Wilson (k, g, v); Dennis Wilson (v, d, k)
Track listing: Do You Wanna Dance (S/US); Good To My Baby; Don’t Hurt My Little Sister; When I Grow Up (To Be A Man); Help Me, Rhonda [LP Version] (S); Dance, Dance, Dance; Please Let Me Wonder; I’m So Young; Kiss Me Baby; She Knows Me Too Well; In The Back Of My Mind; Bull Session With ‘Big Daddy’
Running time: 28.54
Current CD: Capitol 5316392 adds: Summer Days album
Further listening: Pet Sounds (1966); Summer Days (And Summer Nights!!) (1965)
Further reading: Heroes And Villains: The True Story Of The Beach Boys (Stephen Gaines, 1986); www.beachboys.com
Download: HMV Digital; iTunes
Although no one could have known it when it was released, The Beach Boys Today! foreshadowed the end of the group’s first era – the era of songs about cars, carefree love and surfing for which they remain most well known.
The first Beach Boys album of 1965 and their ninth studio album in three years (including a Christmas collection), Today! marked a critical point in Brian Wilson’s development as a songwriter and producer. Perhaps as significantly, it was also when his lucidity was first brought into serious question.
Eager to better the artistic and commercial precedents set by The Beatles and Phil Spector, and increasingly insecure in his ability to do so, Wilson felt straitjacketed by the Boys’ narrow – but winning – formula. His introduction to marijuana, and the bohemian community that supplied it to him, convinced him that the group’s sound should expand as much as his mind if it was to remain relevant. Following an airborne breakdown en route to a Los Angeles live date on December 23, 1964, Wilson announced his retirement from the road to the horrified group, explaining that he would focus all of his creativity into the studio. ‘I told them I foresee a beautiful future for The Beach Boys, but the only way we could achieve it was if they did their job and I did mine,’ recalled Brian. ‘I felt I had no choice, I was run down mentally and emotionally.’
Nothing looks amiss among the sweater-clad grinning boys beaming out from its cover, and the likes of Dance, Dance, Dance and Help Me, Rhonda maintain the group’s good-time reliability. Yet an air of delicate, desperate introspection bleeds from Today’s most beautiful songs (eight of the album’s ten originals written by Brian alone), accentuated by complex orchestrations borne from Brian’s new freedom. The album’s entire second half, particularly, is regarded as the precursor to Pet Sounds’ resolute, lush despair. Please Let Me Wonder (the first song Brian wrote stoned) and In The Back Of My Mind express love not as teenage paradise, but as a submission to paralysing vulnerability, the ultimate threat to childhood naïveté: ‘So happy at times that I break out in tears/In the back of my mind, I still have my fears.’ Even this side’s cover version, The Students’ doo-wop pearl I’m So Young, is equivocal. ‘I’m so young/Can’t marry no one.’
Some of the group (can you guess who?) expressed concern over this break from custom, but to no avail. The Beach Boys Today! was the signpost to The Beach Boys’ tomorrow.
The Sonics
Here Are The Sonics
Before they made The Sonics they broke the mould.
Record label: Etiquette
Produced: Buck Orsnby and Kent Morrill
Recorded: 1965
Released: March 1965
Chart peaks: None (UK) None (US)
Personnel: Gerry Roslie (v, p, o); Andy Parypa (b); Larry Parypa (g); Rob Lind (s); Bob Bennett (d); Kearney Barton (e)
Track listing: The Witch (S/US); Do You Love Me; Roll Over Beethoven; Boss Hoss; Dirty Robber; Have Love Will Travel; Psycho (S/US); Money; Walkin’ The Dog; Night Time Is The Right Time; Strychnine; Good Golly Miss Molly
Running time: 29.20
Current CD: Ace CDHP022
Further listening: Second album and more of the same, The Sonics Boom (1966)
Further reading: www.history-of-rock.com/sonics.htm; surf.to/sonics
Download: Not currently legally available
The secret behind the most visceral garage punk group of the ’60s? ‘We wanted people to gasp, we wanted people to go “oh my gawd!” And so that’s how we approached it,’ reveals drummer Bob Bennett. ‘We wanted to blow people off their feet, not just with loudness, but with tightness, with music that made you want to dance.’ Hence their debut single The Witch. Originally intended as a simple dance number to rival The Twist and The Mashed Potato, the song gradually mutated into a raw, screaming horror show. On hearing the masters, the band were devastated. ‘All I did was pound my drums and I guess it just sounded like bashing when it was recorded,’ said Bob, ‘I remember the engineers arguing. One guy says, “That doesn’t even sound like drums,” and the other guy goes, “Well what am I gonna do – look at this guy?”’
The Witch became the biggest-selling single in America’s Northwest and their record label Etiquette naturally demanded an album. The only problem was songwriter and singer Gerry Roslie’s sloth. ‘I had to prod him,’ recalled Buck Ormsby, Etiquette’s A&R man who had discovered the group, ‘The Sonics weren’t great musicians, but they had this magic thing.’
They eventually got it together at Audio Recording in Seattle. Twelve cuts were recorded live onto 2-track tape. Six songs were covers, including a frenetic take on the Contours’ Do You Love Me and their ferocious reading of Little Richard’s Good Golly Miss Molly. Originals included Psycho, a deranged maelstrom propelled along by pounding drums, the fearsome Strychnine, which extols the virtues of guzzling poison and features Rob Lind’s raucous, wailing sax, and their supercharged ode to a Ford Mustang, Boss Hoss.
What made The Sonics special was Gerry Roslie’s fiendish, manic vocals, which some likened to Little Richard. ‘I always felt that somebody would have to come in and give him a blood transfusion,’ engineer Kearney Barton said, ‘I thought he was gonna tear his throat out – screaming from start to finish – amazing!’
Though influencing just about every band that came out of the North-west The Sonics were unable, despite their best efforts, to break out nationally. Instead, at the end of the ’60s, they broke up.
Bert Jansch
Bert Jansch
Possibly the very first British singer/songwriter album.
Record label: Transatlantic
Produced: Bill Leader
Recorded: 5 North Villas, Camden, London; September 1964–January 1965
Released: April 16, 1965
Chart peaks: None (UK) None (US)
Personnel: Bert Jansch (v, g)
Track listing: Strolling Down The Highway; Smokey River; Oh How Your Love Is Strong; I Have No Time; Finches; Rambling’s Going To Be The Death Of Me; Veronica; Needle Of Death; Do You Hear Me Now?; Alice’s Wonderland; Running, Running From Home; Courting Blues; Casbah; Dreams Of Love; Angie
Running time: 38.52
Current CD: Sanctuary CMRCD204 adds: Instrumental Medley (Live); Angie (Live)
Further listening: Jack Orion (1966); Rosemary