The Smiley Smile Message Board

As many of you may know, one of my primary goals has been to "academize" the work of the Beach Boys; to package it in a way that shows off its intrinsic worth as part of the glories of Western Art.  A perspective that I'm now trying to suss out is the idea that Brian, alongside his faithful studio musicians, was a part of a movement within the Hollywood popular music scene that was developing what I am calling, at the moment, an authentic pop vocabulary.

Here's what I mean by that --  the kind of arrangements and, in particular, orchestrations that Brian and a handful of his peers were doing were a natural extension of the popular music that came before.  These were traditions that emerged directly from a taproot of popular classical music, big band, swing, and rock 'n' roll.

In contrast, after this movement died out (for various reasons) my contention is that, rather than join a developing continuum of innovation, when pop/rock arrangers and producers dipped into instrumentation outside the now standard rock set-up, these arrangers are simply grafting a foreign vocabulary onto their own limited pop-rock vocabulary -- it's not authentic; it's a chimera.

Now, I would appreciate two forms of feedback:

1.  Does this position make sense?
2.  If you buy it, can you help me come up with a handful of arrangers/producers who were part of this movement with Brian?  I think that, for instance, you could put Jack Nitzsche in there, Jan Berry, Billy Strange...etc. 

Thanks!  I'm hoping to write a paper on this.

I think I know what you mean. Sounds like a very interesting idea and project!


Although they started way back in the 50s and didn't work solely in L. A., I think one of the most important objects would be Leiber&Stoller. They are basically the blueprint for the Brian Wilson, Phil Spector, Jan Berry etc. type of producer (in fact, trivia time, the term "producer" on records was coined for L&S).

I feel as though “authentic” is a rather fraught word in this context. Many artists continued to create orchestral pop through the 70s, 80s, 90s and beyond. And while I understand the concept of grafting on out of context instrumentation, Brian himself tacked on Lawrence Welk-style strings to the Surfer Moon before developing a more integrated sonic vocabulary.

There’s also an element here that seems to overlook the work of folks in Philadelphia who created sumptuously orchestrated tracks in the mid-70s, along with disco, which was likewise often carefully arranged for large ensembles. These weren’t movements created by white dudes in California, but does that make them less “authentic”?

I agree with all of this, but I'm trying to keep the focus as narrow as possible for the sake of writing a concise paper, rather than a multi-volume work, at this point.  Certainly your Gambles, Huffs, and Bells, and all the people doing that Sigma sound stuff were creating their own vocabulary, and as such, they deserve credit and they deserve focus.  But after devoting decades to studying the Hollywood scene, I am not going to be the person to do that.

Of course, "authentic" is always a horrible, contentious word in almost any context.  I could probably find a less fraught word.  Perhaps "ex introrsō" or somesuch.

There is a precedent in popular music which I think has to be noted, which if the exact dates can be noted (and I'm not sure they can because it's somewhat dependent on the opinion of the person listening) would parallel Leiber & Stoller's orchestral leanings in pop (being watched by their protege Phil Spector) and may even pre-date it.

I'd recommend at least an introductory discussion on what's referred to as "The Nashville Sound". Late 50's, early 60's Nashville session machine at work, mostly at RCA studio A, Bradley's Barn, etc and on RCA's label.

Here was an overt attempt to shift country music into something more palatable to the masses, and make a lot more money in the genre in the process. They took a genre that had handfuls of sub-genres or labels and basically smoothed it out by adding elements of pop music which was getting airplay and also smoothing out some of the rough edges. What was "hillbilly", "rockabilly", "Honky Tonk", and based a lot on the blues and blues song forms was now getting pop song forms and arrangements which were more from lite pop of the 50's than honky-tonk jukebox hits.

They added string sections, horn sections (often members who became stars themselves as Danny Davis and The Nashville Brass later), background vocal groups (often The Anita Kerr Singers), and they had a core group of studio players who played 98% of these sessions in Nashville and became known as The A-Team. Even an A-Team member like pianist Floyd Cramer who had worked with Elvis on the early RCA sessions (and worked with almost everyone else in Nashville in the 50's and 60's) went on to have massive hits singles and instrumental albums using that same formula. The single "Last Date" in particular pretty much encapsulates the "Nashville Sound" as much as "TSOP" by M.F.S.B. would later do as a Philly Soul instrumental smash hit in the early 70's. And, as any number of the LA Wrecking Crew instrumental hits like Taste Of Honey or No Matter What Shape pretty much summed up the sound of that core band too, in a hit record form.

I think it's very much a template for what would happen in LA, only predating it by either 4 years or 2 years depending on whose account of the history you might read. But take that template, and it's what Phil and Brian and all the Wrecking Crew participants ended up doing in LA. Right down to the fact that most of the true "classics" of the scene were mostly recorded in one of the same 3 studios on most of the big hits, and often using the same core players. And it was not hard rock, or even what purists would call rock and roll music, it was not blues based as the songwriting moved away from blues forms by that time, and just like the Nashville Sound took the hillbilly and rougher sounds out of the genre, so did a lot of the LA records from 62-66 that are in this sub-genre.

It's hard not to see a parallel on both a business model and even a modus operandi overall between that late 50's/early 60's "Nashville Sound" and the 62-66 LA scene with their taking more unsophisticated styles and sounds and polishing them up with orchestral and pop touches. Surf music with sophisticated harmonies and strings, with an occasional harp...rock and doo-wop chord changes with strings, horn sections, and orchestral percussion...etc. I'd also throw in as a possible precedent - to a much lesser degree - the attempts in the 50's to make rock and roll music "safe" by having Pat Boone and that crew recut original rock and R&B tunes with similar orchestrations and pop sounds. Even though I'm not a fan, there is even a parallel in that sub-sub genre of "lite rock remakes" where the addition of strings and the ways they made the beat less insistent and more lightweight put less emphasis on the all-out groove and rhythm and turned small-combo rock and roll bashers into lite pop offerings. 

Once listeners heard strings and vocal group backings on the radio, the thinking at that time was more people would listen and buy. I don't think Nashville was concerned with the art as much as trying to sell more country music to the average people who would not listen to honky-tonk and hillbilly music. And all this was at a time when the Grand Ol' Opry *still* did not allow drums on that stage.

Good thoughts -- I think you're right that Nashville has to be acknowledged in the narrative.

I'm vibing with the concept of the pop vocabulary, now that you've explained things more. That is, that the tradition of Hollywood and jazz and all sorts of recordings in California created this rich vein of music that was partly expressed by artists, but also (or even more importantly) by producers and arrangers. And how this very particular semi-orchestrated sound was hugely dominant and influential for a time but then faded. I also wonder about the ways in which it went underground or survived even after its pop moment was past -- in soundtracks and even commercial session work.

In looking for people who were part of the same movement as Brian, I think you'd have to consider Curt Boettcher. I know some people balk at this notion, but often that's a reaction to some of the more grandiose claims made by Gary Usher which placed Boettcher above all others, Brian included.

I would not put Boettcher ahead of Brian in most respects, but he was certainly doing some interesting work in the period from '66 to '68. A lot of the woodwind parts on the Ballroom sessions are really unique, and Begin is just sublime from start to finish. That intro, which fuses harpsichord with a drum sound which fully anticipates Zeppelin seems to come from a universe in which Smile was released.  I would also say he was pushing effects such as tape delay to their limits as part of the arrangement well before Brian.

If it was me I'd also consider Michael Brown and his father.

Yes, Nashville also came to my mind, but I didn't mention it because as I understood Joshilyn, her work would be settled on L.A. But yes, Nashville's Pop influences shouldn't be underestimated. A lot of big and influential hits came out of there. Elvis Presley, Roy Orbison, Everly Brothers, Patsy Cline a.s.o.
Chet Atkins, Bill Porter, Owen Bradley are among those behind the glas. Not to forget the great Billy Sherill.

But if we are going that route, there also needs to be a point made for Memphis and it's music. Starting with Sun Records and evolving to an industry that had Stax, Hi-Records and Amercian Sound. The question would be if a line has to be drawn for an academic work so that you have more narrow definitions of "Pop". Otherwise you'd have to work a very wide field.

One of my reasons for citing the Nashville Sound was to show that a lot of these events and milestones in the 60's music scene didn't happen in a vacuum and there were precedents from those who came before. In the case of the Nashville scene centered around 1960, minus a few years either way, I'd suggest it was a template if not a direct influence on the LA scene. They took rough-hewn music styles and sounds, often recorded with bare-bones primitive methods by musicians not considered sophisticated or learned in the vocabulary of music and dressed the genre up with musical trimmings like string backing, vocal group backing, and in general a more grandiose form of production. It took the small combos who were making hillbilly music and playing honky tonks to the cleaners and made the country genre they were creating into a smooth and polished singer backed by orchestral instrumentation and singing a song with pop song form and structure rather than a hillbilly version of the blues form.

And it worked! They sold millions and people who would not listen to country of the overly twangy and cry in your beer variety were buying these records because they sounded like pop music. For better or worse, of course, in terms of people who love real, rough-hewn country music like me, but it made them money and sustained the entire genre basically.

It's almost exactly what would happen in LA, when you took these Southern California kids recording in garages and cheap small studios playing garage-band versions of doo-wop and blues song forms with regionally appropriate lyrics about girls, surf, and hot rods and eventually surrounded the song productions in a more grandiose way which also allowed the lyrics to develop more sophistication too.

Hence, the LA "California Sound" sound of 62-66, led by Spector, Wilson, Melcher, etc.  It's nearly a carbon copy of the "Nashville Sound" template a few years earlier in the way it took unpolished (yet very catchy) music and musicians and boosted the genre through production and arranging so more listeners would buy it.

I didn't mention Memphis because the bulk of their run of influence mostly came after the LA run, while Nashville came before and could be used as a precedent example. Unless, of course, you mention Stax, but again there wasn't really an overt or noticeable attempt to "clean up" or make more palatable to the general public any music being recorded at Stax, it was all about capturing the feel and the groove of the Memphis area musicians and artists cutting records there. Unless I'm missing some examples, those early and mid 60's Stax records were known for a tight rhythm section and a horn section, no extra polish on top in the way of strings or orchestral arrangements. And the other Memphis players clique at American Sound like Reggie and Chips and the guys were cutting their most influential music with their own signature polished production sound in the later 60's, after Nashville and LA did their groundwork.

I really appreciate the work you do, but I don't accept your premise at all.

It is true that pop music has gradually shed the specific type of chromaticism and orchestration Brian and others derived from "light" classical music, swing, etc.

But it was gradual -- and Brian's work (and the Beatles, etc. etc. etc.) was a part of that process. Something like "Do It Again" bears more of a relationship to modern studio pop music than it does to Irving Berlin.

Pop music became less and less chromatic and less orchestrated over a long period of time and, even though Brian's own music is/was highly chromatic and highly orchestrated for pop music in the "rock" era, it was still part of that evolution.

The move from the high chromaticism of 1940s pop to something like Adele is a gradual process and it's a bit like a "ship of Theseus" trying to figure out where the line is that it lost its connection to jazz/classical music. There is no moment you can point to that is the turning point, and even if there *was* a moment, I don't think Brian Wilson is it.

If I can get this idea extended into a Phd topic, the breadth could widen -- I have considered and been putting feelers out for doing a PhD on, essentially, the Hollywood recording scene of the 1950s and 60s, for a little while now.

But until such time, I figure I can at least lay the groundwork.  I'd probably put in a paragraph or two about the precedents, and a paragraph or two about the antecedents.  I plan to use lots of musical examples, notated in condensed scores.  

A big part of the thesis is how the studio musicians in LA (as well as other places, of course) were part of the development because they collaborated a lot with the same people, and because they could play anything.  The rock and roll vocabulary comes out of very limited musical abilities (often channeled into greatness) and narrow instrumental possibilities.  The pure classical vocabulary can play anything, but the players may not be as responsive as the LA studio players were, and the instrumentation choices are more limited.  It's closer to a jazz idiom, but without the high level of improvisatory flights.

It all lined up, with arrangers and producers who remembered fondly the popular music of the 40s and 50s, embraced the energy of Rock and Roll, but rejected its increasingly codified forms.  At the same time, these producers exploited the supreme abilities of their musicians in a way that allowed for rapid development -- they were essentially the Finale, or MuseScore of the time -- you give them what to play, you can hear it right way, you can adjust.

Lots of threads I could go on talking about!

Well, I'm not sure that that is my point.  I think that the kind of vocabulary I'm talking about is largely lost, and although I appreciate your point that it's a process, and I agree that Brian was not the turning point, my point is only that he and his cohort went on a distinct and now extinct line.  They expanded this very specific vocabulary to it's baroquest limits, and then, yes, it went downhill.  But I'm not concerned (for the purposes of putting together a thesis) with the decay, only the climax.

I think the biggest challenge is trying to codify anything in popular music beyond the relatively short period of time in which a certain category of pop music or a characteristic group of sounds was popular. It's made increasingly difficult to focus on the period of the 50's up to, say, 2000, because it could be argued that every truly major musical act or sonic trend had roughly a 5-7 year run of innovation, success, and influence before tastes and trends changed and there were different sounds audiences en masse wanted to hear and buy.

It's also more difficult with popular music because unlike classical music of the previous 300 years, the continued creation of the music depends almost solely on commerce to fund the machinery that cranks out new music. There are no wealthy sponsors, grants, or other forms of monetary support as in classical music. 18th and 19th century classical composers were not being funded through ticket sales or concert tours, and obviously not through media sales or airplay royalties when such media - including published sheet music available to the general public - did not exist.

And it is worth noting that 5-7 year span as almost a standard which can apply to almost any of the truly major acts, including The Beatles, Beach Boys, Elvis, even U2 and other examples who crossed the threshold from musicians into pop culture icons. When you break it down, most acts did the work which sold the best, influenced the most, and broke new ground artistically in that small span of 5-7 years (give or take). There are exceptions like Sinatra, of course, but generally these artists get perhaps one decade or less of truly inspired, influential work and after that, something new comes along.

What makes the 60's in particular even more difficult is that everything surrounding popular culture, pop music, and the technology in which pop music was created and delivered to audiences was changing rapidly, if not every year. Consider just the examples of The Beatles and Beach Boys: The Beatles of 1967 sounded nothing like The Beatles of 1963. The Beach Boys of 1966 sounded nothing like the Beach Boys of 1963. The Rolling Stones of 1969 sounded nothing like the Stones of 1964. And all of that change and growth happened within 3-5 years. It takes major artists today 3-5 years to make a new album, versus changing and innovating so much in that same time frame that the sounds and music of those artists becomes unrecognizable when played back to back, even though it's the same people writing and performing the music.

I think some of it comes down to the basic fact of popular culture where tastes change, and audiences' buying and listening habits change. And even that runs in 3-5 year cycles, more or less. Take any year in popular music from the 50's to the 1990's, look at the top song charts for that year, then go forward and backward 5-7 years from that starting point. The trends show themselves in what kind of music was selling the most and making those charts.

Any major producer, and any major studio in those years will have had a "run" of success where they just happened to hold the golden ticket and were making sounds which people wanted to buy. I have to think as much as talent and skill is a factor, there was a timing factor too that was more akin to winning the lottery than it was part of a masterplan to make music that people wanted to buy and hear by the millions. I think that aspect is what makes codifying certain elements in that music's creation and structure very difficult, because what was codified in 1965 as being the elements of a successful "sound" in popular music was already gone a few years later, to be replaced by something else which would also soon be replaced. It's the ever changing nature of pop culture and popular tastes which say this art will be in people's minds one year, and a few years later it will not. It's hard to say that what Elvis was doing from 1954-1958 was any more or less artistic than what Stax Records was doing from 1964-1968, or American in Memphis from 1968-1972, or The Beatles from 63-69, or The Beach Boys from 63-66, or the Philly Soul records from 72-76, or U2 from 85-91, or Garth Brooks in the 90's, or any other example of an artist or studio situation that had an amazing run of influence or success. They all sold massive amounts of product, and influenced the sound of their respective genres before being replaced by the Next Big Thing that came along.

All true, which is exactly why I'm trying to narrow the focus down to something worth commenting on.  Doing scholarship on popular music is hard, also, because there's so little of it to build on.

I'm curious to hear more on the last statement, "there's so little of it to build on". I think popular music - especially that of the 1960's, but in general too - has so much diversity and so many examples where a line of influence can be drawn in "six degrees of separation" style from any given influential piece of music both backward and forward to any number of other examples. I think the sheer availability of examples in popular music due to expanding technology and mass media, and the countless influences which followed offer a lot more openings to build on than the classical libraries which are pretty much set in stone regarding what a certain composer did and what future musicians and composers took from it. In popular music the interpretation factor alone created dozens of unique interpretations of the same piece, whereas most listeners could hear 20 different performances of Beethoven's 9th from the past 100 years and would be hard pressed to notice any significant differences between the performances.

I think one element of early "rock journalism" that is perhaps still holding back a scholarly dissection of the music is that those early critics would often review pop music in terms of the classical and jazz music criticism of the day instead of taking pop music as its own genre with a different goal and a different set of parameters to critique. And if not that, they swung the pendulum too far the other way and used underground and Beat-style writing to dissect the music, almost as if the purpose of reading the review was to read the style of the reviewer versus getting an opinion on the music being reviewed. It's hard to elevate a music genre which was conceived and created under totally different mindsets and with different sets of goals from the composers using standards set by commissioned works.

I think it has to be segmented to dissect the various forms within the genre of pop music, going so far as to ask why did records cut at Gold Star sound so different from records cut at Putnam's or Columbia or Sunset when the same core musicians are playing on the records, but with so much cross-pollination of influence and outright copying of previous sounds and styles to make new music, it really is a difficult task.

I can relate to what you're saying. I don't do academic scholarship anymore, but I was very much in that world for around 10 years, and I did actually plan to write something on Brian but I couldn't crack the nut. I ended up writing about jazz instead.

While there is a fair amount of scholarship on boomer pop/rock, IMO there is still no good academic treatment (musicological or otherwise) of Brian Wilson specifically and why he's interesting. It's just a lot of cliches and "received wisdom."

The problem, as ever, is the knowledge gap: there just aren't enough musicologists with the social history awareness, and not enough social historians with the musicological awareness.

I mean academically speaking, Craig.  When you are expected to cite serious scholarship, and there isn't any serious scholarship on the topic, it's hard to build up an academic paper.  As maggie notes immediately below, there is literally no truly academic work on Brian's music.

I completely agree -- There's so much of people saying Brian is an amazing genius but absolutely no explanation.  I'm not sure if he was a genius, but I do think he was important, and I think the movement he was part of is important, and I think I can articulate why, eventually.  Someone has to!

Just to preface, this is coming from someone who studied jazz, wrote about jazz, played jazz, and teaches jazz: The death knell of jazz seems to have been when the music was overly intellectualized and it became more common to read about or be lectured about how great it is versus hearing actual examples of how great it is in the present day. I think, sadly, certain circles intellectualized the sheer visceral fun out of the genre. I'm hard pressed to find one example of truly new jazz music made in the past 40 years that has struck a deep chord with me. When that does happen, it's usually a performer playing either a version of an old standard from 80 years ago, or playing in the style of a previous innovator. Modern jazz composers have by and large forgotten the emotion of jazz, and how it connected with the general public at one time to become the pop music genre of its day.

That's why I'm kept calm in the long-term outlook of music appreciation whenever I see new, young performers singing God Only Knows, or younger listeners getting excited about Beatles music and wearing the associated T-shirts and other wear. They're actively living the music, and not going to a lecture hall to be told how great it is. And that's the line which I supposed has to be walked like walking on eggshells, so the music of Brian and his peers doesn't become so intellectualized that it gets out of reach to the general public as sadly happened with modern jazz.

With all due respect -- and to a degree I share some of your evident despair with where jazz has ended up -- you're talking about a personal feeling, not the actual state of things. Saying "there is a lot of academic study of jazz" and "I don't like contemporary jazz" (or even "contemporary jazz sucks") is not actually making any kind of causal connection between one and the other, even if you are right that jazz has lost its vitality. And as to that point: I happen to love a lot of contemporary jazz, I happen to perceive its originality, and I don't see why my personal feeling about it or my historical awareness of it are less legitimate than yours.

Pursuant to what Joshilyn said just before this post, I think there is actually a lot of very good scholarship of pop music that hasn't managed to destroy the vitality of the art. For example, I think there's a lot of more than decent scholarship of hip-hop, both from a musicological and from a social history point of view. And the kids still like it, so I don't think "intellectualization" has hurt (or has the potential to hurt) anything.

I absolutely support Joshilyn's project of trying to do an academic study of Brian's music, I just don't agree with the premise of this specific thread.

I'm just giving my opinions, coming from a background of being a jazz musician and currently teaching jazz music. I am talking about the state of things as I see them and as other jazz musicians I've discussed this with have seen it too. It doesn't mean that's the state of things overall spoken as a definitive fact, but it's a pretty common opinion that jazz overall has stagnated in terms of commercial viability, popularity, and even the general public having a basic knowledge of any jazz artists from the past 40 years except perhaps for the Marsalis brothers due to their visibility on TV. Unless you're really into the jazz scene, it's just not in the public eye, and has become - sadly - a niche genre where the older back-catalog classic albums outsell anything new on a regular basis. The most exposure a lot of listeners under the age of 25 have gotten with jazz, if they're not musicians, has come in lecture halls or music appreciation courses. They're not hearing jazz and connecting to it in too many cases.

I never said nor suggested that my personal feelings or historical awareness were any greater or lesser than yours, so I'm not sure where that statement is coming from. I'm just calling it as I see it, and it's my opinion. However, it is true that legacy albums like Kind Of Blue or A Love Supreme continue to outsell and remain more visible than the bulk of modern jazz, and a majority of the charts played at the average jazz gig are songs written over 45 years ago or songs and standards from the Real Book, because that's what people know and that's what people want to hear. In my opinion I don't know of many modern jazz songs that have taken their place next to those standards, and I doubt a lot of them will because many of the compositions are too complex and lack a melodic component that listeners can attach themselves to and groove with. Too many composers seem to go for mathematical, polyrhythmic grooves and angular versus linear (and memorable) melodies, if it's not outright discordant harmony underneath everything.

I think as jazz became more intellectual, and things like dancing to jazz were frowned upon if not outright mocked (see the Ken Burns documentary for examples), the genre itself lost the general public. Then it turned into a situation where it felt like various academics and experts were trying to tell people why they should like jazz and why they're wrong not to versus celebrating the music and trying to reconnect the music to the popular culture, as if that would be a bad thing to return to the 30's and 40's when the kids would keep track of all the big bands and the musicians like kids today may follow the Kardashians or the latest K-Pop boy bands.

I think striving for sophistication and a higher intellectual plane in music is a great pursuit, but not if it basically takes the enjoyment of the music out of the sphere of the general public you're trying to connect with, and it requires a lecture from a professor to explain why someone should like the music they're just not feeling.

This is what I don't understand about academia overall. Someone with an expertise in the field has to be the first to publish, and if it's a topic that has no precedent, someone submitting a paper can and will be the first. I hope it hasn't gotten to the point where a truly new topic being treated in a scholarly and academic manner, elevating it to that level of scholarship in essence, gets rejected because no other academics have previously published on that topic and no citations can be made. It becomes a chicken versus the egg scenario.

I know it's simplistic, but someone had to be the first to publish on the genius of, say, Debussy at a time when no one had done so previously. So can it be with Brian Wilson and the musicology behind his legacy!

We're veering way off topic, but there has been a rush of new jazz musicians in just the last couple of years -- Kamasi Washington and Jon Batiste in the US, and Shabaka Hutchings, Nubya Garcia, and Moses Boyd in the UK -- who have been racking up major concert tours, big streaming numbers, awards, and a huge amount of press coverage, the kind not seen for jazz musicians since Wynton. AND, unlike Wynton, their audience is almost 100% young people. Bands like Sons of Kemet and The Comet Is Coming sure as hell aren't rehashing Kind of Blue or Bitches Brew.

Whether they are any good or not, and whether or not they deserve the attention (I am agnostic on these questions), they're a big deal, and they clearly attest to the music's continuing vitality. I teach 18-22s and many of them are excited about this music just as they are by Lil Uzi Vert or what have you.

I would think that someone who makes a living teaching jazz would be aware that jazz is kind of having a huge youth moment right now??? Clearly the academy hasn't been cramping the music's style because the Shabaka projects are about as un-academic as jazz gets these days.

I'm sorry that I reacted testily to your post, it was just the whole "I am a jazz musician, I teach jazz" preamble that made it sound like you were trying to pull rank on me and/or Joshilyn. Honestly, "all the jazz musicians I know agree with me" gives the same impression.

I understand - Just please don't misquote me. I never said nor would I say "all the jazz musicians I know agree with me", and what I did say is directly above in the post you quoted. And I wasn't trying to pull rank or anything of the sort. I said I teach jazz and play jazz, which I do, so I'm not trying to talk down on a style of music which I have experience in as others might do on styles they don't know much about but criticize or talk smack about it anyway.

What I've noticed in the youth movement *I've heard* is that a lot of it has a large element of funk and even borrows some rhythms from hip-hop breakbeats, which is fine but it's not quite jazz. And a lot of it seems to be coming from a jam band mentality, with those funk beats playing under the extended solos. Maybe that's the present and future of jazz? Maybe that's done to appeal to younger listeners who are more tuned into hip-hop samples of those old funk beats? I don't know. If it gets kids into different kinds of music, I'm all for it. But whether it's jazz or not is something I haven't agreed on yet.

I think Jon Batiste gets a lot of attention too because he's been fronting the house band on a late-night talk show for years, and he's one of the more visible jazz musicians now because of that, much like when Branford was fronting the Tonight Show band for Jay Leno back in the day. Yes he's a really talented player, but when I hear his latest album and especially the single being played from that album, it has prominent New Orleans parade beats and some modern production hooks but it's not really jazz to my ears. Just like some jazz fans don't like Smooth Jazz or the way it turns nearly every track into a smooth funk beat.

I'll have to check out some of those newer artists from the UK, I'm not as familiar with them as those in the US. For me, I still miss the 90's acid jazz like The Brand New Heavies, Us3, etc., but even that sub-genre had to run its course eventually. I think the best marriage of genres was Tribe Called Quest, again going back years at this point. I haven't heard any better combination of hip=hop and jazz than Tribe, they're still the best in my book. Maybe that's why when I hear more prominent newer artists like Trombone Shorty, it often sounds to me like what was being done in acid jazz almost 30 years ago and a few decades before with Miles' 70's bands, marrying jazz elements and harmonies with danceable funky beats. I guess it's all about preferences and what some consider jazz versus others, which is a debate in every genre of music!

Getting back to semi-on-topic, I raised the issue of the jazz genre stagnating because there really has not been anything truly new that has been widely influential for decades, and it seems to be stuck on repeat. What Brian Wilson was doing in 1965 and 1966 was new and original and continues to be influential, but even that did not happen in a vacuum, and neither did the LA scene surrounding him and his peers similarly making innovative music. They took what had existed previously and made something new, and made it their own inventions. I don't hear much of that in jazz today, and a lot of jazz minus that with the funk beats is written over the average listener's head. If these newer artists are connecting with younger audiences I'm all for it, but going to a jazz concert and hearing over an hour of discordant polyrhythmic free jazz compositions and random sax bleating is not going to appeal as much to those young listeners currently digging Batiste, Kamasi, Trombone Shorty, and Thundercat.

I find the idea of academizing pop and rock music fundamentally objectionable.

You gotta say why.

Pop and rock always seemed to be able to be characterized as music for laypeople to enjoy at face value. In my view, over-intellectualizing pop culture overwrites the care free appeal and joy of it.

How so?

Eh, I think it's just that simple but by all means do what works for you. Maybe I'm just not cut out for engaging in that kind of scholarship.

Well, that's just it -- if you're not interested in it, you don't have to engage in it, so why are you against it?  Nobody is forcing anybody to read the American Journal of Musicology.

Craig, you're absolutely right that academia is ridiculous that way.  And of course, somebody does have to be the first, and it is possible to be the first.  But it just means extra work because there is no path already beaten down; you have to machete everything out yourself.  Because of the self-referential nature of academic scholarship, when you have to go outside it to establish facts, you just have to be really extra circumspect and fastidious.


In any case - thank you for the feedback here, it has given me some things to think about.

I can't understand your problem. There are already books on Brian that are academia or lean to academia - the Equinox one and the Philip Lambert one. You could write what you want and to slip in references to these books, and it would look academ-ish enough for everybody. And surely there must be some papers in the Jounal of the Popular Music Studies or wherever.

It's not a problem -- it's simply the state of affairs.  Kirk Curnutt is an English prof and that book is not musicology, and while the Lambert book is the closest thing to a musicological study of the Beach Boys, it's not the final word by any means.  There are no good papers on the music of the Beach Boys that I have found in any journal (there are some bad ones, and even a doctoral dissertation that doesn't contribute anything to history.)

And it's very much not about looking "academ-ish" -- it is about contributing to history's understanding of the music that I love, in a meaningful way, and in a way that has staying power.

That's why I've said "you could write what you want". From my viewpoint, a solid paper or a book devoted to a musical matter is better to be a "pop" one than an "academia" one, but if you prefer the latter, your work should have just enough of recognizable features like references to other such works, and the content which is the most important thing would be of your choice.

I feel like this thread got way off on a tangent and it was partly/mainly my fault, getting into the weeds of the value of academic study of popular music, and we haven't really been discussing Joshilyn's premise.

I think the issue I have with the idea is twofold:

1> It was presented as a "return" to certain kinds of song form or orchestration but actually it's always seemed to me that those elements were vestigial survivals in Brian's art rather than something he "added in" as he matured: just listen to how the strings are arranged on "The Surfer Moon," it's pure Lawrence Welk, and that's where Brian's arranging started from (although I know he had help on those pieces). When Brian became more "authentic" about expressing his individuality in orchestrations, that lineage is much less apparent, except when he's doing style pastiche like the bossa arrangement of "Busy Doin' Nothin'". And indeed, although pieces like "Summer Means New Love" and "In the Back of My Mind" use more or less conventional section arrangements (albeit interesting ones), the strings after 1965 are used much more idiosyncratically, less as a "section." Even Pet Sounds reserves string section arrangements for isolated episodes that sound influenced by Max Steiner more than they do anything from jazz/pop per se, even though there are lots of string parts throughout. This increases with Smile and Brian doesn't really get back into using strings as a "section" until things like "Our Sweet Love."

Similar things could probably be said about the use of horns.

2> The vestigial survival of what we might call the "Welkian" arranging elements in Brian's early orchestrations are very specific and personal to his background, and I don't think Jan Berry's background or Spector's background or Jack Nitzsche's background were comparable. Spector and Berry were both mainly concerned with "functional" orchestration, i.e. with generating sonic effects on the radio. (There are exceptions to this rule, of course, like the Latin elements Spector liked to use.) Brian learned how to do that from both of them, but his use of orchestration for style purposes (rather than functional purposes) was based on his own personal context, i.e. his dad.

Thank you for this -- I'd much rather talk about the idea than the merits of academics.

I think you've hit upon a good point, that in and of itself might be worth exploring, and one could look narrowly at just Brian, or more broadly: A dynamic tension, perhaps, between the stock influences you mentioned, and the genuinely original-leaning impulses of the arranger/producer.  Indeed, the "less apparent lineage" is the one that is interesting to me, and sort of what I'm talking about when I'm talking about developing a vocabulary; you know, where did some of that stuff come from?  And what brought it out?  Clearly, as you say, Brian never really was without that Welkian/Murry Wilsonian impulse, and in some ways never did fully move past it.  But when he transcended that, where was that coming from?

Part of my working answer to that at the moment is that the studio musicians brought it out of him, and that is really a big part of the full premise behind the direction I would take something like a full study.  In fact, I see my project's protagonist as the studio musicians, and Brian as a sort of featured auxiliary character.  Come to think of it, your point about Nitzsche and Berry is useful because I think I need those people in the narrative to provide a certain amount of context.  Nitzsche took arranging classes, and Jan Berry came by his arranging skills in a fairly formal way, even if he was semi-self taught.  My inclusion of those two and their ilk in this conversation links them with Brian in a specific way, viz. I think that when they were arranging their music, they considered themselves to be doing a certain kind of music, writing a chart that was not Jazz, was not Classical, but distinctly "pop" whatever that meant to them at the time.  But Brian was effectively musically illiterate, so he didn't write charts (as such).  I wonder if some of his innovations were borne out of the translation effort from his singing parts at musicians to their perception of it and their attempts to get what he wanted.  So what started as a Welkian thing in Brian's mind ends up getting morphed into something a little more murky, lineage-wise, after essential playing musical telephone games.  But yeah, I do wonder where something so unique as, say, the duet between the pizzicato contrabass and the Fender bass on the verses of Here Today comes from.  Totally unique.

Ultimately, that was a bit of a ramble.  But again I appreciate your engagement, maggie.

Indeed, Joshilyn, I think "game of musical telephone" is a good way to characterize how Brian grouped the instruments available to him in search of certain feels. So he would take combinations and part-writing that Jan and Spector had used for functional purposes (e.g. the dual bass thing) and abstract them from their functional purpose, to see what sounds he could make.

My sense though is that his approach to orchestration was so influential, both because it was so artistically successful but mostly just by virtue of being the producer of the most successful and hit-producing rock & roll band in America, that it's hard to separate Brian as a reflection of his moment from Brian as essentially the creator of a new style. And, as I've suggested, the style came about in an ad-hoc fashion by abstracting pieces of the "Welkian" vocabulary and the functional vocabulary of Jan & Spector, among others.

It's like Charlie Parker. Charlie Parker undoubtedly had a rich basket of influences. But a lot of what followed Charlie Parker involved taking what Parker did and abstracting it from that original context. I kind of think this is what we're dealing with in the "de-jazzing" of pop is other producers taking what Brian abstracted from his Murry context (and from Jan and Spector) and abstracting it even further.

Is it really true that Brian "didn't write charts (as such)", or am I misunderstanding what you mean? I gather that a lot of the parts did come out of improvisations, and that many were simply dictated ("head arrangements"), but I had been under the impression that he did hand out a fair amount of parts on staff paper in his own idiosyncratic hand.

I think the danger could be in giving the session musicians too much credit for what Brian Wilson achieved as his final result, or final mix. Whether it be in the arrangement, orchestration, or the overall production, Brian ultimately was the one creating the majority of the notes played and dictating how they were played. If you watch that interview with Danny Hutton describing how Brian got the string players to play a certain way, demonstrating to them how he wanted them to make the notes "cry", that nails his approach and also falls into place with how Van Dyke Parks described Brian's musical approach using the word primitive, but it really was on a very sophisticated mental, intuitive, and emotional level even though he didn't have all the proper terminology.

I've expressed my opinions on Jan Berry here and elsewhere, but I'll just say Jan may have been one of Brian's favorites to watch produce a session, and there was influence and friendship, sure, but Jan's final results never add up to my ears to be the whole being greater than the sum of the parts. It's missing that something, that X-Factor which made Brian's songs sparkle with almost a magic sheen where all parts work together to create an amazing whole, and Jan has some great parts but the end result wasn't the same kind of classic record which people are still entranced by over 50 years later. Brian and Jan were using many of the same musicians in sometimes very similar ensemble groupings, but Jan's records didn't grab listeners the way Brian's did and still do.

I'll get back to the session players and ask a question mixed in with an answer: On all of the session tapes we've heard from Brian's work with the Wrecking Crew, and on almost all of the interviews with the musicians of the Wrecking Crew talking about working with Brian, do we ever hear anything suggesting Brian was not in full control and knew exactly what he wanted? He had the arrangements in mind, and would usually sing each part to the musicians, either one by one or section by section, until the ensemble got together on his concept. He sometimes had charts too, or would have one of the musicians act as copyist and transcribe Brian's lines for the other players. Whether it was Steve Douglas for the horns, or Hal, or one of the guitarists who could notate parts...if Brian himself didn't come in with some kind of written charts, he'd be right there singing his parts that were in his head when he entered the studio. It helped that when he sang these parts to them, he was usually pitch-perfect doing so, on every voice of the arrangement.

And if someone suggested a change, he'd listen, and if it worked, he'd adapt it. But the change to the God Only Knows bridge everyone knows about wasn't a change in the parts themselves. It was a musician suggesting they play staccato instead of swinging a legato melodic line. But the line itself was not written by a session musician, it was Brian's line adapted in a different rhythmic feel.

What I'm suggesting is I don't think we have much evidence, surely not on audio tape of the sessions, of Brian not knowing what he wanted and not being the one making decisions on the fly. He came in with these complex lines and sounds and arrangements in his head, and if a tweak suggested by a musician happened to work better, he'd adapt it. But it was not a case of the musicians developing these arrangements for him, as some other producers would work.

If anything the musicians either inspired Brian to up his game, or their skill as musicians allowed him to up his game. We also hear numerous sessions where the parts Brian gave them are challenging enough for the musician to have made mistakes, and needed to practice and rehearse the part so Brian would get both the notes and the feel he wanted in the part. That's the musician playing up to the writer and producer, not the other way around.

I'm just thinking it could be a slippery slope to credit the session musicians too much, especially and specifically in the case of Brian Wilson because he had most if not all of what he wanted to hear in his head before they started recording.

Otherwise, how would he know to contract and book certain instruments ahead of time? If he wanted cor anglais on an arrangement, he'd book a cor anglais player. If he wanted harmonica, he'd book a harmonica player. Etc, etc. And they would play what Brian was envisioning for his arrangement. If a player suggested a change of instrument or technique, that was one thing. But I seriously cannot think of any prominent examples on those Brian-led session tapes where a session player "wrote" an arrangement or part of an arrangement that was totally fresh and new that day in the studio. The musicians were there to play what Brian conceived in his mind, and their skill allowed them to do so, sometimes even out of the normal range of their instrument. But they were not the creative element, nor were they doing the arranging for Brian. 

The answer is murky.  The only person who's ever said, that I can think of, that Brian wrote out parts of any kind is Carol Kaye -- and she's always sort of diplomatically charitable about it.  She said something like "sure, the stems were all on the wrong side, and the clefs would be off, and there were enharmonic problems, and his rhythms were wrong, but by gosh, he wrote a chart!"  Then there's a small group of musicians who have attested to getting chord charts from Brian.  But I think the largest group are those who state that they never got anything written from Brian.  So I suspect the truth lies somewhere in that spectrum.

Now, the murkiness of the truth there directly speaks to some of Craig's comments: 


The very sad fact is that we have absolutely zero tape of the arranging sessions.  We have a couple instances of tape starting to roll before an arrangement had come together, but the reality is that the engineers never rolled tape until after they'd been working on the arrangement for up to 2 or 3 hours.  So we really can't know how it went, and I'm not sure that we have enough information to speculate.

If I had to speculate, I think that Brian had the harmonic and rhythmic concept for the feel of it, and the melody, and maybe some instruments he felt like he wanted to try that day.


No he didn't.  To wit:

"Q: Is that where the source of your inspiration came from, the way you heard it in your head?

Brian: I can’t hear music in my head, but I can hear it over the speakers in the studio. But I can’t hear it ... like some guys can hear it all in their head before they get to the studio. I can’t do that."
(source: https://www.recordonline.com/article/20150710/NEWS/150719930)

And since he can't hear orchestrations in his head, he probably did have to do a lot of work in the studio to get it worked up in a way that pleased him.  I think just the opposite of Craig -- I think we have to be careful not to under-credit the musicians.  The Brian as auteur mythology is very intoxicating but I believe he was more collaborative than we've given him credit for.  I think he probably sang 95% of it, and the musicians filled in the 5% and also probably pushed back a little, and maybe they'd try it as a section, it wouldn't work, and Brian would sing the same part to a different instrument and see how that sounded.


I think this is actually a really important question.  In my opinion, it was likely very rare where Brian went in with that specific of an instrument in mind.  That's where the versatility of the musicians was useful.  I just had the opportunity to ask Tommy Morgan, by proxy, what Brian's understanding of the harmonica family was when he first started playing for him.  The short answer is that he had no idea.  But Tommy showed him the expanded range possibilities of the big chromatic harmonica, and the bass harmonica, and Brian loved it.  But he didn't go into the first sessions with anything in mind other than "harmonica."  Likewise, when Brian started writing for wind quartets, what a blessing to have Jim Horn, Jay Migliori, Plas Johnson, Steve Douglas, Bill Green, and the others at your service.  You book four of them, and you pretty much have your bases covered -- all the saxes, all the clarinets, flutes, english horn--you didn't have to go in with a set plan.  Sometimes, yes, it's likely that Brian went in wanting one specific timbre, when he hired less versatile specialists.  But I think that's the exception.

But, again -- we actually really don't--and likely can't--know.

Just a short reply because I have to get up early  ;D

I think we do need to take a pragmatic approach to the arranging process to consider what the process with Brian was. And it obviously was not the same for every song or session, but the basics of arranging still form a process or template to reference. Narrow it down to the Pet Sounds era:

Do you think Brian when booking the musicians for Wouldn't It Be Nice and God Only Knows went in relatively "cold" without having the sound he was going for in his head, and knowing what he wanted his arrangements to sound like or what sounds would be featured? He wouldn't have booked those exact ensembles if he didn't somehow hear it in his creative mind ahead of time. He wouldn't have crammed all of those specific musicians with some very distinct and unexpected instruments into those rooms without knowing ahead of time what he was going for.

When you sit down to create an arrangement, you have to hear it in your head even partially in order to write for certain instruments, especially if it's from scratch as Brian's were and you're not given a specific lineup of instruments as you would being a hired arranger for the Count Basie band or whatever, when they have a set lineup of players.

The point to consider with Brian too is, especially in 65-66 and into Smile, did he ever use the exact same lineup of players twice? If he did, it was rare. And yes, musician availability was a concern, but while other producer/arrangers like Bacharach or Crewe/Gaudio or even Spector and Jack might stick to the same core group and had a similar sound from song to song on a project, Brian did not. He seemed to tailor the lineup of musicians specifically from song to song. It wasn't like he always had 3 guitars, 2 basses, etc. It changed from song to song.

Otherwise he would have or could have had the same musicians playing Sloop, WIBN, Here Today, and GOK, but he did not. Each was specific, with different instrumentation and a different unique sounding voice that would stand out, whether it was a flute, multiple 12-string guitars, accordions, french horn, etc.

There has to be some kind of game plan in place prior to booking sessions and hiring specific players like that. And that game plan would have included some notion of what this will sound like in your head before pulling all of those elements together and booking the time.


Re: Tommy Morgan. I would suggest the song "Peg O' My Heart" by The Harmonicats as another angle to consider. For one, that song was a massive #1 hit record in 1947 and even into the 50's, and The Harmonicats were on numerous TV shows into the 50's - Those shows being watched by kids in the 50's like the Wilson brothers in Hawthorne, and that song "Peg O' My Heart" was on radios and jukeboxes everywhere, in fact I wouldn't doubt there was a copy in the Wilson home too. Their "schtick" for lack of a better term was that they played the harmonica family including the unusual larger sized ones together like a full band, and it was funny to see the big bass harmonica alongside the smaller harmonica with this group of guys puffing away. You can find old clips of them on YouTube.

Another relevant point with "Peg O' My Heart" is that it is often tagged as the first record to use electronic or "artificial" studio reverb, a studio trick cooked up by Bill Putnam on one of his earliest if not the earliest hits he was involved in recording. The record, and that sound, was a sensation just as Les Paul's "New Sound" of overdubbing and vari-speeding was around that same time, and years later Brian's studio of choice was Bill Putnam's.

Not disagreeing with what Tommy said, but I'd be very surprised if Brian Wilson did not know The Harmonicats and "Peg O' My Heart" and how it featured those large, low bass harmonicas. Because literally that record, and the group, were very ubiquitous in the late 40's and 50's. Just like the group The Three Suns, which featured accordion, and also sold millions when Brian was a kid.

EDIT: Search "The Harmonicats" on YouTube and you'll find not only their music and TV appearances, but also other similar harmonica groups playing the large bass models up to the standard ones, often in a comedy style routine. Harmonica groups seemed to be something of a thing in the 50's, a forgotten thing now, but it goes back to Vaudeville apparently. So it's something kids watching TV in the late 40's and 50's definitely would have seen, including the Wilsons.

And not disagreeing with what Brian said either, but isn't there an interview with Carl or Dennis talking about Brian's production where they said Brian heard everything in his head?

Some kind of game plan, but we really don't know what it was.  


Again we really can't know how he went in.  For GOK I think we can deduce that he wanted a string quartet, accordions, and a horn going in, because that's pretty much all the people he booked play.

But let's look at everybody else:

Jim Gordon and Hal Blaine - drummers and percussionists.  Could play anything from drums to mallets to vibroslaps.
Carol Kaye, Ray Pohlman - either of them could play any kind of guitar or electric bass.
Lyle Ritz - Fender, contrabass, or Uke
Bill Green, Jim Horn, Jay Migliori - you book these three players, you have access to the entire woodwind family.  I doubt Brian took the trouble to look up where a baritone sax's lowest note is, so if he needed a saxaphone note lower than that, Jim Horn would've had his bass.  If he'd wanted a bass flute quartet, those guys would've had that in their trunks.
Len Hartman is an interesting one.  He was primarily a double-reed guy.  That's certainly where he buttered his bread, and that's where Brian had used him before.  Maybe he started on the track playing english horn.  Maybe it didn't work.  So maybe Brian asks him to switch to flute.  Then he decides he needs a bass clarinet as well.  Fortunately, as a hollywood reedman, Len can do all of that.
Knechtel and Randi cover pianos, organs, electric pianos, harpsichords, clavichords, clavinets, you name it.

The point is, Brian didn't have to have a firm idea going in.  These guys were like a living MIDI file.  If you don't like the sound bank, change it.



Well, I have no doubt that Brian had some inkling that there were different kinds of harmonicas.  I just don't think he had a keen organological interest in the categories.  That's why he could hire Tommy with the idea that he wanted harmonica, but not initially know the delineations between the different harmonicas capabilities.  Similarly to what I said above, I don't think he concerned himself where the bass sax has to take over from the bari.  I think that he probably would learn something at one session and then want to try it later.  Maybe he wanted a bass clarinet note lower than the standard bass, and someone tipped him off about the contra-range clarinets, and that's how he ended up with one on a version of Good Vibrations.  But heck, maybe Bill Green always had a Contra Alto Clarinet in his trunk.


I think they thought he did.  And I think Brian does hear parts in his head, but in a vocal idiom.  I think he has to parcel the voices out to the instruments and hear them back to really know what he's getting.

I agree with what you're saying. No doubt there was on the job training with Brian, and other producers too, in terms of what specific instruments could or couldn't do. Then there are the famous examples, coincidentally both happening in 1966, like "For No One" and "God Only Knows", where Paul and Brian respectively had a phrase in mind that was outside the normal range of the horns they had on the session. In Paul's case, they had a literal virtuoso in Alan Civil who could produce a note outside the range to play Paul's phrase, and in Brian's case the French Horn player did an overtone technique outside the normal range in order to deliver the phrase. For Paul, at least, he had no idea what the normal range was, but he had a master horn player who could deliver, and for Brian he had a specific phrase in mind and a virtuoso horn player as well who could adapt and produce the note. Id say the same about the accordions on WIBN and the "bellows shake" technique...Brian had the right musicians on the session who could deliver.

That's obviously a key component to the greatness of the records, where the players on hand delivered something that most normal players, even highly-skilled players, perhaps would not have been able to do quite as well. And those sounds - trademark sonic hooks in both cases - would not have happened quite the same without those musicians. Surely if those songs were recorded by the core Beatles or the core Beach Boys, the records themselves would have been vastly different, perhaps still great songs and records in their own way, but they would not have that same sonic magic.

For me it goes back to the person who conceived those phrases and in Brian's case, knew enough of what sounds he wanted to contract a French Horn player instead of another brass player. And I think that's where Brian the arranger at least had a sonic template in his mind before going in to record. And of course things change during a session, whether it be the stop on a Hammond organ, or the type of guitar being played, or bowed bass versus picked bass. But the concept for the arrangement had to be at least in place before the session got underway in a lot of Brian's more ambitious and complex arrangements, in my opinion.

If he threw all of those orchestrations, arrangements, and sounds together on the fly, on the studio floor, completely cold...then the guy is even more of a genius than we knew already!  :)

I just don't think the hired musicians had as much of a hand in the actual arrangements as Brian did, except for as you said suggesting using another instrument in their bag of tricks to get where Brian wanted the part to go.

Of all the LA players who I've seen discussed and have seen interviewed, I would have to say across the board it was Glen Campbell who had an almost scary knack of being able to "compose" guitar parts himself that became hooks, without being able to sight-read and usually just by seeing a chord chart. Not that others like Hal didn't do the same thing, but Glen's ability to write parts on the spot gets mentioned most often I'd say.

Fascinating thread!

I don't have much to add but a couple of things came to mind when reading it...

- the fact that the music/media discussed is still "relevant" and available in its original recording/performance; Guitarfool touched on this a little, but it's an interesting discussion in its own right. It has certainly made it easier for recent generations to cling to their pasts, or for new generations to access it.

- further to the above, the impact of the internet can't be overlooked (or maybe it's just the same continuum of impact as print, radio, and TV). That said, I feel like culture has largely stagnated since the late 90s/early-2000s (except for technology) - consider how images of people in previous decades are very obvious of being of an era but it's less pronounced now. There are still new trends but there's more old stuff, too (This is my own observation, no academic credentials, sorry! This could also be a product of my own aging and general checking out of modern culture)

- on the instrumentation, the electro-theremin is an example of wanting a specific sound/instrument (just to contrast with MIDI session musicians)


Sorry to ramble off topic; hopefully these thoughts spark something useful for you, Joshilyn!

Edit: meant to add that the big seismic cultural shift in 66/67/68 could be some demarcation (the change to a more casual society - again, part of a greater continuum)

Fantastic post! It could lead to several offshoot discussions which I'd love to have separate from the topic, because they're points I think of and see play out on almost a daily basis.

The points in bold , specifically the second one:

Things overall have stagnated since that exact time you pinpointed, I agree 110%. And minus technology and advances there, in terms of creative arts and how that art influences popular culture, where is the innovation? Who are the innovators? Where or what are the characteristic styles and trends that influenced other areas of popular culture?

I have one out of many things to try. Back in the late 80's, there was a 70's revival of sorts. What was deemed unhip, uncool, and even off-limits less than a decade earlier became a "thing". "Hey Ladies" by the Beastie Boys, with the disco Saturday Night Fever tribute, Lenny Kravitz doing a slow-burn southern-soul groove for his breakthrough hit and wearing 70's psychedelic fashions, DJ's remixing 70's disco grooves and sounds, etc etc etc.

So...at that time, and even now, you might have a school thing or a party theme to "dress like the 70's". And you could easily do it.

You can tell an engineer in the studio that you want this song to sound like 1967, and they'd know what to do. You could ask a set designer to do a 1950's living room, and they could do it. You could ask an art gallery to provide designs for a 1980's theme event, and they could do it. You could have a fashion designer create a line based on men's fashion of the 40's Noir era, and they could do it.

You could create a YouTube video on anything as a retro/throwback to any given era like that, and get a decent result.

So factor in that first 70's retro trend was about a decade removed from the original trends in the 70's.

Now, in 2021...could you plug ANY of those requests into the years from 2000-2020 and be able to depict that era faithfully enough to pass muster?

I say no - There is simply nothing innovative or unique enough in the past 20 years to capture and use in that way. 2005 fashion, music, art, design...it could just as easily be 2020 minus again the technology.

Is anyone having "dress like the 2000's day"? Hell no, because it looks the same more or less now as it did then.

You can watch any of the endless "Law And Order" repeats from American TV from 15 years ago and it looks pretty much like it does now in 2021, minus the changes in computers and cel phones. The fashion is the same, the language is the same, the music hasn't changed much. Even the hair styles haven't changed!

Yet, if in 2000 you were to watch a TV program from 1985, the differences in all those areas would be immediate from the first 30 seconds of the show.

That tells me there is little to no true innovation in those areas and the notion of creative arts as a cross-cultural influence is and has been lessened to the point of being insignificant.

What would a stereotypical snapshot of 2007 look like? A younger person playing a video game or tapping on a smartphone? Wearing what clothes? With what kind of hair style? Listening to what? Doing what else besides clutching a smartphone constantly?

I don't know. But it doesn't seem that much different of a generalization 15 years ago from today as it looks in the present moment. And that is sad. I think too much has stagnated, despite being given more technology to connect with others and innovate as anyone ever had previous to the current day.

This is indeed a fascinating thread, and much of it is beyond what's left of my pay grade, but I do have one thought that might juxtapose what Joshilyn appears to be after, the context GF is providing, and the macro-historical overview that Mitchell provided...

...as part of the project to capture the fleeting collision of a "pop music vocabulary" with experimental composition (song fragments or sections combined for the sake of the added power or resonance as a result of their juxtaposition), compare the arranging and recording approaches that evolved from early '65 into the SMiLE sessions with the production approach taken in the 1980s when Brian was "called out" by Lenny Waronker to return to such a compositional/production approach with "Rio Grande." What are the differences and similarities that exist in 1987-88 with respect to (re)creating a type of compositional approach that had been set aside (or, possibly, sublimated into the songwriting process itself, where "tags" produced the functional equivalent/analogue to the more externalized "modular" mode that came to dominate the SMiLE material)? What did Brian utilize to respond to Lenny's "challenge"? Was it a conscious anachronism back to a moment when the moment of breakthrough into a "blossom world" of "experimental pop mosaic" was actually a leap into the void due to the changes in rock music that turned something revolutionary into something passé in a matter of months? For context, recall that this is the point in time when Spector crashes and burns, and the time that Shadow Morton abandons the symphonic angst of the Shangri-Las for Janis Ian and the Vanilla Fudge.

A lot of sea-change in that 1966-68 time period: was not "Cabinessence" simply received as an brilliant but unfathomable artifact from an already (irrevocably) lost era when it surfaced in '69 on 20/20? And given their recognition of the rate of change that was continuing to occur, can we see the effort to rescue "Surf's Up" undertaken by Carl and Jack Rieley as part of a way to reclaim that past in a way that could create a wormhole through which the band could wriggle to some kind of viable future? While I understand that we are after a more direct musical analysis of how Brian got to his unique compositional/arrangement synthesis, I think it's important to note how shockingly fragile any/all of that was in terms of mass commercial success. When Brian made "Good Vibrations," I don't think it was clear to anyone that it would be the first and last of its kind...but it most certainly was, wasn't it?

I'm sorry to keep picking on you, but *man*, you could *not* be more wrong. Fashion is drastically different now than it was in 2005. Even just in business wear, the lapels, ties, jacket and skirt cuts, and waist positions are all hugely different. Have you looked at some photos of what girls and women were wearing in 2004? It's practically a different planet compared to today, at least where I live. High waists, "athleisure", different cuts of dresses, rompers...it's literally as different as the '60s were from the '80s. My students in 2021 dress drastically different from the students I had in 2015, let alone 2005 (when I was a student myself)!

And the absolute same thing is true of pop music. Hip-hop in 2005 didn't sound anything like hip-hop in 2017. The entire rhythmic and sonic signature changed.

And yes, there absolutely are teenage girls doing 2000s nostalgia stuff today (low waists, fake lower back tats, navel chains, big earrings, chunky highlights) for fun.

You're doing that thing again, just like you were doing upthread about the current state of jazz, where you're generalizing based on what I would charitably call limited knowledge of the present. I don't particularly like the dominant popular culture of 2021 but its insane to claim it's remotely similar to 2005.

I was glad Guitarfool had agreed with me (I'm currently watching a show from 2007 that doesn't seem to be particularly 'dated' - though the attitudes and behaviours are), but your assertive rejection of my suggestion has me rethinking things a little (and I certainly defer to someone who actually interacts with people, especially students, as they are less set in their ways). The rise of social media and smartphones has created a new "innovative" space that has informed the general culture in ways I'm definitely less aware, if not completely oblivious. Good point on athleisure, too. It will be interesting to see how future generations view the superficial cultural touchstones of the present and recent past.

Don was trying to tie the discussion back to the premise of the thread... What I was thinking along the same lines is that throwbacks (be it fashion or music) are inherently creative dead-ends and it's increasingly harder to overcome the weight of our cultural consciousness (I'm definitely just making stuff up at this point). Something something postmodernism.

My opinion (which might be over simplistic and/or controversial) on what separated Brian Wilson from the sort of “stock” arrangements or production values of the time are:

1. Spirituality. This might not be something easy to study in an academic sense, but it is hard to deny this was a major driving force in his work 1965-67. Loosely related would be the sort of mysticism that would mark a lot of the work of the era immediately following.

2. Full integration of strings from a production standpoint. Even more that Spector, Brian did not add “string arrangements” on top of whatever the underlying bed was. The strings were fully and completely integrated into the song, arrangement, and most of all the production. There are almost no other examples of this from the period. It’s Brian’s version of the wall of sound, but even Spector used strings as icing floating over the track, and Brian never did. They were the meat and potatoes. Contemporary reviews of Pet Sounds would say things like “out of tune prettiness” or sickly etc.

3. Artistry. Brian Wilson was an absolute artist. His art was completed sound. His peers were Jan Berry and Phil Spector, neither of whom were artists in this way IMO.

Curt Boettcher is a good call out. I think he’s probably the closest to Brian, but I think that’s probably more of a Brian influence kind of situation.

I think the style  you’re referring to continued on in TV show soundtracks and certain kinds of movies until around 1971. One element that will probably go unnoticed is: that style could not continue beyond the 8-track era, from a technical standpoint IMO.

It is tricky to try to attribute spirituality to music without resort to lyrical stuff, but I agree that it does make a difference.  Very hard to measure that, and very hard to analyze.  I've tried to do it with church music, as have others; it takes real skill to put together a cogent argument.

I think you're mostly correct about the string business.  I would expand this to other instrument families, too.  Basically all the non-rock instruments were fully integrated in the arrangements.  Never afterthoughts.  You can hear the difference when they hired outside people to do arrange the strings later, your Vans McCoy and even your Daryls Dragon.  There are small marks where you can see the stitching.  But at the height of Brian's arranging skills, everything was fully part of it.

I just have to say, Donny, that post is a home run. Great thoughts worth considering.

On one specific, yes indeed for many producers and arrangers adding strings was (and still is) referred to as "sweetening" a track after the nuts and bolts have been recorded. Even the term sweetening suggests the "icing" on the cake notion you described. It defined the disco era - I got gigs back in the 90's doing string "sweetening" parts on disco-styled tracks when there was something of a 70's revival happening. Everything is already there, and the arranger just adds that icing on top of the cake. Often it would be just one note sustained to glue everything together. Or you'd have one "live" string player recorded atop a bed of synth strings to get the bow and string noises deliberately on the track for added authenticity. But it was icing on the cake.

And Brian in the 60's did not do it that way. That is one element which definitely sets him apart from the pack.

I'd add too, something which I've discussed with some of you before, the way Brian arranged guitar ensembles, specifically on Pet Sounds. He was writing for guitar sections as a big band arranger would write a sax section. Intertwining lines, playing in harmony, or even traces of counterpoint...sounding when removed from the track like a sax section would write. And that includes different timbres of the guitar, like having Glenn Miller's clarinet lead playing atop a traditional sax section. It made it unique.

So were the guitar ensembles truly unique to Brian? I'd say in some ways no, but in many ways yes, especially how he worked these sectionals into the larger arrangement and ensemble. It's pretty damned innovative either way, especially listening to that guitar arrangement on I Just Wasn't Made For These Times. It sounds like something Ellington could have scored for his woodwinds in the 30's.

The idea of spirituality is a good one to consider too. I've always thought there was what I call an "X Factor" present in Brian's best work. Meaning, you could break down each and every part on a track, factor in the particular studio used on that session, and the players playing the parts...but there is still something present that cannot be written out or even defined. Some would call it magic, I call it the "X Factor". But that, too, whatever it was, is also what set Brian's productions apart from his peers. That intro to California Girls, the middle instrumental break on "Here Today", the entirety of "God Only Knows", the intro to "Wouldn't It Be Nice", the organ break and vocal explosion on "Good Vibrations", the final high note he hits on "Caroline No", the instrumental bridge of "Please Let Me Wonder", and I could add many more. But there is something *there* beyond the notes written and the performance of those notes that still draws in listeners and hits them in the heart and the gut.

You can't define it.

Is it spirituality? I'd say it could very well be, as the term itself as a notion or a concept is difficult to define. You surely cannot write "play spiritually" on a score for musicians to play, right?

But the term also is one that sometimes strikes some kind of fear or even hostility in people because they may tie it to formal religion or religious practices. Something or somebody does not have to be religious in a formal sense to be spiritual,  right? I think that intro of California Girls, where Brian somehow captured the sound of the sun rising over the ocean early in the morning, or that intro to Wouldn't It Be Nice that sounds like it came from the heavens, whichever heavens one may believe in...that's deeply spiritual music, right there. It either has that feel or it doesn't. Some artists could do it, others simply did not. But you know it, and more importantly, you *feel* it, when it's there.

I think apart from any religious overtones, Brian was able to capture in his arrangements and productions the feelings he had for sending love and parts of himself to his listeners through his music. For as rough as he had it both emotionally and later physically, he channeled his positivity through the music he was recording and sending it to his listeners.

Check the quote I have at the bottom of every post I make, from the HOF induction speech. I think that lines up very well with the notion of spirituality in the man's music. 

I wasn't going to reply, but here it is. It's fine to have differing opinions, it's great to discuss them and debate them, and this has been a very good read of a thread since the initial post with excellent, intelligent posts. But I think it is out of line to make the kinds of comments you're making toward my posts - again, for whatever reasons there may be - saying I have limited knowledge of the topic, suggesting I'm "doing that thing again", etc., just as it was not cool to misquote and rewrite things I had said previously when what I actually said was available for all to read. Same with comments like "you couldn't be more *wrong*".

If you disagree with me or what anyone else is saying in this thread, based on your own opinions and experiences - not "facts" unless your experiences are shared across the board by a majority in the US or UK - Please have the courtesy to at least respect the fact that not everyone sees what you see, or shares your take on these things from their own daily experiences. You've mentioned hip-hop several times: With teachers and students alone, depending on the area or the region - especially in the US - there are schools where country music dominates the listening habits of the student body, and fashion at the prom involves cowboy boots and Stetsons as much as tuxes and gowns. I've been involved at seminars at schools where the majority of students listened almost exclusively to EDM, and would rattle off artists the general public wouldn't know. And yet other groups of students might be more into metal or classic rock. So if people in those areas offer their own experiences to form opinions, and they don't line up with your own, is it fair to say they have a limited knowledge of the subject or to come out and say "you couldn't be more wrong"? Of course not.

To avoid being accused of "pulling rank" by listing what my experiences are or were, and how my opinions written above were formed, I won't go into it. But if someone writes as you wrote above, I'll definitely reply to it and suggest otherwise, and also suggest you rethink the way you're replying to others' opinions and have a more level-headed, less personality-based discussion.

I enjoy discussions like this because people here who I respect are contributing some fantastic thoughts and opinions, whether it's Joshilyn coming from both a classical background and being a highly skilled musical analyst and transcriptionist (and multi-instrumentalist musician!) and just being a great person overall, Donny L coming on board with his experience recording and producing music and having a vast knowledge of vintage gear and music, Don Malcolm who knows this music and writes terrific posts that make you think deeper beyond the surface of the topic at hand, Mitchell who has been involved on these forums for years and who posts fantastic thoughts regularly and knows the music and topics he's commenting on...the list goes on. I've disagreed with them in previous discussions, I have probably disagreed too strongly in the heat of the moment on some occasions and for that I apologize, but above all I respect who they are, what they do and what they've accomplished, and what they have to say. It wouldn't be fair to reply to them essentially "you don't know what you're talking about" or "you couldn't be more wrong".

I stand by what I wrote which you disagree with so strongly. Just this afternoon I watched a Netflix film where they flashed back to scenes from "15 years ago" in the plot, and the clothing and overall visual design on the set could have been 2021. There were no key trends or characteristic visuals from 2006 that stood out enough to be noticeable. I don't know what key visuals or fashions or even music would suggest "2006" to any noticeable degree for a general audience anyway, and I think that's the point I was making earlier.

Contrast that with a set designer or a fashion supervisor for a movie set back in 1984 flashing back even 10 years to 1974. The differences would be beyond obvious. Go beyond that: 1969 versus 1963. 1999 versus 1993. 1964 versus 1958. The list could go on, but the point is how drastically popular culture - driven by media such as music, visual arts, film - could change in relatively short periods of time. And it's all generalization, isn't it? For the millions who would immediately see someone dressed like a hippy if they thought of 1969, consider how many more millions of regular people were wearing suits and ties or work clothes every day in 1969 and had nothing to do with hippy fashion or culture. Same with the 1980's...when I grew up...not everyone looked like the stereotypical 80's you'd see during a "Dress Like The 80's Day". I wore open flannel shirts and ragged jeans in 1993, but I wasn't into grunge music and didn't care if it was in style or not, and many others in my circle of friends wore what they wore. Yet, there is no doubt the grunge "scene", and the fashion look, and the media attention sprang from the music and the visuals on MTV, to where a film set in 1993 or '94 with young adult characters would almost have to include a character looking prototypical "grunge". That's a generalization but not too far off from reality.

My point, and opinion, was that from roughly 2000 to the present, as Mitchell noted, there hasn't been as much of a cultural shift to pinpoint, those which influenced popular culture across the board as had happened in previous eras, and there are really no cultural hallmarks to single out like "The Beatles" or "Elvis" or "Warhol" or "Twiggy/Mary Quant"  or "Saturday Night Fever" or "Grunge" or "Eminem" or whatever other 80's and 90's influences carried over from music, art, fashion, movies/TV to cross-pollinate the other areas. After the Beatles were on Sullivan with long hair, within that next year how many more young men started growing longer hair over their ears in all areas of the culture, if not the outright Beatle haircut? That's just one example out of many, and it just doesn't happen the same way in recent decades. And the last two decades have become even more homogenized to where a ten year span doesn't yield nearly the same differences across popular culture areas as it did prior to 2000, which is where I think Mitchell originally commented from. If someone says "1969" or "1957", it creates an imagery and even a "feel" of that year in people's minds whereas saying "2009" or "2015" doesn't have nearly the same effect, if any effect at all.

In Donny's post, he pinpointed a sound and style in music from 1965-67 which ended around 1971. It's a very specific sound and style with recognizable elements in the music, and you can hear the wider influence across other media. Can anything similar be pinpointed that specifically in music from the past 20 years which has had such an influence, or which was considered innovative enough to inspire other areas of pop culture? And will anyone be writing about it and analyzing it 50 years from now? Things come and go so fast, with instant on-demand access to almost anything, that culture and trends become disposable within weeks, and art in general doesn't have the same impact as it did in previous decades. If something has an impact in June, by December it's gone. And music does not have the same impact as it did in previous eras, across other forms of media and popular culture, which is sad but also a sign of the instant-access and endless-choice culture we've created through technology.

I think this has come up before, and I have to agree with Craig/Guitarfool on this one. Not that I don’t see Maggie’s point … and to her point, I think it’s fair that some of us may be looking through a certain lense, whereas a 15 year old kid might think trends from 5 year ago were worlds away.

But I think if we’re talking pop culture- things like mainstream movies, music, etc … while things have indeed changed- they have changed at a significantly slower pace than previously in the past.

The best example I can think of- and I think about it a lot- is the movie American Graffiti. The movie was set 11 years prior, yet was worlds away from the era it depicted at the time of its release. This move set off a series of nostalgic trends that captured the zeitgeist of the ‘70s in many ways. I think it’s fair to say a trend of nostalgia for the year 2010 capturing the spirit of the mainstream today would be unfathomable. Even if some teenage girls might post about things from 2014 or whatever on TikTok. I have nostalgia for the year 2012-2013 in my personal life- nostalgia is always there for many people. But in terms of culture trends and markers of the era, we have been at a point of very slow change and what I would call stagnation for 20-30 years in many ways IMO.

Getting back to The Beach Boys- the distance between Smiley Smile and Summer in Paradise is the same distance as Stars and Stripes and today. Yet the production values of Stars & Stripes are not much different than a record made today.

American Graffiti is a prime example, definitely. Add to it the spin-off on TV, Happy Days, and this nostalgia kick was for a time which was only 10-15 years prior. And, perhaps even more important to note, the music and the fashion was absolutely crucial to the whole scene. Hearing those 50's hits and seeing the 50's fashion was what sold it as much as the plot and characters. And they had such definite music and fashion to feature. I see nothing about 2011 or 2006 that was so strong of a statement in music or fashion which would carry a nostalgia movie or TV show like Happy Days if it were made today. In the first seasons of Happy Days, the first thing viewers saw was a jukebox starting up, the needle hitting a record, and "Rock Around The Clock" came blasting out. What would an equivalent image and sound be for a show today focused on 2006-2011? I cannot imagine one which would trigger the same effect. A thumb hitting the disc controller on an iPad and hearing Sean Paul or Daniel Powter come filtering out through ear buds???  ;D

The point about The Beach Boys' music: I know it's been mentioned before too, but what is simply amazing to me is to consider how there was only a 4 year gap between "Surfin Safari" and "Pet Sounds"/"Good Vibrations". And for The Beatles, 3 years between "Please Please Me" in the UK and "Revolver". The musical growth shown in those 3-4 years is astounding. I cannot think of a single artist of the past 20 years who has anything even close to that kind of growth in their music in such a short time. And consider these groups were actively touring each year, AND cranking out at least two full albums each year as well.

And they were truly innovative. Each album was different, and each step was forward in its own way. Quality and quantity. And the majority of it was done on 4 track machines. Look at what DAW technology has made available and affordable to anyone in the past two decades, and has anyone matched those amazing runs these groups had from 62-66? Hell no. It's unbelievable when we put it into that context.

Another film example to consider, and one of my favorite movies of all time; One which also featured both the music on the soundtrack and the fashions as integral and essential parts of the plot, maybe as equal for the music as some of the characters, with a strong nostalgia vibe even for those who weren't alive at the time the film was set:

Dazed And Confused. And that, too, was a film made in 1993 which was set in 1976, less than 20 years prior. It could be considered an updated version of American Graffiti for the 70's era, the influence is definitely there especially in the way Linklater used the period music throughout.