UNDERRATED ALBUMS # 2

(‘it crowns their struggle to fill the gaps left by their lead singer, chief songwriter and producer…’)

Holland (1973)
by The Beach Boys

Two albums tower over the career of The Beach Boys: the first is Pet Sounds (1966), a universally admired masterpiece to be found near or at the very top of Greatest Ever Albums lists; the other is Smile, recorded the following year, but never released in its entirety until it finally appeared in various forms four decades later. The band’s other albums languish in the long shadows cast by these twin peaks of Brian Wilson’s genius.

Several of the band’s earlier records easily qualify as underrated, but I’m going to concentrate on Holland (their nineteenth studio album in eleven years…) as it crowns their struggle to fill the gaps left by their lead singer, chief songwriter and producer, Brian Wilson, whose main contribution to the sessions was Mount Vernon & Fairway (A Fairy Tale), a short suite intended for children and OK as such, but justifiably relegated to the status of bonus EP by the band. Unlike other albums of the post-1967 period, which had all featured a trickle-down of tracks from the aborted Smile, this time there was to be no tapping of the mother-lode.

Recorded in Holland (hence the title and inverted cover photograph of an Amsterdam canal) in an attempt to be refreshed by the experience of living abroad – and perhaps enjoying a tax-holiday – the album ironically recalls the lifestyle they’d left behind on the west coast of the USA. Its centrepiece, ‘California Saga’, is a worthy addition to The Beach Boys’ legacy of songs celebrating the endless summer of the American Dream. It is also, however, concerned with the emergent ecological movement and a perception of the sublimity of landscape – a concept which extends over the first two thirds of the album. The three parts of ‘California Saga’, which includes a Robinson Jeffers poem, are narrated and sung by Al Jardine and Mike Love. It’s probably Jardine’s finest ever moment with the band.

The younger Wilson brothers are also key factors on Holland. Carl ran the sessions, handled much of the singing and brought his first significant solo composition, ‘The Trader’ to the project. The song sensitively laments the ruthless exploitation of the sort of environment described in ‘California Saga’. Dennis, meanwhile is represented by ‘Steamboat’ which blends well with the frontier atmosphere evoked by the above tracks in summoning up the spirit of the river and memorialising the ‘Mister Fulton’ responsible for developing steamboats as a viable means of river-travel in the US.

‘Only With You’, co-written by Dennis and Mike Love and sang by Carl, is a simple, elegant ballad, whilst the final track, ‘Funky Pretty’, sings the praises of a hippy astrologer ‘pisces lady’ that the narrator used to know well and who he believes will come back ‘when the aspects are right’. It’s an amusing, soulful and indeed funky performance, although one is left at the end of the record, feeling that the evocative concept underpinning the first six of the album’s nine tracks has been allowed to dissolve.

Carl, Brian, Al, Ricky, Dennis, Blondie, Mike

The ranks of The Beach Boys had recently been swelled by the recruitment of two young South African musicians, guitarist Blondie Chaplin and drummer Ricky Fataar who was deputising for Dennis who had injured a hand (the days of Hal Blaine and The Wrecking Crew sessioneers had now passed). Notably, Chaplin is heard singing lead on the terrific opener, ‘Sail On Sailor’, an anthemic shanty of the high seas written by Brian, Van Dyke Parks and three other non-Beach Boys (the bewildering array of co-writers used by the band over the years is an article in itself).  Chaplin and Fataar are even accorded inclusion of one of their own songs, ‘Leaving This Town’, which, though pleasant enough, is rather plodding and overlong. Chaplin is still a busy sideman these days whilst, somewhat bizarrely, Fataar turned up later in the '70s as one of The Prefab Four in the Neil Innes / Eric Idle Beatles spoof, The Rutles.

The instrumental palette of Holland includes strings, flute, banjo, slide guitar, and on ‘Steamboat’, clanking bells and a suitably liquid electric guitar solo. It is, however, a keyboards-led production, with organ, synthesiser and especially piano - played by regular band-associate, Darryl Dragon (of The Captain & Tennile), along with Carl and Dennis - providing the undulating backgrounds for the record’s strong melodies.

Lyrically, the songs find the band striving for poetical effects – successfully on the whole, although they do tend to overdo the close rhyming in places.

Holland would be the last Beach Boys album to garner any real critical acclaim before their long and steady decline into irrelevance. Apart from the occasional hit single, their sales were generated by compilations, which various groupings of the Beach Boys brand would tour like a travelling jukebox. The hope of forging a creative identity more or less independent of Brian Wilson had proved to be a short-lived one.  

N. B.

Who could have predicted, come the 21^st century, that Brian would be the only Wilson brother still alive? Even more extraordinary, given his well documented eccentricities and flaws - including fear of flying and the stage - that he would not only be releasing new albums, but actually touring them? Also to be found in the Fact Is Stranger Than Fiction department in 2012 was the phenomenon of the competing factions in the Beach Boys reuniting to tour their highest charting album of new material since Pet Sounds? The album, That’s Why God Made The Radio, with production credited to Brian Wilson (although almost certainly involving a degree of smoke and mirrors) is not bad either, and when it’s good – as in the title and closing tracks – it’s very good indeed…