Shelter in Playlist: “Do It Again”

This summer, I’m going to make playlists and write about them. Here is the first entry about a series of tracks of I’m calling “Lovestuck.” Hope you enjoy.

“Do It Again – A Cappella,” The Beach Boys

Beach_Boys_Good_Vibrations_from_Central_Park_1971
The Beach Boys performing in Central Park, 1971. Image courtesy of Wikipedia.

We open with a track from I Can Hear Music: The 20/20 Sessions, a collection of demos and backing tracks from 1968, re-released in 2018. When I found it I knew immediately it would set the tone for this playlist. Regardless of how much a listener knows about the Beach Boys, “Do It Again” would strike anyone as inspired by nostalgia. The speaker mentions “old friends” in the first line, and is immediately overpowered by memories of “girls we knew,” when “the beach was the place to go.” It’s “automatic,” he says, this longing for the past, triggered by conversation.

On the Beach Boys’ real timeline, these were the words of Wilson cousin and bassist Mike Love, harkening back to innocent, sunkissed hits like “Surfin’ USA” and the charmed life from which these songs were inspired. Like their Brit-rock counterparts, 1968 rolled off the wake of a period of experimentation and failure for the Beach Boys, their most creative members weathering difficult public transformations, romances, and substance abuse issues. For our country, 1968 meant a spike of US-led aggression in Vietnam, the assassinations of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Bobby Kennedy, and the violent battle between police and protesters in Chicago. The optimism of post-war America was fading and twisting, dissolving the utility of “peace and love” as a viable safety net against racism, corruption, war-mongering, and greed. Like other 1968 hits like “People Got to Be Free” and “Those Were the Days,” the plea of “Do It Again” is tragic because it is futile. You can’t go back, Brian and Mike. No matter how much the song resembles the hits and of the early 60s, the band would leave the studio and walk into a chaotic 1968 world. The desperation for the past as utopia is palpable. It wasn’t even the end of the decade and already the culture was looking back, longing. Reminds me of the evolution of 2000s hipster culture, with their centerpieces of vinyl and vintage; a nostalgia that felt to many to be unearned, too quick.

Now, our nostalgia is compressed into a matter of months. In “Do It Again,” I couldn’t help but recognize my own futile plea for the not-so-distant past of public life before quarantine. The song references the hazy, youthful freedom of simple pleasures of the California outdoors—surfing, warm weather, moonlight, bodies (and here the gentle misogyny of the Beach Boys ethos, placing female bodies as part of the landscape, springing from the sand fully formed with “long hair” and sun-bronzed skin rather than human beings in and of themselves)—not unlike the longing I feel for my own simple joys. The smell of a coffee shop. Chatter and laughter. Hugging a friend. The harmonies of this acapella version are both haunting and delicious in their simplicity, like the sharp, sweet whiff of honeysuckle on a summer breeze, but a bit lonely without back-up instruments. And yet this arrangment of voices, especially in this stripped down version, also conjures what we long for, past and present: companionship, a sense of people being in the room together, making something beautiful.