Love you Beach Boys

Rip It Up, Issue 6, 1 November 1977, Page 4

Love you Beach Boys

William Dart

By way of being a totally balanced and unbiased rave review of the Beach Boys' latest album. A cool and levelheaded explanation of why it is .so superb. Cut the chatter though and let's look into these immortal grooves. Quotation, quotation . . . that's it. Mona'' is a lovely little song full of references to the iconography of popculture from “Gimme Some Loving" to the hallowed name of Phil Spector himself. Later in the record another icon or rather monjtre sacre of American telekulture is exposed in "Johnny Carson ". Well . . . attacked? At least nudged in the ribs a bit. When the Beach Boys talk about Johnny there is more than a suspicion in my mind that there are a few smirks in between the notes: It's nice to have you on the show tonight I’ve seen your act in Vegas--outtasight! Don’t you think he’s such a natural guy The way he’s kept it up could make you cry. It is the Beach Boys' musical treatment of these lines that adds the irony, the melody ricocheting between high and low notes, the harmonies just so precise. Listen to the way they sing Johnny Carson's name. Harmony and rhythm combine to provide an extra dimension to the lyrics. More samples of their rather gentle humour are scattered throughout the album. The extended double entendre of “I Wanna Pick You Up" (Brian

Wilson's own explanation was that this song is "descriptive of a man who considers this chick a baby”). The tongue-in-cheek male chauvinistics of "Love is a Woman”: 123,she’s falling in love with me 456, she fell for all my tricks 789, she makes me feel so fine Everyone must be aware of the almost manic care Brian Wilson takes with the production side of Beach Boys records. And the poor man is enduring a lot of hyping lately— vide recent Rolling Stone article and the enclosure to this record which reads To Brian whom we love with all our heart' signed by the other four Beach Boys. But, in the final analysis the sheer sound of the album is very inventively handled. Listen to the chunky menacing tones of "I Wanna Pick You Up or the buoyant harmonies of "Airplane". What about the very apt use of moog in "I'll Bet He's Nice". What a nice corrective these burbling synthesised sounds prove to the innate romanticism of the lyrics. Further evidence

that the Beach Boys have constructed these songs to work on more than one level. From the standpoint of harmony, the Beach Boys must still be one of the most interesting groups around. So much so that in an age of simplistic three chord opuses it perhaps does make their music seem a trifle mandarin. Such a song is "Solar System" with its rather fey account of the influence of the planets, a parallel to "Transcendental Meditation” from their Friends album. Wilson was inspired to write this song on the way to a school meeting for his daughter hence the charming and deliberate kitsch of the words: Then there's the Milky Way That’s where the angels play You've seen the lover's moon Looks good in the month of June Neptune is God of the sea Pluto is too far to see I know some people just hate this sort of stuff, and I am obviously not one of those. It is just that same whimsy that I think distinguised some

of the numbers on their Christmas album as well as "Take a Load off Your Feet" from Surf's Up. These are very much random thoughts on the Love You album and it certainly seems to have been fairly unsuccessful round the country judging by the numbers of shops who feature it in their sale bins. Wilson was disappointed when the previous album 15 Big Ones didn't really have a single success, and I think "It’s OK" could have made it with the right promotion. A snippet of it certainly distinguished Radio Hauraki's collage-advert fdr its summer rock programme. Best bets for single success on Love You would probably be either "The Night Was So Young" or "Good Time" a song that was performed by Spring in 1972. And as Wilson says, "Why waste a song?" So why not give Love You a try 7 I have probably won no more fans for Love You than I have dissuaded camp followers from the Divine Miss M. . . but one must keep trying.