Entry Eleven - Soulful in a Waspish Way: The Beach Boys' Sunflower
There's blues, folk, and country, and rock like a rollin' stone
The Beach Boys are a great American tragedy that produced some parcels of absolute brilliance, as Robert Christgau put it, they were “soulful, in a waspish way”. Pet Sounds is their well known masterpiece, and will be covered in another entry. It was after all, essentially Brian Wilson’s project, motivated as much by his voracious interest in popular sociology, musical experimentation, psychedelics, and of course competition with Phil Spector. Sunflower, on the other hand, along with its twin album, the nearly-as-good Surfs Up is a Beach Boys record. The vocals and songwriting are spread across all six members of the band. The musicianship is often the Beach Boys themselves, who were gradually developing live rock band chops, but of course, there is plenty of work from those great unionized LA session musicians in the Wrecking Crew. The juxtaposition between different songwriters does not render it choppy or incoherent. Rather, is masterfully sequenced between Brian Wilson dominated emotional pieces, Bruce Johnston’s chansons, and Dennis Wilson’s power pop. Albums made up of any one of these broad categories would be maudlin or repetitive. But in context, this works just brilliantly. It’s unpretentious and downright wholesome.
To take a step back as to how the Beach Boys ended up right in the middle of the road, releasing a record that was critically acclaimed but barely sold and spent decades out of print, it’s useful to situate what the Beach Boys were and what they portended, before and after their brief mid-sixties cult acclaim as a primarily Brian Wilson-led art project. The Wilson brothers and their cousin Mike Love, the heart of the band are second generation descendants of migrants from the Dust Bowl in Kansas. The Wilson patriarch, Murray Wilson was in California from the age of four. Growing up in abject poverty, he ended up working as a machinist right at the time that California was rapidly developing its industrial base. After losing an eye in an industrial accident, and while raising Dennis, Carl and Brian, he had ‘scrimped and saved’ enough to start his own machine manufacturing business, and achieved quite the success. He also was extremely verbally and often physically abusive of his sons, nephew and kids around the neighborhood.
This unique development in American capitalism constituted further the introduction of a novel subject into American life, of which the Beach Boys were exemplary. This is the teenager. Neither a kid nor a grown up. Someone who just wasn’t made for these times. Someone getting bugged driving up and down the same old strip, and needed to find a new place where the kids are hip. These young boomers, full of hunger and otherworldly singing ability perfectly crystalized this contradictory historical subject, even if they were actually between 17 and 21. They had cool outfits but they weren’t really all that good looking. They had ‘baby fat’, and were awkward. Dennis was handsome but seemed reminiscent of Moose from Archie comics. The high voiced and soft-spoken Brian lived in fear of being thought of as a “sissy” or gay. They sang about surfing and sports cars but didn’t surf and only could afford sports cars well after “Little Deuce Coupe” was a local hit. They had an immense rise, from local hitmakers to national stars, with some of the most musically inventive hit singles of all time, pioneering the use of theremin and synthesizer. As singers, especially in their six vocalist iteration being almost otherworldly in their vocal arrangement, they also pioneered multitrack recordings simply dedicated to different vocal parts. One often had Beach Boys records where there effectively 20 or more distinct voices interacting.
The classic period of high pop through psychedelia, from Pet Sounds to Brian Wilson’s legendary Smile project will be chronicled elsewhere. What is interesting about Sunflower, never more than a cult classic on this side of the pond, is how it reintegrates the charm of the early Beach Boys and attempts, perhaps consciously, to fit into the move towards a more ‘organic’ sound exemplified by The Band, CCR, The Beatles’ last three records, among others. After the sputtering out of the Smile project and Brian Wilson’s breakdown, they entered the middle of the road in the public mind, where they would stay until a critical reevaluation in the early seventies, well after this record. With solo work from Dennis Wilson in particular, and albums like this one cited by Big Star, Cheap Trick, and later the Smithereens and other power pop artists, the “full band” era of the Beach Boys has at least entered the music nerd community to the extent that it always did in Europe, where they often toured with at the very least tacit State Department backing.
With Brian Wilson’s functionality being very inconsistent and him not being a touring member, to a large degree this became a new band, primarily led by the other two Wilson brothers, in a tug-of-war with Mike Love. On this and the next few albums, this was even clear with the political distinctions, Mike Love as well as Al Jardine becoming increasingly openly conservative California republicans, while Carl Wilson publicly identifying with progressive politics. All of this while Brian Wilson was laying in bed and Bruce Johnston, still ostensibly an “extra” member in spite of his two excellent songs on this record, somewhat mediating, not unlike his knack for being a perfect second tenor. Yet the group textures are more apparent here than on any other Beach Boys record, and one hears in particular a prefiguration of late 70s Fleetwood Mac, Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers, among many others. It is no accident, in fact, that on one of the latter’s best songs of his later period, “Hung up and Overdue”, Carl Wilson sings, with Ringo Starr on drums.
The lead-off single (which bombed) and central thematic song on Sunflower is “Add Some Music to your Day”. It is one of the crowning achievements of the Wilson/Love songwriting team, often wracked with tension, that they wrote a song that is in a sense, of a piece with “Rock & Roll” by the Velvet Underground. It is music about music, a song about a song, ostensibly even about itself. The thing knows itself, as it were. With every member of the Beach Boys contributing to the lead vocals, both on their own and in ‘endless harmony’, the very simple truisms of music “keeping you calm”, how it “touches your heart” when used in cinema, it could be alright (alright). As "The world could come together as one if everybody under the sun add some music to your day”. This was the bourgeois Wasp “What’s Going On” or “Bad Moon Rising”, a plea for universal harmony so awkward but wholesome that it is unironically gorgeous.
Particularly notable is the depth of character development and world building from each individual vocalist, in order of performance, the now understated Mike Love, the friendly if anxious Bruce Johnston, the emo and showy Carl Wilson, the gregarious and confident Dennis Wilson, the vulnerable but declarative Brian Wilson, and finally, the Beck-like So-Cal drawl of Al Jardine. In their earlier days, they didn’t have as distinctive character, the point of their voices was to blend, to champion unison as much as harmonic singing. This started to shift around “California Girls”, and later on Pet Sounds. As well, on Pet Sounds’ never properly released follow-up, Smile, they recorded songs like “Cool Cool Water”, which fortuitously ended up as the closing track of Sunflower. A psychedelic surf-vocal group hybrid, it evokes their earliest material, while, in classic Love/Wilson show the necessity of water like the necessity of music. The prescriptiveness of the lyrics, of course, are secondary, like on “Add Some Music..” to the sound of dozens of overdubbed voices chanting “water”.
The UK pressing of the album, which is my preferred copy, opens with their great cover of Leadbelly’s "Cottonfields”, reminiscent of “Sloop John B”. This is not canonical and the “real” US edition of the album, as well as subsequent reissues open with the enjoyable Dennis Wilson led “Slip on Through”, with a Christopher Walken style cowbell beat and a driving power-pop chorus. He even plays guitar. Like D. Wilson’s other songs here, this is nothing deep on the surface but is incredibly influential, the same power pop that we would soon be hearing from Big Star. Dennis Wilson’s influence, both in his songs here and his solo work is something not quite as well known in the canon of music nerdery. As much as his brother Brian’s ornate symphonic work set the template for a specific musical form from some of its immediate follow-up all the way to the most recent work by Lil’ Yachty, Dennis Wilson was to power pop what the likes of Iggy Pop and Lou Reed were to punk-rock.
Dennis Wilson’s other three(!) written or co-written songs on the album work with the same template. “Got to Know the Woman” was voted the worst track on the album by Beach Boys fans on Reddit. It is one of those songs that are even hated by the die-hard fans, but it also can’t be denied that it works perfectly on the album. Somewhat incomplete as a song, its two primary charms are the singing, both Dennis affecting a sort of cocky California Robert Plant pose and the layered harmony vocals, and the simple construction of the song. Wilson’s drumming is sloppy and fun and the repetition that becomes drone-like at the same time is annoyingly catchy. “It’s About Time” features lead vocals from brother Carl Wilson, who had a hand in the songwriting as did Jardine and friend of the band Bob Bachman. Primarily written by Dennis Wilson, it’s ostensibly an autobiographical cautionary tale about “rock excess” as the saying goes. One can’t help, however, to notice that it seems to refer to Dennis Wilson’s brief period as a fellow traveler with the Manson family.
And then there’s “Forever”, Dennis Wilson’s best known original, even later becoming a minor hit as sung by 90s Beach Boys drummer John Stamos. Brian Wilson once called it his favorite Beach Boys song. A Dennis Wilson song, co-written with fellow ex-Mansonite Gregg Jakobson, with a Brian Wilson vocal arrangement, it is one of the most stunning sounding songs on the record. While somewhat adult contemporary, there is not a drop of irony or high-fructose corn syrup here. Likewise Bruce Johnston’s contributions, that he himself later thought were too “pop”. Johnston was nothing if not “pop”, later writing the Barry Manilow song “I Write the Songs”. Yet his contributions here are intrinsic to the album as a whole, and frankly, sound a lot less like easy listening than like Serge Gainsbourg crossed with early Belle and Sebastian.
Replete with Wrecking Crew members like the legendary Larry Knechtel on piano, as well as unnamed flautists, strings and the two-bass sound of Pet Sounds, “Dierdre” is otherworldly, one of a kind. Based partially on a piece of music by Brian Wilson, its music hall whimsy is cut by minor keys and Johnston’s somewhat melancholy croon. Some music historians have noted that the song may be named for Manson family member and daughter of Angela Lansbury Dierdre Shaw. Johnston’s other song on the album, “Tears in the Morning” is referenced in Robert Christgau’s review, is another stunner. It features Wrecking Crew members playing all sorts of textures, notably a memorable concertina, as well as Johnston’s contributions on grand piano and the legendary rocksichord, an early electronic keyboard meant to evoke the sound of a harpsichord. Johnston’s vocals have a bite, befitting the lyrics that, as Christgau notes, are a sign of “maturity”, it is a song about divorce, but is less angry than depressed and empathetic, “a cancelled future, well, it's hard on me”.
Aside from “Cool, Cool Water” and “Add Some Music to your Day”, I haven’t even touched on Brian Wilson’s contributions to this album, as he is emphatically not the bandleader here. Instead, he is part of a team of equals and his most pressing contributions here are help with others’ songs and arrangements. Written with Mike Love, who sings lead, “All I Wanna Do” was later seen as proto-shoegaze by a wide array of critics, given the wall-of-sound quality to the production. Primarily responsible for the sound here is Carl Wilson, playing rocksichord once again, plus layered 12 string electric guitar. My own comparison would be less to shoegaze than to dream pop and contemporaries of the Beach Boys, notably the Grateful Dead. Beyond the production style, it is a deceptively simple song, like even their earliest material, the novelty being the arrangement.
“Our Sweet Love” is a classic Brian Wilson ballad, like “God Only Knows” it has Carl Wilson singing lead with backup primarily from Brian and Bruce Johnston. The rhythm is galloping while the production is lush. Indeed, the consensus among critics and fans is that this is the most Pet Sounds type track on the record. Thus, while gorgeous, it doesn’t break new ground. More successful, and also with Carl Wilson singing lead, is “This Whole World”, along with “Forever”, the best known song on the album, and perhaps the height of Waspish soul. It is also one of the most harmoniously complex Beach Boys songs, written by Wilson when he was admittedly quite stoned. Musicologists call the style used in this song “tonal transience", in that, while each verse and chorus followed the same pattern, internally to each section of the song, no pattern repeats itself. The vocals are dazzling, to say the least, and the non-traditional instrumentation, as elsewhere, is memorable, notably the glockenspiel. In turn, it leads right into “Add Some Music to Your Day”, setting it up. It’s the best song on the album.
I remember buying Sunflower in Europe, having never heard it before. I was a Beach Boys fan and and early “online” person and it was the late 90s - so it may have been summer 1997 when I purchased the CD, which had only just been reissued for the first time - and not in North America. Just as I’d read it described by early internet music fans, it was everything I could hope for, and I felt like I had found a lost classic that no one else knew about. I had certainly never heard it or heard of it, aside from being somewhat familiar with the execrable John Stamos versions of “Forever”. Noting critics had called it the precursor to this or that, notably power pop, it encouraged me to branch out and go down those rabbit holes. In turn, unlike even Pet Sounds, it is one of the few records I know of that I can put on just about any time, in part or whole. It is just that brilliant and, frankly, relaxing to add some music to your day.