One of the more disheartening pieces of recent music news was the announcement that the Beach Boys would be touring the UK this summer, as a support act to Status Quo. The Beach Boys now boast only one original member, singer Mike Love; what was once America's Favourite Band today consists of a bald man in his 60s bellowing sun-and-surfing oldies, surrounded by hired hands. A depressing sight, but after years of lawsuits and bizarre public arguments, it seems Mike Love is no longer on speaking terms either with the other surviving Beach Boys, Al Jardine and Brian Wilson, or with the concept of dignity.
As if to highlight the reduced circumstances of the current line-up, EMI has remastered and reissued the Beach Boys' 1960s back catalogue: 16 albums on eight CDs, including the dispensable Beach Boys Concert/Live in London ( ** ) and the contract-filling Beach Boys Party!/Stack O' Tracks ( * ). Unlike the bullish debuts of their British rivals the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, Surfin' Safari/Surfin' USA ( ** ) both sound tentative and awkward, a collection of songs knocked together to cash in on a teenage fad. By the time of Surfer Girl/Shut Down Volume 2 ( *** ) and Little Deuce Coupe/All Summer Long ( *** ), songwriter and producer Brian Wilson - surely the fastest learner in rock history - was already capable of crafting such sublime pop moments as Don't Worry Baby or I Get Around, but the albums still suffer from the indecent haste with which they were created. In the early 1960s, the Beach Boys were averaging an album every four months, and it shows. The CDs are padded out with teeth-gritting comedy skits, while Surfer Girl suffers from a lyrical monomania that tests the patience (Surfer Moon, Rocking Surfer, Surfers Rule, South Bay Surfer). Far better is the coupling of Beach Boys Today!/Summer (Days and Summer Nights!) ( ***** ), the one essential CD here, a startlingly mature collection of exquisitely arranged, beautifully sung tracks, as inspired as any music produced in the mid-1960s.
The remainder of the CDs hail from the era following the Beach Boys' artistic high-water mark Pet Sounds, and Wilson's drug-induced breakdown during the making of the doomed psychedelic epic Smile. Smiley Smile/Wild Honey ( *** ) and Friends/20-20 ( *** ) are disjointed and uneven: Wilson's genius only flickered intermittently - on Friends's lovely Time to Get Alone or Smiley Smile's chilling, acid-damaged Wind Chimes - as he struggled with his ruined psyche.
Brian Wilson wasn't the only Hollywood resident who spent 1967 going slowly insane while trying to create a psychedelic masterpiece. Up in Laurel Canyon, the already peculiar Arthur Lee was becoming more peculiar by the day, ingesting hopeless quantities of drugs and working on his band Love's third album, the remarkable Forever Changes (Warners/Rhino, ***** ). Now remastered, Forever Changes sounds both more gorgeous and more unsettling than ever. Few records so awash with strings and Mariachi trumpets sound this sinister, but then few records offer such a heady cocktail of impeccable pop songwriting, lavish orchestration and sweetly crooned lyrics about isolation and mental illness. It's a far cry from the buttercup-sandwich whimsy of most psychedelia: Wonder People, one of six outtakes added to the CD, was dropped from Forever Changes for sounding carefree. After the album flopped, it was all downhill for Love: the band broke up, two members were reduced to robbing doughnut stands to finance their addictions, and Arthur Lee - a zealous consumer of LSD - survived an overdose, briefly changed his name to Arthur Ex-Lax and currently resides in prison.
Another drawback of becoming a musical acid casualty is that future generations mistake your distress for charmingly dotty creativity and spend their own careers aping you. Take English singer-songwriter Robyn Hitchcock, who has spent the past 25 years as a kind of ersatz Syd Barrett, offering jangly psychedelia, deadpan vocals and look-at-me-I'm-nutty lyrics without the anguish or terror of the Pink Floyd founder's oeuvre. Largely ignored at home, Hitchcock has influential American fans: REM are sometime collaborators, Jonathan Demme made a film about him. Accordingly, the US label Matador has seen fit to add a boggling 26 extra tracks to Underwater Moonlight ( *** ), a 1980 album by Hitchcock's first band, the Soft Boys. Now a double CD, it's maddeningly inconsistent: great when it escapes its influences and delivers songs gleaming with harmonies and a pastoral eccentricity all of their own, irritating when it piles on the Monty Python rhymes and undergrad smuggery.
Drug-influenced rock of a less contrived and more disturbing nature is to be found on Royal Trux (Domino, * ), the eponymous 1988 debut of now-split alt-blues couple Jennifer Herrema and Neil Hagerty. During the album sessions, the duo's celebrated Keith Richard obsession stretched to cultivating ruinous - and audible - heroin habits: Royal Trux sounds exactly like two hopeless junkies in a cheap studio making up a horrid squall of off-key guitars, out-of-time drums, and tuneless moaning in lieu of vocals as they go along. More endurance test than album, it captures the desolation of acute smack addiction perfectly and is therefore no fun whatsoever.
Royal Trux is one of several albums from the American art-rock underground being reissued by UK label Domino. No less dolorous, but considerably more enjoyable, is Smog's 1992 mini-album Burning Kingdom ( **** ), which pits a gothic, Velvet Underground-derived guitar-and-viola grind against songwriter Bill Callahan's beguilingly mordant sense of humour. "Mother's smoking pot in bathroom," he gloomily observes on My Family, "I can hear her butt squeaking on the tub." A more mischievous wit is evident on Chicago post-rock pioneer Jim O'Rourke's Bad Timing ( *** ). A collection of lengthy acoustic guitar and piano instrumentals, Bad Timing is rescued from ponderous indulgence by self-deprecating musical flourishes, best sampled on the closing track, which meanders quietly for several minutes before its contemplative mood is disturbed by the incongruous arrival of a jaunty jazz combo.
With the compilation of early singles that comprises Pavement's Westing by Musket and Sextant ( ** ) proving only that Pavement became a lot more enjoyable when they eased up on the arty posturing and started writing songs instead, the true jewel of Domino's reissue project is There Is No One What Will Take Care of You ( ***** ), the first album by the Palace Brothers. These days, the Palace Brothers' leader Will Oldham goes under the name Bonnie Prince Billy and has his songs covered by Johnny Cash, fitting recognition for his role in rehabilitating country and western as a subversive musical force. Heartbreakingly stark and driven by Oldham's raw, cracked voice, the songs on There Is No One What Will Take Care of You strip away decades of Nashville gloss to reveal an unexpected vulnerability and tenderness. Desperate sadness has rarely sounded so wonderful.
