The Smiley Smile Message Board

Weren't the Beach Boys like the Beatles of America from 62 to 66?  SO why aren't there more of their songs on Mad Men, a show about US culture in the 60s?

I will admit, the use of "I Just Wasn't Made For These Times" when Roger Sterling took acid was absolutely perfect.   ;D

BOY WAS HE MAD

Song rights cost a fortune to place in TV shows. That's why Mad Men tends to use a lot of obscure songs, they want to save money. They had to bust the piggy bank to feature the Beatles once or twice, and I'm sure the Beach Boys don't come cheap, either.  When they used a Beatle song in a particular episode, I read somewhere that it cost them over $100,000.  So, for the most part, they preferred to use more obscure British invasion bands like the Nashville Teens to provide era flavor when the show got to the mid-'60s, rather than pay the big bucks for bigger name bands of the era.

Why aren't there more (mostly) naked ladies in my recording studio like they used to show on MTV? Why was Al Jardine born right-handed? Why do birds suddenly appear every time you are near me?

Pardon me for going off-track for a moment. I shall write the network that airs Mad Men and share my your grievances with them at once! Long live Mr. Roper!

thanks for being the only one who gave me a straightforward and non condescending answer.

I was too busy being a fanboy and screwing off in my stupid Sgt Peppers costumes to give a f***, you see.

lol butthurt

Many times publishing agreements have a "Favored Nations" clause, which guarantees that every publisher gets an amount equal to the highest amount offered any single publisher.  So if Sony/ATV is able to negotiate the best deal for a Beatles song, every other publisher could get that higher deal.  That often limits the number of high profile songs included in a soundtrack.

Lee

There is an important point being missed here, and it's part of the creative vision of the people who create the show. It's similar to Breaking Bad, the sorely missed Breaking Bad which along with Mad Men redefined the way television dramas are made and set the bar impossibly high for nearly every aspect of a TV show's creation, including the way music is selected and used.

Let me use the Breaking Bad example - The main force behind that show explained in an interview prior to the final season that he/they had been holding onto the song "Crystal Blue Persuasion" for just the right time in the story development and the plotlines. It was a natural choice - those who know the show will know what crystal blue meant to that show...so they could have placed that song literally anywhere in the series run. But they held it, and they used it for a season-finale montage that was brilliant, one of the best musical montages I've seen, ranking right up there with Mad Men in an early season which used Dylan's "Don't Think Twice It's Alright" in a terrific scene that was both high art and emotionally crushing. It's one of those rare scenes that i watch again and again, and it never loses a bit of impact. It's true art in television production.

Now to Mad Men. They paid a very large sum of money to use "Tomorrow Never Knows" in the season focused on the changes in the latter half of 1966. It was, again, a terrific use of music to tie in with the plot and the characters.

Mad Men banks on that, they feature songs that seem to fit perfectly with the action unfolding or about to unfold. "On A Carousel" this past season was an example.

"I Just Wasn't Made For These Times" was, to me, even better than Breaking Bad using "Crystal Blue Persuasion". The sound, the feel, the overall effect of how that song played under the scene was again *perfect*, I couldn't imagine a better choice.

Now, what if they had thrown in a bunch of Beach Boys songs in earlier seasons? Would it not, possibly, have watered down the effect of hearing that Pet Sounds track for the LSD scene?

Yes, the option is always there to use more of any band's music, including the Beach Boys.

If the AMC shows were not already known for being willing to spend extra, as in the case of the Beatles' song a *lot* extra, I might say it was financial. Some of it is, no doubt.

But at the same time, they make conscious, deliberate, and often brilliant decisions on when and how to place a specific song.

And they pay extra, too, in order to secure the rights to the original song, and not a soundalike as most major non-cable networks will do to trim the budget a bit.

Think of it as a creative choice, above all. I cannot see when or how placing even a few more Beach Boys songs would have improved the effect beyond the music that was chosen.

That's Mad Men. Back to Breaking Bad, again the series finale held onto the song "Baby Blue" until the very end, the last thing anyone heard on the entire run of the show. And it was, again, very deliberate, well-planned in advance, and above all *perfect*.

My 2 cents.  :)

I love Mad Men but I do find it disappointing that the only nod to surf culture/music in the show was a brief scene in season 4 where Don is in California at a bar.  Staged in a very cheesy way and with Jan and Dean's "Sidewalk Surfin" played instead of something like Dick Dale or The Beach Boys.

I get that the show is set in Manhattan and the Beach Boys may not have fit stylistically/thematically but it does feel like certain aspects of 60's culture were glossed over or unexplored.  Also, could have just been cost prohibitive like KittyKat said.  Sucks that it costs so much to license music.

Cost: Red Herring.

Wasn't I clear enough on that? :-D

I agree with both you & Ebb and Flow.  As great as Mad Men is, I think some 60s US culture was glossed over to give it a more drab NYC feeling.

One of the undercurrents of the show was always the shift in popular culture from New York as the entertainment and media epicenter of the US to Los Angeles, including everything from television like Johnny Carson to music (think Dick Clark moving Bandstand to LA after being a cultural phenom in Philly). In advertising, Madison Avenue and New York was still firmly entrenched in New York, but even they had to follow both the trends and the money, which is what the show has been showing as well.

There were shades of the coast-to-coast shift in early seasons when Don walked into a group of hot-rodders working on their cars when he was in California, before car culture became a nationwide, media-focused thing.

I'd rather not see that.  :smokin

I'm not sure the lack of big-name rock acts and that "drab NYC" atmosphere is so much budget or location as it is generational. The characters started the show as adults in the early '60s. Therefore, they're not going to be big listeners of that era's rock music. Even Peggy, one of the younger cast members, listens to the MOR station in her office when she's working by herself instead of FM rock or Top 40. It's a combination of generation and being generally more conservative. Don had to be turned on to the Beatles by Megan. The show is stuck in the Sinatra generation and always will be, no matter how large their sideburns get.

http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/05/07/how-mad-men-landed-the-beatles-all-you-need-is-love-and-250000/