All This Is That: repolishing the Beach Boys' diamond in the rough

 

“Carl & The Passions - ‘So Tough’” is just about the weirdest album imaginable. I love it, but nothing about it should work. That already starts with the album art and its title. The red sports car in a beach setting image is pretty cool by itself, presaging about a half dozen Beach Boy compilations by over a decade. But it isn’t representative of the music within. Like, at all. The title makes it even worse, other than not even identifying whose album this is (until the CD version akwardly plastered the band name on the cover). Besides being weird as hell, having the Beach Boys adopt a moniker like Carl & The Passions (the name of Carl’s music group as a teenager, ostensibly to cheer him up) and having the ‘So Tough’ title, together with the cover makes it sound like it’s some sort of retro exercise – a return to car and surf songs, maybe, or an exercise in doo-wop. Instead, it is of course none of these things. It’s rather the loosest, and in some ways earthiest album the band would ever cut. By 1972, the popular emphasis on roots music had even reached the Beach Boys, who had experimented with country music as early as the 1970’s single version of “Cottonfields” with its very prominent pedal steel guitar. There’s some pedal on ‘So Tough’, but it really is more about the harmonies, which in places recall the loose harmony style of The Band rather than the Beach Boys.

In tow with the non-fitting album cover and title, none of the musical ingredients on ‘So Tough’ should really go together. Besides the relatively rootsy atmosphere, these songs don’t really have much in common, besides the transcendental meditation undertow to “He Come Down” and “All This Is That”, courtesy of Mike & Al of course. Part of it is that ‘So Tough’ is clearly an album assembled to bring out a Beach Boys product, without the band necessarily having the requisite songs ready, which means that half of the tracks here are hardly Beach Boys tracks at all. The two Ricky Fataar-Blondie Chaplin compositions, fascinating as they are, don’t really seem to feature any other Beach Boys on them, much less a specific Beach Boys sound. Dennis’ two numbers aren’t Beach Boys numbers at all, having been taken from a finally abandoned first attempt at a solo album. Their heavy instrumentation doesn’t really jibe with anything else on the album. Even Carl gets in on the more exotic sounds game, with his “You Need A Mess Of Help To Stand Alone” graced (if that's the word...) by a rather noisy and unusual instrumentation and an even more unusual gruff and growling vocal delivery by the usually most angelic of Beach Boy voices. That leaves just three songs that really truly sound like the Boys: the fantastic retro number “Marcella” and the two aforementioned tracks by Mike & Al. And even Mike’s faux gospel is quite a bit out of his usual wheelhouse.

So, it shouldn’t really work. And yet I love this album dearly. Because the Durban Beach Boys era was definitely the most interesting of the band, making them sound contemporary with their era for the first time. Because lovelorn Dennis is always a winner, over-instrumentation or not. Because Mike and Al arguably provide career highlights. And because this exact incongruous nature of ‘So Tough’ gives it an element of, if not anything goes, than a certain je ne sais pas quoi that other albums don’t have. And while I love a lot of it, warts and all, there’s no doubt that the album is far from perfect.

So, does my re-imagining make it so? Of course not, but it's – I hope – a valiant stab at something slightly more coherent. Before 2022’s Sail On Sailor: 1972 box set, there was of course no way to think of making an alternate album for ‘So Tough’. There simply wasn’t any material, even from a band as much and as well bootlegged as the Boys. The Sail On Sailor box set finally unearthed a couple of outtakes, but I decided not to use them. On an album as divergent as this as is, this seemed counterproductive. They will come back into play when I get to my reimagining of Holland as a double album. But that box set notably proposed a number of different mixes for half of the album’s line up. New mixes for the two Dennis numbers strip them of the overcooked orchestration by Darryl Dragon. “Here She Comes” loses its puzzling original mix in which Fataar’s drums occasionally drowned out Chaplin’s vocals. The changes to “He Come Down” seem minor in comparison, going for a 'drier' sound and more focus on the vocals.

Another idea was the need for better sequencing. People who bought this album in 1972 might’ve checked their turntable twice to make sure they put on the good record, when ‘So Tough’ opened first with the uncharacteristic, though possibly prophetic “Mess”, then followed by the decidedly non-Beach Boy-ish “Here She Comes”. So the idea for All This Is That was to frontload the album with the classic Beach Boys sound of “Marcella”, more evenly distribute the two Dennis numbers and give it more coherence by building around the now new title track “All This Is That” as a unifying element. Part of Al’s original demo, based on Robert Frost's poem “The Road Not Taken” gets transformed into the charmingly simple, acoustic “All This Is That” prelude, the reprise at the end is built around an alternative verse and the a capella version.

So, that's it. All This Is That. It really is. Enjoy.