The Smiley Smile Message Board

I was just curious as to how much of the piano work on BB's albums is Brian.  Of course he used the wrecking crew and various other studio guys on a lot of the stuff, but how much of it is him?  Any examples? 

Obviously Brian was a fantastic pianist, I know I read a quote from someone saying at the time Brain had "the best left hand in the business, so why did he use so many session guys for it?  This may be a stupid question and it might have been beaten to death over the years but I am fairly new here so fogive me!

Also, on the same note, how much does Brian play on his more recent records?  The piano in the live setting isn't much more than a prop, but what about in the studio?  Does any of his playing actually get heard in the final mix?  I know all the albums credit him on piano, but as we all know, Everythign from that camp shouldn't be taken as the gospel!

Brian plays nearly all of the keyboards on the first 5 BB's LP's. For instance the organ solo in Surfin' USA is him, or the heavy piano in Little Deuce Coupe...that's him too. Just like Carl, Dennis, Al, Dave and Bruce...Brian is underrated for his contributions to the BB's recordings as a player.

I like Brian's piano style. Without checking liner notes, you can usually pick his parts out in that they tend to be block chords, and a lot of left-right-left-right hand stuff (as opposed to single note lines or more complex parts).

As for that "best left hand..." stuff, I don't think it should be mistaken as some kind of statement that Brian is a virtuosic pianist or anything. In some ways his playing is very simple. But I think that statement means he really, really came up with cool bass parts and kept them in a fantastic groove.

I'm no musician, butI always wonder when people talk about how well Brian plays piano. In terms of untrained piano players, is he really that great? I mean, sure, he's good. But, for example, here's Paul McCartney playing Lady Madonna:

http://youtube.com/watch?v=CSOXEr_xWsY

And Ben Folds Five playing Theme from Dr Physer:

http://youtube.com/watch?v=dKRqs-uKVO8

It seems like Brian is called "exemplary" at so many things, but his piano playing more "ordinary." Maybe I'm wrong?

I think Brian is a better piano player than he lets on.  Most of the parts he played on the records were pretty simple, but after seeing him do a bit of Rhapsody in Blue on the Beautiful Dreamer doc, I think that he is probably capable of more complex playing than he shows. 

That is a really good question.

I think you're right on...and wrong. He isn't in any way a brilliant pianist, technically speaking. (Didn't Spector kick him off a session?) He is a great musician, though, and I think it comes through in his piano playing. His parts are pretty simple, and even examples of more complicated playing aren't very impressive. His Rhapsody in Blue, or his fast little boogie woogies he does every so often, are very rough around the edges both in terms of rhythm and note-correctness.

All that said, I love his feel, and his songs are just so damn good that I'd take him pounding out those simple block chords all day long.

As a big fan of Brian's piano playing, I can tell you that it is technically not all it should be, but the feel and the power of his rhythm is not to be denied. He drove the band with his keyboards during the early-mid 60's. His piano was there during the Smile sessions of 66-67, and was prominant on Wild Honey , Friends, and 20/20...after that, it gets a bit murky. But they used Brian's piano as a metronome to build their backing tracks on, so the rhythm must be impeccable, and for an example of that "quick left hand" on the bass notes, one only has to listen to the final run of "Surf's Up" to catch the magic in action.

The use of a the piano as a prop is often mentioned in his concert reviews and it has always surprised me he doesn't throw out a few notes during songs with vocal breaks. I think we here know he can play but many in the audience don't. Something for 07 shows maybe if you want my 2 cents.

He played a part of Wind Chimes in the SMiLE shows. The audience went crazy, but I remember some people posting that they thought it made him look like a trained monkey, just doing a simple bit for the people's amusement. I thought it was cool to have him do a little piece.

He did play the keyboard a little bit more in the last few Pet Sounds shows. I think he played an intro to Marcella and a few other things...nothing major, but more than on previous tours.

The video of the making of What I Really Want for Christmas shows Brian playing piano while recording the title track. The piano on the track sounds kind of like Brian's playing, doesn't it?

My question is how and when Brian learned piano...Did he just pick it up, like the bass?

According Audree in "Heroes & Villians", he started playing a childs accordian at age 3, then progressed to a toy piano then took a few lessons a bit later. Also, we must remember that Audree and Murry played piano / organ so he probably picked up a lot from them.

With bass, I'm sure he just picked it up and self taught himself. He has musicians instinct so it was probably trial and error in the beginning. I did the same, I taught myself the guitar by playing along with records then later started picking out chords on the keyboard.

I think Brian played every song on GIOMH just on piano and then the band added their parts afterwards. I'd like to hear the solo-piano songs.
I love Brian's playing. My biggest wish was a CD with just Brian and his piano singing his songs. Like "My little red book" (ok, not his song and a bass was there too, I know) or the demo "Surf's up"; that sounds like magic.
I love the piano-part of "Funky pretty" btw. I'd even like to hear Brian and piano alone nowadays with his "older" voice. He has a great rhythm and, like Carol Kaye says, everything starts to swing when brian plays....

I love all the Brian piano demos that are out there, I really wish there was more...that would make a great cd-release.

Do you really think they recorded to his piano?  I'm not trying to slight him or anything, but every example of him playing on the recent dvd releases are not very steady.  Definately not enough to base an entire recording off of.  Now granted, in the studio you can keep trying till it's perfect so maybe he did play all the songs first. 

In reply to other posts on here, I knew that he played on the early first 5 or 6 albums pretty esclusively.  I was thinking more along the lines of the Today album through now.  Like, for instance, Pet Sounds and the released stuff from the '67 Smile.  How much of Brian is on that? 

Thanks for all the responses.  Very helpful group you all are!

I think that's a difficult question to answer. But I'll try and be rational until someone with more knowledge comes along (AGD?)

Pet Sounds - He played on the "Don't Talk" Piano Demo - See PS Box Set. Did he or Tony Asher pluck the strings on You Still Believe In Me?

Smile - "Surf's Up" Demo. As for Smiley Smile, I'd say that was a group effort so he must have played a lot on that.

Hazarding a guess, he must have played on subsequent albums after Smile a lot more as the studio was built in his house. So they probably weren't using session musicians as often as the 62-67 period?

Brian's finest example of pain playing is probably on the "Love You" piano demos...

That's what has been said. I wasn't there so I can just say what others, including Brian, said. Of course it might have been different.

Here's a cool, exclusive  nugget for you . . .

Brian has been quoted as saying that Jan Berry was a good piano player.

Well, I have hardcore evidence that Jan liked Brian's piano playing as well. In some of Jan's music scores . . . from which the parts were generated by copyists and placed before the session musicians in the studio . . . the piano parts often have a telling little instruction in the bass clef . . . "BRIAN WILSON LEFT HAND."

Left hand doubling the bass line . . .

Jan did that a lot in his music scores . . . Aside from the usual technical articulations, he wrote things like "Jan & Dean Usual" . . . or "J&D Schtick" . . . or "Dick Dale Slide" . . . etc. .

Easy and familiar cues for the musicians who played on all his sessions. They came to know what Jan wanted by those little instructions.

M.

Listening to all the 60's SMILE stuff, Brian's 'hammering' piano technique is an important part of these recordings. Don't know if he played on the released waterish "Love To Say Da Da", but he did play on the air Dada. And of course a lot of demos "All Day", "Child Is Father Of The Man"... Does harpsichord count? - "Wonderful" (Boxset). "Vega-Tables" (Boxset). Intro to "You Still Belive In Me" (very unusual playing technique).

I think it's naive of some people to suggest that because BW wasn't properly tained at college or school that his playing was weak, or worse, that it never improved. Same with those people who talk about Jardine's limited guitar playing.  What?   After 40 odd years?  Did he never work at it?  Dennis, meanwhile, becomes a talented musician with the ability to play Beethoven's Ninth on a penny whistle stuck up his arse.

From film of him over the last few years, I suspect our boy's medical condition probably means that more 'fluent' playing is out of the question.

i think Brian considers himself more as a composer and arranger than a performance-type "pianist".  He creates music on the piano, not necessarily piano compositions. Among the historic band, it's Bruce and Billy who are the trained and accomplished piano players on the performance side, but Brian's the composer, and that's worked out fairly well for the world.  There's some good although regrettably brief, as in about two measures, footage of Brian on the IJWMFTT and I think the Endless Summer DVDs demonstrating the jazz-tinged chord stylings he learned from Four Freshman songs and from his dad. Pretty compelling and it would be nice to hear more of that.  It also would have been nice to be around the house or studio in the early days as he was developing his skills and starting to compose because I think there was probably some pretty terrific piano playing going on.  He's a natural, no doubt about it, even if he isn't the kind to sit down at a score and play Rachmaninoff or Claude Bolling. Like another poster a few posts back, I learned piano from guitar and play best off of chord structures, mainly because I'm lazy and don't work at sight reading or technique enough. My son is just the opposite, go figure.  (I picked up the bass later when asked to join a small jazz/swing/pop combo and really got into that once I discovered how much the bass can drive the song. ) Somewhere along the line Brian or someone said that Carl taught him the "bass basics" and he obviously got the hang of that pretty quickly.  Whatever we want to consider Brian regarding the piano, the result of his being able to play has been rewarding.

None of the Beatles could read sheet music... Jimi Hendrix couldn't... And it never bothered them that much... But Brian can read sheet music, so he relatively wasn't even that uneducated as a musician.

There are so many different kinds of musicians, and even different kinds of education for musicians, that it is a waste of time to try and justify one musician's abilities or talent with some kind of grade along those lines. Whether Brian was a technically brilliant pianist by the traditional definition (which he absolutely, 100% wasn't) has nothing to do with him being a great musician. As others here have said, his primary strengths were composition, arrangement and production -- not to mention his singing ability in the 60s. The fact that he had all of these various skills already makes him an AMAZING musician. Whether his piano skills were rudimentary, competent or virtuosic is almost completely irrelevant, other than as an amusing aside.

(I thought of this when the last post mentioned other talented but non-reading musicians--the ranks of which include plenty of absolutely unbelievable jazz and blues musicians along with rockers, by the way.)

I don't know who did what, but I believe that Carl probably played a lot of the keyboard parts in 'So Tough' and 'Holland'. I also read somewhere that Brian played drums on Funky Pretty.

Brian's still pretty good with the keyboard in the studio. The piano-only version of "This Isn't Love" from the late 90s is excellent, and is just Brian on overdubbed pianos. Likewise, he plays on the title track of WIRWFC and Walking Down the Path of Life. When I saw the band live last month, he played on "In My Room" and the intro to "Marcella."

Brian also played piano on Wilson's Phillips' version of In My Room.

I believe Brian played almost everything on "Funky pretty". That's why I thought it was him playing piano too. Don't know for sure though...

He played keyboards on most of the songs on Beach Boys Today, judging by the SOT session tapes.

I recall at the Adelphi PS show, he played the keyboard (arpeggios) for that tune too.

This is my first post on this board, though I may know some of you from others. I lke this topic a lot. I would say Brian had a great command of the keyboard with playing notes and chords, but was not as technically sound as a session pro. His palaying according to SOT is all over the Today album. He also played organ on That's Not Me.

When I saw him play in Vancouver in 2005 he played the intros to Marcella and WDTPOL. I would really like to see him do the piano on Love and Mercy, I think that would add a great intimacy to the encore. However I think at this point he is more comfortable relying on his talented band to provide the music.

Besides Today, I think Bri plays on a lot of the Smile stuff on SOT. I figure, whenever it's not his voice coming over the 'talk-back' he's probably in the studio on piano. I don't have that stuff with me right now, so maybe I'm full of hot air. And like the post a few back said, he writes SONGS on piano, not musical phrases. Since piano isn't the featured instrument on many songs (in fact, on the best of his productions there are NO featured insts.) his writing style is just to find the chords that fit the melody and worry about individal instrumental parts later. Still, I love his piano demos and have pretty much stolen his style of playing, which seems to impress my friends pretty easily. P.S. Both times I've seen him ('99 and '04) he never played a lick of keys, but he did pretend to play bass!!

I love his piano playing, too. It may be simplistic in a sense (most of the time), but it gets the entire background of a song across, just like strumming a guitar. As a mediocre pianist, I can play songs in that style and sing along, etc. without any trouble.

AGD had the privledge of witnessing a Brian piano performance of "Rhaposdy In Blue" at Westlake Studio back in '85.  I'm sure he'll vouch for Brian's technical ability.

Surely did, and he was on the money - especially the transition into "Cast Your Fate To The Wind", which was so smoothly executed that it took me maybe 30 seconds to realise he'd done it. When he wants to, he's still got it.

AGD, was Brian's performance of RiB a note-for-note performance from the "official" piano reduction score, or was it Brian's own by-ear arrangement?  Or was he playing the actual piano solo parts from the Concerto?

Was it like his performance of Rhapsody in Blue on the BWPS DVD?
Which part is "Cast Your Fate To the Wind"? Or maybe that can't be verbalized. Is it the really fast part?

It was much longer - maybe 10-12 minutes - and much better, flowing and a definite BW arrangement (I'm pretty sure he moved a few sections around and maybe dropped one part), and then he just segued into "CYFTTW". I was sitting in the corner of the studio with my eyes on stalks, my lower jaw in my lap. Prior to this, he'd been pounding out a standard boogie phrase (not, not "Shortenin' Bread" !) and, I'll be blunt, royally fodaing it up. And then he played this wonderful classic, and near-flawlessly. Every hair on my body stood to attention. One of the highlights of my life, musical or otherwise.

And the thing was (remember, this was March 1985), when he'd finished, the Brian Wilson that turned to me, smiled and said "I love that tune" was a regular guy. Relaxed, lucid, polite and funny. Simply the most stunning demonstration of music exorcising personal demons that I have ever seen.

"CYFTTW" is a totally seperate song, popularised (in the UK, at least) by Sounds Orchestral in the sixties. Which made the juxtaposition that much more unexpected.

Slightly OT (and blowing my own trumpet), but my March 1985 trip to LA was pretty much a fan's wet dream. Over a week, with a LOT of help from many good people (a big thanks to Raymond J. McCarthy), I managed to meet and in some cases interview:

Bruce (who also brought me lunch and asked me down to the studio - Westlake Audio: they were doing the final mix)
Carl
Alan
Brian (all in the studio)
Van Dyke Parks (excellent evening spent at his house, almost no BB stuff discussed !)
Stevie Kalinich (bought me dinner, showed me original lyrics)
Stephen Desper (chauffeured me around BBs LA for a day, played some interesting tapes, gave me a tour of Capitol Tower & studio, also Western 3, bought me lunch, and set it up for me to meet)
Chuck Britz (spoke to him for a couple of hours in the control room of Western 3 - does it get any better ? A total gentleman)
Jasper Dailey (told me some great BW stories, bought me Sunday breakfast in Rodeo Drive - another lovely man)

Yeah... what a week.  And cheap - everyone was buying me food. :) Seriously, all these people took time - in some cases a whole day - out of their often busy lives to indulge the mad Englishman. Chuck was still working at Western, Bruce was mixing, Steve Desper was in the middle of a project. I have nothing but the very best memories of that week, and those people, some now sadly departed.

AGD - Where was Mike?

"CYFTTW" is a totally seperate song, popularised (in the UK, at least) by Sounds Orchestral in the sixties. Which made the juxtaposition that much more unexpected.
[/quote]


Oh, right. Hence the phrase "segued into." Sorry, Andrew.

Or "transition into" even.
 ::)

Sleep deprivation sucks.

Andrew's writings on his trip, including interviews with many of the people he mentioned, appeared in Beach Boys Stomp!, issues 49, 51 & 52.  Great reading!  And you get to see a picture of Andrew with shades and matching hair color!

Stomp!  was my main source of BBs info in the '80s.  God, what a great mag!  What a great time!
I miss my twenties!

PS, I remember in Andrew's description of the Westlake session, he said the others explained that Mike hates mixing, thus his absence.  

When I asked that self same, and entirely reasonable, question, Bruce, Alan & Carl all burst out laughing. Eventually, I think it was Bruce, said "Mike mixes down the phone".

Y'know, it's kinda scary when someone knows more about what you've written than you do yourself.  :o

Stomp was a great 'zine back then. Celebrates its 30th anniversary this May. Damn, but I feel old.

I haven't met all of those people, but of the ones I have, and some other Beach Boys related people, it's been very surprising how downright "nice" they all are (or at least can be...).  Just regular ol' people.  Not much rock-star stuff going on at all.  And yes, very giving of their time.

Thus far, excepting the late Eugene Landy, I've only had one person directly involved with the BB that really got my goat. And no, it's not who you're thinking.  ::)

If it's who I think, then you're definitely not the only writer who's has the problem.

What a seriously cool story! Talk about a memory of a lifetime...