The Beach Boys Love You ( and play the MOOG ) – English
The Moog synthesizer is such a great instrument with its buttery smooth bass and truly insane sounds. Its ability to easily compete with an entire orchestra could be witnessed here in Berlin in January 2023 at the Ultraschall Festival with Ying Wang’s wonderful new work 528 Hz 8va.
In the late 60s and early 70s, the new instrument soon found its way into almost all recording studios in the pop music industry. Among the first to gain access were the Beatles and the Beach Boys. In the case of the latter, it was Carl Wilson who acquired one and brought it with him into the recording studio. Where once the electronic sounds of the theremin had played a vital role, helping to shape three of the Beach Boys’ greatest hits (“Good Vibrations”, “I Just Wasn’t Made for These Times” and “Wild Honey”), the band and their struggling maestro Brian Wilson gradually worked their way more and more into the revolutionary new sound of the Moog synthesizer. At first sporadically, e.g. on the album “Sunflower” (1970), then more prominently on “Surf’s Up” (1971) in a song that many consider to be one of Carl Wilson’s best, “Feel Flows”.
It was during this period, following the outset of Brian Wilson’s reclusion after the “Holland” album (a three-year period during which he mostly stayed in bed, gained 150 kg and, according to stories, only listened to the one song by the Ronettes, “Be My Baby”, over and over), that Carl Wilson gradually took over the direction of the Beach Boys.
Wilson’s struggle with depression was recently made the subject of a song (“Brian Wilson”) by the Canadian pop band Barenaked Ladies.
An intervention and subsequent therapy initiated jointly by his wife and the band (which would later have other fatal consequences) temporarily got Wilson away from drugs and saved his life. He returned as if reborn, even performing on stage under the motto “Brian is Back”, and it was here that another brilliant miracle of invention took place in the Beach Boys canon. Wilson brought together material for more than two albums of new songs. He was working clean, spending hours in the studio, and one of the results was the very special album “The Beach Boys Love You”, which was originally intended as a solo record (“Brian Loves You”) but then taken up by the band and released in 1977.
And it is on this oft forgotten masterpiece, that something catches your ear right from the very first notes: the Moog! In the heavy rock number “Let Us Go on This Way”, there’s that inimitable sound: the Moog bass, which would soon dominate a decade of synth-pop music. Here are some playing directions from the Internet for the fanatics among you:
It was here that Brian Wilson found the idiosyncratic sound that best fit his situation at the time, both mentally and physically. An adult, overweight man in his mid-thirties, he was already severely impaired and suffering from an ongoing mental illness. His voice, a euphoric falsetto tenor in his youth, had given way to a broken, whiskey-laden crooner’s voice, almost reminiscent of Sinatra. Piercing, ostinato memories hung over him, of which, for example, the song “Mona”, dedicated to Phil Spector, bears witness on the record with its four repeated chords. At the same time, his endless creativity reflected an insatiable longing for experimentation and adventure, and despite the malaise, his songs remained blessed with wit and gracefulness.
Wilson himself has often said that, as far as the Moog is concerned, he was significantly influenced by Wendy Carlos, whose album “Switched-On Bach” (1970) featured the artist’s pioneering performance of classical works on the large Moog synthesizer by means of laboriously generated electronic sounds.
Here is a link to a short BBC portrait of Wendy Carlos with original recordings:
This influence—he said he listened to the album over and over—must have left Wilson with the idea of an album of his own on which he could largely create and employ his own sounds produced on the Moog.
In keeping with the band and their business ideas and desire to return to their old successes, the first side of the album “Love You” opens with several magnificent rock numbers. “Let Us Go on This Way” is followed by “Roller Coaster Child” and then “Honkin’ Down the Highway”, which is particularly effective with Alan Jardine on lead vocals. The three numbers are characterized not only by rather oblique lyrics, but also—and this is largely due to the Moog bass—by what I would call a vexing sense of ambiguity. Sure, they are each bold, solid numbers, sung by thirty-plus-year-old American men, literally tramping through the cultural landscape. But at the same time, they are curiously broken in spirit and speak of a childish, immature longing for teenage adventures—and then there is always this artificial, clinical, science-fiction aspect to the sound (once more largely due to Wilson’s use of the Moog). The extent to which this phenomenon was reflected in American entertainment and television culture of the time becomes immediately clear from another striking number, “Johnny Carson”, in which Brian Wilson addresses a perhaps seriously intended (but thereby even more disarming and revealing) hymn of homage to America’s leading television night-time talk show host at the time:
Brian Wilson’s art rises here—reinforced by the Moog—to a new level, namely musical REALISM. It speaks, much like Gustav Mahler did: from the viewpoint of observer expressing the unvarnished truth about the current social mores. The stereotypical, rote, muscular nature of synthetic mass culture—presented here in C minor!
(Brian Wilson has very rarely composed songs explicitly in a minor key. The Mozart-like “mélange” of his songs, which I have already mentioned in this blog, is usually created by a darkening of the major and the infiltration of minor chords or mood into an originally cheerful environment.)
The lyrics suggest the biting irony even more clearly: “He speaks in such a manly tone….”
(Carson tried to brush the whole thing off as just a “joke”—of course he had heard the song, but he certainly didn’t consider it ART.)
The speculative, crazy twists and turns of Brian Wilson’s brain could be wonderfully reproduced with the Moog. In “Solar System” he sings a waltz about the planets in front of a group of children, offering up such corny verses as “If Mars had life on it / I might find my wife on it”, accompanied by a spacey-sounding synth band playing sophisticated jazz harmonies.
Likewise, Wilson’s music of isolation, which speaks of world weariness and heartache and in its depth is truly reminiscent of Franz Schubert, can be heard, now with Moog and a crystalline, organlike atmosphere, in two wonderful ballads on “Love You” that directly recall “Pet Sounds”: “The Night was so Young” and “I’ll Bet He’s Nice” (pay attention here especially to the Moog organ bass). We are at the pinnacle of Wilson’s songwriting here, with fantastic vocal performances from his band.
Brian Wilson’s fear of flying was well known—it was a major reason for his withdrawal from the band’s tours. This makes “Airplane”, ethereally enhanced by the Moog synthesizer, all the more bizarre (but then, too, Wilson never surfed) and enchanting; its ending is surprisingly well-grounded, with a funny and turbulent gospel choir outro on the line “I can’t wait to see her face.”
Two other songs—the duet with his then wife Marilyn Rovell, “Let’s Put Our Hearts Together”, and the only borderline-hit on the record, “Love Is a Woman”, show Brian Wilson searching for a new identity as a jazz composer for a singer like Sinatra and with a greater focus on the mainstream. Interestingly, there are fans and Wilson experts whose admiration for the “Love You” album is restricted solely to these two jazz ballads. Both songs, however, are extremely ambiguous affairs: Brian and Marylin split up a year after this duet, and Wilson later apologized for the somewhat embarrassing title “Love Is a Woman,” saying he probably should have chosen “Love Is a Baby” instead. And vouching for all these ambiguities: the Moog, with its droning, sometimes even whimpering, grumbling bass.
In “I Wanna Pick You Up,” a wonderfully quirky-romantic number with lead vocals by Dennis Wilson, the band sings a tender love song to a baby. The Moog not only supplies the bass here, but also a kind of trombone-like melody towards the end, before the Beach Boys’ a cappella choir takes the stage once more as the little one is about to fall asleep.
Who am I? This question that artists ask themselves follows them throughout their lives. There are times, however, when they come a bit closer to an honest answer. The album “Love You” brought Brian—accompanied by the Moog—very close. Not only because he personally wrote all the lyrics, leaving himself open to any and all criticism—and indeed the reaction was quite polarized: lacking in literary quality, simply naive adolescent fantasy, too intimate, too banal, etc.—but also because the presence of the Moog synthesizer in the studio made it possible for him to translate his own personal vision directly into the recording. He played all the instruments on the record—a feat that was just now technically possible and which later led to much outstanding work in the pop music scene, e.g. that of Prince.
Ten years after “Pet Sounds”, a period of personal struggle that probably felt more like half a lifetime, Brian Wilson offers us in “Love You” a comprehensive, intimate portrait of his inner self in the 1970s: thumping, gleaming, jingling, jangling, purring—bizarre, obscure, popular—like the Moog itself!
(Jobst Liebrecht, January 2023 – translated by Kevin Pfeiffer )
- For a contemporary take, you can read Patti Smith’s review of “The Beach Boys Love You” from 1977:
