The Beach Boys: “God Only Knows” (1965)
BEACH BOYS, The. Pet Sounds. Capitol. Remastered 2000; orig. 1965.
BEATLES. Rubber Soul. Capitol. 1965; reissued 2012.
Toward the end of 1965, having heard the Beatles’ newest release, Rubber Soul, the Beach Boys’ resident musical genius Brian Wilson set out to surpass it. The result was Pet Sounds, routinely included in lists of the great rock albums and, as we know from Kenneth Womack’s forthcoming biography of the “fifth Beatle,” producer George Martin, an album that Paul McCartney couldn’t get out of his mind. It wasn’t the Stones or any of the new Brit groups that the Beatles saw as their chief rivals in the mid-60s. It was the Beach Boys, and specifically this album, Pet Sounds. Pet Soundswas a breakthrough album for the Beach Boys, just as Revolver,the next Beatles’ album up, would hands down a year and a half later with the release of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, but chronologically, Pet Soundsstarted the march for both groups away from performance-based recordings to studio-formed recordings and toward the emergence of the concept album, the album not as a set of stand-alone singles (the best of them the marketable “hits”) but an entity –integrated, developing continuous mood, even a story line. You could make a good argument that without Pet Sounds, later on there’d have been no rock opera Tommyor Pink Floyd’s The Wall.
I didn’t much like the Beach Boys’ music at the time. It seemed too light, too froufrou. I liked music with more of a bite. I did admire their later album, Surf’s Up. That, plus reading McCartney’s judgment on Pet Sounds in Womack’s book, led me back to Pet Sounds. Did it offer more than I remembered? The answer was “yes and no.”
There is one great song on it and two close to it. The great one is “God Only Knows,” which starts with the heretical line (for a 60s love song), “I may not always love you,” and goes on to name God in a rock-ish love ballad. Over all, the lyrics are not particularly biting or incisive but it’s wrapped up in a multi-layered musical production that is really quite lovely and that could never, I mean never, be reproduced live in concert. “The Sloop John B.” is almost as good as is “Wouldn’t It Be Lovely?” From my perspective, that’s it. It’s not that the other cuts are inferior but that cumulative effect of them, music and lyrics, is cloying. It’s like cotton candy –looks so good but melts away in your mouth leaving you with a sugar rush but no substance—or maybe those inflatable plastic sex dolls, which have all the necessary appurtenances on the outside but are just … air… beneath the surface. No one harmonized as well as the Beach Boys did, and the album has their certified rhythmic pulse, but it’s too much of the same thing. It needs some vinegar. When I compare it to Surf’s Up, or to the masterpiece of that other California band, the Eagles, Hotel California, I don’t leave it wanting to listen to it again.
The opening lines from “Wouldn’t It Be Nice” run: “Wouldn’t it be nice if we were older / Then we wouldn’t have to wait so long.” The cut starts with tinkly sounds, then goes to the group vocal. The lyrics encapsulate what makes me uncomfortable with this album. Its sentiments may represent a step up from the surfer teenager music the Beach Boys made their reputation on but mature it’s not. Yet. There’s no edge to it and no irony.
****
The Beatles, “Drive My Car” (1965)
The Beatles’Rubber Soul is another animal. From the very first cut, “Drive My Car,” it rocks, has an edge to it. It’s not as experimental an album as Pet Sounds, or the Beatles’ next ventureRevolver, but it has an infectious swagger to it, even disrespect for the conventionalities of love, love, love. It isn’t a unified venture nor even as uniformly successful as the subsequent, programatized albums were, but the rockers on it (“Drive My Car,” “I’m Looking Through You”…) really rock, and remind you what a steady, solid drummer Ringo was, and there is George’s first outing on sitar (“Norwegian Wood”) and the experimental “Nowhere Man.” “Michelle” is a great McCartney ballad, about telling your French-speaking girlfriend you love her, and “Norwegian Wood” may remember a liaison of sorts but it’s not a conventional love ballad by any stretch of the imagination. The weaknesses of Rubber Soulare two: it comes across as a set of separated experiments rather than a suite of songs, and on this album, the group still seems bound by the arbitrary time constraints of the stand-alone pop single: another thirty seconds or more would have enriched the more piquant songs –“Nowhere Man,” “Norwegian Wood.” As to harmony, the Breach Boys may have made their name on their (exquisite) harmony, but the Liverpudlians were no slouches either.
MUSIC & ME 