Last month saw the release of Brian Wilson's SMiLE after 37 years of conjecture, vapor, and bootlegs by the bucketload with semiofficial track sequences, dream track sequences, and Kinko'd cover art. The wait was over, the verdict nearly unanimous: the pundits exhaled a collective sigh of relief (some had eaten garlic, forcing me to dry-clean my sports jacket multiple times) that 1.) It was finally with us as one solid document for good; and 2.) The historical hype was warranted. 'Tis a heart-filling masterpiece. I described it to friends the successful mimicry of fluid human thought, easily trumping the mathematically psychedelic Sgt. Pepper, where inherent weirdness could not conceal a calculated pop form and careful melodic structure. Had SMiLE seen shelves in 1967, The Beatles would've been intimidated to even greater creative heights, and who knows where we'd be today. Hell, maybe the guys in Creed would've become a great bowling team instead of a middling laughingstock.
Naturally, after spinning my copy of SMiLE until I'd committed every harmonic whirl to memory, I visited Amoeba Records in Hollywood on a quest for my Beach Boys roots, to find the album that introduced me to the Brothers 'N' Others when I was a very small, impressionable child. I reserve Amoeba trips for special occasions, and this definitely qualified as special, because I wasn't on the hunt for anything as ordinary as All Summer Long or Shut Down, Vol. 1, which I could've easily bought at the Borders just down the street. Nay, my search was of a more arduous nature.
I wanted the Holland album. Not an easy task. Most Beach Boys recordings are readily available; Holland seems to be the idiot stepchild that enjoys a brief reprieve with each introduction of new technology. When their Capitol catalogue was reissued in the early 1990s, the focus was on the band's '60s recordings, which is quite understandable. It wasn't until the latter half of the last decade that the Beach Boys' 1970s oeuvre started earning a little respect, thanks in part to the essential compilation The Brother Years (1999), which brought forgotten-by-all-but-the-most-diehard gems like "Until I Die" and "Feel Flows" (props to Cameron Crowe for using the latter in Almost Famous) back to public awareness and established a new market for the group's less-remembered releases (Sunflower, Surf's Up, Beach Boys Love You) with the reliable two-albums-per-disc model (the two-fer) that they used earlier in the decade. Holland was packaged with Carl And The Passions - So Tough, and as far as I know, it's the rarest of the latter-day reissues -- rare in the sense that the likelihood of making contact with it on-site, at a record store, in person, is pretty slim. Even after all these years, folks aren't exactly clamoring for either record.
But Holland's always held a special place in my heart. I was born in 1972, in the midst of the group's not-so productive period. The lineup was in constant disarray (Bruce Johnston and Larry Marks were gone by this point, and Brian Wilson was famously a shell of his former self, though he popped in now and then; there's a photo on Holland of a manic, bearded Brian working a production console), and Carl Wilson had recently tapped the services of two younger musicians, South African bandleaders Blondie Chaplin and Ricky Fataar. The duo appeared on the Boys' So Tough and stuck around for Holland, which was recorded both in its namesake country and back home in Los Angeles. A miserable time was had by all, and it shows in the music, which is joyless and paranoid, a grand experiment in recording under the influence of creative fatigue. It's cabin fever on wax, circa 1973.
By this time, a lot of people had given up on The Beach Boys. My dad, however, was an ardent fan and stuck with them like a lovestruck sweetheart waiting for her sugar-daddy's release from the big house, and the budding of my conscious memories just happens to coincide with one of Pop's tours of this particular LP, auspicious ear candy for any toddler who isn't old enough to have a history with himself, let alone a rock band, and who isn't cognizant yet of the Beach Boys' older, sunnier fare, like "California Girls" or "Be True To Your School." Sunny doesn't apply to an album like Holland, where every groove is coated in gloom and all the girls seem to be faraway spectres or Mother Nature.
I recently asked my dad what possessed him to buy this record in the first place, much less subject a toddler to its schizophrenic boogedy-boogedy. "I've always liked The Beach Boys, I grew up with The Beach Boys," he told me. "If I remember correctly, Holland was one of the first albums Brian was really involved with again, and I was looking forward to that. Literally every Beach Boys album out at that time was Greatest Hits, Volume this, Greatest Hits, Volume that -- how many copies of 'Surfin' U.S.A.' can you have? It was just something new and exciting to me, something other than girls, cars, and waves. It's one of the reasons I still like Neil Young: that need to go in different directions. I'm sure Holland drove a lot of people crazy, but I loved it. It was a real departure."
I can dig my dad's appreciation for the different, because I inherited that quality from him. I can imagine him dropping the needle for the first time and being shocked, then amazed. He was experiencing it in the moment -- perhaps this was the beginning of a brave, new trail. All he had to compare these strange sounds to was the band's then-existing canon; he could not have had the foresight to visit Holland from an historical perspective, after the band's career was over. I, on the other hand, am torn between two emotions: As an objective listener with The Beach Boys' entire discography at my disposal, I can't recommend this record. On the other hand, I have a sentimental attachment to it. Holland has always been part of my life.
Dad was particularly fond of Side Two, because it began with Carl Wilson's young son, Justyn, greeting listeners with a nasally "Hi!" before the band launched into "The Trader." Dad worked like crazy to convince me there was a little boy trapped in the record and he was talking to me. It was the side with "Trader," with its memorable rolling melody that I used as a guideline for a reflective poem I wrote at 15 (I remember the last two stanzas: "Fast asleep when Saturday night was live/back in 1975"), and "Funky Pretty," a muddled drone that has to be rescued in the end by an interim Beach Boy, Blondie Chaplin, who flexes his lead pipes on the album opener, "Sail On, Sailor," thus helming what's considered a Beach Boys classic today, as a fleeting member of said group. Of everyone associated with the album, he's the only living, breathing force; everyone else contributes the stench of near-death, the final rattle-wheeze.
Not much to say about the rest of Holland. There's a song about steamboats that makes steamboats sound like the primary means of transportation in the kinds of nightmares that end with ogres slurping the guts out of dead children. You've got Mike Love and Al Jardine trading vocals on the most pretentious epic eco-crap ("California Saga") to spit out of con artist Jake Rieley's pen like wasted sperm, their voices blending anonymously with each other so that neither can be specifically blamed for uttering "scorched meat" and "beaks of eagles." Al pines for "Big Sur," but his Big Sur must exist in an alternate universe of human-bone-constructed vistas where it rains blood and shit. Dennis Wilson is usually a criminally underrated vocal highlight of any Beach Boys album, but here he's just criminal. Holland's obligatory reissue liner notes wonder why his turn on "Only With You" isn't a staple at weddings. Troll weddings, perhaps, but human weddings aren't supposed to be dull and scary. Put this sucker on and you'll be looking over your shoulder for maddened shotgun-toting groomsmen -- whose reception toasts would include proclamations of their tireless devotion to your inevitable doom -- for the rest of your life. (Upon its original release there was an additional, smaller record, Mt. Vernon And Fairway, which my dad had wisely banished to a Lucky Lager box full of 45s. It's back for the CD reissue -- and that's all I want to say about it).
Holland is spooky, Holland is hollow, full of noises you'd hear while transitioning from mortal coil to The Great Beyond. It's one of the few records that's actually improved by aging vinyl, as it gets denser and denser and duller and thicker and sloppier and heavier. The hisses and crackles literally become official bandmembers themselves, enhancing the harmonies and instrumental interplay. It sounds like old, tired blood whooshing down an abandoned gas-station toilet, broadcast from the distant past. Someone should develop a digital technology specific to this release, where it deteriorates with each subsequent play, until it becomes snakes and flames raging across your living room, then engulfing your neighborhood.
God, I love it. Buy it today.
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