Every now and then I post something old, in this case an academic (shudder) paper I submitted in 1990. I know that a great part of this inclination is sheer laziness, but if it was good then, it's probably good now.
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You can speak as you openly like against... tyrants, as long as you can be understood differently, because you are not trying to avoid giving offense, only its dangerous repercussions. If danger can be avoided by some ambiguity of expression, everyone will admire its cunning.
--Quintilian, Institutes
Perhaps owing to our twentieth-century legacy of "new critical" assumptions, Elizabethan literary criticism has rarely come to grips with the impact of official censorship upon writers and their works. Yet it is hard to escape the fact that few other historical periods have matched the repression inaugurated by the Tudors, who within fifty years of the introduction of print into England began to devise a censorship apparatus which required two hundred years and two revolutions to dismantle. Such repressive machinery was bound to affect not only the authors and readers o9f printed texts, but the institutions of public address-- sermons, parliamentary speeches, theater-- and private correspondence and conversation as well.
The institution of modern censorship properly began with the response of Holy Roman Emperor Charles V to the pamphlets and broadsides of Martin Luther and his supporters in Germany. The emperor's Edict of Worms promulgated in 1521 contained a "Law of Printing," which prohibited the printing, sale, possession, reading, or copying of Luther's works or other material deemed contrary to the Catholic religion or directed against the pope, prelates of the church, princes, or university faculties. Any libelous material already in. existence was to be confiscated and publicly burned. Charles appointed professors of theology as censors and empowered local. municipal councils within the empire to administer censorship. Printers were forced to take an oath of compliance with the strictures of pre-publication censorship, with penalties ranging from heavy fines to exclusion from their profession. In 1530 the existing censorship mechanisms, having proved ineffective in stopping the spread of Lutheran ideas, was supplemented by the Edict of the Diet of Augsburg, which required the printer's imprimatur and identification of the city of publication, and by the Edict of Speyer in 1570, which legally confined the press to free imperial cities or towns that had a princely court or university.
In 1564 the papacy itself undertook the business of censorship in decisive fashion by publishing its first Index librorum prohibitorum (known as the Tridentine Index, because it had been authorized by the Council of Trent). The Index included a long list of authors whose entire output was prohibited, an additional list of banned individual titles, and rules for the expurgation of books whose "chief matter" was deemed good, though they contained isolated offenses. The promulgation of the Index provided the last of sixteenth-century European censorship's essential components, along with a process of pre-publication screening to halt the printing of offensive works and the establishment of international and local interdiction of contraband publications. In spite of such formidable weaponry, however, neither church nor state was able to stem the tide of Reformation literature on the continent.
To England, then, belongs the dubious distinction of inventing the first truly effective model of state repression in modern history. Consisting of the same basic components as the apparatus taking shape on the continent, the main difference in the English system was that the state took the leading role in censorship. Taking censorship ougt of the hands of conscience-stricken, lax, or corrupt ecclesiastical officials, the English crown now defined heresy, issued censorship regulations, and relied on civil agencies to enforce its decrees. The Tudor repression was relatively uniform and compliance by English publishers and readers relatively general, at least until the appearance of widespread Puritan dissention late in the. sixteenth century.
Printing was at first not deemed a social or political threat, and there was no attempt in England to control it forr nearly half a century after the introduction of Caxton's press. The impetus for the rise of censorship in England, as in the rest of Europe, was the spread of Lutheran ideas. Luther's works were burned by order of the church of Cambridge in 1520 and in London the following year. Then in 1529, anticipating the papal index by 35 years, Henry VIII promulgated his own list of 85 prohibited book titles, including 22 by Luther, eleven by Zwingli, nine by Oecolapadius, and two by Wycliffe. Without a reliable machinery of enforcement, however, censorship did little to stop the production, importation, or sale of these books. Henry responded in 1530 by proclamation of a licensing system, at first applied only to religious publications, which for the first time put censorship firmly under secular control. Well aware of the power of the printed word in all aspects of policy, Henry would henceforth follow a strategy not only of eliminating undesirable texts, but also of stimulating the circulation of printed matter that supported his cause.
The early 1530s witnessed further book-burnings, along with the execution by burning of those convicted of circulating Reformation literature. The turning point of Tudor history, and the point of no return for English censorship, came in Henry's Act of Supremacy in 1534 and the ensuing Proclamation of 1538, in which the "Great Bible" united king, church, and censor into one absolute ruler whose powers now extended to all kinds of printed texts. Henry's Privy Council now replaced the inefficient hierarchy of ecclesiastical examiners and re-aimed its weapons against the adherents of Rome with a wave of executions, most notably of Sir Thomas More and Bishop Fisher.
Censorship under the reigns of Edward VI and Queen Mary, probably the most lenient in Tudor history, proceeded under the desire to reconcile the sharp divergences in matters of polity and religion. Soon after the accession of Mary, however, it became apparent that a policy of national consensus was doomed, and the stringent censorship of Henry was resumed by Mary's 1555 prohibition of 26 named authors, as well as any book in a foreign language "containing false doctrine contrary and against the catholic faith, and the doctrine of the catholic church" (Gillett 28, citing John Foxe, Actes and Monuments, 1563). Mary's other refinement upon the machinery of censorship was the establishment in 1557 of the Stationers Company, a trade organization of printers under royal charter, which functioned as the official publishing monopoly.
Queen Elizabeth undertook the manifold strengthening and sophistication of the represssive system already in place. Her injunctions of 1559 brought into the business of censorship, alongside those put in place by her predecessors, the Anglican Church hierarchy. Later her Star Chamber decree of 1586, giving the Stationers Company express authority to conduct inspections of print shops for contraband throughout the realm, became the capstone of a legal edifice which stood more than a century.
Book burnings under Elizabeth continued the by now customary persecution of religious nonconformists (including, among others, books by Thomas Cartwright, Walter Travers, Henry Nicholas, Robert Brown, Robert Harrison, Henry Barrow, John Greenway, Francis Johnson, John Udall, and the Martin Marprelates tracts), but significantly they began to include works by such advocates of popular liberty as George Buchanan (De jure regni, 1579) and Hubert Languet (Vindiciae contra tyrannis, 1579). The intense controversy of 1579-1581 over the question of royal succession was quelled by the wrath of Elizabeth against those who dared to express their opinions in print, particularly the gruesome punishment meted out to John Stubbs. The final years of Elizabeth's reign were marked by yet another wave of bannings and burnings, this time mainly directed against satires which "offended against morality," leading to an outright decree by the bishops against offensive histories and printed plays, along with satires.
Few critical studies of recent years have undertaken to assess the impact of censorship as a factor in shaping either the form or content of Renaissance English literature, probably because the majority of critics retain the notion of literature as somehow immune from the vicissitudes of politics. One significant exception has been the study, published posthumously in 1987, by William Empson of Marlowe's Doctor Faustus. Empson's investigation compares versions of the Faust legend in German and English with the extant versions of Marlowe's play and concludes that the institutions of Elizabethan censorship were responsible for the wholesale mutilation of the play.
In the background of Empson's discussion are the ghastly contemporary events on the European continent, as a French traveller reported in 1590: "Germany is almost entirely occupied with building fires for witches. Switzerland has been compelled to wipe out many of her villagers on their account. Travellers in Lorraine may see thousands and thousands of the stakes to which witches are bound (49). Small wonder that the German Faust-book of 1587 was one of the first international best-sellers. Faust seized the popular imagination as a particularly evil witch, but at the same time magicians, well-received by many rulers including Elizabeth, claimed to work via the Middle Spirits, neither of Heaven nor of Hell. The drastic mangling of Marlowe's text, amounting to one quarter of the play's original length, is traced by Empson to its probable entanglement with the Star Chamber on the volatile issue of magic and the propensities of the English public toward the kind of witch phobia gripping thee continent.
Of still more interest to scholars than such an explanation of the impact of censorship upon an individual text is the question of its general effects upon Elizabethan literature and literary careers, and especially the problems of interpretation that arise from the critic's recognition of these effects. Annabel Patterson's Censorship and Interpretation is perhaps to only recent study to address these concerns. In her examination of a wide range of political pamphlets, royal proclamations, published speeches and other records of parliamentary proceedings, sermons, plays, histories, editions and translation of classics, familiar letters, pastoral romances, and neo-Pindaric odes, Patterson explores the conventions of "oblique discourse" characteristic of the English Renaissance and sets forth her own theory of "functional ambiguity," in which "the indeterminacy inveterate to language was fully and knowingly exploited by authors and readers alike" (18). It is to censorship, she insists, "that we in part owe our very concept of 'literature,' as a kind of discourse with rules of its own," and further, that acceptance of her thesis "might require a review of that other set of unexamined assumptions, about the freedom of the literary, or the critical, or the textual, from historical concerns" (4).
The starting point of Patterson's argument is the banishment in 1535 of the French poet Clement Marot by King Francis I and his subsequent complaint against the government agents who had seized the manuscripts from hnis private study in Blois. In Marot's remonstrance to Francis, Patterson finds a "symbolic paradigm of a profoundly mistaken relationship between culture and authority" (5), the idea that both the artist's creative "space," sanctified by the poet's historical privilege, and the reader's right to interpretation are inviolable. "Central to [the Marot incident and its textual consequences] is the equivocal and fragile relationship... between writers in the early modern period and the holders of power, a relationship whose maintenance was crucial to all writers who aspired (as who did not?) to have some influence, either on the shape of the national culture or more directly on the course of events" (7). On the one hand, this relationship is expressed as a "cultural bargain between writers and political leaders"; on the other, Patterson perceives "another binary relationship," that between writing and interpretation, or between author and reader" and asserts that "censorship united writers and readers in a common interest as to how interpretation in fact worked" (7).
In the body of Renaissance literature, Patterson finds "a highly sophisticated system of oblique communication, of unwritten rules whereby writers could communicate with readers or audiences... without producing a direct confrontation," a ubiquitous "system of communication in which ambiguity becomes a creative and necessary instrument, a social and cultural force of considerable consequence" (45). Whatever the efficacy of direct application of the draconian censorship laws, she asserts, "there is a whole range of publishing in England that can be better accounted for by assuming some degree of cooperation and understanding on the part of the authorities themselves...: there were conventions that both sides accepted as to how far a writer could go in explicit address to the contentious issues of his day, how he could encode his opinions so that nobody would be required to make an example of him [by punishment]" (11).
The bulk of Patterson's book is devoted to a careful reconstruction, by analysis of a broad range of selected texts, of this cultural code in England of the late sixteenth century. In her discussion of ambiguities and conflicting interpretations over time of Sidney's Arcadia, she quotes a telling remark from Fulke Greville's Life of Sidney to explain the tendency of Renaissance authors to conceal their "serious" intentions: "that hypocriticall figure ironia, wherein men commonly (to keep avove their workes) seeme to make toies of the utmost they can doe" (cited 43). Another device widely employed by Renaissance authors to accommodate their works to the demands of the censor, one that has perplexed literary critics ever since, was the use of inexact analogies as a deliberate strategy to allow the author an "escape route" from accusations of libel. In certain authors she marks the tendency to hide behind the opinions of classical authorities, and she cites the use of such introductory materials as dedicatory epistles, epigraphs, and emblematic title pages to "alert the reader to his special responsibilities." The central predicament of censorship, says Patterson, became a search for (in the words of one bemused commentator) blatantly offensive "buggeswordes." Hence the indeterminacy of language so characteristic of English writing in the sixteenth century becomes essential to the hermeneutics of censorship; hence the question of authorial intention, hidden beneath the give-and-take of political life, begins to acquire a problematique of its own.
Among the texts Patterson analyzes are plays by Ben Jonson and Phillip Massinger, Shakespeare's King Lear, a court masque by Thomas Carew, John Donne's sermons, the seventeenth-century roman a clef, and the new genre, under the Stuarts, of the publication of private letters. In the English Renaissance she finds the "one period in European history before our own in which there was only one kind [of censorship] that really counted; in which political censorship was so pervasive that it rose to the forefront, as least among intellectuals and to some degree all literate people, as the central problem of consciousness and communication." In the more recent critical methods of Marxism and Freudianism and their twentieth-century offshoots, Patterson posits the possibility among the "subtle intersections of state censorship with self-censorship, as fear shades into caution, caution into prudence, and prudence into more self-serving emotions and motives" (17).
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Empson, William. Faustus and the Censor: The English Faust-book and Marlowe's "Doctor Faustus". Oxford and New York: Basil Blackwell, 1987.
Gillett, Charles Ripley. Burned Books: Neglected Chapters in British History and Literature. Port Washington, NY: Kennikat P, 1964.
Patterson, Annabel. Censorship and Interpretation: The Conditions of Writing and Reading in Early Modern England. Madison: U of WI P, 1984.
Siebert, Fredrick Seaton. Freedom of the Press in England, 1476-1776. Urbana: U of IL P, 1965.
IN ROTATION:
Hampton Hawes, Three Classic Albums Plus (Contemporary/ Avid Jazz, 1955, 1956)
Hawes's sheer velocity is a challenge to the rest of the quartet in the three-volumeAll Night Session series, especially to guitarist Jim Hall. Bassist Red Mitchell and drummer Bruz Freeman complete the rhythm section for a studio session lasting an entire November night in 1956.
The Plus in the compilation's title refers to the first of three Hampton Hawes Trio outings the previous year, minus one track.
Miles Davis, The Columbia Years, 1955-1985 (Columbia 5-LP compilation, released 1987?)
In the late 1980s, this was the largest Miles Davis compilation one could purchase, though its size has been surpassed many times since. Still, I like this collection; there are the usual advantages of the LP over the CD, not least that the enclosed booklet, containing an extensive appreciation by Nat Hentoff, is legible and beautiful to look at.
The arrangement of the set is interesting: instead of ordering the selections chronologically or according to genre, each disc is representative of a single aspect of Davis's playing. Thus the first LP is devoted to blues, followed by those representing standards, Davis originals, moods, and latter-day electric performances. One of the reasons I've kept the set for so many years is that fifth disc, covering music that is not as appealing to me without having to listen to entire albums. Nevertheless, I first found here "Honky Tonk" from Get Up With It, a collection from the early and mid-1970s, and enjoyed it enough to buy the album many years later.
Though Davis has been derided for "selling out" for this sort of music played in big arenas, one must also understand that he was looking for a new audience, beyond the largely white club-goers who were aging. He especially wanted to attract a young, black audience by getting into the styles with which they were already familiar.
Other highlights of the Box set include "So What" in the version recorded live at Carnegie Hall with the Gil Evans Orchestra in 1961. The first disc gave me my first opportunity to hear two of the themes from the soundtrack ofAscenseur Pour L'échafaud from 1957. This time through I enjoyed the "moods" disc most.
Ralph Sutton and Jay McShann, Last of the Whorehouse Piano Players (Chiaroscuro, 1989)
Charlie Haden and Pat Metheny, Beyond the Missouri Sky (Verve, 1996)
The Very Best of Sheryl Crow (A&M compilation, 2003)
Sheryl: Music Featured in the Documentary (A&M 2-CD set, 2022)The entire Sheryl Crow phenomenon from the 1980s on took place largely without my notice. It was my kids' musical era, along with Alanis Morriset, The White Stripes, and Prince.
I finally have taken a chance on her music, and I like what I heard, a real rock 'n' roll woman, a singer-songwriter cut from the same fabric as Bonnie Raitt, whom I have also come to appreciate in recent years.
N.B.: The following is a piece I wrote for esq in the spring of 1991.
The bulk of The Beach Boys' earliest material was not released until 1969, and from then until now collectors have had to put up with a succession of shodily- packaged LPs and bootlegged CDs that left the group sounding like rank amateurs. This compact disc, featuring the pristine sonic clarity of the original studio masters, is the first reissue of theHite Morgan productions really worth owning.* Among its treasures are five alternate takes and a complete audition session consisting of three tracks the Boys performed two weeks before their studio debut, while still calling themselves The Pendletones. This release is also the first to provide extensive session notes that, together with the music, help to clear up some hoary mythology and mistaken discography.
In the interest of accuracy here are some notes on the group's first four sessions. The CD program duplicates my order of presentation, with the exception of "Lavender" from the initial rehearsal tapes and Session #4, which I insert before the February session.
SESSION #1: The Pendletones, September 15, 1961, Hite Morgan home studio audition.
1. "Lavender" (Dorinda Morgan)
2. "Luau" (Bruce Morgan)
3. "Surfin'" (Brian Wilson, Mike Love)
Unbelievable as it seems, the tape reel of this session was stashed away and forgotten for almost thirty years among the memorabilia of Hite Morgan's son, Bruce. Now released for the first time, these demos recorded in Morgan's living room reveal a well-rehearsed and adventuresome vocal quartet (Dennis Wilson apparently was not present). While "Surfin'" and "Luau" are accompanied by acoustic guitar rhythm, "Lavender" is performed a cappella. As the notes point out, this track puts to rest the supposition that The Beach Boys did not attempt a jazzy, Four Freshmen-style vocal arrangement until Brian had time to experiment in the studio. If there is one shining jewel in this collection, "Lavender" is it.
SESSION #2: The Beach Boys, October 3 , 1961, World Pacific Studios, Los Angeles.
Most sources give the date October 4 and the venue Keen Studios in Beverly Hills, so there are still some questions about this session. Some myths, however, can be put to rest. One of them, that "Luau" was sprung on the group as a surprise flip-side, is refuted by the fact that the Boys had auditioned it in September. Another, that "Surfin'" was done in one quick take for the Candix single and later rerecorded for Capitol, is given the kabash here. Brian plays snare drum, and again Dennis is not present (Some accounts have Brian playing upon a plastic trash can lid, but the improved sound quality here clearly reveals wire brushes on a snare). Carl Wilson and Al Jardine accompany on acoustic guitar and string bass. The CD includes takes 1 (false start), 2, and 7 (master take) of "Surfin'." The first complete take is marred by a squeak and by Brian's loss of the beat in the last chorus. On "Luau," we hear takes 1 (fs), 2, and the master.
SESSION #3: The Beach Boys, February 8, 1962, World Pacific Studios.
On all previous issues, these sides have been distinguished by their crude, "garage-band" sound; here it seems as if a gray veil has been lifted. The personnel this time is Brian on Fender bass, Carl on electric guitar, and Dennis on drums. As before, the tunes are performed "live," vocals and instruments together. For "Surfin' Safari," the CD includes takes one and five, the selected master. On both the tempo is rushed, Mike's vocal is slightly breathless, and the muffled drum is out of sync with the guitar. Carl, however, turns out two little gems in his solos turns. (The hit version that later appeared on Capitolcaught on, I'm convinced, largely because of Carl's guitar break.)
In addition, there is an interesting but crude attempt to create a stereo "Safari" by overdubbing a separate channel of electric lead guitar and a full drum kit. It doesn't quite work out, mainly because the drummer (presumably Dennis) can't seem to find the beat.
There can be no more eye-opening comparison than between this "Surfer Girl" and the one released by Capitol in 1963, nor any better measure of what Brian learned about producing records in the meantime. In the studio chatter before the performance, we can hear Brian's request that the bass part be omitted and overdubbed later, but the man in the booth nixes the idea. The result is an echo-chamber mishmash with a droning bass line, not at all the kind of sound Brian had in mind. It is probably not too wild to assume that The Beach Boys' move to Capitol was the direct result of his dissatisfaction with the sound on these versions of "Surfin' Safari" and "Surfer Girl."
The remaining tracks are more successful rhythmically, though not important to the group's catalogue. "Karate" has been described as an edit of the longer "Beach Boy Stomp," but close listening will confirm that two choruses of Carl's guitar solo were simply repeated at the end to create the "Stomp" version. The first of a long series of Carl Wilson blues instrumentals, "Stomp" is a rudimentary nod to Dick Dale, but it has never before sounded so crisp. Likewise, the rhythm on "Judy" really pops.
SESSION #4: Kenny and the Cadets, March 8, 1962, unknown studio in Los Angeles.
1. "Barbie" (Bruce Morgan)
2. "What Is a Young Girl Made Of" (Bruce Morgan)
The Kenny and the Cadets session seems to be a consolation gesture from the Wilsons to the Morgans for having broken their management contract to sign with Capitol. The chronology here is tricky, though: Murry Wilson's "letter of intent" agreement with Hite Morgan is dated March 29, nearly a month after this session took place. If these dates are correct, the rationale given for the session appears strange. In addition to Brian's lead, on backing vocals we hear Carl, Al we and Audree Wilson, the mother of Brian and his brothers. Both sides were performed over a pre-recorded instrumental track. The stereo release on this CD allows isolation of the vocals. On "Barbie" the backing vocals are on the same track as Brian's lead, but on "Young Girl" they are done with the instruments, and we can hear the nineteen-year-old man child Brian singing alone. His octave leap on "Young Girl" is something to behold. "I almost started laughing," he confesses after the take.
*A two-disc set, Becoming The Beach Boys, was issued in 2016 and presented the sessions in their entirety.
The following piece first appeared in esq, summer 1991. (I was submitting them hand-over-fist that year.)
CD REVIEW: THE FOUR FRESHMEN
CAPITOL COLLECTORS SERIES CDP7931972
In the 1950s The Four Freshmen were considered a "Jazz"group, vocally by way of singing groups like Mel Tormés Mel-Tones and Stan Kenton's Pastels, and instrumentally out of the tradition of jazz big bands. By the time of the rock boom of the '60s, they would be called "MOR," and in 1991, you'll probably find this CD, a 21-track compilation of the their best-known work, stuck in the "Easy Listening" corner of your local music store. Don't let industry labels fool you, though: Freshmen vocal arrangements have always been right on the cutting edge.
From the first notes of the first track on this CD, it becomes abundantly clear that the Four Freshmen were the very paragon and inspiration for The Beach Boys' sound, and Beach Boys fans will be especially gratified to find here both "Graduation Day" and "Their Hearts Were Full of Spring" as Brian Wilson first heard them in his teens. Brian modeled his own voice upon Freshmen lead singerBob Flanigan and his own group arrangements after Freshmen timbres, voicing, and phrasing. If you love the vocal sound of The Beach Boys, your first experience of The Four Freshmen may come as a revelation.
From their beginning in 1948, The Four Freshmen set precedents, as Scott Shea's excellent notes to the CD explain: "They were the first four-part group to sing sophisticated jazz arrangements, redefining vocal harmonies: they were among the first artists to use the long-playing album to express a consistent musical theme."
This CD affords an ideal introduction to the quartet's work, and for those already familiar, it offers the pristine clarity of digital sound. The material is presented in chronological order, beginning with the group's signature tune, "It's a Blue World" (1952), and ending with "And So It's Over" (1962), a number the Freshmen used to close their live sets. In between there is a good balance of ballads, up-tempo performances, and Latin rhythms, with accompaniment both by the Freshmen alone and by various studio combinations. As a "greatest hits" anthology, it leaves the listener yearning for more, and there is plenty where this one came from: The Four Freshmen have released 41 LPs to date, 28 of them on the Capitol label. Let's hope that the response to this CD will lead to more digital reissues in the future.
Bing Videos: Link to Elton John/ Leon Russell HBO documentary, The Union.
NB: I present this piece in two parts, one an esq critique from my perspective when Stars and Stripes first appeared, the other a reflection on the past thirty or forty years of The Beach Boys' sixty-year run.
The esq piece appeared in September, 1996:
The Beach Boys, Stars and Stripes, Vol. 1 (River North, 1996)
Take a tip from the old Les McCann-Eddie Davis hit, "Compared to What?" Your enjoyment of this latest Beach Boys CD will depend greatly upon the level of your expectations. No, it's no Sunflower or even an L.A. In fact, it's not exactly a Beach Boys album at all. It is rather another showcase for their big '60s hits, with the twist of the Boys relegating themselves to the background, doing their best to make other singers (most of them up-and-coming or second-tier, depending on your point of view) sound better than they really are. But compared to the other crap o the radio these days, hey: it ain't that bad. If you can resist the temptation to compare these tracks to the original Beach Boys records, this can be an enjoyable listen. It's meant to be taken as a lightweight entry, and on those terms it succeeds.
Bright spots first: The Beach Boys themselves haven't sung together this well on record in a heifer's age. Summer in Paradise in particular had them sounding so homogenized and synthetic that renditions that were meant as loving tributes to originals by others-- and in a couple of cases, themselves-- turned out devoid of spontaneity and spirit. There are no drum machines this time; if the instrumental tracks are not inspired, at least they are human.
Neither are the Boys content with a mechanical repetition of their old charts. There are fresh vocal arrangements on many of the old warhorses, done by none other than Mr. Country Feelin's himself, Brian Wilson. As coproducer with Nashville's Joe Thomas, Brian had a chance to work alongside country-pop visionary Jimmy Webb. Along with the other Beach Boys, Brian did his thing at the mic as well, and if he couldn't quite hit the high notes like he used to, there was Matt Jardine, who has been appearing regularly with the group on their current tour, to restore the lustrous falsetto sound we haven't heard since Brian went down on his luck twenty years ago.
Matt Jardine stands between Wilson-Phillips and Mike Love
There are four or five tracks that stand out from the rest. Lorrie Morgan leads off the album with "Don't Worry Baby," sounding comfortable and believable in the dragstrip setting of the song. (While there's no surf in Nashville, they do have their demolition derbies.) The song most deserving of wide exposure is "The Warmth of the Sun, featuring the legendary Willie Nelson, whose recruitment brought Brian on board this project at the beginning. It's one of Brian's most nearly perfect compositions and an ideal vehicle for the laconic Nelson. Kathy Troccoli sings an energetic "I Can Hear Music" (currently in the Adult Contemporary top twenty and still rising), and Timothy B. Schmit does a very un-countryish, but credible performance on a "Caroline, No" enriched by a new harmony arrangement for voices and strings that finishes the album out in grand style.
While I don't care quite as much for Collin Raye's lead on "Sloop John B," this tune also allows the Boys to fully strut their stuff, and Matt duets with Collin beautifully on the first chorus.
That said, this album-- given the C&W premise-- could have been a lot better in any number of ways. I'm surprised by the relative paucity of ballads here, generally a mainstay of country music. It seems natural that the few that are included-- that is, most of the ones I have just named-- are among the most appealing and successful on the album. I'm also curious about the non-inclusion of Beach Boys songs that, while not necessarily hits, were meant as C&W tunes, "Country Air," "Back Home," etc.
This is probably explained by the disc's almost total concentration on their greatest hits, sacrificing variety to a string of rockers, all at nearly the same tempo, by lead singers who sound nearly alike. I sometimes have to check the song-listing to recall that it's James House singing "Little Deuce Coupe," Junior Brown on "409," Doug Supernaw on "Long Tall Texan," Mark Miller (of the band Sawyer Brown) on "I Get Around" (with real handclaps by God!), Toby Keith on "Be True to Your School," Ricky Van Shelton on "Fun, Fun, Fun," and Graham Brown on "Help Me Rhonda." The two female singers fare well in comparison; I wish there had been a few more represented.*
Finally, some of the backing tracks seem rushed, especially on these fast songs, and several of the singers sound awkward as a result; "Rhonda" comes off most ungainly of all (it's got to be san-copa-ted.) The Beach Boys themselves play no instrument on any of these tracks, which are handled by Nashville cats, as I suppose they should be; still, it would have been nice to hear Carl take an occasional guitar break just to inject a little personality into an otherwise bland instrumental arrangement.
In short, I'm looking forward to a better Volume 2, one that features more excessive singers in a more reflective mood, singing tunes more directly descended from C&W traditions. I'd also welcome The Beach Boys handling a tune or two all by themselves to put their own stamp on the classics of country.
* 2021 note: Stars and Stripes appeared too early to include a sweet duet between Tammy Wynette and Brian Wilson on "In My Room," one of the last tunes she recorded before her death.
A FOND FAREWELL AND A LOOK AHEAD
For my money, The Beach Boys never recovered from the shock of losing Dennis Wilson. No longer could the group benefit from his unique writing and producing talent, but even more they would miss the sound of his voice in the stack, unmistakable, like a little cowlick within an otherwise perfect arrangement.
By 1998, with the death of Carl Wilson, even that perfect sheen, honed by decades of rehearsing and performing together, would be lost. The Beach Boys' past twenty-three years have been the story of, at first three, and now two competing factions. Their single reunion--Brian, Mike Al, Bruce, and David Marks-- for an album and a tour emphasized what they were still capable of doing, but the Boys are getting old, and with each passing year the chances of another reunion recede.
The first obvious thing about KTSA is the absence of Dennis's input, especially when compared to their prior release, L. A. : Light Album, which he rescued with material from his current solo project, Bambu.
Aside from "Goin' On" and the decade-old "When Girls Get Together," there really isn't an interesting track on the album.
The following release five years later, titled simply The Beach Boys, let them down by the sterile, synth-laden production of Steve Levine, the erstwhile producer of the latest fad, Boy George. Some of the tracks do appeal to me: Al's "Crack at Your Love" (!), Mike's "Getcha Back," Brian's "I'm So Lonely," and an interesting dive into Stevie Wonder's "I Do Love You," where I swear Carl and Al's leads both sound as if Stevie himself had sung it.
The best cut on the album, though, was the CD bonus track"Male Ego," if only for the fact it sound like a Brian Wilson production (but isn't).
Their next release, Still Cruising', was a cop-out of sorts, padded out with three songs from their sixties heyday and fair-to-middlin' new material. It marked the album release of their number-one hit-- the first since "Good Vibrations" in 1966-- "Kokomo," which received wide exposure in the Tom Cruise film, Cocktail. Better, though, is Al's swing at "Somewhere Near Japan," which succeeds in creating the tense dilemma set in the lyrics. Many of the rest are included by virtue of their being used in movies, like "Make It Big," but then there are"Island Girl" and the wretched "Wipe Out" with the Fat Boys. And Brian's sole contribution, the clunky "In My Car," has Eugene Landy" written all over it.
(Our sponsor here inserts an unpublished piece he once wrote for esq:)
The good news is that the Beach Boys, after some seven years without a bona fide label contract, managed to get an album out at all. For the third time in their career, the Brother appellation appears, this time as "Brother Entertainment," whose "Executive in Charge of Production" is Michael Edward Love and which is distributed by theNavarre Corporation. Brother's old Indian logo, however has made way for something that resembles a flatted pyramid.
The bad news, of course, is that it's more of the same emotionally inert pop pap that has constituted the bulk of the group's studio output over the past decade. It's not that these tunes aren't pleasant to hear, but once you've heard one Terry Melcher production of a Mike Love song, you've heard them all: "Island Fever" is the latest Kokomo-Klone, while "Lahaina Aloha" recapitulates "Somewhere Near Japan," and neither gets better the second time around. In all, Mike Love co-wrote and sang lead on half the album's songs, the balance consisting of oldie covers and "Slow Summer Dancin'," not one of Bruce Johnston's better efforts. In fact, Summer in Paradise is more a Mike Love album than a Beach Boys album; Brian, of course, had nothing to do with it, and the other three guys appear to be present only to relieve the tedium of Mike's lead vocal on nearly every track.
A few words are in order concerning the oldies in the lineup.Sly Stone's "Hot Fun in the Summertime" is probably the most successful, although interest declines rapidly after the first chorus. A synthetic-sounding "Under the Boardwalk" is rescued by Carl's pretty rendition of the refrain, but even he cannot salvage "Remember," a pallid, robotic nineties-style update of the old hi. Without question, the low spot is "Surfin'," which barely resembles the single that started it all for the Boys thirty years ago.
Remember that crude, makeshiftHite Morgan production? Well, compared to this retread, it was a masterpiece. The new version could be a textbook example on how to waste all the advances in recording technique that have accrued since the original, whose raw energy and sheer joy seem to be mocked here by a condescending attitude and stultifying layers of studio glitz.
Finally John Stamos, who coproduced and sings a Dennis-like lead on "Forever," managed to accomplish a fairly literal remake of the Sunflower track, but it serves only to reemphasize the pointlessness of the whole effort. In short, one seeks in vain for the one cut that could redeem this album, but it simply isn't there: no musical surprises and certainly nothing to challenge one's imagination.
This is the first release I'm aware of marketed in the "eco-pack," which dispenses with the
customary throwaway wrapper. While it's certainly in keeping with the album's ecological slant, you may need a set of instructions to assemble it and a pair of pliers to open the damned thing. Other than that, Robert Lyn Nelson's artwork is the only distinctive feature in this entire project. My advice: buy the package and throw away the CD.
Here we arrive where we began, at the 1996 release of Stars and Stripes, Volume 1, the final Beach Boys album of the last century. With any luck at all, there will never be a Volume 2.
WHAM! Many fans besides me, I'm sure, had been hoping against hope for a new Beach Boys album featuring the five surviving members of the group. It finally arrived with their reunion tour in 2012, and it turned out to be a brilliant success.
As the group nears its 60th anniversary, I'm afraid there's little to come from this time hence.
