On a road trip this month we stayed at a newly built hotel in Norco.  Ellie was impressed: “It smells good in here!”  But when we returned to the hotel from dinner and got in the elevator, she wrinkled her nose at the smell.  “Was someone smoking in here?”

At 2:19 a.m. we were woken up by the fire alarm going off.  By the time we got our bearings, threw on some clothes, and were about to evacuate, the alarm went quiet.  Ellie called the front desk to see whether we should evacuate never­theless.  The answer: no, it was a false alarm… triggered by someone smoking in the elevator.

At a different hotel the following night, we were woken up at one a.m. by an adult woman throwing a tantrum like a toddler, words giving way to a bestial howl.  “GIVE ME MY FUCKING CAR KEYS SO I CAN GO‑O‑O‑OUNGGHH!!”

This hotel was part of a larger resort that had an inner tubing course, so we tried that.  In a sign of the times, the only other guest who was inner tubing with us was glued to her phone the entire time, her face an impassive mask except for the occasional grimace when her screen got splashed.  She was using the phone to play videos with the volume turned up, naturally.

Walking across the Cabrillo Bridge, I couldn’t help but notice that the fence designed to stop people from jumping off it abruptly stops while the bridge is still far enough above the ground that to jump off it would certainly be fatal:

I tried to figure out what the deal was, but quickly I noticed that the fence only runs along the part of the bridge that is directly above the freeway.  I.e., if you want to jump to your death and splatter on the hillside, that’s your own lookout, but they will at least try to stop you from landing on some­one’s car.

Back in the days when paying with cash was a lot more common, at the end of the meal I’d look at the check, slip a few bills into the little folder, and then the server would ask, “Do you want change?”  Usually I would say yes, because if the meal cost $23.04, I wasn’t planning to leave a $16.96 tip.  I’d take some of the change and leave the rest, generally tipping a bit more than the then-customary fifteen percent.  But as I left the restaurant, unattended cash on the table, my OCD would kick in, and I always worried: what if another customer pocketed the tip?  The servers would think I’d stiffed them!  When credit cards took over the world, this became less of an issue, but now other worries bounced around in the back of my mind: what was stopping a rogue server from copying down my credit card information, com­plete with security code on the back?  Or, if I’d tipped, say, five dollars, what was stopping the server from changing that to fifteen dollars with the stroke of a pen? 

Anyway, that finally happened.  Ellie and I went to a restau­rant in San Diego called Barbusa, and when I was clicking around on my bank’s web site a few days later to track my expenses, I noticed something unusual: I nearly always tip such that the total charge is either an integer or an amount that my OCD approves, such as $55.55.  But the total charge at Barbusa ended with “.82”.  I knew I hadn’t done that.  I pulled out the customer copy of my receipt, and true to form, I had tipped $15.18 so the tip would fall into today’s customary range and the total charge would come out to an integer.  But apparently the staff members had deemed this inadequate and helped themselves to an even twenty bucks.  I filed a dispute with my credit card company, which ruled in my favor and gave me a rebate of $4.82, but wow.  I wonder how often these thieves pull this stunt, hoping the customer won’t notice?

Brian Wilson died last month.  All I said about this in last month’s minutiae was that, until my then-gf corrected me in the ’00s, I had thought that Brian Wilson had died in the ’60s.  My understanding was that his band, the Beach Boys, had ruled the American charts in the early ’60s with bub­blegum songs heavy on harmony⁠—such big hits that, even growing up in the ’80s and knowing nothing about music other than what was on MTV, I was familiar with all of these songs even before I got to high school:

Then, in high school, I got into the Beatles to an extent that was borderline obsessive, and read everything about them I could get my hands on; my first year of college, the same was true for the Who.  Through that lens, I learned a bit more about the Beach Boys’ history, as Paul McCartney and Keith Moon turned out to be big fans, and I made a few ad­ditions to the list of Beach Boys songs I was familiar with: “Surfer Girl”, “In My Room”, “All Summer Long”, “God Only Knows”.  What I gathered was that the Beach Boys had abruptly found themselves as yesterday’s news when the Beatlemania engulfed the U.S.  Trying to keep up with the Beatles’ musical innovation, Brian Wilson had the band release an album called Pet Sounds that took the Beach Boys’ sound in a more experimental direction, which in­spired the Beatles to push the boundaries of pop music even further with Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.  Brian Wilson intended to top Sgt. Pepper with an even more ambi­tious album called Smile, but he couldn’t get the music to match his vision for it, spiraled into psychedelic abuse, had a breakdown, and died in ’68 or thereabouts.  The Beach Boys disbanded, but regrouped in the ’80s as a nostalgia act and had an unexpected #1 with “Kokomo”.  After that, they became one of those bands that have 40% of the members keep the name and play the casinos with some random session musicians.

Even after I learned that Brian Wilson had not in fact died in the ’60s, I had no idea how much more of the above was false.  Turns out it’s a lot!  Here’s how I learned just how much.  In the aftermath of Brian Wilson’s actual death, You­tube kept feeding me videos featuring him and his music.  You like watching old David Letterman clips?  Here’s Brian Wilson doing “Sloop John B” on The Late Show!  You like watching music theorists analyze songs from the rock era?  Here are several of them delving into “God Only Knows”!  Eventually I clicked on some of the videos, and they got me thinking that, y’know, after all this time, I should probably try listening to Pet Sounds again.  I’d tried before, at CD listening stations in record stores after I got into the Beatles and the Who, and then again after I read a very insightful post about “Wouldn’t It Be Nice”, by which point Youtube had made a world of music freely available.  But I just couldn’t get past the similarity of this slightly later material to the “Surfin’ U.S.A.” sound, which just made me roll my eyes.  I’d made it maybe three or four songs into Pet Sounds and given up.  But that was, what, fifteen years ago now?  So I made up my mind to listen to the whole thing, no matter what.  And the first time through, yeah, more or less the same thing: the handful of songs I knew and thought were okay I continued to think were okay.  The others did nothing for me.  I tried one more listen.  This time one of the songs that were new to me jumped out at me as strikingly good⁠—maybe the best Beach Boys song I’d ever heard.  On the third listen, I realized this was going to make it onto my chart.  On the fourth, I realized this was going to be nestling in among the Poppy songs at the top of the chart.  I haven’t updated the chart yet⁠—it’ll probably be a while before I do⁠—but I’m currently thinking that #22 sounds about right.  The song in question is this one:

NOW PLAYING

Caroline, No
(1966.0307)

You might notice⁠—no typical Beach Boys harmonies!  This was actually a Brian Wilson solo record (his first) that he put on the band’s album even though no other member of the band played on it.  There are many things I love about this song, but if I had to single out one thing, it’d be the flutes at the end⁠—to me, that is basically pharmaceutical-grade nostalgia.  And the rest of the instrumentation is on the same level⁠—I recently bought a better pair of head­phones than any I have owned up to this point, and while they haven’t made much of a difference on most songs, on this one I was amazed at how each instrument settled into a distinct spot in a carefully arranged soundscape.  (One of those instruments is an empty Sparkletts water jug!)  The melody is beautiful and well sung, and while I don’t gener­ally care much about lyrics, I couldn’t help but think that these lyrics probably would have made this my favorite song when I was sixteen or seventeen, right up to the point that “Smells Like Teen Spirit” came out and knocked it out of the #1 spot.  The overlap between the themes of this song and those of Ready, Okay! was kind of hard to miss.  How did my seventeen-year-old self end up living life over again in its entirety, twice, before I heard this song?

So then I naturally wondered what else Brian Wilson might have written that came up to this standard.  This was when I learned that, after the collapse of the Smile project, the Beach Boys… kept on releasing music!  Quite a lot of it!  And yet between “Good Vibrations” in 1966 and “Getcha Back” in 1985, I hadn’t heard of any of it!  I started clicking through album covers, and was stopped cold by this one:

You’re telling me this is a Beach Boys record?  The “Little Deuce Coupe” guys put out an album with a cover this bleak, topped with the grimly ironic title Surf’s Up?  I saw that one song in particular was recommended by the online commentariat, so I gave it a listen, and I could hardly believe it.  Here were those old Beach Boys harmonies, but in the service of a song that might have made Kurt Cobain think that this guy needed to cheer up:

NOW PLAYING

’Til I Die
(1971.0830)

Further poking around revealed that these later albums found the Beach Boys skipping from genre to genre: R & B, synthpop, disco… I’m only just now starting to listen to their catalogue, but there’s a decent chance that I’ll end up writ­ing a retrospective of it like the one I did for Sparks (which is itself in need of a substantial update).  I did start listening to their discography from the beginning, and when I made it to 1965, one song really jumped out at me⁠—this one:

NOW PLAYING

Girl Don’t Tell Me
(1965.0705)

Once again, the usual harmonies are missing.  Instrumenta­tion is extremely sparse (though I adore that celesta⁠—I’ve actually been playing around with my own mix to bring that and the drums more to the fore, but I am no audio engineer and it still needs some work).  But not only was this a killer song in its own right, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that it wasn’t entirely new to me⁠—that I’d heard a cover version way back when.  But by whom?  I found plenty of lists of cov­er versions, but none of them jumped out at me as clearly the right one.  So when I found a You­tube playlist of covers, I listened to it.  The whole thing.  That’s right: this song is good enough that I listened to it thirty-four times in a row.  I think the last time I listened to a song thirty-four times in a row, I was four.  (That time it was this song.)  And when this album cover popped up, I knew I’d found the one I’d been searching for:

I’d completely forgotten about it, but I once owned that album!  I have no idea why!  I think it was when I lived in North Carolina.  Maybe it was a Usenet recommendation, or a record that came up on Addicted to Noise, or maybe just something I tried out at a CD listening station.  But in any case, yeah, I owned it, I listened to it a few times, and then I sold it back because I only liked the one song.  And I had no idea it was originally by the Beach Boys.  So while there are plenty of good covers⁠—I liked the one by Tony Rivers & the Castaways a lot, with its original harmonies⁠—this is the one I imprinted on.

Of course, one might argue that the real reason the song sounded so familiar to me is that it’s basically “Ticket to Ride”.  The two songs are extremely similar, and of course the Beatles song has much fuller instrumentation.  But I think I like the Beach Boys’ version more!  It uses pretty much the same notes, but while “Ticket to Ride” tends to hover on one pitch or range of pitches, “Girl Don’t Tell Me” descends through the chosen notes dynamically, so the melody is punchier and offers up more catharsis.

Anyway, to sum up, I have a lot to explore over the next few months, but for now, I would like to amend my June minu­tiae entry about Brian Wilson to affirm that everyone who said that we lost a genius last month was right.