"Their Hearts Were Full Of Spring" can also be found on their Live In London album, released in 1969. My copy is on Capitol Records, but pressed in Holland.
Showing 11 responses by bdp24
@mattmiller:
- It’s Brian, not Brion. - Charlie auditioned for producer/A & R man Terry Melcher, not Brian. - Brian didn’t swipe a song from Charlie. Dennis bought Charlie’s song "Hold On To Your Ego", changing some of the lyrics and renaming it "Never Learn Not To Love" (it’s on The Beach Boys 20/20 album).
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@loomisjohnson: My favorite song on Wow is "Can’t Be So Bad". When I did Evan Johns’ Moontan album I was thinking of that song as we recorded "Dear Doc" (both are fast tempo double shuffles). Evan didn’t like to do more than one take of each song, so I had one shot to get a keeper!
https://youtu.be/Jx6w2gGchoY?si=Bzs3ug8k1JagaKSN
https://youtu.be/tGCr89_F38k?si=nU3gWpd1pxmQoQ6N
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@loomisjohnson: I see what you meant by swing. Yes, the early Beach Boys show an obvious debt to Chuck Berry. I hear it in all their albums through All Summer Long. You don’t hear it in the band’s next two albums, Today! and Summer Days (And Summer Nights!). Those two albums barely qualify as Rock ’n’ Roll, being more Adult Contemporary. And at the same time bands like The Kinks, The Yardbirds, The Who, The Animals, Them, The Stones, The Paul Butterfield Blues Band, The Byrds, The Lovin’ Spoonful, etc. were grabbing our attention with much "tougher" sounding music. The Beach Boys---still in their matching stage outfits---were looking very anachronistic. They were, simply put, not cool. @loomisjohnson: To your titles I would add "’Til I Die" (found on the Surf’s Up album), I believe the only song on a Beach Boys album for which Brian wrote both the music and lyrics.
By the way, your mention of Moby Grape inspires me to say that I consider their debut a perfect album, and one of the greatest debuts of all time. They made a bunch of other good ones too (I’m real fond of Moby Grape ’69). Guitarist Jerry Miller was booked at a tavern in Portland last year, and I went to see him. His playing was still excellent (he was still playing his Gibson L-5), but he unfortunately had a terrible backing band. I couldn’t make it through his whole set, leaving early. He died a coupla weeks later.
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@loomisjohnson: Here are my responses to a few of your comments regarding Pet Sounds:
- ..."it always sounded a little compressed and lacking in low end." Right you are. It is also pretty veiled and congested. It is very much a sonically mediocre recording at best. That makes hearing some of the musical "devices" Brian employs hard to hear. Things like the subtle use of inversion (rearranging the notes of a chord, placing the root note in the middle of the chord, or adding a bass note below the chord)---a favorite musical device of mine (bassist James Jamerson employed inversion on a number of Motown songs. Listen for it in "What Becomes Of The Brokenhearted." Thrilling!).
- ..."it doesn’t swing." You don’t really expect The Beach Boys to swing, do you?! Of course not, that’s not what Brian Wilson was about. There is lots of music I myself like in spite of it not swinging.
- ..."not earthmoving in the sense of, say, Moby Grape or Blonde On Blonde." As complete albums, you’ll get no argument from me. I have in fact been conflicted about Pet Sounds for many years. I have never loved it as much as I am "suppose to." It contains a lot of mediocre songs, too many for me to consider it a great album. But "God Only Knows" is so totally, utterly fantastic (McCartney still considers in the greatest Pop song ever written) I would not want to live without the album in my collection. It was actually Smiley Smile (the follow-up to Pet Sounds) that ignited my renewed interest in The Beach Boys. If Smile had been completed and released in 1967 as it was supposed to have been, we’d be having a very different conversation. Imagine an album full of songs as good as "Good Vibrations" and "Surf’s Up". Brian refers to Smile as a "Teenage Symphony To God." The theme of Van Dyke Parks’ Smile lyrics was The Manifest Destiny Of America. Rather highbrow for Pop music. If anyone wants their perception of The Beach Boys to be completely revamped, get a copy of the Smile Boxset.
- ..."Caroline No.": When Brian’s debut solo album was released, Sire/Reprise Records arranged for Brian to do a Record Release Signing event at the Tower Records on Sunset Blvd. in Hollywood. In addition to the that album, I took along my copy of the 7" 45 RPM single of "Caroline No" (see below for why). They had Brian seated at a table on a raised platform, and when I handed him the single he gazed at it (for quite a while), a wistful, heartbreaking look crossing his face (as if he had been transported back in time to 1965). The look on his face almost brought me to tears. I took that single for Brian to sign because it had been released with the center label credited not to The Beach Boys, but to Brian Wilson. I’ll bet that really po’d Mike Love.
I’ll take this opportunity to tell you all about something else I observed at that event: Brian was announced, led up onto the platform, and left there alone. He sat down, and I could see his hands shaking almost uncontrollably, a look of extreme panic in his eyes. All the other people involved (management, record company, "Dr." Eugene Landy, family) were off "doing business." I even saw author David Leaf (who has written three books on The Beach Boys, including the new one just out on the Smile album) busy schmoozing with other business types. I was filled with first disgust, then rage. Who could do such a thing to such an emotionally vulnerable and troubled human being?
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@mark200mph: It was actually Dennis Wilson who was "influenced" by Manson. In 1968 Dennis picked up a couple of chicks who were hitch-hiking on Sunset Blvd., taking them back to his rented house on Sunset. The girls were members of Charlie Manson’s commune in the desert, and they returned to the commune and told Charlie about Dennis’ house. In short order Manson and many of his followers took over the house, and Dennis soon moved out. Before he did he bought from Charlie his song "Cease To Exist", changing many of the lyrics and renaming the song "Never Learn Not To Love". The Beach Boys’ recording of the song may be found on their 20/20 album.
Another Beach Boys story, again a personal one. If that doesn’t bother you, read on: Before The Viper Room was The Viper Room, it was a club named Blackie’s. There was a second Blackie’s, this one in Marina del Rey, located near the harbor where many SoCal boat owners moored their sailboats. One such sailboat owner was Dennis Wilson, who was living on his. On one night in the Summer of 1982 my then-current band was playing the Marina del Rey Blackie’s, and a bandmate of mine (who knew of my love of Brian Wilson) told me there was a guy sitting at a table whom I might want to talk to. It was Dennis, drinking alone. I had a nice little chat with him, telling me of my having seen The Beach Boys live in 1964, and about my fondness of his 1977 solo album. Dennis didn’t live much longer, drowning in 1983.
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I have been anticipating this for a while. Brian is now finally resting in peace. The Beach Boys were the first live concert I attended, at The San Jose Civic Auditorium in the Summer of 1964. I spent that summer listening to their All Summer Long album every day. A year later they had been relegated to the Oldies category, no longer culturally relevant (along with many other early-60’s musical acts). I didn’t bother listening to their Today! and Summer Days (And Summer Nights!) albums, or the now-legendary Pet Sounds. Pet Sounds was followed by an album entitled Smiley Smile, which contained their hit single "Good Vibrations". Suddenly the BB were cool again, so I gave SS a listen. WTF?! Nothing could have prepared me for how odd (in a good way) the album was (is), and I became obsessed with it. To find out why, read the chapter on the making of the album in a Outlaw Blues, a great book written by Paul Williams (not the songwriter/singer). I played the album for the guitarist in my High School garage band, and he was as impressed as I with what he heard. Smiley Smile became for us a litmus test of other musicians. If you got it, you were "in". We of course got Van Dyke Parks’ (Brian’s collaborator on what was going to be the Smile album) Song Cycle album, which had been released in November of 67. Double WTF! Song Cycle is still quite capable of blowing your mind.
Now follows a personal story, one some of you (one of you at a minimum) may want to skip. You’ve been warned! Years passed, and that High School guitarist (now also a pianist) and I were recording his songs (he majored in music at San Jose State College and then the University of California at Riverside) in a little studio we built in his garage. I was engineering, with a pair of small capsule condenser mics, and Revox 2-trk. and Teac 4-trk. recorders. By the Summer of ’75 we had a demo tape done, and the songwriter suggested we fly to Los Angeles and submit the tape to a few record companies. And while we were at it, go to Brian’s Spanish-style mansion in Bel-Air (we knew what it looked like from the pictures of it on the Sunflower album cover) and deliver a copy to him. The songwriter wanted to have Brian produce us in a pro studio. How naive was that?! We arrived at Brian’s house on Bellagio Road, and walked up to the wrought iron gate that was in the middle of the stucco wall in front of the house. I rang the buzzer, and a voice that I assumed was Brian’s wife Marilyn (I was familiar with it, having a copy of The Honey’s album) asked "Yes?" I introduced us, and asked if Brian was home. Duh. Did we really think she was going to invite us in?! She responded "Yes he is. What do you want?" I told her, and she said to leave the tape at the gate. I did, and we drove back down to Sunset Blvd., contemplating what had just transpired. Not comfortable with having left our tape out in the elements (there was a gardening crew working in the property), we went back up to the house. The tape was nowhere to be seen. It wasn’t until the following year that Brian’s condition was revealed to the world. We of course never heard back from him, and the songwriter/pianist informed me he had decided to not pursue a professional career in music. I still have the tapes (and the Revox), which contain some wonderful music. The songwriter passed away in his sleep in early 2009, a heart attack at age 56.
Okay, now to the important part of my post. After having heard Pet Sounds, I of course went back and listened to the Today!, Summer Days, and Pet Sounds albums. On Pet Sounds I heard a song I now consider one of the (if not THE) greatest ever written: "God Only Knows". The song is a master class in composition, and for those interested enough as to why that is so, the video below explains it all.
https://youtu.be/PjPN9zRUrgI?si=IXBsgx0oYei7MSC9
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