The Millennium
Begin

Once upon a time there was sunshine pop, but no one knew it. No group knew they represented it.

The name is makeshift. Just a label, that's all. The Beach Boys of the “Smile” era. The Mamas and Papas. But also The Millennium, with “Begin”, their only work.

The coordinates: Los Angeles, California, 1968. Summer, obviously. The sun shines.

Producer Gary Usher was a forward-thinking guy. Probably nothing to envy in Brian Wilson. Nor to share with his ghosts. Usher and his songwriter friend Curt Boettcher put together a team, recruiting Joey Stec, Dough Rhodes, Lee Mallory, Ron Edgar, Michael Fennelly, and Sandy Salisbury. A supergroup for the "millennium" project. A non-group to create the music they envisioned.

They devised a concept blending surf rock, baroque arrangements, contained psychedelia, vaporous ballads, and a folk-like ethos.

“Begin” boasts lovely, gentle, warm melodies. Catchy yes, but suave and enveloping. The arrangements are complex. The pop is sophisticated pop. In the production phase, Usher collaborates with the equally keen Keith Olsen (a classical music lover). The two acquire two eight-track recorders, unify them, record the instruments, the voices, blend the various layers, harmonize, synchronize... They produce a diaphanous, angelic, crystalline sound. And poignant. A transcendental sound. Remote, unrepeatable live.

Listening to it today, “Begin” is timeless.

It reminds me of Fleet Foxes. Less, much less melancholic. A bit less bucolic, perhaps. Less country, more choral. The enchantment is the same. The Millennium's is just a bit more contrived. Both formations grasp the altitude of that beauty that stands between the voice, the wind, and the clouds. A bit "Shelleyan".

Then, by pure conjecture, the film "Forgotten Silver" by Peter Jackson and Costa Botes comes to mind. A documentary film about a supposed pioneer of cinema, a certain Colin McKenzie, a New Zealander. A fictional character (the film was in fact celebrating 100 years of cinema, and what seemed like a documentary is actually a comedy). So, where is the analogy? In the fictitious nature of something invented and very beautiful. The sound draws distant worlds, an Edenic harmony, where everything is still a leap and enchantment together.

But the silver of that golden age has been lost in the haze, in oblivion, as often happens.

Almost no one cared about them, because they were far from protest songs and intimate folk. Too distant from the rampant lysergic expansion. Too commercial to be broadcasted on the frequency modulations of alternative stations. Too psychedelic and not sugary enough for the amplitude modulation of national radio. Midlands are unpopular. Only to Aristotle in the Nicomachean Ethics.

And yet “Begin”, today, rises to the status of a classic, having long ignored being one.

Innovative, elusive, it hints but doesn’t indulge in psychedelia, practicing it sparingly. It pursues sound quality, the splendor of melody.

Influenced by Beatles, Byrds, Beach Boys, Mamas and Papas, 5th Dimension, Harry Nilsson, The Left Banke. It sounds like the Hollies' Merseybeat launched on clouds mounted with the baroque of the Love deprived of Arthur Lee’s incendiary guitar. And, in support, saucy female choirs.

Too ambitious, too elaborate? I see it as complex as it is ethereal. Mild, intriguing. An out-of-reach, uncontrollable hybrid. Naturally, it was a huge commercial failure, combined, moreover, with an exorbitant gestation cost.

Among the songs: “To Claudia on Thursday”, an elegant, elegiac pop song with exotic rhythm. “Some Sunny Day” dispenses ecstatic keyboards creating a sound carpet over which guitars and feverish voices hover, blending amicably. Then there are the mellifluous and dreamy vocal lines of “I’m With You”, the bucolic “There’s Nothing More to Say”, and the disorienting “Karmic Dream Sequence #1”. Finally, “I Just Want To Be Your Friend”, truly beautiful, captures you with its enveloping plasticity and seductive melody.

The cover is also wonderful, in black and white. The frames of a closed window showcase a fruit tree, a garden, two birds gliding, a cloud, a distant village, with cottages and a bell tower. All reassuring. The alien interweaving between the window lines and the highlighted bird. Strictly speaking, it is neither inside the house nor outside. We miss this detail. And where are we actually?

Distances and interweavings are the theme of the album. What separates us from true affections? From others? From ourselves? The melody takes us there, where we need to go. Without dispelling our doubts. Loving ones and not. Existential ones and not. On some sunny day. Or at Claudia’s, on Thursday.

In conclusion: a submerged classic.