The Beach Boys song inspired by Robert Frost’s poem ‘The Road Not Taken’
In his poem ‘Cruising with the Beach Boys’, Dana Gioia writes the verse: “Every lovesick summer has its song, and this one I pretended to despise. But if I were alone when it came on, I turned it up full-blast to sing along…” The essence is true, everyone loves The Beach Boys—how can you not? They stir some sort of primordial hoy in the soul, a spirit of summer and vitality, a poetry in itself, if you will.
Thus, it seems fitting in the merry-go-round of the arts, that a Beach Boys track was, in turn, inspired by a poem which has also pervaded a sense of artistic truth over the lives of many. As Al Jardine confirmed in a 2013 interview with Rock Cellar Magazine, the band’s 1972 release ‘All This is That’ was inspired by the classic 1916-published Robert Frost poem, ‘The Road Not Taken’.
Jardine explained, “It’s a real moving poem about choices, taking gambles rather than going the safe route.” It appealed to him from the off as a youngster looking for adventure. As it did to most people in the counterculture age where going about the future in a different way to our forefathers who had led to the scourge of war was a central tenet. “Someone turned me onto that poem,” he recalled, “so I went up on a little road in Big Sur right above my house by the Big Sur River, read it and I really got inspired.”
Thus, he decided to pair it with the central musical tenet of the time: spiritualism. So, he turned this inspiration towards the depth of mythology. “A lecture by Maharishi infused in me the wisdom of the ancient Veda scriptures, in particular. the saying that ‘We are all one’. He put it in the term of the Vedas meaning, ‘I am that, thou is that, all this is that,’” Jardine continued. “I thought it was amusing at first and then realized how profound it was in its simplicity.”
Layering simplicity into something complex was a Beach Boys’ forte. It’s how they used proto-sampling to change the world with Pet Sounds. “I thought, ‘What a great chorus that would make,’” Jardine mused. “[Carl Wilson] really took it to heart and added his own vibration to it at the end with that beautiful, soaring melodic mantra that he sings at the end.” Sadly, in the end, the commercial slump remained unmoved for our favourite coastal band and Jardine says ‘All This is That’ was simply “too ahead of its time” to shift that.
Nevertheless, as Frost’s poem asserts, nothing ventured, nothing gained. As he concludes in the final stanza: “I shall be telling this with a sigh / Somewhere ages and ages hence: / Two roads diverged in a wood, and I— / I took the one less traveled by, / And that has made all the difference.” It mightn’t have been a hit, but Jardine’s track still managed to inspire in turn.
