Song Lyric of the Day (The Beach Boys, With “Good Vibrations”)

“I’m picking up good vibrations
She’s giving me excitations.”—“Good Vibrations” (1966), written by Brian Wilson and Mike Love, performed by the Beach Boys

Perhaps no other cultural realm supports Robert Frost’s contention that “Nothing gold can stay” as much as the music industry--and few bands have done so as powerfully as The Beach Boys.

The best of the Beach Boys comes from the poignant sense of a passage in time. Summer doesn’t last forever; the “Surfer Girl” can’t stay young eternally; the Pet Sounds song cycle that started with “Wouldn’t It Be Nice?” ends with “Caroline, No.” Is it any wonder, then, that the group’s production masterpiece “Good Vibrations” reigned atop the Billboard pop charts for only one week, reaching it on this date 45 years ago today?

“We were setting out to create a record that everybody would spook out to,” Brian Wilson told Paul Zollo in 1988. “It would scare people and that would be a really heavy record. And what we did was, we got so into it that the more we created, the more we wanted to create. You know what I mean?”

No, not really. But Wilson, his brains undoubtedly scrambled after years of mental anguish and drug use, did make a kind of sense almost immediately afterward in the same interview collected for Zollo’s Songwriters on Songwriting: “That record came together like nobody’s business. That really was a good record.”

Years ago, I remember, the baseball reliever Mike Marshall tried to analyze strikeout king Nolan Ryan’s success from the point of view of kinesiology. I remember thinking how beside the point it was to deconstruct what really was a phenomenon, maybe even a gift of the gods.

And that is how I feel about Wilson and the creation of “Good Vibrations.” You can talk all you want about the four different studios employed and the textures each created; the double- and even triple-tracking of voices to make them sound like 20 altogether; the use of unusual instruments such as a cello and a theremin; and the care lavished throughout six months of production and $10,000 in expenses—an unheard-of cost at the time.

What remains true, in the end, is that Wilson—in the precious moment before his psyche fractured amid record-company pressures, battles with cousin and group lead singer Mike Love, drug use and residual damage from abuse by his father—seized a creative bolt of lightning and produced textures of voice and instruments that nobody—not even himself—had ever achieved before on the pop-music scene. From what I have seen on You Tube, even his band (and despite Love’s recalcitrance and Brian's absence from the stage, they remained Brian’s) never came close to capturing in concert the same kind of excitement that exploded across the airwaves in late 1966.

The paradox of the Beach Boys and the youth culture they epitomized is that, even as their moment as leaders of pop music passed, they managed to create what Wilson correctly told Zollo two decades later was “an eternal record. Something that will recur in eternity.”

Quote of the Day (Sandy Alderson, on Jose Reyes)

"If you're asking whether I should have sent him a box of chocolates, perhaps I should have done that. On the other hand, the box of chocolates wouldn't have cost $106 million either."—Mets General Manager Sandy Alderson, reacting to star shortstop Jose Reyes’ bewilderment that his longtime team hadn’t really pursued him after he declared himself a free agent, quoted in Adam Rubin, “Reyes-Mets Marriage Reaches Bitter End,” ESPN New York blog, December 7, 2011 post

Sandy, Sandy, Sandy, no need to take Jose Reyes’ jumping ship to the Miami Marlins so personally. Nobody in baseball— heck, no Mets fan anywhere in the world— will blame you for any debacle that occurs this year in Wilpon’s Folly. Any win the team gains this coming season, under the current dire financial circumstances, will be accounted gravy.

In other words, the Wilpons and Omar Minaya built such a rickety organization that you will have a grace period. Or, as expressed by Jon Levin, in a post on the fine Mets-Yankees blog “Subway Squawkers”: “Despite it all, I'll continue to root for the Mets. But I'm beginning to wonder if that's because, to use another quote from Forrest Gump's mother, stupid is as stupid does.”

Photo of the Day: Rockefeller Center Tree

Yesterday I took this photo while out on my lunch hour. One group of visitors after another lined up to get their picture in front of the giant (and, according to the Web site, “now greener than ever”) tree.

Quote of the Day (Garrison Keillor, on the Power of 'Anonymous')

“Without the anonymous author, this country would be a poorer place. Great men would be speechless. Simple directions such as ‘Stop,’ ‘Stir slowly over low heat,’ ‘No Parking,’ and ‘Use only as directed’ would lose their authority if they carried bylines.”— Garrison Keillor, We Are Still Married: Stories and Letters (1990)

Photo of the Day: Ultimate Tree Lights

This is another photograph I took, just before the holiday season kicked off in earnest, near where I work, at New York’s Rockefeller Center.

Quote of the Day (The German High Command, With a Fateful Step Toward the Holocaust, in ‘Night and Fog’)

“Within the occupied territories, communistic elements and other circles hostile to Germany have increased their efforts against the German State and the occupying powers since the Russian campaign started. The amount and the danger of these machinations oblige us to take severe measures as a determent.”— The “Night and Fog” (Nacht und Nebel) Decree, December 7, 1941

For anyone who desires to put December 7, 1941 in a worldwide context, the indispensable place to start is with Stanley Weintraub’s Long Day’s Journey Into War. It shows how the events of that “day which will live in infamy” were experienced not only in Pearl Harbor but in such other diverse places as Washington, D.C., Manila, Moscow, Tokyo, Tobruk, Singapore, London, and Berlin.

It was in the last of these that some of the most chilling moments of that day were experienced, as Adolf Hitler first broke out the champagne to celebrate the attack on the American naval base in Oahu by Axis partner Japan, then took one ominous step closer to the Final Solution with the “Night and Fog” decree.

At first, this key document of the Third Reich sounds like a defensive measure— they’re just trying to defend themselves against those “communistic elements.” But by the time we get to “severe measures,” we realize that the bureaucratese stands for something far more sinister.

The decree (Nacht und Nebel, in German) came from the hierarchy of the Third Reich itself--issued by Adolf Hitler and signed by Field Marshall Wilhelm Keitel, Chief of the German Armed Forces High Command. It called for individuals found to be undermining the security of German troops to be transported to Germany for trial by special courts, thus undermining international conventions governing the treatment of prisoners. Instead of resistance members simply being kidnapped, they would disappear without a trace, in the “night and fog.”

Keitel spelled out the inevitable corollary of this policy in the following passage from a letter he released: “Efficient and enduring intimidation can only be achieved either by capital punishment or by measures by which the relatives of the criminals do not know the fate of the criminal. The prisoners are, in future, to be transported to Germany secretly, and further treatment of the offenders will take place here; these measures will have a deterrent effect because: A. The prisoners will vanish without a trace. B. No information may be given as to their whereabouts or their fate."

　
　

One especially obscene element of this was the measure’s code name. “Night and Fog” had been coined by the titan of German literature, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Its use here reinforces the essential puzzle people have struggled to understand since the 1930s: how a nation of culture— of Goethe, Mann, Beethoven, Haydn, Brahms, Kant, and countless other figures— could have orchestrated this descent into terror.

If Hitler was determined to undermine culture through his appropriation of the term, a French filmmaker evoked the title to use culture as an act of remembrance. Alain Resnais’ short 1955 documentary, Night and Fog, was made only 10 years after the war’s end— at least a couple of decades before literature, film and television began to explore the Holocaust in depth.

Yet, when this film was shown in a high school religion class of mine some 35 years ago, its stark, black-and-white images left all of us silent and shaken— and many of us sobbing— at its conclusion.

Photo of the Day: Site of 1,000 Dreams

Today, Radio City Music Hall is catty-corner from my office, and when I saw several Rockettes outside the legendary entertainment emporium a couple of years ago, they seemed of ordinary size, and less than half my age.

Nearly 40 years ago, however, when I came to the New York City landmark on a class trip, it was entirely different. We were there to catch the movie musical “Tom Sawyer,” starring Family Affair’s Johnny Whitaker in the title role and, as Becky Thatcher, an unknown girl named Jodie Foster.

But I was dazzled by the Art-Deco detail everywhere I looked, and onstage the Rockettes seemed, to a still-pre-adolescent boy, impossibly mature, flamingoes in human form, from another world that consisted of synchronized movement and dazzle.

Obviously, millions have felt something similar, and even more, as testified by the many young women who every year try out for this chorus line and are ready to brave countless hours of bone-weary practice to make their dreams— and awaken those of still more at the annual Christmas show— come true. Not for nothing is this hall one of the iconic black-and-white images in Woody Allen’s famous opening sequence in Manhattan.