The Beach Boys' other masterpiece: The Beauty of Holland

Holland is the best Beach Boys album post-1966. That is probably only a semi-bold statement. It goes to show that the quality of every Beach Boys album post-Pet Sounds was, uh, variable and quality control was sometimes...lax. But is it frivolous to suggest that Holland is the best Beach Boys album, like, ever?

Conventional rock and roll writing since, uh, well, pretty much the time that Pet Sounds came out tells us so. So let’s call it down the middle and say that Holland is by far my favorite Beach Boys album. I never tire of it, and I don’t need to be specifically in the mood to put it on. Pet Sounds, for all its brilliance, is an album-long mood piece, and it you’re not into some long, bitter-sweet melancholy, you might find yourself pushing it back into the shelf. There’s no question that the best songs on Pet Sounds – “Wouldn’t It Be Nice”, “God Only Knows”, “Caroline No” – beat the stuffing out of most of Holland, because they’d beat the stuffing out of most albums. But overall, the quality of songwriting on Holland is amazingly high, especially considering that Brian Wilson was missing in action for pretty much all of it, and out of it when he was in. And there is an amazing variety on it that the single-mindedness of Pet Sounds can’t compete with. Almost every one of the songs here does something fresh and different, apart from maybe the throwback signature sound of “California”. 

I already mentioned in the write-up for All This Is That, the alternate Carl And The Passions – So Tough, that the “Durban Beach Boys” era including South Africans Blondie Chaplin and Ricky Fataar as band members is easily my favorite. For the first time in years, the band was taking actual risks and ventured into a modernization of their sound. For years they had been running behind, constantly being out of step with the times and prevailing music trends. But put Holland on, without any other information for the prospective listener, and you couldn't tell when it was made. Could it be from 1969? 1972? 1975? 1978? There’s no telling. It’s a fantastic album, top to bottom, and the one time the latter-era Beach Boys sounded of their time. Or timeless.

Holland is arguably the high point for the band as a creative unit. Unfortunately, it was also the end of the road for the Beach Boys as any kind of viable, musically interesting band. The end came swiftly. In late 1972, even before Holland was released, hip manager Jack Rieley was sacked or quit (depending, again, on who tells the story), only to be replaced by Chicago manager James William Guercio (leading to some weird crossover attempts) and finally, the decidedly less hip Stephen Love – yes you guessed it, Mike’s brother. By mid-1973 Chaplin was gone and the last hold-out from this period, Fataar, finally left in late 1974. The same year saw the release and success of Endless Summer – a compilation of their surf’n’car hits – profiting from the nascent nostalgia of the burgeoning me-generation for a simpler time sealed the deal. From that point onwards, the Beach Boys would essentially be a Mike Love-led oldies oriented show band. They perked up briefly in 1979 with L.A. (Light Album), the last Beach Boys album of any worth - and, not incidentally an album with more Carl And Dennis and less Mike and Al - but artistically they were essentially done after Holland. So that album is the testament to the Beach Boys being worthy of acclaim as a band, not just the singers and executors of Brian Wilson’s music. And what a testament it is. 

And yet. And yet. Something about it disturbed me, especially after picking up the very good In Concert album issued in 1973. It’s liner notes mentioned that the extremely enjoyable Champlin-Fataar song “We Got Love” was kicked off Holland at the last second to make room for “Sail On Sailor”, after the Reprise record men complained that “we don’t hear a single”. But they kicked off the wrong tune! Because if Holland has a weak spot, it’s the Chaplin-Fataar song that stayed, “Leaving This Town” with its (to me) slightly tedious and long-winded Moog solo, as well as the tendency for all Chaplin-Fataar songs to run a little long, or at least longer than strictly necessary, due to having extended vamp sections at the end. But that one also has Wilson and Love in the credits (and thus, ready to get royalties), so I can see why “We Got Love” got voted off the album while still giving the two ancillary members a token number.

Luckily for fans, the Beach Boys is one of the most-bootlegged band out there, so two other fascinating Holland outtakes were very well documented: the hot little Fataar-Chaplin rocker “Hard Time” (often called “Hard Times” on bootlegs) and the incredible “Carry Me Home”, a co-write between the South Africans and Dennis Wilson. The story of a dying soldier praying that he – or at least his body – make it back home could have been an unusually timely song for a Beach Boys album had it been included – a moving prayer for the boys and body bags coming back home from Vietnam. But, alas, it was maybe abandoned for that very reason, and I have my suspicion that a stout patriot like Mike Love probably has something to do with it.

This is going to be my second stab at an alternate version of Holland, after a first try as a single album I called Nether Lands a couple of years back, posted somewhere in the comments of a Beach Boys thread on the now dearly departed False Memory Foam Island. It essentially swapped “Leaving This Town” for “We Got Love” and reinstated the two mentioned outtakes, while shortening the long run-out grooves the Fataar-Chaplin team favored to make it work as a single album. But before the release of the big Sail On Sailor – 1972 box set two years ago, that was the best I could do, and I thought I was done with Holland. The box set yielded a heretofore unbooted Carl &The Passions outtake with another Fataar-Chaplin number, “Oh Sweet Something” as well as two versions of an aborted Carl &The Passions number, “Out In The Country”. Plus a wealth of backing tracks, a cappela versions and other tidbits. And the game was on, again...

End of part one.

Yup, folks, we're gonna stop here. The write-up for my alternate version of Holland kept getting longer and longer, slowly but surely marching towards the 2000 word mark, and more and more unwieldy to fit into a single blog post. So I decided to do what greedy Hollywood producers have done for years to double their profits: Split the damn thing in two! So, today's post has the back story and my impressions of Holland and its track selections, while the second part, which will drop tomorrow on these very pages, will have a deep dive into the what's and why's and what-have-you's of my alternate album.  

But, faithful readers, it would be unfair to have you read all my musings and then go away entirely empty-handed with the promise of the good stuff coming tomorrow. So, you'll find attached, as a little teaser, a couple of live "Durban Beach Boys" tracks (not from the official Live album, neither from the box set, I transferred a concert from You Tube, but can't tell you the date or venue) and my NAM Mix of "Carry Me Home", in case you haven't picked that one up with Volume Two of All Pearls, No Swine. 

See you tomorrow for Sail On Sailor, the double album concept record re-imagining of Holland...