![]() ![]() Toothpaste and soap will make our oceans a bubble-bathīy the time we hear the original melody again, however, repeated with different words, it is rather lovable, and even the lyrics redeem themselves: Jardine wails the third verse with rather more soul than is called for with a lyric like: It begins without much promise, a rather trite melody that reminds the ear of commercial jingles, but the chorus is imaginative. Surf’s Up, the album, is almost a concept album (remember them?) in its near obsession with the subject of water (if not the Beach Boys, then who?) the last cut of Sunflower was “Cool Water,” five minutes worth, and the first track here is “Don’t Go Near the Water,” by Al Jardine and Mike Love. Like their very best music, it is Light (ness) itself, fragile and transparent as sunshine. Parks’ lyrics make the most of the Beach Boys’ obsession with the polished surface of their music: one is never unaware of the artistry in their construction, and you are tossed mercilessly from content to technique, behind and before the scene, attention drawn to the song itself as an entity: The fullness of the wine, the dim last toasting John Prine Finally Gets the Send-Off He Deserved at Nashville's Week of Tribute Concerts Like “Cabinessence” on 20/20, another Smile number, it is the last cut on side two, and even though this version was recorded completely in 1971, there is something of the effect of Brian saying: “Oh yeah, that’s our new album, but hey, you wanna hear something we had left over around here?” In any case, there is cause to be grateful they got around to it: Here it is, however, just part of the puzzle. ![]() The production is ornate elephant calls melting into French horns and clarinets, percussion via housekeys slapped against a top-hat, and you name it yet never opaque. (It had been performed once by Brian at a piano, in 1967 on a Leonard Bernstein-bestows-his-blessing-on-rock television show, never to be heard again.) Is it as good as was breathlessly rumored by those who had heard the partial track? Well, yes. The song itself emerges out of the legend that withholding it so long created. ![]() “Surf’s Up” itself was to be the piece de resistance to Smile, the album that never was, Brian’s collaboration with Van Dyke Parks. Sometimes the last thing I hear at night before falling asleep is from “Country Air,” Carl holding that note (“Mother Nature, she fills my eyeyeyeyeyey”) and rhyming it to the rooster’s crow that begins the cut. Capitol has scratched all their albums after ’65, Pet Sounds and everything, including Wild Honey, that followed. Now there is an under-rated album, Wild Honey it is surely the most even of their post-surfer LPs, and the last time they truly rocked their asses off, one cut after another. And especially Wild Honey, the entire album. I’m thinking especially of “This Whole World,” the most perfect example on the last album ( aumdidit, aumdidit), but also of “Cottonfields” ( so much more energy and emotion than Creedence’s) on 20/20, and the slightly ragged but good-natured title-cut of Friends. Wilson, Wilson, Wilson, Jardine, Love and Johnston form rock’s only choir, and what one misses on Surf’s Up are more of the incredible group vocals that have been equalled in power only by the Band. Yet wait, there’s more pink fluff inside the cone, and more, and more … (Not to mention the best aftertaste in the business.) Cotton candy: bite into it and the pink fluff becomes sugar on your tongue then, poof! mere aftertaste. ![]() Yet the surface is manipulated so carefully and so brilliantly that (and here I am forced by a certain poverty of analogy to shift senses) it becomes hologrammatic. The production is usually flawless and the melodies so frequently exquisite that one tends to hear, then listen for and finally dismiss it as surface. But the important thing about the Beach Boys is just this aspect of their music. ![]()
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