The Beach Boys—Sunflower (1970)
A lot of hits and a lot of misses.
Welcome back to RETROPOL. Please ignore any cobwebs that may have accumulated during my sabbatical. This week we’re taking on Sunflower, one The Beach Boys’ biggest commercial failures that nevertheless contains some hidden gems in their discography.
By 1970, The Beach Boys were in dire straits (fat, nasty and broke, one might say). As the political situation in the U.S. worsened in the late 60s, audiences were less interested in the shiny, optimistic Americana that the band had been selling for the better part of a decade. After Brian Wilson’s deteriorating mental health caused the much-hyped Smile album to be scrapped in 1967, The Beach Boys limped along until their contract with Capitol Records expired in 1969 in the midst of a legal battle over unpaid royalties. Capitol immediately took the band’s catalog out of print, cutting off any further royalty payments, and a Thanksgiving tour meant to serve as a financial stopgap ended up selling poorly, resulting in many dates being cancelled. Framing all this was the arrest of Charles Manson for the Tate-LaBianca murders, which cast the band in a negative light as Brian Wilson had worked with Manson on his music career, even recording a song he wrote as a Beach Boys B-side.
Eventually, though, The Beach Boys found a buyer for their next record in Warner Brothers, who released Sunflower in August 1970 on Reprise. Reprise was so thrilled to have such a huge legacy act on their label that they printed more copies of Sunflower than they had for any pervious album. Despite this, sales were middling, and the album peaked at 151 on the Billboard 200, the band’s worst performance to that point. Only one of the four singles from the album charted. Nonetheless, the contact with Warner Brothers was inked, and the band survived long enough to achieve a stronger commercial performance with follow-up Surf’s Up (1971). Sunflower was the last album with Brian Wilson’s full participation as his mental health continued to worsen throughout the 70s.
After such a tumultuous few years, one might have expected the band to take a darker turn and cash in on some of the themes their peers were incorporating into their music. In the end, though, any attempts at a rougher sound on Sunflower fall flat. The album succeeds most where it highlights Brian Wilson’s talent for complex and innovative arrangements, serving as a kind of culmination of the era defining sound he pioneered. Interspersed with these triumphs are a handful of hokey duds that never should have seen the light of day.
Side One of the album is the weaker half. “Got to Know the Woman” is one of a handful of tracks on this album where the band takes on an unconvincing rock-n-roll persona. With a vocal affectation á la Paul McCartney on “Lady Madonna” and tinny, mediocre piano playing, one’s mind wanders to the lyrics, where it finds a lustful, bump-and-grind fantasy that fails so completely at being sexy that it reminds me of a teenager’s first attempt at writing a rock song. “It’s About Time” is even more juvenile, the kind of I’m-the-coolest-singer-and-I’m-gonna-make-it-big pablum that you could find in my 6th-grade notebooks when I was trying to start a band with my neighbors. Opener “Slip On Through” is the best of the rock tracks with a vibrating synth line that sparks some interest, but again a certain falseness pervades.
“Add Some Music” is one of the goofiest songs, with the lyrics reading like a dreary Mad Men pitch selling the very concept of music: “Your doctor knows it keeps you calm / your preacher adds it to his psalms / so add some music to your day” (Were doctors prescribing records in lieu of pharmaceuticals back then?) Perhaps forged in the shadow of the band’s contract difficulties, it’s amusing that the record industry ever had to justify itself in this way.
“Deirdre” (unfortunately pronounced “deer-dree”) is the best of the first half. The song is peak muzak, replete with shimmery woodwind riffs and an easy swing rhythm. It’s impossible not to imagine this as a sitcom intro, but by the same token, it’s insanely catchy. The Beach Boys are not built to make challenging or avant-garde music; one appreciates the craft even if the framing is a bit cheez-wiz. When I say peak muzak, I mean it. The hallmark Beach Boys harmonies shine bright here, helped by a vocal bass that breaks through the sweetness a bit.
On Side Two, we get a streak of more solidly constructed tracks that speak to the lasting influence that The Beach Boys have had on popular music. “Tears in the Morning” is a melodramatic track about a divorce that makes big emotional plays and nails every one of them. The Beach Boys have never been masters of subtlety, but here the writing (with lines like “a cancelled future, well it’s hard on me / hope you love the baby I’m never gonna see”) is matched by the orchestration, which builds and descends several times over the course of several verses before exploding at the end in a sea of those sunny California harmonies, this time repurposed for a darker effect. The track ends with a minute-long outro of a ghostly piano line, fully committing to the dark subject matter and demonstrating a musical maturity that is sorely lacking elsewhere on the album.
This is followed by “All I Wanna Do", which is sometimes touted as a precursor to chillwave. I’ll admit the track has a certain relaxing TV Girl vibe with swirling electric organs and a pretty muted drum track, but ultimately it’s still a Brian Wilson joint that doesn’t push the envelope all that much. The album closes out with “At My Window”, a twinkly ode to nature that samples birdsong, and “Cool, Cool Water” which is a sonic sketchbook where the band plays around with a handful of barbershop-quartet-style harmonies and muses aimlessly on the restorative properties of H2O. This is the kind of early-70s noodling that can actually be fun to listen to, and overall the last half of the album avoids the cringe-inducing aping of the blues that drags the first half down.
The Beach Boys’ legacy is sometimes constrained by the fact that they only ever released one “serious” album, Pet Sounds, and the rest of their best work is dispersed among about a dozen albums that don’t really make sense as coherent projects. I am of the opinion, though, that Sunflower has enough of import to make it worth at least a first pass. Even among some serious missteps, more often than not I found myself in awe of these musicians who were able to perfect their sound and then build off of it in exciting ways.
Playlist 3/28/23
No real theme on this one; I’ve mostly been listening to Lana this week in the same way that I imagine Catherine of Aragon wore that hair shirt.