Popcorn Noises

Cold Pizza Friday LVI

Don’t Go Near the Water

Earlier this week, someone asked a question about my desert-island-favorite albums, the stuff I would consign my ears to for the rest of my life, gun to my head. In my answer, I tried to make a point about how the question is misleading and about how you can’t take these kinds of things at face value, but I also went ahead and listed out some of the records that came to mind when I thought about favorites. And you know what? Even before I’d finished typing I felt insecure about my answers. The list I made didn’t look like me so much as a me from two or three years ago. In that time it seems I’ve concocted some delusions about being more worldly and well-rounded, about seeing a bigger picture and appreciating things that aren’t just—pardon the expression—white boy rock music. I still stand by what I said about tastes changing and not being able to know our preferences as well as we think, but it was also a good reminder to get off my fabricated high horse. I decided that it might be a good idea every now and then to use one of these ‘casual Friday’ pieces to go back to those albums and see if they still have something to say.

There’s a great appeal to the post-SMiLE Beach Boys that I think grows directly out of the drain-circling, fading-away-rather-than-burning-out thing they were going through. Brian’s reclusion and the band’s successful early days losing their relevance in light of more serious rock music of the time (this was still a few years before the Endless Summer comp gave them a foothold as an oldies act) creates this very tangible air of having already peaked and being keenly aware of it. It’s easy to take the Brian-centric view, shell out for your collector’s edition Pet Sounds, and leave it at that, but there’s this whole other, much less noble saga of a band toiling away at the margins of a culture that had quite clearly passed them by. This was not a ‘noble underground’ story of geniuses that went unappreciated, but the fumblings of has-been teen idols testing their mettle and trying to stay afloat. Their 1971 effort Surf’s Up is a great album, but you can’t really get away with calling it that. It’s embarrassingly sincere, considerably jumbled, and deeply flawed. Even if you couldn’t just read the history on Wikipedia or scan the liner notes, it’s a record of obvious patchwork—about a dozen different songwriters, some of the material almost 6 years old—that forms this pathetic little quilt you can’t bring yourself to give away.

The Beach Boys were never the type of band to come right out and wallow in their ‘failure,’ but the album is replete with sharp twinges that paint a very clear picture. There’s the cover art, of course, a rendition of James Earle Fraser’s “End of The Trail” sculpture (Fraser never copyrighted the image, hence its knick-knack ubiquity in Western culture) that shows a Native American warrior slumped over on a horse, leaning against the wind and silhouetted by blue-green shadows in a pose of utter defeat. And they decided to call it Surf’s Up? Where once the Beach Boys were presented to the world as ambassadors of carefree California culture, here they throw some of their homeland slang against an icon of oppression and sadness on the American frontier. “You want California?” it seems to sneer, “Here’s California. Enjoy.” The opening track, Mike Love and Al Jardine’s ecologically finger-wagging “Don’t Go Near the Water,” follows suit, a warning to keep your distance from the same band that was inviting everyone on a “Surfin’ Safari” ten years earlier.

Love’s other contribution, “Student Demonstration Time” (co-written with Jerry Leiber & Mike Stoller, I might add), is a protest anthem that aims for a combination of blues-rock grind and social consciousness, but that grates to no end on sharp siren sounds and Love’s bullhorn vocals. It’s the album’s ugly little center (and not in a cool arty way), unpleasant for the ears and about as politically shallow as a protest song can be, yet against all odds it fits the record’s theme: things are a mess. I know that’s not exactly the most original concept for an album, but that’s why I take the careerist approach to it. You have to remember who you’re listening to. Jardine laments unemployment on his folky solo turn “Lookin’ at Tomorrow,” while Carl’s ornate tracks are about perseverance (and, uh, cocaine), and Brian’s closing triad focuses wholly on mortality. With a couple exceptions, the lyrics skew cheesy to the point that you wouldn’t want to throw a bunch of quotes up on a piece like this to defend it (as was often the case with them), especially when it comes to the environmental themes, manifested as they are with a quaint heavy-handedness.

Usually when you lay out some of the flaws of an album you love like this, you’re supposed to take a big turn at some point, to begin a paragraph with “But…” and then say why the good far outweighs the bad. That feels inappropriate here. Forty years is more than enough time for people to stop trying to see how the scales balance out on what is ultimately a pretty unimportant record. And besides, a scale that weighs good and bad traits is a fallacious image. Carl Wilson’s fragile psych pop production, which wraps all this music in the same shades of blue and green that envelope the exhausted figure on the cover, doesn’t do so in spite of Love’s lame excuse for ‘awareness’ or Bruce Johnston’s doe-eyed fantasies of privilege, but because of them. If Surf’s Up is about damaged people in a damaged world, it’s only because the music is damaged, right? The first is a picture of the second, not the other way around. It’s an album that tries its damnedest to be cool and still winds up sobbing through Disney movies and blowing its nose on your sleeve.