Aretha Franklin, the Beach Boys, and the Lord’s Prayer

More info

By Tom Smucker, author of Why the Beach Boys Matter

Every Sunday at my church we recite the Lord’s Prayer. With minor variations, it’s the most commonly shared liturgy across Christianity and the most familiar direct quote from Jesus in the Bible. It’s also the only lyric recorded by both the greatest vocalist of my generation, Aretha Franklin, and my favorite pop group, the Beach Boys.

Aretha’s voice is such a vast container that her first syllable, “our” sums up all the blues, struggle, faith, and triumph explored in the rest of “The Lord’s Prayer” track from her 1987 live gospel album, One Lord, One Faith, One Baptism. This is the product of skill and musicianship, of course, but it’s something more. Aretha’s singing voice was unique, and when she chose to she could call upon a richness and depth that could sum up the entire history of American music, and to my ears, the entire history of America itself, in one syllable.

So begins this musical prayer, but Aretha is soon at work pulling the phrases apart, altering pitch, timbre, volume, and phrasing, looking for meanings and building the drama. “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven,” through recitation and repetition, has settled into many a Christian’s consciousness as nothing more than a nicely balanced couplet, but Aretha lands on the word “will” and embellishes and repeats the transitional “as” demonstrating a master class of gospel music improvisations, making the earthly struggle for heavenly righteousness a human desire that cannot be taken for granted or ignored. “As it is in heaven” has been reconfigured from a pleasant reassurance to a desperate—and successful—existential search for transcendence.

A similar drama is built into the debtors/sins/trespasses couplet. Aretha lingers on the transitional “who” in “who trespass against us,” pulling an ongoing confrontation with the demonic into the center of this prayer, and again, to my ears, making this King James translation from the book of Matthew a profoundly African American, and therefore American, prayer.

The tension builds as we get to “deliver,” repeated three times, three different ways, before she sings the whole phrase “deliver us from evil.” It is as if Aretha and the choir are moving us out of Egypt to the edge of the Red Sea. When they get to “glory” and the “for” in “forever,” the waters are parting, and we are crossing to a place beyond goose bumps, maybe beyond words, where faith is an achievement wrestled from despair. Aretha, the choir, the song, and the prayer stay at this mountaintop of emotion and spirituality and musical chops for a while, and then settle us back down to earth at the end, a descent that requires at least two Amens.

The Beach Boys’ version of “The Lord’s Prayer” first appeared on the flip side of their Christmas 1963 hit single, “Little Saint Nick,” but it did not reappear on an album until 1983 and, as far as I know, has never been performed in public. Before the era of the CD box set and internet-connected collectors, it was nearly impossible to locate. Back in 1972, when I wrote a two-part article about the Beach Boys for Creem magazine, I had never heard it. Now easily streamed, it maintains its reputation as the high point of Beach Boys acapella harmony, matched only by the wordless vocals of “Our Prayer” from Smile and their sentimental concert staple “Their Hearts Were Full of Spring.”

Recorded in November 1963 shortly before the JFK assassination, and released with “Saint Nick” shortly after that event, this “The Lord’s Prayer” captures a confident New Frontier piety laced with a wistful Beach Boys suggestion that something might be slipping away. Moving around inside the melody, the harmony explores a sophistication, sincerity, and depth in what might otherwise strike some as smug midcentury Caucasian Christianity.

Here Brian Wilson has arrived as the master composer of complex five-part harmony with the Boys as master singers. Drawing from doo wop, pop jazz, girl groups, and mainstream Protestant congregational hymn singing, the Beach Boys musical vocabulary was in place by the time the “Saint Nick/Lord’s Prayer” single was released. For them, a lyric is emphasized when the highest voice in the harmony, most likely Brian, goes even higher, into an expressive falsetto. That peak is reached on the “forgive” of “forgive us our debts.”

In the later, countercultural 1960s, seeking forgiveness may have sounded like a guilt trip sprung by organized religion, but I prefer to hear their 1963 prayer in the context of Aretha Franklin’s version from 1983, hear the white church of New Frontier, Los Angeles suburbia through the music of African American, Reagan-era Detroit. Same prayer, same lyrics, different emphasis. One on forgiveness, the other on deliverance, to my American ears, two pieces of one social, political, religious, racial, and musical puzzle.

Aretha’s first live gospel album, Amazing Grace, recorded in Los Angeles in 1973, was a concert and a celebration from the peak of her cultural power and sold two million copies. One Lord, One Faith, One Baptism, recorded ten years later back in Detroit, post-civil rights, pre-Obama, is a church service and was not a commercial success. A people and a city are under attack, and the long night of de-industrialization is settling across the rust belt, but Aretha celebrates and calls upon the rich legacy and resources of African American spirituality and politics: preachers, politicians, and other gospel singers and musicians.

Unique, it seems to me, among American pop stars, Aretha was able to cross back and forth between secular soul and sacred gospel without incurring the disproval of the saved or the disdain of the defrocked. This says a lot about the breadth of her artistry and the political, religious, and musical pedigree of her family, but it also speaks to the social flexibility inside much of American Black Christianity.

The Beach Boys didn’t inherit a similar institution. The white Protestant Christianity they grew up in proved too brittle to maintain its utility through the turbulence of the next twenty years. But they extracted a valuable resource from this inheritance, the deployment of a wordless vocal chorale that added dignity, maybe even transcendence, maybe love and mercy, to everything from teenage songs about cars to songs about growing old and summer coming to an end. “The Lord’s Prayer” without words, so to speak, would prove to be a piece of white middle-class, midcentury Protestantism applicable to the larger pop culture of the last fifty-plus years, and a recognizable part of the Beach Boys musical signature.

Removed from this religious inheritance, their music, especially their lyrics, can sometimes be misunderstood as simple-minded, shallow, too optimistic. Heard in full, however, they can remind us that an average life contains the sacred and that great art can help us hear that. From different but not disconnected traditions, Aretha Franklin and the Beach Boys draw us towards that wisdom.

www.utexaspress.com

Beach Boys Obscurities, a Playlist by Tom Smucker

Spotify Playlist: Beach Boys Obscurities

for Why the Beach Boys Matter by Tom Smucker

Fifty plus years on, it’s easy to catch the big hits and classic cuts associated with the Beach Boys. But some of the tracks and session outtakes that have received less attention can also add insight into the influences and influence of the greatest American white pop group of the last half of the twentieth century.

Surfin’ An early studio attempt at what became their first release on the independent Candix label, simple acoustic white doo-wop that stumbled upon a metaphoric gold mine—surfing. Postwar lower middle-class suburbia may have been racially segregated, but the airwaves were not, particularly in cities like Los Angeles and New York, where white teenagers could listen to black R & B. Jan and Dean and the Beach Boys were listening and soon collaborating with each other, and with Brian Wilson’s help, Jan and Dean produced the first surfing song to hit the top of the charts, “Surf City.” The origin of this explosion was doo-wop.

Surfers Rule It’s all in place here with the solos, the harmony chorus, the surf guitar breaks, and the over-the-top ecstatic falsetto borrowed from Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons, acknowledged in the last half minute. The Beach Boys would make this falsetto a part of their own musical signature, most famously at the end of “Fun, Fun, Fun.” But Frankie was first.

The Lord’s Prayer The flip side of the “Little Saint Nick” Christmas single, unavailable on an album for twenty years. This song marks the high point of Beach Boys acapella harmony singing and is the tip-off that their vocal inspiration came not only from doo-wop and pop jazz, like the Four Freshmen, but also from midcentury middle American Protestant congregational hymnody. Minus the lyrics, this essential musical reference would reappear throughout their career, most obviously on “Our Prayer” from Smile, first released on the 20/20 album.

In the Parkin’ Lot Here that wordless, post-Christian Christianity frames and thereby dignifies a song about making out in your car before school. Some lyrical interpretation for non-boomers: The couplet “here comes the news/ there’s no time to lose” refers to the format of Top 40 radio in the early 1960s. Obligated by regulation, stations would commonly break for five minutes of news before the hour. So when you heard the news come on, you had five minutes before the bell rang at the start of school.

There’s No Other Like My Baby Like the Beatles, the Beach Boys can be understood as a male girl group, appropriating traditionally feminine-at-the-time attitudes towards romantic idealization, vulnerability, and self-worth. This is a studio outtake from the Party sessions, as they work through the Crystals hit.

Don’t Talk String Overdub Pet Sounds was so dense it put off some listeners, but it pulled in others. Just one little layer here of string-section heaven. For those who got pulled in, dismantling the density on Pet Sounds Sessions turned out to be a moneymaker for Capitol Records in the long run.

Let’s Go Away for Awhile Brian Wilson and his accomplices could quote classical music on Pet Sounds (see preceding track), but the real heart of his genius was the ability to fuse the profound, shallow, vulgar, sentimental, and dramatic on this one instrumental. And oh, the chord changes!

Wind Chimes When I want some perfectly executed, stoner, hippie, late 1960s, Southern Californian pop, my first choice is always something from Smiley Smile, and this is only one example.

You’re Welcome A Smile snippet, the B side of the “Heroes and Villains” single, an oddball, upbeat, minimalist, nearly acapella, vocal harmony gem.

Think About the Days Brian relies on a wordless “Our Prayer”–style harmony vocal to open the 50th anniversary reunion CD That’s Why God Made the Radio.

Pacific Coast Highway Then he sets up the conclusion of the album with this short bit about driving alone in his car along the California coast, watching the sun set over the ocean.

Summer’s Gone The Beach Boys’ most sustainable, reusable metaphor—summer—is refashioned as an autumnal acceptance of the winding down of a career, and perhaps a life. Turn up the volume at the end to hear the waves lapping on the beach.

Guess You Had to Be There Brian teams up with talented young Country star Kacey Musgraves to sing about one wild weekend or Brian’s entire late 1960s biography or both. To my ears, this is the first time a Beach Boy has successfully incorporated Country instrumentation and sentiment into a Beach Boys song. Something new.

Dirty Computer Afropunk goddess Janelle Monae samples Brian and his wordless harmony backgrounds to set the tone on her opening track. Further proof that he is moving from being remembered as chronicler of a specific time and place to an innovator and contributor to pop music as a whole.

Summer in Paradise Meanwhile, the lackluster title track from the out-of-print CD by the Mike Love–led Beach Boys touring band got reworked in concert, and a UK release with an additional verse, probably by Roger McGuinn of the Byrds, became a high point of the Mike Love Beach Boys set list. This live version churns along neatly tying together the Beach Boys idyllic portraits of summers past with a plea for environmental justice. Mike’s Chuck Berry–inspired feel for word play propels the verses leading up to Bruce Johnston’s energized contribution to McGuinn’s verse. Make America Great Again, fight climate change.

www.utexaspress.com