Teenage Gymopaedia to God

 

The Beach Boys, Wake the World: the Friend Sessions

 
The Beach Boys, I Can Hear Music: the 20/20 Sessions

 

1.

I’m packing up my records. Yes I am. And I currently have an imposing tower of oversized CD and vinyl box sets sitting on my living room chair. I have three of these canon producing/affirming objects for the Beatles alone. Lest one think such things are only produced for the biggest of artists, I also have equally, if not more so, imposing boxes devoted to John Fahey, Lee Hazlewood and International Harvester. Physical media—as most media is now consumed streaming online—represents permanence by the very nature of the fact it takes up space in the world, and in my house specifically. These box sets are meant to represent the longevity of the music within, beyond your average used record or current repress. To have one of these things devoted to cataloging your work means that someone, somewhere was willing to invest enough money, time and materials to create a monument to your recordings.

On the other end of the spectrum, is the merciless blur of the music streaming services, wherein the entire catalogue of the most significant musicians can be scrolled through with all the attention of a quick scanning of a feed. The music may be just as important, valuable, significant and popular as those collected in the big box sets, but its permanence is already determined by its medium. Our ability to sustain the listening attention of album after album of any artist is both strained by streaming (we are aware that we could be listening to any musician at any time—provided it’s currently streaming) and enhanced by the form itself (it’s easy to find playlists containing the entire catalogue of even the most prolific artists on streaming services). But as much smarter people than I have pointed out, the value of the music itself is nil in the streaming form. It can just as easily be a podcast or a white noise generator that you’re streaming. You pay your $10 a month, you get sounds from our app. On the other hand, no one is mistaking an ample box set devoted to the Velvet Underground’s run of Matrix shows as anything other than a totem to the permanence of genius.

Which makes the lack of physical copies of both the Friends and 20/20 sessions so fascinating. The Beach Boys’ legacy as a reissue group bizarrely mirrors their life as relevant album artists: The Pet Sounds Sessions released in 1996 was one of the first pop CD box sets to obsessively document the recording of a single album the way that the Mosaic label had been documenting the recordings of famous jazz albums. In 2011 Capitol Records did one better and released the long-awaited 5 CD Smile Sessions in a fancy box with a diorama of the famous cover on the front. But just as the albums that followed the then unreleased Smile were forgotten, the tracks and ephemera from those sessions seem to have been forgotten in the reissue era as well. The studio and live tracks from 1967 were collected on a modest two CD set (no vinyl) and, as mentioned above, the tracks recorded in 1968 haven’t been released in any physical form whatsoever.

This state of affairs, though objected to by a number of fans online, seems oddly appropriate for the music. Not because I think it is unworthy of permanence, I actually think some of it is my favorite Beach Boys music, but because all of the music contained in these compilations seems small. If The Pet Sounds Sessions and The Smile Sessions were meant to be the revelation of the processes by which Brian Wilson wrote his teenage symphonies to God, then the music recorded in 1967-1968 seem like Gymnopédies to God. I’ve used both Gymnopédies and Gymnopaedia  in this article to evoke Satie’s famous small piano pieces as well as the ancient greek festival, for which Satie’s pieces are named, which served as a childhood rite of passage in the ancient Greek world. The music on these compilations are small, ephemeral, but they also seem to be rites of passages: fragments of songs from the early sixties, released as the Beach Boys were first performing as young men; passages of exotica that might have come from records ten years earlier; songs to babies and transcendental meditation; and, yes, a song co-authored by Charles Manson as well.

Unlike the session of Pet Sounds and Smile, there’s no cohesive whole, to which these albums are striving. There are “hits” on Wild Honey and 20/20, “Darlin” and “Do It Again” respectively, but neither of those songs have the thematic importance for their albums the way “Wouldn’t It Be Nice” or “God Only Knows” do for Pet Sounds, and “Surf’s Up” as well as “Heroes and Villains” do for Smile. The singles from the post Smile period seem like summer songs picked up on a radio in the middle of an increasingly inscrutable world where the past and future vacillate from song to song, sometimes within a song itself. 

2.

And unlike the Pet Sounds, Smile and Sunshine Today sets, the Friends and 20/20 sessions compilations do not begin with the completed albums from which they draw their session tracks. The fragments of vocals, backing tracks, assorted and sometimes aborted covers is all the meaning you get listening to these two sets. You have to look elsewhere if you want to hear what the end results turned out to be. I guess the assumption is that anyone would would be seeking out the sessions from both of these minor Beach Boys records would already be familiar with final products. However, in the age of Spotify, it’s entirely possible that your first exposure to both Friends and 20/20 could be through these sessions. What would it mean to listen to both of these compilations with no finished album for context?

Wake the World begins with the soporific “Meant for You,” with harmonies borrowed from the then still unreleased Smile project, the whole vibe feels antithetical to everything else going on in both pop music and the world in 1968: “As I sit and close my eyes/ There's peace in my mind/ And I'm hoping that you'll find it too/ And these feelings in my heart/ I know, are meant for you.” The practice of Transcendental Meditation will start to make its appearance in Beach Boys lyrics from here on out. The album ends with a song called “Transcendental Meditation.” What’s fascinating is that the Beach Boys discovered TM through the Beatles, yet Mike Love seems to be a more zealous proselytizer of the practice than any of the Beatles would ever be. The melody reminds me of “Wind Chimes” from Smile/Smiley Smile, sonically evoking the breeze wafting through a beautifully accidental harmony of instruments and voices reverberating.

“Friends” is ostensibly about the group itself, but the lyrics are amber trapped Beach Boys lyrics that could have been written at any point in their sixties run: “You told me when my girl was untrue/ I loaned you money when the funds weren’t too cool/ I talked your folks out of making you cut off your hair.” The last line evokes Pet Sounds’ “Caroline, No” with the exception that this time rather than hair cutting breaking the singers heart, the singer comes to the defense of the friend who wants to grow his hair. Obviously, the gender of the hair cutter plays a big role in the difference here (a short haired girl versus a long haired boy), but both lyrics seem to present a man/group out of time: the singer of “Caroline, No” doesn’t understand why his lover is changing, with the listener at the time aware that he was also singing about a world she seemed to embody (or at least that he was content to project onto her). Here the plea for friendship is undergirded by such 1968-specific topics such as untrue steadies and parents who just don’t get kids’ hair lengths. Compare this to “Street Fighting Man,” “Revolution” or “All Along the Watch Tower” and, from the perspective of the time, you can see why no one was buying Friends in all senses of the word.

Musically, the album should probably be more widely known by Brian Wilson enthusiasts, since it was the last album that he would have strong musical control over until 1977’s Love You and had, on occasion, called it his favorite Beach Boys album. In a certain sense, counter-intuitively, you could argue that Friends is a more explicit influence on all the bands in the 1990s and 2000s who would cite Wilson and the Beach Boys as influences than Pet Sounds and Smile. In 1968 the Beach Boys were losing a lot of money and most of the post-Smile records were recorded in Brian’s home (the location of the famous sandbox). However, with Friends, you can hear that the arrangements echo the larger Wrecking Crew arrangements for the earlier records on a budget scale. But even on such a small scale you can hear out of time Wilson’s music is: exotica, American folk tunes, David Axelrod’s contemporaneous Blake-inspired records…it all seems to be in there but, given the size, in a more nimble and dynamic way. It all reminds me of some of Paul McCartney (Wilson’s great friend/rival) solo records. With no pretense to commercial success, the musical genius of Wilson and the Beach Boys can radiate a small, brilliant, wild light.

“Busy Doing Nothing” is the highlight of the album, a beautiful bossa nova song that absolutely sounds out of place—unless you happen to be listening to Brazilian music—in 1968. The lyrics are a heartening and deeply affecting daily affirmation written by Brian Wilson—who would check himself into a psychiatric hospital the following year—cataloguing the shit he’s managed to actually get accomplished while, seemingly, being busy doing nothing. This song would have been affecting to me regardless of when I listen to it, in the middle of the pandemic and quarantine it sound like an anthem to keeping yourself fucking sane and healthy.

Except for the opening “Do It Again” and a couple of other tracks he worked on, Brian’s influence is largely absent on I Can Hear Music: the 20/20 Sessions. The album opens with its biggest hit, the retrospective and nostalgic “Do It Again.” It’s a decent enough song, but the influence of Mike Love’s desire to turn the Beach Boys into a nostalgia act is already there. This is worryingly continued onto the subsequent pleasant but inconsequential cover of “I Can Hear Music.” These covers are a continuation of what they started with Wild Honey. Coupling these covers, however, with explicitly nostalgic fare like “Do It Again” was a harbinger of things to come.

Thankfully, the dominating presence on these sessions is Dennis Wilson, making long stretches of the sessions sound like rehearsals for his own solo work, and like that work there’s a real dark tinge to a number of these tracks. Rather than sounding like the Beach Boys, the Dennis Wilson songs and demos on the sessions are reminiscent of other outsider singer songwriters of the time. And the themes, often of s psycho-sexual nature, are miles away from the sunshine pop of Brian Wilson’s vision of the group from just one album earlier.

Which, of course, brings us to the reason you might be interested in the album 20/20: “Never Learn Not to Love,” the song co-written by Charles Manson with Dennis Wilson. Brian produced some demos with Charlie as well, but they won’t see the light of day. Instead, the only evidence of Manson’s collaboration with the Boys is the various forms “Never Learn Not to Love” takes in this collection. The demo version of “Be With Me” might as well have been co-written with Manson: “You're going out tonight/ You put your real cool looking clothes on/ You’re getting uptight/ About some little thing I said/ All that I said/ ‘I couldn't play the game’” What might have just been a recording of a lover’s spat morphs into something more ominous as Dennis’ voice cracks over the piano backing. What’s the game he can’t play? 

“A new child is born/ The mother is still waiting/Father’s over there anticipating/Won’t you be with me/ It could set you (us) free/ Come with me/ Be with me/ A part of me”

There’s a world of difference between being with someone and being a part of someone. The desire to incorporate another human whole as an antidote the nuclear family of the mother and father sounds awfully similar to the aims of Charlie and the family.

3.

It’s tempting to romanticize, in opposition to the fetishized object, the ephemeral qualities of the streaming/mp3 only Beach Boys box sets returning the buried and forgotten back to the digital ocean. One of the first bits of music I tried downloading in 2000 was the then unreleased Smile album I had only read about for so long, but had never actually heard. The time and patience necessary for hunting and gathering poorly coded mp3 files seems antithetical to a Beach Boys Sessions playlist made or found within slightly more time than it takes to type a band’s name into a field. But in 2000 the illicit mp3s seemed like a first step in maybe hearing the legitimate recordings in better quality if labels would see that money could be made from such things. Now that the value of music has been reduced to zero—and every label can see exactly how little can be made from releasing these archival recordings—once either the interest in physical media, or the listener’s disposable income, or the manufacturing plants needed to produce such things vanishes, then the recordings are tenuously held by the whims of whatever dominant tech platform decides to maintain such things. It may sound better than a bootleg Mp3, but its potential for permanence is worse.

Such inconceivable tragedy will most likely not occur, precisely because of albums like Pet Sounds and Smile. However, for the miniature, the naked and unarmed, the gymopaedia of little pieces on the Friends and 20/20 sessions, that tenuousness is already contained within the music itself. It sings of the joy in knowing that while existence is short, and there’s no guarantee what you produce will last, you can still work out your cosmic psychic damage in the sandbox of your own making.