Читать книгу The Mojo Collection - Various Mojo Magazine - Страница 49

Record label: Capitol

Produced: Brian Wilson

Recorded: Western Recording Studios and Gold Star Recording Studios, Hollywood; June 8 and 22, August 5 and 8, October 8 and 10, December 16, 1964, January 7–19, 1965

Released: March 8, 1965

Chart peaks: 6 (UK) 4 (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: Do You Wanna Dance (S/US); Good To My Baby; Don’t Hurt My Little Sister; When I Grow Up (To Be A Man); Help Me, Rhonda [LP Version] (S); Dance, Dance, Dance; Please Let Me Wonder; I’m So Young; Kiss Me Baby; She Knows Me Too Well; In The Back Of My Mind; Bull Session With ‘Big Daddy’

Running time: 28.54

Current CD: Capitol 5316392 adds: Summer Days album

Further listening: Pet Sounds (1966); Summer Days (And Summer Nights!!) (1965)

Further reading: Heroes And Villains: The True Story Of The Beach Boys (Stephen Gaines, 1986); www.beachboys.com

Download: HMV Digital; iTunes

Although no one could have known it when it was released, The Beach Boys Today! foreshadowed the end of the group’s first era – the era of songs about cars, carefree love and surfing for which they remain most well known.

The first Beach Boys album of 1965 and their ninth studio album in three years (including a Christmas collection), Today! marked a critical point in Brian Wilson’s development as a songwriter and producer. Perhaps as significantly, it was also when his lucidity was first brought into serious question.

Eager to better the artistic and commercial precedents set by The Beatles and Phil Spector, and increasingly insecure in his ability to do so, Wilson felt straitjacketed by the Boys’ narrow – but winning – formula. His introduction to marijuana, and the bohemian community that supplied it to him, convinced him that the group’s sound should expand as much as his mind if it was to remain relevant. Following an airborne breakdown en route to a Los Angeles live date on December 23, 1964, Wilson announced his retirement from the road to the horrified group, explaining that he would focus all of his creativity into the studio. ‘I told them I foresee a beautiful future for The Beach Boys, but the only way we could achieve it was if they did their job and I did mine,’ recalled Brian. ‘I felt I had no choice, I was run down mentally and emotionally.’

Nothing looks amiss among the sweater-clad grinning boys beaming out from its cover, and the likes of Dance, Dance, Dance and Help Me, Rhonda maintain the group’s good-time reliability. Yet an air of delicate, desperate introspection bleeds from Today’s most beautiful songs (eight of the album’s ten originals written by Brian alone), accentuated by complex orchestrations borne from Brian’s new freedom. The album’s entire second half, particularly, is regarded as the precursor to Pet Sounds’ resolute, lush despair. Please Let Me Wonder (the first song Brian wrote stoned) and In The Back Of My Mind express love not as teenage paradise, but as a submission to paralysing vulnerability, the ultimate threat to childhood naïveté: ‘So happy at times that I break out in tears/In the back of my mind, I still have my fears.’ Even this side’s cover version, The Students’ doo-wop pearl I’m So Young, is equivocal. ‘I’m so young/Can’t marry no one.’

Some of the group (can you guess who?) expressed concern over this break from custom, but to no avail. The Beach Boys Today! was the signpost to The Beach Boys’ tomorrow.