LaRM day 29 (Beach Boys)

Four hours of the Pet Sounds Sessions box-set done. It's an interesting experience listening to the whole thing at once because it's simultaneously incredibly interesting and really boring. The insights into Brian's working mind and method are extraordinary and you really have to stand back in even greater awe at his achievement and his dedication as well as his brilliance. But four hours of working sketches, backing tracks, alternate versions and rehearsals is too much to take in one sitting and it's really quite exhausting. The real purpose that the box-set serves is to make clear quite how much better, how much more incredible Pet Sounds is than any other rock record. In many ways it highlights how much higher he was aiming (and achieving) than those silly little milksops, The Beatles. Brian wanted pop music to be as transcendant and as intricate as classical music, and when people describe Pet Sounds as "symphonic" it's not wide of the mark, this is intensely arranged stuff and listening to its component parts taken apart makes the idea that Brian felt he couldn't touch Sgt Pepper not only utterly, utterly laughable but also tragic. While the Beatles were fannying about in the studio trying to make funny noises, Brian was turning pop music into something akin to an art form.

And so on to possibly the most notorious unreleased work in the history of rock music, Smile. This is an interesting one for me because the reputation of what could have been seems so utterly immense as to make discussing it almost impossible, and yet the sketches (maybe even in some cases finished recordings) on the bootlegs are simply not good enough to warrant the bizarre slavering mania about it. On occasions you can hear that Smile might have been a fantastic piece of experimental music (the vocal harmonies on 'Child Is the Father of the Man' for instance) but on the whole, the idea that Smile would have utterly eclipsed Pet Sounds seems farcical to me. Where Pet Sounds was focussed, clear, beautifully designed and constructed, a masterpiece of musicianship, the bootlegs of Smile sound like sketches from a nervy artist's workbook. I think this is proven by the clear priority that Brian gave to 'Heroes and Villains' and 'Good Vibrations'. He was working and working on these songs, in the same way that he worked on the songs on Pet Sounds, and nothing else. Almost every other song that exists in any form that was planned to appear on Smile (with the possible exception of 'Look' but even that is hidebound by a stupid reference to another tune) is little more than a frivolous (albeit very smart) doodle. Now, it may be that if he had been able to spend the next six or seven years working on Smile it might have been the miracle that people imagine, but frankly it doesn't matter if he had created the most astonishing orchestral arrangement for 'Vege-Tables' it would still be the sub-standard song 'Vege-Tables'. Sonically, I understand the veneration for the idea of what Smile might have been, but in fact I don't believe that whatever it could have been, it would ever have come close to what Pet Sounds achieved. The best record of all time had already been made, there was no way that Brian could trump it himself. In all events, I need to give a shout out to Alex for providing me with the opportunity to even discuss Smile.

And so on to the curiosity that came out of the fall-out from the Smile catastrophe, Smiley Smile (1967). It must have seemed like a particularly peculiar record for the Beach Boys fan at the time. Presumably nobody knew much about either Brian's increasingly erratic behaviour or the debacle of the Smile recording sessions so for Smiley Smile to have appeared in the wake of Pet Sounds must have felt like something of a slap in the face. Or worse, an attempt by the Beach Boys to cash in on the growing psychedelic movement. The fact that Brian had been moving towards an experimental approach would have been a total unknown to the record buying public and as such Smiley Smile will have been a complete head-scratcher. Composed mostly of cleaned up bits and off-cuts from the Smile sessions, it's a difficult album to get to grips with. Where the songs on the Smile bootlegs you can accept as works in progress, the scrappy and haphazard nature of Smiley Smile is a real enigma. Fans listening to 'She's Goin' Bald' and 'Wind Chimes' must have been completely bemused and I think it's fair to say that to ask the audience to accept a sudden leap into lo-fi experimental music was an ask too far. There are still some great tunes here ('Gettin' Hungry' for instance) but on the whole it's a really odd record, and the way it came out gives some credence to that prize idiot Mike Love's view that this was a step into the unknown too far. After the psychic meltdowns of the Smile/Smiley Smile experiences it was time to take stock and the Beach Boys made the ultimate move away from Brian's ambitious heights by recording a back-to-basics piano, vocal and occasional guitar/keyboard rock record, Wild Honey (1967). It's a marvellous record, and you can hear how cathartic it must have been to make. No orchestral arrangements, no massive overdubs, no complex arrangements and no tripped-out paranoid psychedelia, just a true tribute to the notion of songs as an innate instinct. For the most part it's just Brian bashing out some lovely R&B influenced numbers, nothing complicated, nothing tricksy, just great, great songs. People often talk about it as a kind of rebirth of the band after its gruesome collapse under Brian's ambition and the band's antipathy at the end of 1966, and I think that's true. Wild Honey sounds like a new beginning, starting from scratch and using the best materials available to start rebuilding. It really is a lovely record.

The slow rebuilding of the broken Beach Boys continued with Friends (1968). The songs are relatively simple, but you can hear how the band are building up again from the bare bones of Wild Honey and there are some tentatively beautiful harmonies and deceptively lovely little songs here. The title song seems like a plea from each member of the band to the others to remember the value of staying close after the cataclysmic bust-ups they had during the Smile sessions and it's a charming thing to listen to. There are delicate steps back into using the studio as an instrument and making the vocal arrangements interesting, but it's all still very low-key. There are some gorgeous songs on Friends, and the whole thing sounds like the whole band are glad to have the opportunity to relax into making a record for a change. Possibly relaxing too much bearing in mind the whole thing ends with a dedication to the joys of transcendental meditation but we'll just mark that down to it being the 60's. Finally for this week it's the absolutely bizarre Stack-O-Tracks (1968). I have no idea what the point of Stack-O-Tracks was. It's a selection of the band's biggest hits to that date with all of the vocals removed, and weirdly it seems to have been sold as a kind of proto-karaoke deal ("You sing the words and play with the original instrumental backgrounds" shouts the album sleeve). Although the record does make you concentrate on the complexities of the instrumental arrangements, it does also serve to remind you how fundamental the vocal arrangements are to these songs. And therefore you're left wondering why on earth was this released? I think it's fair to assume that this was another desperate attempt by Capitol Records to milk what was left of the Beach Boys cash cow and that the band themselves had very little to do with its release.

Looks like we'll finish up with the mighty Beach Boys on Monday and that means the twin highs of Surf's Up and Holland. Excellent. Good weekends tout le monde.