capn 'I got all the Chinese stickers I can fit on the body, it sits two millimeters off the ground and has a tailpipe the size of a Peterbilt'!). I think is damn near unlistenable, especially the 'I got the pink slip, daddy!' snotty little boast, plus the fact that it's really just 'Shut Down' with a couple of different notes. Otherwise, we hear such spicy metaphors as car-as-girl ('Ballad of Ol' Betsey', the hilariously clueless 'Cherry, Cherry Coupe', which begs for the line 'Get to pop her in all four gears!') girl-as-car ('Car Crazy Cutie', which would be hilarious only if it talked about how nothing gets her pussy hotter than the sticky feel of a genuine naugahyde seat cover as it bonds to her naked, moist buttocks.) cars-as-excuse-for-very-homoerotic-male-bonding-sessions ('Our Car Club', which I have to remind you, makes initiates go through a 'very rough' trial period, sucked on Surfin' Safari and sucks now, which also goes for '409', which is as loose as a 3-week old corpse). Of particularly funny note is 'No Go Showboat', where the guys defensively boast that their car is a real looker, though it gets wasted in the quarter mile against an ice cream truck. Never before has performance incompetence been praised so highly, at least since Motley Crue's 'Ten Seconds to Love' from Shout At The Devil.

And talking about boasts, I've always felt 'Be True To Your School' is completely unconvincing... even the 'rah rah rah rah' backing vocals sound lazy and halfhearted, and besides, were people so na�ve as to actually like high school back in those days? And why exactly is this included here? There ain't no cars in the English class, dunderheads! Well, I guess all of those folks who desperately want to attribute the Beach Boys with some sort of innovation beyond 'they wrote a bunch of songs about cars, girls, and surfing' really want to make the claim that this is the 'first concept album ever', which I, of course, think is a load of donkey moo. Little Richard was a concept album about fucking, and it came out in 1959, Elvis's Christmas Album from 1957 was about Christmas, and Chuck Berry's Chuck Berry Is On Top from 1959 is about jerking off while watching girls pee. I guess nobody, even Brian Wilson, is perfect. And I so wanted my own crazy, fat little perfect pop genius to cuddle close to my heart!

Anyway, despite all inclinations to the contrary, there are some decent songs on here, but I'm sure you can find them other places. As for more original tunes, you're mostly outta business. I guess it's only a few months until Shut Down Vol. 2 and I get my fix.

Capn's Final Word: Conceptualize love songs to your crankshaft. Clunky.

Click Here to Fill Out the Handy Dandy Reader Comment Form

Shut Down Vol. 2 - Capitol 1964

Another phony record album, this time trying to cash in on the success of Little Deuce Coupe, their last somewhat phony record album, or maybe of Shut Down Vol. 1, which was an earlier compilation which even featured people who weren't the Beach Boys (which begs me to mention that there were, around this time, plenty of people who weren't Beach Boys who actually were Beach Boys, like Glen 'Can't Walk the Wichita Line, Man!' Campbell, who now looks worse than Brian did during his early-80's crackpot nadir. The Beach Boys seem to have taken a few steps into the Sixties with this release, as their death grip on the beach continues to loosen This one, however, has at least two all-time classic singles, while Deuce only had one. 'Fun Fun Fun' is a bald-faced (and no, I'm not talking about Mike Love right now) ripoff of 'Johhny B. Goode', but the lyrics are, well, fun...some chick borrows her dad's T-bird and goes jacking around the neighborhood, farming front yards and smashing small children flatter than Claire Danes, until Ward Cleaver comes along and calls her naughty and takes the keys back. Hell, it's good, but 'Don't Worry Baby' is fucking fantastic, Brian's first real attempt at the wall-o-sound Spector thingamabob. This is the high peak of Beach Boys doo-wop, with tricky little rhythms on the falsetto lead line and some extremely beautiful lyrics that seem to go beyond high school puppy love into something more...you know, universal. It's a foreshadowing of the big bout of collective growing up everyone would have to do in the next five years, the ensuing feelings of disconnection and desire for shelter and reassurance a lot of people felt. I'd also like to report, on a lighter note, that this song racily mentions 'making love' at a time when the Boys were still supposedly buzz-cut neuters without a prurient interest in their hearts. Another illusion falls!

So the rest of Son of Shut Up is rather half-assed, but no worse than what the Beach Boys have been trundling out since their debut. Of course it's obvious to everyone who wasn't a record executive in the early 1960's, but people are just not able to generate a dozen or so great tracks every few months, what with endless touring in unheated buses and all the other crap that went along with being a successful teenager group back then. As a result you get albums like Surfin' USA, which had almost half a dozen instrumentals on it, and Shut Down Vol. 2, which has unconscionable filler like 'Cassius Love Vs. Sonny Wilson' and 'Denny's Drums' clogging it all up. The real problem is that the secondary songs, meaning those that aren't singles or covers or space-filler instrumentals and novelty tracks, just haven't been all that great yet. 'The Warmth Of The Sun' is a rare gem, a ballad nearly as pretty as 'Don't Worry Baby', but otherwise these tracks seem stamped out of the songwriting machine without so much as a second look. F'r instance, I haven't seen a big advancement between, say, 'Heads I Win, Tails You Lose' and 'In The Parking Lot'...sure the latter one is better produced, but it's still just as corny of a song, and still just as easily forgotten. Space is still clogged up by one of the lamest, most bleach-white covers of 'Louie Louie' I've ever heard, crap instrumentals like 'Shut Down, Vol. II', which wouldn't even make a particularly titillating backing track, much less hold my interest as an instrumental, and stupid high school songs that can't be fooling anyone anymore ('Rah Rah Pom Pom Girl', which has about four seconds of coolness during the handclap parts). Are we supposed to have our souls ravaged by the raw honesty of 'Don't Worry Baby' and then buy into the story of a girl who wants to run for school office because it'll 'sure make her telephone ring'? Similarly so-innocent-they're-pathological moments abound, and I begin to wonder how long these guys can keep up this teenager facade. They were all pretty much at least 18 by then, and apparently weren't all lily-white like their reputations would have you believe. Hell, wasn't Brian married already? And didn't she know he'd turn out to be a whale-sized cokehead and porn addict who would hide whenever the pool guy came around, and that their kids would later go on the be responsible for Wilson Phillips? I suppose some people just don't have the stomach for suicide, huh? Sometimes you have to take one for the team, especially when your team is the Human Race.

Capn's Final Word: This carelessness is getting old...two more good songs wrapped around a shoddy core.

Click Here to Fill Out the Handy Dandy Reader Comment Form

All Summer Long - Capitol 1965.

I have a hunch there's some growth going on here. Then again, I have to think about it, which probably means there really isn't any. I will say that while the filler is really offensive ('Our Favorite Recording Sessions' is like ''Cassius Love Vs. Sonny Wilson' except they don't even make an attempt to be funny, or surprising, or anything but absolutely clumsy and irritating), there's considerably less of it than we've seen. I still think that Brian could've done better with his consistency than he has, but mostly I just feel he's cut the level of crap to a more manageable level. It's got the fantastic 'I Get Around' I already mentioned (the Beach Boys catalogue has the most overlap between albums outside of some soul acts...James Brown must've put different versions of 'Please Please Please' on over a dozen releases over the years, and that's not an exaggeration) as well as the short, nostalgic title track that somehow captures the waning days of summer and the creeping depression of an oncoming fall like few other songs (hell...when I was in St. Petersburg, as soon as the sun started going down earlier than 8 pm I thought life was about to come to an end because the winter there was like a trip to the Gulag). Lesser known hits like 'Hushabye' (pretty, but not as good as the likes of the highly like-minded 'Don't Worry Baby'), 'Little Honda' (despite essentially being a Honda motorbike commercial and having one of the more mindless choruses in the band's history), and the goddamn-cheating-cunt breakup song 'Wendy', and the chancey surf anthem 'Don't Back Down' also contribute to a sense of quality on this record. Brian's slowly but surely expanding his palatte of chord sequences (there's nothing here that much resembles Chuck Berry, for example) and fresh vocal harmonies

Still, put this up next to A Hard Day's Night or the first Animals record and you'll be amazed as to how lacking this album feels in comparison. Perhaps it was simply because Brian was in charge of everything besides the odd lyric here and there (which Mike Love was extremely fast to take credit for, as if someone would want to actually fess up to writing 'Do You Remember') and he was being driven like a Scottish pack horse to keep his production high and within the formula. Mike Love, especially, resisted violently any attempt Brian made to 'fuck with the formula', and didn't understand anything that didn't fit into his narrow little jock mindset. All this leads to compromise and Brian did what he had to do to get his albums out on time. The space filler is still so blatantly obvious, even in the face of higher-quality product from overseas that spat on instrumentals and blooper tracks as ridiculous wastes of space. Is there any other way to describe 'Carl's Big Chance' (hint: he blows it) or 'Our Favorite Recording Sessions'? I can stomach a 'Surfer Girl' carbon copy like 'Girls On The Beach', because it's a legitimate song (albeit one I've heard better before), but to waste time like they do isn't even funny anymore. They've only got 25 minutes to fill on an album...it seems like they could see fit to fill it with halfway decent songs instead of this disrespectable fucking about. The writing's on the wall...if they were to continue to release half-assed albums like this one, they'd soon be dusted by their British competition. But it'd still be some time before they learn their lesson. 'I Get Around' is one of their most infectious singles, with really impressive interplay between the quick, rhythmic background vocals and Brian's long, spirited falsetto leads, and the Boys never swung harder than they do on the 'I'm gettin' bugged drivin' up and down the same old strip' section. This, I'd say, is one of the Beach Boys first truly original singles, one of the first that doesn't sound ripped from the songbooks of Chuck Berry and the Four Freshmen. Then there's all that stuff about longing for change and slowly growing out of their insular little town mindset, but let's leave that for the therapists in the audience. Enough of that faggy self-reflection bullshit, I want more songs about hemis and four-barrel carbs and Posi-Traction rear ends and all that!

Capn's Final Word: Tiny forward steps and some of the same old irritations. Watching the Beach Boys develop is as frustrating as rooting for the Kansas City Royals. The improvements make the slapdash filler pieces seem all the more hateful.

Click Here to Fill Out the Handy Dandy Reader Comment Form

Concert - Capitol 1964..

An interesting release as it is the first of the live albums by the young white kids (none of whom took any lessons from James Brown, who did it earlier and far better...take a look at the first Live At The Apollo album for a primer on how to really release an early 60's live album), long before the Kinks or Stones released their own scream dreams. Apparently the girls weren't quite as wild back in 1964 as they would be a few years later when presented with the far worse-complexioned Brits. Here, the screams seem to get turned on and off like a lightswitch. and most of the time there's an odd silence as if we're at a Japanese baseball game or something. But then Carl shakes his hips or Mike Love makes his toupee stand on end by wiggling his ears and all girlie hell breaks loose for another two seconds until Murry glowers and threatens to make each and every one of them take a crap on his kitchen table until they shut the fuck up again. Strange stuff, but still fascinating, which is a fuckload more than I can say about the performance itself. The band barrels through all their recent hits ('I Get Around', 'Little Deuce Coupe', you know the drill) in capable but highly dull versions, mixing things up by including a bunch of idiotic covers that never get any better than Dennis' feisty grunt through 'The Wanderer' or a punker-fast version of 'Johnny B. Goode' (that's so hopped up it makes the Sex Pistols version sound like Vanilla Fudge), and are often worse, like Mike's insufferable and unnecessary 'Monster Mash'. They also include crappy, long-forgotten originals like 'Hawaii' instead of perfectly good stuff like 'Don't Worry Baby' (at least they have 'In My Room' as Brian's spotlight track, as he'd soon quit touring altogether). The recording quality is predictably horrendous, and only rarely do we get to have a taste of the band's instrumental abilities, which are admittedly better than I expected. Mostly, I have no reason to enjoy this any more than the Beach Boys other ripoff releases as there's still a strong feeling that they could've done this much better than they did, with only a few more moments of consideration. I guess when you're releasing new albums every couple of months or so, you have to cut all that crap out and get the product out the door. It just all goes to the general sense of what could have been, if they'd have slowed down and taken a breath for a second instead of letting this willy-nilly flood of releases continue unabated.

Capn's Final Word: Another missed opportunity to set the bar with an original idea. Coulda been...coulda been....

Click Here to Fill Out the Handy Dandy Reader Comment Form

Michael Bleicher Your Rating: C+ Any Short Comments?: You know why their instrumental abilities are better than expected? Why the screams are so intermittently scattered throughout the album? Because they're the STUDIO VERSIONS! If not the officially released ones, then the studio backing with new vocals, or outtakes, or SOMETHING. But it's obvious these aren't real live versions. Listen to "In My Room"�it sounds just like the album version, except some engineer has pushed up the volume on the track with the girls screaming on it at random instances, kinda like the Beatles do with the seagull noises on "Tomorrow Never Knows"...

Beach Boys Christmas Album - Capitol 1964.

Given a respectable grade because of singing ability alone. In my grand pantheon of rock music styles, Christmas albums rank somewhere below 'prog-punk' as painful listening experiences, if not actually as low as Christian rap music, which lies somewhere around listening to the sound of a 1/2-inch masonry bit being drilled into my left temple. See, I used to work in drug stores growing up, the kind of lame little chain places that sell cheap, overpriced shit that comes shipped to the store dumped in a big mass into unmarked, dented cardboard boxes that probably came from other stores after sitting on the shelves for years and years. Anyway, the worst time of year was, of course, Christmas shopping season, both due to the inhuman nastiness of the customers, the slush and sand and shit that constantly covered the floors (which were my job to keep mopped clean), and the neverending loop of 'classic' Christmas songs that tormented my days and nights. We only had a couple of cassette tapes to last us the entire season, and one inevitably decided to succumb to self-loathing and shred itself against the play head, leaving us with one cassette to be played and replayed hour after hour, day after day. I still can't hear 'Rockin' Around The Christmas Tree' and not have the smell of cheap potpourri and road slop come flooding back in a fit of nausea. For over ten years now, and probably forever more, I will associate Christmas tunes with Friday nights spent staring at the clock waiting for Aunt Edith down there in the candle aisle to finish groping every last glitter-encrusted knickknack within the grasp of her Cenozoic, lobster-like claws and go shuffling off into the night back to her sarcophagus, leaving me to mourn the loss of another precious moment in a rapidly depleting youth that could've been spent repeatedly fucking my hornball girlfriend on her living room couch while watching Life of Brian for the thirtieth time. Can you fathom the amazing depths of my resentments?

The Beach Boys' Christmas Album is an odious money-grubber that I suppose appeals to the kind of people who voluntarily listen to holiday songs, having determined that hearing them nonstop in the mall, supermarket, and on television just isn't enough to cover up the fact that the holidays are just an excuse to guilt-trip people into spending gobs of money they don't have for people they don't really like, driving them into debt which lasts long after the next Holly Jolly Christmas comes rolling around. For what it is, it's decent...Brian has nothing to do with the orchestral arrangements, which seem to be taken wholesale from the Walt Disney School of Orchestration, but the songs are about what you'd expect. They Don't Fuck With The Formula, which is probably good, since Christmas songs are at least not quite as revolting when they're played straight and not 'poppified'. You got everything from 'I'll Be Home For Christmas' to a spritely 'Merry Christmas, Baby' (the best thing here), to an 'Auld Lang Syne' to help you attempt to remember the incoherent lyrics before you go to your New Year's Eve party and make a mumbling ass out of yourself like everyone else. This is just not for me, and the fact that this was so obviously released to raise a little more cash from the group before their hits were to presumably dry up as the surf craze waned makes me want to slap it around a little. Completists, masochists, and unreconstructed sentimentalists apply within. Everyone else should just get drunk on the egg nog.

Capn's Final Word: It may be Santa's bag, but it ain't mine. Good singing, though.

Click Here to Fill Out the Handy Dandy Reader Comment Form

Today! - Capitol 1965

Finally, a Beach Boys album that feels like a real piece of work rather than a Dagwood sandwich of singles, half-arsed originals that rewrite old singles, covers, instrumentals, and studio-chatter novelty tracks like they've been milking for half a dozen albums already. I suppose it was around this time that Brian finally flipped out bigtime and got out of his touring commitments for good (over 10 years at least), giving him more time in the studio to do the thing only he can do...make increasingly complex pop melodies in increasingly complex studio settings, and the effects are immediate. None of these songs is trivial, and the arrangements are often mind-bogglingly intricate piles of overdubs, horns, and massed vocal harmonies that sound thick, like Jennifer Lopez's engorged pussy lips, except without all that pesky tuna fish smell. Brian's apparently onto some entirely new record production trip (aka marijuana) here that not many people have been willing to embark upon (Spector, obviously, and perhaps a Motown dude or two, but certainly not George Martin, at least not yet), and despite operating without either a roadmap or a clue, he succeeds brilliantly. Though this album has a distinct lack of familiar hits (I doubt many people count 'Dance, Dance, Dance' among the most easily remembered Beach Boys songs, the 'Help Me, Rhonda' is a lame LP-only version, and I mostly know 'Do You Wanna Dance' from the kick-butt Ramones cover version) that may drag it down in some people's view, I see this as a much more accessible listen than Pet Sounds (if not ultimately as rewarding), and a much better introduction to Brian Wilson's brilliance as the threads connecting him to his basic rock-n-roll past have not yet been severed. Listen, each one of these songs is an achievement at least on the level of 'Wendy' or 'Hushabye' from the last studio LP...and the lamest track here (besides yet another goddamn studio chatter take called 'Bull Session With 'Big Daddy'') is the bizarre album take of 'Help Me Rhonda', which witnesses one of Brian's few outright failures in his studio experimentation kick. The man keeps fiddling with the sliders, causing nasty dropouts and false-fades. For someone used to listening to the much more conventionally mixed single version or even the goofy Party! live-in-the-studio one, this one sounds more like an outtake than a legitimate release.

Otherwise, it's good just to sit back and become enveloped in the booming percussion and chiming guitar tones that Brian conjures up. Much is made of the sequence of ballads on the second side that begins with 'Please Let Me Wonder' (which is about smoking weed and daydreaming, by the way) to 'In The Back Of My Mind' and how this was such a major move for a band who was built on surf rockers and STP oil treatment, and it is. But it's a sneaky, insinuating move rather than something that jumps up and down and screams 'I'm a MAJOR artistic achievement! Praise me!' like Pet Sounds does. And that's sort of a relief....these songs aren't generally better than Pet Sounds is, but there's still a certain lightheartedness that is very charming and easy to gulp down compared to the latter albums Big Statements. And I'll tell ya, I probably get an equal amount of entertainment value between the two. And also like PS, I don't think I'm necessarily taken by any of these ballads individually (though 'Kiss Me Baby' always strikes me as one pretty little prissy), but I'm sure able to listen to this album as many times as I want and never get tired of it, either.

What I'm trying to say in such a convoluted, unexpressive and completely nonfunny manner (I've been about as funny as a Craig Kilborn monologue today) is that while Today is the first Beach Boys album without any glaring mistakes (besides 'Bullshit Session', but that's obvious) and while it isn't quite to the level of gravity that marks Pet Sounds, it's in the same ballpark, and the fact that no one analyzes each and every last note of this one but it's almost as wonderful makes it something of an underdog. And we all love underdogs, don't we? Karate Kid, anyone? The Killing Fields? Rocky? Behind the Green Door? Dude, I was sure Marylin Chambers'd never make that black guy with the face paint orgasm all over her face, but she finally did! It just goes to show that no matter how hard something may be, if you keep trying, sooner or later you'll be wiping some random dude's love spunk off your chin!

Capn's Final Word: A solid piece, quiet and unassuming, comes flowing from Brian's pen. The genius makes an inauspicious debut.

Click Here to Fill Out the Handy Dandy Reader Comment Form

Michael Bleicher Your Rating: A- Any Short Comments?: Really, really good...the quintissential Beach Boys album, really. If you combine the best parts of this with the best parts of Summer Days�, you get a great picture of the band at this point in time�Brian still had too punishing a schedule to write a full album's worth of good material every three months.

Summer Days and Summer Nights - Capitol 1965

Backsliding back into novelty slogs about amusement parks and the Mormon Promised Land sure can kill a man's buzz when he's still feeling the effects of Today!'s underrated beauty. But I guess we can view Bummer Days (and Bummer Nights) as the last gasp of the Scroogey Sixties Beach Boys, summing up their first four-odd years with an album every bit as lightweight as their first half dozen raining wheel releases were, and with that comes both killer (good) singles ('Califfornia Girls', 'Help Me Rhonda', 'California Girls', and 'California Girls') and killer (murderous) filler ('Amusement Parks USA', 'Salt Lake City', both of which sound like they were conceived as advertisements). I'm just unable to get over the inconsistency of this album in the face of Brian's continued development, and the excellent job the band did to make the last record such a unified, erm...unit. This is by no means a bad album, but considering where they should've been, including retreads like the single version of 'Help Me Rhonda' (the highly inferior album version ready part of Today!) and a cover of the Ronettes 'Then He Kissed Me' retitled 'Then I Kissed Her' strikes me as somewhat weak. The Al Jardine-sung 'The I Kissed Her' seems like nothing more than Brian showing off to his idol Spector that he already knows all the secret Wall-Of-Shit production tricks and is pulling ahead into uncharted waters full of sea nymphs and Here Thar Be Monsteres. Talk about hanging on to your ego...I dunno about Spector, but if some snot-nose little creep from a surf band started making creepily authentic sounding versions of my biggest hits, I'd load my Luger. Of course Phil would probably empty it again into the nearest female, but that's him. He's been a speedfreak for over 40 years now. So he shot his girlfriend...whaddya expect? That jaw-clencher shouldn't even be allowed to have shoelaces, much less be walking around unsupervised like he did. That's one thing Brian can always take pride in...as screwed up as he was, he was never any crazier than fucking Phil Spector.

Now, I heard somewhere highly unreliable that Brian was already working on Pet Sounds at this time, and was forced to take time out from recording the 419^th glockenspiel overdub on 'Caroline, No' to rush out this album to beat some , which would explain why this album has such a cheap feel. I mean, 'And Your Dreams Come True', pretty as it is, sounds like nothing more than a vocal overdub track left to die on the side of the road by the Pet Sounds bandwagon. It's not a song, it's gumby, dammit! And 'Summer Love Means New Love' revisits the bad old days of the Carl instrumental ripoff, though I'm happy to report that the man's skills have improved greatly since his days of mashing potatoes through 'Misrulou'. Also on the more suspicious side is 'I'm Bugged At My Old Man', a throwaway novelty doo-wop track about parental tyrrany that's supposed to eek laffs out of lines like 'he covered up my windows (oooh, it's dark!)', but it's a little too creepy considering Murry Wilson's somewhat questionable parenting skills. The very idea that Brian might be writing from experience seems to sap all the funny out of the thing. Maybe it's just me, but ever since I saw Capturing the Friedmans I'm a bit hypersensitive to passive-aggressive families that approach their disturbed parents with the sarcasm of Roseanne Barr and the flinching subjugation of a Trojan slave.

Anyway, I'm mostly pissed at what Summer Days could have been more than I am disappointed in what it turned out to be. No one should rightfully dislike an album that has something as perfect as 'California Girls' on it, one of the most marvelous pop songs of Brian's career (besides being one of his personal favorites), and firmly, brilliantly, right in the Beach Boys' comfortable range. It's one step closer to the whacked excellence of 'Good Vibrations', but didn't take near as much effort to complete. While 'Vibrations' was crafted, toiled over, and bled for, 'California Girls' was easy and relaxed as the summer breeze. Still, I can't regard this album as one of the Beach Boys bigger accomplishments, mostly because of the same old problems that have plagued them from the beginning...overzealous management and greedy record company demands. It should be remembered that Brian Wilson (and the others, I have to admit) were still being worked like Mexican seamstresses to keep pumping out the product, up to two big studio albums and one live album in 1965 alone. Perhaps from this perspective, we can view Today! for what it is...an aberration from the usual slapdash quality of recordmaking that Summer Days more closely resembles. 'California Girls' is the 'big single' that takes the hallowed place of a 'Fun Fun Fun' or a 'Surfin USA', as the flagship song on the record, when Today! didn't have one (and didn't need one). This is the end of an era for the band, though, as they would never again be the fresh-faced young hitmakers we've been so impressed and frustrated by for the last few years. From here on out lies crazed brilliance, crazed mediocrity, and, mostly...simple mediocrity. The beach is mostly closed, or just a faded memory.

Capn's Final Word: Back to the old days and the old ways for one last fling in the sun and too much filler diller. Say goodbye to summer.

Click Here to Fill Out the Handy Dandy Reader Comment Form

David Your Rating: A Any Short Comments?: What? No mention of 'Let Him Run Wild'? What are you - some kind of PUDWHACKER? One of the most beautiful songs in Brian's long, deranged ouvre' and you neglect to appropriately fellate it - in a purely textual sense? Are you out of your mind? Spot on with everything else, though.

Party! - Capitol 1965

Almost the very last of the evil moneygrubbers (there's still the undefendable Stack-O-Tracks, which was probably only released because Brian wanted everyone to hear his bewilderingly complex backgrounds), Party! was conceived, recorded, and released in a very short time smack dab in the middle of the endless Pet Sounds sessions as a means of blowing off steam and making a few extra bucks for Capitol so they'd quit breathing down Brian's neck about how amazingly goddamn long the new studio album was taking. Well, nothing pacifies like a cheap one-off that sells well, and it's possible to say that without Party!, there probably wouldn't have been a Pet Sounds. And that's probably quite a blessing, because there sure ain't another reason most people can find to sit through this thing twice. The idea is that the Boys bring a bunch of their girlie pals into the studio, drink a bunch of alcoholic beverages, malt and otherwise, sit in a nice circle and sing some folky songs of the day en masse as a couple of them play acoustic guitars, tambourines, and skinflutes (Mike). They really do this, it's pretty clear, because no one would intentionally overdub such idiotic banter as what's included here. I tell you what...no matter how many times I've gotten ridiculously hankered at a social situation, I'd never think screaming out 'RIGHT!!' after every earnest line my pal Al Jardine sings of 'Times They Are A-Changin' or yacking out the 'Hey!' in 'You've Got To Hide Your Love Away' is the height of hilarity, as these mental defects apparently think it is. Not since the last time I heard a Dixie Chicks have I heard a more hysterical group of whacked-out chicks more misguidedly convinced of their own brilliance as these twats on display here. I mean, you can have fun and whoop and drink screwdrivers and give Dennis a sloppy blowjob behind the drum screen all you want, but at least have a little respect for the songs, eh? Anyway, you can't really blame these morons, because it's not like the Beach Boys are showing their own material a whole lot of respect, either. The 'Medley' is 'hilariously' 'sung' in a stilted highbrow Back East accent by Mike that shows their sense of humor is about as thick as Love's hairline. In fact, the only track that is given a mostly decent treatment is the cover of 'Barbara Ann', which most people still refer to as 'Bah Bah Booey'.

Come on, concept or not, there's no way in my right mind I would record and release people sounding this brainless over performances this pointlessly sloppy. I suppose this was meant to show how 'fun' and 'spontaneous' the Beach Boys are, and in a sort of low-tech 60's way put you right in the room sitting next to your idols, but the joke wears thin quick. What's not a joke is that this ended up outselling Pet Sounds, which is sort of like 1941 having more of a box office take than ET, if you want a rough-and-rougher example. . All this again confirms my conviction that more people thought they were cool and enlightened back in the Sixties than actually were...well, they get one last hurrah because from here on out the teenyboppers and Top 40 simpletons had nothing more to do with this band.

Capn's Final Word: Mindless strumming and random yelling and giggling. It could be a Sebadoh album.

Click Here to Fill Out the Handy Dandy Reader Comment Form

Pet Sounds - Capitol 1966.

Everything it's supposed to be - a gorgeous pinnacle of the artistic arc that began with the first time Brian put pen to paper to write 'Surfin', something more than simply rock 'n' roll...this is pop music taken to a compositional extreme that few have attempted and no one has succeeded in recreating. It squeezes every last bit of potential out of a recording studio packed with session musicians, taking what his rivals and friends had pioneered and jacking it up a half dozen notches. It's the product of a boy grown into a man, sincerely concerned about what was happening to the world around him (including his often troubled marriage) and the confusing changes happening inside himself. But it's also draggy and slow, the product of toil and perfectionism over spontaneity and enthusiasm that seems to insinuate more than it actually says. And me being the mental midget I am, my favorite song on here is 'Sloop John B', by far. I respect this album more than I love or even like it, and you can talk until you turn blue and pass out, I'm not going to be convinced that this album was as influential as everyone always says it is.

I'm not any more convinced by the melodies here than I am the ones on the second side of Today!, and those of you trundling out the tiresome old argument about how complicated the chord structures are on this album, save it. Jazz guys play this kind of shit all the time, especially the bebop kind, and pop songwriters like Burt Bacharach had been making strikingly similar music for decades before this came out. Sure, be impressed by Brian's craft, boundless imagination, and persistence in the face of resistance from his bandmates, management, father, and record company, but don't attribute Brian with reinventing the wheel. All it takes is some practice and the right kinds of piano lessons to write songs this complicated. Finally, most damning of all, though there's parts of it that I can't deny having a strong effect on me emotionally, I really don't think this is that much more effective on an emotional level than a lot of the work Brian had already produced. Pow. This wasn't anything new, it was just conceived more clearly and given the amount of time necessary to really pull into itself like it should. Hell, if Today! hadn't been rushed out in a few months, I say it could have been even better than Pet Sounds, but that's like speculating that if Bob Dylan had finished college, he'd have been an even greater lyricist than he was. No one'll ever know.

You can stop reading now if you want a particularly balanced review of this record, because you won't get one here...I'm awarding this one an A+ out of respect for it's accomplishments, but in my personal estimation I get about an A's worth of enjoyment out of it. But let's not get ahead of ourselves...this is an important record that lots of people have a lot invested into, and deserves to be handled with care. It's not my fault it bores the crap out of me.

Just foolin'.

For those of you who are coming to this page deciding which Beach Boys albums to buy, which is the whole point anyway, I'd say DON'T GET THIS ALBUM FIRST. You'll either be thrown completely or will be disappointed that the other studio albums don't sound like this one. Instead, get a compilation. I usually don't recommend hits packages, but in the case of the Beach Boys I have to say that Endless Summer is such a perfect collection of their early hits, and much more representative of their true influence on pop and alternative music to come, plus being shitloads better than any of their original records (something I would never say about Beatles '62-66 versus their concurrent albums). As for comparisons with their contemporaries, I think it goes without saying that the Beatles equaled or bettered this release more than a few times over the course of their career, especially with Revolver, an album which makes Pet Sounds appear dowdy and unimaginative when you see the dazzling variety of music the Beatles were able to produce at the same time (and without the added pressure of feeling they were making a 'big' album...according to them it was just another day in the studio.). Brian was writing variations on the same sound, over and over and over. The Beatles were producing as many different approaches to the pop song as they could come up with.

Alright, now to the matter at hand - Pet Sounds. This was Brian's baby, the other members having spent This album set some sort of cost records back when it was first recorded because Brian spent months and months building layers of session orchestras on top of some basic rhythm and guitar tracks, as well as all manner of various other instrumentation (glockenspiels, wood blocks, chimes) and gimmicky sound effects (his 'pet sounds'...Coke cans, bicycle bells, Carl's skull) that people love to talk about when describing this record. Listen, if you're impressed by the fact that he used a Coke can as a percussion instrument, apparently you've never spent a few minutes around a toddler. I'm more impressed that he was able to preserve all of these takes of wildly varying timbre, volume, and vintage and mix them all down to just four measly tracks, besides conceiving of the arrangements in the first place. How exactly did he know he wanted the bass clarinet to come in on the off-beat of two, and the banjo to accent the middle note of the triad, the harpsichord to match the second voice in the background, etc. That's what's impressive, but then again there's hundreds of conservatory composition students that do the same thing every day. I do feel, however, that musically (if not lyrically), Brian played it relatively safe compared to what he was capable of. This is all very conventionally structured for anyone who listens to anything besides pop music, unlike the bizarrities he would start exploring on his Smile project....now that stuff was weird.

Songwise, from a pure entertainment level, I much prefer the three 'hits' (including the old folk cover 'Sloop John B', 'Wouldn't It Be Nice', and 'God Only Knows') to many of the side tracks because they're much more clearly constructed and have a punch that the other tracks lack. 'Here Today, Gone Tomorrow', for example, does very little for me because I can see through all the thick arrangements to a not-very-intriguing core. The soundtracky instrumental sections repel me even more. 'That's Not Me' feels lyrically clumsy, too direct and wordy, and the melody is hard to distinguish until the 'packed up and went to the city' section, which feels tacked on from a completely different song. 'You Still Believe In Me' unfolds itself nicely but never reaches the climax it hints at...it's faded out entirely too early. 'I'm Waiting For The Day' begins a much improved section with some interesting contrast between loud and soft, slow and quick march sections that unfortunately transition to the instrumental 'Let's Go Away For Awhile', which leaves me flat. This is soundtrack music (as is the gloopy 'experimental' instrumental 'Pet Sounds', which sounds like Jimmy Page doing a session for the Henry Mancini orchestra), and while I suppose it's pretty, it only garners attention because of the album it's on. If it were stuck on some Herb Alpert record (where it would seem to belong), no one would even look at it twice. And 'Caroline No' is a melodyless, drippy piece of glop that ends the album with a whimper. See what I'm saying about overrated? Every last bit of this record worked Brian's fingers to the bone, but a lot of it goes towards tracks that sum out at not very much. Pretty, sure. Some of the prettiest sections of music you're gonna hear from any pop band anywhere. Wacky instrumentation, sure. But detached and way too labored to interest me long term..

The only track here that even sounds mildly spontaneous is the marvelous 'Sloop John B', an old folk shanty the band had been singing together since the beginning. And the band must've enjoyed it a lot more than re-recording the second tenor part of 'I Just Wasn't Made For These Times' for the 15^th time in a row...they take to it with a spark that's missing from the rest of the vocal harmonies on the record, which feel unfortunately clinical. It also gives a much-needed moment of comic and rhythmic relief with some kooky lyrics about having all of one's corn eaten and tempos that rise above the loping gait of everything else on Pet Sounds.

From a lyrical standpoint, Brian seems to be stuck somewhere between being a confused, sad kid and a stubborn, ambitious adult, which I suppose he was. All of the songs on Pet Sounds are related somehow to this division. It's most clearly enunciated on 'I Know There's An Answer', which he finishes by saying 'but I had to find it out for myself' and 'Wouldn't It Be Nice', where Brian longs for domestic bliss with his loved one but is restricted because he's not 'older'. At his depths, his depression is crushing ('I Just Wasn't Made For These Times') but he can be redeemed through love and understanding ('God Only Knows', which almost seems to guilt-trip his partner into sticking with him, but in a very pretty and original way, of course), but first must find out who he is and where he belongs ('That's Not Me'). The interesting thing is, Brian was really speaking about himself, but many of his songs here can easily be applied to our own problems and feelings as listeners. 'Don't Talk (Put Your Head On My Shoulder)' is really about the lack of understanding between him and his wife, but just as easily sounds like a romantic love songs if you're in the right mood. I personally took a lot of pleasure in hearing an uplifting 'Sloop John B', especially the line 'This is the worst trip I've ever been on!' in the pits of a piss-poor, depressing Russian winter when I missed my country, my spicy food, and my family and didn't know when I'd see them next. This emotional universality of Pet Sounds is one of the things I can't dispute.

If you've been offended or surprised by my sober deconstruction of this album, it's simply because I just don't love the damn thing. All of the beauty, the melodies, the arrangements, vocal harmonies...yeah, sure. I think they're bonanza, too. But to me, there's not a zillion notes being played here...there's just a few, and most of the time it's the sssllloowww, emotionally overwrought ones. Should I just come out and say it's whiny? Okay, it's whiny. Whines like a puppy kicked out of the house for peeing on the kitchen table. It's okay to be a little whiny, but over the course of an entire album it gets old, like how everyone in the movie Magnolia seems to be on the verge of tears all the fucking time. Get over yourself! There's other things to feel in this life! Diversity! Give us a taste of joy, anger, misery, jealousy, devotion, AND confusion. You know what? I'd like to think that Brian himself thought Pet Sounds could use a little spice and be improved upon, because Smile, if nothing else, at least appealed to feelings other than being sad, reflective, and confused. 'Good Vibrations', whatever it is, has about as little to do with the overweening odors of Pet Sounds as Robert Fripp and Lemmy Kilminster. As for the oft-quoted little snippets about being the first concept album (bullshit...we already covered that up in the Little Deuce Poop review) or how Paul McCartney took it as a major influence for Sergeant Pepper's (took it as an excuse to get off his ass and write more songs, is what he did), neither of those are good reasons to buy an album, so don't come here with the idea that if you liked the Beatles, you'll love this. It doesn't work that way.

Okay, so I still give it an A+ because it's a flawed masterpiece that everyone needs to hear at least once to decide for themselves what to think about it. Pet Sounds is good enough to get that classic critical dodge. And that's my final answer.

Capn's Final Word: I know there's an answer. You'll have to find it out for yourself.

Click Here to Fill Out the Handy Dandy Reader Comment Form

Nathan Harper nator9999@comcast.net Your Rating: A+

Any Short Comments?: Come on man, comparing this one to Revolver is kind of a low blow. Revolver is often considered the GREATEST album ever by the GREATEST band ever. But actually, I think I like Pet Sounds better. It may not have as much diversity, but I think the song writing is stronger, and many people would probably back me up in saying that it's more emotionally resonant. I agree that it's overrated in terms of influence though, it's not really anything spectacularly inventive, just a bunch of great pop songs. I can't even pick out my favorite---they're all great.

jason Your Rating: A Any Short Comments?: I appreciate your honest and balanced comments on 'Pet Sounds,' and I agree with most of it, but there's just one thing I have to get off my chest.... 'Caroline, No' is MELODY-LESS?!?!?!?!?!? WHAT? Anyway, I love your site. keep up the good work.

Jim H.S. jim887arc@yahoo.com Your Rating: A
Any Short Comments?: I gave this an A because I like the album, and musically it's a step away from the beach. Nope, I love this album. Although there's a big part of my heart tied to their earlier efforts, when I look back, I remember all those grains of sand (how easy to confuse one with another) and realizing now that after a while they rub where I don't want them to. This one don't do dat. Maybe in Pet Sounds Brian Wilson gets closer than most popular composers can to creating classical, magic, and groundbreaking music. But dat don't make it something other than pop music. If I want those things, REALLY want them, and with a good dash of blood and rock, I go to the likes of Beethoven. Stoned & surfin, maybe not. But deaf & German, yes.

Robert Grazer xeernoflax@jack-the-ripper.com Your Rating: A-
Any Short Comments?: The principle (or, rather, only) problem I have with Pet Sounds is the fact that it doesn't elicit nearly as strong an emotional response from me as it seems to for many other people. The principle reason for this, I think, is that this album seems a wee bit too naive in its uniformly idealised romantic musings, perhaps a bit too focussed on the more innocent excitement of being in love. Of course, this is to be expected from a The Beach Boys, "Sufin' USA" and the like. But the simplicity of Wilson's romantic theory and the general "conservative loving" feel to this album distances it from me in that it strikes me as more a fairy tale, even in its pensive moments, than a full artistic representation of life and love. This minor quibble aside, I do think Pet Sounds does live up to most of its hype on a melodic level, boasting some of the most gorgeous harmonies of the decade, and even in its naivete it sounds more sophisticated than most other music aroun d the same time. And, of course, tracks like "Caroline, No" and "Don't Talk (Put Your Head on My Shoulder)" alone guarantee Pet Sounds some degree of classic status.

Smiley Smile - Capitol 1967.

Pet Sounds had pushed Brian to the breaking point, and his quest to produce the perfect followup just shattered him all apart like Joe Theissman's lower right leg back at that Super Bowl 20 or so years ago. Even had bones sticking out of the skin just like ol' Joe, you see? He was fucked up, and felt the results for almost the next two decades. He'd never again be the same, and it took him almost until the 1990's until even a glimmer of that old brilliance could be seen again...and until just a few years ago until he could really come to grips with his daunting work of the '66-67 period. Whatever could've sent our Beloved Brian spiraling off out into the cosmos in such an inglorious way? Smile has been the subject of so much conjecture and legend that it's taken on an impossibly lofty stature more attributable to wishful thinking than reality. The assumption was that Brian's unbelievable level of artistic growth was to continue - Smile was supposed to make Pet Sounds look like Summer Days (and Summer Nights) (and Summer Days look like Oops, I Did It Again!). It was supposed to impress the Beatles and Phil Spector so much they'd pack up their tents and never set foot in a recording studio again. It was supposed to contain all the sides of Pet Sounds and more, intriguingly correlating humor and philosophy, or something like that. It was supposed to be a lot of things, but we'll never know because Brian flaked out in a most dramatic fashion, probably most tellingly described by his sessions for the track 'Fire' where he gave everyone toy fire hats, set a trashcan ablaze in the center of the studio, and made people play as diabolically as possible while recording the results. Unable to handle it any longer, he retreated to his house and boarded up the windows to keep the demons out. The other bandmembers, firey breath of an angry record company close on their heels, finally coaxed him into rewriting and finally recording some new and leftover material to make up enough for a new album, and he agreed. Smiley Smile was the patchwork result, almost entirely different from, yet built from similar parts as, the never-completed Smile. The end effect was nasty rejection and indifference from a fanbase who either wanted them to produce another Pet Sounds (or more likely another All Summer Long). Besides the singles 'Good Vibrations' (which was old hat by then) and 'Heroes and Villains' (which was a flop), there wasn't anything at all from this album that captured the average listener's imagination. It was difficult, confusing, and tossed off, and was 'crazy' in a disturbing, unpleasant way rather than in a cute, 'wacky' way. Welcome to the arms of madness, ladies and gentlemen.

Of course, after almost 40 years of hearing unlovable racket like Ensturzende Neubauten and Loverboy, the haunting 'pet sounds' and odd vocal harmonies of Smiley Smile no longer seem quite so off-putting. Especially in comparison to Frank Zappa's oddly similar concurrent work with the Mothers (take away all the jazzy instrumental sections and some of the more spectacular yelling, add a few more pop melody fragments, and Uncle Meat could pass for a second disc of Smiley Smile), parts of this album feel merely unfinished, as if they just picked up a handful of random overdub tracks from the Smile sessions, added the completed version of 'Good Vibrations' and a randomly selected final mix of 'Heroes and Villains', and decided to make an album out of it. The more titillating fragments include 'Vegetables' (which, hey! corresponds quite nicely with Zappa's own veggie-fixated 'Invocation and Ritual Dance...' from Absolutely Free), which has Paul McCartney crunching and munching various members of the plant kingdom right there for our enjoyment, and the intriguing harmonies of 'With Me Tonight', which sounds like a Pet Sounds piece, but too pure and good to be included in that bag of mixed messages. Interestingly enough, I hear some big Flaming Lips reference points in 'Fall Breaks and Back To Winter', which is probably one of the most deceptively titled songs since I figured out James Brown's 'Lickin' Stick' probably wasn't about Lick'em'Stix. and Cannibal Corpse's 'Post-Mortem Ejaculation' wasn't about picking dandelions in the park. (A better title for 'Fall Breaks' would probably be 'Trouble Brewin' at Santa's Workshop') Other tracks barely work at all. 'Little Pad' is just worthless, collage of poor-quality vocal tracks interspersed with Hawaiian guitar and random nothingness...the band cracks up at the beginning, which is always a poor omen. The last two tracks do nothing for me, as 'Whistle In' repeats the same little riff for a minute but ends up nowhere, and the growling lead vocal on the listless 'Wonderful' is more distasteful than romantic. Mostly, the thing screams out 'unfinished', as there's no way Brian 'Overdub' Wilson would've let an album out sounding this sparse if he'd had half a mind left when it happened. These tracks literally resemble 1/100^th of the music you'd hear on, say, 'Good Vibrations'. There's more lost in the mix of that song than on the rest of this stuff combined. The fact that it still works at all is testament to the amount of though Brian devoted to the (insignificant) details of his songs.

As the album is already jarring as it is, imagining a version of Smiley Smile without the two singles is like trying to imagine the Spice Girls without Posh Spice's black-patent leather camel toe. You could try, but why? Why try to live with yourself afterwards? Because these final gasps are among Brian's most amazing work. 'Heroes and Villains', which was released in a version that Brian was never quite happy with (and indeed, better versions exist) is a highly goofy pop opera that seems to combine the Ronettes and Gregorian chant, 'la la doo doo doo' and . The words tumble out in a torrent, seemingly unrelated to what's happening in the music, and delightfully incoherent to the listener. This is the type of vocal experimentation I can handle, buddy...

'Good Vibrations' quite possibly may be the best pop song ever released, and I'm not at all joking about that. Of course, trying to prove such a conceit would be about as stupid as starting an internet chain letter (but not nearly as moronic as actually believing there's some kid in Wisconsin dying of cancer who's parents are irresponsible enough to rely on a chain letter to fund his treatment or that if we JUST stop BUYING GASOLINE on MONDAYS and WEDNESDAYS the RAT BASTARD OIL COMPANIES will be FORCED to STOP PRICE GOUGING and LOWER GAS PRICES!!!), but one intent listen and you too will realize the awesome power of this song. Brian's taken Spector's conceit that the orchestra should be felt instead of heard to the logical extreme...there's unknown dozens of tracks somewhere down deep inside this song, and they were all bled and wept over until they reached perfection. He mixes Theremins, an overdriven Fender bass, about a hundred vocal overdubs, and some of the most booming percussion ever put to tape and compresses it all down into a mono, AM masterpiece that sounds superb blasting from cheap car speakers. There's probably more great material lost in the final mix of 'Good Vibrations' than in the entire catalogues of many 'classic' rock bands, and most of it you can only feel because it's almost impossible to actually hear it. And what's more, the song completely, gracefully refutes the ambiguity and confusion of Pet Sounds with a wholly positive feel that brims with, well, good vibrations! If anyone's come close to capturing the little spark that you feel when you first meet someone you know you'll fall in love with, it was Brian Wilson. So long, Brian.

Because Smiley Smile is what it is and came from such a cantankerous period in the Beach Boys history, it's required listening for anyone who's interested in the Boys' story. The instinctive attraction to observing the charred earth left behind by Brian's legendary flameout is just too undeniable. (In fact, when I first got my 6-disc Beach Boys MP3 collection back in Russia, brought it home and popped Disc 1 in my laptop, the first thing I wanted to hear was Smiley Smile. Of course I'd already owned Pet Sounds, but it's telling I didn't much care to hear, say, Wild Honey instead) The problem is that most of this record isn't going to reveal much. While Pet Sounds was so introspective and lucid, and you could pretty much get a snapshot of Brian's mental condition at the time of its making, Smiley Smile is simply too far gone to make much sense at all. Brian went from describing his fears and insecurities in great detail to writing little ditties about vegetables and girls losing their hair in a period of months....I suppose if that isn't enough of a clue into his sad and destructive situation, nothing else can be.

Capn's Final Word: Bizarrity that is pretty damned telling but not all that good. Contains one of the best songs in the history of the universe, though.

Click Here to Fill Out the Handy Dandy Reader Comment Form

Joe H. Your Rating: A+ Any Short Comments?: I'm probably alone in this but some days i think i like this album more than Pet Sounds. Most of the complaints that are against it is that it's too sparse. It's a hastely put together Smile rip-off. Some songs go nowhere. Most songs sound unfinished. The band sounds like they took one too many bong hits of the ol' hashish. I could probably go on for a few more of these average criticisms brought forth upon Smiley Smile. The thing is, i think it's a better album for it. I doubt many people have heard many albums, if any, that sound like this one. It's quite the unique album. Especially on a major label, and especially by a band who was expected to have a number 1 album and had an album like Pet Sounds to follow up. Not to mention especially for the mid-60's. My opinion is people expect too much of Brian Wilson. Maybe this was the absolutely wrong time to release an album like this. Obviously it was bad timing, and one of the most brilliant concepts, and ultimately unfinished/unreleased albums had to be sacrificed. Plus this album has been so typed up by 1967 that nothing would be acceptable to the public except Smile. To wrap up this review quickly, i think this album is extremely underrated and, like i said before, people expect too much of Brian Wilson. I personally don't believe songs need to be "finished" to be really good. What someone thinks is a "finished" song is pretty subjective isn't it? A song could have all the window dressing in the world, but some songs can turn out better with just mere atmosphere and ethereality alone. Granted, compared to Smile, it doesn't have much of a chance against such a grandoise concept, but i love this album because of its unpretentiousness, its whimsy, and of course its creepily bizarre and druggy nature which you may find on Smile to some extent but not to such dramatic lengths. People may say these versions sound like pale skeletons compared to the Smile versions, or what could've been of the Smile versions, but for me i think it's a whole lot more interesting to have the Beach Boys whacked out on drugs and making this highly experimental homemade album at Brian's house and finishing it up within only a few weeks. The results are bizarre, creepy, erratic, and sometimes heavenly beautiful all at the same time. Smiley Smile is a very unique album and a criminally overlooked high point in experimental psychadelic pop

Barry Stoller Your Rating: C Any Short Comments?: Everyone knows the old saw about Pet Sounds inspiring / challenging McCartney to get Sgt. Pepper together. Consider how Smilely Smile had its Fab influence, too - those song scraps tossed across The White Album and McCartney's fluffy first solo album owe serious debt to Smilely Smile, for better and worse.

James Hunter Your Rating: A+ Any Short Comments?: Well, I'm a Pet Sounds worshipping freak, and I'm here to explain why Pet Sounds is my favorite album. Or at least attempt it. Maybe Brian wasn't that inventive at all. Maybe he snatched the idea of chord changes from Bernstein or someone. Maybe all his production techniques on this album are taken from Spector. I don't care. It is just that I CONNECT with this album. Music preference might be based on impulse rather than reason, and there's no way I can say the right words to make anyone who has heard Pet Sounds and thinks it overrated to change. Oh well. At least I like it, and I guess that's all that really matters.

Wild Honey - Capitol 1967.

The beginning of the Beach Boys reclamation project, Wild Honey finds heretofore uninteresting bandmembers (Carl! Al! Dennis!) stepping up their roles to save the band from the crash and burn of the Smile debacle. What's interesting is that whenfor so long these guys labored in the increasingly wide shadow of Brian and a constant, mind-numbing touring schedule, they were growing artistically and professionally too, they just couldn't ever get a word in edgewise. They weren't hopeless squares at all (well, Mike was, and I'm not convinced about goofy Al). So while before I might've described the songs as 'his' (Brian's), now I'm going to have to be careful...there will soon be five writers and singers in this band, and Brian will be one of the least important of them. Oh how things change when you're in the grips of a sickening mental disbalance

While the majority of these songs still carry Wilson/Love writing credits, there's a strongly reduced level of input from Brian...the bandmembers begin to play their own instruments on the album for the first time since, oh I dunno, back on Surfin USA when they all kept performing horrible instrumentals until I coughed up a lung out of protest. As you might guess, the arrangements are also pared down to bite-sized levels, leaving Wild Honey sounding spare, funky and, compared to the likes of Pet Sounds, downright sparse. They've mostly left the ol' weirdness of Smiley Smile completely behind, with some vestiges including the Theremin whistling alongside the title track and the unfinished minimalism of 'Let The Wind Blow', but even those sound darned conventional...people who were thrown by the last album's extreme bizarreness can take shelter here. Wild Honey's about as bizarre as a contemporary Young Rascals album - unless you're from a bass-ackwards redneck place like Texas, the idea of white guys making a shot at doing light soul just shouldn't seem all that revolutionary.

And it isn't. Wild Honey is pleasantly listenable and not a whole lot more, as all of the heavy meaning has also gone the way of the Wall of Brian...these are mostly sweet, simple upbeat light rock songs performed with one primary vocalist. Yup, even the vocal harmonies are greatly reduced! Without Brian to chart each voice they were left to theirThat's akin to Jimi Hendrix playing most of an album without turning on his Fuzzface, ladies and people I wish were ladies! It's not something to pick yer brain about though...massed vocals wouldn't much fit the white-boy soul here. And anyhow, it's quite cool to hear Carl belting his lights out on the title track, 'Darlin', and the raucous Stevie Wonder cover 'I Was Made to Love Her'. Carl's songs are also the highlights, especially the groovy 'Darlin', which dates back several years, but probably had to soak up some more Motwon influences before it got to its current state. 'Here Comes The Night' is almost garage-y in its spit-spat vocal melody, but no garage band ever had singers like this one, did it? The only two moments of weirdness come with 'I'd Love Just Once To See You', which ends with the words 'in the nude' and sounds like the theme song for a potentially violent Peeping Tom, who talks about 'a feeling building up inside' over music fit for the Brady Bunch Variety Hour Nightmare. That's gotta be the track that clued Charles Manson into these guys and made him think maybe there was some 'potential' there, gotta be. Alternately, 'Mama Says' is just a repetitive rhyme of all the things Mama tells you to do ('sleep a lot, brush 'em like crazy') that has some of the only massed lead vocals of the record! Okay!

Listen, this stuff is really very nice, especially when compared to some of the prevailing white soul of the day (though it mostly falls short of being anywhere close to legitimate Motown, which was still riding a creative wave of it's own at the time), but you really have to adjust your expectations. For one thing, it's back to a bewilderingly short 25 minutes in length (excluding the bonus tracks, which are pretty interesting this time around, throwing in a couple of lost work tracks of 'Good Vibrations', an alternate mix of 'Heroes and Villains') and seems to last half that (dude, I can't believe they held onto 'Darlin' for so goddamn long! Take out 'Bull Session' from Today, slap that motherfather on there and I say you've got a firm A, buddy!) , and there are really no 'important' tracks here whatsoever. If you're not in the mood for somethin' light, may I suggest eating a couple of bean burritos and another listen to Pet Sounds (or, better yet, go get Today! like I told you to) instead? But if you don't mind some boppy background funk, Wild Honey might just be your hive.

Capn's Final Word: Strippin' down in more ways than one, and a bit aimless, but nice is nice in a world of mean.

Click Here to Fill Out the Handy Dandy Reader Comment Form

Friends - Capitol 1968.

I suppose I'm not strapping on my cheap blue Nike running shoes and laying down in a bunk anytime soon, though Friends has tried to sink its New Age claws into my brain for thirty minutes now. I concur totally with what my esteemed and similarly scatterbrained WRC compadre Mark Prindle's assessment that Friends is a frightfully stealthy Mike Love recruitment tool for his stupid-ass Maharishi cult masquerading as a 'quiet' Beach Boys album. This album is like ice-cold fingers depressing your brain, making you think that, yeah, feeling 'peace in my mind' may be a prett