Jessica Pratt, Pet Sounds, and the Never-Ending Sixties

Who says you can't go back?

Start with the cover by itself—just look at it for a while, trip on that, man. It’s enough: tells you all you gotta know. This chick is a mama and this mama can sing, man. I mean she’s a chanteuse, man. Like some cosmic alien bird come down, wavy swingin’ hot-bird; Georgie voice by way of the junk down on Haight: she’s come down to do us, this cosmic alien mama, and she’s gonna sing to us some truest grooves, baby, some gen-u-ine kool-aid, no old torch songs and ballads, no man, she’s gonna ring in the New Year with a marijuana coo and an electric toothbrush. I mean just look at the shit she’s slinging: “I want to be/The sunlight of/The century.” She sang that, man! She sang that. This bird must’ve been an Aquarian far back as when the world was just an ocean and Atlantis…

Here in the Pitch, Mexican Summer 2024.

She’s been listening in, man. Long time listening. You know I saw her? Yeah baby, four years ago, saw her with nothing but a Blue Smith Corona Galaxie Typewriter and gray travel-case in the one hand, and her beat-up old Nippon Gakki guitar in the other. Saw her down at Golden Gate in ‘67, busking with her old man, only back then I think she was going by Rainflower—anyways, I think I saw her playing at the park one day; he was passing the tambourine; she was doing Dylan covers and in between maybe a little Fixin’ to Die or some Spoonful, of either the Lovin’ or Howlin’ Wolf' varieties, who knows (it was all blues and acid in those days, before the water turned brown). But you know it’s funny, it’s funny I remember then she tried to sneak in, oh, must’ve been a little Sergio Mendes—or some old Gilberto thing, I dunno which—and suddenly I see the crowd ain’t having that, no-sirree-bob. Clearly marshing their mallow, you know, it was pop, man, and the kids weren’t having it—might as well’ve been playing the Beach Boys, man, might has well have been playing Dean fucking Martin. No muzak no muzak they started chanting and she finally relented: if she cried, though, I didn’t see it. Just stonefaced went on with the next number, wrapped up, and nobody saw her again for years afterwards.

No, right, I heard she put out a few demos—on a label, off a label—she was kickin round the corners same way everybody else did. By ‘68 or ‘69 I think she might’ve been down in L.A. Somebody saw her far off as London. Someone said Paris. I say why not call it Czechoslovakia—she was off on her trip man, who knows where. But I’m saying all that just to say, those albums were sweet-as-pie and as weird as the alien mama she is: play them, baby, play them loud with a rolled number and a night all to yourself and some rain on a window pane tinkling, and you’ll see that sunlight of the century, even if it’s just in a quiet room and her alone with her guitar singing it.

Yes, those albums were sweet-as-sweet-cream, delectable electric blue, baby, but this—this is something else, man. Something entirely else-wise, far off, far out: she’s in a land of discontented blue, in a haze like irises on a wet afternoon, as my man Eric the Red said (after all, he’s the poet, not me). Should really be Eric the Blue: a Joni-Mitchell-Blue. Sometimes I think: how did we skip out on the Pet Sounds thing? I mean, you know, we thought it was just radio music—they were teeny-boppers, right? Little surfer, little one, made my heart come all undone. All that bullshit. Good for my fourteen-year-old-sister. My old man said it wasn’t even half-bad, you know, he even kind of liked the Beatles in the Mop Top days, so that was the moment I couldn’t listen to it anymore.

But, man—Pet Sounds? We should’ve known it wasn’t just super-mart music, man. I mean Brian Wilson was doing more blotter then we were, I mean he got properly fried, man! But we thought cause it sounded somewhere between the Lawrence Welk Show and a baroque concerto, that it had to be just the same old ersatz thing. Boy were we wrong—sometimes I think the best just passed us by. You know Nick Drake made his first record in ‘69? I was getting my head busted up, you thought you were in the Weather Underground: how’d we miss the Brits getting up to their own folkways, too? I don’t know, man. But sometimes it feels like we missed the boat wholesale, couldn’t see it, our eyes were too full of flowers…

Anyways, Jessica—that’s what she’s called now, our own Lady Jane—she was listening, man. Nothing missed her; or maybe she missed nothing. And now she’s come like a cosmic alien bird to coo everything the Aquarians couldn’t set straight. She’s gonna pick up and put us in a big ol’ Ark, two-by-two, in the wake of the cosmic flood, in the future, L.A. land wars and dead disc jockeys and lysergic acid on the tongues of IBM freakazoids, the goldrush for atoms, the atomic age, the digital, the information age, she’s gonna sing the ancient lay of it all—the whole American thing, Jesus and all of it—and she wants to be the fucking sunlight of the century.

Or:

Take Pet Sounds—sound of an acid-soaked boy-choir surfer angel equally discovering Bach, God, and Phil Spector. Taking the latter’s “teenage symphonies” and with not a wall of sound but a cavern bringing the whole edifice of this brand new idea called “Pop” into a future that never happened. A whole world of possibilities no one ever made real. Pet Sounds: Classical the way Mozart is Classical: it is not to be imitated: it’s almost beyond influence.

Now go listen to Revolver—its spiritual complement: the other high-art mammoth of the Pop of the day—and see that besides being keen and searing, where Pet Sounds is yearning and luxurious, it contains a world that had already happened, and a vision of one that was currently being formed. Brief eruption of the id of the age: string quartets, ragas, acid, pot, Queen Victoria, quotidian chores, walks in the park, Tin Pan Alley, death and taxes, The Tibetan Book of the Dead. If Modernism necessitated an art of lists and taxonomies (what older ages called anatomies), then the weird thing Pop came and collided with it and produced a dictionary of pure exalted image. A mood-image: synesthesia. The Beatles (at least on Revolver and Sgt. Pepper’s and some of Magical Mystery Tour) were Victorians, Georgians, Modernists, Pop-Artists, much more than they were flower children. Brian Wilson, for his part, was a pure Californian. And in their wake, in the outpouring of Vishnu and Shiva and Coca-Cola which visited the world in that strange apocalyptic time—for once the word and image behaved as one, in a singularity, for a brief resplendent era of Aquarian advertising. And if Revolver contains a world, and a spiritual challenge to that world; Pet Sounds contains a mind, and that mind’s life-story. It’s a bed to lie on in the middle of the day; it’s touched by the fingers of divinity. Revolver is Adam’s hand reaching up to touch God. Pet Sounds is God’s hand reaching down to Adam.

Now, for further nourishment of the soul, consult each album, as processed through the mind of Mad Men, the greatest American artwork of the twenty-first century—

First, Pet Sounds, and the trip within:

Next Revolver, and the trip beyond—

(We still haven’t passed up Tomorrow Never Knows, have we? Tomorrow Never Knows is Michael Jordan leaping and dunking on our clumsy asses again and again while we stumble around the court trying to catch up; Tomorrow Never Knows is Charlie Parker and the rest of us are playing toy saxophones.)

Never let anyone tell you the Sixties didn’t happen. Sure, it was probably dumb and awful to be there—yet we’re still living in it. We are not its mirror, or its sequel. We are its wake. Very few works of art understand this because most stop at nostalgia. But not Mad Men. And not Jessica Pratt, either. The Sixties are never-ending, until we end them, but apparently that time is not now. We keep going back. But what are we looking for? Is it ourselves? Or is it something which was unleashed—the spiritual equivalent of the atom bomb—a force unleashed on the world, which we still do not understand?

I would like to say that Jessica Pratt is like Mad Men—she understands what was happening in the 60s, what mattered, why it lasts. But while Mad Men plays like Freud and Raymond Carver collaborating on an exegesis of the mid-century American Mind, Jessica is operating in a world of music far more allusive; instinctual; oblique. Listen closely and you’ll hear Ye-Ye, Brit Folk, Bossa, Tropicália, Exotica, Burt Bacharach, and yes, Pet Sounds. But none of those so specifically: her records are more like an after-image of her influences, captured in a moment that’s all her own, that’s near-perfect and timeless. And good luck getting concrete sense out of the lyrics, as artful as they are. Good luck parsing her changes for verses or choruses. In a Jessica Pratt song, a melodic idea starts, and then another starts, and then another, and by the time she’s given you three or four (or five!), she repeats it, and then she ends it, and it’s complete. Her best songs not only sound like they could be happening in the Sixties, they sound like the Sixties themselves. Not the explosive, world-shaking one: the dreamier, melancholy, private Sixties. What only Brian Wilson could really express.

Be aware: this is not mere nostalgia. There is something going on, something subterranean and true. It is a sense of what was lost—but also what was skipped over. It is a sense of what was not understood the first time.

Lady Jane is back and now the tide shifts; the age sputters to a strange new start. And now we have to think: who are we, to say we can’t just do it all over again?