33 1 3 094 The Beach Boys' Smile Luis Sanchez (retail) (pdf)

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stupidly titled Shut Down Vol. 2, Brian wrote Don t
Worry Baby, a song that he hoped would convince
Spector after Don t Hurt My Little Sister failed to. For
Brian, the allure and power of creative proprietorship
never compelled him the way it compelled Spector; the
satisfaction of having one of Spector s girl groups be the
voice of one his songs was in itself more than enough
of a reason to pursue collaboration. Fortunately or not,
Spector never expressed an interest and Brian recorded
Don t Worry Baby with The Beach Boys and released
it as the B-side on the single for I Get Around. Despite
the title s obvious reference to By My Baby, the overall
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effect of The Beach Boys record is radically different
from anything Spector could have achieved with it.
On the surface, Don t Worry Baby is a reiteration
of the hot rod idea, but in tone and atmosphere it works
against its lyrical narrative. It tells a thin story about a guy
so convinced by his own braggadocio that it leads him
and his car crew to an inevitable face-off with their own
potential death. It s not the particulars of the drag strip
that matter here, but that the guy confesses his fear to
his girlfriend, who quiets his mind with a simple phrase.
Sung by Brian in an aching falsetto, the refrain don t
worry baby ripples so supremely that it easily capsizes
the monolithic record that inspired it, defusing Spector s
claustrophobia, and resolving the problem of how to
achieve dimension within the anatomy of the monaural
single. The word pictures for Don t Worry Baby never
quite jelled beyond the force of their prayerfulness,
but Brian sang them with celestial zeal, wrote rock
biographer Timothy White. I like this description, but
I m not sure the qualification White makes is necessary.
The song was co-written by Brian s then-hot rod collab-
orator/lyricist Roger Christian, and it s a prime example
of the way the best Beach Boys records use simple words
and phrases to sensational vocal effect. The brilliance
of Don t Worry Baby isn t that it advances a narrative
about hot rod racing but that it transforms it into a
revelatory set piece about the emotional volatility of the
teenage male. It also represents the moment when Brian
publicly matched Spector for commitment of feeling
within the framework of the teen pop single and raised
the stakes for what both of them would achieve with one
of pop s most persistent clich�s.
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L UI S S A NCHE Z
Christmas Sweaters
It seems odd that most critics attempts to account for
the artistry of Brian s later music, such as Pet Sounds
and especially Smile, haven t considered that music s
aesthetic relationship to The Beach Boys Christmas Album.
Christmas music is a beast of its own, an inescapable
fact of western culture that for several weeks a year
seems to revoke the novelty and surprise that moves
pop music in a forward direction. The impact of a good
Christmas pop record has little to do with theological
conviction and everything to do with the way it absorbs
or reframes the experience of public life. In this sense, it
works like all good pop music does. But the difference is
that the repository of clich� and sentiment that prompts
the ubiquity of Christmas music is also what makes it
almost instantly insufferable. Its parameters of style and
arrangement are inherently constrictive; things can be
reshuffled only so much before the images and feelings
of Christmas just begin to repeat themselves without
any real impact or pleasure. Hear a particular version
of White Christmas more than a couple of times and
you know just how quickly a feeling can be affirmed to
death. For this reason, good Christmas records are ones
that don t take their accessibility or kitsch for granted;
they convey a commitment to sentiment as something
that can be taken sincerely. Their pleasure is in their
capacity to exercise clich� while conveying a sense of why
the sentiment behind it matters in the first place. Good
Christmas pop does more than just affirm hack feeling; it
reshapes it. You could call this music terminally mawkish,
or sappy, or cornball, but it is also very Brian Wilson,
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because what Brian s music does, from the early surf
records through the extravagance of Smile, is develop an
aesthetic architecture where this sort of sincerity can be
expressed nakedly and to its best consequences.
To express his vision of this music, Brian again took
his cue from Phil Spector. In the fall of 1963, Spector
began working on material for what would become a
cohesive, album-length work of Christmas music. Brian
followed suit, first with a single the same year, and
complete album the following one. It seemed like an
unlikely undertaking for both in the sense that the mass
audience for this music had been successfully breached
only once before by an unconventional performer, six
years earlier. In 1957, Elvis Christmas Album spent four
weeks at the number one spot on Billboard s Top Pop
Album chart, remarkably upstaging the positions of
the procedural and returning Christmas pop albums
of that year, including Pat Boone s & and a very Merry
Christmas To You (number three) and Perry Como s Perry
Como Sings Merry Christmas Music (number nine). Elvis s
biggest feat, however, was in usurping the reign of pop
vocal elder statesman, Mr. White Christmas himself,
Bing Crosby, whose Merry Christmas album claimed the
top of the Christmas charts every year since 1945.
Spector s album, titled A Christmas Gift For You From
Philles Records, later revised to A Christmas Gift For You
From Phil Spector, was released on November 22, 1963,
the same day America witnessed the grisly assassination of
President John F. Kennedy. Yuletide cheer didn t stand a
chance against the blackness that descended that day, and
so the record failed to match Elvis s achievement, getting
no higher than the number thirteen spot in Billboard.
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Despite its initial failure to win the Christmas of 1963,
Christmas Gift presents itself as Spector s most delib-
erate and forceful attempt to test the limits of his craft.
The record brings together thirteen procedural songs,
including White Christmas, Frosty the Snowman,
I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus, Winter
Wonderland, Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, and
one original tune Spector wrote in collaboration with
Brill Building writers Ellie Greenwich and Jeff Barry,
the booming Christmas (Baby Please Come Home). As
he expressed it in the record liner notes which are
also accompanied by a suitably gaudy photographic
portrait of Spector (himself a Jewish boy born during
Christmas time) in the tackiest of Santa Claus costumes,
beady eyes peering over a pair of sunglasses the point
wasn t religious observance, but to stake a claim for a
broad vernacular. Because Christmas is so American it
is therefore time to take the great Christmas music and
give it the sound of the American music of today the [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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