The Beach Boys Today!

Background

By the end of a particularly stressful 1964, the Beach Boys had released four albums in 12 months, dismissed the Wilsons' father Murry from his managerial position and recorded the advance hit singles "When I Grow Up (To Be a Man)" and "Dance, Dance, Dance". Mid-1964 also saw the divorce of Mike Love from his first wife Frances St. Martin whom he had married in 1961. During the album's recording sessions, Love told Melody Maker that he and the band wanted to look beyond surf rock, wanting to avoid living in the past or resting on the band's laurels. Brian Wilson had written his last surf song in April 1964, intending All Summer Long (released July 1964) to be the group's final statement on beach-themed music.

Wilson became physically and emotionally exhausted to a point that he suffered an anxiety attack on December 23, 1964. During the recording sessions of Today! in January 1965, he informed the band that he intended to retire from touring and focus his attention solely on creating and producing music, to which the band reluctantly agreed. Wilson expressed regret over not having done this sooner so that he could do "justice" to the band's recordings, saying "I was run down mentally and emotionally because I was running around, jumping on jets from one city to another on one-night stands, also producing, writing, arranging, singing, planning, teaching – to the point where I had no peace of mind and no chance to actually sit down and think or even rest."

Music and lyrics

Today! marked a maturation in the Beach Boys' lyric content by abandoning themes related to surfing, cars, or teenage love. Some love songs remained, but with a marked increase in depth, along with introspective tracks accompanied by adventurous and distinct arrangements. British rock critic Nick Kent explained: "What was really happening was Brian's approach to romance was becoming more and more personalized, more honest in a distinctly autobiographical way."

According to author Scott Schinder, "Today!'s suite-like structure, with the album divided into a side of fast songs and a side of ballads, presented an early manifestation of the rock album format being used to make a cohesive artistic statement – an idea that Brian would soon explore more fully." It was thus the band's first flirtation with the album-as-art form. Brian's recent introduction to marijuana, which he used as a stress reliever, greatly influenced the album's writing, as he later stated: "Pot made the music grow in my head." Musicologist Philip Lambert disagrees with the notion that "Brian wrote B-side songs before his December catharsis and A-side songs in the sunny glow of his subsequent freedom", believing that the compositions which preceded his plane episode still showed evidence of progressive ingenuity.

Side one

PopMatters notes that even though Today!'s A-side is filled with uptempo numbers, "it would be a mistake to assume that the ballads are more sophisticated. ... Wilson proves that he can be just as harmonically and structurally inventive with catchy dance songs as he can with emotional ballads." On "Good to My Baby" and "Don't Hurt My Little Sister", the journal points out "deceptive simplicity" in its music and lyricism, with the latter "capturing the conflicting and tortured feelings Wilson was dealing with through this period" that may not be heard on a first listen. The journal explains that "Don't Hurt My Little Sister" is commonly suspected to be autobiographical, with Wilson alluding to his conflicted, romantic feelings toward his sister-in-law. According to Brian's later collaborator Van Dyke Parks, Brian had a "fervent desire to reinvent himself as an individual, not as a boy." This culminated in "When I Grow Up (To Be a Man)", a song discussing his anxieties about becoming an adult. Released as an A-sided single, it was one of the first rock songs to explore the subject of impending adulthood. The next track, "Help Me, Ronda", would later be re-recorded as "Help Me, Rhonda" to deliver the Beach Boys their second number one hit in May. Its riff was taken from Buster Brown's "Fannie Mae" (1959).

Side two

"Please Let Me Wonder" was claimed to be the first song Wilson had written under the influence of marijuana. "Kiss Me, Baby" contains an expanded instrumental palette of three guitars, two basses, two pianos, two saxophones, and percussion, English horn and French horn. Thomas Ward of AllMusic called the song a product of Wilson's "dense, multi-layered confessional songs, with adult themes and exploring issues previously only developed by performers such as Bob Dylan" while biographer Jon Stebbins would refer to it as "the pinnacle of balladry ... one of the Beach Boys' most romantic and emotional songs." In the book Yeah Yeah Yeah: The Story of Modern Pop, Bob Stanley of Saint Etienne wrote of the lyricism in "In the Back of My Mind":

"[The narrator's] emotions, whatever really was in the back of his mind, seemed to come out without any filter for what was deemed cool, or appropriate, or even musically acceptable ... The same album's 'She Knows Me Too Well' opened with 'Sometimes I have a weird way of showing my love', a line that wouldn't shock in the catalogues of Nick Cave or the Jesus and Mary Chain, but was pretty unsettling in the hands of the car-crazy Californians. Brian was aiming for Johnny Mercer but coming up proto-indie."

The front cover lists nine of the album's 12 tracks, followed by "plus three great new songs written by Brian Wilson." However, of the remaining three tracks, only "In the Back of My Mind" was another original composition. "I'm So Young" is usually attributed to William H. "Prez" Tyus, Jr., and the other song, "Bull Session with the "Big Daddy"", is an informal interview with the band.

Recording and production

Begun on June 22, 1964 in between sessions for The Beach Boys' Christmas Album, "Don't Hurt My Little Sister" was the earliest song tracked for the album. August was devoted to the singles "When I Grow Up (To Be a Man)" and "She Knows Me Too Well"; followed by "I'm So Young", the outtake "All Dressed Up for School", and "Dance, Dance, Dance" in September. Only one session occurred in October for a remake of "Dance, Dance, Dance", being the first session date labelled for Today!, and the only session which was conducted at RCA Victor Studios. "Kiss Me Baby" was then tracked two months later in December. Following Brian's return to the studio on January 7, 1965, the rest of the album was completed in less than two weeks, ending on January 19. As documented by Craig Slowinski, the extent of the album's instrumentation features:

In comparison to previous albums, Today! necessitated Brian's use of session musicians to a greater extent. Despite this, Carl Wilson was still employed on lead guitar for many of the album's tracks, and usually played alongside these session musicians which would later be informally known as the Wrecking Crew, comprising many of the same musicians who played on Phil Spector's Wall of Sound productions that Wilson idolized. The recording process typically involved recording an instrumental on two tracks of 3-track tape with one remaining track left for the first vocal overdub. This tape was then dubbed down to a second tape for an additional layer of vocal overdubs. The LP was finally issued in mono, their first album not to be issued in stereo since Surfin' U.S.A. (1963).

Reception

Despite being a departure from the Beach Boys sound that pervaded prior efforts, the album was a commercial success; Today! climbed to number four in the US chart during a chart stay of 50 weeks and also reached number six in the British chart during the summer of 1966. Singles "Do You Wanna Dance?", "When I Grow Up (To Be a Man)" and "Dance, Dance, Dance" had all charted.

The album is often described as a foreshadowing of the later Beach Boys' album Pet Sounds. Alice Bolin writes: "Pet Sounds was released only a little over a year after Today!, and it can be hard to separate Today! from the masterpiece it led to—so much so that Today! can feel like a rehearsal for Pet Sounds, with its themes and ideas repeated and perfected in the later album." PopMatters adds "Pet Sounds is about growing up and moving on, and as such, it’s melancholic and reflective. But Today! is about the optimism, not the sadness, of leaving adolescence. Even on the more sentimental b-side songs, there’s a sense of excitement and longing for what the future has in store."

Accolades

In 2005, Today! was included in Robert Dimery's 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die. In 2007, The Guardian named it one of "1000 Albums to Hear Before You Die". In 2012, a variety of musicians and writers voted the album at 271 for Rolling Stone's "500 Greatest Albums of All Time" list, with it stating: "The Beach Boys were still into cars, girls and surfboards, [sic] but Brian Wilson was already a genius. He writes sweet California tunes here, and the haunting 'She Knows Me Too Well' hits Pet Sounds-deep."

Release history

Between 1969 and 1971 (Capitol DF-8-0703), 1978 (Capitol DF-703), and again in the early 1980s (Capitol DN-16019 and accompanying 8-track tape), as part of Capitol Records' repackage series of their Beach Boys albums, Today! was retitled Dance Dance Dance and had two tracks deleted: "In the Back of My Mind" and "Bull Session with the 'Big Daddy'".

The album was re-released complete in 2001 on a disc that also contained Summer Days (And Summer Nights!!) as well as several bonus tracks.

This was one of several Beach Boys releases not to be issued in true stereophonic sound. Originally, Capitol issued the album in mono, as well as "duophonic". In 2012, a complete stereo mix of Today! was released for the first time.

Track listing

Track list details per Craig Slowinski. Following a 1990s court case, the songs "Good to My Baby", "Don't Hurt My Little Sister", "When I Grow Up (To Be a Man)", "Help Me, Ronda", "Dance, Dance, Dance", "She Knows Me Too Well", and "In the Back of My Mind" were amended to include a songwriting credit to Mike Love that did not exist previously.

All tracks written by Brian Wilson and Mike Love, except where noted.

Personnel

Sourced from Musician's Union AFM contract sheets and surviving session audio, documented by Craig Slowinski.

Charts