More Shelf Life
Did you, like me, long ago get your fill of the ceaseless repackaging of the Beach Boys catalog as nothing but school's-out-cars-and-girls music? It is truly an Endless Summer, years on end spent in The Warmth of the Sun with The Sounds of Summer, Girls on the Beach, The Sights and Sounds of Summer, Summer Dream, etc. Now there's Summer Love Songs, 20 vintage tracks that, by all rights, are so long in the tooth you'd need a tin of surf wax and a sharpened skeg to extract them. But wait...
That's just the point. Everyone agrees on the brilliance and impact of Pet Sounds, the mad science of "Good Vibrations" and the cathedral-like ambitions of Smile. God bless: They should all live forever in the canon of great American music. Yet, overwhelmingly, what most folks connect with viscerally and emotionally is the band's early material: those direct hits of harmony, melody and unpretentious rock 'n' roll that are now simultaneously the Beach Boys' oldest and most youthful music. Go to any Bri-Fi concert and see what happens--among every audience demo--when he breaks out the '63-'65 material. There's no contest: Surf 'n' summer rule, or, in today's parlance, dominate.
Hence Summer Love Songs. To be truthful, this compilation hews more to the general romance side than to the specific Cali-dream side, though "Surfer Girl" and "California Girl" are here, along with "Girls on the Beach" and "Keep an Eye on Summer," the vastly underrated other ballad from 1964's Shut Down, Vol. 2 (it shared space with "Don't Worry Baby" and "Warmth of the Sun"). The big news, though, and reason enough to pop for this set, is the inclusion of fresh stereo mixes of six songs, which range from the impressive to the drop-dead gorgeous. In the latter category are "Why Do Fools Fall in Love," taken from newly recovered multi-track masters for Shut Down, Vol. 2, and "Hushabye," from 1964's All Summer Long. Brian's cover of Frankie Lymon's "Fools" was always his most overt Spector homage, but now it's both bigger and clearer--and comes with its previously unissued intro, a florid piano set-up that lasts half a minute. You can also hear, both here and on the remixed "Good to My Baby," how skillfully he blended saxes to thicken the bottom of a track without ever sacrificing its light-footedness. Perhaps the platonic ideal of the sublime pop song, "Don't Worry Baby" always sounds good; dig the glide of its harmonies and its rhythmic ease (no need to overheat things with a solo, just chord coolly through the middle eight).
Like "Hushabye" and "Why Do Fools Fall in Love," "I'm So Young" (originally by the Students, but covered too by the Ronettes) comes from the core of Brian and Mike's affection for doowop. But listen to what the group does to this basic (and newly remixed) teen ballad. Against Brian's lead, rich harmonies ebb and flow, single-note bass-string accents bob to the surface then evaporate, the whole piece feigning closure, then restarting only to fade like an afternoon tide. "Time to Get Alone," the wintertime waltz from 1969's 20/20, gets a remix too, though with less dramatic results than "Hushabye" or "Why Do Falls Fall in Love," but Dennis Wilson's previously unreleased Sunflower outtake "Fallin' in Love" profits handsomely from its engineering re-do. It's D.W. at his best, offering an almost embarrassingly intimate performance of one of his better compositions. It's perhaps redundant to claim that his songwriting was second only to his older brother's, but pieces like this explain why the case gets made over and over.
In addition to the remixes and the unassailable but familiar evergreens, Summer Love Songs--almost inadvertently perhaps ("These titles say ‘summer.' Let's include them too")--shines some rays on underappreciated tunes. The Surfer Girl ballad "Your Summer Dream" wears well enough, but "Please Let Me Wonder," like so many of its companion cuts on Today!, actually rivals "Don't Worry Baby," and "In the Parkin' Lot," with its breath-catching stop-start arrangement, was always the sleeper on Shut Down, Vol. 2.
If age is nothing but a number, dates of origin and subsequent flips of the calendar really have no bearing on the shelf life of music. Even when it's not overly inventive, Beach Boys music is art (OK, a genius-led aesthetic enterprise) that requires no further justification. Which is what makes most everything on Summer Love Songs, frankly, radical. In a world whose diversions increasingly run to discord and humiliation, what better antidote than a big dose of beauty, even if it comes wearing flip-flops and carrying an umbrella?
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