A Small World, After All: Annivyrsary 1966
ISSUE #324
Before 1966, the Beach Boys only made surfing music. It didn’t matter that Dennis Wilson was the only member who surfed—neither his younger brother Carl nor his older brother Brian had ever touched a board—the public had a vicious appetite for this promising, carefree California life that was gleaming off the foam of the golden coast. What mattered was that the Beach Boys, with Brian as their chief songwriter, were damn good at making hooks, and could ostensibly crank them out over and over on any subject for decades.
But then, Brian Wilson suffered a debilitating panic attack on tour. Unable to make it to the stage, Wilson left and stayed home for the rest of the tour, spending a lot of time tinkering in the recording studio. With hours alone and his exacting sense of creativity, Brian became one of the first musicians to learn how to “play the studio,” seeking out obscure musical instruments and experimenting with tape-splicing techniques. A new album was starting to bubble up in the cauldron of his mind.
It was 1966 before too long. The Beatles’ fingers were in every ear, and their influence was bearing fruit—from the success of The Monkees, which was essentially The Beatles: The Sitcom, to the urge of every kid from Michigan to Mississippi to pick up an instrument, grab their friends, and launch a wave of garage rock that stretched from The Sonics to the “Hanky Panky.” But the biggest influence came when Brian Wilson sat down with a Beatles record that came out in December of 1965.
When Brian Wilson first heard Rubber Soul—which itself was inspired by Motown and the Byrds—the mind-cauldron bubbling starting building into intense pressure that needed release. Pet Sounds was coming. In his 2016 memoir, Wilson wrote “Rubber Soul sent me right to the piano bench. It’s a whole album of Beatles folk songs, a whole album where everything flows together and everything works.” Invigorated with this new inspiration, Wilson started inventing new arrangements. He built entirely new chord structures. He brought in a theremin. None of the Beach Boys would even play an instrument on the record to come—that would all come from the Wrecking Crew, the elite team of session musicians behind almost every great 1960s hit—but Wilson became a sonic architect the likes of which had never been heard.
What he made was the greatest album of all time. Now, in 1966 alone, we have Revolver, Blonde on Blonde, and Wild is the Wind to contend with. Yet, if I launched a debate on this platform, it wouldn’t be so absurd. Pet Sounds is one of those ones. It’s got it. It's beyond cliché; attention must be paid, no matter how played out it might get.
Wilson spent about $70,000 on Pet Sounds, which is something like $700,000 today. It was a commercial flop, too—at first. “Sloop John B” peaked at #3 on the charts, “Wouldn’t It Be Nice” topped out at #8, and "God Only Knows" only hit #39. Overseas, though, Pet Sounds sold well, largely due to rave reviews from—you guessed it—the Beatles. Hearing it for the first time at a listening party for the British press, McCartney proclaimed “God Only Knows” as the greatest song ever written. When Brian Wilson heard Rubber Soul, he set out to make Pet Sounds. Now that the Beatles had heard Pet Sounds, they set out to make Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.
If asked, with a gun to my head, to explain what the hell people are on about when sincerely endorsing capitalism, I would point to this story. The intense artistic superbloom between Rubber Soul, Pet Sounds, and Sgt. Pepper’s—years also plagued by uniquely capitalistic ventures like the Vietnam War, Jim Crow racism, and plastics—is the closest I can get to seeing what they mean by a marketplace of ideas. It remains the most optimistic spasm of globalism’s puberty, a brief ejaculate of small-world communication amongst genius artists. Therefore, due to the right hands and the right ears, I suppose, this was a rare win for evangelists of free-market competition.
That’s the best I can do—pretty damn good though, all things considered? Go hit play on “God Only Knows” again.
The first sentence of Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis was written in German, which can neither be completely nor unequivocally translated into English. This sentence, which was written exactly 100 years before 2015, has echoed throughout a century of literature:
“Als Gregor Samsa eines Morgens aus unruhigen Träumen erwachte, fand er sich in seinem Bett zu einem ungeheueren Ungeziefer verwandelt”
I was not listening to “Hope There’s Someone,” one of the greatest songs ever written, back in 2005, when it came out. I was a tasteless rube then, with only a few dollars for iTunes singles. No, I was not listening to “Hope There’s Someone” yet, but when I did, I felt could have written it. It’s all the 12-year-old me felt at the time: “Hope there’s someone / Who’ll set my heart free / Nice to hold, when I’m tired.”
Sometime in the 1990s, an incredibly rare cultural gag reflex was triggered. This was the first generational challenge of the status quo since the 1960s: queerness, for once, wasn’t necessarily a death sentence, and feminism even had a third wave. The fact is a miracle to this day.
The best adaptation of 1984 actually came out in 1985, and it was called Brazil. That’s how things go—it takes a year or so to process prophecies. By stamping it 1984, Orwell all but assured the powers that be would only mobilize once the year was safely in the rearview.
1975 has officially been sold as the year of the shark and the Saturday Night. These two things were the ones to last. As much as it might make you cringe to say, it’s undeniable: I’m a Brody sun, a Quint moon, a goddamn Hooper rising. A Gilda sun, a Conan moon, a Chevy… agh, you know what, fuck it.
The house where I grew up was two miles from Highway 61. That’s the historic blues highway that Bob Dylan referenced with Highway 61 Revisited, his 1965 album that, in turn, gave the film A Complete Unknown its name from a lyric in “Like a Rolling Stone.”
When I was 21, I worked at Forever 21. I was the sole stock worker on any given shift, and I ran that backroom like a movie set—there wasn’t a single maxi dress I couldn’t echolocate.
I remember—I remember the first song I listened to for weeks. It was in 2004. I had loved a tune before, sure—your Cher’s “Believe,” your Smash Mouth’s “All Star”—but had never experienced that blissful hunger for one. That came with “All These Things I’ve Done”…
Kurt Cobain died on April 5, 1994. He killed himself—and he did kill himself. Crazy the acrobatics our minds will go through to rule out the reality of suicide. Impossible! That life could be too hard to live? We’re more likely to see misogynistic conspiracy lurk around every corner.
1984 has been called the greatest year in pop, and I think it might still be true. If 1974 was music’s fallow period, ten years later was its opposite. We danced in the dark beneath the killing moon and under purple rain—this was the year the critics and the people met in the Minneapolis streets.
When I started gathering my research for this Annivyrsary back in January, one thing became clear—1974 was not a good year for music. This was very much a puberty period, an awkward personality vacuum that comes between shedding the old and fully realizing the new. This was to be my Waterloo.
Something preposterous happened in 1964: On the week of April 4, one artist had the top five songs on the Billboard Hot 100. It’d never happened before and it hasn’t been matched since. Mere weeks before, in the warming days of March, America found that no fewer than 60% of all records sold were songs by the Beatles.
Safe to say three of the most consequential albums of my life came out in 2013, and that list doesn’t even touch the dozen other nearly perfect albums from this year—Trouble Will Find Me, Modern Vampires of the City, Cupid Deluxe, Yeezus… 2013 changed music as we know it, and a lot of the biggest artists today cemented their status or debuted this year, from The 1975 to Beyoncé.
I do remember that this is the year I got a Nintendo Power subscription though. And I do remember one day, flipping through said Nintendo Power in the back seat of the family van, my parents slid a revolution into the CD player. That was the day I first heard Now!That’s What I Call Music! 14.
So for me, ‘93 was the first year of the 90s, and its evidence lies in several places: in the birth of the Riot Grrrl movement and third wave feminism with Bikini Kill’s “Rebel Girl”; in Nirvana’s dyspeptic final album before Cobain’s untimely death; and in Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers), the harbinger for the soon-to-be golden age of hip hop.
Some stories of note in 1983: the invention of Detroit techno, as embodied by the single “Clear” by Cybotron; the birth of English indie rock as we know it with The Smiths debut and follow up singles (“Hand in Glove” and “This Charming Man,” respectively); and the birth of American indie rock as we know it with R.E.M.’s Murmur.
If you want a little taste of what 1973 was like, go watch Licorice Pizza, the title of which refers to the old LP, a.k.a. the vinyl record—and boy, was this year firmly the middle of the Album Empire.
It’s time for the first of our Annivyrsaries, my favorite history class, and we’re starting with the sounds of 1963. So naturally, I want to focus on something that hasn’t been touched as much by scholars—the rise of the Surf Song.
It was the year the world was supposed to end. For music, in a own way, it did. As the 2009 class of indie darlings delivered underwhelming follow ups (Shields, Centipede Hz, Swing Lo Magellan—many now, in ten years time, seen as unsung greats), critics were reckoning with the rise of poptimism.
In 2002, I was listening to All That You Can’t Leave Behind from the backseat of a minivan while I flipped through the pictures in Nintendo Power. I thought all songs debuted through Now That’s What I Call Music! I was Coldplay’s perfect mark—I had no idea what a cliché even was.
I must’ve gotten my hands on Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas in 2004, when I was 10 or 11 years old. Grand Theft Auto maintains a dual reputation as one of the greatest video games of all time as well as one of those Matrix-level Y2K-era youth corruptors.
The first time I went crowd-surfing was in a stranger’s dark living room to “Come On Eileen.” I remember being lifted on shaky hands and the warm breeze borne from the drunken crowd. It was during that thumping chant of the bridge, every foot moving to the brow-beating stomp. My nose scraped the ceiling as I sang along.
At the height of his fame, David Bowie forged Ziggy Stardust to help him withstand the heat of the limelight. He quickly came to resent it. He was starting to think that he was Ziggy. He even went as far as trying to kill Stardust off one summer in London. “That fucker would not leave me alone for years,” he once said.
Pretend it’s 1962. Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring hits The New Yorker in June. In a month, heavy smog descends upon London; the first Walmart rears its head in Arkansas. Another month, and Marilyn Monroe is dead. The world could collapse any day now.
Summer morning doesn’t strike the Midwest sky so much as it subdues it. The sun will lay the night down gently—first with the grip of firm, pink fingers, then a whispered command in daffodil light.
It's 2001: CDs are excessive. Packing 1.4 million bits into a single second of stereo? In reality, we need only 128,000—a mere twelfth the size of what we were sold.
In 1991, Kevin Shields of My Bloody Valentine spent three years making their second record, held up by perfectionism and his visionary sound—thousands of pedals to make the guitars shimmer, a mirage of pitch-bent tremolo effects.
She and I stood face-to-face—cheeks rolling as we chewed in calculated fury—in a bathroom flooded so many times you could see from peeling paint the location of each waterline. Moments ago, we’d scoured the concrete for bright strips of green between the rippling sheet of the Mississippi River and the faded auditorium where we now conspired.
At 11:59 p.m. on the first day of 1971, families watching The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson witnessed the last ad for cigarettes ever broadcast on television. 60 seconds dedicated to Virginia Slims. Those who preferred CBS’s Merv Griffin saw the same but for a different pack—Marlboros. Dick Cavett fans got Benson & Hedges.
Before 1966, the Beach Boys only made surfing music. It didn’t matter that Dennis Wilson was the only member who surfed—neither his younger brother Carl nor his older brother Brian had ever touched a board—the public had a vicious appetite for this promising, carefree California life that was gleaming off the foam of the golden coast.