Hey hi hello people! Hope you all had great weekends and good weeks so far. Let's waste no idea and get into this week's update on the next DDD...
WHERE WE LEFT OFF
For the last update, I had listened to the first nine albums from the Beach Boys, which got me up to midway through 1965. At this point, the Beach Boys were an established hit-making group and America's answer to the British invasion.
However, cracks were starting to show - while they may have been America's response to the Beatles, that didn't mean they always equaled the Beatles in terms of sales and critical reception. Capitol kept marketing them as young, chipper, do-gooders, but the boys wanted to branch out. And on top of it all, the group's main songwriter Brian Wilson began to suffer immensely from it all - following a mental breakdown on a plane in 1965, he went fully into studio hermit mode and did not tour with the rest of the group. This effectively split the group between the Boys in the touring band and the Boy who recorded the albums.
Wouldn't it be fun if we watched that dichotomy play out over the next few albums? Anyway, let's watch that dichotomy play out over the next few albums!
ALBUMS I'VE LISTENED TO
Beach Boys Party!: A fascinating experiment, even if it was hastily thrown together at Capitol's request. Some nice covers of the Beatles and Bob Dylan, and of course the big hit Barbara Ann. The constant crowd noises were annoying at times, but (I also believe a reissue or collector's edition of this album had mixes that got rid of the crowds, so that's nice too.)
Pet Sounds: Imma be real for a sec - I first heard this album many years ago, and while I liked it, I felt like I was missing something. Going back to it for this DDD, I realize now what I was missing; the context of the past few albums. Hearing the onramp to Pet Sounds made me appreciate not only how it differed from the early albums, but how it stepped up the already-good game of the previous bigger-sounding albums. This is likely gonna get a MASSIVE section in the video, but suffice it to say, I thought Pet Sounds was outstanding. Gorgeous, dense, even emotionally unsettling at times. Feels like the ultimate deconstruction of what the Beach Boys could sound like. Wouldn't It Be Nice and God Only Knows are two of the greatest songs ever.
Smiley Smile: The remnants of the Smile sessions, and the closest thing we got to Brian Wilson's "humor" album. I cannot say I clicked with it? So I won't! Felt like Brian took his studio magicianry from the years prior and let fully loose, but at the expense of the hefty beef and meat songs from Pet Sounds. Some songs sound like outright trolls. But some songs are interesting, and some like Heroes & Villains and Good Vibrations are standouts in the overall catalog.
Wild Honey: Apparently this whole album was heavily inspired by Stevie Wonder!! Kudos to the Boys for noticing Stevie's talent in 1967, before he even got to the legendary run. I thought the album was fine - a nice reset from the studio-heavy tricks and a return to more collective group work. (Pet Sounds and Smiley Smile were effectively Brian Wilson solo albums with loads of outside musicians.)
Friends: A turn into more psychedelic matter for the Boys! Thanks in large part to the Boys' relationship with Maharishi Mahesh Yogi - the same man who would inspire the Beatles' psychedelic work. Transcendental Meditation might be the corniest song they've ever done!
20/20: The point where Carl and Dennis Wilson took over as main producers for the Beach Boys. Brian was working through mental health issues, and was even in a psych hospital for a chunk of this album's making. This album struck me as a blend of the earlier band harmonies with a more AOR sound. I don't mean this in any qualitative way yet - this was where I could really start to see the version of the BBs fronted by Mike Love that plays the nostalgia circuit. Also one of the songs was co-written by Charles Manson!!!!!
Smile (the 2011 release): Possibly the most famous unreleased album in popular music history. The stories of how it came to be and then didn't could fill entire dedicated videos, but if you enjoy Pet Sounds, I'd highly recommend the 2011 compilation. I'm also aware that Brian Wilson put out a re-recorded version in 2004, but I still gotta check that out.
INTERESTING THINGS I'VE LEARNED
Barbara Ann becoming a single wasn't the Boys' decision. Brian had initially given Capitol a song called The Little Girl I Once Knew for a single, but radio programmers dismissed it and instead went with Barbara Ann.
Brian Wilson's main creative impetus for making Pet Sounds was hearing the Beatles' Rubber Soul. And in tandem, Pet Sounds gave the Beatles the drive to make Sgt. Pepper.
Pet Sounds didn't have that great of a release!! This truly blew my mind - reviews were positive but mostly muted, and at least in the US, the album commercially underperformed. It did have a better time in the UK, eventually becoming one of the top 5 best selling albums of 1966. Of course, nowadays it's considered an all-time classic, but it just shocks me that it wasn't instantly loved. I think it's because I feel like most of these landmark 1960s albums were successful then AND now - Sgt. Pepper, Exile on Main Street, Blonde on Blonde, etc.
What also surprised me - and I'll need to find more concrete details - but apparently it took a WHILE for Pet Sounds to take off in music circles. We're talking 30 years later into the 1990s! In that sense, is Pet Sounds the Beach Boys' Pinkerton? Are the Beach Boys basically Weezer??
My current plan for the video is to have a dedicated section for Good Vibrations and the Smile sessions between Pet Sounds and Smiley Smile, and then a section for Smile at the very end. Figured it would make for a nice end to the story. I'm honestly still digging through everything related to Smile, but Jeeeeeeeesus Christ it's a lot. Not just for the story that Smile took, but the journey Brian Wilson went through and the demons he fought.
Though speaking of Smile - the big sign to Brian that Smile wasn't gonna pan out was when he heard the Beatles' Strawberry Fields Forever. In the words of a friend, they had pretty much done what Brian was aiming to do.
Following Friends, the BBs went out on two tours that did terribly. The second was with the Maharishi, who would give a lecture on TM after the BBs played. They had to cancel a Queens show because, in a 16,000-seat venue, they only sold 800 tickets.
"THE CALIFORNIA MYTH"
Las time, I briefly touched on how the Beach Boys helped to popularize the "California myth." At the time, I had only a surface-level understanding of what that meant. But I've been reading this book on the band by David Leaf, and it had a passage that really stood out to me. Here it is:
"When the Beach Boys started out, surfing was just a sports fad with little chance of spreading to the rest of the country for the simple reason that most of America is landlocked. Because of their geographical predicament, America's children turned to the Beach Boys for their surfing. Surfing, in this musical idiom, stood for freedom, the ocean, the sun, and the cruising fun that the Beach Boys supposedly enjoyed "out there" in coastal California.
That teenage lifestyle was immensely appealing to the rest of the country and eventually to much of the world. Writer Nik Cohn described California as a teen heaven, "a hugely enlarged reality [that] verges on complete fantasy it is the joob-joob land far beyond the sea where age is suspended at twenty-five, school is outlawed, Coke flows free from public fountains and the perfect cosmic wave unfurls endlessly at Malibu." For kids whose oceans and beaches were made by intersecting asphalt and fire hydrants, whose winters were filled with long, cold, snowy nights, California had to be the end of the rainbow."
SONGS TO CHECK OUT
The Times They Are A Changin: This struck me as the ultimate symbol of the Beach Boys at this time - singing a legendary protest song by one of the era's greats, for an album Capitol wanted for the holiday season with all the usual Beach Boys branding.
God Only Knows: Yeah. Yeah..... yeah. Had to. Only Brian Wilson could start a love song with "I may not always love you."
Heroes & Villains: I admit, I'm more a fan of parts of this one. I'm not a huge fan of how start-and-stop it is. But the parts that hit are STELLAR. The section from 2:47 to 3:32 is pure gold.
I Was Made To Love Her: The hell you mean the Beach Boys were out here covering Stevland Wonder????
Be Here In The Mornin: The flanger effect on the chorus vocal reminds me of Fishing For Fishies-era King Gizzard. Nice ukulele at the end too.
Cabinessence: A re-recording of a song from the Smile sessions. Some of the most surreal vocal work on a BBs album thus far. (CORRECTION: As some folks have pointed out, it comes straight from the Smile sessions, so it's not a re-recording!)
Surf's Up (Smile version): Absolutely gorgeous song about a man reckoning with a spiritual awakening. I understand this song will also be on a future album, but that's for future me to hear!
And that's it for now! I'll see you all later this week for a main-channel video, then next week for another update. Thanks as always for being here!!