Carl & The Passions - So Tough / Holland

The Beach Boys - Carl & The Passions - So Tough / Holland

Carl & The Passions - So Tough / Holland
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CD Details

Artist: The Beach Boys
Edition: Music CD
Format: Original recording reissued, Original recording remastered
CD Release Date: 2000-08-15
Music Label: Capitol
Soundtracks:
Music CD 1
  1. You Need a Mess of Help to Stand Alone
  2. Here She Comes
  3. He Come Down
  4. Marcella
  5. Hold on Dear Brother
  6. Make It Good
  7. All This Is That
  8. Cuddle Up
Music CD 2
  1. Sail On, Sailor
  2. Medley
  3. Steamboat
  4. Only With You
  5. Leaving This Town
  6. Medley
  7. Medley
  8. Mt. Vernon and Fairway
  9. I'm the Pied Piper [Instrumental]
  10. Better Get Back in Bed
  11. Magic Transistor Radio

Music reviews of Carl & The Passions - So Tough / Holland

Music Review: OK by normal standards; bad by Beach Boys standards
Rating: 2 Stars

"Carl and the Passions: So Tough" is more like an EP than a CD, and three of the eight tracks are excellent. Unfortunately, four others aren't just average; they're unlistenable. "He Came Down" is tolerable, but ultimately dissatisfying. The three gems are "Marcella," a great Brian Wilson-written tune that may require a few listens to enjoy, "All This is That," a Carl Wilson/Al Jardine/Mike Love track that requires even more listens before "sticking," and "Cuddle Up," one of Dennis Wilson's best records. Why The Beach Boys stuck such a stunningly beautiful track - think beautiful strings and great instrumentation as a backdrop for Dennis' wonderfully emotional vocal delivery - at the end of a throwaway glorified EP is beyond me. "All This is That," meanwhile, is a great psychedelic tune that's lyrically and musically similar to Carl's great "Feel Flows" from the "Surf's Up" album. The rest of the album? Fahgetabahhhhtit. The Beach Boys would have been much better off saving the three standouts from this "album" and saving them for their next effort, which leads me to ...

"Holland." This is The Beach Boys' most overrated album of all time. It's average. It's OK. It's forgettable. Yet somehow it received good reviews when it came out (and still does). Considering the amount of money the band spent on putting out this record, moving their entire operations to Holland, they should have come up with something better than this. Brian's main contribution, the "Mount Vernon and Fairway" fairy tale, pretty much says it all about how little Brian was able to contribute to the band at this point in the group's career. Sure, he composed the music to the strong "Sail on Sailor," but as most people know, this track was tacked onto the album after label officials heard the album, panicked and approached "Smile" collaborator Van Dyke Parks in search of a single. He had a demo of "Sail on Sailor" featuring Brian and him at a piano, and some who heard this demo say it actually is a lot better than the released version of the song. And some also report that Brian started fiddling around with the production of the track, taking his time with it, and the rest of the band tore it away from him and made it themselves because of the big rush. If that's true, it's awfully frustrating to consider what this track could have been. Inexplicably, "We Got Love," a solid song by black South Africans Ricky Fataar and Blondie Chaplin, both of whom were Beach Boys in the 70s, was bumped from the album in favor of weaker tunes such as "Leaving this Town" and "Only with You." "We Got Love" does appear on "In Concert," and it's a great song. After "Sail on Sailor" comes "Steamboat," a drunken-sounding Dennis song that plods along dreamily with Carl's great voice as a buoy. The self-indulgent "California Saga" follows, and it typifies the album: decent in some parts, but forgettable. Mike Love's "Big Sur" in its original form was a good, psychedelic-sounding song with a different beat and backing vocals washing over Mike's voice. Here, it's a minimal, country-sounding track that makes anyone who's heard the original wonder why it was rewritten. Listening to "The Beaks of Eagles" is like being dragged to a bad poetry meeting. "California," meanwhile, actually is decent, bolstered by some of Al's best songwriting, a wonderful chorus and pretty good lyrics. Then comes the bipolar "The Trader," which starts in pedestrian form, stops and switches into a beautiful, meandering piece that seems unrelated, both musically and lyrically, to the first passage. "Leaving this Town" and "Only with You" follow, and both are boring enough to bring back memories of "Carl and the Passions: So Tough." The final track before the fairy tale, "Funky Pretty," is another decent but forgettable song. Then comes the horror. Brian Wilson has created some jaw-droppingly good music in his lifetime, but "Mount Vernon and Fairway," which is divided into several almost unlistenable tracks, ain't among them. It's not that he hadn't matured into a great songwriter or had lost his abilities - the fact that he had created "Pet Sounds" and much of "Sunflower" and had yet to create "The Beach Boys Love You" proves that he still had his "good stuff" - but one can't help but get the sense that Brian got awfully bored over in Holland, and the result is this. If one takes the three strongest songs off of "Carl and the Passions" and lops off the last three songs of "Holland," along with all of the fair tale, and jumbles the track order, the result is one pretty good album. Divided they fall, though, and fall hard. It's especially strange that these disappointing albums come between better work ("Sunflower" and "Friends" on one end, and "Love You" and "M.I.U. Album" on the other). Don't get me wrong; these two CDs would be great by most other bands' standards. They just don't quite make the grade by Beach Boys standards.

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Description of Carl & The Passions - So Tough / Holland

(5256942)
If the uneven Sunflower and Surf's Up albums demonstrated the Beach Boys resolve to soldier on despite the largely AWOL status of Brian Wilson, their founder and troubled creative mainstay, 1972's So Tough showed how quickly their own disparate instincts could lead to a creative face-plant. Though not nearly the train-wreck its dismal reputation might lead one to believe (its original distributor thought so little of the project that it was packaged as a two-fer with a reissue of Pet Sounds). The album's R&B/gospel sensibilities seem woefully misplaced, while "Marcella" shows just how willing the band was to beat a hasty retreat into comfortable nostalgia. The good news was that Tough was only eight tracks long. Given that background, 1973's Holland seemed like a minor miracle. Possessed of a melodic sense and muscular musicality that the faithful must have given up for dead, the great "Sail On Sailor" leads the way to one of the band's best post-'60s efforts. Bolstered by new bandmates Blondie Chaplin and Ricky Fataar (the latter would become a cult hero as a member of the Beatles-parodying Rutles) and a change of recording venue (hence the title), the Beach Boys attacked Carl Wilson's "Trader," Dennis Wilson's "Steamboat," and other group standouts like "Funky Pretty" and "Leaving This Town" with a vigor and self-assurance they hadn't shown in years. It even overcomes Mike Love's ham-fisted attempt at eco-awareness, the musical triptych "California Saga," and the strange, spoken-word children's tale "Mt. Vernon and Fairway," highlighted only by Brian Wilson's fleeting presence. Both albums are newly remastered on two discs. --Jerry McCulley

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