The Beach Boys - "Good Vibrations", charted #1, 1966

Surf Scene

In the early 1960s, one of the most popular forms of rock and roll was Surf Rock, which was characterized by being nearly entirely instrumental and by heavy use of reverb on the guitars. The spring reverb featured in Fender amplifiers of the day, cranked to its maximum volume, produced a guitar tone shimmering with sustain and evoking surf and ocean imagery.

Duane Eddy's "Movin' and Groovin" is thought by many to be the main contender for laying the groundwork as the first surf rock record, while others claim the genre was invented by Dick Dale on "Let's Go Trippin'", which became a hit throughout California. Most early surf bands were formed in during this decade in the Southern California area. By the mid-1960s the Beach Boys, who used complex pop harmonies over a basic surf rock rhythm, had emerged as the dominant surf group and helped popularize the genre. In addition, bands such as the Ventures, the Shadows, the Atlantics, the Surfaris and the Champs were also among the most popular Surf Rock bands of the decade.

The Beach Boys are an American rock band formed in Hawthorne, California, in 1961. The group's original lineup consisted of brothers Brian, Dennis, and Carl Wilson; their cousin Mike Love; and their friend Al Jardine. Distinguished by their vocal harmonies and early surf songs, they are one of the most influential acts of the rock era. The band drew on the music of jazz-based vocal groups, 1950s rock and roll, and black R&B to create their unique sound, and with Brian as composer, arranger, producer, and de facto leader, often incorporated classical elements and unconventional recording techniques in innovative ways.

The Beach Boys began as a garage band, managed by the Wilsons' father Murry, with Brian's musicianship dominating their creative direction. In 1963, they gained national prominence with a string of top-ten hits reflecting a southern California youth culture of surfing, cars, and romance, later dubbed the "California Sound". After 1964, they abandoned beachgoing themes for more personal lyrics and ambitious orchestrations. In 1966, the Pet Sounds album and "Good Vibrations" single raised the group's prestige as rock innovators and established the band as symbols of the nascent counterculture era. Following the dissolution of the group's Smile project in 1967, Brian gradually ceded production and songwriting duties to the rest of the band, reducing his input because of mental health and substance abuse issues. The group's commercial momentum subsequently faltered, and despite efforts to maintain an experimental sound, they were dismissed by early rock critics as the archetypal "pop music cop-outs".

Carl took over as the band's musical leader until the late 1970s. Personal struggles, creative disagreements, and the continued success of the band's greatest hits albums precipitated their transition into an oldies act. Since the 1980s, much-publicized legal wrangling over royalties, songwriting credits and use of the band's name transpired. Dennis drowned in 1983 and Carl died of lung cancer in 1998. After Carl's death, the group's corporation, Brother Records Inc (BRI), allowed Love to lead a touring band under the "Beach Boys" name. Even though they have not performed together since their 2012 reunion tour, Brian, Jardine, and Love remain a part of BRI and as official members of the band.

The Beach Boys are one of the most critically acclaimed, commercially successful, and widely influential bands of all time. The group had over eighty songs chart worldwide, thirty-six of them US Top 40 hits (the most by an American rock band), four reaching number-one on the Billboard Hot 100 chart. The Beach Boys have sold in excess of 100 million records worldwide, making them one of the world's best-selling bands of all time and are listed at No. 12 on Rolling Stone magazine's 2004 list of the "100 Greatest Artists of All Time". In 2017, a study of AllMusic's catalog indicated the Beach Boys as the 6th most frequently cited artist influence in its database. The core quintet of the three Wilsons, Love and Jardine was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1988.

At the time of his sixteenth birthday on June 20, 1958, Brian Wilson shared a bedroom with his brothers, Dennis and Carl – aged thirteen and eleven, respectively – in their family home in Hawthorne. He had watched his father, Murry Wilson, play piano, and had listened intently to the harmonies of vocal groups such as the Four Freshmen. After dissecting songs such as "Ivory Tower" and "Good News", Brian would teach family members how to sing the background harmonies. For his birthday that year, Brian received a reel-to-reel tape recorder. He learned how to overdub, using his vocals and those of Carl and their mother. Brian played piano with Carl and David Marks, an eleven-year-old longtime neighbor, playing guitars they had each received as Christmas presents.

Soon Brian and Carl were avidly listening to Johnny Otis' KFOX radio show. Inspired by the simple structure and vocals of the rhythm and blues songs he heard, Brian changed his piano-playing style and started writing songs. Family gatherings brought the Wilsons in contact with cousin Mike Love. Brian taught Love's sister Maureen and a friend harmonies. Later, Brian, Love and two friends performed at Hawthorne High School.[10] Brian also knew Al Jardine, a high school classmate. Brian suggested to Jardine that they team up with his cousin and brother Carl. Love gave the fledgling band its name: "The Pendletones", a pun on "Pendleton", a style of woolen shirt popular at the time. Dennis was the only avid surfer in the group, and he suggested that the group write songs that celebrated the sport and the lifestyle that it had inspired in Southern California. Brian finished the song, titled "Surfin'", and with Mike Love, wrote "Surfin' Safari".[14] Murry recalled, "They had written a song called 'Surfin',' which I never did like and still don't like, it was so rude and crude."

Murry Wilson, who was a sometime songwriter, arranged for the Pendletones to meet his publisher Hite Morgan. He said: "Finally, [Hite] agreed to hear it, and Mrs. Morgan said 'Drop everything, we're going to record your song. I think it's good.' And she's the one responsible." On September 15, 1961, the band recorded a demo of "Surfin'" with the Morgans. A more professional recording was made on October 3, at World Pacific Studio in Hollywood. David Marks was not present at the session as he was in school that day. Murry brought the demos to Herb Newman, owner of Candix Records and Era Records, and he signed the group on December 8. When the single was released a few weeks later, the band found that they had been renamed "the Beach Boys". Candix wanted to name the group the Surfers until Russ Regan, a young promoter with Era Records, noted that there already existed a group by that name. He suggested calling them the Beach Boys. "Surfin'" was a regional hit for the West Coast, and reached number 75 on the national Billboard Hot 100 chart. It was so successful that the number of unpaid orders for the single bankrupted Candix.

1962–1967: Peak years

By this time the de facto manager of the Beach Boys, Murry landed the group's first paying gig (for which they earned $300) on New Year's Eve, 1961, at the Ritchie Valens Memorial Dance in Long Beach. In their earliest public appearances, the band wore heavy wool jacket-like shirts that local surfers favored before switching to their trademark striped shirts and white pants. In early 1962, Morgan requested that some of the members add vocals to a couple of instrumental tracks that he had recorded with other musicians. This led to the creation of the short-lived group Kenny & the Cadets, which Brian led under the pseudonym "Kenny". The other members were Carl, Jardine, and the Wilsons' mother Audree. In February, Jardine left the Beach Boys to study dentistry and was replaced by David Marks. Murry remembered that after "Surfin'", the group had a difficult time being picked up by another label; "they all thought the group was a one-shot record."

After being turned down by Dot and Liberty, the Beach Boys signed a seven-year contract with Capitol Records. This was at the urging of Capitol executive and staff producer Nick Venet who signed the group, seeing them as the "teenage gold" he had been scouting for. On June 4, 1962, the Beach Boys debuted on Capitol with their second single, "Surfin' Safari" backed with "409". The release prompted national coverage in the June 9 issue of Billboard, which praised Love's lead vocal and said the song had strong hit potential."Surfin' Safari" rose to number 14 and found airplay in New York and Phoenix, a surprise for the label.

The Beach Boys completed their first album, Surfin' Safari, with production credited to Nick Venet. Carl later denied that Venet had any significant role in the group's early music, saying that Venet "would be in the booth, and he would call the take number, and that was about it. I wouldn't call him a musical heavy by any ... Brian didn't want anything to do with Venet." Surfin' Safari, released in October 1962, was different from other rock albums of the time in that it consisted almost entirely of original songs, primarily written by Brian with Mike Love and friend Gary Usher. Another unusual feature of the Beach Boys was that, although they were marketed as "surf music", their repertoire bore little resemblance to the music of other surf bands, which was mainly instrumental and incorporated heavy use of spring reverb. For this reason, some of the Beach Boys' early local performances had young audience members throwing vegetables at the band, believing that the group were poseurs.

In January 1963, the Beach Boys recorded their first top-ten single, "Surfin' U.S.A.", which began their long run of highly successful recording efforts. It was during the sessions for this single that Brian made the production decision from that point on to use double tracking on the group's vocals, resulting in a deeper and more resonant sound. The album of the same name followed in March and reached number 2 on the Billboard charts. Its success propelled the group into a nationwide spotlight, and was vital to launching surf music as a national craze albeit the Beach Boys' vocal approach to the genre, not the original instrumental style pioneered by Dick Dale. Biographer Luis Sanchez highlights the "Surfin' U.S.A." single as a turning point for the band, "creat[ing] a direct passage to California life for a wide teenage audience ... [and] a distinct Southern California sensibility that exceeded its conception as such to advance right to the front of American consciousness." Five days prior to the release of the Surfin' U.S.A. album, Brian produced "Surf City", a song he had written for Jan and Dean. "Surf City" hit number one on the Billboard charts in July a development that pleased Brian but angered Murry, who felt his son had "given away" what should have been the Beach Boys' first chart-topper.

Throughout 1963, and for the next few years, Brian produced a variety of singles for outside artists. Among these were the Honeys, a surfer trio that comprised sisters Diane and Marilyn Rovell with cousin Ginger Blake. Brian was convinced that they could potentially be a successful female counterpart to the Beach Boys, and he produced a number of singles for them, although they could not replicate the Beach Boys' popularity. He also attended some of Phil Spector's sessions at Gold Star Studios. His creative and songwriting interests were revamped upon hearing the Ronettes' 1963 song "Be My Baby", which was produced by Spector. The first time he heard the song was while driving, and was so overwhelmed that he had to pull over to the side of the road and analyze the chorus. Later, he reflected: "I was unable to really think as a producer up until the time where I really got familiar with Phil Spector's work. That was when I started to design the experience to be a record rather than just a song."

At the beginning of a tour of the Midwest in April 1963, Jardine rejoined the Beach Boys at Brian's request. Although he had started playing live gigs again, Brian soon left the road to focus on writing and recording. The result of this arrangement produced the albums Surfer Girl, released September 16, and Little Deuce Coupe, released October 7.[citation needed] Surfer Girl marked the first time the group used outside musicians on a substantial portion of an LP. Many of them were the musicians Spector used for his Wall of Sound productions.[42] The sextet incarnation of the Beach Boys did not extend beyond these two albums, as Marks officially left the band in early October because of conflict with manager Murry, pulling Brian back into touring.[citation needed] To close 1963, the band released a standalone Christmas-themed single, "Little Saint Nick", backed with an a cappella rendition of the scriptural song "The Lord's Prayer". The A-side peaked at No. 3 on the US Billboard Christmas chart.

The British Invasion

The surf music craze, along with the careers of nearly all surf acts, was slowly replaced by the British Invasion. Following a successful Australasian tour in January and February 1964, the Beach Boys returned home to face their new competition, the Beatles. Both groups shared the same record label in the US, and Capitol's support for the Beach Boys immediately began waning. This caused Murry to fight for the band at the label more than before, often visiting their offices without warning to "twist executive arms." Carl said that Phil Spector "was Brian's favorite kind of rock; he liked [him] better than the early Beatles stuff. He loved the Beatles' later music when they evolved and started making intelligent, masterful music, but before that Phil was it." According to Mike Love, Carl followed the Beatles closer than anyone else in the band, while Brian was the most "rattled" by the Beatles and felt tremendous pressure to "keep pace" with them. For Brian, the Beatles ultimately "eclipsed a lot [of what] we'd worked for ... [they] eclipsed the whole music world."

Brian wrote his last surf song in April 1964. That month, during recording of the single "I Get Around", Murry was relieved of his duties as manager. He remained in close contact with the group and attempted to continue advising on their career decisions. When "I Get Around" was released in May, it would climb to number one, their first single to do so, proving that the Beach Boys could compete with contemporary British pop groups. In July, the album that the song appeared on, All Summer Long, reached No. 4 in the US. All Summer Long introduced exotic textures to the Beach Boys' sound exemplified by the piccolos and xylophones of its title track. The album was a swan-song to the surf and car music the Beach Boys built their commercial standing upon. Later albums took a different stylistic and lyrical path. Before this, a live album, Beach Boys Concert, was released in October to a four-week chart stay at number one, containing a set list of previously recorded hits and covers that they had not yet recorded.

In June 1964, Brian recorded the bulk of The Beach Boys' Christmas Album with a forty-one-piece studio orchestra in collaboration with Four Freshmen arranger Dick Reynolds. The album was a response to Phil Spector's A Christmas Gift for You (1963). Released in December, the Beach Boys' album was divided between five new, original Christmas-themed songs, and seven reinterpretations of traditional Christmas songs. It would be regarded as one of the finest holiday albums of the rock era. One single from the album, "The Man with All the Toys", was released, peaking at No. 6 on the US Billboard Christmas chart. On October 29, the Beach Boys performed for The T.A.M.I. Show, a concert film intended to bring together a wide range of hit-making musicians for a one-off performance. The result was released to movie theaters one month later.

By the end of 1964, the stress of road travel, writing, and producing became too much for Brian. On December 23, while on a flight from Los Angeles to Houston, he suffered a panic attack only hours after performing with the Beach Boys on the musical variety series Shindig! In January 1965, he announced his withdrawal from touring to concentrate entirely on songwriting and record production. For the rest of 1964 and into 1965, session musician Glen Campbell served as Brian's temporary replacement in concert. Carl took over as the band's musical director onstage.

We needed to grow. Up to this point we had milked every idea dry. We milked it fucking dry. We had done every possible angle about surfing and then we did the car routine. But we needed to grow artistically.

Brian Wilson

Now a full-time studio artist, Brian wanted to move the Beach Boys beyond their surf aesthetic, believing that their image was antiquated and distracting the public from his talents as a producer and songwriter. In the period following his resignation form touring, Brian put more distance between him and his bandmates, and began expanding his social circle to include a mix of worldly-minded friends, musicians, mystics, and business advisers. He also took an increasing interest in the developing Los Angeles "hip" scene and in recreational drugs (particularly marijuana, LSD, and Desbutal). Musically, he said he began to "take the things I learned from Phil Spector and use more instruments whenever I could. I doubled up on basses and tripled up on keyboards, which made everything sound bigger and deeper."

Released in March 1965, The Beach Boys Today! marked the first time the group experimented with the "album-as-art" form. The tracks on side one feature an uptempo sound that contrasts side two, which consists mostly of emotional ballads. Music writer Scott Schinder referenced its "suite-like structure" as an early example of the rock album format being used to make a cohesive artistic statement. Brian also established his new lyrical approach toward the autobiographical; journalist Nick Kent wrote that the subjects of Brian's songs "were suddenly no longer simple happy souls harmonizing their sun-kissed innocence and dying devotion to each other over a honey-coated backdrop of surf and sand. Instead, they'd become highly vulnerable, slightly neurotic and riddled with telling insecurities." In the book Yeah Yeah Yeah: The Story of Modern Pop, Bob Stanley remarked that "Brian was aiming for Johnny Mercer but coming up proto-indie." In 2012, the album was voted 271 on Rolling Stone magazine's list of the "500 Greatest Albums of All Time".

Capitol continued to bill the Beach Boys as "America's Top Surfin' Group!" and expected Brian to write more beachgoing songs for the yearly summer markets. In April 1965, Campbell's own career success pulled him from touring with the group. Columbia Records staff producer Bruce Johnston was asked to locate a replacement for Campbell; having failed to find one, Johnston himself became a full-time member of the band on May 19, 1965, first replacing Brian on the road and later contributing in the studio, beginning with the June 4 vocal sessions for "California Girls", which first appeared in the band's next album Summer Days (And Summer Nights!!) and eventually charted at number three in the US while the album went to number two. The album also included a reworked arrangement of "Help Me, Rhonda" which became the band's second number one single in the spring of 1965.

To appease Capitol's demands for a Beach Boys LP for the 1965 Christmas season, Brian conceived Beach Boys' Party!, a live-in-the-studio album consisting mostly of acoustic covers of 1950s rock and R&B songs, in addition to covers of three Beatles songs, Bob Dylan's "The Times They Are a-Changin'", and idiosyncratic rerecordings of the group's earlier hits. The album was an early precursor of the "unplugged" trend. It included a cover of the Regents' song "Barbara Ann" which became a surprise number-two hit when released several weeks later. In November, the group released another top-twenty single, "The Little Girl I Once Knew". It was considered the band's most experimental statement thus far. The single continued Brian's ambitions for daring arrangements, featuring unexpected tempo changes and numerous false endings. It was the band's second single not to reach the top ten since their 1962 breakthrough, peaking at number 20. According to Luis Sanchez, in 1965, Bob Dylan was "rewriting the rules for pop success" with his music and image, and it was at this juncture that Wilson "led The Beach Boys into a transitional phase in an effort to win the pop terrain that had been thrown up for grabs."

Throughout the summer of 1966, Brian concentrated on finishing the group's next single, "Good Vibrations". During the making of Pet Sounds, Wilson started changing his writing process. Rather than going to the studio with a completed song, he would record a track containing a series of chord changes he liked, take an acetate disc home, and then compose the song's melody and write its lyrics. With "Good Vibrations", Wilson said, "I had a lot of unfinished ideas, fragments of music I called 'feels.' Each feel represented a mood or an emotion I'd felt, and I planned to fit them together like a mosaic." Most of the song's structure and arrangement was written as it was recorded. Instead of working on whole songs with clear large-scale syntactical structures, Brian limited himself to recording short interchangeable fragments (or "modules"). Through the method of tape splicing, each fragment could then be assembled into a linear sequence, allowing any number of larger structures and divergent moods to be produced at a later time. Coming at a time when pop singles were usually recorded in under two hours, it was one of the most complex pop productions ever undertaken, with sessions for the song stretching over several months in four major Hollywood studios. It was also the most expensive single ever recorded to that point, with the production costs estimated to be in the tens of thousands.

While in the midst of "Good Vibrations" sessions, Wilson invited session musician and songwriter Van Dyke Parks to collaborate as lyricist for the Beach Boys' next album project, soon titled Smile, to which Parks agreed. Wilson and Parks intended Smile to be a continuous suite of songs that were linked both thematically and musically, with the main songs being linked together by small vocal pieces and instrumental segments that elaborated upon the musical themes of the major songs. It was explicitly American in style and subject, a conscious reaction to the overwhelming British dominance of popular music at the time. Some of the music incorporated chanting, cowboy songs, explorations in Indian and Hawaiian music, jazz, classical tone poems, cartoon sound effects, musique concrète, and yodeling. Saturday Evening Post writer Jules Siegel famously recalled that, during one evening in October, Brian announced to his wife and friends that he was "writing a teenage symphony to God". Brian told Melody Maker: "Our new album will be better than Pet Sounds. It will be as much an improvement over Sounds as that was over Summer Days." Derek Taylor continued to write articles in the music press, sometimes anonymously, in an effort to further speculation about the album.

Recording for Smile lasted about a year, from mid 1966 to mid 1967, and followed the same modular production approach as "Good Vibrations". Concurrently, Wilson planned many different multimedia side-projects, such as a sound effects collage, a comedy album, and a "health food" album. Capitol did not support some of these ideas, which led to the Beach Boys' desire to form their own label, Brother Records. According to biographer Steven Gaines, Love was "the most receptive" to the proposal, wanting the Beach Boys to have more creative control over their work, and supported Wilson's decision to employ his newfound "best friend" David Anderle as the head of the label, even though it was against the wishes of band manager Nick Grillo. In a press release, Anderle stated that Brother Records was to give "entirely new concepts to the recording industry, and to give the Beach Boys total creative and promotional control over their product." The group established a short-lived film production company, called "Home Movies", to create live action film and television properties starring the Beach Boys. The company completed only one production, a music video for "Good Vibrations".

"Good Vibrations" was the Beach Boys' third single to top the Billboard Hot 100. The song proliferated a wave of pop experimentation with its rush of riff changes, echo-chamber effects, and intricate harmonies.

Released on October 10, 1966, "Good Vibrations" was the Beach Boys' third US number-one hit, reaching the top of the Billboard Hot 100 in December, and became their first number one in Britain. That month, the record was their first single certified gold by the RIAA. It came to be widely acclaimed as one of the greatest masterpieces of rock music. In December 1966, the Beach Boys were voted the number-one band in the world in an annual readers' poll conducted by NME, ahead of the Beatles, the Walker Brothers, the Rolling Stones, and the Four Tops. Billboard said that this result was probably influenced by the success of "Good Vibrations" when the votes were cast, together with the band's recent tour, whereas the Beatles had neither a recent single nor had they toured the UK throughout 1966; the reporter added that "The sensational success of the Beach Boys, however, is being taken as a portent that the popularity of the top British groups of the last three years is past its peak."

The Beach Boys ended the final quarter of 1966 as the strongest selling album act in the UK, dethroning the three-year reign of native bands such as the Beatles. In 1971, a writer in Cue magazine noted that, from mid 1966 to late 1967, the band "were among the vanguard in practically every aspect of the counter culture." Biographer David Leaf wrote that the success of "Good Vibrations" "bought Brian some time [and] shut up everybody who said that Brian's new ways wouldn't sell ... his inability to quickly follow up [the single was what] became a snowballing problem." Sanchez writes that as time passed, the hype for Smile turned into "expectation", "doubt", and finally, "bemusement".

In July, lead single "Heroes and Villains" was issued, arriving after months of public anticipation, and reached number 12 in US. It was met with general confusion among underwhelming reviews, and in the NME, Jimi Hendrix famously dismissed the single as a "psychedelic barbershop quartet". By then, the group's lawsuit with Capitol was resolved, and it was agreed that Smile would not be the band's next album. In August, the group embarked on a two-date tour of Hawaii. Bruce Johnston, who was absent for most of the Smiley Smile recording, did not accompany the group, although Brian did. Their performances were filmed and recorded with the intention of releasing a live album, Lei'd in Hawaii, which was also left unfinished and unreleased. Jesse Jarnow of Pitchfork opined that the Hawaii performances "most definitely would not have passed the Monterey acid test against the likes of the Who and Jimi Hendrix." In an interview that month, Brian stated: "I think rock n' roll–the pop scene–is happening. It's great. But I think basically, the Beach Boys are squares. We're not happening."

Smiley Smile was released on September 18, 1967, and peaked at number 41 in the US making it their worst-selling album to that date. It began a string of under-performing Beach Boys albums that would last until 1974. When released in the UK in November, it performed better, reaching number 9. Critics and fans were generally underwhelmed by the album. According to Scott Schinder, the album was released to "general incomprehension. While Smile may have divided the Beach Boys' fans had it been released, Smiley Smile merely baffled them." Over the years, the album gathered a reputation as one of the best "chill-out" albums to listen to during an LSD comedown. In 1974, the writing staff of NME voted it as the 64th greatest album of all time.

When we did Wild Honey, Brian asked me to get more involved in the recording end. He wanted a break. he was tired. He had been doing it all too long — Carl Wilson.

The Beach Boys immediately recorded a new album, Wild Honey, which was an excursion into soul music. Carl described it as "music for Brian to cool out by. He was still very spaced." The album was a self-conscious attempt by the Beach Boys to "regroup" themselves as a rock band in opposition to their more orchestral affairs of the past. Its music differs in many ways from previous Beach Boys records: it contains very little group singing compared to previous albums, and mainly features Brian singing at his piano. Again, the Beach Boys recorded mostly at his home studio. Love reflected that Wild Honey was "completely out of the mainstream for what was going on at that time, which was all hard rock/psychedelic music. It just didn't have anything to do with what was going on, and that was the idea."

Wild Honey was released on December 18, 1967, in competition with the Beatles' Magical Mystery Tour and the Rolling Stones' Their Satanic Majesties Request. It had a lower chart placing than Smiley Smile and remained on the charts for only 15 weeks. As with Smiley Smile, contemporary critics viewed it as inconsequential and it alienated fans whose expectations had been raised by Smile. That month, Mike Love told a British journalist: "Sure people were baffled and mystified by Smiley Smile but it was a matter of progression. We had this feeling that we were going too far, losing touch I guess, and this new one brings us back more into reality ... Brian has been re-thinking our recording program and in any case we all have a much greater say nowadays in what we turn out in the studio." Wild Honey remained the last Beach Boys album to feature Brian as a primary composer until 1977. Over the coming months, its non-conforming approach would be echoed in albums released by Bob Dylan (John Wesley Harding), the Kinks (Village Green Preservation Society), and the Byrds (The Notorious Byrd Brothers).

"Heroes and Villains", charted #8, 1967

Wild Honey", charted #29,1967

 

 

_______________________________________________________________Copyright © July 2018______________________________________________________________