The Smiley Smile Message Board

Did the charts have to be written out, and if so, by whom?

Yeh, and other string/wind instrument arrangements from that era. Did Brian write charts for his own songs? I know he did Good Time...

It was arranged by Van McCoy.

The strings were arranged by Van McCoy, based on Dennis' ideas, and the horns were arranged by Roger Neumann, again likely from ideas plotted out by Dennis. Neumann did a lot of the horn arrangements for late '60s BBs tunes. You may be interested to know that the French horns on this tune were played by Alf Clausen...later famous for composing the "Simpsons" theme.

Wow, that's a fascinating bit of information!    I wonder if Mike was aware of this at the time he was planning on doing a duet with Bart Simpson in the early 90s.

According to Wikipedia, Clausen has done numerous other theme songs/scores for TV and film, including Moonlighting, The Naked Gun, ALF and Ferris Bueller's Day Off.

And on ALF, the title character frequently referenced Help Me, Rhonda on the show, being that his girlfriend on his home planet had that name.  Coincidence? Probably.  Just like it's a coincidence that a guy named Alf did the theme song for ALF :)  But it's fun to speculate…

Alf Clausen's Pickle Brothers.

Correction: Alf Clausen didn't write the Simpsons theme, he wrote/writes the incidental music for the show. The theme is by Danny Elfman.

Ah - thanks!

In 25+ years of writing music for the show, one would think that there would maybe be some BBs musical nod worked into an episode somewhere...

And amazing that a convo about this great tune of Denny's (was it cowritten by Manson? Or is that a nonsense rumor?) could morph into a BB/Simpsons discussion.

Don't know about the Manson thing, but I've heard that rumor too. I can tell you that Kowalski plays the drums, and Bruce is on Fender Rhodes. Eddie Carter is there on guitar, and Jimmy Bond is on upright bass.

Disappointing that it was Carter on guitar if not Carl.  I had always hoped in my earlier fandom days that it was Carl on Bluebirds solo also, but I guess in my heart of hearts I knew it wasn't!  Could Carl play much of anything outside of his surf/C. Berry style of guitar??  I always felt that the Boys were pretty severely limited as a self-contained musical combo and did not grow in that regard like the Beatles/Stones.  This surely hurt them in the long run....

I think Carl was more of a rhythm guy that a lead player. On his solo albums and tours, someone else handled the guitar solos. But don't let that fool you - Carl was a great guitar player. There's more to guitar playing than just blazing lead parts. He knew every chord, every variation of every chord, what to play and what not to play, he just had it all together musically.

Back when Carl was living in Colorado in the early '90s, I heard stories of him popping into local clubs and sitting in with blues bands. I think his bluesy playing on Dennis' "Holy Man", while not technically great, has a great bluesy "feel", and would maybe be indicative of that side of his guitar ability.

This is the most interesting new (to me) piece of information I'd heard in a while. Count me among those wishing to hear Carl Wilson cut loose with a guitar solo.

Absolutely. There are players, and there are musicians. All three Wilson brothers were more musicians than players, but Carl was the one who really could play, too.* I mean, really play. Not shred. Play.


*Yes, Brian was a pretty good keyboard player, too, in a way. (I want to say "in a clumsy, clunky sort of way," which I know will just piss people off, so I won't say it. Even though I kind-of just did.) But I think Carl's guitar playing was better than Brian's keyboard playing.

Yeah, but Brian's keyboard playing seems to have fed into his songwriting in really interesting ways. I think Brian's excellent bass lines and chord voicings emerged out of his heavy left hand, boogie woogie piano style. And it ain't like it's easy to play the "Child is the father of the man" refrain at the end of "Surf's Up." Brian could do exactly what he needed to do, and that ended up turning a lot of conventional songwriting on its head. I believe it's impossible to separate Brian's heavenly output from his piano playing. If that wasn't how he played piano, he might not have written the way he did.

It's impossible to rate the Wilsons against each other in terms of musicianship, especially Carl and Brian on respective instruments. For one, Brian was arranging, writing, and producing and his ideas and arrangements developed on the keyboard. It's been said Brian's main instrument was a combination of the Beach Boys and the recording studio itself, and that's as true a statement as I think can be made. He never set out to be Art Tatum, just like Carl never set out to be Chet Atkins or James Burton. He used the piano keyboard as a tool to develop his final product, which was the song and the final production in the studio.

What Brian's piano playing did do is give the Beach Boys the jazz background combined with R&B elements that marked their sound. Without Brian taking apart those intricate Freshmen vocal harmonies and jazz chord harmony then dealing out those similar techniques to the Boys' vocal arrangements using his own chord progressions, therefore creating a need for Carl (and Al and David too) to learn jazz guitar techniques to play those chords beyond the Chuck Berry or Dick Dale or Kingston trio guitar styles they had been learning, they probably would not have been playing 7b5 or maj7add9 chords had it not been for the necessity of learning them to play what Brian was writing and arranging. So it's a full circle, and it is all interconnected.

Two elements stand out, though, in terms of the Wilsons' musicianship as individuals:

Dennis played drums in a way that matched who he was and how he lived his daily life, if that makes sense. When you watch or hear tapes of him playing live with the band, he brings a unique energy and feel to the music that *no other drummer* could match. And this is despite Dennis not being a formally trained drummer and despite Dennis only taking up the drums for the purpose of playing in the band with his brothers. His drumming is pure energy, raw energy, and it drives the performances in a way no one could match. It's like Ringo Starr - Everyone who tries to dismiss Ringo as too simple, untrained, etc...they still can't do exactly what Ringo did for the band. Drummers have finally in the past 15 years or so come to realize just how unique Ringo was, and how despite being able to play his parts to the letter, it still doesn't sound like Ringo. And that is what Dennis brought to the Beach Boys, and why that energy simply isn't there in quite the same way when he's not behind the kit in concert.

Carl is a unique case too because here was a kid in his teens sitting in and playing sessions with studio musicians twice his age who had studied at colleges and conservatories and in some cases had been paying their dues for as many years as Carl was alive as of 1965-66...yet Carl was more than holding his own in the studio. And he was also playing and singing these parts live. It is really impressive to think someone as a teenager was able to do this in that kind of pressure cooker studio environment. There are many guitarists who would simply fold up if they saw a musician like Barney Kessel or Ray Pohlman sitting next to him, and here was Carl at 17 or so playing lead with those guys. Impressive as hell.

I wouldn't say his piano playing gave them a jazz background. I'd say that was his composing/arranging. The harmonies had jazz elements, but the playing itself was very non-jazz piano. (Closer to certain style of jazz guitar, actually, like Freddie Green's chunk quarter-note drive.)

Couldn't resist actually trying to rank them, so I came up with this:

Musicians: 1-Brian, 2-Carl, 3-Dennis
Singers: 1-Carl, 2-Brian, 3-Dennis
Songwriters: 1-Brian, 2-Dennis, 3-Carl
Solo Artists: 1-Dennis, 2-Brian, 3-Carl.

A bit of unfortunate news regarding the career Alf "Be With Me" Clausen:

http://variety.com/2017/tv/news/simpsons-composer-alf-clausen-fired-1202543183/

It seems that Mike's one-time would be duet costar, Bart Simpson (indirectly) has fired the Alf-ster.

"Bart Fires ALF" should have been the headline.

There was an episode where Lisa went to art camp, which features some Glee castmembers, that did a parody of Good Vibrations. 

Oddly enough, The Simpsons announced yesterday that Alf Clausen was let go as composer.  Harry Shearer tried to jump ship a year or two ago, now they're changing the music after 28 years.  Might be time to pull the plug on a once great show.

I'll be playing "Be With Me" in his honor.

Whatever Carl's merits as a rhythm player, it still just seems a bit odd to me that he never did develop that much as a lead guitarist beyond the surf/C. Berry style.  I don't say that as a knock, it is just kind of odd, I think.  To be playing the types of leads he did basically when he was just a child, one would think he would have developed further in that regard....Still think it may have hurt their popularity in the late sixties, early seventies that he could not play more contemporary type leads, especially in concert...I think the retro sounding solos may have helped to paint the band into their oldies corner....

Carl once said that at a certain point, he concentrated on developing his singing abilities rather than his guitar abilities.

I think there was an interesting quote in the Lost Beach Boy book from David Marks, which I know don't exactly remember out of blue but anyway David told about the time when he rejoined the group in the later 90's and said that he just suddenly then realized how "cornered" Carl was at that point musically because apparently Mike insisted everything always being played exactly like on the old records. I think there just wasn't room for much other styles or guitar work techniques on the Beach Boys world after the early 70's or something. Everybody kinda settled on their shoes and Carl propably just wasn't that interested about playing anymore, at least not as much as singing. But those are just my guesses.