Song 26: Don't Worry, Baby

Don't Worry Baby - The Beach Boys

This video is fabulous - The Beach Boys really were quite the most nerdish assortment the world of pop music has ever seen. The juxtaposition of the stunningly beautiful song with the lame, awkward, cliched images is a delight.

'Don't Worry Baby' is an interesting song for the Beach Boys - it's pretty early (1964) and still part of their bubblegum pop/ surf music phase. In fact it was originally the B-side to 'I Get Around'. And, lyrically, it deals with those basic Beach Boys themes  - as Prefab Sprout wrote 'Cars and Girls'. It's a boy telling his girl not to worry about him taking part in a drag race. Simple as that.

But it is, arguably, the first sign of the sophistication that has led to Brian Wilson being seen as one of the great geniuses of popular music, which led then to 'California Girls' and to 'Pet Sounds', 'Good Vibrations' and 'Heroes and Villains'. And it may just be my favourite of the lot.

When I worked in Blackwell's bookshop in 2001-02, it seemed like every staff member was not a bookseller per se, but a writer slash bookseller, an artist slash bookseller, a poet slash bookseller or a rock star slash bookseller. It was rather wonderful. One such individual was a friendly guy from Newcastle called Jim who worked in the Literature department, lucky devil (I was stuck in Social Sciences). Jim was very enthusiastic about many things, including Newcastle United and including his own talent. He had an unswerving belief that he was capable of making the next 'Pet Sounds', the most sophisticated, beautiful music this country had heard for decades. It was mainly confined to his head/bedroom at that stage.

My brief postscript to the tale, before I get to the point, is that, a year or so later, I did see Jim and his band doing a gig, and it was far from a crushing let-down - he really did have excellent, sophisticated pop songs with lovely tunes and arrangements. He's never "made it" which is a shame, but he's far from a self-deluding charlatan.

But, almost as much as he loved his own music, Jim loved, loved 'Don't Worry Baby'. He used to walk around the shop humming it and described it, simply, as the finest melody ever created. He tried, various times to explain that, by breaking it down, but i am a bit of a musical klutz, so I didn't really get everything he was saying, but even I could tell, it's such a beautiful, fluent, melody.

It is, apparently, Brian Wilson's attempt to recreate something of his own favourite song, 'Be My Baby' by the Ronettes. While it doesn't quite hold that exalted place in the history of music, perhaps it deserves to.

Anyway, when I made a last futile attempt to learn the guitar properly in around 2004/5, and after my sausage fingers had sabotaged my attempts to get beyond the fourth chord and I realised it was a doomed enterprise, I used to sit with the guitar, just repeatedly picking out the melody line to 'Don't Worry Baby' over and over again, as if, although I'd never get on the first rung of any stage of the creation of music, I was at least able to share in some aspect of one of pop music's most perfect moment.