Brian or Dennis - who was/is the better piano player?

[Rocker]

First I wanted to call this thread "best piano player in the Beach Boys" but since the answer very certainly would be (and rightly so) Bruce, I just made it about the two Beach Boys who probably saw (and still see) the piano as their instrument.

So, how good were Dennis and Brian ? Dennis started to play very late, compared to Brian, but I wonder if Brian could've played something like "Piano variations on: Thoughts of you". He always seems to pound more than play the piano, the right hand hammering the beats and the left playing a bassline (very rock'n'roll-like). I don't think Dennis did that too much. Quite often he plays the piano more like picking a guitar ("Time" is a very good example) which on the other hand limited his basslines on the keyboard.
In the promo video for Billy Hinsche's DVD about Dennis, Jack Riley calls Dennis a "brilliant piano player" (you can see the clip on youtube). But was he really that good?
Interesting thought: Dennis was considered a clubber on drums and came up with this exquisite stuff on piano like "Piano variations..." while Brian's kinda a clubber on piano but could, according to Steve Desper, at one point play drums in a way as tasteful as Hal Blaine

[Paulos]

I'm not sure who is considered the better player from a technical view as I don't know enough about that sort of thing but I must say that I find Dennys piano playing to be very sparse yet moving and beautiful. Some of my favourite piano progressions come from Denny - River Song, Barbara, Holy Man, Mexico, Piano Variations On Thoughts of You and many more.

I don't feel that Brian is a clubber, on Surf's Up he plays beautifully but as Brian didn't seem to often play prominent piano parts on record, (corrections welcomed if I'm wrong) it's hard for me to judge against Denny who seemed to play the majority of piano on his recordings (again, corrections welcomed). Brian wrote on the piano and obviously made some of the greatest music ever so his piano playing must be at least quite good....... :

So for the best pianor player im going with Dennis but for best piano composer i'm going with Brian (somewhat fence sitting, I know).

[Jon Stebbins]

First I wanted to call this thread "best piano player in the Beach Boys" but since the answer very certainly would be (and rightly so) Bruce, I just made it about the two Beach Boys who probably saw (and still see) the piano as their instrument.

So, how good were Dennis and Brian ? Dennis started to play very late, compared to Brian, but I wonder if Brian could've played something like "Piano variations on: Thoughts of you". He always seems to pound more than play the piano, the right hand hammering the beats and the left playing a bassline (very rock'n'roll-like). I don't think Dennis did that too much. Quite often he plays the piano more like picking a guitar ("Time" is a very good example) which on the other hand limited his basslines on the keyboard.
In the promo video for Billy Hinsche's DVD about Dennis, Jack Riley calls Dennis a "brilliant piano player" (you can see the clip on youtube). But was he really that good?
Interesting thought: Dennis was considered a clubber on drums and came up with this exquisite stuff on piano like "Piano variations..." while Brian's kinda a clubber on piano but could, according to Steve Desper, at one point play drums in a way as tasteful as Hal Blaine

A basic flaw in the premise...Dennis did not begin playing piano very late, he was playing boogie woogie(as taught by Audree) before the BB's were a band, he was playing Beethoven and Gershwin pieces in the earliest days of the Beach Boys at rehearsals and after gigs, Carole Wilson stated that the first thing Dennis bought when they moved in together ('64) was a piano and that he immediately started composing...this is all well documented by folks who were there. Bruce's assertion that he 'taught" Dennis how to play the piano on the '66 Japan tour has been shot down by several people who knew Dennis before Bruce was on the BB's scene, perhaps he taught Dennis more advanced chordings etc... than he was capable of prior to that...but Dennis probably learned basic piano in '59 or '60(of course self taught, or taught by Brian, Audree and maybe even Murry). By '69 or '70 Dennis was blowing people's minds with his piano voicings. The other premise problem is that Dennis as clubber/drummer is a dying myth as we learn more and more about the many classic BB's tracks that DW was drummer on. Again, self taught, primitive perhaps, but the guy played on some of the BB's best stuff, Don't Worry Baby, Catch a Wave, Little Saint Nick, I Get Around, When I Grow Up, Dance Dance Dance, I Can Hear Music and on and on. Anyway, my point is the Wilsons were all really versatile musicians, none of them were significantly better than the other. On a given song one could outshine the other, but overall, not much distance between them as musicians, or as players.

[Andrew G. Doe]

I would have to say that, currently, Brian is without a doubt the better piano player. 

[Amy B.]

Brian wrote on the piano and obviously made some of the greatest music ever so his piano playing must be at least quite good....... :

Apparently Irving Berlin was a horrible piano player, but he was quite a good songwriter.

[Wirestone]

True fact: Irving Berlin could only play in one key. So he had a transposing piano made, on which he could change the key he was playing in with a (IIRC) foot pedal.

[bossaroo]

"Variations" is pretty but is it really all that technically difficult?

I'd have to give Brian the upper hand, for the chord progressions he came up with and the ability to play Gershwin, Four Freshman harmonies, etc.

[Rocker]

A basic flaw in the premise...Dennis did not begin playing piano very late, he was playing boogie woogie(as taught by Audree) before the BB's were a band, he was playing Beethoven and Gershwin pieces in the earliest days of the Beach Boys at rehearsals and after gigs,

Thanks for mentioning that, Jon ! Didn't know that but was going with Daryl Dragon who says that Dennis didn't know who Richard Wagner was when he first heard him play.

Again, self taught, primitive perhaps, but the guy played on some of the BB's best stuff, Don't Worry Baby, Catch a Wave, Little Saint Nick, I Get Around, When I Grow Up, Dance Dance Dance, I Can Hear Music and on and on.

No matter how much I love Dennis' drumming (he's my favorite drummer of all time, but not when it comes to technique of course; that place probably would go to Ron Tutt), the mentioned songs have effective but not very difficult drum parts, so I guess the "clubbing" still fits with them, especially since it's just a metaphoric expression which more or less means what you, rightly, call "primitive"

[Amy B.]

True fact: Irving Berlin could only play in one key. So he had a transposing piano made, on which he could change the key he was playing in with a (IIRC) foot pedal.

Didn't he have a lever like this one? :-)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8hTLZz2hUOA

By the way, Fred Astaire was a better pianist than his friend, Irving Berlin!

[TdHabib]

Thanks for that fact, Clay, I've never known that.

My choice is Dennis. Brian was/is a musical genius and some more inventive melodies and chord patterns than Dennis...but Brian's piano style 9 times out of then seems to be the same block chords style or boogie woogie style. Dennis' piano was beautiful, fluid and slightly classically influenced. They complemented each other perfectly.

[c-man]

AGD once heard Brian play "Rhapsody In Blue" (perfectly, he said) up close and personal.  Andrew, maybe you'd like to share your impression of that?

And, although Billy Hinsche isn't technically a "Beach Boy", I thought I'd mention that Bruce told me last year that he considers Billy the best piano player the band ever had, outside of Brian.  That's interesting in that Bruce is basically saying that Billy's awesome, Brian's better, and they're both better than him (he was possibly just being humble in that regard).

[TdHabib]

Yeah, I had Brian's Gershwin stuff in the back of my mind, as well was when he'll break out the odd Four Freshmen stuff in an interview.

[Chris Brown]

Unfortunately all we have to go on is what's on record, but I'm willing to bet that Brian had more chops than just the block chords/boogie woogie that we always hear him play.  Not necessarily because of his composing skills, but just based on what we've heard about his skills as a musician in general.  If he wanted to learn how to play piano in a more classical way, I don't think it would have been much of a challenge for him.  If he did though, it just wasn't something he ever displayed on record.

I'll second c-man's question to AGD, I would be curious to hear more about that.

[♩♬🐸 Billy C ♯♫♩🐇]

Quote from: Jon Stebbins on Today at 12:59:57 PM
A basic flaw in the premise...Dennis did not begin playing piano very late, he was playing boogie woogie(as taught by Audree) before the BB's were a band, he was playing Beethoven and Gershwin pieces in the earliest days of the Beach Boys at rehearsals and after gigs

Yet ANOTHER BB myth busted...I *really* should make a BB mythbusters thread..

[Ganz Allein]

Didn't someone in the Wrecking Crew say that Brian had the best left hand in the business?  He played some awesome, really inventive piano basslines, like in the coda of Surf's Up.

[Andrew G. Doe]

AGD once heard Brian play "Rhapsody In Blue" (perfectly, he said) up close and personal.  Andrew, maybe you'd like to share your impression of that?

Firstly, bear in mind the context: back in March 1985, I was hardly the cynical ol' grouch I am now, and I was in the middle of a week in LA during which I hung out with Steve Desper, Jasper Dailey, Stevie Kalinich, Bruce, got to meet Chuck Britz in Western 3 control room and spend several hours with the band while they mixed two tracks on the new album.

That said, after running through a few minutes of bog-standard boogie-woogie (with a few fluffs), Brian just slid smoothly in "RIB", and to my (hardly objective) ears, it sounded just perfect - certainly not his usual pounding, but a true performance. The transition into "Cast Your Fate To The Winds" was equally seamless - so much so that it took me a few beats to realise he had !  It was, simply, a magical experience, as much for the music as for the effect it had on Brian. For those fleeting minutes, he was, basically, 'old' Brian.

[slothrop]

Didn't someone in the Wrecking Crew say that Brian had the best left hand in the business?  He played some awesome, really inventive piano basslines, like in the coda of Surf's Up.

I'm digging that piano that's all over Wild Honey right now. Great bass lines. Did Brian play all of the main piano parts on that album?

[c-man]

Didn't someone in the Wrecking Crew say that Brian had the best left hand in the business?  He played some awesome, really inventive piano basslines, like in the coda of Surf's Up.

I'm digging that piano that's all over Wild Honey right now. Great bass lines. Did Brian play all of the main piano parts on that album?

I believe so.  On a piano specially-tuned for his ears.  A lot of the organ might be Bruce, but I think ALL the piano on that album is Bri.

[Sam_BFC]

"Variations" is pretty but is it really all that technically difficult?

You make a good point, I love 'Variations...' but it is just essentially broken chords I think...I suppose what is interesting is the amount of mileage Dennis was able to get out of some simple broken chords.

[Mr. Cohen]

I'm digging that piano that's all over Wild Honey right now. Great bass lines. Did Brian play all of the main piano parts on that album?

In a dream I heard a remixed stereo version of Smiley Smile and Wild Honey. Not only could I hear Brian's brilliant piano playing more clearly, but some of the songs were radically different. Had the Beach Boys released the version of "I Was Made to Love Her" I listened to in my dream, it probably would have been a hit. It had a great guitar part and some interesting twists and turns that aren't in the real version. If this hadn't been a dream, I would now be able to understand how some members of the group thought Brian was purposefully underproducing some of their songs.

[kirt]

  I think most of us have seen the clip of Daryl Dragon talking about Dennis's song "Barbara" and that the folks he had been in "music school" (sorry can't think of the proper term)  couldn't even write that.   

I believe it's on "Endless Harmony".   

 

[Mike's Beard]

Tough to answer in that (a) for many songs you don't know WHO is playing the piano on what. Esp after '65 when the songs started having multiple piano/keys parts on the same track. Could be Dennis or could be Daryl Dragon? Could be Brian or could be Wrecking Crew member/Bruce? (b) they were both so good at utilizing their playing talent to come up with great material. (c) both had very different playing styles. I can't play piano so could not say what is harder to play out of say, "Thoughts of You" and "Mt. Vernon and Fairway". I DO know Brian could never have composed the former and Dennis the latter. Both too unique. I'd say it's a tie. Cop out I know!

[adamghost]

I wanted to weigh in here since I'm a keyboard player and I've also worked out a lot of both of their parts...and it IS a really tough call because their piano styles are COMPLETELY different.  Brian generally likes to play block chords in rhythm on the piano, with the left hand movement doing the bass line.  Very functional and basic like a lot of his playing.  Dennis is a more apreggiated style not dissimilar from Elton John's.

There's no way to really say for sure.  My gut says that Brian had a much better grasp of music theory than Dennis, and he apparently has or had a really agile left hand.  I suspect, though, that Dennis had more overall chops.  I've heard him do more technically demanding parts and more versatile parts than Brian overall.  I'm excepting things like "Rhapsody In Blue" because basically anybody, musician or no, can learn this or that piece through repetition to a point that it's almost flawless.  I don't count that as the same as overall technical ability.

It's also interesting in terms of the choices they made in the studio as keyboardists.  When not on piano, Brian tended to play the organ, celeste, harpsichord, Moog, things like that.  Things that sounded expansive.  Dennis' sonice tastes were funkier:  electric piano, clavinet, ARP synthesizer.  Again, even their tastes on the keyboard were very dissimilar.

It's funny, they really were two totally different kettle of fish as keyboard players.  CARL'S style was also very distinctive.  Much closer to Brian's but he favored very clustered chord structures and had this weird hammering thing he did with his left hand on the bass notes that I've never seen anyone do.

[Fall Breaks]

This thread is great. Adam, could you elaborate on Carl's playing style a bit more?

[adamghost]

I don't know how much more to say about it, because I only know from working his parts out and watching a few videos.  But he tended toward Brian's basic style -- block quarters in the right hand, moving bass in the left -- but he seemed to have his own twist on it.  From footage I've seen, he would kind of hit the left hand with sort of a karate chop action.  That would put extra weight on the bottom notes, make them stand out more.  In the right hand, he really liked what my old piano teacher called "crushed chords."  That is, very cramped tonal clusters, and he also seemed to like to follow certain shapes around.  For instance, if you take the first verse chord sequence of Long Promised Road, it goes like this:

Em7/C   Cmaj7/E   Fmaj7-->F6

Those are all white keys.  The left hand makes a simple movement from C, to E, to F.  The right hand likewise hardly moves, but Carl is always holding down FOUR notes in the right hand, with a major 7th being the widest interval between the top and bottom notes, but it's usually just a sixth from top to bottom.  On the first chord, you have a C in the bass, which isn't in the Em7 chord (which technically makes it a C--what, a 13?  This is where my theory fails me).  But the bottom line is that chord has 5 of the 7 notes of the C major scale all lumped together.  And the rest of the song goes on this way - lots of four note chords in the right hand clustered together with the bass off somewhere else, which some seriously crazy voicings, none of which make sense if you're a trained keyboard player but if you're just an intuitive musician feeling your way around the white keys and trying to keep your bass notes away from the tonic, make total sense.  I myself couldn't "learn" the song until I stopped thinking about how the chords related to each other and started thinking about how the SHAPES related to each other.  "Long Promised Road" of all the Beach Boys songs I've ever learned, was the hardest.  The only Brian song I can think of that's more complicated is "I Just Wasn't Made For These Times," though there's probably a few others on PET SOUNDS I'm missing.

Anyway, this tendency for Carl to use these closed, complex voicings are part of the reason his songs have this otherworldly quality, and also this feeling of not going anywhere but being tense at the same time.  When you use these kinds of voicings, you're using a lot of 2nds and 6ths and as my piano teacher  once said to me, "those voicings don't lead anywhere."  They created a disturbing kind of static quality, like there's something in the chord that isn't exactly dissonant (because it's in the major scale) but that's "blurring" the chord.

So when you start layering those chords, on piano or guitar, you create this kind of spaced out, murky quality that comes from all those whole step intervals rubbing up against each other.  If this is too hard to understand, just sit down at a keyboard and just lay your hand randomly across a bunch of white keys, and hear the notes kind of smash against each other.  Now imagine layering that sound with organs, electric pianos, guitars, etc.  A blur, right?

This usually doesn't work.  Trained keyboard players tend to stay away from these kinds of voicings because pianos, organs etc. already are so harmonically rich that they'll turn a track to mush just by playing a standard chord.  For example, a trained player probably would have left the "E" out of that first LPR chord, so it would be a "simple" C11 chord, and so there would be at least a third between each note, so there'd be that sonic space maintained.  When Brian would lay out complicated chords -- and most of his chords were complicated -- he mostly did this OR, if he did a dissonant voicing, it would be a major 7th or something where the two notes were right on top of one another but the rest of the chord had space.  There are some exceptions I can think of -- I've never worked it out but "'Til I Die" sounds like it was written in a very similar way to "Long Promised Road" -- but while Brian's chords were unorthodox, the way he voice them on the piano never struck me that way.

So, anyway, Carl had a real genius for making these close, crabbed voicings work, and moreover, layering the instruments to make those voicings create a very particular sonic world that I've never heard anyone else do.  And the guy knew what he was doing...the choice of voicings may have been intuitive, but he was very methodical in his production and how he fit the instruments together.