Talking About Lunch

March 7, 2008

The last track of The Beach Boys Today! (1965) consists of a recorded conversation between the members of the band (Al Jardine is not present). The beginning is all about food. Someone claps his hands and rubs them together and says "Food!" There are a flurry of lines from different people:

Did you get a malt?
Didn't bring any malts
What'd you get us?
A burger I mean cheese here's cheese
Oh it's mine
Did you order one?
No I'm kidding
What'd you get me?
Mike I'm gonna take a bite pretty quick
Oh thank you
I would've rather had that
No that's all wrong
Hey there's onions on this so I hope all you guys don't mind
Hi Earl
Here's some french fries you can all split
Oh there's kosher pickles
Thank you for the french fries I'm really uh

It sounds pretty unimportant, but anything that gets put on an album will be a carrier of a message. In this case the desire to connect the Beach Boys to common American taste is pretty apparent. It becomes even more so when Brian Wilson states that the only thing that really stuck out to him about Europe was the bread. This conversation makes them sound like ordinary guys and we can bet that studio execs instantly saw the logic in including this conversation on an album that was expected to be a top seller.

Another way to approach this conversation is to think about what it says about material culture. Listening to it I am struck by how easily I can follow what is happening. I don't mean just the words, but the wrappers being opened and the hand motions. This took place over forty years ago, yet I know just what is happening and what their food tasted like. The group has sent someone to pick up a fast food order: burgers, fries, milk shakes (malts).

This recognition may not seem remarkable, but I suspect that a conversation about food prior to World War II would be difficult for me to understand. Any similarly recorded conversation from the 19th century or earlier would be completely foreign. I would have no idea what the foods looked or tasted like. But with this conversation of the Beach Boys I have no trouble going back over 40 years and imagining everything.

The Beach Boys Today! contains the songs "When I Grow Up to Be a Man" and "Help Me, Rhonda." Their follow-up album would contain "California Girls." This was a classic period of American popular music creation.. and I don't think it is coincidental that even as the songs remain in popular circulation, the food they were eating also has stayed well known. Which is just to say: "classic" periods create pockets of cultural stability in multiple areas of consumption. We are today much closer to The Beach Boys Today! than they were to the cultural fixed-points of the pre-World War II period. The fact that the music is so easy to listen to is related to the fact that I can effortlessly imagine their informal fast food meals.

Nothing lasts forever. It is extremely unlikely that in a hundred years this same familiarity will be present. Odd as it may seem, the Beach Boys music will come to sound strange and the food they were eating a relic of the past. These will come to resemble the obscure music and food references that mystify me in classical Greek or medieval Arabic literature. They will be something to wonder at: what would that have been like? What is that rustling sound? Why is there a pickle in the bag? Part of our job here at Old Roads is to listen to the present as it will sound to the distant future.