:format(jpeg):mode_rgb():quality(90)/discogs-images/R-436560-1347290163-2853.jpeg.jpg)
:format(jpeg):mode_rgb():quality(90)/discogs-images/R-436565-1448984383-5918.jpeg.jpg)
(#285: 6 August 1983, 2 weeks; 10 September 1983, 1 week)
Track listings:
Volume 1: Surfin' Safari/Surfin' USA/Shut Down/Little Deuce Coupe/In My Room/Fun Fun Fun/I Get Around/Don't Worry Baby/When I Grow Up (To Be A Man)/Wendy/Little Honda/Dance Dance Dance/All Summer Long/Do You Wanna Dance?/Help Me Rhonda/California Girls/Little Girl I Once Knew/Barbara-Ann
Volume 2: You're So Good To Me/Then I Kissed Her/Sloop John B/God Only Knows/Wouldn't It Be Nice/Here Today/Good Vibrations/Heroes And Villains/Wild Honey/Darlin'/Country Air/Here Comes The Night/Friends/Do It Again/Bluebirds Over The Mountain (not "Blue Skies Over The Mountain" as the rear cover inaccurately lists)/I Can Hear Music/Break Away/Cottonfields
"But still there are simple yet profound qualities...that I regard as eminently Californian: action, space, light, movement, rapport with nature, confidence." - David Thomson, The Whole Equation
"What happens here is that ocean-cooled air drifts in over the coastal plain and gets trapped beneath the warm desert air floating in over the mountains to the east. That’s the famous thermal inversion, and the opposite of the usual arrangement, where the warm surface air progressively cools as it rises. And the atmosphere below the inversion layer is incredibly stable….go out to the Santa Monica palisade and gaze out over the cool water. It’s completely clear and distinct, clean out to the horizon. The heat rising from the ground in most places…is in turn what makes stars shimmer and twinkle in the night sky….if you’re an astronomer you want your star–or for that matter, your sun–to be distortion-free: solid as a rock. And that’s what you get here. The stars don’t twinkle in L.A." Hal Zirin, in Lawrence Weschler's "L.A. Glows"
Or, a photographer...
Our Prayer
To the earth, to the sky, to the ocean, to the sun: the rough dunes that lead to the flat beach, the waves breaking gently in the early evening, the sun there red and warm in the distance setting, the sky still holding its light and radiating it peacefully. All is still, save for the waves. All is calm, by the Pacific. It is beautiful and no one else is here, save for my mom and me, as my father takes picture after picture of the sun setting over the ocean, one summer's evening, at Zuma Beach.
Or:
The plane takes off, headed east but first having to turn around over the dark ocean to go in the right direction. It is late and the water is all formless blackness. Then, as the plane turns and heads back over the city, the golden lights of each block, each building, the many lights glow in a way that feels like a blessing. This is my city beneath me, the lights shine and salute me as I go home. I have just been to see my father's grave only the day before, leaving yellow and white flowers, my own torch of sorts in the darkness. And here is Los Angeles, block by block, distant and yet with me, as the plane ascends and ascends...as the lights recede and disappear into the darkness....
If you were born, as I was, in Los Angeles in the 60s, The Beach Boys are so indelibly a part of you that to write about them naturally means an overwhelming feeling of closeness and understanding of time and place and even things beyond those dimensions. To say that they were my first favorite group seems almost redundant, but they were - I mean who else could have been? - and I remember answering that question when I was what, 11? And that based only on songs I heard on my radio and their albums Smiley Smile and Wild Honey we had at home. I heard all this at once, though in truth I must have heard those albums in the year of my birth, when they first came out - 1967 - and no doubt knew "Good Vibrations" and much else from the time I was conceived.
Our Prayer (encore)
I am two-and-a-half. I am at home, outside as usual, and somehow the front gate is open...I'm not sure how it was, but it was. Being curious, I go past the gate and begin to walk down the street, probably fairly quickly as I am out of sight when my mom checks on me and doesn't see me anywhere outside. She phones the police and I keep going along there in residential Hollywood, accompanied by a counterculture dude who decides to keep an eye on me as we both go down the street. The police find me and him, give him a lecture and return me back safely to my mom, who is so relieved she takes the anti-cop signs down from outside the house.
It was the summer of 1969 and you just know things could have turned out much much worse. But they did not. By some minor miracle I am safe. I have no idea who that man was who looked after me, but I still want to thank him.
Wonderful
Hollywood, 1966: I am conceived after a party my parents throw at home, some time in late April. After six years they finally decide to have a child, just the one due to the population boom. My mom drinks Fresca and eats Tommy burgers for her cravings, and also gradually starts to lose her hearing in her left ear, as part of being pregnant.
At the same time, somewhere else in L.A., Brian Wilson working on "Good Vibrations" and in a couple months' time will start to work on Smile (original title: Dumb Angel) with Van Dyke Parks (a session musician/songwriter he first met at a party at Terry Melcher's place in '65). Wilson wants to create something even beyond Pet Sounds, which has puzzled Americans but sent the UK into a tizzy, as it is declared there to be the greatest album of all time, even from those who have nothing to gain by saying so. The only way to go bigger, more spiritual, more emotional? To give voice to the American Experience itself, to do a near patriotic duty in giving the country a voice. (Bob Dylan & The Band are up to the same business in upstate New York, in their own way, of course.) This is a huge leap. And it nearly comes off, save for doubts (internal and external) Wilson suffers, not helped by drugs or (later on) a lawsuit with Capitol Records over royalties.
It is supposed to be in record stores in January 1967; Smile doesn't emerge, but I do, in the middle of the month, a week early, on my mom's birthday*. I am named after my father's mother and though I have my own room, I spend a lot of my time in the playpen in the kitchen, where there's a radio, marking distinctly my love of both music and kitchens and all they represent. I am the child who is the father (mother?) of the man, as after I am born my father ends working for the U.S. army as an animator and begins working elsewhere, mainly as part of the team that will animate what the Apollo 11 journey will be like, in 1969...
Mother and father, both nonbelievers, end up raising me, never a nonbeliever. How can I be sceptical when there is so much great music on the radio?
California, the frontier; a place to get lost and found. My mom is from Los Angeles but my father is originally from Nebraska, just a farm boy who had an overwhelming need to leave central California and see what he could see...a boy who had seen tornadoes and dustbowls and was destined, by family tradition, to be a preacher. To give witness and proclaim. Most certainly, to lead others and bring a community some kind of authority and guidance. That he would rather draw and mess around with animation and cameras must have upset his parents, but he was not cut out to preach, or farm. That he had this authority and ability to witness stayed with him anyway.
And he loved "Good Vibrations."
And so I come into a world, while Smile is still being worked on and the burden of taking on US history begins to unravel Wilson. Mike Love doesn't help much by questioning the poetical lyrics of Parks; he wants something more boy-girl, more fun-fun-fun, not ponderous lines about crows and cornfields. He later claims to have nothing against the lyrics, but if so, why did he confront (as no one denies) Parks about them? If only this was all about the music, but with The Beach Boys it's about family as well. And Wilson may have given up on Smile as it was too hard and had too much going against it - and was the world ready for this?
Sometimes I wonder if there are certain moments - not just in the life of musicians but of anyone who pays attention to music - when a sudden leap is something that is inevitable, that it is something that just happens. The leap takes you with it; you don't make it yourself. You become possessed by music, or at least very, very involved with it. This can happen due to native genius, need, desire, instinct...
Workshop
Or just plain enjoyment - or most likely, a moving and energizing combination of some or all of the above. The Beach Boys made music at first to deal with their father; music as a defense, an escape, a love that was available on the radio and one their father pushed, essentially riding their ambition and desire and trying to perfect that drive towards freedom and happiness. Do it again until you do it right. It's not done until it's done. Murry Wilson's perfectionism wasn't so much rubbed off as embedded, ingrained, into Brian Wilson's psyche. The hard time he got - once you have a hit, you need another, another, and another...would be enough to make the mildest, meekest son bridle; Brian tried his best but found the pressure too much, and by the time he was 22 he stopped touring, sensing that what he needed was to develop a closer relationship with music itself (shades of Glenn Gould, who also retired from touring in 1964). He had time to hang around Hollywood recording studios and watch Spector up close; Spector underestimated his ability to learn, to put into practice the technique he saw, the placement of microphones, the building of layers and overdubs and sounds and textures to make something unique and challenging to the session players, who loved working with Wilson, even if he puzzled them, at times.
My father told me I had to do something a thousand times badly to do it right once. Then it is second nature, but it is a practice that distrusts any idea of gifts, talents, genius for that of sheer labor and faith in experience over inspiration. He also believed that you had to apply yourself, believe you could do something, and voila - you could do it. He wasn't much of a super patriot in many ways, but this is pure American thinking, and I am sure he could hear the care and practice in The Beach Boys.
But Murry Wilson was far harder on Brian than my father ever was with me; when a parent senses a gift, a musical gift, how awful they can be to their child...my gift, as such, was the early ability to read; but what of Brian, who could hear and hum back songs before he could walk? Who heard Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue when he was transformed by it at the age of two? By that time he was already seeking refuge in music to get away from his feelings of sheer terror at his father's treatment of him, which include (Wilson himself wrote this) "dropped me in my infancy" on the sidewalk, which Wilson believes may have caused some brain damage.. Murry Wilson comes across to me as a terrible Chronos figure, trying to swallow his children whole, perhaps even unable to deal with their sheer existence in the first place.
Murry Wilson could tell Brian was talented; it is fine to work on talents, but to be heralded as a genius when your whole group is turning against you puts you in a damned hard place. A leap can turn into a freefall.
Heroes And Villains
As soon as I began to read rock writing I sensed, when reading about The Beach Boys, that no one liked (or indeed likes) Mike Love. He is the non-genius; he is the Salieri to Wilson's Mozart; he is to blame for everything that ever went wrong in the group. A self-obsessed/fame-obsessed figure who must always have his way and so on. But many groups have figures in them who oppose each other in some way - whether they are childhood friends, siblings, or people who just don't get along, period. A certain amount of creative tension is a good thing in music; but in order for this tug-of-war to work, both sides have to be equal, or as near as equal as can be managed. But rock writers have their sides to take, as anyone does, and what halfway-sensitive writer is going to go against sensitive/reclusive Brian over loudmouthed/forceful Mike?
Though he may want to please the farmers in Kansas, Mike's idea of The Beach Boys as merely "commerically competitive" and the musical resource for sun, fun and girls can seem crass, one-sided. Yet "Surfin' Safari" and "Surfin' USA" are not rusty old tubs of songs. Sure, people still surf, they do it as much as ever, but the sheer joy and freedom of these songs puts you right there searching for the perfect wave, just so damn happy to be OUT and smelling the salty ocean air, feeling the good sandy earth between your toes, the actual danger of wiping out far from everyone's minds. (That surfing is the melding of the human and nature, a kind of wild and unpredictable nature at times, means it is something primal and even sexual, though I don't think of these songs as sexy, per se.) Mike liked this side of The Beach Boys and yet if they had kept up with it, they were bound to go out of fashion. So an older American obsession - cars - soon came into view, with "Shut Down" and "Little Douce Coupe" coming in to take care of things when the waves just ain't there. Even if you know nothing about cars and can't even drive (what can I say? I may have been born in Los Angeles but I didn't live there for all that long) these songs are about a kind of macho superiority ("I'm not braggin' so don't put me down" almost guarantees that you are braggin', Mike) that The Beach Boys were surrounded by in Hawthorne; a world where the car you drove said an awful lot about you, and also reflect Murry Wilson's way-beyond-driven competitive streak, a streak that Brian tried to emulate...
Is Murry Wilson the enemy then, if not Mike Love? Is he to be as disliked in history as the parents of Marvin Gaye, Prince, Michael Jackson, all prodigal sons? I wonder just how many successful musicians have nurturing parents, and how many others (even if their parents support them) work ridiculously hard on their music to show that music isn't just messing around with a piano or guitar but is in fact work. Work they must continue to do, or else they would be lost, as Brian Wilson was for long stretches through the late 60s/70s/early 80s. That compulsion can be scary to read about in the abstract, let alone experience as a musician - great if you have total control and your own studio, sure, but with your own band and famous session musicians and your record label keeping a wary eye on you, compulsions and urges can get all messed up. You can turn into your own worst enemy, which is what Brian Wilson did, and no one seemed willing to calmly sit down with him and give him space to think. He was just Brian - the genius, the songwriter, and even if Mike Love didn't want to sing "over and over the crow cries uncover the cornfield" he did so anyway. And Murry Wilson had been fired from managing his own family - or even coming to the studio - as his style of square aggression could only go against the increasingly complex feelings in Wilson's songs, songs that already defied the Hawthorne side, ones like...
...the early test-the-audience of "In My Room." We're not on the drag strip or the beach, but at home, where all is calm, where in the night solitude can be found, away from abuse, nagging, mean teasing...but this room (which I always thought meant the bedroom) actually refers to the music room, a place Brian would go to escape everything, and even sleep by the piano if he needed to...(the piano as security blanket?)...this is a song he wrote with Gary Usher in under an hour, a song that signalled early on that this wasn't and never could be just a good time party band - that there was something transcending all that underneath, a moon, if you like, to the relentless sunshine of most of their songs. It is a song of longing and need, remembered tranquillity and safety.
Holidays
"Fun, Fun, Fun" is almost an archetypal song - the girl who borrows her father's car, her love of racing (quite different from Jan & Dean's "The Little Old Lady From Pasadena" who never cruises through the hamburger stand) and wild goose chases - you can just see her out there having a blast, giving guys the eye, daring them to outdo her - only to have her father cotton on to what she's up to, and the narrator inviting this hotrod mama to come along with him because "we've got a lot of things to do now" (I can only wonder what that could mean). The fun doesn't stop, it just becomes another kind of fun...and the complex world of girls appears, with this (implied) fast one contrasted with the (not on the album, though it should be) "Surfer Girl" - not a flirtatious figure but one to be worshipped, looked upon with awe, allied as she is with Mother Nature herself.
"I Get Around" is controlled gut-led force; a declaration of independence, one of the songs Murry Wilson criticized so much that Brian (with the support of everyone else in the band) fired him as their manager, tired of his micromanaging every little thing about the band, which was necessary in '61 but not so much in '64. So if there is an extra fierceness of the first line "I'm gettin' bugged driving up and down the same old strip/I've gotta find a new place where the kids are hip" - nope, it's not poetry, but then it is "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" which has its own beauty. That the melodies alternate and a guitar solo pops up is of some interest, but "none of the guys go steady 'cause it wouldn't be right/to leave your best girl home on a Saturday night" is the real heart here - a gang mentality, a freedom from ties, maybe a celebration of youth or...a refusal to grow up? (And again I wonder about bands and how much suffering actually does take place as the gang mentality is kept going long after it should...) Nope, too busy cruising for girls and looking for potential drag races so you can shut down the other guy...
"Don't Worry Baby" is about that drag race and the fears of how too much bragging can get you in trouble, but it is mainly about the girl, who is in charge here, soothing her boyfriend, telling him not to worry...this song was a direct response to "Be My Baby" (a song that Wilson flipped over - he bought ten copies, he says, and listened to it on repeat until he had it in his bones). Could he outdo the great Spector? A Spector who thought "I Get Around" was "dumb enough to do pretty good"? Well with this he did, and as I listened to it on the stereo I got a rare clue as to why - the backing vocals. Sure, Wilson's own voice is high and passionate, but the oooohs of the song are warm and sweet, not complex, just as the guitar solo is one chord to another, the music a hymn to a loving woman, one who says "everything will be all right" - the race may be the cause of the narrator's worry, but her love is the real subject, and it feels like an audio hug, and those backing vocals - straight out of the Four Freshmen, as usual - give a kind of grounding tenderness, as gentle as they can be...
Brian Wilson was scared, as he admits, but then as principal songwriter/bandleader/producer, he had a lot more to be scared about than any Beatle or Stone, let alone the mighty Motown or even Dylan. No one is going to expect one of the greatest bands ever to come from some modest quarter of Los Angeles, and as the 60s started to deepen and speed up, Wilson had to keep up, taking his increasingly puzzled group with him, whether they liked it or not.
Do You Like Worms (Roll Plymouth Rock)
Or, a new world. A new world of drugs? For Wilson, yes. First marijuana, then LSD; he took them to open his mind, to compete, to get to that next level. More competition, more stress? More drugs.
And so the first song about growing up - "When I Grow Up (To Be A Man)." How vital and yet fearsome a prospect; the age of the boy-to-man is 14 to 31, as if life really did end when you were 30, that you could no longer really trust yourself after that. But the future is coming, anxiety is in the air, questions hang around unanswered and maybe unanswerable. A new world is coming, the signs are all there, the bits of twigs and birds showing the shore of a whole new place is close, and getting closer...
"Wendy" is the first stab here at out-and-out misery, and here the narrator cries; the first real love that lets him down, hurts the narrator so bad. More growing up, more maturing - "guess I was wrong." The macho Hawthorne veneer is starting to wear off, or is it that the drugs helped the vulnerability bubble up clearer, stronger?
Never mind, here comes Mike with "Little Honda" and the urgent need to go "faster, faster" - sure it's sexual (all those gears, all that freedom to escape the city and civilization) but the feeling now is so slightly but importantly different. "It's all right!!!" the chorus reassures, a swoon into something a little more intense, as if the freedom to go wherever you like means you can blissfully leave yourself, ultimately. This is what California is all about, especially within the context of the USA, and that acute sense just increases over the next section...
But what about dancing, that other blissful joyous body sensation? "Dance, Dance, Dance" and "Do You Wanna Dance?" are about casting aside everything but that body, that elation. There are some who love The Beach Boys' dance music most of all, as there is no side to it, no irony - not even much secondary meaning. The beat's really high, let's dance - again, it's all right! I don't want to say there's anything sacred going on here - we'll get to that soon enough - but there is an elegance to this balanced out by the more profound songs to come...
"All Summer Long" is about the end of summer, about the idea of summer, when awkward things can happen but it doesn't matter because...it's summer. There is an inherent sadness to this of course - summer is ending - but summer as a concept has been The Beach Boys season, inspiration, their domain. The light - that particular solid and unifying light of Los Angeles, well that is here too. Every now and then we hear our song - moments of grace are enough to sustain something that is so warm, so good...the moment, like the light, can almost be grasped, as if it was a physical thing.
And all this time, Wilson still had to please everyone.
"Help Me Rhonda" is where the proverbial dam broke. Murry Wilson was throwing fit after fit in the studio, trying to direct Al Jardine, trying to produce the thing himself. Brian put his foot down and Murry left, with his wife, still angry and dissatisfied. I don't know if its going to #1 helped Wilson recover, but something had to change, and this was the start. The song is nervous, flooded with urgency, coming back and back like wave after wave, as if Rhonda is the only woman who could help the narrator's broken heart, to clean it out fresh.
And now to "California Girls" - inspired by Bach, it is stately, yet winks and smiles, as if to say, hmm, ohh, hmmm....and "the cutest girls in the world" (note: not beautiful or gorgeous, but cute - short for acute, striking, as well as signifying sweetness and general adorability). The descending first notes seem to lower a veil, to reveal something, to induce an experience of something greater than anything that has come before - again a kind of adoration, a magnificence that makes the narrator wish they could all be California girls (which as one I take as a compliment, of course, though I know it's just as big a wish as "if everybody had an ocean"). The music sways its hips and poses and smiles; Mike gets to sing about his favorite topic; it is a triumph all around, a bridge from "normal" Beach Boys into something...other....
"Little Girl I Once Knew" can seem awkward, but with the first few notes - a leap from past to present in sound, an astonishing moment that signifies there is definitely something going on - the pauses, the spoken word "Look out babe" and "Split, man" - she's all grown up and he wants her, and doesn't care if she's got a boyfriend or not ("Look at the way he holds her" the narrator says, in disbelief). "I'll be movin' in one day" he vows, and the no-messing-around vibe combined with that leap of a chord is like sensing that the shallow end is over, being in a pool and suddenly losing sense of the floor, of floating...a little dangerous, but exciting too, as if now the real action begins...this is the new world...there, here, all around, vivid and sensuous.
It must have been frustrating for The Beach Boys to be so popular in the US with so many of the above songs and yet only get their first UK Top Ten hit with their cover of "Barbara Ann" from their Party!** album - one where Dean of Jan & Dean led in the singing, not Mike or Brian. Its exuberance sat in the UK charts (or rather, claps & jokes) alongside Gene Pitney, The Walker Brothers and The Rolling Stones to one side and Herb Alpert And The Tijuana Brass, The Hollies and Nancy Sinatra on the other. They didn't quite connect in '63, in the full flow of Merseybeat, nor did they get very far in the Big Four period of Britpop Mk I dominance. This, in March 1966, was just loud and casual and charming enough to win the UK public over, not to mention some young men in Germany as well (Kraftwerk Klaxon, as some might say on social media).
Surf's Up
There is a direct pounding goodness to "You're So Good To Me," a song sung with real gratitude and astonishment that is disarming. It's a percussive thing, not too melodic or complex, as if that wonderment fixed the song in place, not so much in a trance-like way as much as a state of joy. The emotion is raw, unfiltered - Wilson's use of drugs just amplified that naivete he had, but left him bare when it came to defending himself, as we shall see.
Wilson admired Phil Spector greatly - hence this cover of "Then I Kissed Her" - yet that naivete I just mentioned somehow protected him from Spector in a way; Wilson rejected any idea of them working together, as it would be too much for Wilson, pressure-wise. (As far as I can tell Spector never sensed Wilson's keen ear and complete absorption of Spector's use of the studio as musical instrument; or if he did, he didn't see Wilson as much of a threat. He writes songs about surfing, for God's sake.) Wilson rated "Be My Baby" as Spector's greatest song, but Spector rated "Then He Kissed Me" even higher; and so here are The Beach Boys making a song about kissing, not surfing. It's definitely a physical song - you can tell the kissing part is just the beginning, not the end - but with the harmonics hushed and the beat insistent and simplified, it's a trustworthy eroticism, safe in the best possible way.
I have already written about "Sloop John B" elsewhere, but again to give this some perspective, it was in the same UK chart as "Wild Thing," "Paint It, Black," "Rainy Day Women Nos. 12 &35," "Sorrow" and "You Don't Have To Say You Love Me." The wide blue skies and seas of the opening few notes soon give to a take of an endless trip with no end with a captain who won't mysteriously let the hapless narrator go home. The acapella section is enough all by itself to compel repeated listens, as is the exuberance-through-misery of the song itself. I cannot help but think that the captain is Murry Wilson, and that after this thing are going to get even more intense than they already are. (This is side three of the double album, by the way, which started with "You're So Good To Me." I had to take a literal breather after I finished listening to side three after it finished, as if something had been freed inside me and needed air. This hasn't happened to me before while listening to anything for this blog or Music Sounds Better With Two.)
In 2009 a UK rock magazine - I think it was Q - asked Jack Penate (whatever happened to him? I miss him) about his favorite songs and "God Only Knows" was one of them. He heard it while working as a bartender at a Cafe Rouge and it was on a mixtape that his boss insisted be played all the time. (Hands up anyone who's experienced this.) It was, according to Penate, the only good song on the tape.
But of course, it would be, with a few exceptions, the best song on any tape.
This is the kind of song that makes chart positions or other comparisons obsolete, way beside any point. It is a song that in so many ways show that what sounds like it can't work does, like the bumblebee that theoretically shouldn't be able to fly but does so anyway. Sleigh bells? (Paging Scott Walker and Sufjan Stevens.) Ba-ba-ba-ba-bom-ba-ba old school frat vocals alongside swooning harmonies? Flutes, accordion, woodblock, strings? This isn't The Beach Boys as anyone knew them, so stately and profound and stupefying. The US public were lukewarm to it at best, whereas the UK public took it to the near top (as I wrote about here), understanding that Carl and Brian and Bruce back in Los Angeles were on to something. "Everywhere it takes risks," writes Bob Stanley in Yeah Yeah Yeah, "...the sentiment is that real love is all-consuming, it's frightening." This song is so deep and complex and sink-to-the-ground overwhelming as love itself, the sort of love that, to quote Richard from Texas in Eat, Pray, Love, "so damn beautiful it'll make you wanna throw rocks at the Taj Mahal."***
As a married person I listen to "Wouldn't It Be Nice" and am reminded - as almost all married people should be - that the state of marriage is one that others yearn for, dream about, "hope and pray and wish" for a lot of the time. That merely being with the Other overnight - not being alone, apart, missing and wishing you were with the Other - is a great gift in itself. And how wise was Tony Asher (lyricist on Pet Sounds) to call this aspect of married life "nice."
I am going to channel my 12-year-old word nerd self here and give some old definitions of "nice": foolishly particular, attentive to minutiae, accurate, sweet or very pleasant to the taste, refined.. Nice has its roots in ignorance, foolishness, simplicity. There is no side to niceness; it's too naive and unknowing that there even is such a thing as "side." That simplicity is underrated in marriage, and I sense foolishness (the good, silly sort) is too.
Mike Love likes to portray himself as Mr. Upbeat & Optimistic vs. Brian Wilson's Mr. Downbeat & Melancholic, but look who is singing this song about the joys and perils of new love? It ain't Brian, that's for sure. The whole horns-and-bass avalanche sensation - the song feels during the chorus just like one - along with the devastating harmonies makes this feel like a warning against falling in love altogether. It is bound to roll right over you, or lift you up and thunk you down again, smartly. Love is "here today, then it's gone...so fast." The oceanic tide is a-comin' in feeling (to put it another way) makes the listener want to hold on to something - your ego, perhaps - as love goes ahead and smashes everything around you, including the fabric of time itself. We are in the deep end of the pool here, for certain.
We now leave the emotional high and changeable waters of Pet Sounds to travel across the wide and strange and unique world of Smile.
"Good Vibrations" is the alpha and omega of Smile (it was written first but finishes the album). It fizzes and bop-bops, aaahs and whirrs, pauses quietly and then explodes, like a kaleidoscope, forever being turned and shaken, turned and shaken, for different colors and shapes and levels of sound...
To get to Smile, to really understand it, is, for me anyway, absurdly easy in part. It grew as I did, in the same Hollywood air, water and light and so on that got to me in the womb directly or indirectly. The same light and air and water as Brian Wilson and Van Dyke Parks, (minus any drugs they were taking, of course). For me to say that it affects me, moves me, is a tremendous understatement. As a girl I heard Smiley Smile and had no idea Smile existed, didn't know it existed (in bootleg form) for a very long time, in fact. Hearing the bootlegs, Brian Wilson's Smile (2004) and The Smile Sessions (2011) makes me feel like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, having woken up from her dream and proclaiming "There's no place like home."
But understanding is not the same as being able to write, at times. I can but try. Smile crosses time and space, looking at US history and essence. It is one of the few American works of art that grew in stature because it was hidden, abandoned by Wilson and the rest in May 1967, after much work, pressure and drug usage that had gotten way out of control. (It was finished by Wilson and Parks in 2004, but the original never was successfully finished, and hence is infinite.) Smile is delicate and elegant and tender, then goofy and silly and random, and its genius is that it all somehow (like the US itself) fits together. The luau and the cantina, the fire and the wind, the old master painted and the girl of "Wonderful."****
Wonderful me, in that temporary house; and Wilson, trying to figure out his house and where and what it could be:
A house that stands in my heart
My cathedral of silence
Every morning recaptured in dream
Every evening abandoned
A house covered with dawn
Open to the winds of my youth
And:
Wind Chimes
"Surf's Up" is, however, the balancing opposite of "Good Vibrations."
I am still not sure if the world was exactly ready for Smile*****; this excerpt from Leonard Bernstein's televised look at the state of pop in 1966 shows that he found "Surf's Up" obscure and poetical, a sure sign that something was changing - and if he found it obscure, you can pretty much guess most of The Beach Boys' fans would have as well. As much as it would be, yes, nice to imagine Smile being released in 1967, I am not really sure anyone would have got it, at least (I must sigh as I admit this) in the US.
If "Good Vibrations" is the upbeat and futuristic end to Smile, "Surf's Up" is the sensuous and dark heart of it, a song of what civilization is - sophisticated and elegant, sure, but also ruined in a way, spoiled. Songs are dissolved in the dark, the night is toasted, the night is quiet and ending, a man who is feeling grief is nevertheless "too tough to cry." And whispered now and then - "bygone, bygone" as if this whole "columnated ruins domino" shows a world that is, unbeknownst to itself, about to disappear. A world of carriages and lamplights, of opera in the city, a world much like the opening scenes of, say, The Age of Innocence.
Renewal of innocence is one of the themes of Smile, and while "Wonderful" is the song I take most personally, it is the end of "Surf's Up" that moves me the most - to cry, in fact. "I heard the word/Wonderful thing/A children's song..." The Sessions version has the return of "Child Is Father To The Man" as the seeming end of an era is met with "A children's song - have you listened as they play?/Their song is love and the children know the way."
"Surf's Up" starts in the same key as "A Hard Day's Night" - G7 - and is quiet and contemplative (with a shaking percussion that was supposed to sound like jewelry shaken gently, as if by waves) and then shifts key and builds up to some peaks of emotion (the rush of one line being like watching a ballerina do one mind-boggling move after another, only to end on one toe, poised and still) that are the opposite to the groovy catch-and-releases and anticipations of "Good Vibrations."
It is a damn shame that Smile didn't get finished, let alone released; The Beach Boys left Capitol for Reprise, yet another label that hopefully waited for it to be finished. Wilson, understandably crushed by the lack of support he got in general from his bandmates, did a long bloody retreat into drugs, food, depression - all the while still being expected/hoped to carry the band forward, somehow. Smile was abandoned. Van Dyke Parks went on to do Song Cycle, and The Beach Boys, Smiley Smile.
And yet songs from Smile, the supposedly doomed project, keep cropping up. "Heroes And Villains" is one of them, the first song Wilson and Parks wrote together, the kind of song that is psychedelic and ecstatic without bearing many of the hallmarks of psychedelia. It is a happy song, after all; the central figure is a girl who survives life in the wilderness of the west (it is based on a country song, "El Paso") and a narrator who has been away from the city that if he went back there, hardly anyone would believe it was him. It is full of fine harmonies, "doot-doot-doots" and "la-la-las" and has nothing to do with surf, sun, cars - and yet is indubitably of California, of braveness, of escape from the city...yet with a sense that this world too is gone, kind of...sort of...
By late 1967 Wilson had retreated to his house, and the rest of the band decided to build a studio in his house (just below his bedroom) to encourage him to keep writing and recording - this is when Carl, the youngest Wilson, had to take over the band as Brian continued his retreat. Wild Honey was the album that resulted, and it is a before-it-was-fashionable back-to-basics album that reflects the 1967 of soul and r&b as well as the beautiful, religious tones Wilson was still striving for (when he was able) as well.
"Wild Honey" is an rock and soul (to borrow a term) classic, with Carl letting loose and getting down with his bad self. This is a fun song - all the formalism of Smile has been cast aside to get back to what compelled The Beach Boys to make music in the first place - r&b and harmony groups, with a theremin (as in "Good Vibrations" but in a different key) to start it all. The band were now a band again, not just Brian telling the rest what to do, and though Carl's taking over was necessary Wilson resented it. But you can tell the band is cohesive, listening to each other, enjoying what they are doing. And yes, it's back to Mike Love writing the lyrics (hence the "sock it to me" and other slang, just as dated yet charming as "gettin' bugged" was in 1964). And thus endeth side three, with me gasping, in appreciation, amazement...the kind of feelings that are hard to explain and yet take you over completely...
"Darlin'" is the first song on side four, one where "doggone outta sight" is high praise, with Carl again singing, saying he was living like "half a man" before he met his Other, a song that got into the charts just as 1967 ended; the harmonies are simple, the horns are held close to the melody - while not the formula they started with, this is The Beach Boys gone Stax, in a way. This isn't so easy to sing, I'd guess (it is still Wilson's music, after all, and maybe not so simple as it first sounds), and Carl sounds joyous, as if he is making up the lyrics as he goes. (The song was first written in 1963 - see what I mean about songs hanging around? - as "Thinkin' 'Bout You Baby.")
"Country Air" is one of those songs that I must have heard at age 11 and been entranced by, without really knowing or caring why; evocative of the countryside, of early mornings, roosters crowing, wide spaces to breathe in and out, this is like Smile without being a song from it (unlike Smiley Smile, which has several songs from Smile on it in different form - "Wonderful," "Wind Chimes" and "Vegetables" and so on, Wild Honey ends with "Mama Says," a fragment from Smile). And here they all are, harmonizing together, a harmony that no other group - not The Association, not The Mamas and The Papas - could hope to achieve. The whistling, the yelled "Come on!" from the distance, the first of many songs about Mother Nature...The Beach Boys as part of nature, as opposed to just speeding around near it, in a car or on a motorcycle.
"Here Comes The Night" is the peak of Wild Honey, with Brian singing lead, and if the eroticism from earlier songs is tender and delicate, this is a rush of hormones, a very physical song in every sense. (I can well imagine Wilson Pickett doing this, for instance.) Unlike another song by the same name, this night is eagerly, hungrily anticipated, and Brian sings it in a way where you know that the "hold me, squeeze me" is maybe a request for something else, something so powerful that it can't really be named (and I don't mean in a polite way). Just when things seem to be more lighthearted, there is this tension, building and building, a tension that feels good (like the Santa Ana winds in Los Angeles that come down from the mountains that feel sooo gooood...at first) and yet Brian seems just one step away from falling into a kind of sexual abyss. It is one hell of a song.
Look (Song For Children)
And into the maelstrom of 1968, The Beach Boys released Friends, a tranquil, you-gots-2-chill album that was essentially the exact opposite of the "this is my scene and I'm freaking out" experienced across the country and around the world. Having done their back-to-basics soul album, they were now pushing new boundaries in mellowness, that most stereotypical of 70s vibes. At this point they were far more popular in the UK than the US, which is why this (and nearly all subsequent songs) are here. "Friends" is a waltz, with Wilson talking directly to the others about the band's struggles and triumphs - indeed all the Wilson brothers and Al Jardine helped to write this song, nearly jazz-like (vibes, soaring, leaping harmonies) and beautiful.
To quote Brian: "Harmony usually means notes that are perfectly and mathematically related to each other, like 1, 3 and 5. This is the basic chord of music. Then there's 1, 3, 5 and 7. This is a more complex chord. It gets much more complex than that, but I try to keep it sounding simple, no matter how complex it really is." (Friends liner notes)
I don't think there's a better way of explaining how Wilson hears music in his head to be composed and then communicated to his bandmates; the implication that in The Beach Boys he could write 1, 3, 5, 7 and 9 if needed is just another way of saying that sure there's lots of families who sing together, but to have this understanding of harmony and a willingness to write songs that use it is rare. I think of Gershwin and Charles Ives, Wilson's American ancestors, not to mention Debussy, Darius Mihaud, John Barry, Gil Evans, Carla Bley, Burt Bacharach, Dave Brubeck (not forgetting The Four Freshmen)...and wonder what they would have made or do make of this song, and so many others here...
The big hit from their next album, 20/20 is "Do It Again." Growing up, my knowledge of The Beach Boys - as gained from a Dutch double album somewhat like this one - was that this was their last big hit (I'm pretty sure the album ended here). It's a totally Mike Love song, with deliberate stokings of nostalgia - "California girls" get a mention, don't you know - and it's a funky singalong of a song (when are those first snare drum beats, all echoed and huge, going to be sampled? - have they already?). It took me a while to figure out, growing up, how people in 1968 could be nostalgic for something from 1963; but 20/20, as its name implies, looks forward and backward too...as this song ends, the hammering from Smile's "Workshop" bleeds through, as if Smile is refusing to be forgotten...
"Bluebirds Over The Mountain" was another look back, this time to a regional hit in the US for Ersel Hickey from 1958; a totally new song to me (it got to #61 in the US, #33 in the UK) that is definitely country/proto-reggae, a song Bruce Johnston brought in for the band to do much as Al Jardine had brought in "Sloop John B." So here they are, bringing back songs that explain their roots...
...as does "I Can Hear Music," a song that - unlike others so far - was produced by Carl, not Brian; a Ronettes song that once again explains influences and roots, and was a hit, but seems like a way for the group to continue sans Brian; and as nice as it is, as good as Carl's producing is, it seems a little...too pleasant, if such a thing can be said. (This song was sung by one Freddie Mercury as he auditioned for Queen - yet another band indebted to The Beach Boys.)
Leaving 20/20 for a moment, we get to the last song The Beach Boys released as a single for Capitol, before signing on to Reprise - "Breakaway." A song written by Brian and of all people, his father, it was a last chance for the group to have a hit in the US and for Murry Wilson to make some money (Capitol, as part of their response to being sued by the group for royalties simply refused to sell any of their older ones, making all their lives & Murry Wilson's increasingly difficult). The song is, in fact, about their wanting to leave the label (paging both The Sex Pistols and Aimee Mann):
I can breakaway from that lonely life
And I can do what I wanna do
And breakaway from that empty life
And my world is new
When I layed down on my bed
I heard voices in my head
Telling me now "Hey it's only a dream"
The more I thought of it
I had been out of it
And here's the answer I found instead
It is - I'm guessing because of Murry's involvement - a real throwback harmonically to how they once were, solid and with that warmth and optimism that hides a barbedness, not to mention yet another reference to being alone in bed, distracted, seeking hope and a way out...
You'd think this anthology would end here, but no, it ends with their cover of Lead Belly's "Cottonfields." Yet another song brought in by Al Jardine, it was a hit everywhere, it seems, than in its home, the US (I'm not even sure it was a single there). And here The Beach Boys stop, doing a song from before they were born, yet another 20/20 gesture towards roots...nostalgia...a way out of the 60s. (Note: there are two versions of this, one produced by Wilson, another by the rest of the band, who were tending to take over production as they thought Wilson had underproduced this and "Breakaway.")
The Smile ghost, now two years old, would not go away. The band, wanting new songs from Brian but not really getting much, went back to "Our Prayer" and "Cabinessence." These close the album, making the word nostalgia run for cover; the past is refusing to remain the past. And how terrible and moving is it that "Our Prayer" - a wordless chant that goes right back to William Byrd - comes after "Never Learn Not To Love," a song Charles Manson gave to Dennis Wilson, who in turn changed the lyrics, upsetting Manson, who then wanted Dennis dead; the massacre on Cielo Drive******* came in August, as Manson wanted producer Terry Melcher dead. Melcher had moved since '66, though, and you know the rest...
And so this ends, just as I am starting to make that walk down the street in Hollywood; just as a nation is reaching whatever highs or lows it has before the 60s are over.
I have been wondering just why this, of all things, was a hit all over again in the UK, just as it had been in the summer of '76 - was it the heat? 1983 was, as Paul Weller called it, the "long hot" summer, though to Bananarama it was "cruel." The forward-looking over-the-top here-we-go New Pop bursts of energy and punctum were mostly gone; and with them gone, or in hiding, or distressing the public more than pleasing them, The Beach Boys were a break from the present, a break from having to contemplate God knows how many more years of Thatcher. This is one way of looking at it, and in a time when Rod Stewart could get to #1 in the chart by giving away a free beach ball with his new single ("Baby Jane"), you can see that people were more than eager to get back to simple pleasures, distracting them from the ever-present threats of nuclear war, for instance.
The irony of course is that they may have been buying this for nostalgic/old time's sake purposes, but The Beach Boys promise of endless summer was one complicated by the rupture around Smile, a past that refused to stay in the past, an album that wouldn't go away. How many who bought this in the summer of '83 had any idea about any of this, I don't know.
But I do know that in order to have a better perspective on The Beach Boys, it really helps to listen to Smile and then know that bootlegs of it were shared and copied around for years, hence filtering into the musicians lives and works who heard it (I am thinking of Escalator Over The Hill, but also The Beatles White Album). In a way that is eerie, in hearing Smile I can finally hear where so many things came from, and regard it as familiar not just in a geographical sense to where I grew up but sonically as well - and the band's dismissal of this work as too "out there" and not sticking to the formula looks worse and worse over the years, though at the time they did record it, they do perform songs onstage, they did try their best with something so utterly different...
And so the first song about growing up - "When I Grow Up (To Be A Man)." How vital and yet fearsome a prospect; the age of the boy-to-man is 14 to 31, as if life really did end when you were 30, that you could no longer really trust yourself after that. But the future is coming, anxiety is in the air, questions hang around unanswered and maybe unanswerable. A new world is coming, the signs are all there, the bits of twigs and birds showing the shore of a whole new place is close, and getting closer...
"Wendy" is the first stab here at out-and-out misery, and here the narrator cries; the first real love that lets him down, hurts the narrator so bad. More growing up, more maturing - "guess I was wrong." The macho Hawthorne veneer is starting to wear off, or is it that the drugs helped the vulnerability bubble up clearer, stronger?
Never mind, here comes Mike with "Little Honda" and the urgent need to go "faster, faster" - sure it's sexual (all those gears, all that freedom to escape the city and civilization) but the feeling now is so slightly but importantly different. "It's all right!!!" the chorus reassures, a swoon into something a little more intense, as if the freedom to go wherever you like means you can blissfully leave yourself, ultimately. This is what California is all about, especially within the context of the USA, and that acute sense just increases over the next section...
But what about dancing, that other blissful joyous body sensation? "Dance, Dance, Dance" and "Do You Wanna Dance?" are about casting aside everything but that body, that elation. There are some who love The Beach Boys' dance music most of all, as there is no side to it, no irony - not even much secondary meaning. The beat's really high, let's dance - again, it's all right! I don't want to say there's anything sacred going on here - we'll get to that soon enough - but there is an elegance to this balanced out by the more profound songs to come...
"All Summer Long" is about the end of summer, about the idea of summer, when awkward things can happen but it doesn't matter because...it's summer. There is an inherent sadness to this of course - summer is ending - but summer as a concept has been The Beach Boys season, inspiration, their domain. The light - that particular solid and unifying light of Los Angeles, well that is here too. Every now and then we hear our song - moments of grace are enough to sustain something that is so warm, so good...the moment, like the light, can almost be grasped, as if it was a physical thing.
And all this time, Wilson still had to please everyone.
"Help Me Rhonda" is where the proverbial dam broke. Murry Wilson was throwing fit after fit in the studio, trying to direct Al Jardine, trying to produce the thing himself. Brian put his foot down and Murry left, with his wife, still angry and dissatisfied. I don't know if its going to #1 helped Wilson recover, but something had to change, and this was the start. The song is nervous, flooded with urgency, coming back and back like wave after wave, as if Rhonda is the only woman who could help the narrator's broken heart, to clean it out fresh.
And now to "California Girls" - inspired by Bach, it is stately, yet winks and smiles, as if to say, hmm, ohh, hmmm....and "the cutest girls in the world" (note: not beautiful or gorgeous, but cute - short for acute, striking, as well as signifying sweetness and general adorability). The descending first notes seem to lower a veil, to reveal something, to induce an experience of something greater than anything that has come before - again a kind of adoration, a magnificence that makes the narrator wish they could all be California girls (which as one I take as a compliment, of course, though I know it's just as big a wish as "if everybody had an ocean"). The music sways its hips and poses and smiles; Mike gets to sing about his favorite topic; it is a triumph all around, a bridge from "normal" Beach Boys into something...other....
"Little Girl I Once Knew" can seem awkward, but with the first few notes - a leap from past to present in sound, an astonishing moment that signifies there is definitely something going on - the pauses, the spoken word "Look out babe" and "Split, man" - she's all grown up and he wants her, and doesn't care if she's got a boyfriend or not ("Look at the way he holds her" the narrator says, in disbelief). "I'll be movin' in one day" he vows, and the no-messing-around vibe combined with that leap of a chord is like sensing that the shallow end is over, being in a pool and suddenly losing sense of the floor, of floating...a little dangerous, but exciting too, as if now the real action begins...this is the new world...there, here, all around, vivid and sensuous.
It must have been frustrating for The Beach Boys to be so popular in the US with so many of the above songs and yet only get their first UK Top Ten hit with their cover of "Barbara Ann" from their Party!** album - one where Dean of Jan & Dean led in the singing, not Mike or Brian. Its exuberance sat in the UK charts (or rather, claps & jokes) alongside Gene Pitney, The Walker Brothers and The Rolling Stones to one side and Herb Alpert And The Tijuana Brass, The Hollies and Nancy Sinatra on the other. They didn't quite connect in '63, in the full flow of Merseybeat, nor did they get very far in the Big Four period of Britpop Mk I dominance. This, in March 1966, was just loud and casual and charming enough to win the UK public over, not to mention some young men in Germany as well (Kraftwerk Klaxon, as some might say on social media).
Surf's Up
There is a direct pounding goodness to "You're So Good To Me," a song sung with real gratitude and astonishment that is disarming. It's a percussive thing, not too melodic or complex, as if that wonderment fixed the song in place, not so much in a trance-like way as much as a state of joy. The emotion is raw, unfiltered - Wilson's use of drugs just amplified that naivete he had, but left him bare when it came to defending himself, as we shall see.
Wilson admired Phil Spector greatly - hence this cover of "Then I Kissed Her" - yet that naivete I just mentioned somehow protected him from Spector in a way; Wilson rejected any idea of them working together, as it would be too much for Wilson, pressure-wise. (As far as I can tell Spector never sensed Wilson's keen ear and complete absorption of Spector's use of the studio as musical instrument; or if he did, he didn't see Wilson as much of a threat. He writes songs about surfing, for God's sake.) Wilson rated "Be My Baby" as Spector's greatest song, but Spector rated "Then He Kissed Me" even higher; and so here are The Beach Boys making a song about kissing, not surfing. It's definitely a physical song - you can tell the kissing part is just the beginning, not the end - but with the harmonics hushed and the beat insistent and simplified, it's a trustworthy eroticism, safe in the best possible way.
I have already written about "Sloop John B" elsewhere, but again to give this some perspective, it was in the same UK chart as "Wild Thing," "Paint It, Black," "Rainy Day Women Nos. 12 &35," "Sorrow" and "You Don't Have To Say You Love Me." The wide blue skies and seas of the opening few notes soon give to a take of an endless trip with no end with a captain who won't mysteriously let the hapless narrator go home. The acapella section is enough all by itself to compel repeated listens, as is the exuberance-through-misery of the song itself. I cannot help but think that the captain is Murry Wilson, and that after this thing are going to get even more intense than they already are. (This is side three of the double album, by the way, which started with "You're So Good To Me." I had to take a literal breather after I finished listening to side three after it finished, as if something had been freed inside me and needed air. This hasn't happened to me before while listening to anything for this blog or Music Sounds Better With Two.)
In 2009 a UK rock magazine - I think it was Q - asked Jack Penate (whatever happened to him? I miss him) about his favorite songs and "God Only Knows" was one of them. He heard it while working as a bartender at a Cafe Rouge and it was on a mixtape that his boss insisted be played all the time. (Hands up anyone who's experienced this.) It was, according to Penate, the only good song on the tape.
But of course, it would be, with a few exceptions, the best song on any tape.
This is the kind of song that makes chart positions or other comparisons obsolete, way beside any point. It is a song that in so many ways show that what sounds like it can't work does, like the bumblebee that theoretically shouldn't be able to fly but does so anyway. Sleigh bells? (Paging Scott Walker and Sufjan Stevens.) Ba-ba-ba-ba-bom-ba-ba old school frat vocals alongside swooning harmonies? Flutes, accordion, woodblock, strings? This isn't The Beach Boys as anyone knew them, so stately and profound and stupefying. The US public were lukewarm to it at best, whereas the UK public took it to the near top (as I wrote about here), understanding that Carl and Brian and Bruce back in Los Angeles were on to something. "Everywhere it takes risks," writes Bob Stanley in Yeah Yeah Yeah, "...the sentiment is that real love is all-consuming, it's frightening." This song is so deep and complex and sink-to-the-ground overwhelming as love itself, the sort of love that, to quote Richard from Texas in Eat, Pray, Love, "so damn beautiful it'll make you wanna throw rocks at the Taj Mahal."***
As a married person I listen to "Wouldn't It Be Nice" and am reminded - as almost all married people should be - that the state of marriage is one that others yearn for, dream about, "hope and pray and wish" for a lot of the time. That merely being with the Other overnight - not being alone, apart, missing and wishing you were with the Other - is a great gift in itself. And how wise was Tony Asher (lyricist on Pet Sounds) to call this aspect of married life "nice."
I am going to channel my 12-year-old word nerd self here and give some old definitions of "nice": foolishly particular, attentive to minutiae, accurate, sweet or very pleasant to the taste, refined.. Nice has its roots in ignorance, foolishness, simplicity. There is no side to niceness; it's too naive and unknowing that there even is such a thing as "side." That simplicity is underrated in marriage, and I sense foolishness (the good, silly sort) is too.
Mike Love likes to portray himself as Mr. Upbeat & Optimistic vs. Brian Wilson's Mr. Downbeat & Melancholic, but look who is singing this song about the joys and perils of new love? It ain't Brian, that's for sure. The whole horns-and-bass avalanche sensation - the song feels during the chorus just like one - along with the devastating harmonies makes this feel like a warning against falling in love altogether. It is bound to roll right over you, or lift you up and thunk you down again, smartly. Love is "here today, then it's gone...so fast." The oceanic tide is a-comin' in feeling (to put it another way) makes the listener want to hold on to something - your ego, perhaps - as love goes ahead and smashes everything around you, including the fabric of time itself. We are in the deep end of the pool here, for certain.
We now leave the emotional high and changeable waters of Pet Sounds to travel across the wide and strange and unique world of Smile.
"Good Vibrations" is the alpha and omega of Smile (it was written first but finishes the album). It fizzes and bop-bops, aaahs and whirrs, pauses quietly and then explodes, like a kaleidoscope, forever being turned and shaken, turned and shaken, for different colors and shapes and levels of sound...
To get to Smile, to really understand it, is, for me anyway, absurdly easy in part. It grew as I did, in the same Hollywood air, water and light and so on that got to me in the womb directly or indirectly. The same light and air and water as Brian Wilson and Van Dyke Parks, (minus any drugs they were taking, of course). For me to say that it affects me, moves me, is a tremendous understatement. As a girl I heard Smiley Smile and had no idea Smile existed, didn't know it existed (in bootleg form) for a very long time, in fact. Hearing the bootlegs, Brian Wilson's Smile (2004) and The Smile Sessions (2011) makes me feel like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, having woken up from her dream and proclaiming "There's no place like home."
But understanding is not the same as being able to write, at times. I can but try. Smile crosses time and space, looking at US history and essence. It is one of the few American works of art that grew in stature because it was hidden, abandoned by Wilson and the rest in May 1967, after much work, pressure and drug usage that had gotten way out of control. (It was finished by Wilson and Parks in 2004, but the original never was successfully finished, and hence is infinite.) Smile is delicate and elegant and tender, then goofy and silly and random, and its genius is that it all somehow (like the US itself) fits together. The luau and the cantina, the fire and the wind, the old master painted and the girl of "Wonderful."****
Wonderful me, in that temporary house; and Wilson, trying to figure out his house and where and what it could be:
Interlude I – The House (Or, The French Always Seem To Understand These Things Best)
First, a few quotes from Gaston Bachelard's Poetics of Space:
My cathedral of silence
Every morning recaptured in dream
Every evening abandoned
A house covered with dawn
Open to the winds of my youth
“This house, as I see it, is a sort of airy structure that
moves about on the breath of time. It
really is open to the wind of another time.”
And:
“I should like my house to be similar to that of the ocean
wind, all quivering with gulls.”
“A house as dynamic as this allows the poet to inhabit the
universe. Or, to put it differently, the
universe come to inhabit his house.”
After he had his nervous breakdown in late 1964, Brian
Wilson went back to the old Wilson home in Hawthorne with his mother; as he
writes in Wouldn't It Be Nice, “In my room. These four empty
walls, the place it had all begun, where I had discovered the soul-satisfying pleasures of music and
written my earliest songs, was quiet and empty, a skeleton of faded
sounds. Still, with my eyes shut, I had
no trouble imagining my bed and the piano and organ in the space that was two
steps down. I wanted to slip back into
that special time and place but couldn’t find the way."
It was in this place that the music began, where the silence
penetrated him, as in “Cybele’s Reverie” by Stereolab:
Les pierres, les arbres, les murs, racontent
La maison, la maison d’autrefois, la maison, la maison
d’avenir
et le silence
me pénétrera
me pénétrera
It was a silence so penetrating that Wilson never went back,
until there was a plaque put up nearby to where the house once was to mark that
it existed in the first place – he attended the unveiling of the plaque, the
only Wilson brother left to do so.
Even if he didn’t go back to his childhood home, perhaps the
most famous scene – not pictured (that I know of ) but imagined, is Wilson at
home in 1966 at his piano, the piano set in a sandbox. This is a literal way of bringing the
universe (the beach, the gulls, the wind) into the house, of making it the
literal foundation of the music. This
interior universe happened at some point when Wilson and Van Dyke Parks were
working on the Smile album, where the openness of their efforts let in the
winds of a different time, a time which stretched back to the earliest days of
the US, when it was still a group of colonies, to the promise of the newest
state, Hawaii, the Pacific state that represents in Smile something of a utopia, a place even more western and Other
than California. (The sand could just as
easily represent Hawaii’s island promise as it could Santa Monica beach.)
That deep need Wilson had to go home was to really go back
to that first place of creativity, only to find it was gone, that it wasn’t the
place so much as the person – himself – that was his own house, so to speak,
wherever he went. That he was never
called up on his sandbox (save by the piano tuner and Parks, both of whom were
repulsed by the situation, especially since Wilson had two dogs) and told that
you know, Burt Bacharach doesn’t compose like this, neither does Motown, is
perhaps a sign that others around him cared more about what he did rather than how he was. When Wilson went back to see his old home he
was just 22 ½ years old, already feeling old, a failure, confused about his
feelings and unable to get anything, it seems, other than “You’re not going
crazy” or sympathetic cluckings from anyone...
"Surf's Up" is, however, the balancing opposite of "Good Vibrations."
I am still not sure if the world was exactly ready for Smile*****; this excerpt from Leonard Bernstein's televised look at the state of pop in 1966 shows that he found "Surf's Up" obscure and poetical, a sure sign that something was changing - and if he found it obscure, you can pretty much guess most of The Beach Boys' fans would have as well. As much as it would be, yes, nice to imagine Smile being released in 1967, I am not really sure anyone would have got it, at least (I must sigh as I admit this) in the US.
If "Good Vibrations" is the upbeat and futuristic end to Smile, "Surf's Up" is the sensuous and dark heart of it, a song of what civilization is - sophisticated and elegant, sure, but also ruined in a way, spoiled. Songs are dissolved in the dark, the night is toasted, the night is quiet and ending, a man who is feeling grief is nevertheless "too tough to cry." And whispered now and then - "bygone, bygone" as if this whole "columnated ruins domino" shows a world that is, unbeknownst to itself, about to disappear. A world of carriages and lamplights, of opera in the city, a world much like the opening scenes of, say, The Age of Innocence.
Renewal of innocence is one of the themes of Smile, and while "Wonderful" is the song I take most personally, it is the end of "Surf's Up" that moves me the most - to cry, in fact. "I heard the word/Wonderful thing/A children's song..." The Sessions version has the return of "Child Is Father To The Man" as the seeming end of an era is met with "A children's song - have you listened as they play?/Their song is love and the children know the way."
"Surf's Up" starts in the same key as "A Hard Day's Night" - G7 - and is quiet and contemplative (with a shaking percussion that was supposed to sound like jewelry shaken gently, as if by waves) and then shifts key and builds up to some peaks of emotion (the rush of one line being like watching a ballerina do one mind-boggling move after another, only to end on one toe, poised and still) that are the opposite to the groovy catch-and-releases and anticipations of "Good Vibrations."
It is a damn shame that Smile didn't get finished, let alone released; The Beach Boys left Capitol for Reprise, yet another label that hopefully waited for it to be finished. Wilson, understandably crushed by the lack of support he got in general from his bandmates, did a long bloody retreat into drugs, food, depression - all the while still being expected/hoped to carry the band forward, somehow. Smile was abandoned. Van Dyke Parks went on to do Song Cycle, and The Beach Boys, Smiley Smile.
The Old Master Painter
Or, Wilson as the master who got old before his time; change
the name and these lyrics could be about him:
Harder, harder, hardest
I am the artist
That makes it easy for you
To paint you in a corner
I am the artist
That makes it easy for you
To paint you in a corner
Marcus said
Or at least he might have said
I know what it is to be sad
You should see what I once had
Or at least he might have said
I know what it is to be sad
You should see what I once had
Alcoholic alchemy
Write a song for me
I can turn lead into gold
Just don't let me get old
Write a song for me
I can turn lead into gold
Just don't let me get old
Have a heart
Just take one look at my art
It should give me amnesty
It means everything to me
Just take one look at my art
It should give me amnesty
It means everything to me
"Marcus Said," Sloan, Smeared (1992)
All that changing of lead into gold, those alchemical
processes, take a lot out of a person. The
Beach Boys depended on Wilson’s alchemy, and went along with it, more or
less. To keep reaching up higher, to go
further, to get to that next song is (or should be) a joy; but so often
songwriters talk about their blank days, ideas that come to nothing, fragments
that accumulate but only slowly become a song.
Some can piece things together over years, but for Wilson the song had
to be a felt, palpable thing, pop art – the main frustration being taking what
he heard in his head and then somehow was able to communicate to others how to
make those sounds, notes, archings and soarings and so on. The best songs are usually the immediate ones
(“God Only Knows” was written in an hour or so) though something as complex as
“Good Vibrations” took a lot longer, took more alchemy. That his fellow Beach Boys would have to take
over the group because of Wilson’s condition at age 25 shows how intense this
alchemy was, and how the failure of Smile
– that house of an album he didn’t want to go back to***** – crushed him, he who
needed amnesty, to be accepted…
And yet songs from Smile, the supposedly doomed project, keep cropping up. "Heroes And Villains" is one of them, the first song Wilson and Parks wrote together, the kind of song that is psychedelic and ecstatic without bearing many of the hallmarks of psychedelia. It is a happy song, after all; the central figure is a girl who survives life in the wilderness of the west (it is based on a country song, "El Paso") and a narrator who has been away from the city that if he went back there, hardly anyone would believe it was him. It is full of fine harmonies, "doot-doot-doots" and "la-la-las" and has nothing to do with surf, sun, cars - and yet is indubitably of California, of braveness, of escape from the city...yet with a sense that this world too is gone, kind of...sort of...
By late 1967 Wilson had retreated to his house, and the rest of the band decided to build a studio in his house (just below his bedroom) to encourage him to keep writing and recording - this is when Carl, the youngest Wilson, had to take over the band as Brian continued his retreat. Wild Honey was the album that resulted, and it is a before-it-was-fashionable back-to-basics album that reflects the 1967 of soul and r&b as well as the beautiful, religious tones Wilson was still striving for (when he was able) as well.
"Wild Honey" is an rock and soul (to borrow a term) classic, with Carl letting loose and getting down with his bad self. This is a fun song - all the formalism of Smile has been cast aside to get back to what compelled The Beach Boys to make music in the first place - r&b and harmony groups, with a theremin (as in "Good Vibrations" but in a different key) to start it all. The band were now a band again, not just Brian telling the rest what to do, and though Carl's taking over was necessary Wilson resented it. But you can tell the band is cohesive, listening to each other, enjoying what they are doing. And yes, it's back to Mike Love writing the lyrics (hence the "sock it to me" and other slang, just as dated yet charming as "gettin' bugged" was in 1964). And thus endeth side three, with me gasping, in appreciation, amazement...the kind of feelings that are hard to explain and yet take you over completely...
"Darlin'" is the first song on side four, one where "doggone outta sight" is high praise, with Carl again singing, saying he was living like "half a man" before he met his Other, a song that got into the charts just as 1967 ended; the harmonies are simple, the horns are held close to the melody - while not the formula they started with, this is The Beach Boys gone Stax, in a way. This isn't so easy to sing, I'd guess (it is still Wilson's music, after all, and maybe not so simple as it first sounds), and Carl sounds joyous, as if he is making up the lyrics as he goes. (The song was first written in 1963 - see what I mean about songs hanging around? - as "Thinkin' 'Bout You Baby.")
"Country Air" is one of those songs that I must have heard at age 11 and been entranced by, without really knowing or caring why; evocative of the countryside, of early mornings, roosters crowing, wide spaces to breathe in and out, this is like Smile without being a song from it (unlike Smiley Smile, which has several songs from Smile on it in different form - "Wonderful," "Wind Chimes" and "Vegetables" and so on, Wild Honey ends with "Mama Says," a fragment from Smile). And here they all are, harmonizing together, a harmony that no other group - not The Association, not The Mamas and The Papas - could hope to achieve. The whistling, the yelled "Come on!" from the distance, the first of many songs about Mother Nature...The Beach Boys as part of nature, as opposed to just speeding around near it, in a car or on a motorcycle.
"Here Comes The Night" is the peak of Wild Honey, with Brian singing lead, and if the eroticism from earlier songs is tender and delicate, this is a rush of hormones, a very physical song in every sense. (I can well imagine Wilson Pickett doing this, for instance.) Unlike another song by the same name, this night is eagerly, hungrily anticipated, and Brian sings it in a way where you know that the "hold me, squeeze me" is maybe a request for something else, something so powerful that it can't really be named (and I don't mean in a polite way). Just when things seem to be more lighthearted, there is this tension, building and building, a tension that feels good (like the Santa Ana winds in Los Angeles that come down from the mountains that feel sooo gooood...at first) and yet Brian seems just one step away from falling into a kind of sexual abyss. It is one hell of a song.
Look (Song For Children)
And into the maelstrom of 1968, The Beach Boys released Friends, a tranquil, you-gots-2-chill album that was essentially the exact opposite of the "this is my scene and I'm freaking out" experienced across the country and around the world. Having done their back-to-basics soul album, they were now pushing new boundaries in mellowness, that most stereotypical of 70s vibes. At this point they were far more popular in the UK than the US, which is why this (and nearly all subsequent songs) are here. "Friends" is a waltz, with Wilson talking directly to the others about the band's struggles and triumphs - indeed all the Wilson brothers and Al Jardine helped to write this song, nearly jazz-like (vibes, soaring, leaping harmonies) and beautiful.
To quote Brian: "Harmony usually means notes that are perfectly and mathematically related to each other, like 1, 3 and 5. This is the basic chord of music. Then there's 1, 3, 5 and 7. This is a more complex chord. It gets much more complex than that, but I try to keep it sounding simple, no matter how complex it really is." (Friends liner notes)
I don't think there's a better way of explaining how Wilson hears music in his head to be composed and then communicated to his bandmates; the implication that in The Beach Boys he could write 1, 3, 5, 7 and 9 if needed is just another way of saying that sure there's lots of families who sing together, but to have this understanding of harmony and a willingness to write songs that use it is rare. I think of Gershwin and Charles Ives, Wilson's American ancestors, not to mention Debussy, Darius Mihaud, John Barry, Gil Evans, Carla Bley, Burt Bacharach, Dave Brubeck (not forgetting The Four Freshmen)...and wonder what they would have made or do make of this song, and so many others here...
The big hit from their next album, 20/20 is "Do It Again." Growing up, my knowledge of The Beach Boys - as gained from a Dutch double album somewhat like this one - was that this was their last big hit (I'm pretty sure the album ended here). It's a totally Mike Love song, with deliberate stokings of nostalgia - "California girls" get a mention, don't you know - and it's a funky singalong of a song (when are those first snare drum beats, all echoed and huge, going to be sampled? - have they already?). It took me a while to figure out, growing up, how people in 1968 could be nostalgic for something from 1963; but 20/20, as its name implies, looks forward and backward too...as this song ends, the hammering from Smile's "Workshop" bleeds through, as if Smile is refusing to be forgotten...
"Bluebirds Over The Mountain" was another look back, this time to a regional hit in the US for Ersel Hickey from 1958; a totally new song to me (it got to #61 in the US, #33 in the UK) that is definitely country/proto-reggae, a song Bruce Johnston brought in for the band to do much as Al Jardine had brought in "Sloop John B." So here they are, bringing back songs that explain their roots...
...as does "I Can Hear Music," a song that - unlike others so far - was produced by Carl, not Brian; a Ronettes song that once again explains influences and roots, and was a hit, but seems like a way for the group to continue sans Brian; and as nice as it is, as good as Carl's producing is, it seems a little...too pleasant, if such a thing can be said. (This song was sung by one Freddie Mercury as he auditioned for Queen - yet another band indebted to The Beach Boys.)
Leaving 20/20 for a moment, we get to the last song The Beach Boys released as a single for Capitol, before signing on to Reprise - "Breakaway." A song written by Brian and of all people, his father, it was a last chance for the group to have a hit in the US and for Murry Wilson to make some money (Capitol, as part of their response to being sued by the group for royalties simply refused to sell any of their older ones, making all their lives & Murry Wilson's increasingly difficult). The song is, in fact, about their wanting to leave the label (paging both The Sex Pistols and Aimee Mann):
I can breakaway from that lonely life
And I can do what I wanna do
And breakaway from that empty life
And my world is new
When I layed down on my bed
I heard voices in my head
Telling me now "Hey it's only a dream"
The more I thought of it
I had been out of it
And here's the answer I found instead
It is - I'm guessing because of Murry's involvement - a real throwback harmonically to how they once were, solid and with that warmth and optimism that hides a barbedness, not to mention yet another reference to being alone in bed, distracted, seeking hope and a way out...
You'd think this anthology would end here, but no, it ends with their cover of Lead Belly's "Cottonfields." Yet another song brought in by Al Jardine, it was a hit everywhere, it seems, than in its home, the US (I'm not even sure it was a single there). And here The Beach Boys stop, doing a song from before they were born, yet another 20/20 gesture towards roots...nostalgia...a way out of the 60s. (Note: there are two versions of this, one produced by Wilson, another by the rest of the band, who were tending to take over production as they thought Wilson had underproduced this and "Breakaway.")
The Smile ghost, now two years old, would not go away. The band, wanting new songs from Brian but not really getting much, went back to "Our Prayer" and "Cabinessence." These close the album, making the word nostalgia run for cover; the past is refusing to remain the past. And how terrible and moving is it that "Our Prayer" - a wordless chant that goes right back to William Byrd - comes after "Never Learn Not To Love," a song Charles Manson gave to Dennis Wilson, who in turn changed the lyrics, upsetting Manson, who then wanted Dennis dead; the massacre on Cielo Drive******* came in August, as Manson wanted producer Terry Melcher dead. Melcher had moved since '66, though, and you know the rest...
And so this ends, just as I am starting to make that walk down the street in Hollywood; just as a nation is reaching whatever highs or lows it has before the 60s are over.
I have been wondering just why this, of all things, was a hit all over again in the UK, just as it had been in the summer of '76 - was it the heat? 1983 was, as Paul Weller called it, the "long hot" summer, though to Bananarama it was "cruel." The forward-looking over-the-top here-we-go New Pop bursts of energy and punctum were mostly gone; and with them gone, or in hiding, or distressing the public more than pleasing them, The Beach Boys were a break from the present, a break from having to contemplate God knows how many more years of Thatcher. This is one way of looking at it, and in a time when Rod Stewart could get to #1 in the chart by giving away a free beach ball with his new single ("Baby Jane"), you can see that people were more than eager to get back to simple pleasures, distracting them from the ever-present threats of nuclear war, for instance.
The irony of course is that they may have been buying this for nostalgic/old time's sake purposes, but The Beach Boys promise of endless summer was one complicated by the rupture around Smile, a past that refused to stay in the past, an album that wouldn't go away. How many who bought this in the summer of '83 had any idea about any of this, I don't know.
But I do know that in order to have a better perspective on The Beach Boys, it really helps to listen to Smile and then know that bootlegs of it were shared and copied around for years, hence filtering into the musicians lives and works who heard it (I am thinking of Escalator Over The Hill, but also The Beatles White Album). In a way that is eerie, in hearing Smile I can finally hear where so many things came from, and regard it as familiar not just in a geographical sense to where I grew up but sonically as well - and the band's dismissal of this work as too "out there" and not sticking to the formula looks worse and worse over the years, though at the time they did record it, they do perform songs onstage, they did try their best with something so utterly different...
Interlude II, In which Sufjan Stevens’ Illinois and Terry Riley’s In
C remind me of the Bigger Picture (For Nathan, who pointed me to the Weschler essay)
Illinois as the center, California as the edge of the
nation, where the highs and lows are greater.
Earthquakes, landslides, brush and forest fires, droughts,
flash floods, all are to be accepted and understood (and prevented if
possible).
Man is a PART of nature as opposed to nature.
Are the best American albums about coming to terms with the
nation itself?
But not exercises in nostalgia, because a true understanding
of the US isn’t just physical but METAPHYSICAL
What CANNOT be seen
What CANNOT be explained
What is in the air, the light********, the rawness of the people and
the land
What CANNOT be marketed,
What CANNOT be grasped commercially,
The PURPOSE of the place that can be felt on every street,
in every park, though it be rough or smooth, that PURPOSE is always there,
within reach
The cold night air of Detroit, the warm Santa Anas of Los
Angeles, the hot solidity of Louisville, the clear thin air of the Rockies, the
smoggy air every night that summer, the enveloping swamp air of Washington
D.C., the relief of fresh air outside a stifling car, the endless winds of New
York and Chicago…
This is as much of what the US is as anything else. And it ends in California, the blue
Pacific…as if to say ‘rest’ and ‘there is a whole other world, but yes, rest’
Those who are from California,
Those who moved
Those who moved back,
Those who escaped to it, in fear,
Those who couldn’t leave,
Those who only came back in coffins,
“Never forget you are a Californian."
Twenty years ago a cousin reminded me that our family was
able to settle in California during the Great Depression only because other family members had already made their
home there; that sense of being accepted and welcomed makes for long memories,
and a very loyal attitude towards the Golden State.
Wonderful (encore)
In the end here, I have grasped my roots, not out of nostalgia, I hope, but a sense of where I am literally from; something profoundly different, I am guessing, from the majority of the UK public that bought this in the summer of '83. The light, the water, the sense of peace, wonder, the air inverted and placid, the glowing beauty that makes any harshness seem worse, the unpredictable human and natural world...that something so unlikely as five guys from Hawthorne - near South Central! - could, with energy, practice and - I can't really skirt from this - genius - produce all this, is one of the wonders of my hometown.
And as you can see, I am attached to them still - appreciating them now more than ever, living thousands of miles away from Los Angeles, in a climate that is so often the exact opposite of the sunny, bright one I grew up in. Just this morning I heard a new song on the radio and it reminded me of them - "Love Letters" by Metronomy - and wondered if Brian Wilson would ever hear it. Because this music at its best pushes forward with "warmness, serenity and friendship" as Bob Stanley writes, and these are good and necessary things that are audible in the music, in Wilson's own return to Smile, unthinkable in '83.
In hearing this I know myself better; indeed somehow I have regained part of myself that I didn't really know about, and that is about as much as anyone can ask from music.
Next up: The Prodigal Son, Part 2.
Wonderful (encore)
In the end here, I have grasped my roots, not out of nostalgia, I hope, but a sense of where I am literally from; something profoundly different, I am guessing, from the majority of the UK public that bought this in the summer of '83. The light, the water, the sense of peace, wonder, the air inverted and placid, the glowing beauty that makes any harshness seem worse, the unpredictable human and natural world...that something so unlikely as five guys from Hawthorne - near South Central! - could, with energy, practice and - I can't really skirt from this - genius - produce all this, is one of the wonders of my hometown.
And as you can see, I am attached to them still - appreciating them now more than ever, living thousands of miles away from Los Angeles, in a climate that is so often the exact opposite of the sunny, bright one I grew up in. Just this morning I heard a new song on the radio and it reminded me of them - "Love Letters" by Metronomy - and wondered if Brian Wilson would ever hear it. Because this music at its best pushes forward with "warmness, serenity and friendship" as Bob Stanley writes, and these are good and necessary things that are audible in the music, in Wilson's own return to Smile, unthinkable in '83.
In hearing this I know myself better; indeed somehow I have regained part of myself that I didn't really know about, and that is about as much as anyone can ask from music.
Next up: The Prodigal Son, Part 2.
**In my view not nearly enough bands make albums like this - semi-rehearsed covers done in the studio, with that you-are-there vibe. Sloan did one as a bonus cd for their epochal One Chord To Another album in 1996, but I don't know anyone's who's done one since.
***Please note: I do not advocate throwing rocks at any building, esp. the Taj Mahal.
****The most touching song for me on Smile for me; at times I think it's even about me, which I rarely feel when listening to music.
*****There was, also in 1967, an unfinished album called Teenage Opera - recorded in the UK and written by Mark Wirtz. It is the UK equivalent of Smile, and I think it deserves more attention than it gets; I wrote about Keith West's "Excerpt from 'A Teenage Opera'" here. I may as well add that Sunshine Pop, a movement from California (I mean, where else?) was in the air as well, with "My World Fell Down" (written by John Carter, sung by sometime Beach Boy Glen Campbell) by Sagittarius; The Association had two US #1 hits (produced by Wilson pal Gary Usher and Curt Boettcher) and the latter organized a group called The Millennium. You could get lost in Sunshine Pop.
******Wilson, encouraged by others, did go back to Smile in 2003 and finished it with Van Dyke Parks, to much praise and astonishment, and they worked together again on That Lucky Old Sun (2008). The Smile Sessions was released in 2011 and is the best representation as to what the album could have sounded like in part. The Wire had to run an essay in their year-end poll issue wherein they explained how it had won, sort of, album of the year (James Ferraro, also of California, was the winner) – proof that in some ways it is as avant-garde as ever, full of experimentation and not just a legendary album that never was finished…
*******By 1970 we had moved to Silverlake and I went to nursery school; my mother had a list of all moms, kids and addresses & phone numbers - it was a co-op nursery school, after all - in her address book. It stayed there long after I left, and at some point I noticed one of the families who was part of my year lived on Cielo Drive - not close by to Rose Scharlin, but close enough to make me feel retrospectively very lucky.
********"It seems to me, actually, that there are four - or, anyway, at least four - lights in L.A. To begin with, there's the cruel, actinic light of late July. Its glare cuts piteously through the general shabbiness of Los Angeles. Second comes the nostalgic, golden light of late October. It turns Los Angeles into El Dorado, a city of fool's gold. It's the light William Faulkner - in his story "Golden Land" - called "treacherous unbrightness." It's the light the tourists come for - the light, to be more specific, of unearned nostalgia. Third, there's the gunmetal-gray light of the months between December and July. Summer in Los Angeles doesn't begin until mid-July. In the months before, the light can be as monotonous as Seattle’s.
Finally comes the light, clear as stone-dry champagne, after a full day of rain.
Everything in this light is somehow simultaneously particularized and idealized:
each perfect, specific, ideal little tract house, one beside the next. And
that’s the light that breaks hearts in L.A." D. J. Waldie, in Lawrence Weschler's "L.A. Glows"
Dedicated to my father, Dietrich Peter Friesen, 1930-1988
Dedicated to my father, Dietrich Peter Friesen, 1930-1988
