Dad’s Vinyl #8: Good Vibrations

I  can tell ‘Good Vibrations’ has been played a lot, it pops and clicks all the way through – although there are no scratches, and it never jumps – and the paper sleeve is in a bit of a state.

This is one of the singles i think I heard being played when I was a kid, but I’m not sure*. It certainly wasn’t played as much as ‘Hotel California’ or ‘American Pie’, but nothing was (until mum’s Barbara Streisand phase in the early 1980s).

The Beach Boys “Good Vibrations”

For such an upbeat track, ‘Good Vibrations’ has an unexpected air of melancholy.  It starts in a minor key ‘I… love the colourful clothes she wears…‘, and quickly moves to major chords, but even during those ecstatic stacked harmonies – good! Good! GOOD! – it seems somehow sad, like the minor chords have stained the positivity,  uncertainty spilling out over the three and a half minutes.

The song almost seems like instant nostalgia, knowing that this perfect summer, this perfect girl, this happiness, is fleeting.  Is the ‘she’ of the song even real?

 

 

 

*I suppose I could just phone him and ask, but that takes all the fun out of it.

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Making my own CDs

After much printing, cutting and sticking¹, the CD of Mink15’s ‘Pebble Beach‘ is now finished. It doesn’t look as professional as the last release (it’s not in a CD jewel case for a start) but it seems more ‘real’ now it has physical form and is not just a load of zeros and ones on the internet somewhere.

I’ve had many problems with  this – the CD labels are slightly different to all the other CD labels I’ve ever bought, so they don’t align properly. Which I didn’t notice until I’d printed a couple of sheets. Also my printer decided it didn’t recognise the new cartridges, or even the old ones (made by the same company) and I thought I’d have to buy a new printer at one stage.

But now I’ve got  back into the swing of it, I think I’ll make CDs of my other music.

‘Pebble Beach’ is on sale at the bargain price of £2 including postage (£2.50 for international/intergalactic orders²) you can afford to splash out. Or if you can’t afford that, you can download it for free.

 

¹ My gods, how I hate my Epson printer.

² Apologies, but we can not currently deliver to Andromeda for technical reasons