Several drug-and-meditation addled men in their thirties singing about dating girls at an amusement park! A cover song, no less! This should be a complete disaster, and the fact that it actually works pretty well can only be attributed to the total singing conviction of Carl Wilson, who can somehow sell lines like “I took a ride on the shoopty shoop / The girl I sat with almost puked” or “And when she winked, I gave that girl a hug.” Somehow his delivery and the neat backup vocals (which do their best to assure us that yes, the rides are indeed running) even distract the astute listener from the creepy fact that this obviously middle-aged-sounding narrator has “taken a walk in the dark” to hit on women at an amusement park. We don’t want to think about that. We want to think about how his arms are flying up! Like a rocket ship! Down! Like a roll-er coast-er!

(Note that in trying to figure out who wrote the original “Pallisades Park,” I’ve come across this man. His game show experiments aside, you have to respect anyone who writes a plainly fake autobiography about being a secret CIA assassin in order to “make a point,” whatever point that may be, and this endears me significantly to his lyrics.)

I confess that in my book, I’ve amalgamated Carl and Al into one character. I had to. Both Carl and Al are engagingly bizarre, true and I’ve spent enough time obsessing over these matters to be able to write both pretty well, but they’re both a quiet kind of bizarre, and when compared to the full out crazy of your Brians, your Dennises, your Mike Loves, there’s no way it can work to have two quiet characters, and it’s far better to combine their eccentricities. When I really regret that decision is when I listen to a really, really good Carl song from a terrible part of Beach Boys history—notably, his lead on the crazy 1979 disco remake of “Here Comes the Night.” He is really working very, very hard through his singing to make that record into a good decision.

Carl Wilson in the latter-day Beach Boys is fascinating in the way Albert Speer is fascinating. Yes, he shouldn’t be in the situation he’s in, but he’s sure going to make the best of it!

I have little more to say about “Pallisades Park.” As far as songs about the fair go, this is about on par with “Amusement Parks USA” from the 1965 Summer Days and Summer Nights album. Eerily, the 1976 age-inappropriate cover song about amusement parks is actually more wholesome than the earlier song, cut when the band members were in their twenties, given the 1965 cut’s horrifying spoken word bridge, its references to snake women and to people burning to death in bumper cars, its quiet voices squeaking “Is it REAL?”

I like “The TM Song” because of its nostalgia factor. One of the most endearing, weird parts of the Beach Boys 1960s albums was always the weird spoken word skit used to fill out the running time of the record, sometimes staged, sometimes fly-on-the-wall style. (Notable entries in this genre: “Cassius Love vs. Sonny Wilson,” “Bull Session with the Big Daddy.” Actually, those may be the only entries in this genre.) At the time, the band members ranged in age from something like sixteen to twenty-four, and the wacky energy of “Hey guys, let’s just turn on the studio mics and talk and see what we get!” was kind of a chore to get through, but intriguing just for the weird lack of acting talent among the group, lines either sounding ridiculously wooden, so mired in weird accents or cartoony vocal stylings to matter, or terrifyingly deadpan (Brian.)

So it is nice that 15 Big Ones gives us the same kind of fun and inventive energy again, except this time all the band members are well over thirty, and they are using their cartoon voices to promote the life’s work of the Maharishi.

Notably, in the ostensibly-written-by-Brian “autobiography” Wouldn’t It Be Nice, the author makes the claim that this song came out of intensive therapy sessions with the sinister Dr. Landy, along with a series of songs about using up all the peanut butter, “blowjobs,” and apparently Johnny Carson. I buy that just because of how lackadaisical the lyrics are here. They are worth quoting:

Maharishi gave it to me
And I wondered if it’d set me free
And it did

and

Transcendental meditation should be part of your time
It’s simple, it’s easy as making this rhyme
Transcendental meditation really works for me good
More, much more than I thought it would

I can’t get over that ending and the way it wholly fails to convince me, and probably anyone, of the value in transcendental meditation. What would be comparable?

I used to think religion was all lies people’d say
But thanks to the Bhagavad Gita, I know it’s okay

The only way to heaven is Jesus’ precious blood
Burn in endless hellfire, or don’t, it’s all good

(Making up fake Beach Boys lyrics is always a good time, vis.)

The lyrics by themselves are plainly terrible, but their awful quality is much, much magnified by the sense of total conviction that a good rock and roll delivery can provide. That, plus the opening skit, plus the bridge part where the nature of meditation is described through tempo shifts, makes me unhesitatingly recommend “The TM Song” as a true highlight of 15 Big Ones. Seriously; this is good listening. It is largely downhill from here.

It has been a while since I have written in this. Part of the danger of doing any kind of large-scale ambitious project about the Beach Boys is that the very fact of writing about the Beach Boys curses such projects. Witness the fate of the late, lamented Dumb Angel webcomic. We can only hope that Brian broke the curse by releasing Brian Wilson Presents “SMiLE” in 2004, or that the upcoming November 1 Smile Sessions release will do the unsavory job at last.

But we are talking about “That Same Song.” It’s so goofy I can’t really dislike it, even though it’s an iffy Mike concept about how all world music is basically the same, marred by even iffier execution (Brian’s strangled roar of “One more miiiiiiile” is one of the more depressing moments in Beach Boys recorded history) and probably inaccurate musicology.

According to “That Same Song,” this is the history of rock music:

1. Gregorian chants (rhythm, rhyme)
2. Gregorian chants II (rhythm, rhyme + harmony)
3. Gospel choirs (rhythm, rhyme, harmony + influence of Jesus)
4. A rock style (all of the above + the Beach Boys!)
5. One more mile (all of the above + The Future)

Gee, WHAT PEOPLE ARE MISSING FROM THIS HISTORY OF ROCK MUSIC?

Also, do Gregorian chants even rhyme? I didn’t think they did, but then when researching this Tumblr post (oh God) I found the following, by St. Thomas Aquinas:

Panis angelicus
fit panis hominum;
Dat panis caelicus
figuris terminum:
O res mirabilis!
manducat Dominum
Pauper, servus, et humilis.

So okay, I guess Mike Love has taught me a little something I didn’t know about the history of music. Of course I don’t think Mike or Brian knew it either.

For all the really evident problems, there’s something irresistible about the “doo-be-doo” backing vocals, the weird little organ part just before the chorus, and the whole wacky concept. And really, if you think about songs like “Add Some Music to Your Day,” it’s not all that silly. That is a song about how even your dentist has music for you, and everyone likes music. This is at least some kind of stab at the question of where music comes from.

What I am starting to conclude, as I think about serious ways to address the tracks on 15 Big Ones, is that something about the Beach Boys makes people want to make excuses for them and their nutso latter-day excesses. It’s literally impossible to imagine someone getting into the Beach Boys due to “That Same Song,” and just how iffy it is stands out hardcore when you, say, switch the CD in your car player even to something like Smiley Smile/Wild Honey. Yet at the same time, “That Same Song” is one of their better tracks from this album. And it isn’t really *bad,* but look at the end of the last paragraph. I literally gave this song a pass because it occurred to Mike and Brian at some point to wonder about where music comes from, and to devote five minutes of thought to exploring and developing that concept. That is literally why I think this song is okay.

I like the idea of this being a dynamic in The Novel, this kind of radical doomed diminishing of expectations that starts to develop the more you hang around a given band. What causes it?

Liking this band is like being in a cult, but I can think of no other cult I would want to belong to.

The arrangement is cheesy, fakey, grating. Carl’s vocal is good for most of it, if a little by the numbers. Talk to me, he says, over and over. Talk to me.

Then, abruptly, the song is hijacked by the rest of the band singing “Tallahassee Lassie” in a menacing and harsh groupthink:

Comes from Tallahassee

She’s got a high-flyin’ chassis

Maybe looks a little sassy

But to me she’s real classy

It’s really uncomfortable and unpleasant and actually undermines every scant piece of good about the first part of the song. Talk to me, Carl says. And they do! And what they have to say is sexist and obnoxious and uncomfortable, and it makes you want to immediately stop playing the album.

The worst of the 15 Big Ones by a very wide margin.

Here’s what I love about Mike Love: he really seems to believe in his ideas. His icy blue eyes stare at you and burn ultimate conviction into your very soul. Thus we get “Everyone’s In Love With You,” a torch song to the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. Mike sympathizes with the Maharishi because although all the world loves him, he can’t have sex, as Mike and other human scum can. This is done with authentic feeling and tenderness, plus a lot of flutes and strings and Captain and Tenille backup vocals.

A useful comparison could be made between this and “Sexy Sadie.” Both songs have essentially the same lyrical content, but John Lennon thinks that “laying it down for all to see” is breaking the rules. In contrast, Mike Love thinks that promoting instant, guiltless karma for all the world merits universal love. In the one case, simplistic spiritual leaders are to be denounced, in the other, embraced. Who is correct??

I can’t comment on the music so much. The melody starts out being pretty, but then turns grating, obvious as we hit the end of each quatrain, and Mike Love chestnuts (“I tell you people,” “Part of you/heart of you”) lock into place like the gears of the TM industry. There’s something about the way moon so resolutely approaches June at the end of each and every quatrain that’s a bummer, like a favorite uncle pointing at the stars on an eerily warm summer night, far from city glare with the entire universe spread out above you, and he asks if you know the story of a certain constellation.

No! you say. Tell me!

God made that constellation, is all he says.

That’s what Mike Love’s rhymes are like in this song, and it wouldn’t be so frustrating if the start of these quatrains coupled with the music wasn’t consistently so good at opening up this vast space, creating this sense of strange tenderness, wonder, and devotion.

But honestly, Dennis’s drums are really good, at least toward the start of stanzas, the group vocals toward the end are a good fitting for Mike’s eerily sincere, sensitive lead performance, and the music has the aforementioned spacious, infinite quality—especially if you can do the equivalent of squinting with your ears and ignore the creepy disciple/master slant to the lyrics. It’s not too terrible for one of what looks like only about two tracks in the Beach Boys’ vast recording legacy that’s straight-up cradle-to-grave a Mike creation (the other being “Sumahama,” which I haven’t yet heard.) I figure if you just somehow erased the flute arrangements from human memory this would be a pretty great track.

It would be a pretty great track about how Mike thinks we should feel bad for the Maharishi because he can’t have normal sexual relationships.

I want someone to make a YouTube clip with this song set to astonishingly violent imagery from recent David Lynch films, but until we have that, here is this.

*

I am perhaps hampered by not knowing that much technically about music, and I can’t say in any smart-sounding way why the Dixie Cups version of “Chapel of Love” works so much better than Brian’s version. Maybe it has to do with the way the original song’s production hews shifts, dips, surges, and falls due to some kind of complicated relationship it has with the vocals. It is a song about a journey. We are going to the Chapel of Love, presumably crossing a lush meadow to do so, taking our time by the lake, etc. The melody has a clear destination but it isn’t afraid to wander and to loop, to reinforce itself when it needs to.

Listening the Beach Boys production of “Chapel of Love” is like looking at someone’s line art hacked out with the Photoshop lasso tool and pasted over a complicated photo to which a lot of filters are applied. The melody is still good, but you can’t really tell, because the melody and the background don’t seem to connect at all. The lead vocals are basically Brian Wilson doing bar karaoke (albeit enthusiastic bar karaoke), and the background is a tank of church bells, synths, and textures, approaching the Chapel of Love like black Panzers approaching Paris, tire tracks on the Dixie Cups’ garden path. Again I feel hampered by a lack of technical knowledge, but it sounds like there’s some kind of looping quality to the background that should really change when the chords change, and that doesn’t seem to change when the chords change.

I can’t decide if it’s a blessing or a curse that the background vocals are mixed so low as to be virtually inaudible, because what I can hear of them sounds like a goblin army, cackling at the atrocities it will perform. It sounds like they are going to desecrate the Chapel of Love.

A cover version of a song should try to cut through the context of the song, to own its contents somehow. Courtney Love singing “He Hit Me And It Felt Like A Kiss” is an interesting Spector cover. This is a song about how much Brian Wilson likes the song “Chapel of Love,” not a song about how we might ourselves want to find a fresh way to get there. This is not a good reason to record a cover song.

Still, the original song is hard to screw up totally, and the love and appreciation for the track is plainly there, if poorly expressed. These things carry this death march to the Chapel of Love farther than it perhaps ought to go. Or possibly my listening to these songs in my car literally every day is destroying my capacity to be objective about them.

(I can’t find the Beach Boys version of this on YouTube, so here’s the weirdo Spector version of the song, which sounds like it has the bells and at least some strange background vocal parts.)

The little woodwind and the nice piano is only part of what makes this one of the better of the 15 Big Ones, even given the fact that we start out listening to Mike Love’s lead for the third song in a row. Mike Love is like a cluster bomb; he must be carefully deployed to avoid international outrage. When he sings “Had to phone ya” over and over in the opening lines, DEFCON status drops a point and Security Council members knit their brows, loosen their ties, take long prayerful drinks of water. When he sings that “California’s not so far away” and the triumphant “Feel so good when you come on the line,” love parades spill nakedly into the streets of Prague; a thousand doves are released from a thousand cages; an evil man sings of redemption. It is good stuff!

The round robin vocals here are what make this track kind of a gem. Even though Carl and Dennis each get maybe ten seconds of solo vox time, it’s worth listening to this just for those performances; Carl gets to sing about his spirit and Dennis gets one of those great sustained Dennis notes. I don’t know what Al was doing while this was getting recorded (or I just can’t pick out Al’s voice so well), but it is a pretty good document of the band members who were actually related, and what the special superpower of each member happens to be. Even Marilyn gets to be on this one, or at least I assume that’s her saying “Hey, Brian!” on the fadeout. Her superpower is to put up with Brian!

(N.b., one could usefully compare the Beach Boys to the Royal Tenenbaums, in that Mike Love is Eli Cash, and this is the root of his struggle. One could not make many useful comparisons to the Royal Tenenbaums beyond this.)

And it’s hard to imagine another group that would try to pull off what the group almost pulls off on the bridge section, with a long group vocal chant solely consisting of the word “you.” The only real iffy part about this, I think, is the rough recording, the roughness of which becomes much more evident when the singers are literally just singing the same word over and over with a different pitch and inflection each time. It still almost works. It’s still this kind of over the top nutso emotionalism that only this band can do, because it seems not to know how nutso it is, or not to care. Brian writes the best lyrics because they have almost zero sense of boundaries, my favorite instance of this being “Could we, could we, could we get married? / I’m sick I’m sick I’m sick of going steady” on Love You’s “Mona,” or the time on the Friends album where he gives Beach Boys fans incredibly accurate directions to his house. Because he wants you to visit him! He will not come to you!

A good essay could be written on the number of times in post-Smile Beach Boys albums when Brian seriously addresses the logistical question of getting a girl to his house, or getting to a girl’s house. Graphs could be made about which years contain the most instances of such logistics, who goes to visit whom, whether a phone call precedes the journey, etc.

The most troubling moment on this track, though, is when Brian finally takes the lead on the outro, revealing his voice on a record for the first time since the 1973 Holland album (where if I’m not mistaken, all he really does is the cartoon voice of the Pied Piper from the Faraway Land of Night on the bonus EP), and providing through his totally destroyed voice the most powerful argument against smoking and cocaine one can muster. I have to believe this was a shock to hear in 1976, and it’s still a really jarring moment, even given the iffiness of the “you” chant immediately preceding his entry. Dennis’s voice gets bad as the group goes on, true, and for the same reason, but Dennis’s voice was never famous for being The Best Voice, the voice you think of when you think of the Beach Boys, the voice that made Kraftwerk decide to start a band, the voice of God speaking through dumb angel teenagers. God as ultimate manifest destiny hedonistic empire. That God.

A really dreadful but compelling mashup could be made between this and that Lady Gaga song.

Why would you ever call a song “It’s O.K.”? Seriously, why? This is shooting your song in the foot. What’s your new single called, guys? “Not Too Bad.” “Passable.” “We’re Trying.” “It Fills The Time Before Death.”

That said, this is a big improvement on “Rock and Roll Music.” The group vocals on the chorus are welcome, and if we can’t have Mike Love’s really good bass vocals in the foreground, the second best thing is when he’s shouting vapid stuff at you about how YOU MUST HAVE FUN, like you are in an internment camp of fun, and he is the guard wearing the turban.

The thing that is neat about 15 Big Ones is that it seems like the last time on a studio album that the entire band is actually involved in the proceedings, contributing to each other’s work, united under Brian’s veering stewardship. At their worst, this band is a group of five or six people who hate each other and should not interact. At their best, they are a group of five or six people who hate each other, yet find a way to sing together; at their best the Beach Boys point the way to some kind of hedonistic City on the Hill. Thus the rare Dennis/Mike collaborations are often my faves, and it’s Dennis who gets the enigmatic shout-out at the end of “It’s O.K.” He tells us to “Find a ride,” which is either a kind of low-key way of telling us we should do what Herr Love says and get to the beach right away, or of telling us we should find a woman to have sex with, which is almost the perfect capstone to Mike Love’s Summer Reich of Lemonade and Pleasure. Not only are we going to hit the road and shed our loads and tan our hides in the tide, but we are also going to exploit a young woman’s heart in our quest for the ultimate wave. Somehow Brian’s music makes this seem spiritually fulfilling.

This is a song about how having fun is not easy for us, but if we work hard and sacrifice, we, too, can go to the beach. This is kind of a incredible thing that has been created.

15 Big Ones was in theory Brian Wilson’s big return to form in the 1970s, accepting the premise that he’d ever really been away in a significant sense. Relatively speaking, yes: although Smiley Smile, Friends, and arguably Wild Honey were all pretty much Brian solo productions with some assists from Carl, Dennis, and occasionally others—whatever the credits read—the mad genius of the Beach Boys had been spending most of the early 1970s following other pursuits, mostly smoking, cocaine, and bed rest.

To fill the power vacuum, the other Beach Boys dutifully crowded into the studio they had built in Brian’s house to crack out the hits and flex their production muscle. (Imagine this: every day, all you’re doing is lying in bed trying to keep out self-doubt and sometimes the devil, and downstairs the relatives and friends whose success you were responsible for are trying to write better songs than yours. Every day, this is your world.) Each Beach Boy developed a style. Dennis had the lockdown on intense, emotionally borderline ballads. Carl blended the Wilson ear for sound with a love for bluesier, more soulful music and good instrumentation. Al descended into a personal nightmare of eerie novelty songs and high concept politicking. Bruce wrote a lot of gooey love songs and then phased out of the group to write hits for Barry Manilow. And Mike, although he basically wrote no music, still stepped up his game lyrically and turned his odes to, um, car ownership and meeting girls into odes to the noble history of California as a place where all people might own cars and meet girls. I guess.

The band’s democratic era came to a crashing end after a one-two punch: the release of Holland and the failure of the Caribou recording sessions that followed it to amount to anything releasable, and Capitol’s release of the 1974 greatest hits compilation Endless Summer. Since Capitol could only apparently only draw on the pre-Pet Sounds material in putting together the album, heavy on the surf & cars, the Beach Boys became forever frozen in time at their arguable peak, indisputably led by Brian Wilson.

Endless Summer was a massive hit and transformed the Beach Boys into one of the most popular live acts in America, albeit one that was generally discouraged from playing any material post-1967. Suddenly vast sums of money were on the table, all of them dependent on Brian Wilson being dragged out of bed and restored to his place at the head of the group. And this is exactly what happened, with a little bit of encouragement and love, and a lot of financial and spiritual exploitation by laughing psychotherapist Dr. Eugene Landy, who used his patented “twenty-four hour therapy” cult immersion tactics to take away Brian’s soul and replaced it with his own. Hurray! Brian Was Back! The hits were once again flowing through the pipeline, keeping the financial pistons of the music business pumping! Let’s celebrate our fifteen years as a commercial act—15 Big Ones!—with fifteen new songs of dubious quality! Let’s make a TV special! Let’s have John Belushi and Dan Akroyd drag Brian Wilson into the ocean, force him to surf in his bathrobe, broadcast the terror in his eyes as the waves consume him to a overjoyed nation! America’s Band!

This album has lingering bad vibrations. Brian seems not exactly present. Reportedly Carl and Dennis hated it. Even the liner notes on the Capital “two-fer” CD release admit that this is a bad album, “no Smiley Smile, or even Wild Honey.” Most of the songs are covers.

Mike Love leads off the album singing one of these, the B. Wilson-arranged version of Chuck Berry’s “Rock and Roll Music.” It became the band’s first Billboard Top 10 single since “Good Vibrations” ten years earlier. Why? How is that possible? John Lennon had the idea of covering it many, many years before, and better. The vocal arrangements are buried in the mix, but don’t sound as if they’d be much improved by being brought forward. Brian’s creepy 1970s synthesizer is rumbling around somewhere in the bass, making everything subtly horrifying. Worst, though, is Mike Love’s lead, which is competent enough, but I can’t separate it out from my sense of Mike Love as a person: the kind of insecure guy who responds to insecurity by condemning everything he doesn’t understand.

Enough of your acid alliteration, we hear him sing in these words. Enough of your crow cries, your cornfields, your vibrations and your ego death trips. Give me simple music. It is all I will dance to. The only aberrant behaviors I will cotton to are yogic flying and the occasional turban on stage. If the music sounds like symphony, this is wrong.

It is a kind of return to form, sure. But what form? I hate this song. There are better ones to come.

To start: I know that the actual lyric from “Warmth of the Sun” is “What good is the dawn.” This is more elemental.

To explain: Hi! My name is Jeanne Thornton and I’m writing a novel about the Beach Boys and Brian Wilson. Right now I’m at the point in the writing where I basically have to forget that I live in the twenty-first century and immerse myself in the 1960s and 1970s and the long and sordid story of my alternate universe Beach Boys (the “Get Happies” in the book, although Brian Wilson is still Brian Wilson. The other members of the band are different.) To assist in this project of , and also to prevent me from bothering friends with talking about these songs, I’ve decided to create this Tumblr to review every Beach Boys song in existence, album by album, and possibly the solo material as well.

To start, I’ve decided to review the under-appreciated 1976 “return to form” album, 15 Big Ones. Please enjoy!

(You can also follow the progress of the book on my other blog at http://jwthornton.tumblr.com. I’ll be posting tiny excerpts as I type them up from the handwritten first drafts. Currently the first draft is something like 70,000 words, or REALLY REALLY LONG.)