Tag: The Beach Boys

John Wesley Harding

Recorded while Dylan took a break from The Basement Tapes sessions. Many consider it to be part of the larger project. This is Dylan at his most mythic. “I Dreamed I Saw St. Augustine” is begging me to cover it.

I love how the last two songs sound almost like a different project, but serve as perfectly seasoned representation of what I think is the central conceit of the collection. One way to look at the album is that there are ten philosophical predicate songs and that the last two are the full expression of the philosophical explorations in action.

The work here is a sort of bridge from that early-sixties era of great experimentation and rapid development represented by his previous 6 albums towards something a little bit more sustainable and relaxed. It still has that romantic, poetic drive but is at the same time more low-key and, I think, more musical.

Charlie McCoy’s bass playing throughout this record is some of the most breathtaking I’ve heard. A top-notch Nashville cat™ on mouth harp, his bass playing perfectly captures the spirit of discovery and freedom that lies at the heart of this clutch of songs.

• Listenability: 9
• Cultural Value: 6
• Personal meaning: 12
• Technical value: 7
• Fuck the Establishment value: 3

37 out of 40

Revolver

I have in the past, it must be said, proclaimed this the best rock album ever made, and today I stand by that proclamation. So why am I doing an “album battle?” I think because of the significance of Revolver, the real battle is for second place. What do I think is the second best rock album that happened in 1967? Also, I love and have much to say ’bout this ‘un.

I love the 14-song version that has all of the John songs restored (and is much better for it!) I also have a two-disc version that includes the concurrently-recorded non-album single, “Paperback Writer” c/w “Rain,” but for my purposes here, I will listen to the “British version” single CD that I have had for years.

This is the tightest they ever were as a band and the Ringo/Paul duo has a HUGE amount to do with this era of the band’s musical success. Paul had (still has) a fantastic ear to go along with his expressive, melodically inventive playing, and Ringo unfailingly found the right strokes and was perhaps the best drummer around at editing his compositions. There’s not an extra move anywhere in his performances on Beatles records. The combination of the two and their ability to lock in together hits its absolute peak at around this time.

I also love all of the vocal work on this album. John’s ‘harmonies’ on “Yellow Submarine” are hilarious, and really, what makes all of the vocal performances here so compelling is the personality of the four singers. These are four guys with massive star power, and that presence comes through with great immediacy through these grooves some 58(!) years after they were recorded.

I also advocate for the consideration of Revolver as the very first progressive rock album, with its odd time signatures, horn sections, string quartets, tape loops and sound collages, while maintaining the feeling of an extraordinary rock band playing together, which is why I class this album abover Sergeant Pepper’s Loney Hearts Club Band, along with my sense that this is simply a better collection of songs than either the previous or subsequent Beatles album.

As an example, it contains a perfectly-constructed morning raga in George Harrison’s “Love You To,” which is compressed a bit to fit into the 3-minute pop song format this album adheres to, but which could just as easily be stretched out to the half-hour plus rendition inclusion in a performance of such music would cause it to be formatted as.

This whole album is just… pop perfection.

• Listenability: 10
• Cultural Value: 6
• Personal meaning: 12
• Technical value: 9
• Fuck the Establishment value: 1. Dude. They were the establishment.

38 out of 40

Piper at the Gates of Dawn

“Look at the sky, look at the river. Isn’t it good?” from “The Gnome” slays me. I live in a place where I have that feeling pretty much every day, so the resonance with that love-of-nature conjuring Syd does is the warmest of embraces. A moment of surprising simplicity and purity, and a good representative moment of what this album does best — put you in a place and let you absorb it completely, without throwing any extraneous emotional baggage at you.

It’s worth remembering that whatever emotional baggage one can associate with Syd Barrett’s art comes later — not very much later, but within these grooves, it’s all in abeyance, all hidden behind the brilliance.

“Pow R Toc H” may be my favorite track on this album, because it comes from all 4 members of the band. I enjoy that it’s more compact than the more famous “Interstellar Overdrive,” which is the other track the band jammed out together.

“Take Up Thy Stethoscope and Walk” is Roger’s great Colin Moulding moment, marks him as a proficient songwriter and made him the leading candidate for main songwriter, once Syd was no longer an option. Another candidate for best song on the album.

In keeping with that, I’m sad that there’s no Richard Wright song on this album. It’s my greatest quibble with the project. There is a great Richard Wright song on the b side of “Apples and Oranges” called “Paintbox,” which is possibly my favorite Floyd song of all. I think it wouldn’t have been a good fit with the rest of what’s on this album, though it meshes quite well with what Pink Floyd would later become, and set the stage for much of what the band did.

• Listenability: 9
• Cultural Value: 6
• Personal meaning: 12
• Technical value: 7
• Fuck the Establishment value: 2

36 out of 40

Smiley Smile

Mike Love is an infamous asshole. Let’s start there. As the follow-up to Pet Sounds, Smile would have been the great step forward that Brian Wilson was looking to create, but it was a step too far for Mike Love, who has made no secret over the years of his loathing for this music, particularly for Van Dyke Parks’s impressionistic lyrics, and the quantum leap away from accessible mainstream pop that Smile represented.

But the project was shelved, and instead we got Smiley Smile, which sounds to me like slightly tarted-up demo tracks for the larger project, but which also stands as a bold, if even less accessible experiment. I find I like it better than the long-after-the-fact reconstruction of Smile released under Brian Wilson’s name in the mid 1990s. I have not heard the double-album release of the Smile Sessions.

I’ve read interviews with former Fleetwood Mac guitarist and pop music mastermind Lindsay Buckingham where he points to the track “Wind Chimes” specifically as an example of pop genius. I have to agree, and there are several other songs here that stand along side that for me, including the lead-off track “Heroes and Villains,” “Vegetables,” the gorgeous Carl Stalling-like “Fall Breaks and Back to Winter,” and the ultimate Beach Boys song “Good Vibrations,” which was recorded during the Pet Sounds sessions but not completed in time to include. It seems likely that it was included here to make this album more attractive to the record-buying public.

Smiley Smile‘s lush, layered vocals and rudimentary instrumentation gives an aura of almost David Lynchian strangeness, and that is a huge attraction for me, as I love unconventional, even difficult-to-listen-to music. Frankly, if you open your ears even just a little bit, there is so much to love about this album as a listening experience. My “listenability” rating went up quite a bit with the review I did for the sake of this post.

• Listenability: 7
• Cultural Value: 6
• Personal meaning: 12
• Technical value: 9
• Fuck the Establishment value: 3

37 out of 40

Conclusion

Final Standings:

• 1. The Beatles – Revolver
• 2. The Beach Boys – Smiley Smile (tie)
• 2. Bob Dylan – John Wesley Harding (tie)
• 4. Pink Floyd – Piper at the Gates of Dawn.

This was fun. I’ll do another one of these “album battle” thingies soon. There’s more background info on this battle in my previous two posts.