Hurry, hurry, hurry, hurry, folks
Step right up to the Beach Boy circus
The best little show in town
Hurry, hurry, hurry, it’s only a dime, folks
One thin dime, just one tenth of a dollar
—“Amusement Parks U.S.A.”
Rock and roll was made in England and America, and you could say that the Beach Boys were made on both sides of the ocean, too. We learned from British bands, and we always played well in the UK and in Australia. Audiences there are more sensitive to artists. They have more love for American music than American audiences do. But we were only ever making American music, which is one of the reasons the end of 2007 was so exciting and rewarding.
One afternoon I came home from a walk in the park (my second walk of the day—I was feeling healthy and clear-headed) and I was watching the news when all of a sudden I heard Melinda scream. It wasn’t a worried scream. It was a happy scream. She came into the room. “Brian,” she said, “you just won the Kennedy Center award.”
“What the hell?” I said. “What for?”
She told me that it was for my contribution to American music and my lifetime achievement in the field. We were invited to Washington to meet with President and Mrs. Bush. I couldn’t believe it. I had watched the Kennedy Center Honors on TV before. I saw when Smokey Robinson was honored. He was such a great songwriter and singer, one of the people in the music world I respected the most. I couldn’t believe that I was in Smokey’s company. Melinda told me the other honorees, and they were incredible company, too: Diana Ross, Steve Martin, Martin Scorsese, and Leon Fleisher.
A few minutes later I remembered that it wasn’t my first trip to the White House. Back in the early ’80s, Reagan’s interior secretary, James Watt, banned the Beach Boys from playing in the White House’s official Independence Day celebration. He said that rock bands attracted the wrong element. All hell broke loose. People on all sides of the issue started expressing their opinion, louder and louder. Finally, Watt got called on the carpet by Nancy Reagan, who said that if we attracted the wrong element, then she was the wrong element because she was a huge fan of ours. That was a surprise to me, though I had heard the Reagans’ daughter, Patti, liked our music. The next thing I knew, President Reagan was inviting us to play privately at the White House. I got to meet the president and the First Lady, and they were so complimentary about our music. I don’t remember whether we met James Watt.
I found myself at the White House again in 2004. My band and I were on the SMiLE tour, and we were playing the Warner Theatre in Washington, DC. Melinda decided she wanted to take a White House tour. I don’t know how she arranged it, but we all got into a car—me, Melinda, Daria, Delanie, Gloria, and Jerry—and we drove to the White House gates, where we were met by a guide. He was a nice young guy, and he took us through the whole place. It was incredible. We walked past the Situation Room. We went to the Press Room and I stood at the podium and did a fake Nixon voice. We went into the Rose Garden and saw the Bushes’ dog, Barney. President Bush wasn’t there during that time. He was in Texas. But I talked to the guide about him. I asked what time he woke up, what time he ate breakfast, and what his favorite breakfast was. I don’t remember the answers. We invited that guide and his family to our show that night.
I wish I had remembered what President Bush ate for breakfast because I could have made a joke about it when we went back to Washington, DC, for the Kennedy Center Honors. It was a few days of events, including a performance, a reception, and several meals. I was staying with the whole family—again, Melinda, Daria, Delanie, Dylan, and Gloria—in an incredible suite at the Mandarin Oriental hotel. All the other honorees were there also, and some other people from my band and my life. Jeff Foskett and his wife, Diana, were there. David Leaf and his wife, Eva, were there. Melinda’s friend Susan was there. Ray Lawlor was there. It was a full group.
I was nervous when we got to the hotel and more and more nervous as the week went on. The night of the White House reception was the worst—I mean, it was the best, but I was the most nervous. I paced around the hotel corridors until it was time to get into my tux. I called Ray. “Come help me get dressed,” I said. He helped with the tie and the buttons and the shirt. It’s really complicated. I didn’t feel completely dressed until Melinda hung the Kennedy Center Honors medal around my neck.
We still had about two hours until the ceremony, so Ray and I went down to the lounge in the lobby in our tuxes. It was an amazing elevator ride. The elevator stopped a few floors below us and in walked Diana Ross and her daughter. “Brian!” she yelled. “Oh my God!”
I yelled back, “Diana!” I don’t think we had seen each other since the T.A.M.I. Show in 1964. That was forty years, which was hard to believe. We had both come a very long way from the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium.
Two more floors and another stop: this time it was Steve Martin and Martin Short. “Hi,” I said.
“It’s the two amigos,” Ray said, and the two Martins laughed.
The last stop wasn’t a Kennedy award-winner, but it was almost better: Cameron Diaz. I remember thinking that first she was in my song—she was in the lyrics of “South American,” on Imagination— and then she was in my elevator.
Ray and I hung out at the lobby lounge drinking Diet Cokes. I talked a bit to Steve Martin. Then it was time to head for the White House. When the limo pulled up, I couldn’t believe it. From Hawthorne to here. I might have even said it out loud. Some men in suits ushered us into a reception area where all the honorees and their families were standing. I don’t think I ever felt so proud. President and Mrs. Bush came around and we were introduced. “I am honored to meet you, Mr. President,” I said.
President Bush shook his head. “No, Brian,” he said. “The honor is mine. I am honored to meet you.” I couldn’t believe it, you know? I remember how gracious the Bushes were to us. They were so nice. The president walked over to Gloria. “Mrs. Ramos,” he said, “would you like me to sign anything for you?” You can’t imagine a nicer guy. And Condoleezza Rice came up to Melinda and me to talk about music—she told us she was a classically trained pianist, but most importantly she was a California girl. She said she was probably going to go back to Stanford when she was done in the government. Then we all had pictures taken with the president and went to the Kennedy Center for the ceremony and performance.
The rest of the night was a blur, though I can pick out moments. Art Garfunkel gave a nice speech about me while a film was shown. The audience gave me a standing ovation. I was focusing all my energy on just keeping it together. It would have been so easy to be overwhelmed. Then people started performing. Lyle Lovett did a great take on “God Only Knows,” and then Hootie and the Blowfish came out and sang “I Get Around.” Then they segued into “California Girls” and I saw all these powerful Washington people act like any other crowd: they started dancing. First it was Senator Ted Kennedy. He stood up. Then the distinguished gentleman next to him stood up. Pretty soon the whole place was rocking. I took a peek over at President and Mrs. Bush, and at Secretary Rice. They were up, too, singing along with every word. Music is bipartisan.
The last act in the tribute show was a boys choir group from England called Libera. They came out wearing white robes and sang “Love and Mercy.” It just kept building and building. Everyone was crying. When they ended by dropping a bunch of beach balls from the ceiling, I could sense how powerful the night was for everyone, not just for me. I’ve had so many great nights in my life, but that was one of the greatest. At one point I scanned the crowd and saw Smokey Robinson on the aisle, half-turned toward me, clapping like hell and smiling.
The idea of America that was part of the Kennedy Center awards was always around the band. One of the Beach Boys’ greatest hits records from the mid-’70s was called Spirit of America. People built their idea of America, especially California, from the things we talked about in our songs. We weren’t the only artists like that, of course. In 2009 I was playing a benefit show at the Count Basie Theatre in Red Bank, New Jersey. The whole time we were playing our show, there was a guy sitting in a folding chair on the side of the stage. I sit on the side of the stage sometimes myself during sound check, so I was paying special attention to the guy. I couldn’t tell who he was at first. I couldn’t see very well from the stage. But he definitely was someone—everyone who walked past him shook his hand.
It turns out it was Bruce Springsteen. He was so quiet there on the side of the stage. It was almost like he was taking notes. At the end of that show, he came onstage and sat in with us; he played guitar on “Barbara Ann” and sang harmonies on “Love and Mercy.” I remember turning and seeing him standing next to Taylor Mills, our pretty blond backup singer, and thinking that all singers have moments when they are just guys (or girls) standing at microphones. It doesn’t matter how famous they are. They still have to go to the microphone and sing. Bruce came by afterward and hung out for a little while. He had really nice things to say about the band and how perfectly it fit the music. He said that the songs were American masterworks. It was nice of him to say. He has written some himself.
After that, after the Kennedy Center, after Lucky Old Sun, Ray was in Los Angeles visiting me. He didn’t bring any pizza that time. We went to the Beverly Glen Deli. That’s where I like to go. I have been going there for at least fifteen years. They have a big diner menu with lots of choices and everything is good. We were eating dinner, and my mind was drifting a bit while Ray talked. I was thinking about movies—first, that movie Educating Rita, with Michael Caine and Julie Walters. He was brilliant in it, I thought. Then I was thinking about On Golden Pond and how strange it must have been for Jane Fonda to work with her dad, and then I was thinking about An Officer and a Gentleman, which had that great song “Up Where We Belong.” Jack Nitzsche, who did “The Lonely Surfer,” cowrote that song. Joe Cocker sang it. Something about thinking about Joe Cocker made me think about “You Are So Beautiful,” and that made me think of an older song, “I Was So Young (You Were So Beautiful.)” It wasn’t a song I knew that well, but I remembered hearing it. It was an early George Gershwin song. That made me think of something else. “Oh, no,” I said.
“What?” Ray asked.
“I signed to do a Gershwin album,” I said. It was a joke, but not completely a joke. I had remembered and then forgotten.
“What do you mean?” Ray said.
“You know, an album of George Gershwin songs that I would arrange and sing. They even agreed to let me finish some of his unfinished songs.”
“That’s great,” Ray said. “That’s awesome.”
I told Ray that I had to go through all the great Gershwin songs and pick the ones I thought I could do well with my voice and my band. I had been talking about the songs with Paul Von Mertens, who was in my band and had ideas about which songs would be best for the project. And then I told Ray what I remembered. “The record company needs the first list of songs I might want to do by Tuesday.” It was almost Tuesday.
We finished up eating and then Ray drove me home. I used to live down near Shaquille O’Neal. I never really hung out with him, but sometimes I would see him getting out of a car or getting into one. Paula Abdul and John Fogerty were near there also. But then we built a house farther up the hill. When we got inside, Ray went right to the computer and started calling out the names of Gershwin songs. “What about ‘Summertime’?”
“Definitely,” I said.
“What about ‘It Ain’t Necessarily So’?”
“I’m not sure about that one.” It wasn’t one of Ira’s best lyrics. It had a dark vibe. But it was a song I liked singing.
“What about ‘I Loves You, Porgy’?”
“Yeah, yeah,” I said. “I have to include that. And it has to be sung a certain way. Are you writing this down?”
Ray turned and frowned at me. “You write it down, Brian. It’s your album. It should be in your handwriting, don’t you think?”
I got a piece of paper and started writing down all the songs that sounded good to me. Ray and I worked on the list until he had to leave that evening to fly back to New York.
The next morning I woke up early and went to look at the list again. But I couldn’t find it. I called Ray in New York.
“Hello?” He sounded tired.
“Ray,” I said, “do you have the list? I can’t find it.”
He sighed. “I’ll retype it for you.”
“And then what?”
“Then I’ll fax it to you.” He paused. “You do know how to use the fax machine, don’t you?”
“Of course I know how to use the fax machine,” I said.
About twenty minutes later, the machine started whirring and a piece of paper came through. I took it out and called Ray back.
“You got it?” he asked.
I said yes.
“So we’re all set?”
“Well,” I said, “I can’t really read it. The letters are so small and I can’t find my glasses. Can you send it back to me with bigger letters?”
Ray hung up while I was talking, but he sent me that second fax, too. The letters were the perfect size. I could read every title. And the best one, the one that I knew would start the album, was right at the top: “Rhapsody in Blue.”
When I started the Gershwin album, Paul Von Mertens worked with me closely. He and I had already talked a little bit about the songs before Ray and I made the list, but we talked about them more and more. We talked about what they meant. We talked about which ones could be rearranged without taking too much away from the originals, and which ones should be done just like they were done originally. We listened to old versions by so many other singers. He helped me decide which songs would work best for my vocal range. Some of them went too high for my older voice, and I’m not even sure that I could have sung them when I was young. Paul, he’s great, and he’s a student of anything Gershwin. He arranged the strings and horns on the whole album. I made some adjustments to them, revamped what he wrote out, but he did most of it. He’s very good. He’s on top of it.
I had Paul Von Mertens. Gershwin had his own Paul. He had Paul Whiteman, a bandleader who played all around the West but came to New York in 1920 to work for Victor Records. He met Gershwin there, and the two attended a jazz show in 1923 with a Canadian singer. I think Gershwin played piano at the show. Paul Whiteman went home from it and had an idea. His idea was to ask Gershwin to make a piece of music that represented America. Gershwin wasn’t sure at first. He thought maybe the idea was too big, and that anything he made would collapse under the weight of it. I know how he felt. But then he read a newspaper article that said Vincent Lopez, another piano player and composer in New York, was about to do his own version, and Gershwin started to think that maybe he should do it. While he was taking a train from New York up to Boston, he let his mind roam around and think about the country and all the things it created even without composers, and how a composer might be able to organize all that energy into a piece of music. The piece came quickly after that, and Ira had the idea of calling it “Rhapsody in Blue.”
“Rhapsody in Blue” was the first Gershwin piece I heard, or at least the first piece I heard that I knew was by him. I might have heard other songs sung by popular singers or jazz singers, but then one day I was at my grandmother’s house and she played a copy of “Rhapsody in Blue,” the Glenn Miller version that he did in 1943. I must have been two or three, which meant that the record was only about a year old. When she played it for me, I was blown away. I was transported somewhere else. I just smiled and listened and tried to take it all in. When it was over, my grandmother asked me how I liked it, and I couldn’t answer. My mother asked me the same thing, and I still couldn’t answer. I guess I was still trying to take it all in. Back then, that’s what I did with music. My mother said that I could hum entire tunes when I was real small. After I heard “Rhapsody in Blue” that first time, I let it play through over and over again in my head until I could hum the entire tune. I liked the way it sounded, and I liked the way it had ideas in it, and I even liked the way he worked with his brother. If I had to pick a favorite section, I’d pick the middle, the prettiest part. The violins had amazing harmonies. He was doing amazing things with the way lines ended, with the way they put themselves down.
At the time, I hadn’t studied Gershwin. I didn’t know anything about how he was born Jacob but called George, the same way his brother was born Israel but called Ira. I didn’t know anything about the Yiddish theater, or what his life was like on the Lower East Side in the early twentieth century, or how he didn’t even start with the piano until he was ten. But I did hear his music, and that taught me one thing early on, which was that music is perfect. It’s sound taken to a higher level. Some rock and roll groups and some rock and roll songs will be remembered. I hope that mine will be. But I am sure that Gershwin will be remembered. His music was very special. He was very advanced musically, ahead of his time. So maybe it’s not just that he’ll be remembered. Maybe it’s that everyone else will catch up to him and start to hear things the way he heard them.
I wanted to show people his ideas when I made the record, but I also wanted to show people my ideas. In a way, the picks that Paul and I made were a kind of second SMiLE, another picture of America but with Gershwin’s puzzle pieces instead of mine. That meant that I had to change things. I did “Rhapsody in Blue,” but I changed it around a bit. The original key was too high. I put it in C, down a bit. I thought it sounded great that way. “I Loves You, Porgy” was a chance to try to capture the mood of a Negro spiritual. I left the lyric in the feminine; some people change the words, but that wouldn’t seem fair to Ira, and I wanted to pay homage to him, too.
At times I went for a summer vibe, not only when it was obvious, in “Summertime,” but also in “I Got Plenty o’ Nuttin’.” Other times it was finding the level of the song, like “Love Is Here to Stay.” It was a real pleasure to sing those melodies. They are sweet and sensitive songs. I sang differently than I did with Beach Boys songs or my own. For “They Can’t Take That Away from Me,” I tried to make my voice convey the main idea, which is that you hold on to what you have tightly. It’s also a shuffle beat, like “Little Deuce Coupe,” so I could get right into it. And on “Someone to Watch Over Me,” we cut it with a harpsichord and ended up close to “Caroline, No” in feel. Going back to Gershwin and American music of that time, I had to pass through lots of the music I made, and that was a real interesting experience.
When I think of an arrangement for a song, I don’t get it down on paper right away. Other people take lots of notes. Paul McCartney did colorful drawings showing where all the instruments should go in the mix; some of them were published in the liner notes to one of his albums, and I thought they were amazing. I can’t really draw, though I sometimes did little drawings for the singles. I drew a transistor radio once for the Mount Vernon and Fairway EP sleeve, and I also drew the sleeve for the “Love and Mercy” single. But I don’t draw so much for my music. It’s mostly mental with me.
I was sitting there at the board. We were doing the Gershwin songs. I was quiet. I didn’t have anything to say really. I was looking straight at the board. Maybe ten minutes passed, though someone told me it was an hour. Someone else said, “We have to get going. What are you doing?”
“I’m working,” I said. I was working out the arrangement in my head. I might lay down a vocal and peel it up. I might turn a track down so I could hear another track in isolation.
Fifteen minutes later I stood up from the board. Maybe it wasn’t just fifteen minutes. I went over to the piano, though whenever I went over to the piano, it wasn’t just to play the piano. It was to sing the melody line and demonstrate the harmonies and show all the parts of the songs. I wanted to make sure that everyone in the studio heard me and understood what I meant. I tried to be specific but not too technical. “I want to get a chunk-a-chunk-a melody,” I’d say. Or I’d do the rhythms out loud: “I want you to play boom, boom—boom boom.”
I could be technical also. I was technical back when we did Pet Sounds, and I was technical sometimes on the Gershwin record, too. When we were recording “Summertime,” I stopped the session on the talkback and told Todd Sucherman, who was drumming, “At the fourth bar of that transition thing, I want you to hit the snare hard three times—boom, boom, boom. Everyone else, drop out.”
We went to Ocean Way Recording in Hollywood, which used to be United Western, for that one. I love that studio because of its design. I was cutting the vocal for “Someone to Watch Over Me.” We went through the first take. “That’s the take,” I said.
Melinda and Mark Linett were there at the studio, and they turned to me with looks on their faces—and not supportive looks. “Why don’t we try another one?” Melinda said.
“That’s the one,” I said. “I can hear it. I’m sure.” They still didn’t look convinced. I used Ray as a tiebreaker. “Ray, what do you think?”
“I think you’ve got a better one in you,” he said.
I tried it again. I’m willing to try.
The two new songs were the most intense. The Gershwin estate let me work with fragments and turn them into songs. One of them was called “Will You Remember Me” and the other one was called “Say My Say.” Scott Bennett wrote lyrics, I added some new melodies, and we turned them into two new songs, “The Like in I Love You” and “Nothing But Love.” I especially liked the lyrics he did for “The Like in I Love You.” It’s a love song, but one that talks about how love is not just one great feeling but lots of little feelings that add up over time.
I see your picture coming through
The story’s always you
It’s more than harmony
When you sing with me
It’s an entire symphony
The other great part of that song was when Scott wrote about the way that ideas happen in art. You have to be willing to look everywhere in your life.
The pain in painting
The muse in music
And the pain in music, too; even though the Gershwin songs could be light and sophisticated, they could also get to some of the scarier parts of life. Some days during the record I heard voices or I felt like I wasn’t completely keeping things under control, and the music really helped me get centered again. Listening to Gershwin’s melodies or even finishing some of them could be as satisfying as writing my own songs. I wondered what would happen if he could come back and hear it. What would he say? Hopefully he’d say that it was great. I hope I did right by him.
Gershwin makes singers. In 2001, during the time of the tribute show to me at Radio City, I made some friends go uptown with me to a cabaret show. I didn’t tell them who we were going to see. It was Rosemary Clooney. She did a record in the late ’70s where she sang Gershwin songs. We didn’t overlap much in our choices, except that we both did “Love Is Here to Stay” and “You Can’t Take That Away from Me.”
Tony Bennett was in the audience. I was in jeans and a flannel shirt. After the concert we went backstage. Rosemary looked up. “Oh my, it’s Brian,” she said. “When are you going to write a song for me?”
“I’ll do it,” I said. “I’ll write a ballad.”
She died not long after that. I didn’t get to write a song for her. But in a way, all the songs are for her. When she did “Tenderly” back in 1956, she taught me how to sing. I’ll never forget it.
The Gershwin project did so well that the record label asked us to do a second album. The record label was Disney, and that led to the idea, which was to take songs from Disney movies and give them the same treatment as the Gershwin songs.
Disney was a big source of everything for me. I remember when Disneyland opened in Anaheim. I was thirteen years old. It was an amazing thing. I remember friends going there. It was like a whole other country inside America, but somehow even more American. I went with Carnie and Wendy when they were little, and I went with Daria and Delanie when they were little. I remember going with Daria and Delanie better. We were coming out of a candy store, and Daria had a big jawbreaker and Delanie had a huge lollipop. I asked them if I could share, and then I took a huge bite out of the jawbreaker and a huge bite out of the lollipop.
The Disney amusement park was a big deal, but the movies were an even bigger deal. The first wave of cartoons came out either before I was born or when I was a tiny baby: Snow White in 1937, Pinocchio in 1940, Dumbo in 1941. Bambi came out in August of 1942, when I was only two months old. I didn’t see it then. But there was another round about ten years later—Cinderella in 1950, Alice in Wonderland in 1951, Peter Pan in 1953—when I was the perfect age, and then more classics in the ’60s, like Mary Poppins and The Jungle Book. Those I remember catching on TV when my kids were little, which is also when I saw some of the movies from the ’40s. One thing those movies did was give audiences great songs. It goes from the newer Randy Newman songs, which blow me away, all the way back to songs like “Baby Mine” from Dumbo. “Baby Mine” was beautiful. It has a beautiful melody and it’s so much fun to sing. It’s one of my favorite cuts on that record. Paul and I did selections and arrangements for that, too, the same way we had on the Gershwin. We tried to find songs that matched my voice or songs where I could match the emotion with a new arrangement.
Because there were so many great Disney songs and so many movies, we tried to go with only one song per movie. That made it kind of hard. There were so many amazing songs that the Sherman Brothers wrote for Mary Poppins, but we picked only “Stay Awake.” That’s my favorite song on the Disney album. I love the chords, and I think my lead vocal is one of the best of my entire solo career. From The Jungle Book, we did “The Bare Necessities,” which was the only song the Sherman Brothers didn’t write for that movie. “The bare necessities of life will come to you”—that really got to my soul. That was written by Terry Gilkyson, who also wrote “Memories Are Made of This,” a great song that was recorded by Dino, Desi, and Billy—a group that Billy Hinsche was in with Dean Martin’s son, Dean, and Desi Arnaz’s son, Desi. I really liked those guys. Two of them were my brothers-in-law; Carl was married to Annie Hinsche first and then to Gina Martin after that. Billy and I wrote the group’s last single, “Lady Love.” That came out in 1970, right around the time Elton John released “Your Song.” That was the only exception on the whole Disney record—not Dino, Desi, and Billy but Elton John. We did two of the songs he wrote with Tim Rice for The Lion King. We did “Can You Feel the Love Tonight,” which was a big ballad we did a little smaller, still keeping the spiritual lyrics, and “I Just Can’t Wait to Be King,” which we did like an early rock and roll song, with a kind of shuffle beat. Those lyrics I didn’t like as much. They embarrassed me. It was way too egotistical. I liked “Colors of the Wind” from Pocahontas. How can the wind have colors? It’s a very pictorial lyric.
We closed the record with “When You Wish Upon a Star” from Pinocchio, which Dion and the Belmonts had covered back in 1960. I had been thinking about their version when I wrote my first song, “Surfer Girl,” and when I thought about it again I realized how important the lyrics were to me. It was one of the songs that had always been with me, ever since I was a little kid. When I showed the track list around, some people wondered if “When You Wish Upon a Star” was my way of saying good-bye to recording, if I was ending things by going back to the beginning. I think they could probably have thought that about almost any final song on any record I could have made at that point. Lots of things seemed like ways of ending.
You’d think that by the time I got to sixty I would have learned everything about singing, but that turned out not to be true at all. I keep learning, and lots of that is about unlearning. Back in the ’60s I was absolutely obsessed with my voice. I was really obsessed with how it sounded, especially the high parts. Now I don’t sing as high anymore and I use it simply as an instrument to communicate love and good vibes. The Gershwin album was a huge help in that way because I was singing songs that so many great singers had done before me, and the Disney album was the same way. Those two albums have some of the best lead vocals I have ever done in my solo career.
The Disney record has one other place where it meets up with the other music I made. There was a song on Surf’s Up called “Disney Girls (1957).” I didn’t write it. Bruce Johnston did. It was one of the songs he did that became the most famous. It wasn’t about any specific Disney girls like Annette or Darlene. It was about how certain parts of American culture were myths that kept people away from reality.
Oh, reality, it’s not for me
And it makes me laugh
Oh, fantasy world and Disney girls
I’m coming back
It was a song about nostalgia, but not necessarily the good part of nostalgia. The guy in the song loves that he can think about Disney and Patti Page and Tootsie Rolls, but those things aren’t really part of his life anymore. The guy is stuck in time and trying to go back to something that wasn’t even real in the first place. I always thought it was a sad song, but a great song. The Disney album I made was different. It wasn’t about the idea of Disney really. It was about all these great songs that happened to be from Disney movies. I could update the songs with new arrangements. I could combine old songs and new songs. No one was stuck in time.
The Disney album was also the final chapter in a run of albums that seemed very different but were all kind of the same thing. Those four albums—the live remake of SMiLE through Lucky Old Sun, the Gershwin album, and then the Disney album—were all ways of looking at America. SMiLE was about how America thought of itself, how it invented itself and what it thought about itself as it moved west. Lucky Old Sun was mainly about California, but it was really about all of America. Gershwin was writing mainly about New York, but he was really writing about all of America. And Disney was something that everyone had in common. The liner notes for the Disney record mentioned that. They said that the record was like a meeting between two people who created America’s idea of California, me and Walt Disney. The cover art showed a surfing van driving toward a sunset, and the sunset had mouse ears like Mickey. It was a little strange.
The Gershwin and the Disney are the solo records I listen to most in the car. I don’t know if it’s because I don’t like listening to songs I wrote or because I love the way I’m singing on those albums, but I like hearing them. I listen to the radio for other people’s songs, too, and every once in a while one will pop up and catch me. Once I was driving with someone, maybe Carnie, and “Baby Come Back” by Player came on the radio. It’s not a band that people remember very much, but I loved that song. That’s how songs work with me. I don’t go by a band’s reputation or how many records they’re selling. I listen for a kind of magic that gives energy to all the people listening. I heard that energy in Michael McDonald, “What a Fool Believes.” I heard it in Diana Ross and in almost every Marvin Gaye song. I heard it in a song called “Pretty Little Angel Eyes,” which was produced by Phil Spector and sung by a guy named Curtis Lee. That was all the way back in 1961. I don’t even know if the guy made other records, but that record was a great one. He was a hell of a singer.
Those are all American singers or groups. I’m not saying that there’s anything wrong with British singers and groups. I loved the Beatles. I loved the Stones. I loved the Who. If “London Calling” was on the radio, I wouldn’t shut it off. But there’s something special about American music that doesn’t try to imitate British music, American music that just tries to be itself. It’s like Van Dyke said about SMiLE. It’s music that doesn’t put its snout in the British trough.