Liner Notes- 01.Sept.2022

Sunflowers, Surf Rock, and Cincy

Sep 01, 2022

Thursday issues are normally available only to paid subscribers. This week I’m pulling back the curtain to give everyone a chance to see some of what they might be missing.

Note for newer readers: This year, I’ve taken on the challenge of reviewing 100 new (to me) records. This is the latest in the series.

The Beach Boys- Sunflower

Click the record to listen on your platform of choice.

There is a scene in a Mad men episode where Don, Roger and a few others decide to take LSD.

As the scene plays out, “I Just Wasn't Made For These Times” by the Beach Boys plays. It’s fitting on a lot of levels; on an abstract level, Don and Roger are both a little unmoored at this point in the series, and operate in a world they’re no longer familiar with. On a macro level it’s unnerving watching older people take a drug usually left to a crowd their kids’ age. It’s like seeing your parents drunk for the first time, or falling down a YouTube rabbit hole and landing on a video of a grandma ripping bong hits.

Real fish out of water stuff.

That song of course is from the band’s seminal Pet Sounds album. A record that at this point is immune from any sort of criticism. It’s been on everyone’s “best of” list for so long, nobody bothers to see if it’s actually any good anymore (spoiler alert: It totally is).

But setting a bar that high isn’t always a good thing. For the Beach Boys, it became a litmus test against everything else they ever did. It also became a dividing line, where every record that came before is somehow regarded in a higher light, and everything after in a lower one, if not ignored outright.

The truth, of course, is somewhere in the middle.

Not everything that came out prior deserves to be lauded. Don’t believe me? Take a field trip through side 2 of records like “Shut Down Volume 2,” or Today! They’re…something.

And not everything that came after was garbage, though I’ll make a declarative statement that “Kokomo” is insufferable. In fact, most of the band’s post “Pet Sounds” catalog can be best described as overlooked.

Records like 1970’s “Sunflower.”

1969/1970 found the band in the same untethered space Roger and Don were in. No longer the clean cut band your parents would approve of, and no longer in step with the heavier sounds kids were into. Their popularity was at its lowest level in years, and their public image in ashes (hanging out Charles Manson tends to do that). Worse, they were still reeling from 2 awful tours.

So, on top of everything else, they were broke.

Oh, and without a label, having been dropped by Capitol after previously failing to deliver enough material for a new record. And with a Brian Wilson stepping increasingly closer to the edge with each passing hour.

So yeah, not great

But that also gave the other Beach Boys time to shine. At this point, Dennis Wilson was completely ignoring things like restraint and virtue, but he still managed to pen a couple of fantastic tracks. “Slip On Through” kicks the album off in fine style, and “Forever” is one of the best on the record.

Great lyrics, harmony, and more. It checks all of the boxes you’d expect from a Beach Boys classic.

In a few years, Wilson would release the beautiful Pacific Ocean Blue. How a man living such a debauched existence could create such wonderful work is beyond me. That’s some god-level dissonance. But here we are. Brian Wilson gets tagged with the genius label, but for my money, it’s Dennis who’s released the best solo record of the bunch.

Of course, he’s also human, and while he gifted us tracks like “Forever,” he also gave us “Got To Know The Woman.” If this was an instrumental? 7/10. I was into it…until I looked up the lyrics. They’re not…good. They’re lecherous when looked at through a 2022 lens, and in that context I can give them a pass. But the words themselves are just awful.

I mean,

If you feel the feel I feel
Haha you dig the feel of me (You know you look like you dig feelin' me)
Love the way you feel dear
Ah, you make a make a man out of me (You make you make a man out of me)
Come on
Come on come on and do the chicken

C’mon, man!

And even that is topped by Brian Wilson’s “Cool Cool Water,” which is about, well, cool water.

When I'm thirsty and I reach for a glass
Cool water tastes like such a gas
From the mountains on down to the sea
Cool cool water keeps on coolin' me
Cool cool water keeps on coolin' me
Cool cool water keeps on coolin' me
Cool cool water keeps on coolin' me

Cool water might be a gas, but these words are hot air, and read like a warm up exercise for writers. (“look around the room, pick the first object you see and write about it”). Was he stuck, or was this further proof that his mind was breaking up in mid air?

In Mad Men, Don tells Roger to go be alone in his truth. And the truth is “Sunflower” has some rough spots. That’s to be expected from a band showing a little wear and tear and trying to find a place to land in a world they no longer recognize. But to my ear, there’s less blatant filler than on some of their earlier records.

Bottom line- “Pet Sounds” is an off-the-charts outlier. The overall quality of their records leading up to pets and those immediately after is similar; the only difference is no one was listening to the latter.

“Sunflower” peaked at 151 on the charts. Of the four singles released, only “Add Some Music To Your Day” went anywhere, and even that peaked at an anemic #64 in the U.S.

Shame really; the Woody’s were gone, and there was no over the top Wall Of Sound, but they still had plenty to offer the world. “Sunflower” is a record that both Don Draper and his kids would have enjoyed. LSD or no.

P.S. I need to give a huge shoutout to Kiley Larsen over at Check This Out! for turning me on to Wilson’s “Pacific Ocean Blue” record recently. He took his own look back at “Sunflower” in 2020 as part of the record turning 50. You can check that out here.

The Routes- The Twang Machine

Imagine a world where a Japanese band gorged on Dick Dale and then did a record of Kraftwerk covers. It’s exactly as you’d imagine, and everything you’d want it to be. What a time to be alive!

Vacation-Existential Risks & Returns

More fantastic pop (or “grit pop,” to use the band’s term) from The Queen City. I’ve written previously about how I didn’t have “Cincinnati as a thriving scene” on my music bingo card. Yet the great music just keeps coming. This 2021 release starts strong and never slows down.

What was On:

A look at some of the records I listened to this past week. There will be repeats. There will never be any rhyme or reason to any of it.

Camper Van Beethoven- Telephone Free Landslide Victory
Cocteau Twins-Garlands
Elvis Costello- Armed Forces
Galaxie 500-Today
Gang Of Four- Entertainment!
Graham Parker- Squeezing Out Sparks
High Vis- No Sense, No Feeling
INXS- Listen Like Thieves
Jesus and Mary Chain-Automatic
John Hiatt-Slow Turning
Joy Division-Closer
Lifeguard-Crowd Can Talk
Male Idiot Theory- S/T
Pearl Jam- Ten
Pearl Jam- Yield
The Police- Ghost In The Machine
Superchunk- Tossing Seeds
Superchunk- On The Mouth

What’d you have on?

B-Sides:

St. Nick: The Long, Strange and Wonderful Career of Nick Lowe

But, still, pretty mad: Now, when Lowe tours, he’s the only person onstage not wearing a Mexican wrestling mask, which is certainly one way to telegraph a lifelong, near-militant refusal to take oneself seriously, and which made a show I caught at White Eagle Hall in Jersey City, New Jersey, feel, at times, more like a visit to the Roadhouse bar in Twin Peaks.

More on the resolution making it’s way through Congress to revamp the way musicians are paid for streaming.

And today, Representative Rashida Tlaib, from the Great Rock and Roll City of Detroit, sent a letter to her colleagues introducing a resolution that Congress establish a new streaming royalty to be paid directly to musicians.

A Musical Mystery right here on Substack!

If you’re looking for something new & different, Challenge 69 (from friend of On Repeat Tim Coxall) is for you. Think serialized mystery meets High Fidelity. It’s pretty cool.

What is the mystifying ‘Challenge 69’ competition that has appeared online? How have its recipients been targeted? And what could its prize, heralded as ‘unique’, possibly be?
Stuart, a music obsessive with a meandering mind, decides to take up the ‘challenge’ and find out. While at first just another of his many distractions, the competition (with its ever more convoluted clues) soon starts to bring Stuart a new focus.