GGGGGGGood afternoon y'all! We're gearing up for a teeny tiny heat wave over the next few days. Hope you're staying chill and cool wherever you are...
WHERE WE'RE AT NOW
The Beach Boys!
They made Thriller!*
They made Like A Prayer!**
They made Rumours!***
I've been covering their journey for several weeks now. If you want specific thoughts on any album or period of theirs, feel free to check out the previous update posts.
My current game plan is to finish the script by this weekend, film and do VO over the weekend, and then spend the following two weeks editing. That means you can look forward to a brand spanking new DDD at the end of the month.
THE SCRIPT
Since filming is about to kick off, this week's update will likely be the last one to feature a look at the script. This section is about their 1972 album Surf's Up.
(As always, this section is subject to change between now and the vid's release.)
ALBUM 17. SURF’S UP (August 1971) ✅
Now it would be great if anyone actually listened to them. Sunflower’s reviews were quite good at the time, but it was a commercial dud in the US. The album barely made a dent on the charts, and only one song charted in the US, Add Some Music To Your Day. Once again though, the UK response was way better - the album got into the top 30.
Brian took the album’s flopping quite harshly, he hadn’t been hurt like this since Pet Sounds. He continued to retreat into his home, self-medicating, and running a health food store called the Radiant Radish… sure why not?
It was there where Brian had met the radio DJ Jack Rieley. Jack had Brian on air for his first ever full length radio interview right before Subflower dropped. Following the interview, Jack sent the band a six page memo, and off the strength of that memo, the Beach Boys hired Jack as their new manager.
So what did that memo say? First off, no more matching band outfits. Throw them out. Second, Carl’s the band leader now. And third, go back to a certain Smile track, and release it.
Jack’s reinvention played out over the course of a year. Ad slogans like “It’s now safe to listen to the Beach Boys.” (PURPLE SKIN) And it wasn’t before? A live performance at the Big Sur Folk Festival that had Rolling Stone apologizing for their treatment of the band after skipping the Monterey festival. An appearance at a Grateful Dead show, at which Bob Dylan attended and said “Fuck they’re damned good.”
The Boys might actually have been back in town. But we weren’t gonna know until they dropped a new album. Recording for it ran from January to July 1971, and in August, the Beach Boys released Surf’s Up. (COVER) Yeah? Is it???
Have you ever seen a more confrontational album cover in your life? And get this, the opening song, from a band famously associated with the water, is called Don’t Go Near The Water? It’s like the Beatles put out a song called I DON’T Wanna Hold Your Hand. At least in terms of presentation, this is the Beach Boys rejecting everything the public knew about them. And I am so here for it.
Not only on a conceptual level, but also on a musical level. This is music! And really good music at that. Carl owes his newfound status as band leader right off the bat. He gets his first ever solo writing credits with Long Promised Road and Feel Flows, and he recorded them both almost entirely on his own.
Disney Girls (1957) is Bruce Johnston taking the spotlight, bemoaning the drugs taking out the young folks in the band’s fanbase. The result is this weary waltz that might be his best work with the band.
It's also one of many steps towards more... dare I say… political material! Jack Rieley encouraged the band to write more topical lyrics. Opener Don’t Go Near The Water condemns environmental pollution, accompanied by one of the finest vocal harmony breakdowns in the band’s history. And Mike Love’s Student Demonstration Time reworks a Leiber and Stoller song to reflect the mood after the Kent State shootings. Many folks think this is the album’s worst song - I don’t love it, but I do love that it's here, if only just to show how far the Boys were willing to go in re-establishing themselves.
Brian gives us A Day In The Life of A Tree, another environmentally conscious song sung from the perspective of a dying tree. It’s not sung by any Beach Boy, but by Jack Rieley, in case it wasn’t clear how crucial he’d become to the band.
And finally, we get the closer, the title track, and the song Jack Rieley mandated the band pull from Smile… Surf’s Up. This recording comes straight from the Smile sessions, almost untouched aside from some minor overdubs. Like the album cover, this one is a total subversion of the band’s previous image - a man experiences a divine intervention at a concert and decides to devote his life to God. The first half is as harmonically free form as you’d expect from Smile-era Brian, but the second half and that outro (CLIP)… yeah if God played me that, I’d be divinely inspired too.
I’m gonna say something bold… this might be my favorite Beach Boys album. It may not be as outwardly impressive as Pet Sounds, but there is something so captivating about the Beach Boys collectively rejecting who they were, who other people kept trying to make them be, and embracing a new future. I love this album.
DENNIS WILSON: CIA OPERATIVE?
In this week's installment of "Dennis Wilson is The Most Wildest Man To Ever Exist":
Last week I talked about Dennis' connection to Charles Manson. Tl;dr, he housed Charles and some of his Family for a bit, Charles wrote a song that later appeared on the band's 20/20 album, Dennis and Charles had a falling out after the band changed the lyrics, Charles orchestrated a bunch of murders a year later. Shit's wild! But it doesn't end there.
In 2019, journalist Tom O'Neill published a book called Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties, the result of a two decade long rabbit hole he fell into after being assigned a much smaller magazine story. O'Neill's book pokes a lot of holes in the official Helter Skelter narrative from prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi, and floats the idea that Manson may have had some kind of relationship, direct or indirect, with the CIA's MKUltra mind control program.
The theory largely centers on a psychiatrist named Louis Jolyon "Jolly" West, who ran a CIA funded clinic in Haight-Ashbury around the same time Manson was living in the area, and whose research focused on hypnosis and behavioral control. Members of the Family reportedly visited that clinic. Dennis is part of the story mainly because his house was where Manson's entry into the LA music scene, and by extension a lot of these theorized connections, actually took place. So the argument by O'Neill wasn't that Dennis had a CIA handler or worked with the CIA in any way, but Manson's rise, his strange run of legal luck, and his apparent ability to control his followers so completely all raise questions that never got fully answered. Still wild to even have a potential connection to the CIA!
Lemme make clear - this remains a theory, not a proven fact. Even people who find O'Neill's research compelling tend to stop short of saying there's a confirmed link between Manson and the CIA, and O'Neill himself has acknowledged that plenty of his findings are circumstantial. BUT the book has still been massively influential. It inspired a 2025 Netflix documentary, Chaos: The Manson Murders.
SONGS TO CHECK OUT
These are just songs I've heard before, but I've been going back to for one reason or another.
Please Let Me Wonder: One of Brian's best compositions of the early BBs days, maybe ever?
Long Promised Road: Such a good chorus.
Deirdre: Been coming back to this one, not only for its perfect-for-summer, bouncy feel, but for being sampled in TWO classic RPGs (Earthbound and Undertale)
Pacific Ocean Blues: God Dennis' debut album is so good.
Still Cruisin': I still maintain that, for all the band's faults in the 80s, the decade's sonic palette could fit the band well at times. Especially in a post-Kokomo world. The instrumental parts in this song after 1:49 sound great to me.
And that's it for now! Next week I'll have some BTS bits from filming and maybe even some semi-edited video to share. Thanks for reading this far, and look out later this week for a new main channel vid!
(*The Beach Boys did not make Thriller.)
(**The Beach Boys did not make Like A Prayer.)
(***The Beach Boys did not make Rumours.)