To know an object is to lead to it through a context which the world provides.
William James
A surfboard. Not even a full-size surfboard. Not even a real surfboard, for crying out loud.
It was autumn, 2004, and I was riding home from seeing Brian Wilson and his band perform SMiLE. It had been a great concert, a great evening, and I was trying to sort through the kaleidoscopic impressions of the show. The amazing theatricality of the event. The way SMiLE effortlessly held my attention – what an incredibly entertaining piece of music! – making forty-five minutes feel like fifteen. The sheer exultant joy, the triumph of it all.
And out of that whirlwind of sounds and sights, one image kept bobbing to the surface. That surfboard. That silly, silly surfboard.
It was during the encore: "Surfin' U.S.A.," to be precise. The Stockholm Strings ‘n' Horns folks (who had added so much fun and spirit to the show) were dancing and clowning around. One of them held up a kid's surfboard – it might have been one of those disposable foam models – with a ridiculous smiley face drawn on one side. On the other side, two simple words: “Surf's Up!”
To understand the profound effect of that seemingly trivial detail, you have to understand a little bit about what it was like to be a Beach Boys fan in, say, 1970. It was hard, back then, to get "cool" people to listen to Beach Boys music. The Beach Boys were surfing Doris Days. Striped shirts. Psychedelic barbershop. Their late Capitol albums were out of print. They were hopelessly passé, outmoded, irrelevant…unhip.
After 1971 we had a secret weapon: a way to fight back against those attitudes. It was the song "Surf's Up," originally intended (as we all knew) for the legendary lost SMiLE album…but now available as the title song of a brand-new release. It was the masterpiece. The magnum opus. It was staggeringly sophisticated, melodically and lyrically. It was (for lack of a better term) art song. Even the hipsters had to accord it a grudging respect.
And the song's name: well, that was an important element in the equation. Because, you see, this was no goofy surfing song…even if the title made it sound like one. It was an inside joke. An ironic take on the Beach Boys image (or so we thought). It was a metaphor. Reverse hip. To associate this serious work of art with the adolescent twanging of "Surfin' Safari" or "Surfin' U.S.A.": that would have been heresy. Sacrilege. Those early surfing songs came from another beach, another ocean…another planet.
But that was the past. SMiLE was no longer “lost and gone and unknown.” And there was one of Brian's backing musicians, gleefully holding up a surfboard with the sacred words "Surf's Up!" scrawled on it…while the band cranked out "Surfin' U.S.A." It was just a bit of fun, a passing moment. But it stayed with me for days, and it took a while for me to figure out why.
When SMiLE failed to show up in the record stores, back in 1967, the reputation of the Beach Boys, at least among "serious" listeners, went into a decline from which it never fully recovered. The SMiLE songs assumed a kind of mythic status, inhabiting – as far as I was concerned – a plane far removed from the rest of the group's work.
But that’s not how things work. Works of art don’t just appear out of nowhere, like Athena popping out of Zeus’s forehead. They have ancestors and descendants; they’re connected to what comes before, and they’re connected to what follows. If SMiLE had been released back in the day, it would have been a stunning, history-making album; but it would have been, when all was said and done, another Beach Boys album…linked to the albums that came before and to the albums that would come after. Its songs – some of them, anyway – would have found a place in the group's concert setlists and greatest-hits compilations.
It took that throwaway surfboard, I finally realized, to bring all of that into focus. The truth is that "Surf's Up" and "Surfin' U.S.A." do not belong to different worlds. They are two wonderful songs, each with its own special virtues, each composed by the same gifted songwriter.
Van Dyke Parks, for one, understood that point from the beginning. In 2005, at a SMiLE panel discussion, Van Dyke Parks spoke about that connection. And his comments make clear that the title "Surf’s Up" was not, after all, an expression of ironic distance. Here is the account:
Perhaps the highlight of the session was Parks telling of how he came up with the title for the song, “Surf’s Up”….
Parks said that Dennis Wilson cried when he heard an untitled demo of the track in 1967, but it was only after the Beach Boys drummer related a story about how the band’s surf image had been ridiculed on a recent British tour that Parks came up with the song title.
It was in defense of that “beautiful” image. 1
Not irony after all, but celebration: a celebration re-enacted onstage thirty-odd years later.
Once we have identified the surfing cross-current, we can begin to search for other connections: to place SMiLE itself within the larger context of the music of the Beach Boys, Brian Wilson and Van Dyke Parks.
We might notice that the early song “County Fair” anticipates, in its carnival-barker lines, the SMiLE experiments in blending spoken-word and comedy with conventional song structures (“Heroes and Villains,” “On a Holiday”). Or maybe we will see the song “’Til I Die” as a sort of mini-“Elements Suite,” with verses devoted to water, air and earth (ocean, wind, mountainside).
Perhaps we will see that the line “clang of the Yankee reaper” would fit perfectly alongside the wheatfields, threshers and crows of “Cabin Essence.” And we might be struck by the fact that Van Dyke Parks’s first two albums begin with brief “quotations” from other works: a snippet of “Gypsy Davy,” ostensibly performed by a defunct folk group (on Song Cycle); and a fragment of a genuine Mighty Sparrow song (on Discover America). SMiLE, too, begins with that sort of musical epigraph: an allusion to “Gee,” by the Crows. In the case of the Mighty Sparrow song, the vinyl noise is authentic; in the case of “Gee,” it is carefully added. These opening gestures acknowledge history, musical and otherwise; we discover the similarities only when we begin to consider these works in context.
Acknowledging history, we might reflect that American Indians – Saturday-morning-cartoon Indians, to be sure – first appeared in a Brian Wilson song in 1962, long before "Heroes and Villains" and "Roll Plymouth Rock":
The fourth little Indian took her riding in his big canoe
The fifth little Indian took her down the waterfall
The sixth little Indian taught the squaw how to woo-woo
But the squaw didn't like 'em at all
On the same 1962 album – five months before "Waimea Bay" was namechecked in "Surfin' U.S.A.," eleven months before we were invited to come along to "Hawaii," five years before anyone wished he had a "Little Pad," six years before “Diamond Head,” forty-two (!) years before "In Blue Hawaii" – this lyric introduced the Hawaiian connection:
They’re angling in Laguna and Cerro Azul
They’re kickin’ out in Doheny too
I tell ya’ surfin’s mighty wild
It’s getting’ bigger ev’ry day,
From Hawaii to the shores of Peru
Interesting insights, without question. But there are also more meaningful discoveries waiting to be made. One of them has to do with a theme that runs through much of SMiLE: manifest destiny, westward expansion, subjugation of native peoples. It races with the iron horse through "Cabin Essence"; it hides just below the rollicking rhythms of "On a Holiday"; and it finds its most powerful expression in "Roll Plymouth Rock," which tracks the course of empire westward from Plymouth Rock to the shores of the Pacific…and beyond, to the Hawaiian Islands.
A big theme, certainly, not easily confined to a single album or a single phase of an artist's career: a theme that demands, for full understanding, a context. Has it surfaced elsewhere: in other songs by the Beach Boys or Parks? By way of answering that question, let's focus on two particularly clear instances: "The Trader," from the Beach Boys Holland album, and "Cowboy," from Parks's Tokyo Rose.
Such comparisons are not easy. SMiLE – a work that spans five decades – is both ancestor and descendant of these other albums (are we looking at cause…or effect?). And the diversity of styles and techniques complicates matters further. "Roll Plymouth Rock" is a masterpiece of compression, eschewing conventional narrative in favor of the skillful juxtaposition of symbols and images. "The Trader," on the other hand (lyrics by Jack Rieley), is more discursive, more linear. "Roll Plymouth Rock" explains nothing: a handful of phrases, a few Hawaiian syllables, and it is over; we are left to draw our own conclusions. "The Trader" relates its story with the efficiency of a textbook, and makes sure to tell us, along the way, how we are to feel about that story. And "Cowboy": "Cowboy" is somewhere in between: between the cryptic telegraphy of "Roll Plymouth Rock" on the one hand, and the exhaustive detail of "The Trader" on the other. It is as precise and as elegant as a page of Japanese calligraphy.
This is all "Roll Plymouth Rock" needs to conjure up the image of ships bringing a foreign way of life to the Hawaiian Islands. The history is there, but it is there by implication:
Waving from the ocean liners,
beaded cheering Indians behind them….
Once upon the Sandwich Isles,
the social structure steamed upon Hawaii.
In "The Trader," however, the history is right at the surface, textbook-style. The Trader sets sail in search of new lands; he discovers the "virgin plain"; he evaluates its riches; he meets (and judges) its inhabitants; and he takes brutal possession of it:
Trader sailed a jeweled crown
Humanity rowed the way
Exploring to command more land
Scheming how to rule the waves.
Trader spied a virgin plain
And named it for velvet robes
Wrote home declaring,
"There's a place
Where totally folks are free
(Happy completely)
Nourishment fills the prairies and the hillsides
And animals stalk the mountains and the seaside
And fish abound the lakes and birds the skies
Signed sincerely."
Trader found the jeweled land
Was occupied before he came
By humans of a second look
Who couldn't even write their names (shame!)
Trader said they're not as good
As folks who wear velvet robes
Wrote home again and asked, "Please help
Their breasts I see; they're not like me
Banish them from our prairies and our hillsides
Clear them from our mountains and our seaside
I want them off our lakes so please reply
Signed sincerely."
Note the delicacy with which "Roll Plymouth Rock" handles the imposition of a European name (and a foreign "social structure") on the islands: the process takes place off-stage, as it were, with "Sandwich Isles" stamped "upon Hawaii" within the space of a single couplet:
Once upon the Sandwich Isles,
the social structure steamed upon Hawaii.
In "The Trader," the lyric spells out the renaming process in these lines –
Trader spied a virgin plain
And named it for velvet robes
and the "civilizing" process in these lines –
Trader he got the crown okay
Cleared humanity from his way
He civilized all he saw
Making changes every single day
In each case, "The Trader" trades imaginative power for clarity of expression.
In "Roll Plymouth Rock" the condemnation of colonialist excesses is subtle: we are invited to "see" the destruction of native life and native lands, but that destruction is never described in concrete terms:
Ribbon of concrete – just see what you done –
done to the church of the American Indian!
Bicycle rider, just see what you’ve done –
done to the church of the American Indian!
The "Mahalo" section of the song is most plausibly translated as a sort of despairing prayer to Hawaiian gods who will not – or cannot – intervene to preserve native folkways and culture. Associated with this prayer is a plea for heavenly lightning to kindle a cleansing fire (to rid the islands of the outsiders?). Here, too, the indictment is allusive rather than concrete.
Unlike most SMiLE insights, this one isn’t a matter of speculation or interpretation. We have Parks’s own thoughts on the “Roll Plymouth Rock” lyrics, and it’s abundantly clear that he was interested in showing rather than telling:
[M]ore than try to tell an audience what to think, I wanted to help an audience feel that experience with some anecdotes and snapshots of the westward expansion. That had to do with the conquering of the Indian tribes, and yes there was some sense of religion there too. With the conquering of the Indians went their concept…that the land was sacred. 2
“The Trader,” on the other hand, isn’t at all shy about telling the listener what to think. It’s replete with concrete (though rather prosaic) details:
Trader found the jeweled land
Was occupied before he came
By humans of a second look
Who couldn't even write their names (shame!)
Trader said they're not as good
As folks who wear velvet robes
Wrote home again and asked, "Please help
Their breasts I see; they're not like me
Banish them from our prairies and our hillsides
Clear them from our mountains and our seaside
I want them off our lakes….
Perhaps the most telling contrast is this one, in which the very same act – the laying of roads through virgin land – is described in strikingly different terms. Here is "Roll Plymouth Rock":
Ribbon of concrete – just see what you done –
done to the church of the American Indian!
And here is "The Trader":
Trader he got the crown okay
Cleared humanity from his way
He civilized all he saw
Making changes every single day (say)
Shops sprang over the prairies and the hillsides
Then roads cut through the mountains to the seaside….
The "Roll Plymouth Rock" couplet has the concentrated energy of a haiku; the lines from “The Trader” sound like a summary of a public-television special. But if "The Trader" lacks the lyrical sophistication of "Roll Plymouth Rock," it does manage to emulate some of its structural inventiveness. "Roll Plymouth Rock" is a three-part suite of sorts, comprising the Sandwich Isles/Plymouth Rock section (fulfilling the role normally assigned to a song's verses); the Bicycle Rider section (acting as a kind of chorus); and the chant-like "Mahalo" section. If one is prepared to lump verse and chorus together, then this three-part structure resolves itself into two main components: a "European" section and a "native" section.
In "The Trader," the two-part structure is obvious: the division between them mirrors the division between European and native cultures. The first part of the song recounts the depredations of the Trader (quoting, along the way, from his imagined correspondence); the second part, on the other hand, offers an escape from the Trader's influence: a retreat into an idealized existence free of colonialist domination:
Making it softly
Like the evening sea, trying to be
Making it go
Creating it gently
Like a morning breeze, a life of ease
Eyes that see
Beyond tomorrow, through to the time without hours
Passing the Eden of Flowers
Reason to live
These gentle lines stand in sharp contrast to the heedless momentum of the lines given to the Trader; the music of this section reflects that same change of tone. The short, cyclic phrases have a chant-like quality of their own, recalling – in design rather than specific effect – the Hawaiian section of "Roll Plymouth Rock." If the second part of "The Trader" consisted of this verse alone, the song would be a considerably stronger composition. Regrettably, the succeeding verses descend into a sort of mid-1970s fuzzy-mindedness and diffuseness, and the power of the song dissipates into meaninglessness:
Beyond the sorrow, on to the force without power
Piercing the crust of the tower
and
Beyond the showers, on to the suns of tomorrows
Burning the flesh of all sorrows
“The crust of the tower” and “the flesh of all sorrows”: what is one to make of those lines? If “The Trader” had ended in the "Eden of Flowers," we would be better off all around. The image of the garden/forest/Eden reverberates powerfully not only through "The Trader," but also through several SMiLE songs…explicitly and by way of allusion. The young girl of "Wonderful" knows how to "gather the forest"…a forest to which she will "return" after the "fall." Two of the best-known songs ("Pauahi 'O Kalani" and "Aloha Oe") of Queen Lili'uokalani 3 – invoked by name in "On a Holiday" – describe female figures who dwell in sacred "bowers." And "In Blue Hawaii" is set in an intensely-imagined Hawaiian paradise, complete with waterfall.
Sacred bowers: a natural transition to a discussion of "Cowboy."
Both "Roll Plymouth Rock" and "The Trader" are essentially impersonal songs: "Roll Plymouth Rock" reduces mighty journeys and struggles into a handful of highly charged images, and "The Trader" addresses historical events (and the morals to be educed therefrom) without bothering very much with individual joys or sorrows: the Trader is a "character" in the song, but he is more of an abstraction than a person.
"Cowboy" is a very different kind of song. In structural terms, it is wholly conventional: verse, chorus, bridge. Its economy of language is masterful; but unlike "Roll Plymouth Rock," it condenses a large story into a tale of two lovers: a "Paniolo cowboy" and a "wanderin’ Wahini":
Paniolo cowboy in a field of sugar cane
Once there was a forest where they hid there in the rain
Cowboy cowboy cowboy
Wanderin' Wahini under locks of raven hair
Beads of inspiration
Hopin' he would not forget just where
The Paniolo – the traditional Hawaiian cowboy – can trace his history back to 1832. But the story begins further back: in the year 1793, when Captain George Vancouver imported the first cattle into Hawaii. They multiplied rapidly in their congenial tropical surroundings…encouraged, no doubt, by King Kamehameha's sacred kapu (ban) on their slaughter ("wholly holy cow!"). The kapu was removed in 1830, but that was too little too late. Two years later Kamehameha was forced to send for three Mexican vaqueros: to thin the herds, and to train the natives in the cowboy life. And so the Paniolo – the Hawaiian cowboy – was born (the very word "Paniolo" is a Hawaiian adaptation of the word "espanol," a term used by the Hawaiians to describe their Mexican guests). When they weren't busy riding and roping, the Paniolos found time to develop the traditional Hawaiian slack-key guitar style.
In a sense, the very existence of the Paniolo (colorful though he may be) bears witness to the usurpation of native Hawaiian culture: one requires cowboys only where there are cows, and the longhorns that ran riot over the islands were imported by the colonialists. The last verse of "Cowboy" deals with this historical datum in a direct (and hilarious) manner; we'll get to it in a moment.
The lovers of “Cowboy” take refuge in their own secret forest:
Up above the canopy in the highest branches of a tree
He would take her longingly and say "One day you'll belong to me"
A sacred bower, indeed: a place where one may commune with the Creator:
So they lay suspended dreaming of some kind of god
With their limbs akimbo and extended to the mind of God
The "forest" of "Wonderful"; the bowers of "Pauahi 'O Kalani" and "Aloha Oe"; the "virgin plain" and the "Eden of Flowers" of "The Trader": these are different names for one and the same place (and surely the "wanderin’ Wahini" is a cousin of the women who inhabit these idyllic places).
No refuge, however, remains secure forever; even the retreat at the end of "The Trader" is a retreat into an imagined paradise rather than a real one. In “Cowboy,” the peace of the lovers' hiding place is rudely shattered:
I forgot to mention it was nineteen forty-one
Zeros kept a-comin' like to blanket out the sun
For Van Dyke Parks, 1941 – the year of the attack on Pearl Harbor – is an important year, a pivot on which history turns. Here is a lyric from another Tokyo Rose song:
Old Ned was a veteran and better and the best in forty-one
When blue Hawaii glistened like a diamond lights the sun
Note the "blue Hawaii" image: it will be developed, in SMiLE, into an entire song. And consider this 2004 interview with Darian Sahanaja, in which he describes Brian’s and Parks’s reactions to hearing – for the first time in many years – the "Mahalo" section of "Roll Plymouth Rock":
I remember the time we were listening to the Hawaiian chant on ["Roll Plymouth Rock"], and Brian said, “Man, what a great sound! How did we do that?!” Van Dyke said, “Oh yeah, that's beautiful! It's a lap steel guitar…and a vocal.” So, a lot of it was coming back to both of them.
I have to tell you one thing that really stuck out in my mind from these sessions – you'll appreciate this. When we listened to that section I just described, Van Dyke said, “That's so…December 6th, 1941. You know, just before the Pearl Harbor attack, and America's fascination with the Tropics. That just nailed it for me. 4
December 6, 1941 is literally a final moment of innocence; the attack that took place on the following morning (and the events triggered thereby) fundamentally changed the world. For the lovers in the song, as for America, it is no longer possible to hide from brutal realities. We cannot stay; the forest is a sanctuary no longer:
He would say "I'd stay" yet have to go….
The last verse of "Cowboy" is a marvel of compression (and humor):
King Kamehameha met with Captain Cook upon the shore
Lookin' at all the cattle asked him "What the hell are these for?"
That couplet imagines a remarkable conversation between the King and the Captain, taking place at a remarkable moment: the moment at which the first foreign hooves touch Hawaiian shores. (An imaginary conversation, to be sure: Cook was already fourteen years dead when Captain Vancouver's longhorns arrived.) It is funny, certainly, but it seriously suggests all that was implicit in (and symbolized by) the arrival of those cattle: the overthrow of the Hawaiian monarchy and the subjugation of native culture. The Paniolo – the cowboy of the song's title – is part and parcel of that reality.
And these lines –
Gone now is the forest and the lovers of the trees
Now there is a chorus playing golf who say in Japanese
Kau-boi
tell the very same story as these lines, from "Roll Plymouth Rock":
Ribbon of concrete – just see what you done –
done to the church of the American Indian!
and these, from "The Trader":
Shops sprang over the prairies and the hillsides
Then roads cut through the mountains to the seaside
Truly: no refuge remains secure forever. The ribbon of concrete paves over the prairies that make up the church of the American Indian. Shops and roads, constructed under royal warrant, deface the virgin plains, the hills and mountains. And in "Cowboy" – the urbane phrases are so wittily turned that one might almost miss the point – a golf course has taken the place of the lovers' secret forest hideaway. If we pause to reflect that the golf course is patronized by Japanese tourists – a fact placed, non-judgmentally, within a few lines of a verse about the Pearl Harbor attack – well, that is simply one more irony. Cycles repeat; over and over, the sacred places are overrun. The form of the attack – marauding cattle, dive-bombing Zeros, bulldozers and backhoes – is ultimately merely a minor detail.
One theme; three very different treatments. When we examine these songs in context, can we draw conclusions to be drawn from those differences?
We may as well acknowledge that "The Trader" is the least compelling of these songs (there is certainly no shame in placing third against such distinguished competition). Over the years, I have heard many people express reservations about the opacity of Van Dyke Parks's lyrics. When one compares "The Trader" with "Roll Plymouth Rock" and "Cowboy," one concludes that those people might have been well advised to wish for less clarity and more poetry. In fairness, however, "The Trader" is at something of a disadvantage here: while "Roll Plymouth Rock" and "Cowboy" are songs from conceptually unified albums, in which themes and references recur and resonate, "The Trader" is strictly a stand-alone composition. As such, it needs to establish a context and tell a story; it's not surprising, therefore, that it contains a fair amount of "exposition." Given those conditions, it is an effective song.
"Cowboy" is stylish and seemingly – seemingly! – effortless; a casual listener might almost take it for a clever love song set in an exotic island locale, and nothing more. The integration of the love story and the greater historical theme is deftly accomplished, and the local-color Hawaiian details are evocative. It is certainly the "smallest" of these three songs: almost a charming, wry miniature. While its final verse invokes 18th-century Hawaiian history, it is really a 20th-century song, centered on 20th-century people and events. It is slight where "The Trader" is ponderous, and muted where "Roll Plymouth Rock" is thunderous. On its own terms, however, it is a notable success.
Which leaves, of course, "Roll Plymouth Rock." Unlike "The Trader," it does not proceed in the manner of a linear prose narrative. Unlike "Cowboy," it does not present recognizable characters interacting in comprehensible ways. It encompasses a huge expanse of history and geography: from the landing at Plymouth Rock, to the American expansion across the continent, to the colonization of the Hawaiian Islands. But there are no links, no "speaking voices," no comfortable narrative devices of any kind. To borrow a phrase from William Carlos Williams: the song is "a machine made out of words." (And its ellipses are every bit as important as its words.)
In fact, Parks's words (and ellipses) are always important; and that's true of his seemingly offhand remarks just as it is of his lyrics. One such remark appeared in a 2004 interview, in which he described SMiLE as "a big totem pole." 5 As applied to "Roll Plymouth Rock," this statement comes very close to capturing the essence of this song's enigmatic power.
The ancient Native Americans of the northwestern coast did not – so far as we know – possess a written language. Like all humans, however, they had the need to tell and preserve their stories: their myths, their legends, their unique identity. Instead of words, they coded those stories into concrete objects:
To the Northwest Coast Indians, the totem pole provided a means of communicating their stories, myths and legends. The totem pole is an arrangement of symbols or memory devices in sequence created for the purpose of recalling a story or event. These symbols function as a form of “writing” – pictures, not written letters, convey meaning. 6
This would work, for most purposes, as a description of "Roll Plymouth Rock." It happens to be "made of" music and words, but it bears little resemblance to news, or historical accounts, or everyday conversation. It is an artifact, an arrangement of images, symbols, "memory devices." Like most such artifacts, it communicates at a deep and mysterious level rarely reached by ordinary speech.
In a final twist, the author of the foregoing passage goes on to speculate about what a modern-day American totem pole might look like – what symbols or memory devices it might contain:
In our own culture the White House, Plymouth Rock, the Lincoln Memorial are all symbols which “contain” stories each school child knows – and which get evoked, maybe subconsciously, by their mere sight. 7
It is striking – and not at all coincidental – that this writer, like Parks, seized on Plymouth Rock as a mythically powerful American symbol.
One theme; three very different treatments. For those who demand the linearity of conventional storytelling, "The Trader" may be the song of choice. For those who want their history thoroughly mixed with what critics sometimes call "human interest," "Cowboy" is a natural alternative. To repeat: they are both successful songs. In their success, they provide a context: a perspective on the towering achievement of "Roll Plymouth Rock," which rises to totemic heights to which they cannot aspire.
Footnotes
1 Van Dyke Parks at SXSW Panel, March 18, 2005 (source unavailable)
2 Van Dyke Parks, unidentified 2004 interview (source unavailable)
3 https://www.huapala.org/Pa/Pauahi_O_Kalani.html; https://www.huapala.org/Aloha/Aloha_Oe.html
4 Darian Sahanaja, quoted at https://web.archive.org/web/20040905175607/http://www.musicangle.com/feat.php?id=60&page=0
5 Van Dyke Parks, quoted in the Arizona Republic, September 27, 2004 (source unavailable)
6 https://teachersinstitute.yale.edu/curriculum/units/1985/6/85.06.01.x.html
7 Ibid.
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