Читать книгу The Mojo Collection - Various Mojo Magazine - Страница 132

Record label: Capitol

Produced: The Beach Boys

Recorded: Brian Wilson’s home studio, Bel Air, California; ID Sound Los Angeles; February–April 1968

Released: June 24, 1968

Chart peaks: 6 (UK) 126 (US)

Personnel: Mike Love (v, s); Carl Wilson (v, g, k); Alan Jardine (g, v); Brian Wilson (k, g, v); Dennis Wilson (v, d, k)

Track listing: Meant For You; Friends (S/US); Wake The World; Be Here In The Morning; When A Man Needs A Woman; Passing By; Anna Lee, The Healer; Little Bird; Be Still; Busy Doin’ Nothin’; Diamond Head; Transcendental Meditation

Running time: 25.58

Current CD: Capitol 5316382 adds 20/20 album

Further listening: 20/20 (1969); Sunflower (1970)

Further reading: The Nearest Faraway Place (Timothy White, 1996); Brian Wilson And The Beach Boys: The Complete Guide To Their Music (John Tobler, 2004); Heroes And Villains: The True Story Of The Beach Boys (Stephen Gaines, 1986); www.beachboys.com

Download: HMV Digital; iTunes

Friends remains, perhaps, The Beach Boys’ most misunderstood and underrated album. Upon its release in the early summer of 1968, it was thought to confirm the once mighty group’s swift decline into commercial and cultural irrelevancy. Its American chart peak of 126 was profoundly lower than any of its 18 predecessors.

Friends is a polar opposite to the lushly orchestrated, hyper-emotional density of Pet Sounds. Friends also signifies the moment at which much of the group’s remaining fanbase abandoned any hope that Brian Wilson would deliver a true successor to his 1966 masterwork. Spare, calm and ‘full of air’, says Johnston, Friends was the result of the group’s deliberate attempt to make ‘a really subtle album that wasn’t concerned with radio’. Indeed, the album’s dozen shockingly brief tracks (five are under two minutes) rarely last long enough to anchor their delicate hooks before swiftly fading out. Only its lovely, waltz-time title track charted (and was, incidentally, the band’s lowest charting single in six years).

It could be argued that virtually anything The Beach Boys might have released during the musical, cultural and political upheavals of 1968 would have failed. ‘The Beach Boys were just unfashionably unhip,’ admits Johnston. ‘Friends came out just after Hendrix and Cream. The whole country had discovered drugs, discovered words, discovered Marshall amplifiers, and here comes this feather floating through a wall of noise.’ Given distance and hindsight, however, Friends is a uniquely rewarding Beach Boys album that, excepting Pet Sounds, is the group’s most sonically and thematically unified. Its 26 weightless minutes make up possibly the sweetest album ever to be filed under rock.

Significantly, Friends also marked the songwriting debut of drummer Dennis, whose beautifully fragile Be Still and Little Bird are highlights, signalling his development into a songwriter of major emotional reach. Friends has won many admirers since its initial humiliating launch. In his 1991 autobiography, Brian himself called it ‘my favourite Beach Boys album’.