Aloha!
Here we are with the fourth installment of The Beach Boys: Turn That Frown Upside Down, 1967-71 Retrospective (click for the full Spotify playlist) featuring songs from the 1968 album 'Friends', the Beach Boys' fourteenth studio album, the last of the "lo-fi trilogy", and the last to be effectively led by Brian Wilson until their 1977 album 'The Beach Boys Love You'. While I've only chosen five songs from this album (one of which is an uncut version not released at the time), there are two excellent and fascinating tracks I've chosen to omit: "Busy Doin' Nothin'" and "Diamond Head". The former is a straight up bossa nova ala Joao Gilberto or Antonio Carlos Jobim, and it demonstrates just how adept Brian was at adapting and understanding diverse musical styles. The latter is described as "exotica lounge"--a sort of early term for world music--but is clearly inspired by Hawaiian music; it was co-written by Brian with three session musicians and was recorded to complete the album after the other Beach Boys had left for a tour. As such, these two tracks--as great as they are--only feature Brian and are only Beach Boys tracks by virtue of having been released on a Beach Boys record.
As for the rest, sit back and enjoy selected tracks from 'Friends' ...
The Beach Boys: Turn That Frown Upside Down, 1967-71 - III. Friends
Friends
- released 24 June 1968
Produced by The Beach Boys
* Recorded at a relatively happy time in Brian Wilson's life, 'Friends' was very nearly a return to form for the Beach Boys' musical leader. Unfortunately, it would not last long as Brian's mental health problems, likely exacerbated by increased drug use, would become acute after the release of the album and he would voluntarily institutionalize himself soon after. While it's unclear if any single cause led to Brian's decision to admit himself to a psychiatric hospital, numerous issues contributed but the failure of the 'Friends' album itself must have played a part. Whereas 'Smiley Smile' and 'Wild Honey' reached number 41 and 24 respectively in the US--'Wild Honey' despite the higher chart position, sold fewer copies--'Friends' only managed to hit number 126 and sold an estimated 18,000 copies at the time. For comparison, their first US number 1 album, 'Beach Boys Concert' (1964) attained gold status--sales of 500,000--in four weeks. (Meanwhile in the UK, the Beach Boys continued to be far more successful with the three albums reaching numbers 9, 7, and 13 respectively.) However, 'Friends' would--like many of the group's albums of the era--receive much greater appreciation retrospectively and is now generally well regarded. Unfortunately, that appreciation came far too late for a band that was struggling with its place in the rapidly changing pop music landscape.
Although production was still being credited to the Beach Boys*, Brian Wilson primarily took the helm for this project, even going so far as to call it his "second unofficial solo album", despite the fact that the album not only consisted of co-written material but also two songs attributed to Dennis. Carl, Dennis and Al Jardine all had a significant hand in the songwriting for the first time in the group's history. Mike Love still contributed writing to four songs on the album, but he also only recorded vocals on four of the songs as he was absent for the initial recording sessions. (More on that shortly...) While the other members contributed to the writing, the actual tracks were recorded primarily by session musicians; only a few songs--"Meant For You", "Passing By", "Anna Lee, the Healer"--may have been exceptions. But this meant that Brian was once again in charge and making use of a variety of instruments and tonal colors that had been largely absent on the previous two albums, 'Smiley Smile' and 'Wild Honey' (both '67). Two songs on the album--"Busy Doin' Nothin'" and "Diamond Head"--only feature Brian, lending credence to the notion that the album was somewhat of an unofficial solo album.
The songs on 'Friends' are all quite gentle, easy going or introspective. The songs dealt with friendship or feelings of love or goodwill in general ("Meant For You", "Friends", "Be Here in the Mornin'", "Be Still", "Busy Doin' Nothin'"), nature ("Wake the World", "Be Still", "Little Bird", "Meant For You" extended version), and family life including childbirth ("Be Here in the Mornin'", "When a Man Needs a Woman"). Apart from the two instrumentals, the two other songs on the album--"Anna Lee, the Healer" and "Transcendental Meditation"--did not fit quite as neatly into the overall themes of the album, and yet they were not entirely out of place either. These were among the songs that Mike Love had the most direct influence on as they were borne of the group's recent introduction to Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. "Meant For You", also co-written by Love, is reflective of the inner peace experienced through meditation and helps to bring these songs together into the overall mood of the album.
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Mike Love is at the far right, wearing dark blue
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The Beatles were first introduced to Maharishi Mahesh Yogi in London in August of 1967. The Beach Boys--minus Brian--met him subsequently in Paris while they were on tour in Europe for the 'Wild Honey' album. Mike Love became particularly enamored with the Maharishi's teaching and was invited to attend the training seminar in India the following year. This was the same seminar that the Beatles famously attended. Love arrived in Rishikesh at the end of February 1968, while the other Beach Boys began recording songs for the 'Friends' album; he would start his return journey home on March 15th, his birthday, after celebrating with the Beatles (Ringo had already left by this point), Donavon, Prudence and Mia Farrow and other members of the Beatles coterie. This would not only account for Love's absence but also for the Beach Boys continued association with TM (transcendental meditation) and the Maharishi throughout the 70s. However, it also led to a disastrous tour with the Maharishi later that year after the Beatles had already distanced themselves from the yogi in April due to rumours of their spiritual guru making sexual advances towards several women during their time there. Additionally, the recent assassination of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. on April 4th had led to riots and racial tensions that also led to cancelled shows during the preceding tour supported by the Buffalo Springfield. (Shortly after this, Dennis Wilson also began his association with Charles Manson, but more on that when we get to '20/20', the following album.) The tour with the Maharishi was cancelled after only five shows due to poor ticket sales--at one 16000-capacity venue, less than a thousand people showed up. These were difficult times but hopes were high perhaps that the album, released the following month, would turn their fortunes around.
Unfortunately, this was not to be. At some point in the weeks following the release of 'Friends', Brian's mental health began a precipitous decline. Danny Hutton, friend of Brian's and singer for Three Dog Night, said that during the summer of '68 was when Brian's "real decline started." Tensions peaked during session in which the group attempted an arrangement of the 1927 showtune, "Ol' Man River"; Wilson was attempting to return the level of extreme perfectionism such as had originally created tensions during 'Pet Sounds', and according to music writer Bride Chidester, "he and the band seemed at the end of their rope with one another." You can hear the somewhat listless performance from the group in this unfinished recording of the song. It was around this time that Brian's first wife Marilyn quoted him saying, "Ok you assholes, you think you can do as good as me or whatever -- go ahead -- you do it. You think it's so easy? You do it." Brian's subsequent withdrawal from the band had truly began; Hutton stated that Brian had expressed suicidal wishes; Brian perceived that the rest of the group resented him; the group had lost several hundred thousand dollars due to cancelled tour dates; and the failure of 'Friends' led to their record label, Capitol, to panic and ultimately lose faith in the Beach Boys.
1968 as a whole would prove to be the first major low period for the band after the collapse of 'SMiLE'. While there would still be some high points, such as the hastily written and recorded "Do It Again", a self-conscious callback to their surfing days--a top 20 US hit and their second UK number 1 after "Good Vibrations"--released two weeks after 'Friends' struggled to make the charts, and signs of recovery as the Beach Boys would release two excellent albums with 'Sunflower' ('70) and 'Surf's Up' ('71), their glory days were now and forever well and truly behind them. The music scene was changing; the 60s blues explosion that birthed the Rolling Stones, the Yardbirds, and Cream would soon give way to the likes of Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath. The American music scene was trending towards singer-songwriters like Joni Mitchell, Neil Young and Leonard Cohen along with the burgeoning country-rock scene spearheaded by the Byrds and the Flying Burrito Brothers. Pop music was becoming increasingly socially conscious as well as expanding beyond psychedelia into more complex forms as concept albums and progressive rock came to the fore. 'SMiLE' would very much been a part of these developments had it been completed; it would have preceded the Beatles' 'Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band'; it would have been musically and lyrically progressive (as tracks released on subsequent albums would bear out); and it would have been socially conscious, reflecting as much of it did on American as it was and as it came to be.
Brian Wilson's January '68 interview with Jamake Highwater gives us a Brian that was together and hopeful, looking forward to making new music. He seemed genuinely impressed with the benefits his bandmates had gotten from transcendental meditation. In hindsight, fans of the group could have hoped that this was the turning point for Brian and the Beach Boys, that 'Friends' would hail a more collaborative dynamic within the group, and that they would continue to develop as a unified whole, but it was not to be. In hindsight, it's amazing the Beach Boys continued at all. In many ways, I believe it would have been better if they hadn't, but the demands of the business, high living, and financial burdens likely required that they carry on. After all, they had been a group since most of them were teenagers--what other life did they know?
13.
Friends (B. Wilson/C. Wilson/D. Wilson/A. Jardine)
2:32 - released as a single on 8 April 1968 (US no. 47; UK no. 25)
Believing there weren't enough waltzes in contemporary pop music, Brian adapted the original song from 4/4 into waltz time. While a relatively straightforward song structurally, "Friends" does have some unusual qualities harmonically. There's the half-step up in key (from D to Eb) mid-verse; the harmonic planing of 7th and major chords up a D-lydian scale at the end of the verse; along with--typically of Brian--the overall harmonic ambiguity of the song. (It floats around the key of D but never settles on a particular mode.) Brian was also making more elaborate use of session musicians with vibes, upright bass, saxophone, strings, and harmonica (the bass harmonica, when the harmony changes to Eb, rhythmically plays two against three--an especially nice little touch) just to name some of the colors utilized. The drums, played with brushes rather than sticks, also adds to the songs easy-going vibe.
After all, the song is about friendship. On first listen, I didn't think it was necessarily about the singer's male friends and, even after reading the lyrics, the gender of the friend is ambiguous. The line "I talked your folks out of making you cut off your hair", for examples, evokes the song "Caroline, No" ("Where did your long hair go?"), so my initial impression was that it was about a female friend. Rhonda, perhaps?
Another waltz albeit with a bit of a Hawaiian vibe, this one was another collaboration with everyone but Johnston contributing. It also features additional vocals provided by Brian's first wife Marilyn and the Wilson's father, Murry. Murry's presence is slightly surprising considering he'd been fired as the group's manager in 1964; however, he was still involved in the group's publishing as head of
Sea of Tunes having taken sole ownership in 1965 due to a verbal agreement with Brian. (This handover came partly in consequence of a rather vitriolic
letter Murry wrote to Brian on May 8th, 1965--it is astounding and speaks to the troubled dynamics within the family.) That and, of course, he was still father and uncle to four of the six Beach Boys.
Musically, this one is also fairly straightforward in many respects; the chord progressions for the most of the song are standard ones (I, IV, iii7, vi--in the verse; I, vi7, IV, ii7, V7, I, IVsus4-3--in the chorus). However, the alternating lines of the verse, like "Friends", plane harmonically across major chords that are further emphasized by the parallel harmonies in the vocals; the parallel octaves in the bass and top tenor vocals create a particularly unusual sound that I find quite interesting. Even more unusual is the fourth line (the wordless "ooh ah ah ah ah") is only two bars--one in 3/4 and the second in 4/4. Touches like these, along with Jardine's vari-sped up vocals and the flange added to Carl's second chorus vocals, are what makes songs like this fascinating.
A chill instrumental somewhat typical of a certain strain of music throughout the era, one could imagine "Passing By" being used in a soundtrack about the hip, swinging youth. That doesn't exactly sound like a ringing endorsement, but it is. Quincy Jones was known for his soundtracks in the '60s and I could see this tune fitting in nicely with some of his music from the era. It's also got plenty of harmonic flavor with numerous 7th chords--major, minor, and diminished--throughout. While harmonically centered around Eb with interludes that move to the dominant key of Bb, chords will also shift from major to minor--the first phrase of the verse begins with an Eb-major7, the second phrase with Eb-minor7; the verses end with a Bb-minor to Bb-major. The outro of the song simply alternates Eb-major7 and Eb-minor7 as the melody repeats and adjusts accordingly to the shifting harmony. It's subtle but effective.
This may also be one of only a couple of songs on which many of the Beach Boys themselves play with Brian on organ, Johnston on keyboard, Carl on guitar, Jardine on bass, and Dennis on conga. These last two are not certain, however. Lyle Ritz, a member of the Wrecking Crew, covered the bass parts for most of the album but theses parts were often doubled with both electric and upright basses being recorded. Jim Gordon, another Wrecking Crew member and later of Derek & the Dominoes fame, played drums on most of the tracks--as this track features drums and congas, it's possible Dennis played the latter.
Probably my favorite track on the album, it's like an R&B song got together with a Disney song and made a baby and that baby was "Little Bird", the first song credited to Dennis Wilson along with poet Stephen Kalinich. Kalinich, with whom Brian would the next year produce the album '
A World of Peace Must Come', stated that Brian in fact rewrote most of the music for the track but didn't take any credit as a way of helping out his younger brother. This is borne out by the fact that a section of the unreleased '
SMiLE' track, "
Child is Father of the Man", can be heard in the penultimate section the song with the muted trumpet.
Otherwise, this is a relatively simple tune harmonically; each section only has two chords that alternate. However, each section of the song essentially transposes to another key, so the harmony has different feeling each time around with only the initially G-minor and D-minor7 chords of the verse repeating with regularity. Other touches like the syncopated bass of the verses, the cello arrangements, the counterpoint of the wordless vocals, the horns on the bridge, and of course the banjo all contribute to making this a really unique song. One of my favorite moments in the song comes just about halfway through when Dennis sings "mow the lawn"; the backing vocals are doing a heavy, shimmering, hummed vibrato--an unusual effect in general, but especially for the Beach Boys who otherwise rarely used vibrato.
Finally, the final verse, in which Dennis is joined by the others, is the only one to have a harmonic shift mid-section; the vocal harmony ends on a suspended chord ("life") as the chord progression transposes from G-minor to C-major. The final section is, in my opinion, very much like something you would have heard in a Disney movie such as
Robin Hood or
Song of the South--it just a bit of that vibe, especially with the lyrics being what they are. What's more, Brian would release a solo album of Disney songs in 2011, '
In the Key of Disney', and Disney was no less a California institution than the Beach Boys. Either way, it was the first song that I'd ever heard sung by Dennis and it immediately jumped out as one of the coolest on the album, even for all its "Disneyfication".
17.
Meant For You - alternate version with session intro (B. Wilson/M. Love) 2:17
Finally, although this song opened the album with a 38-second edit, I've included the full length version here for a couple of reasons. Firstly, the
full length version clocks in at 1:50 and considering that one criticism of the album was how short it was at 25 and a half minutes, it seems strange that they would cut so much of the song. (For a comparison, the two longest songs together on Jimi Hendrix's double album, '
Electric Ladyland', released that same year, are longer than '
Friends' in its entirety.) What's more, the two lines cut from the song, sung by Brian, were very much in keeping with the spirit of the album with references to love, family, friendship, and nature. It's a very gentle, welcoming song to bring listeners into the spiritual space the album inhabits. I, for one, think it was a mistake to have cut it.
Secondly, the extended version linked above begins with some of the session chatter; here you can hear Murry advising Brian from the control booth. They seem to be getting on well; considering what the Wilson family had gone through up to that point, it seemed they were still trying to work things out and find ways to get along with each other. It's not for us to know whether Brian and his brothers ever really made peace with their father, but the relationship would continue to be up and down until Murry's passing in 1973. Though this song, likely inspired by Mike's introduction to TM after having been introduced to it by Dennis, speaks of peace in one's mind and the feelings in one's heart, the history of the Beach Boys would continue to be a tragic one.
With that, the golden era of the Beach Boys was definitively over as Brian's mental health issues led him to institutionalize himself and withdraw further from the group. While he would continue to write some new material for the group over the next 2-3 years, the bulk of it would be drawn either from the 'SMiLE' sessions or from other not yet completed material. The new material that he would complete would be some of his most deeply personal music and speak volumes as to the personal turmoil he was going through. The other Beach Boys, in the meantime, would soldier on with each of its members contributing to various degrees but with Dennis Wilson and Bruce Johnston most significantly filling in the gaps. While not successful at the time, a couple of these later albums have come to be highly regarded and I have to agree, they're good. So, until next time ...
Surf's up!
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