I not gonna pretend that I’m a Beach Boys nut. I don’t have tons of records by the band, Brian Wilson, his family members, or folks he produced, but what I do have I treasure. My earliest memory of The Beach Boys is hearing their songs on FM radio. Again, I won’t try and be cool, lie and say that their music was something I was into. To me stuff like “I Get Around”, “Help Me Rhonda” and “California Girls” were just old cheese. I thought the band were the epitome of squeaky clean. I didn’t know anything about The Brothers Wilson, their bullying / domineering dad, the darkness of Dennis, or Brian’s corrupt / controlling shrink Eugene Landy. I didn’t know about all the weed and LSD (1). 

In my mid teens, me and my mates had just come through 2-Tone and hip hop was only a few spins and scratches away. Capital Radio DJ Nicky Horne worshiped The Beach Boys though, and would eulogise about the beauty of songs such as “Sloop John B” and “Heroes & Villains” before playing them at Sunday lunch time, while my mum made a roast. The sugary, close harmonies just sounded dated. I wasn’t schooled enough to hear that Wilson was taking them somewhere else. Somewhere far, far away. Crucially, in retrospect, I hadn’t ingested any psychedelics yet. 

I bought a reissue of The Beach Boys’ album “Pet Sounds”, solely because it was a record that everyone was supposed to own. I didn’t play it much. As with most things musical my reappraisal came later, in a roundabout way, re-joining the dots, retracing steps back through other artists’ releases and recommendations. Song titles dropped in interviews and reviews. Like many sonic sidewalks I’ve sped down, all roads, eventually lead back to Andrew Weatherall. I started buying Brian Wilson vinyl because of Primal Scream, and their Weatherall-produced opus, “Screamadelica”. 

The first clue came with a Weatherall remix of the The Scream song “Higher Than The Sun”, which was subtitled “American Spring”. A Weatherall groupie, I needed to know what “American Spring” was. The internet was there, but it wasn’t awash with info. I eventually found a 45 by a group of that name, titled “Shyin’ Away”, on eBay. From there I tracked down a recent reissue of their self-titled LP. Fronted by sisters Diane and Marilyn Rovell, the album consisted of songs written by each of the Beach Boys, and was produced by Brian – who was married to Marylin, and later had an affair with Diane. Listening I immediately made the connection. 

The American Spring tracks, such as “Sweet Mountain”, were rooted in old-fashioned genres like doo-wop and barbershop, but the production was pioneering, weird, otherworldly. The eccentric arrangements employed harpsichords, theremins, early, rudimentary drum machines. There were tape effects that dropped random hits of slo-mo timpani, that sounded like someone suddenly switching the turntable off, and that rumbled and crashed like distant claps of thunder. Under the guise of something sweet and saccharine, it was really radical. It was like Joe Meek, but way, way more upmarket, on a millionaire budget. Studio experimentation not on a shoestring, above a leather shop on North London’s Holloway Road, but sitting in a sandbox in the Californian sun. High on quality grass and Orange Sunshine, not chewing cheap amphetamine. This was something that Weatherall, his very able assistant Hugo Nicolson, and The Scream totally tapped into (2). 

Similarly, Primal Scream’s cover of Beach Boys rarity, “Carry Me Home”, turned me onto the fragile, dark, broken soft rock diversions of the song’s writer, Brian’s brother, Dennis Wilson. A scary, spectral tribute to a youth lost in Vietnam, it sent me scouring second hand shops for a copy of Dennis’ coveted, cult LP, “Pacific Ocean Blue”, and I finally found the original of “Carry Me Home” on a dodgy bootleg called “California Feeling”. Credited to “Carl & The Passions”, it comes with a very dodgy cover and equally dodgy sleeve notes penned by the despicable Dr. Landy. 

“Carry Me Home” was an outtake from the sessions for the 1973 LP “Holland”, so I bought one of those too. The song “Sail On Sailor” became a favourite. By this time the band were being pushed by their label and manager toward a more conventional, contemporary, FM radio-friendly A.O.R. sound, and on the surface this track might appear like standard `70s rock pomp, but its lyrics talk of being “often frightened, unenlightened” and encouraged its audience to keep experiencing, keep learning. To tackle troubled waters and not be dashed on disappointment’s rocks. To simply keep on keeping on (3). 

The Beach Boy’s “Smile” sessions were the stuff of myth and legend. Intended as the follow up to “Pet Sounds”, for “Smile” Brian teamed up with lyricist Van Dyke Parks to compose, in his own words, “a teenage symphony to God.” Work on the record began in the summer of `66 but by the spring of `67 it was still unfinished and abandoned. Brian, who acknowledged that he wasn’t in the best mental shape, and always a perfectionist, had put himself in a self-imposed race with The Beatles to be not only popular and prolific, but also continually innovative, different. He buckled under the stress, and resistance from other band members to the “avant garde” new material. Stories abound of wild, wigged out excess. Drug dealers, hangers on, plus crowds of creatives popping in, all contributing. Pianos in sandboxes, tents pitched in the studio. Role playing games, chanting and transcendental meditation. So when these sessions were finally issued, fascinated, I had to have a copy. 

Songs such as “Cabinessence” demonstrate how Brian planned to put the pieces together. It jumps between sections of country banjo picking, folky flute, bluegrass harmonica, and a cello-driven chamber music chug (4). His method lay all in the editing. With the tape constantly rolling and everything recorded, the magical bits would be excised and juxtaposed. He’d done this already with “Good Vibrations”, The Beach Boys’ perhaps most perfect single. This alternated between angelic, orchestral, introspective sections – with what sounds like backwards pizzicato – and rocking – all be it with weird, electro-theremin waling – nods to their “Surfin’” smashes of yesterday. Resulting in a ground-breaking shot of shiny, polished psychedelia.

 

The studio technique of recording in separate sections, or as Brian called them “feels”, then combining them, also serves to illustrate The Beach Boys’ by then schizophrenic nature. The band, minus Brian, who refused to tour, were playing sellout gigs knocking out their greatest hits, and then coming back to the studio to experiment with all sorts of freaky shit. 

While “Smile” was shelved a lot of the songs were reworked and cropped up on later albums. One those records was 1971’s “Surf’s Up”. I bought this LP primarily for “Feel Flows”, which several shoegaze artists had cited as source of inspiration. The song’s words a lucid dream stream of consciousness, suitably flowing, the music, continually passing / travelling through filters, phase and mixing desk trickery. 

However, the album also contains “’Til I Die” which is truly amazing. Written by Brian, in part, about the heartbreak he felt about his failure to complete “Smile”, it’s one of those songs that everyone projects their own memories on to. 

“I lost my way, hey, hey, hey.”

A damn fine confirmation of Brian’s unique genius, each of the instrumental elements – organ drone, vocals and its ticking, programmed rhythm – seems slightly out of sync / step with the others. Making something that could have been simple far from it. 

Deep, doom-ridden bass notes, beneath the pretty melody, reflecting the album’s dark, defeated Don Quixote artwork.  Expanded editions of the LP include an awesome acapella version and also Brian’s piano demo. Both of these make clear just how much of an influence The Wilson’s music was on Primal Scream, “Screamadelica” and, in particular, its less-than-elegantly wasted lullabies and high-as-a-kite “Inner Flight”s.  

With my mind and ears opened, I returned to “Pet Sounds”. As much as I like and admire all the other stuff, it’s this album that retains the most personal resonance. Predictably amongst the strange arrangements, rich with reverb, extravagant echo, dense with careful, delicate detail, yet somehow still full of space, it was the outsider-themed numbers that got the most spins. 

The haunting, hushed “Caroline No”, with its wonderful rhymes, and the world weary Phil Spector-like wall-of-sound on “I Just Wasn’t Made For These Times”. Both paid homage to a music, conservative, traditional, like show tunes of a bygone age, but sent it out into new alien orbits. 

Listening now, there’s something almost Sun Ra / Arkestra-esque in how, on the latter, the band are simultaneously so tight and so loose. 

“God Only Knows” always has me flashing back to the tail-end of the Second Summer Of Love, when my family was splitting up and I sought solace in partying and Ecstasy-fuelled camaraderie. The song’s words of obsessive, singular love, only served to make me more lonely, on the Sunday evenings I spent alone, as the weekend’s gear wore off. The chemicals and me crashing, and the onset of that crushing feeling, where reality appears even worse than it did before you took the pills. A serious seemingly bottomless sensation with the potential to destroy, or, if you’re lucky, like I was, oddly spur you on. The song takes me back to a tiny box bedroom in a South London house shared with strangers. My lodgings after dad kicked me out. When “God Only Knows” plays, the pain is still palpable, but I did find some strength then, in that sense of having nothing and so nothing to lose (5). 

Notes

(1) Brian wrote “California Girls” after dropping acid. 

(2) 4AD band Lush, who were tight with The Scream, once covered the American Spring, Dennis Wilson-penned single, “Fallin In Love“. 

(3) There’s a barmy story about “Holland”, about how Brian had his whole Californian studio taken apart, shipped and rebuilt in in a barn, in Baambrugge, near Amsterdam. 

(4) The folky sections remind me of Burt Bacharach’s “Butch Cassidy & The Sundance Kid” score. Wilson deliberately used American instruments, like the banjo, to counter The Beatles’ Englishness. 

(5) It made me feel so shit, that, when I was sober, it made me work harder. Maybe without the seesawing I might not have got my PhD.