Beach Boys – Pet Sounds (1966)

They say I got brains

But they ain’t doin’ me no good

I wish they could

No regular reader of 2 or 3 lines will be surprised to find Pet Sounds on my list of the greatest albums released during the first half of rock’s “Golden Decade.”

If you spend an evening sampling the vast body of writing about Pet Sounds, you’ll learn a lot of interesting things.  

For example, you’ll learn that Paul McCartney and John Lennon were great admirers of Pet Sounds, but Pete Townshend and Mick Jagger were not.  (That makes sense when you compare Beach Boys records to the music put out by the Beatles, Who, and Stones.)

You’ll also learn that the Beach Boys’ record company was not enthusiastic about the album, which sold only moderately well in the U.S. and failed to garner even a single Grammy nomination.  (The Beach Boys were not big stars in the UK prior to the release of Pet Sounds, but it did very well in the UK.  The album reached #2 on the English album charts – the Sound of Music soundtrack kept Pet Sounds out of the top spot – and stayed in the top ten for six months.)

But you won’t learn why Pet Sounds is the greatest album in history by reading.  

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All the words in the world aren’t adequate to explain why Pet Sounds is so great.  The only way to get its greatness is to listen to it.  And not just once or twice.

I first listened to Pet Sounds in 1966, when I was a shy and angsty fourteen-year-old.  

The last time I listened to it was more than fifty years later, when Brian Wilson performed the album in its entirety at the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC.

I have not listened to Pet Sounds since I attended that performance because I didn’t see how that experience could be topped. 

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Pet Sounds is first and foremost an album – not a collection of individual songs, which is what most albums are.  

It’s often referred to as a concept album, but it’s not like Tommy, or The Wall, or other concept albums – it doesn’t tell a story, or have a specific theme.

Here’s what Brian Wilson had to say about Pet Sounds as a concept album:

If you take the Pet Sounds album as a collection of art pieces, each designed to stand alone, yet which belong together, you'll see what I was aiming at. . . . It wasn't really a song concept album, or lyrically a concept album; it was really a production concept album.

Wilson has put his finger on something essential here.  A few years ago, I stopped writing about songs and started writing about records.  

A great song doesn’t always make a great record.  To make a great record, you need a great song – but you also need great production.

Pet Sounds has a number of exceptional songs.  Wilson was a genius, but he was also an innocent – his compositions for Pet Sounds were complex and subtle, but appealed to the heart as much as to the head.  (John Cale of the Velvet Underground said that Pet Sounds was “adult and childlike at the same time,” and he was right.)

But what sets Pet Sounds apart from all other albums is Wilson’s exceptional production.  He threw in everything but the kitchen sink to give that record its unique sound – not only strings and horns, but also a theremin, a bicycle bell, a five-gallon water-dispensing jug, and barking dogs.  

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So . . . after telling you that words weren’t adequate to explain the greatness of Pet Sounds, what did I do?  I wrote a lot of words attempting to explain the greatness of Pet Sounds.  

Sorry about that, boys and girls – sometimes I just can’t help myself.

Click here to listen to Pet Sounds.

Click here to buy Pet Sounds from Amazon.

Grateful Dead – "China Cat Sunflower" (1969)

Crying Leonardo words

From out a silk trombone

I rang a silent bell

It’s a very special time of the year at 2 or 3 lines.

January is gone, and February is here . . . which means that it’s time for 28 Posts in 28 Days™.  Happy happy joy joy!

This year, 28 Posts in 28 Days™ will feature the best albums released during the first half of rock music’s “Golden Decade” – which began the year I entered 7th grade and ended the year I graduate from college.

Next year, 28 Posts in 28 Days™ will focus on the best albums from my college years – 1970 through 1974.

As for the next 28 Posts in 28 Days™ – we’re talking February 2028 – I might feature albums from my law school years.  Assuming I’m still alive in February 2028, of course.  (I have a condition called “I’m old,” and they tell me there’s no cure for it.)

[Note: for those of you who are new to the 2 or 3 lines party, I should explain what 28 Posts in 28 Days™ is.  I used to do 28 themed posts in February – one each day.  That got to be too hard, so I cut back to doing 12 themed posts in February.  However, I liked the 28 Posts in 28 Days™ name so I kept it.  If you took the name too literally, that’s on you!]  

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You younger 2 or 3 lines readers may wonder what the hell I’m talking about when I talk about a record album – also known as an LP.

An LP is a big round black thing that plays music.  Here’s a picture of one:

Many years ago, it wasn’t unusual for people to put an album on a turntable and listen to it straight through.  

Actually, they’d listen to the first side straight through, then turn the album over and listen to the second side.

Today, people construct playlists that usually contain songs by many different recording artists.  In essence, you create your own personalized albums rather than listening to the particular group of songs an artist has chosen to put on an album.  

If you want to repeat or skip a song on your playlist, it’s easy to do so.  But when all we had were LPs, repeating or skipping songs required some effort – you had to walk over to your record player, pick up the tone arm, and attempt to drop it on the blank groove that preceded the track you wanted to hear.  It was much easier just to listen to an album in its entirety.

Unfortunately, most albums were a mixture of good and bad tracks.  If you were lucky, the good tracks outnumbered the bad ones – but all too often, the reverse was true.  I hate to think how many albums I bought because they had two or three great songs that I had heard on the radio – only to discover that the rest of the album was filler.

While the albums I’m featuring in this year’s 28 Posts in 28 Days aren’t perfect, they’re pretty darn close to it.  Sure, you might find a stinker here or there, but the bulk of the albums consists of grade A stuff.   

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 SPOILER ALERT: there will no Beatles album in this year’s 28 Posts in 28 Days.

That will shock some of you.  But I make no apology for that.

The Beatles recorded a lot of great music.  But their albums contain a lot of clunkers.  None of them are as perfect as the ten albums I’ve chosen to feature this month.

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One other group that didn’t make the cut is the Grateful Dead.

Not every Grateful Dead song sucks.  But a lot of them do – including “China Cat Sunflower,” which I stumbled across recently on a Sirius/XM channel.

Robert Hunter said he wrote the song’s lyrics while “I had a cat sitting on my belly, and was in a rather hypersensitive state, and I followed this cat out to – I believe it was Neptune – and there were rainbows across Neptune, and cats marching across the rainbow.  This cat took me in all these cat places; there’s some essence of that in the song.”

Author Eric Wybenga said “China Cat Sunflower” has “one of the very few rock-and-roll lyrics (including Dylan’s) that has as much impact on the page as it does sung, if not more. . . . ‘It’s about acid’ does it less justice than the observation that it's about seeing, sensing, and making connections in a sensuous world.  Anyone out there remember what it was like to be three years old?”

I don’t remember what it was like to be three years old, but I hope it was nothing like the lyrics to “China Cat Sunflower”:

Look for a while at the china cat sunflower

Proud walking jingle in the midnight sun

Copperdome bodhi drip a silver kimono

Like a crazy quilt star gown through a dream night wind

Krazy Kat peeking through a lace bandanna

Like a one-eyed cheshire, like a diamond-eye jack

A leaf of all colors plays a golden-string fiddle

To a double-e waterfall over my back

Comic book colors on a violin river crying Leonardo

Words from out a silk trombone

I rang a silent bell, beneath a shower of pearls

In the eagle-winged palace of the Queen Chinee

Click here to listen to “China Cat Sunflower.”

Click here to buy the version of “China Cat Sunflower” that was released on the Grateful Dead’s 1969 studio album, Aoxomoxoa.

Red Hot Chili Peppers – "Snow (Hey Oh)" (2006)

Runnin’ through the field

Where all my tracks will be concealed

So how’s the weather where you are today?  

At the 2 or 3 Lines World Headquarters campus, we’re up to our ass in snow.  (Speaking of our ass, we’re freezing it off as well. ) 

As Charles Dudley Warner famously said, “Everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it.”  (You probably thought that Mark Twain famously said that, but he didn’t – that quote came from Warner, who was a close friend of Twain.)

My favorite weather-related quote comes from Oscar Wilde:

Conversation about the weather is the last refuge of the unimaginative.  

True dat.

Here’s a really annoying quote about the weather from the 19th-century English polymath, John Ruskin:

Sunshine is delicious, rain is refreshing, wind braces us up, snow is exhilarating; there is really no such thing as bad weather, only different kinds of good weather.

I call bullsh*t on John Ruskin.

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I referred to Ruskin as a “polymath,” which is a term used to describe someone who is learned in many different fields. (“Renaissance man” is another term used to describe such a person.) 

Ruskin was an influential art critic.  But he also wrote on geology, mythology, crystallography, ornithology, and economics .  

Ruskin was also a talented draftsman whose three-volume treatise, The Stones of Venice, contains detailed drawings of many Venetian structures.  (Ruskin thought Venice’s architectural heritage was at risk, and wanted to preserve it – at least on paper.)

John Ruskin’s drawing of
the Ducal Palace in Venice 

Ruskin was no fan of industrial capitalism, which he believed polluted not only the environment but also the soul.  He championed many things that are now viewed as standard elements of the modern welfare state — like universal education, a minimum wage, and urban green spaces.

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Law students take classes covering a broad array of legal subjects.  

But the explosive proliferation of laws and regulations over the past several decades have made it impossible for lawyers to be legal jacks of all trades.  Just as most doctors focus on one part of the body, most attorneys limit their practice to one particular legal area – whether that’s corporate law, or patent law, or family law, or criminal law, or something else.

As lawyers get older, they often find themselves narrowing the breadth of their practice in order to deepen their knowledge of their speciality.

One of my law partners formulated a succinct description of how a lawyer’s practice tends to become increasingly specialized as time passed.  “We learn more and more about less and less,” he used to say, “until we know almost everything about almost nothing.”

That’s it in a nutshell.  A legal jack of all trades is almost certainly a master of none.  Even John Ruskin would have to specialize if he were a 21st-century lawyer.

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“Snow (Hey Oh)” was the third single from the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ 2006 double album, Stadium Arcadium.

Stadium Arcadium was recorded at a Laurel Canyon house known as “The Mansion,” which was owned by record producer Rick Rubin.  

The first album ever recorded at “The Mansion” was RHCP’s best record ever, Blood Sugar Sex Magik.  Others who have recorded there include Jay-Z (“99 Problems”), LCD Soundsystem (“Drunk Girls”), and System of a Down (who recorded both the Mezmerize and Hypnotize albums there).

Click here to listen to “Snow (Hey Oh).”

Click here to buy “Snow (Hey Oh)” from Amazon.