Beach Boys Skyline Stage, September 8
Joe Thomas, founder of River North, first proposed to Love the idea of a Beach Boys country album. Love, he told Billboard, replied, “If you can deliver Willie Nelson to me, I can deliver Brian Wilson to you.” As executive producer, Love positioned the Beach Boys’ hot-rod songs as forerunners of 90s country. “Both styles of music are uniquely American,” Love has said. “Both are about telling stories.”
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Thomas and Brian Wilson produced Stars and Stripes, and they elicit some shining harmonies from the band on Lorrie Morgan’s “Don’t Worry Baby” and Kathy Troccoli’s “I Can Hear Music.” As a compelling and original vocal unit, the Beach Boys have the potential to age more gracefully than most 60s geezers, but they’ve yet to try a full-out a cappella record or tour. Most of the album’s country rockers fall flat, the infectious hooks of “I Get Around” and “Help Me Rhonda” handily defused by changes in tempo and rhythm, respectively. Willie Nelson’s hesitant reading of “The Warmth of the Sun” blossoms in later verses with some thoughtful phrasing. “Caroline, No,” the plaintive ballad that closes Pet Sounds, receives a full orchestral arrangement, with Timothy B. Schmit delivering a close copy of Wilson’s young, fragile vocals.
At the time Wilson was collaborating with Andy Paley (a producer of Jonathan Richman’s Modern Lovers) on new material for a Beach Boys album; he was also assembling The Pet Sounds Sessions with producer Mark Linett. A gargantuan project, it includes a reissue of the original mono mix, alternate takes of songs, tracking sessions in which Wilson discusses and shapes the arrangements with a large ensemble of pop and traditional instrumentalists, and a stereo version in which the vocals and instrumental tracks were digitally matched from different master tapes. It’s clearly a project based on the supposition that people will be studying this stuff in a hundred years–and clearly intended to give credit where credit is due.
Quick on the heels of Leaf’s book came an “authorized” biography by Byron Preiss, which was similar in scope to Leaf’s book but was intercut with half a dozen quotations per page, as if amended by committee. The 1983 death of drummer Dennis Wilson frames Steven Gaines’s merciless Heroes and Villains, a detailed and lurid account of rock-star excess that manages to be even-handed by leaving no one unscathed but seldom articulates the beauty of the band’s music.
Wilson’s side was propped up once more by the film and sound track of I Just Wasn’t Made for These Times, both the work of record producer Don Was. The film portrays him as an addled but energetic man who feels deeply about music and is more candid about his own transgressions than many of his family and friends. It exonerates him for years of indolence and self-absorption, laying blame on his abusive father, his myopic bandmates, the pressures of the music business. John Cale of the Velvet Underground and Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore are on hand to legitimize Pet Sounds for the Nirvana generation. But don’t go looking for a copy at your local retailer: the CD was pulled from stores in preparation for the big reissue project. Pet Sounds spent its 30th birthday out of print.
