It’s hard for me to listen to the Beach Boys in a vacuum. I can’t really hear their music without also hearing the strife and the discord that went on in the background, the bad vibrations at the heart of the band that came to destroy it.
It’s easiest to ignore all that stuff with Pet Sounds. The conventional wisdom has it that Pet Sounds was the greatest Beach Boys album, and that conventional wisdom is probably right. In every technical respect it’s the best shit they ever did. Even today, circa 2009, it’s still a “cool” record; indie assholes are always namechecking it for cred. Chronologically, Pet Sounds stands alone, bounded on both sides by (arguably) patchy records largely made up of potboilers, though with the occasional great song tossed in.
But I really do like some of the stuff that happened after Pet Sounds, particularly Wild Honey, which I kind of listened to four times in a row today. (It’s not hard to do – the thing is twenty-four minutes long.) Wild Honey captures these guys at such a precarious stage – that one moment before the roller-coaster took that plunge from which they’d never recover.
Right after Pet Sounds, Brian Wilson had felt suddenly invigorated. He decided he’d do even better. He’d come up with something new and incredible; it would be called SMiLE and it would be the greatest record ever made by anyone. But he couldn’t get his shit together – and SMiLE didn’t happen. The pieces that were to become SMiLE largely ended up on Smiley Smile, the actual Pet Sounds followup: a frequently-bizarre mishmash of fragments that never congealed, and made no sense as anything but a tantalizing glimmer of what could have been but never would be.
And so, after Smiley Smile, the Beach Boys went into the studio to do Wild Honey. Wilson had worked through most of his backlog of ideas and he was burned out; this shows. The record is a collection of sparse, spare songs with straightforward, sloppy arrangements; Carl Wilson, with his thin, bedraggled voice, sings more than Brian.
There’s an unspoken apprehension creeping in at the edges of the Wild Honey stuff. With “Here Comes the Night”, in particular, the song’s generic lovey-dovey lyrics belie the nervousness in the singing, in the sound, in the texture. The band sounds like it’s about to fall apart – and it sounds like it knows this.
For the ten-or-so years after Wild Honey‘s release, Brian Wilson would gradually lose his mind, just as the Beach Boys would gradually lose any commercial footing they might once have had. Throughout the seventies, they put out shitty, desperate album after shitty, desperate album. And eventually – in 1979 – they dug “Here Comes the Night” out of the archives and recorded a ten-minute-long version of it with a disco arrangement, in amazingly-misguided hopes of scoring a crossover hit.
Yeah, the Beach Boys’ slow-motion crash-and-burn was complete and extreme. The Beatles breaking up – that was nothing compared to this shit. In 2009, Carl Wilson and Dennis Wilson are dead, Mike Love is a Republican, and Brian Wilson, the poor guy, is a zombie who takes so many psychiatric meds that, judging from interviews, he barely even seems to know who he is.
In retrospect, I guess Wild Honey - and, to a degree, everything else the Beach Boys did - is kind of gruesome.
Post a comment