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The Beach Boys On CD: The Beach Boys In Concert
Ask ten different Beach Boys fans their favourite period for the band as a live act, and you'll get ten different answers. Over the years, the band's stage show changed radically, and each period showcased a different aspect of the band. So some may prefer the band's shows from the late 60s and early 70s, centred around the gentle material from Wild Honey, Friends and Sunflower. Others prefer the "Brian's back" era of the late 70s, when the now-husky genius returned to the stage to add the quirky Love You material to otherwise nostalgia-driven shows. Yet others will argue for the 1993 box set tour, with its unplugged sets, positioning the band squarely in the 'classic rock' field, or the 2008 UK tour, or the 2012 reunion tour, both of which managed the difficult feat of balancing the artistic and nostalgia aspects of the band.
But more than any other period, people mention the 1972-74 period as a highlight for the Beach Boys' live shows. In some ways, this is entirely for good reasons — this was the period when they had the most adventurous live sets, and had some of the best backing musicians they would ever have.
In other respects, though, it betrays a certain insecurity among Beach Boys fans. The 1972-74 live band were wonderful, but this was also the period where the band was the most acceptable to the kind of people who talk about 'real music'. Yes, the band had none of the tacky accoutrements that damaged their later shows — no cheerleaders, Hawaiian shirts, cheap synthesisers or attempts at rapping — but on the downside there was a certain obviousness to the arrangements, with delicacy being ignored in favour of a riffy, heavy, guitar-based sound.
This is not to say that these performances were bad, by any means — they do deserve their reputation — but they were good in a very particular way, and represent a vision of the band, as long-haired, bearded, guitar-toting rockers, that practically oozes testosterone. If that's not the version of the band you're interested in — if you have less interest in rock music than in pop — then adjust your expectations accordingly.
While this album is compiled from many shows, over two separate tours (an early single-album version, with only material from the winter 1972 tour, was rejected by the record label, so they recorded summer 1973 tours and turned the result into a double album), it is an authentic record of what the band sounded like live at this time, as those who have heard the many audience recordings from this period can attest.
I will have less to talk about with this album on a track-by-track basis than for other albums, as I have already spoken about most of these songs in the context of their original albums. There are some general notes which are applicable to all the songs, though.
Firstly, as stated above, this is a rock album, not a pop one. In general, the songs are sped up and more dominated by guitar than the studio versions. There are also two drummers on most tracks, and at least one of the drummers uses far more cymbal than was ever used on a record produced by Brian Wilson.
Secondly, the harmonies are very different from what one might expect. With Brian Wilson absent from the touring band and Bruce Johnston having quit, the low and middle ends of the harmony stack are far more prominent than the high end. In later years, of course, the band would hire outside falsetto singers to take those parts, as they became more concerned with reproducing the sound of the hit records than with playing their new music, but at this point their set was dominated by songs which had little or no falsetto anyway. On the other hand, Dennis Wilson's voice is far more audible in the harmony stack than it was most of the time — at this point, he was still unable to play the drums because of his hand injury, and so he was singing a lot more (he very rarely sang while drumming).
What's perhaps most noticeable is the repertoire. This was the Beach Boys' third live album in ten years, and yet of its twenty songs, only six had appeared on either of the previous two (and none had appeared on both). This was a band that was still growing, still changing up its setlist regularly, and mixing hits, obscurities and new songs with more concern for putting on a good show than for fitting someone's preconceived idea of what a Beach Boys show 'should' be.
With those points in mind, on to the songs themselves.
Carl Wilson, Dennis Wilson, Al Jardine, Mike Love, Blondie Chaplin, Ricky Fataar
with backing band members Billy Hinsche, Ed Carter, Robert Kenyatta, Mike Kowalski, Carli Muñoz
Sail On Sailor
Songwriter: Brian Wilson, Van Dyke Parks, Ray Kennedy, Tandyn Almer and Jack Rieley
Lead vocalist: Blondie Chaplin
Unsurprisingly, the opening track, from the band's then-new album, sounds very similar to the studio version. The main differences are a more prominent bassline, a slight increase in tempo, and the loss of the 'morse code' guitar part, but otherwise this is much like the record.
Sloop John B
Songwriter: trad arr Brian Wilson
Lead vocalist: Carl Wilson and Mike Love
The second in a miniature set of songs about sailing that starts the album, this is, like much of the album, a stripped-down, simplified, but relatively faithful arrangement of the hit. The orchestration is obviously not there (though the flute intro remains), but there are some nice instrumental touches, like the twelve-string guitar being doubled by an analogue synth.
The most notable differences from the record are Carl, rather than Brian, Wilson taking the lead vocal on the verses, the lack of the a capella break (in general the harmonies suffer more than the instrumental parts on this album), and the frenetic pace at which it's taken (I actually felt my heart racing when listening to this with headphones, it goes at such a pace).
It's not the best live version of the song (that would be the version on the Live In London album), but it's a perfectly decent performance.
The Trader
Songwriter: Carl Wilson and Jack Rieley
Lead vocalist: Carl Wilson and Mike Love
Much as with Sail On Sailor, this was recorded close enough to the release of the studio version that it's, if not indistinguishable, then still very, very similar. The most notable difference is a prominent bongo track in the left channel, and the inescapable fact that when performed live the transition between the two sections of the song is less abrupt.
You Still Believe In Me
Songwriter: Brian Wilson and Tony Asher
Lead vocalist: Al Jardine with Carl Wilson
A very creditable attempt at what is possibly the most difficult song from Pet Sounds to perform live. Obviously, there was no possibility at this point of them reproducing the complexities of the record on stage, but the solutions here (replacing the plucked piano strings and falsetto on the intro with guitar and Moog, for example) work very well at giving the same feel.
This is also the best example of the band's vocal work on the album. While Jardine can't reproduce the delicacy of Brian Wilson's original falsetto vocal part, his stronger, richer tone gives the vocal a pleading note which works just as well, and the transition between his vocal and Carl Wilson on the line "I wanna cry" (which goes out of Jardine's range) is handled extraordinarily well. The harmonies on this show that while the band were hampered at this point by having their vocal ranges concentrated in the mid range, they could still pull off some beautiful vocals when required.
California Girls
Songwriter: Brian Wilson and Mike Love
Lead vocalist: Mike Love
Pretty much exactly what you'd expect a live version of California Girls to sound like. The harmonies on this are a bit ragged, and we hear Dennis at the beginning exhorting the crowd to sing along, but you already know what this sounds like. Love's joking "ooh, we mean it so much!" at the end seems to confirm that at this point, the band still saw their biggest hits as something of a joke and a distraction from their more artistic work, though that attitude would soon change.
Songwriter: Brian Wilson and Mike Love
Lead vocalist: Carl Wilson
This kind of material is where the band at this time excelled — songs that depend on a driving rhythm and a lead vocal performance. While the horns from the original are sadly missed, the addition of Hammond organ, along with the best drum and percussion track on the album (some great cowbell work and bongos) makes this the first song on the album that it's safe to say is a definite improvement over the original.
Songwriter: Brian Wilson, Jack Rieley and Tandyn Almer
Lead vocalist: Carl Wilson
This track mostly differs from the studio version in that the guitar parts have been beefed up substantially — unsurprisingly given that the original's glossy sonic sheen is pretty much unreproducible in a live setting. The vocals here again shine — this version of the band was not wonderful at the close harmonies that normally defined the band, but were as good as any vocal group ever at singing interweaving, independent solo lines in counterpoint with each other, and this track gives a great opportunity to show that off. The one flaw in this track is the percussion part in the left channel, which goes slightly out of time on occasion.
This arrangement of the song, as opposed to the studio version, is the basis for the version played live by Brian Wilson's touring band in recent years, and is also the arrangement used on the Beach Boys' fiftieth anniversary reunion tour.
Caroline, No
Songwriter: Brian Wilson and Tony Asher
Lead vocalist: Carl Wilson
This, again, has a simplified arrangement (no percussive intro, just straight into the first verse), but this was never a song that needed much in the way of orchestration, and the simple electric piano part (presumably Dennis Wilson) and flute embellishments work perfectly (though the solo gets a little too close to lounge jazz for my own tastes). If you have a singer as good as Carl Wilson and a song as good as this, it's impossible for it not to sound great.
Leaving This Town
Songwriter: Carl Wilson, Blondie Chaplin, Ricky Fataar and Mike Love
Lead vocalist: Blondie Chaplin
The upside: the organ solo on this (played by Billy Hinsche) has some real feeling and invention to it.
The downside: this is thirty seconds longer than the already-ridiculously-overlong version on Holland.
Probably sounds really good if you're stoned.
Heroes & Villains
Songwriter: Brian Wilson and Van Dyke Parks
Lead vocalist: Al Jardine and Carl Wilson
The early-70s band's version of this track is spectacular. Al Jardine, on the verses, sounds much more comfortable than Brian Wilson does on the single. Carl Wilson sings the Bicycle Rider lyrics on the choruses (and Mike Love adds in the "heroes, a-heroes, a-heroes and a villains" chant), and again the band are given the chance to shine vocally, including on the only a capella sections on the entire album (for the scat section and the last "I've been in this town" section), again singing wonderful cascading, overlapping vocal lines like no other band could do. Easily the highlight of the album.
Funky Pretty
Songwriter: Brian Wilson, Mike Love and Jack Rieley
Lead vocalist: Carl Wilson, Al Jardine, Blondie Chaplin, Ricky Fataar and Mike Love
The consensus among Beach Boys fans is that this is a massive improvement on the studio version, and that this is 'how the song should always have sounded.'
Like most Beach Boys fan consensus, this is bunkum. On Holland, Funky Pretty is a mediocre song brought up to near-greatness by a spartan, Moog-dominated production that makes it sound almost like a piece of experimental electronica. Adding guitar riffs, honky tonk piano and a 'proper' rock drum track, and cutting out most of the Moog parts, turns it into something that sounds like a Rolling Stones album track. (It's no surprise that the band regularly covered Jumpin' Jack Flash in shows at this point, or that Blondie Chaplin spent most of the 1990s and 2000s as a sideman in the Stones' touring band).
Let The Wind Blow
Songwriter: Brian Wilson and Mike Love
Lead vocalist: Carl Wilson
Of all the more radical reworkings on this album, this is the one that works the best. While the original track, on Wild Honey, has a gorgeous delicacy to it, this turns it into a gospel ballad that wouldn't be out of place on a Ray Charles or Al Green record, with the original's shared lead vocal turned into a solo for Carl Wilson. The wordless backing vocal lines from the original are dropped until the last verse, and other than the answering lines and some occasional touches from Jardine, the only vocals we pay attention to here are from Carl Wilson — the whole track is built around his vocal performance. Luckily, it's an absolutely stellar performance, so while when hearing this one still misses the ethereal beauty of the studio version, this has its own strengths.
Help Me, Rhonda
Songwriter: Brian Wilson and Mike Love
Lead vocalist: Al Jardine
The oddest rearrangement on the album is this, with all the arrangement details blurred out into a nondescript guitar boogie with little charm and less grace, an excuse for jamming on mediocre solos. Bizarrely, the band stuck with this arrangement as late as the mid-90s (and Brian Wilson still uses it for his solo tours), though Mike Love's touring "Beach Boys" (and the reunion tour of 2012) thankfully reverted to the original arrangement. Al Jardine does his usual spectacular job, and the audience sound enthused, but it just seems rather cruel to do this to a song that never did anything to harm the band.
Surfer Girl
Songwriter: Brian Wilson
Lead vocalist: Al Jardine and Mike Love
Mike Love's introduction to this, emphasising how old the song is, is another pointer to how mildly embarassed the band were at this time to be doing this material.
Despite this, though, they do a lovely job on this. The harmonies are huskier and more fragile than on the record — these are definitely Beach Men, not Boys — but they still sound good.
Wouldn't It Be Nice
Songwriter: Brian Wilson, Tony Asher and Mike Love
Lead vocalist: Al Jardine and Mike Love
It shows the way the band had improved as musicians over a relatively short time that while on Live In London they cut out a huge chunk of this song (the part where the tempo changes in "you know it seems…"), here they not only perform that section but it gets what sounds like the biggest cheer of the disc.
Jardine once again does a splendid job on the lead vocals, although some of the backing vocals are rather perfunctory.
We Got Love
Songwriter: Blondie Chaplin, Ricky Fataar and Mike Love
Lead vocalist: Ricky Fataar
The one new song of the album was this, a song which had been originally intended for Holland before it was dropped at the last minute. It's another very pleasant, but unspectacular, track from Chaplin and Fataar, this one possibly influenced by Allen Toussaint's song Riverboat, which had been recorded by Van Dyke Parks on his Discover America album around the same time, and which has the line "We got love" emphasised several times, and a generally similar feel. (Toussaint's song would actually have fit well on Holland, and may have also inspired Steamboat).
The lyrics, which sound like Love's work primarily, are a generic call to treat other people nicely along with some new age stuff equating evolution and karma.
This is the last Chaplin/Fataar collaboration to feature on a Beach Boys album — Chaplin departed from the band, acrimoniously, before the end of 1973 after disagreements with Rieley. Fataar would remain with them until the end of 1974, and leave on mildly better terms, but by the time the next Beach Boys album came out, both would be long gone.
Don't Worry Baby
Songwriter: Brian Wilson and Roger Christian
Lead vocalist: Al Jardine and Carl Wilson
Given that they have a bigger band to play with here than they did when recording the single, the band decide to stop pretending and just play this as Be My Baby, right down to the drum intro, and until the lead vocal comes in this bears far more resemblance to the Spector classic than to the Beach Boys' track (prompting two waves of recognition-applause from the audience — one at the beginning when the track starts, and another when the lead vocal starts and they realise what song it actually is).
Jardine and Carl Wilson split Brian Wilson's lead part between them the same way they did on Heroes & Villains, with Wilson taking the higher part in the choruses and Jardine taking the slightly lower verses, and both do a very good job, though neither quite has the fragility of Brian Wilson's original. Jardine messes up some of the lyrics, but in a recoverable way (and oddly is mixed far to one side), but the harmonies are spot on, and this is as good a version of this song as one could hope for given the absence of a 22-year-old Brian Wilson.
Surfin' USA
Songwriter: Brian Wilson and Chuck Berry
Lead vocalist: Mike Love with Al Jardine
This is about what you'd expect — a little faster than the original, the guitars a little more distorted, and with Al Jardine attempting Brian Wilson's falsetto part. A rockier, more muscular live version of the song, but basically what you'd expect to hear from a 1970s Beach Boys show.
Good Vibrations
Songwriter: Brian Wilson and Mike Love
Lead vocalist: Carl Wilson and Mike Love
This is about as accurate a rendition of an impossible-to-perform song as one could imagine (understandably, as the song is too big a hit, and too much of a masterpiece, to dare mess with). The big change made to the arrangement, and one the band kept through to the late 90s, was to extend the 'gotta keep those lovin' good' section to several times its original length (and change the lyrics on that line to 'happenin' with you' instead of 'with her'), to allow for an audience sing-along section and a scatted show of vocal dexterity. Other than that, the only notable differences from the record are those made to make the song performable at all live (the 'theremin' part being played on a ribbon synthesiser, rather lower in the mix than on the record, no odd instruments like the jew's harp, the triplets in the chorus being played on guitar rather than 'cello).
Fun Fun Fun
Songwriter: Brian Wilson and Mike Love
Lead vocalist: Mike Love
And the album ends with a rather chugging, graceless, performance of this song, which trades the original's pop energy for a 70s heaviness. Hearing this version, it becomes much clearer why this song was a natural choice for a duet between the Beach Boys and Status Quo in 1996.
Overall, this is probably the best Beach Boys live album one could hope for, and at times it matches or even surpasses the studio recordings. If it lacks the subtlety and gentleness of the best of the band's studio work, that's more a reflection of just how special that studio work is, rather than a negative about the band themselves. With current technology, and on current budgets, it's possible to reproduce the textures of Brian Wilson's production on stage, but in the early 70s this was as good as it would be reasonable to expect it to get. It will never be my favourite Beach Boys album, but it's a good one, and one that can be useful for dispelling some of the myths about the group. But there's a definite sense from this that you had to be there.
The Beach Boys On CD: Holland
Holland is, in many ways, the last gasp for the Beach Boys as an artistic group. They would produce good work again, both as a band or as individuals, but in future their work would be driven by one or two members of the band at a time rather than being a true group effort.
For the recording of the bulk of the album, the band decamped to Baambrugge in the Netherlands, and had their recording studio shipped over as well (which caused a huge amount of delay). This was at the instigation of Jack Rieley, and many reasons have been given over the years for the move, including tax issues, the idea that a change of scenery would inspire Brian Wilson, and even the laughable claim that it would be harder for those band members with drug problems (especially Brian Wilson) to obtain drugs in Holland than the USA. The fact that Rieley opted to remain in the Netherlands (and, for a while, attempted to continue managing the band's career from a distance) may say more about the reasons than anything else.
The trip abroad did inspire Brian Wilson, but not in the way that the band had hoped or expected. Instead of coming up with any new conventional songs, his main piece of work during the trip to the Netherlands was a short story with musical accompaniment, Mount Vernon And Fairway (A Fairy Tale), that was initially included with the album as a bonus 45 and is now included at the end of the CD release.
The resulting album was considered too weak to release by Warner/Reprise, until Van Dyke Parks suggested that the song Sail On Sailor, initially not part of the album's line-up, would make a good single. This replaced the Chaplin/Fataar/Love track We Got Love (which was accidentally included on some early German pressings of the album) and the resulting album got some of the best reviews of the band's career, though it was less commercially successful, scraping into the top forty in the US, but doing slightly better in the UK where it made the top twenty.
The album is actually one of the most cohesive the band had done, with an ongoing theme of travel, especially by sea, and of a homesick longing for America. It's also the most collaborative of the Beach Boys' albums, with many different combinations of band members writing together in ways they otherwise never did.
This cohesion helps overcome what is actually a fairly weak set of material — there's nothing here on the level of an All This Is That or Make It Good, let alone Til I Die or Surf's Up, but the album is nonetheless one of the more worthwhile listening experiences of the band's later years.
Brian Wilson, Carl Wilson, Dennis Wilson, Al Jardine, Mike Love, Blondie Chaplin, Ricky Fataar
Sail On Sailor
Songwriter: Brian Wilson, Van Dyke Parks, Ray Kennedy, Tandyn Almer and Jack Rieley
Lead vocalist: Blondie Chaplin
The opening song has a history which has been the subject of much recent debate. The generally-accepted story until recently was as follows: the Beach Boys turned in the Holland album but it had no obvious single on it. At this point Van Dyke Parks remembered a cassette he had in his possession of a song being written by himself and Brian Wilson, which had single potential. Various hands brushed up the song, at which point Carl Wilson took various backing band members into the studio and cut a backing track, with Brian supervising over the telephone. Dennis Wilson attempted a lead vocal, but gave up after a couple of takes, and Blondie Chaplin took over.
However, Steve Desper, who had been the band's engineer for much of the late 60s and early 70s, but had stopped working for the band just before the trip to Holland, claims that the backing track dates back much earlier, and is a track that Brian Wilson had been working on for a long time. He also claims that the song originally had Carl Wilson on lead vocals, and that Chaplin is imitating Wilson's phrasing exactly (a reasonable claim — Chaplin sounds spookily like Wilson here).
Whatever the truth of this (and I am inclined to believe Desper here), there is also the question of who exactly wrote what. A press release at the time claimed it was "a Brian Wilson-Jack Rieley song with writer credits suggesting informal assistance from a wide range of characters, among them Van Dyke Parks". Steve Desper, on the other hand, has claimed that the lyrics are entirely Parks' work, and Parks has claimed in the past that not only did he write all the lyrics but also the chord changes in the chorus and the start of the middle section. If this is the case, then Brian Wilson's contribution to the song is reduced to coming up with the verse riff (a 12/8 shuffle between I and IV, actually quite similar to a gospel take on Imagine) and possibly the melody.
One might possibly get an idea of what actually happened by listening to a version of the song recorded by KGB, a band featuring Ray Kennedy. This version is credited only to Wilson/Kennedy, and has fairly incoherent lyrics about cocaine and trying to get out of the ghetto. One suspects that Wilson brought his initial idea to several different collaborators, at different times, without necessarily thinking to mention to them that he was working with other people. My own guess (given the reliability of the various parties involved) is that Parks' account is largely correct — not only is Parks the most scrupulously honest person involved, with an excellent memory, but the song just sounds like a Van Dyke Parks song rather than a Brian Wilson song.
Whatever the process involved though, the end result is the most convincing attempt at R&B that the Beach Boys ever did, with a strong lead vocal from Chaplin, excellent group backing vocals (apparently only featuring Carl Wilson, Chaplin and Fataar from the Beach Boys, along with backing band member Billy Hinsche, session steel guitar player Tony Martin, and Gerry Beckley from the band America, though some have claimed that the other Beach Boys later overdubbed additional vocals), and in its VIb-VIIb-I chorus changes a hook so powerful that the band reused it (a tone up and in 4/4 time) for their 1985 hit Getcha Back.
The song was released twice as a single, hitting number 79 on the charts in 1973, and number 49 in 1975. Despite this relative lack of chart success, it was popular on the radio at the time and has remained a fixture in the setlists of the Beach Boys and their various solo shows.
Songwriter: Dennis Wilson and Jack Rieley
Lead vocalist: Carl Wilson
The second track on the album continues the sailing theme, here with a typically-inscrutable Rieley lyric about steamboat travel. The lyrics are pretty and evocative, but make very little sense on any kind of literal level — lines like "The stream is a timepiece of children bridged with crystal haze" defy any normal interpretation. On the other hand, the lyric is slightly more comprehensible in the USA than elsewhere, as the "Mr Fulton" referred to, Robert Fulton, is considered a major historical figure in the US for his development of the first successful steamboat. He doesn't, however, have the same "as every schoolchild knows…" status elsewhere.
Musically, the song is built around simple I-V7 changes for the most part (with a V7-VI7-II7 change at the end of the verse which is actually similar in its effect to the more outrageous chorus progression in Sail On Sailor), until the tag when the V7 changes into a VIb7, with mechanical-sounding drums perfectly evoking the feel of a paddle-wheel turning in the water and the hiss of steam.
The effect is possibly a little too dragged out — the combination of Carl Wilson's lazy-sounding vocals, however, lovely, and the slow, mechanical pace of the song, tends to drag long before the four minutes and thirty-six seconds of the song is up — but it's a worthwhile track, and a sign of the stylistic evolution that was bringing Dennis Wilson to the more confident style of his later work on Pacific Ocean Blue.
California Saga: Big Sur
Songwriter: Mike Love
Lead vocalist: Mike Love
The centrepiece of Holland, covering the bulk of side two, was a thematically-linked suite of songs by Love and Jardine called California Saga. Possibly the most artistically-ambitious thing either man ever did, this was in part inspired by their homesickness for California while living in Holland, but also tied into the themes of the environment and of travel that suffuse the band's music at this point.
California Saga is unusual in the Beach Boys' work in that rather than celebrating Southern California, and in particular Los Angeles, as most of their California-centred work did, it instead focuses on Central and Northern California, especially the less-populated areas.
The first of the three songs is this, the first song released by the band to have Love as the sole credited writer, and a surprisingly pleasant song. Starting with the ascending/descending Cm arpeggios that make up the bulk of the next song, we then go into a pleasant country-folk waltz, mostly based on a single C major chord with a scalar bassline that goes up and down much as the arpeggios at the beginning.
The song only really contains four chords, and is the kind of thing that could be written by someone with rudimentary or non-existent instrumental skills, but it has a catchy enough melody, and shows that Love was at least a competent songwriter in his own right. The instrumentation is equally primitive, mostly acoustic guitar and harmonica, evoking a campfire singalong, along with piano, drums and steel guitar.
The whole track is surprisingly pleasant, for a first solo songwriting attempt, but it could have been better — the song was first recorded three years earlier, and that version (unreleased but widely bootlegged) is in 4/4 rather than waltz time. Once one has heard this earlier version, the version on Holland sounds slightly ungainly in comparison, with the stresses falling less gracefully than on the original.
California Saga: The Beaks Of Eagles
Songwriter: Al Jardine, Lynda Jardine and Robinson Jeffers
Lead vocalist: Al Jardine and Mike Love
The second part of the California Saga is unique in the Beach Boys' catalogue, though it points the way stylistically towards some of Jardine's later work.
It's almost two separate songs in itself, in fact. In what, for want of a better term, we can call the verses, we have the ascending/descending C-minor piano arpeggios (with a descending bass) that started Big Sur, along with some Morricone-esque flute from Charles Lloyd. Over this, Love recites, in three sections, The Beaks Of Eagles, a poem by far-right-wing environmentalist poet Robinson Jeffers, about how in the lifetime of one eagle human civilisation could change utterly, and how yet ultimately humans are constrained by their natures just as much as the eagles are.
The choruses, meanwhile, are in C major, built around yet another ascending/descending bassline, and feature Jardine, singing new lyrics to a conventional melody, over a guitar/bass/piano/drums/flute backing.
The thing that most people listening to this will notice now is that it is the first time Jardine uses a style which he uses consistently in his later songs, of having someone speak or recite poetry over part or all of a song (see especially the Tidepool Interlude on his solo album A Postcard From California , but also California Energy Blues and Santa Ana Winds), and it's interesting to see this as a step towards that style from Jardine, probably inspired by the artistic success he'd had using The Road Not Taken for All This Is That (Robert Frost, the author of The Road Not Taken, was a contemporary of Jeffers and wrote on similar themes).
But what's more interesting is to compare the poem that inspired this piece, and which Love recites verbatim, with the interpolated material by the Jardines. Jeffers referred to himself as an 'inhumanist', and claimed that humanity was fundamentally unimportant to him, that he preferred nature to humanity. His poem, therefore, like much of his work, is an attempt to see things on an inhuman scale, to apply a perspective that one might call either realistic or misanthropic depending on one's own sympathies.
The chorus material, though, is all on the human scale — about death, and rebirth coming from it. The lyricist here (either Al or Mary Ann Jardine) is also writing about natural cycles, as Jeffers is, but on a human scale, and based in human needs and concerns. And despite the rather hippyish conclusion, there's a real sense here of how the need to acquire mineral wealth can destroy people's lives (the image of the dead mariners, shipwrecked while transporting limestone ore, ties in nicely both with the first two songs, but also with The Trader).
Fundamentally, while Jardine may have been inspired by Jeffers' poetry, their worldviews are incompatible. The writer of those chorus sections cares about human beings in a way that Jeffers doesn't, and while one may argue that in the grand scheme of things Jeffers' worldview is more correct, the worldview of the choruses is much more caring and decent.
California Saga: California
Songwriter: Al Jardine
Lead vocalist: Brian Wilson, Mike Love and Al Jardine
The second single off Holland was this song, the last part of California Saga, and with good reason. Easily the most commercial thing Jardine has ever written on his own, this is an updating of California Girls for the 1970s country-rock era, keeping Love's nasal voice and the Tumbling Tumbleweeds bass-line (here played on Moog), but using acoustic guitar, harmonica (apparently played by Brian Wilson) and banjo rather than a Wall Of Sound orchestra.
Musically, it's a simple song, just using the chords C, F and G, but it communicates a feeling of relaxed joy in nature that really does seem like a more mature version of the youthful ecstasy of California Girls. Out of the larger context of the California Saga, this is an unpretentious and unambitious song, but all the better for it.
Despite its relative lack of commercial success (barely scraping the top 100 in the US, though reaching the lower reaches of the top forty in the UK), this has remained a fan favourite, and was the only solo Jardine composition (and, other than All This Is That, the only one for which he was primary songwriter) to appear on the career-spanning Good Vibrations: Thirty Years Of The Beach Boys box set. Jardine returned to the song on his 2010 solo album A Postcard From California, remaking it with David Crosby, Stephen Stills and Neil Young providing harmony vocals, and the song also became a regular in the setlists of the Beach Boys' 2012 reunion tour.
The Trader
Songwriter: Carl Wilson and Jack Rieley
Lead vocalist: Carl Wilson (with Justyn Wilson saying "Hi")
The Trader is Carl Wilson's primary songwriting contribution to the Holland album, and the last new song he would bring to the band until LA (Light Album) in 1979, so it's a good job that it's a good one.
The song breaks into two halves, with little connection between them, either musically or lyrically. The first half is possibly the most overtly political thing the Beach Boys ever recorded (albeit it is a condemnation of acts carried out by people who were long-dead). Over a piano-led rock background, Wilson sings about the colonisation of the Americas, the genocide of their native population, and the way the land had been 'civilised'. It's Rieley's most straightforward lyric, and also his best. It also manages to tie in with the themes of sea travel, America, and nature in opposition to industrial civilisation that permeate the whole of the album.
But then, almost exactly half-way through the song, the key changes from G to C, the prominent piano drops out to be replaced by sighing backing vocals and tinkling Moog, and the lyric goes from concrete to utterly abstract, as the song turns into something closer to Carl Wilson's songs from Surf's Up. Instead of "Trader found the jeweled land was occupied before he came/By humans of a second look who couldn't even write their names", the lyrics suddenly become "Embracing together, like the merging streams, crying dreams".
Frankly, it shouldn't work — this song sounds exactly like something that's been bolted together from two different ideas, with no real thought as to how the two sections actually interact. Yet it does work, mostly through sheer chutzpah, but also through an absolutely remarkable vocal performance from Carl Wilson, who goes from a strained, pained vocal near the top of his range in the rock section to a softer, gentler, reassuring vocal for the second, mellow section. Somehow, the result is actually better than the sum of the parts, though there's no earthly reason why it should be. It works because Wilson and Rieley say it works, and because they both had enough talent at this point to do something as ambitious as this.
The song became a regular in the band's setlist for much of the rest of the 1970s, even as the rest of the set became increasingly dominated by hits, and was a favourite with crowds, again thanks largely to Carl Wilson's vocal performance.
Leaving This Town
Songwriter: Carl Wilson, Blondie Chaplin, Ricky Fataar and Mike Love
Lead vocalist: Blondie Chaplin
A tedious song that unfortunately merges the worst aspects of both Carl Wilson's and the Flame team's writing, this plods along based on slow, steady piano chords in much the same style as Feel Flows, and has a simple chord sequence (alternating between I, V, i and v in two keys a tone apart) with little of interest about it. Then the melody over the top stays, like all the Chaplin/Fataar material, in a narrow range, and consists mostly of long, held notes.
Once the song gets to the two minute long Moog solo, it takes a great deal of effort for the listener to keep awake, and the lyrics are enough of a formless mess (a case of too many cooks, one suspects) that there is no emotional hook there to encourage one to listen for much longer. Easily the least interesting thing that Chaplin and Fataar had a hand in during their time with the Beach Boys, and the most pointless thing on the album (Beaks Of Eagles is worse, but it's an ambitious failure, while this seems to have been made with no greater ambition than filling six minutes of vinyl).
Only With You
Songwriter: Dennis Wilson and Mike Love
Lead vocalist: Carl Wilson
In an unfortunate piece of sequencing, Leaving This Town is followed by another sedate, mellow song at a near-identical tempo, and the momentum of the album is killed stone dead. It's a shame because, unlike the previous song, this one really is worthwhile.
While Love and Dennis Wilson had a legendarily fractious relationship, their few songwriting collaborations (of which this is the only one to end up on a Beach Boys album rather than a solo release) show a deeper mutual sympathy, and Love's lyrics and Wilson's music here complement each other perfectly.
Musically, this is one of the simplest things Dennis Wilson had composed to this point, possibly because it wasn't written in collaboration with the more musically-sophisticated Daryl Dragon, and the only really interesting change is the one from Em/G to E7/G# (in a section that feels like it's in G, but which is in fact in the same key of D as the rest of the song) under the phrase "love had always had its ups and downs". However, the song's simplicity is its key — a direct lyric combined with simple changes gives this song a formal grace that is very different from the primal howl of many of Dennis' songs.
While Carl Wilson's vocal on this track has been almost universally praised, it doesn't quite work as well for me as for many others — while his vocal on the quieter verses is exemplary, he is a little mannered on the middle eight and tag (something that would become increasingly true of his vocals over later years). It's a very good performance, yes, but one is left wishing that Dennis had sung his own song, with his less technically perfect but more expressive voice.A version of the song with Dennis Wilson on vocals was released in 2008, on the Pacific Ocean Blue CD reissue, and will be discussed in the chapter on that album.
While it's not as perfect a song as Forever or God Only Knows, two songs it is clearly an attempt to emulate, it's still extremely good, and one of the best things on the album, and it makes one wish that Love and Dennis Wilson had been able to work together more often.
Funky Pretty
Songwriter: Brian Wilson, Mike Love and Jack Rieley
Lead vocalist: Carl Wilson, Al Jardine, Blondie Chaplin. Ricky Fataar and Mike Love
The only song, other than Sail On Sailor, contributed by Brian Wilson to the Holland project proper was this track on which he contributed nearly all the instruments (Carl Wilson added some guitar, and Fataar some percussion, but Brian played the drums as well as probably playing all the keyboard parts).
Musically, the song is not all that interesting as a song, but is fascinating as a pointer to Brian Wilson's musical direction at the time and for the next few years. The entire track is based around Moog, with Moog parts in three ranges (a squelchy, fuzzy bass part, a mid-range part in the same range as the piano, and a high counter-melody), with only the most rudimentary drum part and no real connection to conventional rock music at all.
While the song's title sums up the feel very well (the vocals have a great, soulful feel, while there's an ethereal beauty to the Moog parts), the lyrics as a whole are fairly pointless, combining the worst of both Rieley (pointless prettiness without any sense) and Love (an obsession with astrology, a long list of place names, and a slightly lecherous tone). The vocals, though, are extraordinary. For those playing along at home, Carl Wilson takes the verses (and the verse backing vocals), Jardine takes over on "where's my spark in the dark?", Fataar "Glow glow glow come on glow", Chaplin on "the funky pretty flame in my heart" and Love "me and my Pisces lady are apart."
On the second chorus, Chaplin sings "Cos it's a silent night in the sea", Jardine "and if you're cosmically conscious you'll see", Fataar "why she's a princess imparted to me" and Love "daughter of Neptune, the ruler of the sea". Carl Wilson takes the middle section with the listing of place names, and Chaplin takes the fade. The fade-out would be the perfect end for the album, but then we have…
Mt Vernon And Fairway (A Fairy Tale)
Songwriter: Brian Wilson (with Carl Wilson and Jack Rieley)
Lead vocalist: Jack Rieley (with Brian and Carl Wilson)
Possibly the most controversial thing the Beach Boys ever released, this is, depending on who you talk to, either one of Brian Wilson's greatest masterpieces or a sad record of a once-great talent's decline.
When the Holland album was being recorded, Brian Wilson was at a low ebb, mentally and creatively, and wanted little or nothing to do with the recording process. Instead, he found himself listening over and over to Sail Away by Randy Newman [FOOTNOTE:An absolutely wonderful album, which anyone who likes good songwriting should check out.].
He discovered that while he was listening to this, he was able to get into a creative mood, and wrote a fairytale, about a young prince who lived at Mount Vernon And Fairway (the address where Mike Love had grown up) and who, while alone in his bedroom, discovered a magic transistor radio, which normally played the music of Bach, but sometimes was possessed by "the Pied Piper from the faraway land of night", whose music was unlike anything the prince had ever heard.
Unsurprisingly, when he presented this fairytale to the other band members and suggested it go on the album, their reaction was not hugely enthusiastic, and Brian was apparently so discouraged that he didn't finish the story (Jack Rieley apparently supplied the rather abrupt ending, as a result). Nonetheless it was agreed to package the result as a 7 inch single with the album (it appears as a bonus track on CD releases), and the finished piece is one of the most interesting, ambitious, and beautiful things Wilson has ever created.
Rieley narrates the story, which is clearly the work of someone who is not especially articulate, but which makes up for in emotional honesty what it lacks in craft, while under it we have electronic sound effects, piano music, and snatches of vocal music, mostly repeated lines ("Pied Piper, I'd better get back in bed," "I'm the Pied Piper in the radio", "Dom dom King dom"). The effect is somewhere between Peter And The Wolf and Nilsson's The Point, with tiny moments of beauty that are never developed into full songs, but drift away like someone tuning the radio to another station.
The music itself has had more appreciation since it was released, without the spoken narration and sound effects, as Fairy Tale Music on the Good Vibrations: Thirty Years Of The Beach Boys box set, but while the story is not the work of someone with any great skill in language, it's still joyful and perfectly conveys the wonder of a lonely teenager, sat in his room listening to the radio, hit from out of the blue with music only he can hear, more wonderful and exciting even than Bach.
The Beach Boys On CD: Carl And The Passions (So Tough)
Carl & The Passions feels very much like the work of a totally different band from the one that recorded Surf's Up, and that's because to a great extent it is.
After Dennis Wilson damaged his hand and could no longer play drums, he moved to the front of the stage and became a co-frontman with Mike Love. This left an opening on the drum stool, and Carl Wilson suggested that two members of The Flame, a South African band who he had been producing for Brother Records, should join the touring band.
The addition of Blondie Chaplin (on guitar and bass) and Ricky Fataar (on drums) changed the sound of the band immensely, as one would expect from adding two black South African musicians to a band that was the quintessential whitebread American band. The band then changed even more with the departure of Bruce Johnston, part-way through recording this album. The circumstances around Johnston's departure remain unclear, although it seems to have been due to a clash between Johnston and Jack Rieley. Rieley saw the band as two factions — the Wilson brothers, who were interested in making interesting, creative music, and Love, Johnston and Jardine, who weren't.
Whether this was true or not, the addition of two proteges of Carl Wilson, and the departure of Johnston, definitely brought the band more in line with Rieley's vision. The resulting album is much more R&B flavoured than anything the band had done since Wild Honey, but shows little group unity (the fact that the back cover photo has Brian Wilson crudely pasted into a shot of the rest of the group says much about the state of internal relations in the band at the time). Essentially, this is an album of four singles — two rockers by Brian, two Love/Jardine songs about meditation, two Flame tracks, and two Dennis Wilson ballads — that could be the work of four different bands. Carl Wilson is, largely, the common denominator, working with everyone to get their tracks into shape, and it's because of his role as de facto leader at this point that the album is named Carl & The Passions, after a name under which an early high-school version of the band had performed.
Carl Wilson is, in fact, the only Beach Boy to appear on every track on the album, but to a large extent there's a coherent band playing the backing tracks, with a core band of Carl Wilson, Chaplin, Fataar and Billy Hinsche (Carl Wilson's brother-in-law, and keyboard and guitar player in the touring band). The production credit for the album reads "produced by the Beach Boys (especially Carl Wilson)", although the two Dennis Wilson tracks were actually produced by Dennis Wilson and Daryll Dragon, for an earlier, abandoned project.
While the album never hits the heights of Surf's Up or Til I Die, it's actually the band's most consistently good album since Friends, which makes it all the more annoying that the record was hamstrung by a bizarre marketing decision.
Part of the band's contract with Warners had specified that they would complete the Smile album and release it, and it was originally intended that it be as a double-album set with this album. However, without Brian Wilson's collaboration, Carl Wilson was unable to get the Smile tapes into a releasable state. Instead, it was decided to release Carl & The Passions as a two-disc set along with a reissued Pet Sounds, the rights to which had reverted to the band.
This meant that the music on the album had to stand direct comparison with what was generally regarded as their best ever work, as well as annoying long-time fans who had to buy a second copy of an album they already owned and putting off new listeners who didn't want to listen to six-year-old music. The end result was that Carl & The Passions became the least critically successful work of their post-1967 career to date, despite its generally strong quality.
Brian Wilson, Carl Wilson, Dennis Wilson, Al Jardine, Mike Love, Blondie Chaplin, Ricky Fataar, Bruce Johnston (uncredited)
You Need A Mess Of Help To Stand Alone
Songwriter: Brian Wilson and Jack Rieley
Lead vocalist: Carl Wilson
A rewrite by Rieley of an unreleased Brian Wilson song called Beatrice From Baltimore, this isn't much of a song in itself, consisting mostly of just I, IV and V chords, with a brief F-G7-A7 rise on the chorus line being the only break from the home key of G. The melody is trite, and the lyrics don't say very much.
The performance and arrangement are another matter, though. Carl Wilson's lead vocal here is just extraordinary, consisting of a near-perfect double-tracked 'clean' lead (one track in the centre channel and one panned slightly to the right), along with, in the left channel (and sometimes itself doubled), an incredibly gruff, barked version of the same part that must have been hell for his vocal cords, and which manages to keep the same exact pitch and phrasing throughout while singing in a completely different voice. (There is also, sometimes, right on the edge of hearing, another 'gruff' voice, which might be bleed-through from an early take or dummy vocal, and which I couldn't swear isn't Brian Wilson singing). He then uses yet another, sweeter, voice for the "she don't know" sections of the song. It's an astonishing, virtuosic, vocal performance, and one that is utterly unlike anything he'd ever done before. The Beach Boys have here turned from a pop band into a rock band, and amazingly they do it rather well.
The instrumental arrangement benefits enormously from the musical abilities of Chaplin and Fataar. The Flame had been a band whose music was halfway between soul (they started as a soul covers band) and Beatles pastiche (it's no coincidence that Fataar was later chosen by Neil Innes as the drummer for his Beatles parody group The Rutles), and here we have the band playing with a groove they've never really played with before — the difference between this and the lumbering attempt at rock that is Student Demonstration Time is revelatory — while there is some gorgeous George Harrison-style slide guitar added on top of the more normal rock guitar.
Then on top of this we have some lightning-fast double-time picked banjo, played by legendary bluegrass musician Doug Dillard, in another example of how the band were starting to integrate folk and country instruments into their musical blend.
The whole thing works entirely because of the level of attention paid to details of arrangement and performance, for what is at root a rather lacklustre song. On the other hand, as a statement of intent, this works — it sounds absolutely nothing like "the Beach Boys" as they were in the mind of the public, and so it was chosen as the lead-off single for the album, though unsurprisingly it flopped.
Here She Comes
Songwriter: Blondie Chaplin and Ricky Fataar
Lead vocalist: Ricky Fataar and Blondie Chaplin
Unsurprisingly, the first Chaplin/Fataar song on a Beach Boys album sounds utterly unlike the Beach Boys, and rather a lot like The Flame. A simple, rather plodding country-rock track heavily influenced by The Band and George Harrison (it sounds like Old Brown Shoe was a distant influence), this is the kind of thing a thousand bands were doing at the time, with lyrics like "crazy woman can you see/that I'm giving to you can you dig me?"
That's not to say it's unpleasant, however — it's a very, very competent example of its genre, and very enjoyable to listen to. It's just unoriginal.
The most noticeable thing about this song is how well Chaplin and Fataar fit with the Beach Boys vocally. While Johnston's voice never fit the band's family blend, Chaplin especially has a voice that sounds spookily like Carl Wilson at times, and sometimes also has something of Jardine's resonance. His singing style is more soul-influenced than theirs is, but he (and to a lesser extent Fataar), sounds like a Beach Boy, in a way that neither Johnston or David Marks ever really did.
He Come Down
Songwriter: Brian Wilson, Al Jardine and Mike Love
Lead vocalist: Mike Love, Blondie Chaplin, Al Jardine and Carl Wilson
Another piano-based song based on I-IV and I-V changes, this is very much a musical cousin of You Need A Mess Of Help, but here the music is in a gospel style — a style which the band had never really explored before, but which they suit perfectly. Over a backing track of just piano, organ and handclaps, the band are allowed to shine with what is easily the most impressive vocal performance of the album, with each vocalist allowed to sing freewheeling gospel vocal lines over a unison chant of "dit dit, you know I believe it", with a break for a mass choral "yes I believe it" which is just spellbinding.
The only flaw with the track is the lyrics, which seem to be trying to teach a syncretic Christian Hinduism, in which both Jesus and the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi are avatars of Krishna, or something. However the lesson here is simply that one doesn't turn to the Beach Boys for theology lessons. Musically, this is spectacular.
Songwriter: Brian Wilson, Jack Rieley and Tandyn Almer
Lead vocalist: Carl Wilson
And side one of the album finishes with the third and last Brian Wilson contribution to the album (as well as the only song on which Johnston appears). Another simple, riffy, R&B-flavoured rock song, this one had a history going back almost nine years at the time it was recorded, having started life in the early 60s as All Dressed Up For School (a track that remained unreleased until 1990) before then becoming the Sunflower-era outtake I Just Got My Pay. This final version had lyrics about a favourite hem-hem masseuse of Brian's acquaintance, before Rieley and Tandyn Almer (the writer of, among other songs, Along Comes Mary for The Association) got hold of it and added some vaguely hippyish lyrics to it.
This side of the album has proved, if nothing else, that the Beach Boys really could work as a rock band in the early-70s mode. While this song does not admit of much analysis, it's a wonderful record, and the song stayed in the band's setlist for several years. It's also a mainstay of Brian Wilson's solo shows, and was played regularly during the band's fiftieth anniversary reunion tour in 2012.
Hold On Dear Brother
Songwriter: Blondie Chaplin and Ricky Fataar
Lead vocalist: Blondie Chaplin
The second song by the Flame members on the album is cut from the same cloth as the first, but is, if anything even more obviously influenced by The Band — it's hard not to imagine Levon Helm singing lead on this even while it's playing.
Harmonically, this is extremely simple, being almost entirely based around a doo-wopish vi-IV-I-V progression, with the only real musical spot of interest being in the chorus, where the song changes from its slow waltz time into alternating bars of fives and sixes.
This is certainly not a bad track in any way, although it does rather outstay its welcome at nearly five minutes, but it has little to do with the Beach Boys other than Carl Wilson's backing vocal part, and it could have been made by any of a thousand bands at the time. Pleasant enough, but inessential and inconsequential. Some nice slide guitar by Red Rhodes isn't enough to let the track stand up to repeated listens.
Make It Good
Songwriter: Dennis Wilson and Daryl Dragon
Lead vocalist: Dennis Wilson
This, on the other hand, is half the length of the previous song but an absolute revelation. For some time, Dennis Wilson had been working with Daryl Dragon, the band's touring keyboardist (who would later find fame as The Captain in The Captain And Tennille), but other than one Tim Hardin-influenced single (released under the name Dennis Wilson And Rumbo) nothing from their collaborations had been released, thanks to the disagreements over the tracklisting for Surf's Up. This track and Cuddle Up were both originally intended for a Dennis Wilson solo album, but later completed for this project.
Here, for the first time, Dennis Wilson has found his own voice. His previous work, while often approaching greatness, had always been in his brother's style — Forever, for example, could as easily have been Brian's work as Dennis'.
This, on the other hand, sounds like nothing the band had ever done before. Dennis' song (and it is mostly Dennis' song, Dragon mostly assisting with the arrangement) owes as much to Wagner as to Brian Wilson, and has simple, impressionistic lyrics, with only a few words per line, over a huge, sweeping, string arrangement, with the vocals croaked in a broken voice that would be Dennis' trademark from here on in.
It should, frankly, be awful — on paper it sounds like the worst kind of overblown 70s pretentious nonsense. But it works, and it works absolutely. This is Dennis Wilson finally showing the same kind of musical honesty as his brother, and just like Brian Wilson he manages to convince absolutely. The difference in styles is the difference in the two men's personalities — while Brian's music, like the man himself, is quiet, diffident, and slightly off-kilter, Dennis' music has his own characteristics — extreme, passionate, completely over-the-top. By all accounts Dennis Wilson was a man with little control of his emotions, who had higher highs and lower lows than any of his bandmates, and those large emotions need a large musical canvas to paint on.
Simply gorgeous.
All This Is That
Songwriter: Mike Love, Al Jardine and Carl Wilson
Lead vocalist: Carl Wilson, Al Jardine and Mike Love
This, meanwhile, is a rare attempt at genuine artistic growth from Love and Jardine (Carl Wilson apparently came up with the vocal arrangement, for which he got his portion of the songwriting credit — he also produced the backing track, which features only him, Chaplin and Fataar).
Harmonically extremely simple (a chorus based on Imaj7-IVmaj7, with a verse going Imaj7-ii7-V7, about as simple as it can get), the beauty of this song is entirely in the sound and feel of the track, with some of the best vocals the band have ever done.
The song was originally written by Jardine, based on Robert Frost's poem The Road Not Taken , but Love and Jardine later combined this influence (in the chorus line "two ways have I/both traveled by/and that makes all the difference to me") with inspiration from the Upanishads (the core religious texts of Hinduism) as interpreted by the Maharishi.
Love, in particular, clearly thought this was an important message for the band to convey, and turns in possibly the best vocal performance of his life on the verses (subtly shadowed by Jardine on the first verse), but the real highlight of the track — and of the album, comes with the tag, as Carl Wilson goes higher into his falsetto than he ever did before or since (it may be the only time he actually goes into true falsetto on a studio recording) singing "Jai guru dev" [FOOTNOTE Roughly, this translates to "victory to the great teacher", where "the great teacher" can mean both a higher, more spiritual level of one's own mind, and can also (for those who, like Love, follow the principles of Transcendental Meditation) mean the specific person who trained the Maharishi.], while Mike sings it in the bass register like a mantra. It may be the single finest vocal moment on any Beach Boys record.
This song clearly means a lot to Love, who regularly includes it in sets by his touring version of the Beach Boys, and it was also a highlight of the 2012 reunion tour.
Cuddle Up
Songwriter: Dennis Wilson and Darryl Dragon
Lead vocalist: Dennis Wilson
And the final song is another one that was originally intended for Dennis' solo album (where it was originally going to be titled Old Movie), and one of the best things he ever wrote. Based roughly around a melodic idea from Brahms' Lullaby, this actually has a lot of harmonic similarities with Forever — both start their verses with the simple pastiche-baroque idea of having a descending scalar bassline, while keeping as many notes in the rest of the chord as possible the same — but unlike Forever this then goes into a B section ("Your love, your love…") which reverses this. A pedal note of C is kept while a triad progresses upwards through a scale (C-Dm7/C-Cmaj7-F) but then the inevitable progression upwards takes us up and out of the home key altogether, as we keep progressing up by tones to the climax ("honey…I'm in love"), which drops us briefly back to the C chord for a second but which ends up with us in the new key of B-flat , a full tone down from where we started.
It's a progression which absolutely works, and makes sense, but is completely counterintuitive, and has the song building to an almost orgasmic peak before collapsing down into a post-coital doze.
While it has more Beach Boys involvement than the previous Dennis track (both Carl and Blondie can be heard with very prominent backing vocal lines), this is still a Dennis Wilson solo track in all but name, and points the way forward to the style he would use for his solo work in the latter part of the decade. While the Wagnerian pomp of Dragon's string arrangements is less appropriate here than on Make It Good, it still works, and this track manages to be the perfect close to an album which, despite all its inconsistencies, is one of the best the band ever produced.
This Week's Spotify Playlist – The Beach Boys
Normally, when I do my spotify playlists, I put in a mix of tracks by different artists in different styles. Today's playlist, on the other hand, is a little different, in that it's entirely made up of the music of the Beach Boys.
The Beach Boys are one of my very favourite bands – possibly my very favourite, though there are several bands that could compete with them – but I've had great difficulty explaining the appeal to people. Individual Beach Boys albums are often patchy, some of the music I love by them is quite quirky, and people also associate them with their early hits.
So I've put together a playlist of music by them that I think would appeal to any music lover, that's not too difficult to get into, but also isn't Barbara Ann. If you're a music-lover at all, and have never really checked out the Beach Boys, then please listen to this – it will open your eyes.
Meant For You from Friends is a gorgeous little thirty-second song by Brian Wilson and Mike Love that I think should open every compilation ever.
Surf"s Up from Surf's Up is a song I've written about several times before, and which I consider possibly the greatest song ever written. Written in 1967 by Brian Wilson and Van Dyke Parks, and cobbled together in 1971 by Carl Wilson from fragments of Smile sessions and a 1967 solo Brian Wilson piano demo, with a new vocal by Carl over the first half of the track, this somehow managed to work superbly. If you can hear Brian singing "a choke of grief, heart hardened I, beyond belief a broken man too tough to cry" without choking up then you've a tougher heart than I.
It's About Time from Sunflower is a fantastic 70s rocker, primarily written by Dennis Wilson, with band members Al Jardine and Carl WIlson and someone called Bob Burchmann. The lyrics are, as often with the Beach Boys in the 70s, pseudo-spiritual drivel, but the lead vocals (by Carl Wilson) and backing track are astounding – there's a bootleg track that just isolates the percussion for this (played, I think, by the great Earl Palmer) and that's great on its own.
Til I Die from Surf's Up is possibly the saddest song ever written. Written by Brian Wilson, one of his few solo songwriting credits, the lyrics are almost haiku-like, but what gets me every time is the cheerfully-resigned way Brian sings "I've lost my way, hey hey hey" in a song that's about crippling depression.
Busy Doin' Nothin' from Friends is another Brian Wilson solo song, but while it shares the childishly simple lyrics and fiendishly complex chords of the previous song, it's the polar opposite in terms of mood – an uptempo, cheerful bossa nova with lyrics which include directions to his house.
Heroes & Villains from Smiley Smile is another song originally written for Smile – this, Surf's Up, Cabinessence and Wonderful were supposedly written in one night, the first night Wilson and Parks ever wrote together – if this is true, then that must have been the most productive night's work in songwriting history.
Please Let Me Wonder from The Beach Boys Today! is one of the earliest songs in this bunch, from late 1964, and is the first time in this playlist you'll hear the theme that Brian Wilson keeps coming back to over and over, of being a weak man, aware of his own limitations, in love with someone unattainable and perfect but who somehow loves him anyway – many of these songs border on goddess-worship. Brian Wilson was originally credited as sole writer of this, but Mike Love won co-writer credit in a lawsuit in the 1990s.
Marcella from Carl & The Passions (So Tough) is a rewrite by then-manager Jack Rieley and songwriter Tandyn Almer of one of Brian Wilson's songs, about a 'masseuse' of his acquaintance. Nicer than the original version, from ten years earlier, which had the chorus "All dressed up for school/ooh what a turn-on"…
Don't Talk (Put Your Head On My Shoulder) from Pet Sounds may be the best love song ever written – it's customary at this point to point out that the bass part under 'listen to my heart beat' sounds like a heartbeat, but I'd rather point out the little string section straight after that. Brian wrote the music and Tony Asher the lyrics.
This Whole World from Sunflower is another Brian Wilson solo composition, sung fantastically by Carl. This goes through more key changes in its under two minutes than many whole albums do…
All This Is That from Carl & The Passions (So Tough) is a gorgeous song written by the three least-talented songwriters from the original lineup of the band – Carl, Al and Mike. The lyrics are the usual early-70s meditative drivel – Mike writing about Transcendental Meditation – but the sound of the track is gorgeous, especially Carl's soaring falsetto singing 'jai guru dev' over Mike's low bass mumbling of the same words.
Don't Worry Baby from Shut Down Vol 2 is another example of the goddess-worship (with lyrics by Roger Christian), and also an example of how you can tell the truly great bands because everyone knows their B-sides (this was the B-side to I Get Around). It's also, even though it's a guitar-based recording, a song that could only have been written by a piano player. Listen to the arrangement of the vocals on the choruses – the independently moving falsetto and bass lines, with the three-part block harmony in the middle. That's what you'd do if you're playing the piano – play the bass vocal part with the left hand (Wilson's always played piano in a left-handed manner, with most of the interesting stuff going on in the bass parts), block out the chords with the right hand, and sing the falsetto part over the top. An example of how form can follow function even when you move away from the original tools.
Break Away, a non-album single now on the Friends/20/20 twofer CD, is at first listen just a cheery little pop song. When you listen more closely, it's clearly the song of someone trying to overcome mental illness ("When I lay down on my bed/I hear voices in my head… And here's the answer I found instead/found out it was in my head"). What makes it more disturbing is that 'Reggie Dunbar', Brian Wilson's co-writer on this, was actually Murry Wilson, the father whose abuse contributed to Wilson's illness.
Sail On, Sailor from Holland is a song with many writers, based around a demo by Brian Wilson and Van Dyke Parks. As close to soul as the Beach Boys ever get, Blondie Chaplin (a South African musician who was with the band for three albums) does a wonderful job on the vocals.
God Only Knows from Pet Sounds is a song you may well have heard before. Listen to it again anyway. This was another B-side incidentally. Lead vocals Carl Wilson, lyrics Tony Asher, music Brian Wilson.
Time To Get Alone from 20/20 is another Brian Wilson song, originally written for Redwood, the band that became Three Dog Night – the longing to get 'away from the people' is another recurring subject in Brian's songwriting.
Guess I'm Dumb isn't actually a Beach Boys song at all, but a song Brian Wilson wrote (with Russ Titelman) and produced for Glenn Campbell, who had toured with the Beach Boys for a few months in Brian's place after Brian became too mentally unwell to tour, and who was a session musician on many of the band's records (this was before he had his own huge hits). Wilson's wife's band The Honeys sing backing vocals, and the same backing musicians who played on most of Pet Sounds play on this.
And finally Wonderful from Smiley Smile is another song written for Smile. This is a gentle, organ-based remake with a rather bizarre middle section, and a stunning vocal from Carl Wilson. Written by Brian Wilson and Van Dyke Parks.
Please take a listen and let me know what you think…


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A Conversation with John Jack Anderson, Occupy Photojournalist (UPDATE)
7:58 pm in Uncategorized by Kit OConnell
UPDATE: John Anderson will join us on the FDL Book Salon on March 30!
More: See John Anderson's recent collaboration with the Austin Chronicle's Michael King: "Fun And Games With Stratfor"
John Jack Anderson has decades of experience as a photojournalist. As part of the Austin Chronicle team, he conducted a long study of Occupy Austin from its first beginnings till the point when its activity waned two years later. He continues to be a fixture at local protests, and during the height of Occupy was our embedded reporter — someone activists trusted enough to tip off about direct actions and civil disobedience before they happened, even in those paranoid days of police infiltration and provocation.
Though the Chronicle published a continuous photo gallery, Jack Anderson has just collected the best of his coverage into a pair of photo books: In Search Of A Revolution, and the shorter Occupy Austin: The Encampment Months. Both are available as vivid, full-color printed editions, but Revolution is also available as an inexpensive iBook and .pdf.
Anderson has a sharp eye and caught many funny, chaotic and even tragic moments. The books contain both large events like marches and arrest, but also general assemblies, tent city life, and play. Revolution also documents his photos of the undercover Austin Police Department officers who infiltrated the movement — a special glossary in the back shows where to find each known officer in each photo in the book.
Of course I'm partial to the book in part because it contains so many great photos of my friends, myself, and all that we accomplished from the moment that first tent went up on the steps of Austin City Hall right through all the months we continued gathering and acting despite eviction. But anyone interested in the life of social justice movements and the use of public spaces should get a copy.
Though Anderson is an unapologetic supporter of Occupy's goals, he stood at just a step removed from the rest of us citizen (gonzo) journalists in the camps with our tweets and streams. His loving outsider's view of this uprising should not be missed. From occupiers raised in chants and song to the faces of police as they swing a baton or fist, there will be much that lingers in your memory here.
I sat down with Jack recently to talk about his experiences at Occupy and the new books.
Kit O'Connell, Firedoglake: Tell me a little of your background before Occupy.
John Anderson: I started getting into activist photography when I lived in Washington, D.C., as a photo student. There's always a protest, march, rally or something in D.C. It made for easy assignments. My first photograph that was published in 1986 when Reagan bombed Libya. I went down to the White House and it got published in the paper and I got hooked on that.
The intentions of the Occupy movement really got my attention. It was something I'd been waiting for, for years. It was trying to get at some of the root causes — capitalism — of the structural issues in our society. Instead of chasing environmental issues over here, and education issues over there, Citizens United — instead of all those separate issues, Occupy wanted to bring them all together to strike at the root, which to me was too much corporate power in our government and the resulting inequality.
I wanted to go to Occupy Wall Street but just couldn't manage it, but then of course the movement spread and came here to Austin and I thought 'great!' Now I can document Occupy without having to go to New York. At the same time, the Chronicle started putting together photo galleries for the website and we realized an ongoing encampment at City Hall would certainly be worthy of a photo gallery. At that point we were ambitiously hoping to update it every day, but you were having general assemblies every day and marches every night, and everything else in between.
I loved the energy, the 24/7 aspect of it. If I were downtown and between assignments I could just go down to City Hall and hang out. You can't compare that to anything else, at least that I've covered. It started as an assignment and then became a labor of love. No one at the Chronicle expected it to go on for years!
FDL: Do you have any favorite moments from documenting Occupy?


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SPRINGFIELD, Ore. — Some University of Oregon business students are conducting a survey about Dorris Ranch in Springfield.
For their class project, they're trying to measure the public's awareness about the park.
They hope to come up with possible opportunities for the park.
People can take the survey until Feb. 23. They will be entered to win family passes to Splash! at Lively Park.


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Pagan Fire Show
Photograph by Konstantin Zavrazhin, Getty Images
A Russian pagan puts on a fiery show Saturday during Kupalo, a summer solstice festival held in a forest about 37 miles (60 kilometers) from Moscow.
(See "Summer Solstice 2010: Why It's the First Day of Summer.")
The first day of summer officially kicked off today at 7:28 a.m. ET, the beginning of the summer solstice and the longest day of the year in the Northern Hemisphere.
The summer solstice is a result of Earth's north-south axis being tilted 23.5 degrees relative to the sun, experts say. This tilt causes different amounts of sunlight to reach different regions of the planet over the course of the year. Today the North Pole is tipped closer to the sun than on any other day of 2010. The opposite holds true for the Southern Hemisphere, for which today is the winter solstice, the shortest day of the year.
Published June 21, 2010
Solstice Celebration Circle
Photograph by Konstantin Zavrazhin, Getty Images
Followers of Slavic neo-pagan religious movements gather in a Russian forest for a summer solstice 2010 celebration on Saturday.
The summer solstice is recognized and often celebrated in many cultures around the world—in both the past and present, experts say. For instance, Stonehenge in the United Kingdom has been associated with the winter and summer solstices for about 5,000 years.
(Pictures: "Summer Solstice Marked With Fire, Magic" [2008].)
Published June 21, 2010
Solstice Fire Jumper
Photograph by Konstantin Zavrazhin, Getty Images
Russian pagans jump over a ritual fire during a summer solstice 2010 celebration on Saturday.
At high noon on the first day of summer the sun appears at its highest point in the sky—its most directly overhead position—in the Northern Hemisphere. But that doesn't mean the first day of summer is also the hottest day of the year.
Earth's oceans and atmosphere act like heat sinks, absorbing and reradiating the sun's rays over time. So even though the planet is absorbing lots of sunlight on the summer solstice, it takes several weeks to release it. As a result, the hottest days of summer usually occur in July or August.
Published June 21, 2010
Druid King at Stonehenge
Photograph by Matt Cardy, Getty Images
A man dressed as Druid King Arthur Pendragon conducts a summer solstice 2010 sunset service near Stonehenge in the United Kingdom on Sunday.
Observers in the center of the standing stones can watch the summer solstice sun rise directly over the Heel Stone, which stands just outside Stonehenge's famous circle.
Published June 21, 2010
Pagan Solstice Dancer
Photograph by Konstantin Zavrazhin, Getty Images
A Russian pagan dances near a ritual fire during a summer solstice 2010 festival on Saturday.
While the summer solstice generally occurs on the same day in June every year, the date does change every once in a while. For example, in 2008 the summer solstice occurred on June 20.
Published June 21, 2010
Solstice Friendship Nest
Photograph by Niall Carson, PA Wire/AP
Summer solstice 2010 revelers sit in a "friendship nest" at the Body and Soul festival, held at Ballinlough Castle in County Meath, England, on Sunday.
The summer solstice has long been marked by cultures worldwide. The ancient Egyptians, for example, built the Great Pyramids so that the solstice sunset, when viewed from the Sphinx, sets precisely between two of the Pyramids.
Published June 21, 2010
Summer's First Sunrise
Photograph by Robert Atanasovski, AFP/Getty Images
The sun rises behind a rocky crest filled with astronomical markers at the Kokino observatory in Macedonia early on Sunday, the day before the summer solstice.
The 4,000-year-old astronomical observatory includes special stone markers used to track the movement of the sun and moon on the eastern horizon.
Published June 21, 2010
Indian New Year
Photograph by David Mercado, Reuters
Bolivian indigenous people celebrate sunrise during a winter solstice ceremony in Tiwanaku, about 44 miles (70 kilometers) from the capital of La Paz, on Monday.
In the Southern Hemisphere, the June solstice is the first day of winter, since that part of Earth is tilted farthest from the sun.The winter solstice coincides with the start of the New Year for South America's Aymara Indians.
Published June 21, 2010
Cloudy Summer Sunrise
Photograph by Kieran Doherty, Reuters
Thousands of druids and revelers witnessed a cloud-obscured sunrise Monday at Stonehenge on summer solstice 2010.
Many people make an annual pilgrimage to the ancient site, on England's Salisbury Plain, to celebrate the first day of summer.
Published June 21, 2010
The Future of Food
Why Food Matters
How do we feed nine billion people by 2050, and how do we do so sustainably?


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3 comments:
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One of our best memories yet! Have lived almost our entire lives here in San Diego, and have never seen the city look so beautiful! The folks at Barnstormer were extremely friendly. Would highly recommend that anyone add this experience to their life's bucket list! :)
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What a fun experience! My husband and I rode together and got lots of great photos and (GoPro) video. The staff was friendly and walked us through everything we needed to know, and the pilot let us know what we were seeing (and when he needed to change altitude, so we didn't freak out). We did the 50-minute ride, which took us out across the UCSD campus and over La Jolla, then all the way down the coast past PB, Mission Bay, Point Loma and Coronado (right over the bridge!). We hit all the San Diego coast highlights... a great experience, highly recommend!
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My boyfriend and I loved it! Everyone was super nice :)
The ride was awesome and the pilot was super cool! Great time and wonderful views. Will definitely do this again!
Wonderful experience! Would do it again. Well worth it. Pilot was excellent.
very aexciting,had a great time on doing this for the first time,its beatiful especially seeing san diego from the air.thats why they call it americas finest city.


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Indeed.com targets local online jobs market
PUBLISHED: 24 Sep 2013 00:05:38 | UPDATED: 24 Sep 2013 04:15:13PUBLISHED: 23 Sep 2013 PRINT EDITION: 24 Sep 2013CEO Rony Kahan says Indeed is taking 'Australia much more seriously today than we have before'. Photo: Louie Douvis
James Hutchinson
US-based online job ads search engine Indeed.com is boosting staff and resources in Australia in a bid to take on the domestic market, claiming it has already surpassed market mainstay SEEK in the number of domestic job ads.
Unlike typical job sites that rely on advertisers, the website takes job ads from other online job boards, recruitment firms and employers and presents them as search results in similar fashion to Google, promoting paid ads to the top of search results.
The company has been offering Australian job ads for four years but only opened an office in Sydney in May in order to customise the website for Australian visitors and attract ads directly from employers, including Telstra, Origin Energy and GlaxoSmithKline.
It now claims to have 130,000 job ads online available concurrently from 6500 separate sources, versus the 111,000 job ads current market leader SEEK reported in July this year.
"The product wasn't as good as it should've been [in Australia]," global chief executive Rony Kahan told The Australian Financial Review. "We're taking Australia much more seriously today than we have before."
Founded in 2004, Indeed operates in 50 countries. It sold to Japanese recruitment giant Recruit Co last October for an estimated price of $750 million to $1 billion. The company, which has 800 employees, now has 17 staff since opening in Sydney earlier this year and plans to grow the office as it expands the business.
Mr Kahan claimed the Australian site now attracted a million unique visitors per month, out of the 100 million visitors it receives to global sites.
SEEK, by comparison, reported 30 million total monthly visits to its Australian ads site in July, but did not specify unique visitors.
Mr Kahan said Indeed.com typically did not compete with online job boards like SEEK. It had partnered with Monster in the United States to receive job ads and advertising. However, Mr Kahan confirmed there were no plans to seek a similar partnership with SEEK in Australia.
"We don't include SEEK in our jobs, we've never tried to include them," he said. "I think they've said before that they don't want their jobs on any aggregators, so we've never tried."
SEEK reported record revenues and earnings last month for the 2013 financial year globally, but declines for its local business, citing lower volumes in job ads.
Chief executive Andrew Bassat said the company saw significant growth in domestic jobs because the online share of ads spend is only 63 per cent in Australia, versus 90 per cent in the more advanced United States market.
Mr Kahan said the domestic market was relatively strong.
"People say unemployment rates are really high, almost 6 per cent. If you go to any other country in the world. . . they would love to have unemployment at 6 per cent," he said.
"Although people here complain, from my perspective, it seems pretty good."
The Australian Financial Review


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Senior Member
I assume these are PBE changes correct? If so I don't know the full extent of the changes, but unless her QWE were nerfed, and arguably significantly so at that, than she is by no means dependent on her ult to perform. Naturally, her ult should do enough dmg to make it worthy of being an ult, however, the rest of her kit still deals significant damage and has low CD (especially that W). In a teamfight if she is not dying than her ult is likely going to be completely out damaged by worthwhile margin by the rest of her kit, unlike the old ultra ult dependent Kat who would win teamfights with just R and nothing else or lose them if her ult failed. Currently, Kat's ult isn't exactly desirable... generally to only be used as a last resort if your other abilities haven't made a kill... and really just to refresh CDs so you can use QWE again... The dmg on it is quite bad even as AoE and healing reduction.
Riot Pwyff
Player Communications
Pwyff, you just put a lot of work into an extremely long post that said almost nothing relevant. The only part that was at all addressing the point of this thread was:
Was I the only one who downvoted this OP's post? They didn't nerf Kat and buffed her ult, his logic is literally a pile of steaming sh*t. EDIT; This is like Darius players getting back the full reset and complaining about it. I don't get it.