The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
The Beach Boys · produced by Brian Wilson · Capitol · about 36 minutes
Mode
Harmony pop turned inward; the studio used as an orchestra, on harmonies that move by inversion
Mythos
Innocence and experience: the wish to be older, the fall it fears, the garden left at the close
Phase
Thirteen tracks on two sides; the couple’s present on side one, its doubt on side two, a wordless escape near the end of each, and a train leaving after the last song
Presentation
Album; thirteen tracks, about thirty-six minutes, heard in the original mono mix
Register
Harpsichord, French horn, bass harmonica, flutes, timpani, bicycle bells, Electro-Theremin and strings under stacked voices, fused in one mono image
Scale
One adolescent interior at a single threshold, with the couple, time and the sacred in view
Governing Proposition
The leader of a hit band stays home from the tour and builds, with hired players and the band’s voices laid on afterwards, a record of courtship and doubt in orchestral dress, on harmonies that seldom stand on their root: love at the threshold of adulthood, entered with the knowledge of its own ending, carried from a wish to be older to a mourning for what was lost, and closed on a passing train.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The record opens on a guitar figure that rings like a harp, and lifts at once into a wish: a teenage couple who want to be older, married, and free to stay together. It is the brightest song on the album, and it is already a song about what is not yet. Everything the record goes on to know is in that tense. The wish for adulthood is what its thirteen tracks will spend, and by the last of them the innocence the wish was spending is gone and mourned. The first song is joy, and it is joy at a threshold that the rest of the record crosses.
Capitol released the album on 16 May 1966: thirteen tracks on two sides, about thirty-six minutes, produced by Brian Wilson. Most of the words are Tony Asher’s, written with Wilson. The backing tracks were cut in Los Angeles by session players directed by Wilson while the band toured, and the band’s voices were added afterwards, so that the group’s harmonies arrive as one more arranged section of an orchestra their leader had already built. Two tracks had a life outside the album: Sloop John B was recorded and issued as a single before the album was made, and Caroline, No was issued as a single under Wilson’s own name.
The record is heard here in its original mono mix, the one Wilson made and the only one he supervised for the release. The stereo mix first made for The Pet Sounds Sessions in 1997 opens the layers to the ear, and it is evidence of how the record was built; it is not the record. In the mono every instrument is placed in one image, doubled sounds fuse into timbres no single instrument has, and the lead voice stays clear inside the mass. No player is heard alone. The whole is one voice, and that voice is the record’s instrument.
Movement II
The scoring is not a pop band’s. Harpsichord, French horn, bass harmonica, flutes, timpani, bicycle bells, Electro-Theremin and strings sit under the voices, and the familiar instruments are doubled until they stop sounding like themselves: bass with guitar, organ with accordion. Wilson writes the arrangements, directs the players section by section, cuts the backing in several studios and builds the vocals in stacked layers. Bass lines move as counter-melodies rather than marking the root, and the harmonies move by inversions, so that the ground under a song is seldom quite where a listener expects it.
Side one is the couple’s present. You Still Believe in Me climbs in a multitracked vocal over a plucked piano and sets gratitude and self-reproach in one breath. That’s Not Me is the softest song on the record. Don’t Talk asks for silence and gives its centre to strings, rising by withholding. I’m Waiting for the Day follows, and then Let’s Go Away for Awhile ends the side: the escape the songs keep asking for, given once and without words. It cannot be spoken, so it is not sung. Six tracks later the title instrumental stands before the closing song in the same place on side two, and it is the slighter of the two.
Here the form is the knowledge. Change the setting and much of what the record knows goes, because its doubt lives in the harmony and the arrangement, not in the words. The making that carries this is load-bearing on nearly every track, and its faults are few and small. Sloop John B keeps the plainer arrangement of the earlier session it came from; the title instrumental is thin as a composition; a few lead vocals are slight beside the harmonies around them; and That’s Not Me and I’m Waiting for the Day are served by the form rather than enacting it. Two tracks of thirteen could go with small loss, and neither is part of the frame.
Movement III
The second side’s second track is the record’s summit. French horn, sleigh bells and harpsichord stand under a single voice, and the song, a song of devotion, opens on a contingency: it begins by allowing that the love may not last, and the devotion survives the admission. The harmony says the same thing beneath the words. The song sits on a key it seldom states, with the bass under inversions, so the devotion never stands on firm ground. On a plainer setting it would be a love song. On this one it is a love song that knows its own ending.
Then the voices enter one on another over the closing tag, three of them in a round, and the song climbs to a height few records reach. That is an arranger’s feat as much as a singer’s. The elevation of the record is warm throughout. Wouldn’t It Be Nice lifts at once, You Still Believe in Me climbs, Don’t Talk swells where its words stop, Let’s Go Away for Awhile is transport without a voice, and Caroline, No ends in a hush that is itself a height. Eight or nine of thirteen tracks rise. Three stay level, and none reaches for terror: a high, warm, single temperature.
What the record discloses can be stated, and it holds: love at the threshold of adulthood is entered with the knowledge of its own ending, and tenderness is shadowed by unworthiness. Here Today warns that love’s present tense is its only one; Caroline, No grieves a change in a girl that is also a change in the one who loved her. The music discloses as much as the words, and often more, since Asher’s words are plain and the unsettled harmony is where the doubt is heard. The condition is one sensibility’s, at one threshold. It is not a society’s, and that is the limit of what the record uncovers.
Movement IV
The strangest song on the record rises in its harmonies over the Electro-Theremin’s eerie line, the one cool sound on the album. It names the unfitted self, and it turns the record’s longing inward: what is wanted now is not a girl or a future but a world the self could belong to. Society enters the record only here, and only as the times the singer was not made for. It is the one place the album looks outward, and it looks outward to say that it cannot live there.
The tradition the record turns from is the band’s own. Surf, cars and the beach had made them, harmony pop sold to teenagers, and behind it Phil Spector’s Wall of Sound, which Wilson revered. The leader of a hit band stopped touring and built, with hired players, a record of introspection with no surf and no cars, and set aside the sound and subjects that were still selling. The path was not unbroken ground. Spector’s production was proven, the Beatles had already made the album a whole, and the band’s own records of 1965 had begun the turn. The swerve is the completion, and it was paid for with the formula that had made the band.
The record showed three things at once: that the pop album could be a unified emotional statement, that a producer could use the studio and hired players as a composer uses an orchestra, and that pop harmony could carry ambiguity. From it runs the line of chamber and orchestral pop through the decades since, and the measure of the producer as author. The reach came slowly in its own country. The return has not slowed. The Pet Sounds Sessions opened the multitracks in 1997, the isolated parts became a study of their own, and Wilson played the album whole on tours decades after he made it. What it yields on return is formal more than semantic: the parts the mono fuses, not new meanings in the words.
Movement V
Side two is the couple’s doubt. Sloop John B, a sea song of a wrecked voyage and the one track from another session, wants to go home; God Only Knows admits that love may end; I Know There’s an Answer, Here Today and I Just Wasn’t Made for These Times press the doubt further; the title instrumental stands aside. Then Caroline, No, an elegy at walking pace, grieves a girl who has changed and a love that has changed with her. After it a train passes and dogs bark. A departure, and the animal world the title names: the garden left.
That close makes audible the pattern the whole sequence carries. Innocence and experience: the record runs from the wish to be older in its first song to the mourning of youth lost in its last, and passes through the fall it fears. The particulars stay particular, a couple, a boy who wants to go away, a girl with her hair cut short, and Sloop John B’s wreck is the old figure of the voyage that cannot get home. But no figure bears the pattern. The lovers have no names but Caroline’s, and the archetype is a passage the songs make together rather than a structure each of them carries.
Sixty years on the mono master survives as the reference for every reissue, God Only Knows and Wouldn’t It Be Nice are in daily use by people who do not know the album, and nothing on it is fixed to 1966 but the timbre of its studios. What it holds is one adolescent interior, with the couple and time held fully and the sacred and the natural order glimpsed; labour, the state, history and technology are absent, and the family is only a future wished for. That is the scale of a single life at a single threshold. Within it the law holds from the first wish to the last song, and the record ends with something leaving.
Act III · The Twelve
Thirteen tracks in about thirty-six minutes, and no song outstays its idea by length. The frame is compelled: Wouldn’t It Be Nice must open, the wish for adulthood the record will spend, and Caroline, No must close, the mourning of the innocence that wish was spending. God Only Knows, Here Today and I Just Wasn’t Made for These Times are required by the passage from devotion to doubt, and Let’s Go Away for Awhile gives once, without words, the escape the songs ask for. The test bites only at the margins. Sloop John B was recorded before the album was conceived, though its wish to go home is not foreign here; the title instrumental restates the sixth track more slightly; That’s Not Me is soft.
Score: 8.5 / 10
The disclosure can be stated, and it holds: love at the threshold of adulthood is entered with the knowledge of its own ending, and tenderness is shadowed by unworthiness. That is a meaning, not a mood. God Only Knows opens a devotional song on a contingency and the devotion survives it; You Still Believe in Me sets gratitude and self-reproach in one breath; Here Today warns that love’s present tense is its only one; Caroline, No grieves a change in a girl that is also a change in the one who loved her. The sound discloses as fully as the words: the harmony that will not settle is the doubt. What holds the axis below the top is the condition’s reach, one sensibility’s and not a society’s.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Height and frequency are both high, and the elevation is warm. God Only Knows is the summit: French horn, sleigh bells and harpsichord under a single voice, then a closing round of voices entering one on another. Wouldn’t It Be Nice opens on a harp-like guitar figure and lifts at once. You Still Believe in Me climbs in its multitracked vocal over a plucked piano. Don’t Talk rises by withholding, strings swelling where words stop. Let’s Go Away for Awhile is transport without a voice. I Just Wasn’t Made for These Times rises over the Electro-Theremin, and Caroline, No ends in a hush that is itself elevation. That’s Not Me, Sloop John B and the title instrumental stay level, and terror is absent.
Score: 9.1 / 10
Myth is evoked often, and one pattern is built across the whole sequence: innocence and experience. The record runs from the wish to be older in its first track to the mourning of youth lost in its last, so that the order of the songs passes through the fall the songs fear. The close makes the frame audible. After Caroline, No a train passes and dogs bark, a departure and the animal world the title names: the garden left. The particulars stay particular: a teenage couple, a girl who has changed. What holds the axis below the gate is that no figure bears it: the lovers have no names but Caroline’s, and the archetype is a passage the songs make together, not a structure each carries.
Score: 8.4 / 10
The inheritance is the band’s own: surf, cars and the beach, harmony pop sold to teenagers, and Phil Spector’s Wall of Sound, which Wilson revered. The turn is large. The leader of a hit band stops touring and builds, with session players, a record of introspection with no surf and no cars, scored for harpsichord, French horn, Electro-Theremin and strings among much else, on harmonies that move by inversions and avoid the root. The stake was the formula itself: the sound and subjects that had made the band were set aside while they still sold, and the band’s voices were laid over tracks cut without them. What holds it below the top is the path: Spector’s production was proven, the Beatles had made the album a whole, and the band’s records of 1965 had begun the turn.
Score: 9.2 / 10
Change the form and much of what the record knows goes, because the doubt is in the harmony and the arrangement. God Only Knows sits on a key it seldom states, with the bass under inversions, so devotion never stands on firm ground: on a plainer setting it would be a love song. Let’s Go Away for Awhile is an escape that cannot be spoken. The mono mix fuses instruments into new timbres, so the whole is one voice. The sequence is counted here, once: side one in the couple’s present, side two in its doubt, closing on a train leaving. Held short of the top by Sloop John B, a container from another session, and by two songs the form serves without enacting.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Sixty years supply evidence, and the return has deepened rather than settled. The Pet Sounds Sessions (1997) opened the multitracks, and the isolated backing and vocal tracks became a field of study in themselves, each hearing showing layers the mono fuses. A literature has grown around the making and around Wilson’s harmony, and Wilson performed the album whole on tours decades later. The yield is in the record too: the fused timbres do not resolve into their parts by ear, and the harmonic motion of God Only Knows still repays analysis on every return. That formal depth carries the figure. The semantic return is thinner: the words are plain, and what the songs mean on the tenth hearing is close to what they meant on the first.
Score: 9.1 / 10
The contest is with the pop single and with the band’s own formula: the teenage pop record is answered with a whole album of adult doubt in orchestral dress. The intrinsic force is high. The record showed that the pop album could be a unified emotional statement, that a producer could use the studio and hired players as a composer uses an orchestra, and that pop harmony could carry ambiguity; Spector and the Beatles had each shown part of this, and this record joined them. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: it founded the line of chamber and orchestral pop that runs through the decades since, and set the measure of the producer as author in popular music, though its reach came slowly in its own country.
Score: 9.1 / 10
Survival is weighed over sixty years. The form is whole: the mono master survives and has been the reference for every reissue. Presence is continuous and wide. God Only Knows and Wouldn’t It Be Nice are in daily use in broadcast, film and ceremony, sung by people who do not know the album, and the album has held its place at the head of critics’ lists for decades. The fabric is sound: no topical surface, no named event, nothing fixed to 1966 but the timbre of its studios, aged into period colour. Two charges stand: presence began narrow in its own country, and the album is heard less widely than its two songs. It stands level with Revolver and Vertigo, a tenth below Tokyo Story, two below the Parthenon.
Score: 9.0 / 10
Command of the recorded medium is load-bearing on nearly every track. Wilson writes the arrangements, directs the session players section by section, cuts the backing in several studios and builds the vocals in stacked layers, so that the band’s harmonies are arranged as one more instrument. Doubled instruments make timbres no single instrument has: bass and guitar, organ and accordion. Bass lines move as counter-melodies. The mono mix places everything in one image and keeps the lead voice clear inside it. The round that closes God Only Knows is an arranger’s feat. The faults are real and small: Sloop John B’s arrangement belongs to an earlier, plainer session, the title instrumental is thin as a composition, and a few lead vocals are slight beside the harmonies.
Score: 9.2 / 10
One law governs the record: longing that knows its object will be lost, voiced through tender, layered sound. The two most distant elements obey it. Sloop John B, a sea song of a wrecked and rowdy voyage, and Caroline, No, an elegy at walking pace, both end on wanting to be elsewhere, home or before; the shanty’s surface strains the law and does not break it. Wouldn’t It Be Nice, the brightest song, is still a wish for what is not yet; I Just Wasn’t Made for These Times, the strangest, turns the same longing on the self; the instrumentals obey it without words. The range runs from shanty to elegy. What holds the axis below the top is its temperature: no anger, no terror, no irony, and narrowness is not coherence.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Judged on what the record holds, with no discount for the album form. Consciousness is held fully: one adolescent interior across thirteen tracks. The couple is held through courtship, the wish to marry, devotion, doubt and loss. Time and age are the record’s subject: the passage from youth, the girl changed. The sacred is evoked, in God Only Knows and I Know There’s an Answer, more as word than as order, and the natural order enters only at the close, as animals and a train. Society appears only as the times the self was not made for. Labour, the state, history and technology are absent, and the family is a future wished for. Three orders held and two glimpsed, joined by one consciousness: that count holds the figure lowest.
Score: 7.0 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.8 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Swerve and The Made at 9.2, then The Sublime, The Bottomless Well and Pressure on Tradition at 9.1. A band’s formula left for a record of adult doubt scored for an orchestra of the studio, a making load-bearing on nearly every track, warm elevation on eight or nine of thirteen, layers that still yield sixty years on, and a line of chamber and orchestral pop that runs from it. Below them, The Imperishable at 9.0: the mono master whole and two of its songs in daily use.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 7.0: one adolescent interior, the couple and time held, the sacred and the natural order glimpsed, and labour, the state, history and technology absent. Below the rest, The Archetypal Deep at 8.4: innocence and experience are built as a frame across the sequence, closed by the train and the dogs, and borne by no figure. Then The Inevitable at 8.5, where Sloop John B and the title instrumental could go with small loss.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.5 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 8.8, The Made at 9.2, The Inner Law at 8.8, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet: The Swerve at 9.2, Pressure on Tradition at 9.1, The Imperishable at 9.0 and The Unconcealment at 8.8 clear the bar of 8.5, but The Archetypal Deep at 8.4 falls short. The Universal Minimum is met: no axis but The Encompassed falls below 8.4, against 7.5, and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.0.
Basis · the complete album as released by Capitol on 16 May 1966, thirteen tracks in sequence on two sides, about thirty-six minutes, in the original mono mix, the one Brian Wilson made and the only one he supervised for the release; judged from knowledge of the recording, its documented making and its reception. No recording or lyric sheet was in hand. The album is the unit; the stereo mix first made for The Pet Sounds Sessions (1997), later stereo and remix editions and Wilson’s later performances of the album are used only as evidence. Songs are cited by title, and no lyric is quoted. Track lengths are given only roughly. Facts that could not be verified, among them the chart positions, the record’s sales at home, the mixes issued in 1966, the timing of a hits compilation, the band’s reception of the songs, the speed of the closing song’s master, whose dogs bark at the close and the published studies of the record, are not given.