From the “Idea That Was Pure Dumb Genius But Didn’t Sell Because It Was More Pure Dumb Than Pure Genius but in the End Isn’t Half Bad” Files, I give you The Beach Boys’ positively perverse 1968 LP Stack-o-Tracks.
Because The Beach Boys aren’t on it! Brian isn’t in his room on “In My Room”! The room is empty!
Here’s the pitch for Stack-o-Tracks. Have you ever wished Brian, Carl, Dennis, Al, Mike, and Bruce had just shut their traps and let YOU do the singing? And put down their instruments and let YOU do the playing? If so, Stack-o-Tracks is your man. Because what Stack-o-Tracks gives you are the backing tracks of fifteen Beach Boys songs, along with a booklet with the bass lines, lead lines, chords, and lyrics. Talk about your concept albums with an actual purpose. Stack-o-Tracks makes YOU the star! It’s your chance to shine, to leave Brian, Carl, Dennis, Al, Mike, and Bruce in the dim shadow of your radiant genius!
It’s as if Lou Reed had included guitar lines and lyrics for Metal Machine Music! But Lou was never that smart.
It’s right there on the album cover: “You sing the words and play with the original instrumental backgrounds to 15 of their biggest hits.” A few things should be said here. First, the LP was released in Duophonic, the pleather to the leather of true stereo. And despite its manifest unpopularity—it’s one of only two Beach Boys records that failed to reach the pop charts—Capitol Records saw fit to re-release it on CD, twice, but in both cases without the booklet with the lead lines, chords, lyrics, and what not. Talk about leaving you high and dry. You’re going to have to find the album, and you can forget about the European versions, because all they give you are the lyrics.
If the album flopped, it was only because I wasn’t head of marketing at Capitol Records at the time. What I would have done, promo genius that I am, was turn the album into a contest, with one lucky random buyer winning a fabulous reward. Namely, The Beach Boys would have come to their house and sang and played over the backing tracks, perhaps with one or two of Dennis Wilson’s Manson Family girls in tow! The album would have flown off the shelves! Brian Wilson may have showed up at your house wearing a fireman’s helmet and a bathing suit! You could have listened to the guys do their thing while the Manson Girls told you all about Charlie. Hell, maybe Charlie would have come too!
That “15 of their biggest hits” is a dubious claim—I see a lot of B-sides (including 1965’s “Let Him Run Wild,” supposedly one of the first songs Brian Wilson wrote under the influence of demon marijuana) and such undistinguished fare as the 1965 shout-out to the band’s many Utah fans “Salt Lake City” and 1963’s “Catch a Wave” (which Jan and Dean reworked into “Sidewalk Surfin'”—and scored a hit!). The LP also includes such relatively successful but hardly household names as 1967’s “Darlin’” and 1968’s “Do It Again.” You get many of the ones we all know and love as well.
But the real question is this—is there any reason to own this album? I would have said no way, waste-o-moolah baby, but then I listened to it, paying it only half the attention it deserved, and in paying it only half the attention it deserved realized it wasn’t half bad—that I was actually subliminally enjoying myself. So I listened to the LP more closely and I’ll be damned if it doesn’t have its charms.
Some of these songs hit you like stripped-down instrumental Burt Bacharach—see, for instance, “Let Him Run Wild” from 1965’s Summer Days (And Summer Nights!!) or the 1968 standalone single “Do It Again”; others have a raw rhythmic drive that pushes you along whether you want to be pushed along or not—just check out 1964’s “Little Honda,” which includes some feedback howl you won’t hear on the full-fleshed version or 1968’s very groovy “Wild Honey,” which is all electro-theremin, tambourine, and bongos.
Stack-o-Tracks is definitely a hit or miss proposition—it’s shameful the way the propulsive “Catch a Wave” is undone by inexplicable washes of strings, and the Herman Munster organ doesn’t help either. And “Here Today” drowns in horn blare. “Salt Lake City” is a surprise winner—it’s all drive, piano and horns, with a delicate guitar figure and short bit of sax blurt. And it just gets bigger and bigger as it goes along. “Sloop John B” is pure pleasure and a thing of beauty, especially when the drums come along to give it a push. The horns are nice too. The driving “Do It Again” is as stripped down as they come, that is until this quiet passage comes along only to pushed aside by the big drums and a really cool guitar solo—and here I thought we were the guitarists!
“Wouldn’t It Be Nice” is lovely, and comes complete with the horns; “God Only Knows” still packs a punch, even with Brian’s plaintive vocals gone MIA. “Surfer Girl” is late-night beach bonfire groovy, with the guitar line coming along to add texture. “Darlin’” is all rhythm track and galloping horns, Burt Bacharach with balls. “In My Room” is perfect midnight mood music marred only by an early wash of Mantovani strings. And then there’s “Little Saint Nick,” which comes complete with some buried nonsense singing but comes up a winner thanks to that pounding piano. And the vocalists finally come up for air with a final “Aaaaah, Merry Christmas baby.”
What would have been really cool is if this baby had been a three-album deal, with these tracks on one disc and the vocal tracks on another disc and the rest of the stuff on the third, because then you could have put one record player in the living room and another record player in the kitchen and a third record player in your bedroom and played them simultaneously, so that it sounded like the Beach Boys had literally infested your house and you’d have to hire a fumigator to get rid of them!
What amazes me about Stack-o-Tracks is that it’s not a throwaway, that despite all the amputations (thanks Lou) its denuded tracks stand up more than you could ever imagine they would. Would I listen to it when I could listen to the finished products? The answer, shockingly, is yes. Stack-o-Tracks makes for great background music, and it’s uncannily hypnotic. It’s a curiosity and record label cash-in for sure, but that doesn’t necessarily make it a rip-off.
On Stack-o-Tracks The Beach Boys show you how the sausage is made. But who would have guessed that listening to the sausage being made could be a pleasure?
GRADED ON A CURVE:
B
