The Confluence of Albums and Basketball Teams: Criteria, Justification, and "Pet Sounds"

My friend (and editor at the Gothic Ginobili) Aaron contractually obligated me to write this piece after another 3000-word unpublishable rant about stats. He says that all my pieces are basically just Lovecraftian ramblings about Richard Jefferson and the "untold nature of numbers" (my words, not his). Guilty. This is... actually a good point, Aaron. You're right. I need to loosen up. Heh. So, *sigh*, here's a possibly-viral, reader-friendly post for all the music lovers out there! I was thinking about how musical albums (like LPs) would translate to basketball teams. There are several modes of analysis we can use to base a sane comparison on. After all, consider the following:

• Depth- how many songs are good? How many songs are playoff good?
  • Numerically this works seamlessly. Most teams have about 10-15 players and most albums have about 10-15 tracks (and in both cases a typical listener's playing time for each song will be proportional to that song's quality, with the last few often being skipped entirely in both cases). What is the distribution of the album's quality?
  • Playoff depth? How many players would you honestly trust to start or finish the Western Conference Finals? Not so fast, Ramon Sessions, even though we all love you. How many songs would you honestly listen to on their own for pleasure? Not so fast, "That's Not Me" from Pet Sounds (okay, situationally, sure, sue me, I'm nostalgic). Not so fast, 2nd-best George Harrison song on a Beatles album (except Here Comes the Sun)! How many songs would you trust with your life?
• Good Fit/Chemistry/Variety between the players (especially when it comes to the role players) is essential when talking about the greatness of teams.
  • This can mean fit caused by track ordering/lineup tandems (see side B of Abbey Road).
  • But it can also be fit caused by inherent chemistry (for example, between a offensively-limited stopper and a ball-dominant volume-shooter). To keep with the Beatles' example, "Revolution #9" and "Good Night" from the White Album are both very good songs, in my humble opinion  But they work especially well in that specific order: the transition from one to the other is epic and shows a deep understanding of how to use those two songs in the lineup.
  • "Fit" means that players can be put in lineups that play better than the sum of their parts, but it also means that the team has a diverse skillset of pieces for matching up against any opponent (or any adjustments that opponent might make). The players can "fit" into any basketball puzzle needed of them. The musical equivalent to this is to have a range of styles, aesthetics, moods, lyrical modes, chords, etc. Basically the questions boil down to "Is this a versatile album to listen to in a variety of situations?" Like: Would you put a stretch of this album on in your friend's car (sorry, Pet Sounds/2003 Spurs/2011 Mavericks)? Would you listen to this album alone if you were feeling depressed (sorry, Rush, but come on, you are a silly band. You are a silly band to like [I'll call you back when I'm better I will meet you and we will get ice cream together you are so funny, Rush, I didn't mean to hurt your feelings]. Sorry, Ringo [except for the devastatingly sad "Don't Pass Me By". Dead serious])?
• Star quality:
  • What do the stars do? Do they have a simple game or are they multifaceted? Are they just very good players or are they transcendent, once-in-a-lifetime, impossible-to-replicate players? Are they conducive to building a great team or are their talents actually a limiting factor in the team's ability to attain greatness?
  • What do the best songs do? Are they simple or musically complex? Are they simply very good or are they transcendent masterpieces? Is the song conducive to building a great album around or do they call undue attention to themselves and fit poorly with the other songs on the album?
• Offense vs. Defense - Offense is musical creativity, defense is musicality. Sue me, the metaphor falls apart here. I'm not going to rely on this except as a sort of semantic tie-breaker. Bob Dylan's mid-60s output is a balanced two-way team, not too great in either.
• Pace - pace is pace. Err... I mean tempo is tempo. Possessions per minute is beats per minute. But possessions aren't beats. There you go.
• Historical Success. What did this team/album do? Did it never win any championships but everyone that watched them won championships of their own? Sup, SSOL Suns (thanks, Bill Simmons, for that prenatal article premise, by the way).

This is gonna be a series, usually covering albums I've listened to dozens (if not hundreds) of times: Today I'm gonna review The Beach Boys' Pet Sounds, later I'll probably do such masterpieces as Songs In The Key of Life by Stevie Wonder, Trout Mask Replica by Captain Beefheart, That One Pretty Good Kanye Album That Everyone Pontificated About, Especially Kanye, by Kanye West (or My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, as it's more commonly known), Moment of Truth by Gang Starr, and, finally, the greatest album of all time, which is, of course, Om by John Coltrane.

The Beach Boys, Pet Sounds

I chose Pet Sounds deliberately because it's the trickiest album out there to suss out, in terms of quality and comparisons. Certainly one of The Albums, a pantheonic tour through Brian Wilson's mind (but supplanted by Wilson's aborted SMiLE album), this album is not only meticulous and successful in production song-by-song, but also in how the songs fit together to form a sort of melancholy, yearning, vulnerable mood. Wilson described SMiLE as a "teenage symphony to God". And despite Wilson's new harmonic and production sophistication, Pet Sounds is an album at its core about the adolescent experience.

But for all its production mastery and success with musical forms, it's hard to show this album to others. It's hard to say "now we (or I) should listen to this album for an hour". It's not that kind of an album. It's the kind of album where you get into a specific, eclectic mood and the only thing you want to do is soak up the conveyance of another's emotions for awhile. You can't listen to it as music for its own sake, so to speak; whatever that would mean. Every song is ridden inescapably with mood and emotion, and all those jazzy Bacharach minor seventh chords and Four Freshmen vocal harmonies don't allow you to naturally focus in on any one musical element. You can't sing the lyrics if you don't intuit the harmonies. You can't intuit the harmonies if you don't hear the melody. And so on. The end result of all this is that Pet Sounds gives the listener a coherent, unique experience of music, emotion, and moment, an experience that has no analogy in other music or other life experiences, an experience filled with mourning, joy, and the melancholy ambience of an introspective moment arrested in and out of time.

Depth - 10 or so ballads, 2 instrumentals, 1 upbeat reworking of the folk song "Sloop John B". This is the first major wrinkle in the comparison framework: Most of the songs individually are not exceptional - I've probably played them each about 80 times, and they all hold up, and none of them is unpleasant, and none of them outstays its welcome. But really, how many playoff-ready songs are there? Again, would this song start in the Western Conference Finals of your soul?

1. Wouldn't It Be Nice: Heaven on Earth, harmonic and melodic complexity, choirboy sensibility, sweet, innocent, beautiful lyrics. Masterpiece. Moar, plz. Historical-level Franchise Player.
2. You Still Believe in Me: Innocence, vulnerability, that one bike horn sound that melts my heart, great situational value. Great role player. Could start in right situation.
3. That's Not Me: Works in the context of the album, and a neat confiding song. Captures the soul of adolescence. Kind of weak musicality, and not especially good creatively and lyrically. Eminently competent, but I just skipped it. No mercy. Sasha Pavlovic.
4. Don't Talk (Put Your Head on my Shoulder): Amazing the depth this team has. At worst a third-ballot HOFer , maybe knock off a half a point from a first-ballot because it doesn't grab you as a masterpiece the way "Wouldn't It Be Nice" and "God Only Knows" do - it is a masterpiece, even though it's harder to convince your friend in a car that *THIS* of all the songs in the world is your favorite. Immense musicality and sentimentality - makes the game of music simpler and the rest of the album immensely better. Prime Ben Wallace or Manu Ginobili, maybe? Someone that's only on the bench because of a historically deep frontcourt in the lineup. Put it this way, if this album doesn't have "Don't Talk", the whole ordering has to change. This 2-6 rotation suddenly seems a lot weaker, and "Sloop John B" is a prop-up for a relative snoozefest of role-players.
5. I'm Waiting For The Day: Sneakily decent song, but whose appeal mostly turns on a cutesy turnaround from sentimental recounting of a rebound romance "He hurt you then but now that's done/I guess I'm saying you're the only one" into a subversive grin of rationality "You didn't think/That I would sit around and let him work?" Really depends on the album for its likable cleverness and good vibrations (sorry). J.J.Barea, maybe? 
6. Let's Go Away For Awhile: 1986 Bill Walton - spells the starters fantastically well as an instrumental, very solid musically and has a complex, adaptable skillset, you might want it closing an album on a whim occasionally. Still seems like a neutered, formulaic version of a more Pantheonic song... Wouldn't start on a true contender, though.
7. Sloop John B: The record company added this fast-paced, actually-kind-of-trippy folk number about a sailing trip (a "sloop" being a type of boat) to the middle of the album, much to Wilson's bleeding-heart-artist chagrin. Wilson thought it broke up an album of beautiful ballads, his teenage symphony to God spoiled forever! But really, suck it up, Brian, you still had the Wrecking Crew, and those great vocal harmonies! It sounds fine! (I kinda see Brian's point, though it's more like a different look, then a better/worse proposition). Sou desu ne~ as they say. Let's say Prime Amar'e Stoudemire. Complicating matters is that it is legitimately one of the best songs on the album.
8. God Only Knows: Read the paragraphs about "Wouldn't It Be Nice" and "Don't Talk" above. This is better than the things I said about both those songs. Total tour de force. We're talking that Magic triple-double as a center. We're talking 2003 Duncan. We're talking 1977 Bill Walton. And so on. We don't even need to elaborate on this (though the fact that I'm me and this is the Gothic Ginobili compels me to elaborate anyway). But just listen to it in a darkened room. Absolute bliss, at least for me. I'll go specifically with 1978 Walton (you know, the one that went 50-10 and then got injured the rest of the way but still won MVP) because it's tinged with clinging melancholy. Even though "God Only Knows" is a standard and a quintessential love song, the song resists all cliche in Tony Asher's lyrics. A lot of people know that the song starts with "I may not always love you" (which is immediately turned around, anyway), but what about the more straightforward fact that the song's chorus is "God only knows what I'd be without you"? Like, the song has a sweet, assertive melody, but the lyrics recast "God Only Knows" as an anthem of dependence at its core, filled with all the duende and unfairness of the blues that recognizes that even the truest love will pass and take away any meaning to life in its passage, just like Bill Walton after his injury, at least for awhile (read "The Breaks of the Game" for this and many other wonderful details). Anyway, yeah, comparison to basketball. Back to that. Heh.
9. I Know There's an Answer/Hang On To Your Ego: It's the same song but (as I recall) lead bass vocalist Mike Love had a well-meaning insistence that the chorus be changed from the second one to the first one (to sound more like an introspective song and less like a drug song). Yeah. Anyway, either way, it's a superb song that fits into the general theme of the album. Wouldn't listen to it as a standalone, though. 2012 Danny Green/Kawhi Leonard come to mind. Basically, couldn't be a good starter, but does enough things and meshes well enough to justify a start.
10. Here Today: holds up well as a relatively fast-paced song, an ode to how fast love comes and goes. It's not "Now Ella Fitzgerald will record this standard"-quality, but it's not filler, either. Impermanence neatly sets up the next (and altogether superior song)... this is your proverbial 12th-man, though. Human victory cigar that's well-liked by everyone involved. Ends up writing the expose and becoming the primary source for the star's personality. Maybe hits an important shot here and there. Steve Kerr on the Spurs and Bulls comes to mind. Brian Scalabrine isn't good enough at basketball.
11. I Just Wasn't Made For These Times: A guy is too smart for his own good and can't put it all together and can't find anyone to help him - for all of Brian Wilson's greatness, this is maybe the most biographical song he's ever written. The soul of the album, featuring the famous theremin solo. The song is as good as the mood you're in, but undeniably has a feel for the game and fantastic musicality (including some rarely-taken, chromatically-dazzling 9th chords!). I'll go with Stephen Jackson (not because S-Jax is that guy, but because Jackson is the soul of his teams, for better or for worse)
12. Pet Sounds: An instrumental that served as Brian's entry into a James Bond theme song contest, apparently. The title track is actually one of the understated masterpieces on here. But it doesn't really serve any purpose except as a set-up for taking "I Just Wasn't Made For These Times" home into the final track. Feels like the best song on a Bix Beiderbecke or Chet Baker or Dave Brubeck or a Miles Davis album, if you get me. Wonderful, but in this album feels more like filler. It's a fantastic rhythmic exploration that comes and goes, would probably have become a jazz standard (or the iconic version of one, but it was underutilized (but used in its role effectively)). 2011 James Harden?? 2003 Manu??
13. Caroline, No: total masterpiece (it might seem like I'm throwing this word around, but Brian Wilson is one of my favorite songwriters and he was at or near his peak in the Pet Sounds era), saddest track on the album, makes you question everything you knew about the depths of human misery, brings the album to a close in the most melancholy way possible, evokes a more innocent, simpler past in a way that speaks to a sad and uncertain future, for both the listener and for Wilson himself, who would (soon after the release of Pet Sounds) go into a long, reclusive period of drugs and mental illness after a burst of initial genius that in its output rivals or surpasses the mature work of master songwriters like Hoagy Carmichael, Harold Arlen, and Burt Bacharach. Err... I hate to do this, but remember, I said uncertain, not certainly devastating. I'll go with 2012 Tim Duncan for his yearning, defensively masterful series against the Thunder in a losing effort.

Fit/Chemistry/Variety: Excellent, but not for a wide variety of situations. The album has a good flow to it, where a lot of the songs sound very similar, but there's enough within-song variety and enough change-ups that you probably won't get sick of the album on account of sheer musical flow and musical variety (note the modifiers). Songs follow one another and the album to the point where you can make sensible "narrative" conspiracy theories. Oh, it's a concept album in the mold of Blake about innocence and innocence lost! Or maybe Brian is writing the song about a single romance he had, that goes through various phases as they change in life (a sort of musical "Annie Hall"). The point is... you have to stretch that kind of a thing... but not that far, and that's a promising sign that the album contains a good amount of good album structure.

Now, the album's flow and coherency are obvious and the musical variety is there even if it's not central. On the other hand, the emotional and situational variety are simply missing from Pet Sounds. Variety, in this sense, is not a strength fro the album. Every single song is somehow melancholy, even "Sloop John B", and this is maybe the album's defining characteristics, once you get past the overwhelming first impressions of musicality, creativity, slowness, and general sadness. I mean, unlike any other Beach Boys (or Brian Wilson solo, for that matter) album out there, Pet Sounds is the single, glaring sunspot of deadening humorlessness. There are only fleeting moments of humor here, if any. The net effect is to take life very seriously: You will feel uncannily like you're in the same room with an especially Tim or Jeff Buckley on an especially serious day and they are talking about dying young. Pet Sounds, if I'm not making this clear already, is seriously psychologically energy-draining to listen to, and not just because "Caroline No" might make you want to curl up in a bunch of blankets and watch "Annie Hall" a hundred times until you die from starvation or drown in your own tears. No, you invest yourself in this album emotionally and you engage it, and it takes you somewhere. It doesn't beat you over the head with break-up songs (there's not a single pure break-up song on here). Instead, Pet Sounds just beats you over the head with the talking points of vulnerability, dependence, impermanence, and the fact that you will never, truly, go home or fit in anywhere and neither will anyone else you will ever meet, that we're all alone and there's nothing anyone can do about it ... so much so that you feel like you just got rejected by this album. The fact that the album is "useful" only for managing either effusive joy or great sadness (which are equally dangerous) in an introspective way, is at once the basis for the album's coherency and its limited situational appeal. Pet Sounds needs to be put together that way to be fully effective with its pieces (cf. 2012 Spurs). Lucky for Brian (or unlucky, actually) we generally don't game-plan as a society against the depressive mood.

Star Quality: Oh, man, did you see me raving about "Don't Talk", "Wouldn't It Be Nice", "God Only Knows", and "Caroline No"? . Yeah, the only problem with that starting foursome (fifth starter is, oh, let's say, Sasha Pavlovic)... is the minor issue that they all require one another and the team of Pet Sounds to be fully actualized... In the sense that while Bill Walton might have been right when he raved about the 1977-8 Blazers of Lionel Hollins, Mo Lucas, and Dave Twardzik, etc.... it's also true that that team seemed precisely constructed to make each of those players as fine and as dominant as he could possibly be. Like, you don't have to search far to find Bill Walton raving about Mo Lucas' toughness, but Lucas' ahead-of-his-time floor-spacing and tenacity never quite translated to a transcendental force on other teams. It's easy to make everything about Bill Walton, here (or about "God Only Knows"), but what do you do with Rick Barry quotes calling them "maybe the most ideal team ever put together"?

Overall, the album fits together extremely well, as we've already established. But its stars don't stand alone. The non-"GOK" stars are more "no-stats all stars" like Shane Battiers and Bill Russells than LeBrons and Wilts whose goal is to minimize redundancy and maximize situational impact. In the second FreeDarko book, the illustrator showed the 1960s Celtics as a literal machine. And the stars in this are "album stars" as much as individual "song stars". Sure, if Brian produced it and marketed it differently, "Don't Talk" is a #1 standard. But then it wouldn't have been quite as special in the context of the album, or when recalling the song (after all, one of the reasons for Brian's obsessive level of production is that it's devastating to a song's posterity if people have bifurcating memories of a song, one much better or worse). What I'm trying to say here is that the stars are more like Manu, Sam Jones, late-period Kevin Garnett/Tim Duncan, James Harden, Scottie Pippen, and other players that we tend to forget existed or thrived, relative to their level of success.

Offense vs. Defense: Pace is slow, so this is certainly a half-court team. But it's a good halfcourt team. And well-coached on both ends. If you've never read first-hand accounts of Brian Wilson in the studio, here's the short version: He knew his stuff and didn't waste time. The closest he came to wasting time was recording the jazz standard "Stella By Starlight" as an experiment with the Wrecking Crew (LA's premium musicians). Despite Brian's professionalism, he was well-liked and incredibly knowledgeable, rewriting hooks on the fly, chasing a vision that he knew was there, and getting the most out of musicians (and making sure they knew their cues and making sure they knew he knew every cue, too). Then he went home and gathered some hippies and they smoked grass and talked about philosophy in a sandbox and a makeshift teepee in his LA house.

Stop me when you think of Phil Jackson. Yeah, Brian Wilson probably gave the Wrecking Crew books he thought would open their minds. Like Jackson, Wilson was also notoriously ego-filled and competitive in addition to being spiritual and musical-wizard-like in his intellect.

Pace - Pet Sounds is nearly always slow, with one speedster ("Sloop John B") coming off the bench to provide a not-particularly-defensive spark that the coach never plays, specifically because that coach hates fun. This speedster's only purpose is to cleanse the visual palate of the viewers and give the fans something to be happy about besides raw contention. Mike Brown or Larry Brown definitely coached this album. Patty Mills is the speedster. Mike Brown is frowning at a beautiful penetrate-and-kick by Mills and waving to Sasha Pavlovic to spell Patty immediately for "defensive purposes" (and, as a bonus, because it gives Mike Brown an excuse to preen salaciously about the bench and luxuriously exercise his massive mouth).

Historical Success: Won one championship, then flamed out immediately because of injury and/or drugs. Blazers, Blazers, Blazers. Maybe 1986 Celtics in terms of the arc, depending on how closely you identify the 1981 C's with the 86 C's and how closely you identify "Lonely Sea" and "Fun Fun Fun" with "Don't Talk".