* As Townes Van Zandt said, quoted adorably by Emmylou Harris on her 2000 Baden-Baden live album, there are only two kinds of songs, blues and Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah.
One of those horrible days, I happened to hear the Beach Boys “Do It Again” with new ears. To the bottomed-out me, the song’s reflection on bygone good times took on a different tone than I’d heard in it before. In fact, it sounded like an expression of unhealthy longing. I wrote several hundred words back then, making my case for “Do It Again” being the saddest song in the entire Beach Boys catalog; like everything I wrote then, I deleted it.
Those wretched days are rapidly dwindling away in the rear view, so I was surprised to find, on hearing “Do It Again” this summer, it still sounds as heart-wrenching as it did then.
The Beach Boys are hardly known for their laments, so their portfolio of sad songs is fairly slim. A few of them, though, do stand out for their air of regret and sorrow, or at least, melancholy.
“The Warmth of the Sun” jumps toward the top of the list of mournful Brian Wilson songs, both for the song itself and the circumstances surrounding its writing. It was long thought—possibly encouraged by the song’s co-writer, Mike Love—the song was written as a response to the JFK assassination, and as such, it is one of the most eloquent expressions of sorrow in modern pop music.
Except the story has subsequently been revised to reflect that “Warmth of the Sun” was written shortly before JFK’s death, about a guy losing “the love of [his] life” who didn’t “feel the same way.” And is no less eloquent as a song of lost love, so no matter when, or why it was written. The narrator’s despair is so deep, he questions the point of seeing another day dawn, with her gone, and tries to deceive himself into thinking he’s still in the arms of the lover he’s lost. His sole consolation is still having the warmth of the sun that stays with him even after it’s set.
Gorgeous and heart-rending as it is, “Warmth of the Sun” is supposed to be a sad song; that was the intent. As often as I’ve maligned Mike Love for his later compositions (“Brian’s Back,” “Looking Back with Love,” “Teach Me Tonight” … need I continue?), he penned some cool lyrics before Brian moved beyond Mike’s comfort zone. And really, if Love wrote the lyrics to “Warmth…,” he was able to stretch his comfort zone considerably beyond the subjects of surf, car, and girls. The lyrics to the 1966-released version of “Good Vibrations,” not too bad, either.
Considerably less impressive are the lyrics to another contender in the saddest Beach Boys song sweepstakes, “Wendy,” one that works in spite of the words being sung. I’ve argued elsewhere that, “Our Favorite Recording Sessions” excluded, All Summer Long is both one of the strongest entries in the BB’s catalog and a highly effective—if unintentional—concept album. Significantly, the most effective thoughtful lyrics on the album, those to “Hushabye” and “We’ll Run Away,” were provided by Doc Pomus and Gary Usher, respectively.
The loser singing “Wendy” simply could not imagine why she would ever “make it with another guy,” some chump whose “future looks awful dim”—in comparison to the jilted fellow, of course. It’s enough to make a guy cry, and how could she do this to him?! Self-centered, clueless males dominated pop culture in 1964 (and before, and since), so where is the tragedy when one gets dumped? “Wendy” is effectively dour, and gorgeous, just nothing to evoke much compassion.
“Caroline, No” and the album it’s part of (Pet Sounds) seem like a breakthrough in maturity, in melody, arrangement, and lyrics. But hints of teen lovers outgrowing each were found in the Today! album track, “When I Grow Up (To Be A Man),” where the narrator speculates about “digging the same things that turned [him] on as a kid” and whether he will love his wife for “the rest of [my] life.” Now “Caroline” has cut her long hair and has become someone the narrator doesn’t know; she’s moved on, just as the singer must when he becomes a man.
Just two years removed from the kicks of ridin’ Hondas in the hills, with the adult realities of “When I Grow Up” as prelude, “Caroline, No” is about the saddest of inevitabilities, growing older, and the potential of growing apart. Realistically, the “girl he used to know” has become a woman he doesn’t recognize, before he grew into a man capable of a mature relationship, something deeper than spilling Coke all over her blouse.
It is sad to “watch a good thing die,” and the song is fittingly melancholy (and gorgeous). But it’s a breakup song, albeit a very sophisticated one, and we should expect those to be sad.
“Do It Again,” though, is something else.
The circumstances that led to Mike Love writing the lyrics to “Do It Again” vary with Love’s various recounting. In a 1992 Goldmine magazine interview, Love told the story this way: “I went surfing with my old high school buddy Bill Jackson in a place called Tressles in southern California. It was a beautiful day, the waves were perfect. I just wrote that as sort of a diary of the day’s events. It took no more than ten minutes to write.”
Ten years later, in January 2012, he was quoted in Goldmine magazine saying:
“I remember going to Brian’s house and getting him out of bed, and walking down on the beach with him,” Love recalls. “We came back and wrote ‘Do It Again’ in about 10 to 15 minutes. He was staying in his bed most of the time. The studio was put in his house, because he was very reclusive at that point in time. He was better off being around the house than wandering around Hollywood, I guess.”
[Why he had to get in the dig at Brian, on the verge of their 50th anniversary tour and new album release, is as unfathomable to me as Mike’s desecration of the Beach Boys reputation and catalog. Mr. Love is an enigma, wrapped in a riddle, embroiled in a lawsuit, and I presently have neither the time to explore my feelings about the guy’s role in the Beach Boys story nor the resources to defend myself from him in court. Another time, perhaps.]
The one constant in these accounts is that Mike put down the words very quickly. This was visceral, spontaneous writing, a strong, instantaneous response to an experience. In the first account, he was trying to capture a perfect day in his “diary”; in the second, he drug a reclusive Brian out of bed for an apparently unwilling walk on the beach, for some reason Love does not reveal. That walk with Brian sounds like anything but “beautiful” or “perfect.” But both accounts were given at some considerable remove from the experience.*
* If either of Love’s accounts is accurate, I think it’s got to be the one about going to Tressles with his old high school buddy. The idea that his “talk with old friends” would inspire the nostalgia of “Do It Again” makes more sense than his forcibly dragging Brian down to the beach having done so.
In 1968, when the experience was fresh, Love wrote lyrics about the great times they used to have, not about any bang-up times they were then. He doesn’t talk about that perfect day he’s just had in 1968, but how he’d like to relive good times gone by.
A mere four years after the celebratory All Summer Long, here are the Beach Boys singing wistfully about fun in the sun as if it’s a distant memory. “The beach was the place to go,” but now they have to go to the studio, on the road, to meetings, even home to the wife and kids (by ’68, Mike was on his second marriage and had at least two ankle-biters running around his little pad). The “beautiful coastline” is something they see out the tour bus window. There were all those “girls [they] knew,” whose “hair was long and blond;” now they go home to their Carolines, who wear their hair in more practical, more adult, less ostentatious lengths.
The Beach Boys in 1964, top, and four (apparently) tough years later.
They’re singing about things that were integral to their lives, not at all long ago, but now the beach and the surfer girls are as lost to them as they were unattainable to most of us. Even the song’s chugging tempo and muted arrangement (appealing as they are) sound enervated and sluggish compared to “Surfin’ USA,” “I Get Around,” “Fun Fun Fun”—any of the signature, early songs that glorified the SoCal beach lifestyle they’re now missing in “Do It Again.”
Then there’s the bridge.
The chugging guitar drops out, the arrangement dissolves into a muted, Today! styled understatements, and the melody and lush backup vocals harken back to the sound of “Girls On the Beach.” Fittingly, as the bridge is the beach men in flashback mode, evoking the “lonely sea” of their earlier song about loss, another sad one, and how good even the desolate ocean looks if you’re with a girl. To put a fine point on just how inaccessible the moonlit beach is to them now, the bridge ends with them realizing that it’s been so long since those days, as if it may as well have happened to someone else. (At least that’s how I, landlocked and jealous of what I supposed was their sun-drenched SoCal surf lifestyle, always heard it.)
By the end of “Do It Again,” anyone who thinks these guys are going to “get together” with all their old friends hasn’t been listening to the fatigue and resignation permeating the song. Much as I love this song (which is a lot), if the dour, bearded Mike Love of the 1968 photo showed up at Tressles, far from welcoming him, the beach bunnies and surfer boys would have him hauled in for mopery.
As I mentioned a few hundred words ago, I came to this conclusion about “Do It Again” before I knew about, much less heard the remake, recorded in 2011 by the reconstituted Beach Boys, and released in spring, 2012, only on the shameless cash-grab special 50th anniversary edition “zinePak” disc, which pairs this exclusive with a TEN SONG greatest hits collection. I’ve taken the band to task for pairing DIA2012—the first release by the reformed band—with the chintzy, e.p.-length hits set, and for presenting it as a career-spanning retrospective. Ah, well, exploitative Beach Boys releases are hardly “stop the presses” stuff.
I suppose “Do It Again” proved irresistibly apropos to a band pulling together for the unlikeliest of reunions after decades apart. They certainly don’t bring anything new to it in the 21st century (other than a few extra seconds of guitar vamping at the beginning and a sloppy, concert-style rave up ending). Despite the allegations of digital enhancement (AutoTune) that I haven’t discerned, the new DIA is noteworthy as evidence that the senior citizens still have their voices and gift for vocal harmony. And while I was skeptical that the record was a true indication, the live, unplugged set on the Rolling Stone magazine site removed any doubt that they can still, by god, sing.
What’s most interesting to me about the “Do It Again” remake is how much more poignant it makes the original sound to me. Not because of any perception of advanced age in their voices; they sound better than they have any right to do. No, what’s heartbreaking to me is that the sentimental longing of DIA, which is perfectly appropriate at a 40-plus-year remove from the original, was first expressed by the some guys in their 20s, just five years after the irrepressible “Surfin’ USA.” That says more to me about the experience of being a Beach Boy than any tell-all book ever could.
What about “’Til I Die,” my choice for Brian Wilson’s zenith as a songwriter? It’s a recognition of one’s mortality and insignificance, that we all have very little choice in the direction of our lives, that we exert about as much influence on our world as a cork does on an ocean. Sucks for us, but this one’s more about facing facts than about sorrow.
“Ballad of Old Betsy”? No, really! It’s a sad song! And not only for the personification of a possession.
And although I haven’t listened much to the new Beach Boys album (and never thought I’d type those words again unless in reference to yet another greatest-best-smash hits collection), “Summer’s Gone” …
There are definitely other gray places amid the sun baked beaches and perfect waves of the Beach Boys songbook. “Do It Again,” though, is unique in its expression of losing an entire way of living, so quickly and so irrevocably. Sure, it’s possible I’m reading far more into this than is there. To me, however, “Do It Again” is as tragic as Dennis Wilson, too old and in too-poor condition, diving into the ocean after mementos of his lost lifestyle.
I hope you are never as low as I was in 2011. If you are, give this song a listen and see if it doesn’t break your heart, even more than it already is.
