The New World: The Beach Boys: "Sloop John B"

If you look at a globe you will see the world, but if you are from California you will see the world mostly as either this or that - land or sea. The Pacific Ocean is the largest and most mind-boggling thing on the Earth, and if you look at a globe in a certain position it is literally all you can see. To live on the edge of it in what the rest of your country considers to be a paradise is a profound experience; as an Angeleno myself I can't say I spent a lot of time at the beach, but knowing it was there made everything seem...different. It was a tangible cold wash of infinity right there, not stormy like the Atlantic but deep and peaceful, hypnotizing, even....and growing up in Canada with the perpetual roll-down map of the world for geography lessons (an old map, showing all countries with UK ties as red), the Pacific itself stretched and went on in a way that almost laughed at the idea of humans ever really truly taking over the planet. Empires come and go; the vast remains...

We've had The Big Four already in this blog, but now comes the US band that leapt up from being merely another surf band to giving voice to that land/sea division, out of which blossoms everything from fun and more fun to a growing appreciation of what actually matters in life.

The Beach Boys were the band - the only one, I'd argue - who could do this, as it was they who sang so loudly and rocked so hard about cars and girls and the majesty of California itself in the first place. With them, life in California made life anywhere else sound boring and routine; it made surfing a national right and having the right car the key to happiness itself. Perpetual recess sounds like a good idea, but on those foggy, rainy (the song is wrong - it does rain in southern California) days a man can get to wondering if there is more to life...

...and if you are Brian Wilson, steeped in American music from Stephen Foster to George Gershwin, you are going to want to do something big. Something that can bring the California sublime to a point and then present it and give it dimensions and richness. It was a huge project, but he had to start somewhere. In July 1965 he was at the piano when Al Jardine, a folk music fan, sat down next to him and presented him with this song. Wilson wasn't much for folk and Jardine had to then show him how it could be done in the Beach Boys style.

Wilson still didn't seem all that enthused, but what did Jardine find the next day but all the musicians, from Carol Kaye and Hal Blaine on down, there in the studio ready to play, Wilson building on Jardine's arrangement and slightly changing the lyrics to suit the band (Wilson sings the first and third verses, Mike Love the second; of course Jardine wanted to sing it but Wilson was boss).

Something mythic in the song - its sadness balanced with hope (surely the captain will let them go home) must have called out to him; and the tension between the misery of being at sea to the joy of being back on land is there too...though the song just fades out, with no resolution. It's the worst trip, and yet it continues...and yet the song (compared to this, much closer to the original calypso) is almost by definition cheery because of the music - glockenspiel, baritone saxophone and flutes will give something extra to the song, wider dimensions, a feeling that all will be well...

...that Wilson did this amidst doing more 'standard' Beach Boys music (for Beach Boys' Party!) shows that his ambitions were rising - let's do some Beatles songs and then - boom! - he heard Rubber Soul and vowed he would make the greatest album of all time. He was just 23, but had been working like crazy for years writing songs, and now he was inspired...

...and "Sloop John B" got caught up in the madness, coming out as a single as the band were still working on their new album, and put on that album as that is what happened to singles - they just got stuck on whatever album was coming out next. Wilson must have known this and realized he had to be at least this good in order to be cohesive; but then everything he did was of a piece, so incredibly focused he was, bringing the rest of the band along to make music that wasn't just unlike anything they had done before, but unlike anything anyone had done before. The one-off folk song became a template, the music itself at one point stopping...

...for the voices.

Oh, the voices!

At this point the harmonies were well known, but in this song they come to the fore, from high to low, as if they are all on that damn ship, somehow tethered to the song just enough to keep with it, but also flying high above it*. There is so much going on in just a few seconds that - though of course all their songs have harmonies - that in the context of this blog, a new standard has been set, the Pacific has been reached and oh, what are other groups going to do now.

There is rippling brightness and terrible fights, loneliness and gorgeousness, rock sweeping up folk and its history and making the old new, by bringing new and old together. Foster and Gershwin were next, but there would be a lot of praying beforehand.



*I tend to think of the The Beach Boys' harmonies as a stunning Californian scenery like Yosemite or Big Sur - of course it was a product of a lot of luck and hard work, but it epitomizes the overwhelmingness of Californian life, at once ordinary and extraordinary, normal and abnormal. Brian Wilson learned from The Four Freshmen as much as from Chuck Berry, but was after something...new here. He more than got it.