Amanda

Mike Love of course being the REAL genius? Never mind yer Pacific Ocean Blues, what about Mike Love Not War for an album? Eh? Eh?

wasn’t dennis w. the first person to use a DRUM MACHINE? if so that clinches it for me

I remember Beach Boys revisionism first time round - ca. early 90’s, Bobby Gillespie and Norman Blake and Duglas Stewart and the rest. I remember it because the orthodoxy was that Dennis Wilson was the forgotten genius and “Holland” the great album - Brian Wilson? Nah! Even non-hip people liked Brian Wilson! I remember having a conversation at the time and joking “You watch, it’ll be Carl Wilson who’ll be hailed as the genius next!” And guess what?

Verdict on the free Holland EP with Brian’s bedtime story about the transistor radio?

I think I’d probably place Holland as my second favourite, but I do enjoy the non-obviousness of it - in a way it’s the one that’s most precious to me; but some of the ‘California Saga’ is a bit shabby, and it’s probably true that the best tune is still Brian’s. I really like Wild Honey as well.

Couldn’t have said it better myself. Being an almost-native Californian and having lived most of my life there, I can recall the Beach Boys back as far as 1962, perhaps a little earlier. (Whenever “Surfin’ Safari” was a regional hit.) I think that in 62-63 they might have been au courant (sort of) to someone in middle school. But all that business about surfing and cars–even girls were less significant in their music–now seems so juvenile. I’ve always thought they were quite overrated, although some of my fellow twelve-year-olds were big fans in 1963–and I often wonder if their, um, “mystique” (for lack of a better word) wasn’t based on a romanticized version of California predating readily accessible air travel and the fact that they just didn’t have that much competition until the Beatles came around. And then they sort of went to pieces because they couldn’t measure up to the Beatles.

This “drip of a song” strikes me as the moment the Beach Boys finally capitulate as far as their rivalry with the Beatles is concerned–let’s just go back to being the surfer dudes we used to be. But that, of course, was impossible for a bunch of guys pushing thirty.

(By the way, one of the more amusing moments on the Beatles’ “White Album” is “Back in the USSR,” which, according to George Harrison, is a Beach Boys parody. “Those Ukraine girls really knock me out . . .” is obviously an allusion to “California Girls,” and just listen to those “duh-duh-duh” “ooo-woo-ooo backing vocals.)

Odd, but the only Beach Boys records I actually liked came in the early 1970s, by which time they were regarded as completely passe. The thoroughly uncharacteristic Holland album (”Sail on Sailor”) is perhaps the most artistically interesting thing they ever did. Maybe Carl Wilson, the youngest brother, should have been the one out front all along.

Kind of a drip of a song, isn’t it?

The thing is, from 1964 through 1968 the change was so fast that elements seemed to keep exploding out of songs that didn’t know how to contain them, so in each song you were hearing This Year’s Pop but also sounds that were either blasting their way out of the song as something new or you were hearing attempts at This Year’s Pop that actually contained song elements that were hopelessly six months out of date and unable to catch up. Nostalgia was a way to try to sidestep all this I suppose.

But in the early ’70s, Sixties sound explosions were regularized, and power chords and feedback and guitar screech became just more features on the palette of what was a generally louder but more standard sound. Which is to say that they became kind of so-what, and the Sixties music they were regularizing sounded quaint in comparison. Which means that you’ll have to take my word for it that the early Beatles were raucous clatter and that “Get Off Of My Cloud” was a what-the-fuck pile of noise and that “I Can See For Miles” was a roar I’d never heard before. Whereas listening now, I hear a lot of it as sounding really dinky. Well, not the Stones, who were so forceful and inimitable that you still get their power, if not their strangeness. But I mean, just listen to some hyphy, grime, or crunk, then listen to some of these Sixties classics, and you’ll be hard put to make sense of “Oh, the Sixties, the Wild Decade.” (Hmmm. My musings have run far afield of the Beach Boys, who sounded up-to-date for about ten minutes in 1962 and 1963.)

Funnily enough, I did a Beach Boys post on my own blog recently, about ‘When I Grow Up’ and I had some sense of them being keen on looking both forward and back simultaneously, at least in the sort of golden era that this is close to the end of (after that we get the uncommercial but artistically interesting early Seventies, and then they just turn into a nostalgia act). I suppose that drum intro is part of that; not that they knew Moroder was going to happen, of course, but it’s part of that search for new sounds and presumably when he thought of it he just appended it to whichever track he was working on at the time.

My thoughts on the Sixties were a sort of compare & contrast with the Eighties, which I did live through - and it’s certainly the case that most of the music from *that* decade that I like isn’t the stuff that I remember hearing at the time. In fact probably more of my emotive memories of the time are from the sixties music I heard in the house.

My experience is that I feel more emotional connection to pop eras that I “lived through”. I’ve grown to love a lot of 60s music - doing this blog has helped a lot - but it’s a different kind of love. Also some of the sounds, rhythms and techniques I most enjoy in pop music were either unavailable, primitive, or not widespread in the 1960s.

Also, Chris, your comments prompt me to suggest that you should start posting about music here. I’d like to read more.

As for Do It Again - my favourite bit is the drum & bass intro that mimics sequencers years before Moroder etc used them in pop.

By the way, I’m not sure that logic about not living through the Sixties entirely holds - I didn’t either, and that’s why I didn’t have to hear all the Des O’Connor records and others of that level.