The Smiley Smile Message Board

This just appeared in The Guardian:

http://www.theguardian.com/music/2016/jan/31/three-albums-1966-beatles-revolver-bob-dylan-blonde-on-blonde-beach-boys-pet-sounds

Posing a question I have sometimes mulled over myself, wondering if it had really been that great or was it just the memory of hormones kicking in?

It almost seems I've spent a lifetime reacting to that year.

Yes indeed! If I had to choose just one year, it would be 1966. It combined many, many great 45s with some truly great albums. And it was a year full of promise. All highly subjective, of course...

Thanks, TM - I really enjoyed that. But I would add 1967 to that.   ;)

Throw in Rubber Soul from Dec 65 and I'm good.

Oh, yeah!  :lol

Agreed.

1966 was a sensational year for the evolution of music...and Rock.  Sure the 3 lps already feted are worthy of the praise...and then some  100%.  No question.  No contrary BS.  

BUT...let us also stop to consider that '66 gave us the first Rollimg Stones' lp featuring ALL Keith/Mick material...Aftermath.  One of their best lps ever.  [even if it spelt the beginning of the demise of poor Brian Jones]  We got the first Buffalo Springfield album...the initial Mamas and Papas lp If You Can Believe Your Eyes and Ears...There was the Bluesbreakers record with John Mayall and Eric Clapton [and some guy named John McVie]...The WHO/A Quick One, 5th Dimension by the Byrds, Fresh Cream by some supergroup, Sunshine Superman from Donovan, Daydream and Hum/Lovin Spoonful and a couple from Simon and Garfunkel...Sounds of Silence and Parsley Sage Rosemary and Thyme.

Yup...66 was and is a difficult year to outdistance.  Oh and...let's not foget Good Vibrations...one of the most important singles ever recorded was also a 1966 gem.

We should be so lucky 50 years later.

But we're not.

Let's see a picture of Lee from 1966! ;D

Good gawd NO!!!!  My parents might have barely accepted the 'Lee look' back in '66 [the typical Beatles circa '65 look] but at 14 I thought I looked like a real DINK!!!  I wanted it longer and shaggier.  Brian and Dennis had neat hair.  Mike Al and Carl...not so much.  I moved out of the house at the end of '67.  Needed to live under a roof with different rules and regulations.  So I moved in with me, myself and I. 

49 years later...my hair is still way down my back.  Another 1/2 year or so and it'll reach my belt.  [and I don't wear my pants up under my friggin arm-pits either. :lol ]

I'm only about 1 inch taller...maybe 1 1/2 than I was in '66.  Weight wise though?  On my best days of recent yore I'm about 55 lps heavier.  Ell Bees are a pisser.  Booze and food are great. ;)

Fair enough :lol

I think it was the captain who in another thread suggested that 1965-67 was more realistic than naming a single year.

I can live with that. It was certainly a fantastic time for pop----particularly 1966. ;D

John k picture from that era? ;D

It seems that drug use by someone with an artistic mind can spawn a brief period of expanded creativity, followed often by a sharp burnout. 

1966-67 was that creative period for many musical artists- it was all happening at once in the music world.

"Guess You Had To Be There".   ;)

OSD 1966 army picture? ;D

I would say 1965-66; in the case of the 3 artists mentioned in the article, that would include Bringing it All Back Home and Highway 61 Revisited along with BOB; Beach Boys Today and Summer Days along with PS (and Party, if you must); and here in the US, Beatles VI, Help!, Rubber Soul, and Revolver (and the butcher album, lol). 65-66, for me, is the point where the music starts to get a little more 'serious', but it was still fun. '67 seems to be the turning point, where groups like the Beach Boys, Paul Revere and the Raiders and the Lovin' Spoonful fall out of favor for being too silly, straight, or ...whatever. Or if you're the Kinks, you don't get heard anymore because you've been banned from entire countries!

1966 was the last year that pop music was a cohesive whole, with Dylan, the Supremes, James Brown, the Beach Boys and Andy Williams all co-existing within the same milieu.

In 1967 the pop world began to split into the FM-radio, album-oriented counter-culture bands, and the AM-radio, singles- oriented artists. Some fantastic music resulted, but something essential -- a common experience?-- was lost forever.

My feelings too, that something went missing in '67. Maybe '66 raised hopes so high that '67 could only be an anticlimax.

I find it odd the author dissed Here, There and Everywhere so much, right after praising Pet Sounds. Here, There and Everywhere was, after all, a deliberate copy of the Beach Boys, Pet Sounds in particular. In fact, a few years ago it dawned on me it was basically an imitation of You Still Believe in Me, though I'm not sure McCartney was fully aware he was copying it so closely.

Instead of a "deliberate copy", it was most probably a loving tribute or at the least a tip of the hat to Brian Wilson and his writing.  :)

With the Beatles retiring from the road at the end of that summer, yeah, it marked the culmination and end of that breathless rush of excitement, energy and creativity unleashed by their advent on Ed Sullivan early in '64.

Whew, what a run!

One commentator, I can't remember who, remarked the decade seemed to simultaneously speed by while taking a century to complete, so crammed was it with happenings of profound import and transformation - each year having a feel of it's own.

Pet Sounds clearly an extension of while simultaneously a departure from Summer Days, Sgt. Pepper likewise growing out of Revolver.

And yet, there is a ripeness to '67, like a fruit ready to turn, that is not yet evident in '66...I think...well maybe...hmmmm....

Here, There and Everywhere is to me more boring than all of Pet Sounds and the rest of Revolver. 1966 was THE year though. Pet Sounds, Revolver, After-Math, A Quick One ... never topped, if you happen to have the same musical taste as me. The best works of the respective artists.

Wow. I've never heard someone agree with me on this. If that's a tribute to Pet Sounds, it really misses the mark.

It's all opinion, Emily, but I've always believed that HTAE and Sun King were done with Brian Wilson in mind. Listen some time to the ending of Here Comes The Sun. Yes? No?  ???

Pure memory here, but didn't McCartney acknowledge (maybe in his bio?) that "Here, There and Everywhere" was a tribute to or modeled on Brian's work?  Certainly, "Back In the USSR" was a light-hearted tribute.

-ITS BEEN SAID THAT "HERE, THERE AND EVERYWHERE" WAS INFLUENCED BY THE BEACH BOYS. IS THAT ACCURATE?

PAUL: "It's actually just the introduction that's influenced...John and I used to be interested in what the old fashioned writers used to call the verse, which we nowadays would call the intro...this whole preamble to a song, and I wanted to have one of those on the front of 'Here, There and Everywhere.' John and I were quite into those from the old-fashioned songs that used to have them, and in putting that [sings "To lead a better life”] on the front of 'Here, There and Everywhere,' we were doing harmonies, and the inspiration for that was the Beach Boys. We had that in our minds during the introduction to 'Here, There and Everywhere.'

--http://albumlinernotes.com/Paul_McCartney_Comments.html

It's really just the harmonies, which isn't so much a Pet Sounds thing particularly, more a Beach Boys thing generally.

eta - though even what Paul McC says above doesn't entirely make sense because the harmonies don't kick in until after the intro on HT&E.
I kind of think, despite what McCartney says here, that it's the falsetto (though it's not the sort that BW ever used) and the ooh-ing that make people think it's a BB tribute, and maybe it was, but it's really not very Pet Sounds-like at all to my ears. It doesn't have any of the interesting instrumentation or adventuresome structure of Pet Sounds. Some of the Beatles' stuff does, but Here, There and Everywhere is Beach Boys-like to me in the same way Back to the USSR is.

If Here Comes the Sun and Sun King are BW tributes or BW inspired, I think they are much more successfully so than HT&W. BW's music was just never as tepid as HT&E (to me, of course... yes, this is all opinion and on this topic I have no irksomeness regarding other opinions).

I prefer 67, not because of the cliche Summer of Love but because of all the amazing bands that appeared that year.

I'm aware of that McCartney quote, but the more I've listened to the two songs, the more similar they seem to each other. It's not just the intro, but pretty much all of HTAE is quite similar to YSBIM. I know McCartney has also said he really liked that particular Pet Sounds song, so I can't help but think he was copying it, even if subconsciously.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lSoM2sJ4N1M
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8FjUzPsG3c8

I can recall a Christmas party, 1966, at which Pet Sounds was played in rotation with the Fugs and Herman's Hermits Greatest Hits. Twas really mind-changing.

Yes, and in June '67 hearing the first cuts from Pepper on AM radio, jumbled up with 1941 Mining Disaster and Up Up and Away, and feeling these were not just different sounds, but different ways of thinking.

No, I've never recovered from those years, never became a Young Republican, always longed to recapture that elusive feeling, that elusive moment.

The music was that powerful, that transformative. Believe it.

And now that the stars have turned in the wheel of heaven we find ourselves in the mirrored image of that time- Revolution.

Do you mean in the melody? I can definitely hear a similarity there. YSBIM is still, to me, so very much more interesting and adventurous musically that HT&E. I'm a really big Beatles fan - but HT&E just seems weak (to me). BW music is never blah.

Not that 1966 (or '65 or '67) was all about the Boys (and/or the Fabs)----far from it!---- but it does warrant this topic's inclusion in the General On Topic Discussions. :=)

In those years in the UK we were lucky to have the offshore "pirate" radio stations who played everything and anything, including (in 1966) David Bowie's earliest outings with the Lower Third and truly obscure stuff like "Screwy Mooey" by The Peels. In fact it was in 1967 that such stations were declared illegal and the BBC took over----not a positive step, in my opinion. This may have coloured my attitude to 1966, as the last year of UK pop radio freedom. I wonder how much one's choice of year (1965/66/67) depends on which side of the pond one was at the time----or from today's perspective. Anyway... 

This book has been heartily recommended to me (I'm sure I'll buy it one day):   

(https://consequenceofsound.files.wordpress.com/2015/02/1965.jpg?w=806)