Podcast appearances and mentions of Al Jardine

What can you say about the Beach Boys that hasn't already been said? Especially now with the recent passing of leader Brian Wilson, the band is back to the forefront where they deserve to be. Former member Al Jardine recently released a new EP called Islands in the Sun and he and I talked about it two days before Brian died. That fact gives a unique spirit to this interview as it will likely go down as one of the last Al gave that was about him and his music solely. I was especially curious about the band's 80s period since it's less talked about as well as the upcoming tour Al has planned, his approach to his solo music and more. It was already extremely fortunate to have Al on the show. With Brian now being gone, it's a moment I'm grateful that we captured forever.  www.aljardine.com  www.patreon.com/c/thehustlepod

In this special episode of LEGENDS: Podcast by All Day Vinyl, host Scott Dudelson speaks with Beach Boys co-founder Al Jardine for an intimate and wide-ranging conversation that honors a musical brotherhood spanning more than six decades and dives into Al's next creative chapter. Jardine reflects on the recent passing of Brian Wilson, sharing deeply personal memories, behind-the-scenes stories from the Beach Boys "Love You" era, and the creative spark that helped shape one of the most influential bands in music history. The episode also explores Jardine's new Island in the Sun EP—how revisiting archival recordings led to new inspiration, and how themes of nature, spirituality, and family continue to drive his songwriting. From unexpected collaborations with Neil Young and Flea to the quirky backstory behind Brian Wilson's “Ding Dang,” Jardine offers fresh insight into both classic tracks and his new material. Listeners will also hear about his upcoming tour with members of the Brian Wilson Touring Band - now called The Pet Sounds Band - and how the music continues to evolve while staying rooted in the harmonies and heart that defined the Beach Boys. A moving tribute, a creative journey, and a rare conversation with a rock and roll icon. If you like this episode please rate, follow and subscribe and check us out on YouTube, FB and IG @alldayvinyl  

Scott Wolf's estranged wife cuffed and claiming abuse? Just three days post-split, why Kelley Wolf was detained and caught on camera making explosive accusations. Then, HGTV's Tarek El Moussa in a Vegas brawl? The panic, punches, and new police video. Plus, John Stamos in tears as The Beach Boys say goodbye to Brian Wilson. Only ET's with Stamos, Mike Love, and Al Jardine inside their final days with the music legend. And Eric Dane emotional detailing how his ALS diagnosis is changing his life. Then, Ricki Lake unfiltered and dropping all the specifics about her recent plastic surgery. Plus, a “Felicity” flashback 23 years later. Keri Russell and Scott Speedman reunited and reliving their first meeting. And only ET is with Bryan Cranston's daughter turned breakout star on “The Pitt”. Taylor Dearden on the show's realness, and her dad's unforgettable acting advice. Then, Sydney Sweeney on the future of “Euphoria” and her character Cassie's wild storyline. Plus, a “Landman” exclusive. What's next for Billy Bob Thornton and Ali Larter. And a “Matlock” shocker…is Dolly Parton headed to the courtroom with the cast? Then, “Scream 7” spoilers?! OG star Matthew Lillard on his big return and the call that had him screaming. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Dean Richards, entertainment reporter for WGN, joins Bob Sirott to provide the latest news in entertainment. Bob and Dean share statements from Mike Love and Al Jardine as they remember Brian Wilson and a “Leave It to Beaver” reunion. They also talk about Mel Brooks’ return to “Spaceballs” with Rick Moranis, things to do this […]

As we all mourn the loss of Beach Boys founder Brian Wilson, this is a rewind episode with fellow Beach Boys bandmate, Al Jardine.

Beach Boys er historien om en families episke rejse gennem rock & roll, med sex, drugs og store skæg. Beach Boys består af de 3 Wilson brødre, Brian, Carl og Dennis, deres fætter Mike Love og skolekammerat Al Jardine. På overfladen var de den amerikanske drøm, de var lyden af sommer, strand og surfing, men … Læs videre "Beach Boys"

Le chanteur de U2, Bono au cœur d'une vive controverse après son passage dans le podcast de Joe Rogan, il s'est attiré les foudres d'Elon Musk et d'une partie du public à propos des réductions de l'aide internationale américaine. Robbie Williams a dévoilé les coulisses de sa collaboration avec Tony Iommi, guitariste de Black Sabbath, pour son nouveau single "Rocket". Ce 31 mai, le groupe américain Linkin Park a enflammé l'Allianz Arena de Munich en ouverture de la finale de la Ligue des champions de l'UEFA. Al Jardine, le chanteur des Beach Boys, a sorti le nouveau single "My Plane Leaves Tomorrow (Au Revoir)", avec la participation de Neil Young. Le manager d'Iron Maiden avait demandé aux fans d'éviter de vivre les nouveaux shows via l'écran de leur smartphone, une demande bien accueillie et bien respectée sur les premières dates de la tournée. Mots-Clés : étude, université, Boston, décès, monde, réseau social X, entrepreneur, menteur, idiot, coupes budgétaires, USAID, pop, rock, album, studio, BRITPOP, performance, spectateurs, tubes, morceaux, victoire, Paris Saint-Germain, Inter Milan, record, histoire, compétition, sessions d'enregistrement, A Postcard From California, Stephen Stills, David Crosby, trompette, Flea, Red Hot Chili Peppers, basse, solo, merci, téléphones, éteints, fans, salle, égoïste, filmer, douloureux. --- Classic 21 vous informe des dernières actualités du rock, en Belgique et partout ailleurs. Le Journal du Rock, en direct chaque jour à 7h30 et 18h30 sur votre radio rock'n'pop. Merci pour votre écoute Plus de contenus de Classic 21 sur www.rtbf.be/classic21 Ecoutez-nous en live ici: https://www.rtbf.be/radio/liveradio/classic21 ou sur l'app Radioplayer BelgiqueRetrouvez l'ensemble des contenus de la RTBF sur notre plateforme Auvio.be Et si vous avez apprécié ce podcast, n'hésitez pas à nous donner des étoiles ou des commentaires, cela nous aide à le faire connaître plus largement. Découvrez nos autres podcasts : Le journal du Rock : https://audmns.com/VCRYfsPComic Street (BD) https://audmns.com/oIcpwibLa chronique économique : https://audmns.com/NXWNCrAHey Teacher : https://audmns.com/CIeSInQHistoires sombres du rock : https://audmns.com/ebcGgvkCollection 21 : https://audmns.com/AUdgDqHMystères et Rock'n Roll : https://audmns.com/pCrZihuLa mauvaise oreille de Freddy Tougaux : https://audmns.com/PlXQOEJRock&Sciences : https://audmns.com/lQLdKWRCook as You Are: https://audmns.com/MrmqALPNobody Knows : https://audmns.com/pnuJUlDPlein Ecran : https://audmns.com/gEmXiKzRadio Caroline : https://audmns.com/WccemSkAinsi que nos séries :Rock Icons : https://audmns.com/pcmKXZHRock'n Roll Heroes: https://audmns.com/bXtHJucFever (Erotique) : https://audmns.com/MEWEOLpEt découvrez nos animateurs dans cette série Close to You : https://audmns.com/QfFankxDistribué par Audiomeans. Visitez audiomeans.fr/politique-de-confidentialite pour plus d'informations.

"Stephen Stohn is one of the architects of the current Canadian star system. He is also its most committed champion, so proud of the creative class we have here in Canada, and yet so humble about his own contribution to our vibrant creative community. From k.d. lang to Drake, from 'Black Velvet' to Degrassi, he's telling the stories  —  as a mentor, as a visionary, and, above all, as a dedicated fan who recognises the value of Canadian talent and who has built a career out of making sure that that talent is recognised around the world."  —  Elaine Lui, founder, LaineyGossip.com By Nick KrewenSpecial to the Star He's the chancellor of Trent University, an Order of Canada member, a former top entertainment attorney to the stars and has served as executive producer for most of the run of the “Degrassi” TV franchise. And at 76, Stephen Stohn just added a new accomplishment to his impressive résumé: recording artist. As GTA Rhythm Section, Stohn, who acted as producer, arranger and conductor, and several musicians — including Matthew Jardine, singing son of charter Beach Boys member Al Jardine — will release a six-song EP called “The Orange Sessions” next month that includes “Opus 42 — Ode to Summer,” a nine-minute track that came to Stohn in fragments while he slept (and was released Dec. 1). Website: https://stephenstohn.ca/Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/artist/1D3D14r6869nlKp917qXdJ?si=adtj7xU7Q_-kiMqUsKpBIQ This Episode is brought to you by..Go to BETTERHELP.com/apologue for confidential online counselling.use the code word Apologue for a 7 day free trial Checkout my YouTube Channel with long form interviews from the Subversives | the History of Lowest of the Low. A weekly release on Tuesdays .https://www.youtube.com/@simonhead666 Pledge monthly with Patreon https://www.patreon.com/apologueShop Apologue products at http://apologue.ca/shop

Mike Love is a singer, songwriter, and co-founder of the Beach Boys. In 1961, Love, alongside his cousins Brian, Dennis, and Carl Wilson, and their friend Al Jardine, defined the California sound of the 1960s as the Beach Boys, co-writing hits including “Good Vibrations,” “California Girls,” and “Fun, Fun, Fun,” while weaving the themes of youth, surfing, and romance into their songs. He was one of the band's vocalists and lyricists for the entire career of the Beach Boys; Love played a crucial role in the group's vocal arrangements, adding a popular doo-wop sound and R&B influences. An inductee into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, he went on to revamp the Beach Boys in 2011, announcing the band's 50th Anniversary Tour, release five solo albums, and publish an autobiography titled Good Vibrations: My Life as a Beach Boy. ------ Thank you to the sponsors that fuel our podcast and our team: Squarespace https://squarespace.com/tetra Use code 'TETRA' ------ Vivo Barefoot http://vivobarefoot.com/tetra Use code 'TETRA25' ------ LMNT Electrolytes https://drinklmnt.com/tetra Use code 'TETRA' ------ Athletic Nicotine https://www.athleticnicotine.com/tetra Use code 'TETRA' ------ Sign up to receive Tetragrammaton Transmissions https://www.tetragrammaton.com/join-newsletter

Get ready for an electrifying episode this week! We're thrilled to present an exclusive interview with the legendary Larry Dvoskin, the visionary producer and co-author behind Al Jardine's latest single, “Wish”! This is an opportunity you won't want to miss as we dive deep into the fascinating story behind this stunning reimagined version, celebrating the golden days of The Beach Boysand so much more. Our dude of all things awesome Madcat has the single “Why Bother” from Jenni Orlopp, and Donna has the brand new song “Star” from Christian Love! Other music from Nate Ruvin and Roi and the Secret People. Tune in this week and discover the magic. #thebalconyshowrocks #LarryDvoskin #aljardine #christianlove #jenniorlopp #thebeachboys #radioshow #LikeFollowShare Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Send us a textScott Johnson primarily lives in Boulder with his wife and two kids, but the family also owns a house in New Orleans, located on North Rampart Street. Over a decade ago, he played a gig and mentioned that he would have loved to learn how to play the sousaphone, as at the time he played upright and electric bass. A trumpet player and friend playing the gig with him said that he would help Johnson learn the ropes. This motivated Johnson to teach himself the instrument, and feeling comfortable playing New Orleans jazz, he gathered friends of his to form a band to play that jazz: the Rampart Street Stompers, a name that tributes his house.The band focuses on traditional New Orleans jazz from the 1920s and '30s, from Louis Armstrong to Louis Prima, and the lineup has changed slightly over the years to home in on that particular sound. The current lineup consists of Johnson as band leader, sousaphone player, and vocalist; Fred Renken on trumpet; Fred Rollenhagen on trombone; Michael Bocim on clarinet; Al Scholl on banjo and guitar; Steve Balgooyen on drums; and Corinne Johnson, Scott's daughter, as a vocalist. Other members have included Josh Schnabel on banjo and ukulele, Ellie Brown on vocals, and Justin Peterson on trumpet. Johnson calls the band a middle ground between Preservation Hall Jazz Band and Tuba Skinny, the latter of whom Johnson credits with inspiring the band in the first place.Also, stay tuned to hear responses from Al Jardine of The Beach Boys to questions about that band's time at Caribou Ranch in Nederland! Thank you for listening to The Mountain-Ear podcast featuring the news and culture from peak to peak. If you would like to be featured in the podcast, contact the host at media@themountainear.com!SUBSCRIBE ONLINE and use the COUPON CODE PODCAST FOR A 10% Discount for ALL NEW SUBSCRIBERS https://www.themtnear.com/subscribe/ You can find us online by visiting https://www.themtnear.com/Find us on Facebook @mtnearShare this podcast around wherever you've found it or by sharing the link https://themtnearpodcast.buzzsprout.com/ or https://www.themtnear.comYou can contact our editor at info@themountainear.com.Thank you for listening.

Musician Al Jardin talks Beach Boys with host Frank Mackay on this episode of The Frank Mackay Show!

Héroes y Villanos Todo sobre The Beach Boys The Beach Boys se formo en la ciudad de Hawthorne, California, Estados Unidos en el año 1961La banda :Brian Wilson (compositor, voz, bajo y piano), Carl Wilson (guitarra y voz) y Dennis Wilson (batería, voz); junto con un primo de la familia, Mike Love (voz); y un compañero de estudio de Brian, Al Jardine (guitarra y voz). Bruce Johnston (voz, bajo y piano) se unió más tarde al grupo para reemplazar a Brian Wilson en las actuaciones en vivo.

Suite à la vente quelque peu chaotique des places pour les 17 concerts d'Oasis au Royaume-Uni et en Irlande transformée en véritable parcours du combattant avec des places beaucoup plus chères que les prix annoncés avant la vente, faut-il réglementer le système de vente de tickets de concert en Belgique ? David Gilmour en a plus qu'assez de parler de son ancien collègue du groupe Pink Floyd, Roger Waters, en froid depuis des décennies maintenant, David accusant même Roger d'antisémitisme plus tôt cette année, et s'est dit très intéressé par la vente du catalogue de son ancien groupe Pink Floyd. Sir Elton John a révélé qu'il avait dû faire face à une "grave infection oculaire" qui l'a contraint à une "vision limitée" de l'un de ses yeux. Al Jardine, multi-instrumentiste et cofondateur des Beach Boys, a dévoilé une nouvelle chanson intitulée " Wish ". Billy Corgan, le chanteur des Smashing Pumpkins, a parlé sur les médias sociaux de ses taches de naissance qui s'étendent sur une grande partie de son bras gauche, dans une déclaration ‘'Body Positive'' (‘'positivité corporelle''). Mots-Clés : cause, adaptation, prix, billets, fonction, demande, porte-parole, SPF Economie, Etienne Mignolet, système, tarification, dynamique, violer, interdiction, pratiques commerciales déloyales, avenir, situation, ennui mortel, guitariste, vieux type, sujet, compte Instagram, officiel, été, étape, guérison, équipe médicale, proches, gain, casse-tête, prise de décision, discussion, point de vue, financier, bain de boue, misogyne, apologiste, Poutine, incident, tensions, conflits, album solo, Luck And Strange, 1990, ode, frères Wilson, coéquipier, Brian, Dennis, tutelle, cause, démence. --- Classic 21 vous informe des dernières actualités du rock, en Belgique et partout ailleurs. Le Journal du Rock, une production de Classic 21 la radio rock'n'pop. Merci pour votre écoute Plus de contenus de Classic 21 sur www.rtbf.be/classic21 Ecoutez-nous en live ici: https://www.rtbf.be/radio/liveradio/classic21 ou sur l'app Radioplayer BelgiqueRetrouvez l'ensemble des contenus de la RTBF sur notre plateforme Auvio.be Et si vous avez apprécié ce podcast, n'hésitez pas à nous donner des étoiles ou des commentaires, cela nous aide à le faire connaître plus largement. Découvrez nos autres podcasts : Le journal du Rock : https://audmns.com/VCRYfsPComic Street (BD) https://audmns.com/oIcpwibLa chronique économique : https://audmns.com/NXWNCrAHey Teacher : https://audmns.com/CIeSInQHistoires sombres du rock : https://audmns.com/ebcGgvkCollection 21 : https://audmns.com/AUdgDqHMystères et Rock'n Roll : https://audmns.com/pCrZihuLa mauvaise oreille de Freddy Tougaux : https://audmns.com/PlXQOEJRock&Sciences : https://audmns.com/lQLdKWRCook as You Are: https://audmns.com/MrmqALPNobody Knows : https://audmns.com/pnuJUlDPlein Ecran : https://audmns.com/gEmXiKzRadio Caroline : https://audmns.com/WccemSkAinsi que nos séries :Rock Icons : https://audmns.com/pcmKXZHRock'n Roll Heroes: https://audmns.com/bXtHJucFever (Erotique) : https://audmns.com/MEWEOLpEt découvrez nos animateurs dans cette série Close to You : https://audmns.com/QfFankx

Telephon Tuesday. Entertainment from 1982. US revolution officially over, San Marino founded, Sweden driving laws. Todays birthdays - Alan Ladd, Memphis Slim, Mort Walker, Hank Thompson, Al Jardine, Don Brewer, Charlie Sheen, Jennifer Paige. Vince Lombardi died.Intro - Pour some sugar on me - Def Leppard http://defleppard.com/Hanging on the telephone - BlondieEye of the tiger - SurvivorLove will turn you around - Kenny RogersBirthdays - In da club - 50 Cent http://50cent.com/Born with the blues - Memphis SlimIt don't hurt anymore - Hank ThompsonI get around - The Beach BoysWe're an American Band - Grand Funk RailroadCrush - Jennifer PaigeExit - It's not love - Dokken http://dokken.net/Follow Jeff Stampka on facebook and cooolmedia.com

This week's guest, producer, songwriter, and multi-instrumentalist Evan Taylor (Bernie Worrell Orchestra, Loantaka Records), brings us The Beach Boys' 21st studio album - and the last one under the group's name to be written and produced solely by troubled leader Brian Wilson - 'The Beach Boys Love You'. Released in 1977, this strange, at-times childlike collection of songs sounded like nothing else the band had done up until then. With raspier-than-usual vocals from the Wilson brothers and Brian's newfound infatuation with the Moog synthesizer, it left many fans/critics confused at the time but has since been recognized for presaging both synth-pop and new wave.  Songs discussed in this episode: Good Vibrations - Brian Wilson (Live on SNL, 1976); Distant Star - Bernie Worrell (Featuring Jerry Harrison); Take 5 - Bernie Worrell; What Have They Done To My Funk - Bernie Worrell (Featuring Bootsy Collins, Michael Moon Reuben, Ouiwey Collins, Buckethead); Be My Baby - The Ronettes; Let Us Go On This Way, Hey, Little Tomboy, Roller Skating Child, Mona, Johnny Carson, Good Time - The Beach Boys; Good Time, Shyin' Away - American Spring; Honkin' Down The Highway, Ding Dang, Solar System - The Beach Boys; Solar System - Alex Chilton; The Night Was So Young, I'll Bet He's Nice - The Beach Boys; Shoot The Curl - The Honeys; Let's Put Our Hearts Together, I Wanna Pick You Up, Airplane, Love Is A Woman - The Beach Boys; Wave From The WOOniverse - Bernie Worrell (Featuring Miho Hatori)

Héroes y Villanos especial sobre Al Jardine en los 60's Grupo del Programa: https://www.facebook.com/groups/466068480231762/

We had a great conversation with Emmy Award-winning Actress Danielle Bisutti on The Chris & Sandy Show. We talked about her role in The Blue Rose, what she learned from her role, her life and so much more!Born and raised in Los Angeles, Danielle Bisutti attended California State University, Fullerton, where she received a BA in Acting and Musical Theatre graduating Magna Cum Laude. While attending CSUF, she was nominated multiple times for Best Actress in the Irene Ryan Competition and took the runner-up position at The Lincoln Theatre in NYC. She played the role of ‘Sheila' in a California-based production of Hair and brought the cast to Chicago to perform at the Democratic National Convention, along with a five-week run at The New Athenaeum Theatre. Her other theater credits include Reno Sweeney in Anything Goes, Maggie in Boy's Life, Yelena in Uncle Vanya, Fastrada in Pippin and Ophelia in Hamlet. She also studied with Lesley Kahn, performed with the Upright Citizens Brigade and studied with the Film Actor's Workshop under Eric Kline. Bisutti has been seen on some of television's most popular series including Parks & Recreation, Last Man Standing, CSI: Miami, Without a Trace, The O.C., Castle, NCIS, Criminal Minds, 90210, Shonda Rhimes' For the People, Private Practice, Body of Proof, Two and a Half Men and Boston Legal. She is best known for her starring role as Amanda Cantwell opposite Keke Palmer on the Nickelodeon series True Jackson VP. Her film credits include Insidious Chapter 2, Universal Studio's Curse of Chucky, Michael Rosenbaum's indie comedy Back in the Day, Lionsgate's Venice Underground opposite Eric Mabius, The Neighbor with Matthew Modine and Lionsgate's Faith-based film No Greater Love. She won a Los Angeles area Emmy Award in 2022 for hosting Street Music Los Angeles. She co-produced the web series Hollywood Girl in which she had a starring role as Pasha Maneer. Her talents lend to both onscreen and behind the scenes work. In 2018, Bisutti provided the voice and motion capture for the Witch of the Woods, who is later to be revealed as the Goddess Freya in the Sony Playstation video game God of War. She continued her role for the 2022 release of God of War: Ragnarok – roles for which she has been BAFTA nominated for. Additionally, she performance captured the role of “Claudia Grimstone” in Madden NFL 21: Face of the Franchise and voiced “Wonder Woman” in the Lego Movie 2 video game. A Writer, Producer and Director: Her company Perfect Timing Productions' current projects include Mood Swings, a TV comedy series for Pureflix, and short film Little May which was an "Official Selection" of Academy Award qualifying LA Shorts International Film Festival and Fade In Awards Grand Jury Prize "Best Short Script" 2019. Projects in development include TV pilots: Wonderland, Damsels and feature films projects: The Fort, The Christmas Rebound, and Wake Me.As a Singer-Songwriter, Danielle's original songs have been placed in films Venice Underground, April Moon, In the Presence of, Shadowheart, and theme song Heaven for the indie feature City of... which she performed live at the 19th Annual Steve Chase Humanitarian Awards Desert AIDS Project accompanying dancers Kupono and Marko from So You Think You Can Dance with with choreography by Ray Leeper. She received a Los Angeles Music Award for "Best Female Singer-Songwriter." Her album "Glimmer" was nominated for AAA Album of the Year and her song "In Passing" has received Unanimous Choice Recipient Award for Independent AC Single of the Year. Music Connection Magazine has featured Danielle in its Hot 100 Unsigned Artists list. Annually Danielle sings on stage with rock n' roll legends at the Venice Beach Sign Holiday Lighting ceremony, past artists: Al Jardine of The Beach Boys and Andy Summers of The Police. Danielle sings and plays piano, guitar and ukulele with her band Midnight Velvet, interweaving jazz and blues standards in...

Discover if it's storytelling or shit talking on the latest episode of Unrehearsed with storied percussionist Jackie Bertone.  Basile and Bertone go back over 30 years and have had plenty of shared, eyebrow-raising moments in the studio. Hear them chronicle their experiences together with Brian Wilson and The Beach Boys as well as Jackie's escapades on his growing and impressive podcast, Jackie's Groove. Let's raise a glass for Melinda, Carl and... Joe Thomas.  Producer's Note:Jackie's Groove can be found on all the same platforms as Unrehearsed. Go follow, like and listen. Special thanks to Kyle Ross, Sound Wizard. Even my life is just better with your ears on it. Go check out Stars and Stripes Vol. 1. What an adventure.  JBSupport the Show.Follow, rate and share if you dig the podcast. Follow Basile's antics on Instagram and Twitter, and check out the website for even more. In the meantime, take care of one another.

Al discusses his relationship with the Trio reading a letter that Nick Reynolds wrote him and an intro Bob Shane read for Dr. Tom Dooley

Dean Richards, entertainment reporter for WGN, joins Bob Sirott to provide the latest news in entertainment. Bob and Dean share details about the cause of death of a ‘General Hospital’ actor and Audra McDonald’s return to Broadway. They also talk about The Bear‘s season three trailer and Dean’s interview with Mike Love and Al Jardine.

On this episode of the California Now Podcast, host Soterios Johnson speaks with Mike Love and Al Jardine, founding members of the most California band of all time, The Beach Boys. The two share insights into the band's legacy and discuss the brand-new documentary, The Beach Boys, streaming on Disney+ beginning May 24th, 2024.   “So much of our music was inspired by California itself,” Love explains during the first segment of the episode. Reflecting on the essence of the California Dream, Love highlights how The Beach Boys' lighthearted and carefree music resonates across generations and geographic boundaries. “Those songs evoke such good vibrations and such positivity. It's just miraculous that we're still able to create that good vibration to this day,” he shares.  Johnson then chats with Jardine, who shares stories about the band's early days and comments on the group's continuing appeal more than six decades after they started out. “[It's] without a doubt the songwriting genius,” Jardine says, adding that the band also owes much of its success to “the wonderful comradery and the family connection.”  Both stars conclude their interviews by taking the California Questionnaire, answering a lightning round of questions about their love for the Golden State.

Ahead of their new documentary coming to Disney+ on May 24th Sean interviewed The Beach Boys! He sat down with Mike Love, Al Jardine and legendary producer Frank Marshall and talked about their favorite current artists, what they're watching and favorite The Beach Boys pop culture moments! Sean also gives his thoughts on the Superman suit reveal, the new trailer for The Acolyte and reviews The Idea Of You and Challengers!EARGASM Use the code METALCORENERDS to save 10% off your order. Protect your hearing while still enjoying the music you love.Buy Metalcore Nerds MerchSong of the Week: Great American Ghost "Hymn Of Decay"Check out the Metalcore Nerds Pull List Spotify PlaylistJoin the Metalcore Nerds Community:Discord | FB GroupFollow Metalcore Nerds on Social Media:Facebook | Instagram | Twitter | YouTube | TikTok

In this episode of Seeing Them Live, eight-year-old Emma and her father Barry delve into their concert escapades, sharing their experiences as a father-daughter photography duo. Barry's profession as a professional concert photographer provided Emma with opportunities to experience various concerts from a different angle. Barry started his career as a freelance photographer in 1997 for JAM TV, which quickly became a partnership for the Rolling Stone Network. This was where he eventually became the first photo editor for Rollingstone.com, working there through 2001. His freelance photography work also includes wire services for Getty Images and the Associated Press. He also contributes to live music publications as well as other areas of interest, including portraits, food, restaurants, and special events.Emma's adventure begins with a memorable experience at City Winery in Chicago on Father's Day, 2021. Emma brought her Polaroid camera along, capturing special moments and collecting souvenirs. At the concert, Emma received an autographed photo from the singer Tiffany, marking the start of her souvenir collection. Later, Barry surprised Emma with tickets to see Mike Campbell and the Dirty Knobs at Park West, where they enjoyed a front-row experience and received guitar picks as additional mementos.The excitement continued as Emma attended an Olivia Rodrigo concert at the Aragon Ballroom, discovering the artist through a video game. Barry's surprise tickets to the concert delighted Emma, who received memorable souvenirs, including a guitar pick and flowers left on stage. Emma also attended her first Duran Duran concert at the United Center in Chicago, although she couldn't enter the pit due to technical constraints. Despite this, Emma enjoyed the show with Barry and their writer, adding a unique perspective to Barry's concert photography work.Emma's presence during concerts added depth to Barry's work, capturing moments that might have been missed otherwise. Their adventures culminated in Emma's attendance at Lollapalooza, where she met band members backstage. Emma and Barry discuss other live music experiences, including Guns N' Roses at Wrigley Field and Al Jardine's performance at the Schaumburg September Fest. Emma shares her excitement about receiving a guitar pick from Duff McKagan at the Guns N' Roses concert after catching his attention with the rock and roll sign.Transitioning to Al Jardine's performance, Barry highlights their special connection with the artist and their collaboration on photography. Emma, using a Canon digital single lens reflex camera, captured memorable shots of Al Jardine and his band, learning the importance of composition and technique. Barry emphasizes the significance of focusing on key band members and anticipating moments to capture compelling shots.Their conversation also touches on Emma's evolving photography skills, from using a point-and-shoot Polaroid to a professional-grade camera, guided by her father's expertise. They discuss Emma's approach to concert photography, including her focus on the band and strategies for capturing dynamic moments. Additionally, they share insights into concert souvenirs, including t-shirts and vinyl records, and reflect on the unique experiences of attending concerts and red-carpet events together.Overall, the episode showcases Emma and Barry's passion for live music and photography, their shared experiences, and the joy of creating lasting memories together. PATREON:https://www.patreon.com/SeeingThemLivePlease help us defer the cost of producing this podcast by making a donation on Patreon.WEBSITE:https://seeingthemlive.com/Visit the Seeing Them Live website for bonus materials including the show blog, resource links for concert buffs, photos, materials related to our episodes, and our Ticket Stub Museum.INSTAGRAM:https://www.instagram.com/seeingthemlive/FACEBOOK:https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=61550090670708

In this episode we welcome revered High Llamas leader (and arranger to the hip and the mighty) Sean O'Hagan to Hammersmith and ask him about his life and times from Microdisney to new album Hey Panda. We hear about Sean's Luton childhood, his family's move back to Ireland, and his 1980 encounter with the late Cathal Coughlan — the Corkonian with whom he formed the brave and brilliant Microdisney. Their path through '80s pop via Rough Trade and Virgin, and their eventual unravelling at the end of the decade, is discussed with reference to the new BBC documentary The Clock Comes Down the Stairs. The birth of the High Llamas involves RBP's own Mark Pringle, who recalls his production work on the 1992 EP Apricots (a.k.a. Santa Barbara). The influence of Brian Wilson on the sound and aesthetic of 1994's Gideon Gaye and 1996's Hawaii leads to Sean's reminiscences of meeting the Beach Boys and (almost) producing them. A side story involves his amusing memories of backing another cult L.A. genius, Love's Arthur Lee, in London. After we've heard clips from Mike Quigley's 1969 audio interview with Carl Wilson, Mike Love, Al Jardine and Bruce Johnston, we return to the arc of the Llamas' story and ask Sean about the influence of contemporary R&B on the Llamas' Hey Panda. Finally, Mark and Jasper talk us out with quotes from the pieces they've most enjoyed adding to the RBP library over the preceding fortnight. Many thanks to special guest Sean O'Hagan. The High Llamas new album, Hey Panda, is out now; visit highllamas.com or your local record shop to get your hands on it. Pieces discussed: The High Llamas: You Can Call Me Alpaca, The High Llamas: Lo-fi Heaven, The High Llamas: A Different Breed, An Improbable History: Microdisney Interviewed, The Beach Boys audio, Ted Nugent Unleashes His Little Ball of Fire, Leonard Bernstein: Lenny's song and dance in Vienna, Lounging with Mr Williams, So why exactly does David Gray have this effect on women? and Terence Trent D'Arby: Neither Fish Nor Flesh.

Welcome to the Instant Trivia podcast episode 1130, where we ask the best trivia on the Internet. Round 1. Category: 7 1: Tradition says this city was founded in 753 B.C. on one of a group of 7 hills. Rome. 2: In the Romanian language, this group includes Duminica, Luni and Vineri. days of the week. 3: Shivah in this religion is a 7-day period of mourning. Judaism. 4: Lust, sloth and gluttony are 3 of the 7 of these. the 7 deadly sins. 5: Bryn Mawr, Vassar and Barnard are among this scholarly septet. Seven Sisters. Round 2. Category: The State Governed 1: Bill Clinton. Arkansas. 2: George Pataki. New York. 3: William McKinley. Ohio. 4: Christine Todd Whitman. New Jersey. 5: Janet Napolitano. Arizona. Round 3. Category: Got Milk? 1: AKA "America's Dairyland", it's one of the leading U.S. states in milk production. Wisconsin. 2: This "MMMBop" trio pushes "MMMMilk". Hanson. 3: 1 of this unit of milk weighs about 8 pounds. a gallon. 4: This Chicago Bulls forward sports golden-colored hair as well as a white mustache. Dennis Rodman. 5: A Frenchman created this process that kills microorganisms in milk by heating it. pasteurization. Round 4. Category: Band With 1: Freddie Mercury andBrian May. Queen. 2: Mike Love,Al Jardine andthe Wilson brothers. the Beach Boys. 3: Eddie Vedder on vocals. Pearl Jam. 4: Richie Sambora on guitar. Bon Jovi. 5: Donald Fagen andWalter Becker. Steely Dan. Round 5. Category: The Anthony Quinn Film Festival 1: In 1962 Anthony Quinn played a fierce Bedouin leader in this desert epic. Lawrence of Arabia. 2: Anthony Quinn is best remembered for his role as this earthy title peasant in a film based on a Kazantzakis novel. Zorba the Greek. 3: In this 1943 film "Incident", Anthony Quinn and Dana Andrews are mistakenly lynched by a mob. The Ox-Bow Incident. 4: Kirk Douglas was Vincent Van Gogh and Anthony Quinn played Paul Gauguin in this artsy 1956 big screener. Lust for Life. 5: In 1962 Quinn played this title criminal set free so that Christ could be crucified. Barabbas. Thanks for listening! Come back tomorrow for more exciting trivia!Special thanks to https://blog.feedspot.com/trivia_podcasts/ AI Voices used

In 1961, a band influenced by the southern California lifestyle (surfing, cars, and romance) emerged from a garage in Hawthorne, California. The band consisted of brothers Brian, Dennis, and Carl Wilson, their cousin Mike Love, and friend Al Jardine. They were called The Beach Boys. Need we say more?   Join Team Derringer (Laura, Paul, and Alton) as we discuss little known facts about The Beach Boys. Did Brian Wilson's band jump the shark? Did they Cross the Rubicon? Listen and discover. Find all the Derringer Discoveries artist insight episodes, released monthly, on our website or your favorite podcast platform.  If you enjoy this episode, please subscribe to our podcast, and tell your friends about Derringer Discoveries. Episode: www.derringerdiscoveries.com/056 Website: www.derringerdiscoveries.com Newsletter: www.derringerdiscoveries.com/subscribe © Copyright 2024 | Derringer Discoveries | All Rights Reserved  

In 1961, a band influenced by the southern California lifestyle (surfing, cars, and romance) emerged from a garage in Hawthorne, California. The band consisted of brothers Brian, Dennis, and Carl Wilson, their cousin Mike Love, and friend Al Jardine. They were called The Beach Boys. Need we say more?   Join Team Derringer (Laura, Paul, and Alton) as we discuss little known facts about The Beach Boys. Did Brian Wilson's band jump the shark? Did they Cross the Rubicon? Listen and discover. Find all the Derringer Discoveries artist insight episodes, released monthly, on our website or your favorite podcast platform.  If you enjoy this episode, please subscribe to our podcast, and tell your friends about Derringer Discoveries. Episode: www.derringerdiscoveries.com/056 Website: www.derringerdiscoveries.com Newsletter: www.derringerdiscoveries.com/subscribe © Copyright 2024 | Derringer Discoveries | All Rights Reserved  

Bobbie Childress Shane sits down to talk with Al Jardine of The Beach Boys to discuss how The Kingston Trio influenced his musical career as well as the intricacies of harmony singing.

Terry Carleton of Bones & Knives Recording Studio has recorded music for major TV shows, indy films, commercials for radio, and, in some cases, has led to helping clients procure major record deals.  Terry studied classical, jazz, and composition on full scholarship. Playing in bands for the better part of 40 years. Has played live with many notables, including rockabilly legend Link Wray, pop and gospel vocalist Maria Muldaur, and jazz B3 icon Tony Monaco. As a member of Daddy-O, Terry helped back The Drifters, The Coasters, The Platters, The Marvelettes, Al Wilson, and Motown pioneer Mary Wells, to name a few. Terry has also recorded drums for Giraffe, Kevin Gilbert, Robert Ferris, and the British Progressive rock band Camel and continues to co-write songs with their frontman, Andy Latimer. He's performed with The Beach Boys' Al Jardine, Johnny Lee, Norton Buffalo, Jewel Akens, and Carey Ott, whose recordings from Bones and Knives have been featured on TV shows like "Grey's Anatomy" and "Unnecessary Roughness."  Most recently, Terry was commissioned by Sean Mendelson, whose dad is the late-great Lee Mendelson, the original producer of the iconic Peanuts Cartoons, to remix over 150 original Vince Guaraldi recordings from his Charlie Brown cartoon soundtracks, most recent being A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving (50th Anniversary Edition). We talk about his work on the Vince Guaraldi / Charlie Brown recordings, Bones & Knives Recording Studios, His Collection of odd instruments, meeting the Mendelsons, the arc of Terry's career, and more. Learn more about Terry's studio and career at BonesAndKnives.com.  Support the Unstarving Musician The Unstarving Musician exists solely through the generosity of its listeners, readers, and viewers. Learn how you can offer your support. This episode was powered by Music Marketing Method, a program for independent musicians looking to grow their music career. Music Marketing Method was created by my good friend Lynz Crichton. I'm in the program and I'm learning tons! I'm growing my fan base and learning about many ways that I'll be earning money in the new year. It's also helping me grow this podcast. How cool is that? To lean more and find out if Music Marketing Method can help your music career, visit UnstarvingMusician.com/MusicMarketing. This episode of the was powered by Liner Notes. Learn from the hundreds of musicians and industry pros I've spoken with for the Unstarving Musician on topics such as marketing, songwriting, touring, sync licensing and much more. Sign up for Liner Notes. Liner Notes is an email newsletter from yours truly, in which I share some of the best knowledge gems garnered from the many conversations featured on the Unstarving Musician. You'll also be privy to the latest podcast episodes and Liner Notes subscriber exclusives. Sign up at UnstarvingMusician.com. It's free and you can unsubscribe at anytime. Mentions and Related Episodes BonesAndKnives.com  A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving (50th Anniversary Edition)  Alabama Song by The Doors  The Starving Musician  Undercover Blues w/Johnny Burgin (video playlist) Resources The Unstarving Musician's Guide to Getting Paid Gigs, by Robonzo Music Marketing Method – The program that helps musicians find fans, grow an audience and make consistent income Bandzoogle – The all-in-one platform that makes it easy to build a beautiful website for your music Dreamhost – See the latest deals from Dreamhost, save money and support the UM in the process. More Resources for musicians Pardon the Interruption (Disclosure)  Some of the links in this post are affiliate links. This means I make a small commission, at no extra charge to you, if you purchase using those links. Thanks for your support! Visit UnstarvingMusician.com to sign up for Liner Notes to learn what I'm learning from the best indie musicians and music industry professionals. Stay in touch! @RobonzoDrummer on Twitter  and  Instagram @UnstarvingMusician on Facebook  and  YouTube  

We've got a mix of new tunes and Christmas tracks this hour on Catching A Wave! There's festive tunes from Joel Paterson, Dave Del Monte & The Cross County Boys, Al Jardine, Martin Cilia, Agent Octopus, The Delta Ring and Gary Huey as well as a Jammin' James Jukebox selection of the week (The Ventures)! Beth Riley has a Good-Time deep track by The Beach Boys. The Marketts have a track celebrating it's 60th anniversary in our Good Time segment too! Plus, there's rockers from The Breakers, Micky Dolenz, The Carnivals, Savarit, The Surfers, The Rhino Chasers, The Patina Turners and Interstellar Riders!   Intro music bed: "Catch A Wave"- The Beach Boys   The Breakers- "Sharks In The Streets" The Carnivals- "Tropicana Je" Savarit- "Desert Sun" The Surfers- "Tequila" The Rhino Chasers- "Moonlight Swamis"   Good Time segments: The Marketts 60th Anniversary of The Marketts Take To Wheels (1963) The Marketts- "Bucket Seats"   The Patina Turners- "Shore Break" Interstellar Riders- "Tombstoning"   Surf's Up: Beth's Beach Boys Break: The Beach Boys- "Good Time" Follow "Surf's Up: Beth's Beach Boys Break" HERE   Micky Dolenz- "Radio Free Europe"   Christmas programming: Joel Paterson- "Christmas Island" The Delta Ring- "O Holy Night" Al Jardine- "Sunshine To Snowflakes" Martin Cilia- "Deck The Halls" Agent Octopus- "Rudolph The Red Nosed Spy"   Jammin' James Jukebox selection of the week: The Ventures- "We Wish You A Merry Christmas"   Dave Del Monte & The Cross County Boys- "Christmas Light Fight" Gary Hoey- "Frosty The Snowman"   Outro music bed: Los Straitjackets- "God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen"

There's another Catching A Wave "Two-nami" in the forecast this hour with 2 songs in a row featuring Bob Spalding on guitar (solo track and new one from The Ventures). Beth Riley has a deep track from The Beach Boys in her Surf's Up: Beth's Beach Boys Break. We've got a La Luz tune from an album celebrating it's 10th anniversary in our Good Time segment and we'll drop a coin in the Jammin' James Jukebox to hear our selection of the week (instrumental from Cheap Trick). Plus, there's a couple of songs from the new Triple Agent Records Volume VI release (Tremolo Beer Gut with Zombierella and The Greasy Gills) as well as rockers from Al Jardine, The Meteoroids, Magnatech, Black Flamingos, U2, Surf Cult, The Patina Turners, Guitarmy Of One, Kay Firlito & The Sun-Dried Surf Band, His Lordship and Shriek If You Know What I Did Last Friday The 13th!   Intro music bed: "Catch A Wave"- The Beach Boys   Black Flamingos- "Tales From The Crypt" Guitarmy Of One- "Jack Lord Of The Sea" U2- "Atomic City" Shriek If You Know What I Did Last Friday The 13th- "Shrieker Stomp" The Meteoroids- "The Creeper"   Good Time segment: La Luz 10th Anniversary of It's Alive (2013): La Luz- "Sure As Spring"   Magnatech- "Valiant Rides Again" His Lordship- "Jackie Works For The NHS"   Surf's Up: Beth's Beach Boys Break: The Beach Boys- "Rock And Roll Music" (2012 mix with extra verse) Follow "Surf's Up: Beth's Beach Boys Break" HERE   Tremolo Beer Gut (feat. Zombierella)- "Codename Tremstar" Al Jardine- "Waves Of Love 3.0 Ocean Mix" The Greasy Gills- "Tequila Bill" (alternate version) The Patina Turners- "Blue Crab Boogie"   Two-nami: Bob Spalding- "The Broken Road" The Ventures- "The Alien"   Jammin' James Jukebox selection of the week: Cheap Trick- "Oh Boy" (instrumental version)   Surf Cult- "Ghost Pirates" Kay Firlito & The Sun-Dried Surf Band- "Summer Vacation Kinda Sucked"   Outro music bed: Eddie Angel- "Deuces Wild"

We are very excited to bring you Al Jardine's song “Waves Of Love 3.0”! Co-written and produced by #1 Amazon book seller, 4X Grammy nominee Larry Dvoskin! Larry joins us to talk about this song and so much more! With a thirty year extensive music career, a new book coming out, and his Web 3 expertise there are a lot of surprises in this show. Larry is also sharing his brand new song “Live It All”! Fun and fabulous are just two words to describe Larry. Don't miss this show! Other music from Mack MeadowsGtr and Sam Sims #catchingrisingstars #thebalconyshowrocks #LarryDvoskin #newsong2023 #beachboy #internetradioshow #LikeFollowShare Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

National pet rock day. Entertainment from 1959. US revolution officially over, San Marino founded, Sweden driving laws. Todays birthdays - Alan Ladd, Memphis Slim, Mort Walker, Hank Thompson, Al Jardine, Don Brewer, Charlie Sheen, Jennifer Paige. Vince Lombardi died.Intro - Pour some sugar on me - Def Leppard http://defleppard.com/I'm in love with my pet rock - Al BoltThe three bells - The Three BellsBirthdays - In da club - 50 Cent http://50cent.com/Born with the blues - Memphis SlimIt don't hurt anymore - Hank ThompsonI get around - The Beach BoysWe're an American Band - Grand Funk RailroadCrush - Jennifer PaigeExit - It's not love - Dokken http://dokken.net/https://www.coolcasts.cooolmedia.com/show/history-factoids-about-today/

Beave and Len debate the music and the impact of the Beach Boys. Beave argues the band's significant impact, rivalry with the Beatles, and the greatness of their album Pet Sounds, while Len sniffs in disdain. Beave tries to educate Len on the cultural impact of the song "Chug-A-Lug". They compare 45-minute playlists (which can be found on Spotify), talk their favorite albums, and the subsequent solo efforts of Brian Wilson. Tune in for some California jams!

On this week's episode of the Hollywood Chronicles: Frank sits down with founding member of the Beach Boys, Al Jardine to discuss his star filled solo album, career, and life!

Beach Boys co-founder Al Jardine guests on this brand new Fake Show podcast with host Jim Tofte...enjoy!!!

My very special guest this week is Al Jardine co-founder of legendary band The Beach Boys Al spoke to me about the recording of his excellent solo album 'A Postcard From California' which I highly recommend Al continues to tour with his Endless Summer band. For more information and dates visit: https://www.aljardine.com

Time Machine, new tunes, deep tracks and a whole lot more are in store for you this hour on Catching A Wave! We hear a track from Jan & Dean's Surf City & Other Swingin' Cities that is celebrating it's 60th anniversary this year.  Beth Riley has a "friend"ly tune from The Beach Boys in her Surf's Up: Beth's Beach Boys Break.  We'll board the Catching A Wave Time Machine for the week ending October 31st, 1964 to hear some tunes on the Billboard Hot 100 (including the #1 song) and we'll drop a coin in the Jammin' James Jukebox to hear our selection of the week.  Plus, ride the killer wave of rockers from The Atlantics, Al Jardine, Resonadores, The Neanderthals, Colony House, Surfmaster, The Tentakills, The Tourmaliners, The Cruncher, Kincaid & The Memetics and Dave Myers & The Surftones!   Intro music bed: "Catch A Wave"- The Beach Boys   The Atlantics- "Surfing The Wedge" Resonadores- "republica banana" The Neanderthals- "Devil or Angel" Colony House- "Cannonballers" Kincaid and The Memetics- "Skaters Ain't Haters"   "Good Time" segment: Jan & Dean 60th Anniversary of Surf City And Other Swingin' Cities Jan & Dean- "Kansas City   Surfmaster- "Don't Let Me Down" The Tentakills- "Seaweed"   Surf's Up: Beth's Beach Boys Break: The Beach Boys- "Passing Friend" Follow "Surf's Up: Beth's Beach Boys Break" HERE   The Tourmaliners- "Loco Moco" The Cruncher- "My Favorite Martian"   Catching A Wave Time Machine week ending October 31st, 1964: #49 Del Shannon- "Do You Want To Dance" #32 The Kinks- "You Really Got Me" #1 The Supremes- "Baby Love"   Jammin' James Jukebox selection of the week: The Honeys- "He's A Doll"   Al Jardine- "California Saga" * Dave Myers & The Surftones- "Surf Breaker"   Outro music bed: Eddie Angel- "Deuces Wild"   *"California Saga" features among others David Crosby on background vocals.  RIP David Crosby (August 14, 1941 – January 18, 2023)

Dig deeper into The Beach Boys' latest box set release with one of the guys who helped put it together. The always entertaining and insightful Howie Edelson returns to talk up this fascinating new set. We discuss the challenge the group faced in 1972 of winning over concertgoers with their new music, Al Jardine rolling up his sleeves, stripping down Dennis Wilson's ballads, the contributions of Blondie Chaplin and Ricky Fataar, and the still murky history of "Sail on Sailor."

As we're in the period between Christmas and New Year, the gap between episodes is going to be longer than normal, and the podcast proper is going to be back on January the ninth. So nobody has to wait around for another fortnight for a new episode, I thought I'd upload some old Patreon bonus episodes to fill the gap. Every year around Christmas the bonus episodes I do tend to be on Christmas songs and so this week I'm uploading three of those. These are older episodes, so don't have the same production values as more recent episodes, and are also shorter than more recent bonuses, but I hope they're still worth listening to. Transcript We talked in the last bonus episode about how the American Christmas music canon more or less ends in 1963. One record that just got in under that wire was "Little Saint Nick", recorded by the Beach Boys in October 1963 and released in December: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "Little Saint Nick"] Brian Wilson, the Beach Boys' leader, was apparently inspired to write a Christmas song by Phil Spector -- Wilson turned up to at least one of the sessions for the Spector Christmas album, and had briefly played piano during a couple of takes of "Santa Claus is Coming to Town", although he wasn't actually on the record itself, as Spector decided he wasn't a good enough player. The date the Beach Boys recorded their Christmas song, October the twentieth 1963, was actually a historic date for the group. We'll talk about this more in a few weeks' time when we next look at the Beach Boys in the main podcast, but they had gone through a bit of a lineup shuffle, and David Marks had played his last gig with the group the night before, while Al Jardine had rejoined the band shortly before that. That meant that this was the first session since their first single at which the Beach Boys were the classic five-person lineup of Brian, Carl, and Dennis Wilson, Mike Love, and Al Jardine. There seems to be some confusion about what happened at that session, as they recorded two backing tracks. One of them became the "Little Saint Nick" that was a hit, but they also recorded a track that later became an album track called "Drive In": [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "Drive In"] But there also exists a recording of that backing track, but with the lyrics to "Little Saint Nick": [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "Drive In (Little Saint Nick version)"] I've seen conflicting accounts of how that track came to exist. Some say that they tried both backing tracks with the same lyrics at the original session, and that they then wrote the "Drive In" lyrics for the track that didn't make the cut as "Little Saint Nick", while others say that they actually sung the "Little Saint Nick" lyrics to the "Drive In" track as a joke a few months later, long after the original "Little Saint Nick" had already come out. Whichever is the truth, the version of "Little Saint Nick" that eventually came out as a single was this one, which became one of the last holiday classics in the US Christmas canon: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "Little Saint Nick"] "Little Saint Nick" is very clearly modelled on an earlier hit by the group, "Little Deuce Coupe", and so it makes sense to me that the track that was chosen was the originally intended one, as musically that's quite close to the earlier song. "Little Saint Nick" was only a moderate success on the main chart, but it made number three on Billboard's Christmas Singles chart, which was enough of a success that the group decided the next year to record a full Christmas album. That album included a remixed version of "Little Saint Nick", with the backing track stripped down to sound more like the rest of the album's first side, which was rush-recorded with few overdubs. That album was recorded in a style that the Beach Boys did quite a bit at that time, with a side for "the kids" -- uptempo original songs -- and a side for "the adults", with orchestral versions of more traditional Christmas songs, arranged by the Four Freshmen's arranger Dick Reynolds, including a gorgeous version of "We Three Kings": [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "We Three Kings"] The Beach Boys would have another attempt at making a Christmas album, in 1977, which went unreleased at the time -- mostly because much of it is truly terrible. However, there were a couple of worthwhile tracks on the album -- Brian Wilson's "Winter Symphony": [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "Winter Symphony"] And his brother Dennis' "Morning Christmas": [Excerpt: Dennis Wilson, "Morning Christmas"] Much of that album has since been released, with their 1964 Christmas album, on the compilation "Ultimate Christmas". Both Brian Wilson and Mike Love have since released solo Christmas albums. Both are patchy affairs, but Wilson's has a lovely version of "Joy to the World" as a bonus track: [Excerpt: Brian Wilson, "Joy to the World"] And it has a few other genuinely nice tracks, while the highlight of Love's is rather less impressive -- a reworking of "Shortenin' Bread" titled "Reason For the Season": [Excerpt: Mike Love, "Reason for the Season"] Both albums also include remakes of "Little Saint Nick", the one Beach Boys Christmas song that has really entered the consciousness of the general public. And while this podcast episode might have ended up being too late for you to still be hearing that one on the radio, I'm sure you'll start hearing it again, for the fifty-eighth straight year, come the last week of November 2021. Because some things, at least, stay the same no matter what's happening in the rest of the world.

We start a new segment on this week's Catching A Wave that we'll do periodically called Juke Box Heroes.  We check in on Al Jardine's jukebox and play 3 of the tunes that he has loaded in there.  We'll spin a solo tune from his as well.  Beth Riley has a great deep track from The Beach Boys too in her Surf's Up: Beth's Beach Boys Break.  And we'll drop a coin in my jukebox too to hear our Jammin' James Jukebox selection of the week.  Plus, we've got rockin' tunes from Brian Wilson, Laughing Gravy (Dean Torrence), The Go-Go Rillas, The Grass Roots (with mix and performance from The Courettes), Z & The Tiki Twisters, Resonadores, Urban Zotel & The Thunderbirds, Electric Heaters, The Brain Waves, The Violet Mindfield, The Strings Aflame and the Dwellers!     Intro music bed: "Catch A Wave"- The Beach Boys   Urban Zotel and The Thunderbirds- "The Chase" Resonadores- "Conga" The Go-Go Rillas- "O-Rang-a-Tang" The Violet Mindfield- "Beautiful Nightmare" The Dwellers- "Tide Breaker" The Electric Heaters- "Beyond Banzai" The Brain Waves- "Slithering" Brian Wilson- "Run James Run"   Surf's Up: Beth's Beach Boys Break: The Beach Boys- "Mona" Follow "Surf's Up: Beth's Beach Boys Break" HERE   Z & The Tiki Twisters- "Mechanical Ducks" The Laughing Gravy (Dean Torrence)- "Vegetables" (Alternate Mix) Al Jardine- "California Dreamin'" (with Glen Campbell and David Crosby)   Juke Box Heroes: Selections from Al Jardine's jukebox Chuck Berry- "Sweet Little Sixteen" The Chords- "Sh-Boom" Bill Haley & His Comets- "(We're Gonna) Rock Around The Clock"   Jammin' James Jukebox selection of the week: The City Surfers- "Beach Ball"   The Grass Roots (with mix and performance by The Courettes)- "Let's Live For Today" The Strings Aflame- "Factotum"   Outro Music Bed: Eddie Angel- "Deuces Wild"  

To cap a year's worth of Caropop episodes, we've got an original Beach Boy, Al Jardine. He provided perfect harmonies to this band of brothers and a cousin; he sang lead on “Help Me, Rhonda,” “I Know There's an Answer,” “Vegetables” and “Cotton Fields”; and he brought in “Sloop John B” and wrote "California Saga/California." At 80 and still sounding great, Jardine tours with his own Endless Summer Band and Brian Wilson and has a solo album, A Postcard from California. How did his mom give the Beach Boys its start? What did he think of the band's use of studio musicians? When did he realize Brian suffered from mental illness? Why was there no 60th anniversary reunion tour this year? Jardine knows there's an answer…

In this episode we are going to listen to Brian Wilson's most creative and controversial period in making music. Brian had stopped touring with The Beach Boys and got into a creative phase writing new music without the distractions and stress of touring and he let his muse run wild. His writing had expanded in subject matter as he was getting more personal and moving away from the surf music the band was known for. The peak of his creative powers were during the sessions for his "Pet Sounds" album. He reached a creative zenith with this album and sought to continue his momentum on his next album, "Smile". But for many reasons, He couldn't complete the album and soon abandoned the project. Some tracks were leaked out and many felt this collection was a lost classic. The myth of "Smile" has expanded all these decades later and a large cult has been devoted to it.I'll be playing select tracks from this period. If you would, please make a donation of love and hope to St. Jude Children's HospitalMake an impact on the lives of St. Jude kids - St. Jude Children's Research Hospital (stjude.org)Also Other Items of Interest:Kathy Bushnell Website for Emily Muff bandHome | Kathy Bushnell | Em & MooListen to previous shows at the main webpage at:https://www.buzzsprout.com/1329053Pamela Des Barres Home page for books, autographs, clothing and online writing classes.Pamela Des Barres | The Official Website of the Legendary Groupie and Author (pameladesbarresofficial.com)Listen to more music by Laurie Larson at:Home | Shashké Music and Art (laurielarson.net)View the most amazing paintings by Marijke Koger-Dunham (Formally of the 1960's artists collective, "The Fool").Psychedelic, Visionary and Fantasy Art by Marijke Koger (marijkekogerart.com)For unique Candles have a look at Stardust Lady's Etsy shopWhere art and armor become one where gods are by TwistedByStardust (etsy.com)For your astrological chart reading, contact Astrologer Tisch Aitken at:https://www.facebook.com/AstrologerTisch/Tarot card readings by Kalinda available atThe Mythical Muse | FacebookEmma Bonner-Morgan Facebook music pageThe Music Of Emma Bonner-Morgan | FacebookFor booking Children's parties and character parties in the Los Angeles area contact Kalinda Gray at:https://www.facebook.com/wishingwellparties/I'm listed in Feedspot's "Top 10 Psychedelic Podcasts You Must Follow". https://blog.feedspot.com/psychedelic_podcasts/

Pet Sounds was the eleventh studio album by the Beach Boys.  The album revolutionized music production, helped establish the album as the dominant form of music, and made the recording studio an instrument.  The Beach Boys at this time are Brian Wilson, Carl Wilson, Dennis Wilson, Bruce Johnston, Al Jardine, and Mike Love.Some consider Pet Sounds to be a Brian Wilson solo project.  He stopped touring with the Beach Boys a year prior to producing this album, and most of the Beach Boys had not heard the songs until they came into the recording session after the tour.  Additionally, the album contained a lot of departures from standard Beach Boys fare.  Wilson had moved them away from the surfing focus over the course of several albums, but this was deeper, more art rock, and inorporated jazz and other genres which just couldn't be duplicated in concert with a standard small rock set used on Beach Boys tours.Brian Wilson wanted this to be the greatest rock album ever made, and wanted it to be a cohesive work with no filler songs.  Some consider it a concept album, but it is more like a curated art work - the songs hang together but don't focus on a single theme.  While the album has become recognized as one of the greatest rock albums ever written, it was not initially received that way either commercially or critically.  This really hurt Wilson, as he considered it a public rejection of his artistry.  Even later when folks would tell him how great the album was, he didn't want to hear it.  He was already starting to breakdown mentally and psychologically.Bruce brings us this iconic album. Wouldn't It Be NiceThe opening track to the album was released as a single in July 1966.  It describes a young couple fantasizing about being older, married, and free.  It peaked at number 8 on the Billboard Hot 100.  Brian Wilson and Tony Asher wrote it (with Mike Love getting writing credits after a 1994 court case), and Brian Wilson is on lead vocals.Don't Talk (Put Your Head on My Shoulder)The instrumentation here features a string sextet, and is really complex.  The lyrics are about non-verbal communication, and Brian Wilson is the only Beach Boy on the song.  There's a 12 string electric guitar in this song which is played by a session musician named Glen Campbell.Caroline, NoThis really was a Brian Wilson solo song, released as his debut solo record in March 1966.  The lyrics are about an old flame who grows older, or maybe the relationship grows older, and loses a lot of its allure.  There are a lot of jazz chords in this piece..God Only KnowsThis track leads off side two of the album, and was pretty controversial.  At the time it was taboo to have the word “God” in a non-religious song.  The key is somewhat ambiguous, varying between E major and A major in different sections.  Paul McCartney considered it "the greatest song ever written," and it has received numerous accolades from lots of singers and songwriters.   ENTERTAINMENT TRACK:Main theme from the television series "Perry Mason"The now famous detective series completed its 9-season run in May of 1966. STAFF PICKS:Time Won't Let Me by the OutsidersWayne starts the staff picks with Cleveland's own Outsiders, and the Cleveland Indians used this song when bringing in relief pictures.  It hit number 5 on the charts.  The jingle is used in many commercials, as the message about not waiting carries over well from relationships to commercial applications.Eight Miles High by the ByrdsBrian brings us an acid rock song - often considered the first acid rock song - inspired by an airplane flight.  At least that was the story the band used to avoid concerns about drug references getting the track banned from radio stations.  The drug concerns were not overcome, causing the song to quickly drop off the charts. Twinkle Toes by Roy OrbisonRob's staff pick is from Orbison's 9th album.  This was Orbison's last top 40 hit, appearing at number 39 on the charts.  Roy Orbison had 22 top 40 hits between 1960 and 1966, and would enjoy more success in the 1980's when several of his songs were covered.  He died at 52 years old in 1988, and his final top 10 single, "You Got It" would appear on the charts posthumously.Strangers In the Night by Frank SinatraBruce concludes the staff picks with Sinatra's first number 1 hit in 11 years.  While this song would win multiple Grammys and remain on the charts for 15 weeks, Frank Sinatra hated it.  Glen Campbell played rhythm guitar on the studio recording of this song. INSTRUMENTAL TRACK:Let's Go Away for Awhile by the Beach BoysWe get in a little double-dipping with this instrumental from Pet Sounds, performed by an uncredited group of session musicians later known as the Wrecking Crew. 

Whether pretending to be surfers and getting slapped with fines from the manager for swearing or cavorting with transcendental meditation and falling out with one another, The Beach Boys were never quite what people thought they were. They were often at each other's throats, relationships were fraught a lot of the time, members of the band seemed to withdraw from the group and return whenever the mood suited them and that's before we even mention Brian Wilson's sometimes extreme battle with mental health. The story of the Beach Boys is weirder, sadder and madder than you could have ever imagined. We spent a lot of last week talking about that aspect of their career. The lore is so thick, in fact, that we had to stop only half way through their career because these guys have said and done a lot in the last 61 years. So this week, we pick up where we left off – the late 80s, when the began to slow down significantly when it came to their musical output, but refused to vanish entirely, becoming a legacy touring act with a rotating line up of ex-members and studio musicians alike, all revolving around Mike Love and Bruce Johnston.  Given the legacy of this band, we decided to offer up our own subjective interpretation of that legacy. Were The Beach Boys really at their best with Brian Wilson? Is Mike Love a bit of a dick? What about the extensive contributions of Carl and Denis Wilson, as well as Al Jardine and Bruce Johnston? Do the band deserve to be heralded as one of the greats? Can they even be Unsung? We answer all of these questions. Then we dive into the three albums that Vicki struggled to choose from - Wild Honey, Sunflower and Surf's Up. We do a bit of a dive into Wild Honey and Surf's Up before giving Sunflower the full Unsung treatment.  What do you folk think? Is Sunflower the most underrated and underappreciated Beach Boys record? Let us know what you think! REMINDER: It's Record Club shipping time! We'll be posting out vinyl and emailing digital download codes to all of our subscribers next week so there's still time to get involved before the end of March! You can also drop in and out if an ongoing subscription is too much for you. Find out more here: www.patreon.com/unsungpod

Maybe it was mostly the Wilson Family Singers, but slave-driver Papa Murry pushed them to the top. And let's not forget Mike Love and Al Jardine were also part of the original band, but it was mostly the brainchild of Brian Wilson's music and sound that formed this phenomenon that has spanned the ages and been the background to all kids who hit their teens and discover cars, surfing, parties, and dating. There are plenty of more adult-oriented or darker/broodier bands that kids will dance to as well, but the Beach Boys seem to be one of the only bands that are all about having a good time all the time, nothing but pure fun when boys discover girls and girls discover boys. Let someone else take it after the first heart breaks, or unexpected teen pregnancy, but until that time comes, let the Beach Boys blast on the stereo of your little Deuce Coupe, throw your arm around Barbara-Ann, and cruise through Salt Lake City on your way to a Surfin' Safari. Also Ty and Justin get frequently side-tracked in this episode, so hang on and enjoy the ride while they talk about was the Titanic a clever Insurance Fraud scam pulled off by the White Star Line and any number of other topics. Hopefully Ty didn't have a stroke, because he just can't seem to get it together in this episode. --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/about-what/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/about-what/support

Episode one hundred and forty-two of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “God Only Knows" by the Beach Boys, and the creation of the Pet Sounds album. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on "Sunny" by Bobby Hebb. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt's irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ Resources There is no Mixcloud this week, because there were too many Beach Boys songs in the episode. I used many resources for this episode, most of which will be used in future Beach Boys episodes too. It's difficult to enumerate everything here, because I have been an active member of the Beach Boys fan community for twenty-four years, and have at times just used my accumulated knowledge for this. But the resources I list here are ones I've checked for specific things. Stephen McParland has published many, many books on the California surf and hot-rod music scenes, including several on both the Beach Boys and Gary Usher.  His books can be found at https://payhip.com/CMusicBooks Andrew Doe's Bellagio 10452 site is an invaluable resource. Jon Stebbins' The Beach Boys FAQ is a good balance between accuracy and readability. And Philip Lambert's Inside the Music of Brian Wilson is an excellent, though sadly out of print, musicological analysis of Wilson's music from 1962 through 67. I have also referred to Brian Wilson's autobiography, I Am Brian Wilson, and to Mike Love's, Good Vibrations: My Life as a Beach Boy. For material specific to Pet Sounds I have used Kingsley Abbot's The Beach Boys' Pet Sounds: The Greatest Album of the Twentieth Century and Charles L Granata's I Just Wasn't Made For These Times: Brian Wilson and the Making of Pet Sounds.  I also used the 126-page book The Making of Pet Sounds by David Leaf, which came as part of the The Pet Sounds Sessions box set, which also included the many alternate versions of songs from the album used here. Sadly both that box set and the 2016 updated reissue of it appear currently to be out of print, but either is well worth obtaining for anyone who is interested in how great records are made. Of the versions of Pet Sounds that are still in print, this double-CD version is the one I'd recommend. It has the original mono mix of the album, the more recent stereo remix, the instrumental backing tracks, and live versions of several songs. As a good starting point for the Beach Boys' music in general, I would recommend this budget-priced three-CD set, which has a surprisingly good selection of their material on it. The YouTube drum tutorial I excerpted a few seconds of to show a shuffle beat is here. Transcript We're still in the run of episodes that deal with the LA pop music scene -- though next week we're going to move away from LA, while still dealing with a lot of the people who would play a part in that scene. But today we're hitting something that requires a bit of explanation. Most artists covered in this podcast get one or at the most two episodes. Some get slightly more -- the major artists who are present for many revolutions in music, or who have particularly important careers, like Fats Domino or the Supremes. And then there are a few very major artists who get a lot more. The Beatles, for example, are going to get eight in total, plus there will be episodes on some of their solo careers. Elvis has had six, and will get one more wrap-up episode. This is the third Beach Boys episode, and there are going to be three more after this, because the Beach Boys were one of the most important acts of the decade. But normally, I limit major acts to one episode per calendar year of their career. This means that they will average at most one episode every ten episodes, so while for example the episodes on "Mystery Train" and "Heartbreak Hotel" came close together, there was then a reasonable gap before another Elvis episode. This is not possible for the Beach Boys, because this episode and the next two Beach Boys ones all take place over an incredibly compressed timeline. In May 1966, they released an album that has consistently been voted the best album ever in polls of critics, and which is certainly one of the most influential even if one does not believe there is such a thing as a "best album ever". In October 1966 they released one of the most important singles ever -- a record that is again often considered the single best pop single of all time, and which again was massively influential. And then in July 1967 they released the single that was intended to be the lead-off single from their album Smile, an album that didn't get released until decades later, and which became a legend of rock music that was arguably more influential by *not* being released than most records that are released manage to be. And these are all very different stories, stories that need to be told separately. This means that episode one hundred and forty-two, episode one hundred and forty-six, and episode one hundred and fifty-three are all going to be about the Beach Boys. There will be one final later episode about them, too, but the next few months are going to be very dominated by them, so I apologise in advance for that if that's not something you're interested in. Though it also means that with luck some of these episodes will be closer to the shorter length of podcast I prefer rather than the ninety-minute mammoths we've had recently. Though I'm afraid this is another long one. When we left the Beach Boys, we'd just heard that Glen Campbell had temporarily replaced Brian Wilson on the road, after Wilson's mental health had finally been unable to take the strain of touring while also being the group's record producer, principal songwriter, and leader. To thank Campbell, who at this point was not at all well known in his own right, though he was a respected session guitarist and had released a few singles, Brian had co-written and produced "Guess I'm Dumb" for him, a track which prefigured the musical style that Wilson was going to use for the next year or so: [Excerpt: Glen Campbell, "Guess I'm Dumb"] It's worth looking at "Guess I'm Dumb" in a little detail, as it points the way forward to a lot of Wilson's songwriting over the next year. Firstly, of course, there are the lyrical themes of insecurity and of what might even be descriptions of mental illness in the first verse -- "the way I act don't seem like me, I'm not on top like I used to be". The lyrics are by Russ Titelman, but it's reasonable to assume that as with many of his collaborations, Brian brought in the initial idea. There's also a noticeable change in the melodic style compared to Wilson's earlier melodies. Up to this point, Wilson has mostly been writing what get called "horizontal" melody lines -- ones with very little movement, and small movements, often centred on a single note or two. There are exceptions of course, and plenty of them, but a typical Brian Wilson melody up to this point is the kind of thing where even I can hit the notes more or less OK -- [sings] "Well, she got her daddy's car and she cruised through the hamburger stand now". It's not quite a monotone, but it's within a tight range, and you don't have to move far from one note to another. But "Guess I'm Dumb" is incorporating the influence of Roy Orbison, and more obviously of Burt Bacharach, and it's *ludicrously* vertical, with gigantic leaps all over the place, in places that are not obvious. It requires the kind of precision that only a singer like Campbell can attain, to make it sound at all natural: [Excerpt: Glen Campbell, "Guess I'm Dumb"] Bacharach's influence is also noticeable in the way that the chord changes are very different from those that Wilson was using before. Up to this point, when Wilson wrote unusual chord changes, it was mostly patterns like "The Warmth of the Sun", which is wildly inventive, but mostly uses very simple triads and sevenths. Now he was starting to do things like the line "I guess I'm dumb but I don't care", which is sort of a tumbling set of inversions of the same chord that goes from a triad with the fifth in the bass, to a major sixth, to a minor eleventh, to a minor seventh. Part of the reason that Brian could start using these more complex voicings was that he was also moving away from using just the standard guitar/bass/drums lineup, sometimes with keyboards and saxophone, which had been used on almost every Beach Boys track to this point. Instead, as well as the influence of Bacharach, Wilson was also being influenced by Jack Nitzsche's arrangements for Phil Spector's records, and in particular by the way Nitzsche would double instruments, and have, say, a harpsichord and a piano play the same line, to create a timbre that was different from either individual instrument. But where Nitzsche and Spector used the technique along with a lot of reverb and overdubbing to create a wall of sound which was oppressive and overwhelming, and which obliterated the sounds of the individual instruments, Wilson used the same instrumentalists, the Wrecking Crew, to create something far more delicate: [Excerpt: Glen Campbell, "Guess I'm Dumb (instrumental and backing vocals)"] Campbell does such a good job on "Guess I'm Dumb" that one has to wonder what would  have happened if he'd remained with the Beach Boys. But Campbell had of course not been able to join the group permanently -- he had his own career to attend to, and that would soon take off in a big way, though he would keep playing on the Beach Boys' records for a while yet as a member of the Wrecking Crew. But Brian Wilson was still not well enough to tour. In fact, as he explained to the rest of the group, he never intended to tour again -- and he wouldn't be a regular live performer for another twelve years. At first the group were terrified -- they thought he was talking about quitting the group, or the group splitting up altogether. But Brian had a different plan. From that point on, there were two subtly different lineups of the group. In the studio, Brian would sing his parts as always, but the group would get a permanent replacement for him on tour -- someone who could replace him on stage. While the group was on tour, Brian would use the time to write songs and to record backing tracks. He'd already started using the Wrecking Crew to add a bit of additional musical colour to some of the group's records, but from this point on, he'd use them to record the whole track, maybe getting Carl to add a bit of guitar as well if he happened to be around, but otherwise just using the group to provide vocals. It's important to note that this *was* a big change. A lot of general music history sources will say things like "the Beach Boys never played on their own records", and this is taken as fact by people who haven't investigated further. In fact, the basic tracks for all their early hits were performed by the group themselves -- "Surfin'", "Surfin' Safari", "409", "Surfer Girl", "Little Deuce Coupe", "Don't Worry Baby" and many more were entirely performed by the Beach Boys, while others like "I Get Around" featured the group with a couple of additional musicians augmenting them. The idea that the group never played on their records comes entirely from their recordings from 1965 and 66, and even there often Carl would overdub a guitar part. And at this point, the Beach Boys were still playing on the majority of their recordings, even on sophisticated-sounding records like "She Knows Me Too Well", which is entirely a group performance other than Brian's friend, Russ Titelman, the co-writer of "Guess I'm Dumb", adding some percussion by hitting a microphone stand with a screwdriver: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "She Knows Me Too Well"] So the plan to replace the group's instrumental performances in the studio was actually a bigger change than it might seem. But an even bigger change was the live performances, which of course required the group bringing in a permanent live replacement for Brian. They'd already tried this once before, when he'd quit the road for a while and they'd brought Al Jardine back in, but David Marks quitting had forced him back on stage. Now they needed someone to take his place for good. They phoned up their friend Bruce Johnston to see if he knew anyone, and after suggesting a couple of names that didn't work out, he volunteered his own services, and as of this recording he's spent more than fifty years in the band (he quit for a few years in the mid-seventies, but came back). We've seen Johnston turn up several times already, most notably in the episode on "LSD-25", where he was one of the musicians on the track we looked at, but for those of you who don't remember those episodes, he was pretty much *everywhere* in California music in the late fifties and early sixties. He had been in a band at school with Phil Spector and Sandy Nelson, and another band with Jan and Dean, and he'd played on Nelson's "Teen Beat", produced by Art Laboe: [Excerpt: Sandy Nelson, "Teen Beat"] He'd been in the house band at those shows Laboe put on at El Monte stadium we talked about a couple of episodes back, he'd been a witness to John Dolphin's murder, he'd been a record producer for Bob Keane, where he'd written and produced songs for Ron Holden, the man who had introduced "Louie Louie" to Seattle: [Excerpt: Ron Holden, "Gee But I'm Lonesome"] He'd written "The Tender Touch" for Richard Berry's backing group The Pharaos, with Berry singing backing vocals on this one: [Excerpt: The Pharaos, "The Tender Touch"] He'd helped Bob Keane compile Ritchie Valens' first posthumous album, he'd played on "LSD-25" and "Moon Dawg" by the Gamblers: [Excerpt: The Gamblers, "Moon Dawg"] He'd arranged and produced the top ten hit “Those Oldies but Goodies (Remind Me of You)” for Little Caesar and the Romans: [Excerpt Little Caesar and the Romans, "Those Oldies but Goodies (Remind Me of You)"] Basically, wherever you looked in the LA music scene in the early sixties, there was Bruce Johnston somewhere in the background. But in particular, he was suitable for the Beach Boys because he had a lot of experience in making music that sounded more than a little like theirs. He'd made cheap surf records as the Bruce Johnston Surfing Band: [Excerpt: Bruce Johnston, "The Hamptons"] And with his long-time friend and creative partner Terry Melcher he had, as well as working on several Paul Revere and the Raiders records, also recorded hit Beach Boys soundalikes both as their own duo, Bruce and Terry: [Excerpt: Bruce and Terry, "Summer Means Fun"] and under the name of a real group that Melcher had signed, but who don't seem to have sung much on their own big hit, the Rip Chords: [Excerpt: The Rip Chords, "Hey Little Cobra"] Johnston fit in well with the band, though he wasn't a bass player before joining, and had to be taught the parts by Carl and Al. But he's probably the technically strongest musician in the band, and while he would later switch to playing keyboards on stage, he was quickly able to get up to speed on the bass well enough to play the parts that were needed. He also wasn't quite as strong a falsetto singer as Brian Wilson, as can be heard by listening to this live recording of the group singing "I Get Around" in 1966: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "I Get Around (live 1966)"] Johnston is actually an excellent singer -- and can still hit the high notes today. He sings the extremely high falsetto part on "Fun Fun Fun" at the end of every Beach Boys show. But his falsetto was thinner than Wilson's, and he also has a distinctive voice which can be picked out from the blend in a way that none of the other Beach Boys' voices could -- the Wilson brothers and Mike Love all have a strong family resemblance, and Al Jardine always sounded spookily close to them. This meant that increasingly, the band would rearrange the vocal parts on stage, with Carl or Al taking the part that Brian had taken in the studio. Which meant that if, say, Al sang Brian's high part, Carl would have to move up to sing the part that Al had been singing, and then Bruce would slot in singing the part Carl had sung in the studio. This is a bigger difference than it sounds, and it meant that there was now a need for someone to work out live arrangements that were different from the arrangements on the records -- someone had to reassign the vocal parts, and also work out how to play songs that had been performed by maybe eighteen session musicians playing French horns and accordions and vibraphones with a standard rock-band lineup without it sounding too different from the record. Carl Wilson, still only eighteen when Brian retired from the road, stepped into that role, and would become the de facto musical director of the Beach Boys on stage for most of the next thirty years, to the point that many of the group's contracts for live performances at this point specified that the promoter was getting "Carl Wilson and four other musicians". This was a major change to the group's dynamics. Up to this point, they had been a group with a leader -- Brian -- and a frontman -- Mike, and three other members. Now they were a more democratic group on stage, and more of a dictatorship in the studio. This was, as you can imagine, not a stable situation, and was one that would not last long. But at first, this plan seemed to go very, very well. The first album to come out of this new hybrid way of working, The Beach Boys Today!, was started before Brian retired from touring, and some of the songs on it were still mostly or solely performed by the group, but as we heard with "She Knows Me Too Well" earlier, the music was still more sophisticated than on previous records, and this can be heard on songs like "When I Grow Up to Be a Man", where the only session musician is the harmonica player, with everything else played by the group: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "When I Grow Up to Be a Man"] But the newer sophistication really shows up on songs like "Kiss Me Baby", where most of the instrumentation is provided by the Wrecking Crew -- though Carl and Brian both play on the track -- and so there are saxophones, vibraphones, French horn, cor anglais, and multiple layers of twelve-string guitar: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "Kiss Me Baby"] Today had several hit singles on it -- "Dance, Dance, Dance", "When I Grow Up to be a Man", and their cover version of Bobby Freeman's "Do You Wanna Dance?" all charted -- but the big hit song on the album actually didn't become a hit in that version. "Help Me Ronda" was a piece of album filler with a harmonica part played by Billy Lee Riley, and was one of Al Jardine's first lead vocals on a Beach Boys record -- he'd only previously sung lead on the song "Christmas Day" on their Christmas album: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "Help Me Ronda"] While the song was only intended as album filler, other people saw the commercial potential in the song. Bruce Johnston was at this time still signed to Columbia records as an artist, and wasn't yet singing on Beach Boys records, and he recorded a version of the song with Terry Melcher as a potential single: [Excerpt: Bruce and Terry, "Help Me Rhonda"] But on seeing the reaction to the song, Brian decided to rerecord it as a single. Unfortunately, Murry Wilson turned up to the session. Murry had been fired as the group's manager by his sons the previous year, though he still owned the publishing company that published their songs. In the meantime, he'd decided to show his family who the real talent behind the group was by taking on another group of teenagers and managing and producing them. The Sunrays had a couple of minor hits, like "I Live for the Sun": [Excerpt: The Sunrays, "I Live for the Sun"] But nothing made the US top forty, and by this point it was clear, though not in the way that Murry hoped, who the real talent behind the group *actually* was. But he turned up to the recording session, with his wife in tow, and started trying to produce it: [Excerpt: Beach Boys and Murry Wilson "Help Me Rhonda" sessions] It ended up with Brian physically trying to move his drunk father away from the control panel in the studio, and having a heartbreaking conversation with him, where the twenty-two-year-old who is recovering from a nervous breakdown only a few months earlier sounds calmer, healthier, and more mature than his forty-seven-year-old father: [Excerpt: Beach Boys and Murry Wilson, "Help Me Rhonda" sessions] Knowing that this was the family dynamic helps make the comedy filler track on the next album, "I'm Bugged at My Old Man", seem rather less of a joke than it otherwise would: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "I'm Bugged at My Old Man"] But with Murry out of the way, the group did eventually complete recording "Help Me Rhonda" (and for those of you reading this as a blog post rather than listening to the podcast, yes they did spell it two different ways for the two different versions), and it became the group's second number one hit: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "Help Me, Rhonda"] As well as Murry Wilson, though, another figure was in the control room then -- Loren Daro (who at the time went by his birth surname, but I'm going to refer to him throughout by the name he chose).  You can hear, on the recording, Brian Wilson asking Daro if he could "turn him on" -- slang that was at that point not widespread enough for Wilson's parents to understand the meaning. Daro was an agent working for the William Morris Agency, and he was part of a circle of young, hip, people who were taking drugs, investigating mysticism, and exploring new spiritual ideas. His circle included the Byrds -- Daro, like Roger McGuinn, later became a follower of Subud and changed his name as a result -- as well as people like the songwriter and keyboard player Van Dyke Parks, who will become a big part of this story in subsequent episodes, and Stephen Stills, who will also be turning up again. Daro had introduced Brian to cannabis, in 1964, and in early 1965 he gave Brian acid for the first time -- one hundred and twenty-five micrograms of pure Owsley LSD-25. Now, we're going to be looking at acid culture quite a lot in the next few months, as we get through 1966 and 1967, and I'll have a lot more to say about it, but what I will say is that even the biggest proponents of psychedelic drug use tend not to suggest that it is a good idea to give large doses of LSD in an uncontrolled setting to young men recovering from a nervous breakdown. Daro later described Wilson's experience as "ego death" -- a topic we will come to in a future episode, and not considered entirely negative -- and "a beautiful thing". But he has also talked about how Wilson was so terrified by his hallucinations that he ran into the bedroom, locked the door, and hid his head under a pillow for two hours, which doesn't sound so beautiful to me. Apparently after those two hours, he came out of the bedroom, said "Well, that's enough of that", and was back to normal. After that first trip, Wilson wrote a piece of music inspired by his psychedelic experience. A piece which starts like this, with an orchestral introduction very different from anything else the group had released as a single: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "California Girls"] Of course, when Mike Love added the lyrics to the song, it became about far more earthly and sensual concerns: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "California Girls"] But leaving the lyrics aside for a second, it's interesting to look at "California Girls" musically to see what Wilson's idea of psychedelic music -- by which I mean specifically music inspired by the use of psychedelic drugs, since at this point there was no codified genre known as psychedelic music or psychedelia -- actually was. So, first, Wilson has said repeatedly that the song was specifically inspired by "Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring" by Bach: [Excerpt: Bach, "Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring"] And it's odd, because I see no real structural or musical resemblance between the two pieces that I can put my finger on, but at the same time I can totally see what he means. Normally at this point I'd say "this change here in this song relates to this change there in that song", but there's not much of that kind of thing here -- but I still. as soon as I read Wilson saying that for the first time, more than twenty years ago, thought "OK, that makes sense". There are a few similarities, though. Bach's piece is based around triplets, and they made Wilson think of a shuffle beat. If you remember *way* back in the second episode of the podcast, I talked about how one of the standard shuffle beats is to play triplets in four-four time. I'm going to excerpt a bit of recording from a YouTube drum tutorial (which I'll link in the liner notes) showing that kind of shuffle: [Excerpt: "3 Sweet Triplet Fills For Halftime Shuffles & Swung Grooves- Drum Lesson" , from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2CwlSaQZLkY ] Now, while Bach's piece is in waltz time, I hope you can hear how the DA-da-da DA-da-da in Bach's piece may have made Wilson think of that kind of shuffle rhythm. Bach's piece also has a lot of emphasis of the first, fifth, and sixth notes of the scale -- which is fairly common, and not something particularly distinctive about the piece -- and those are the notes that make up the bass riff that Wilson introduces early in the song: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "California Girls (track)"] That bass riff, of course, is a famous one. Those of you who were listening to the very earliest episodes of the podcast might remember it from the intros to many, many, Ink Spots records: [Excerpt: The Ink Spots, "We Three (My Echo, My Shadow, and Me)"] But the association of that bassline to most people's ears would be Western music, particularly the kind of music that was in Western films in the thirties and forties. You hear something similar in "The Trail of the Lonesome Pine", as performed by Laurel and Hardy in their 1937 film Way Out West: [Excerpt: Laurel and Hardy, "The Trail of the Lonesome Pine"] But it's most associated with the song "Tumbling Tumbleweeds", first recorded in 1934 by the Western group Sons of the Pioneers, but more famous in their 1946 rerecording, made after the Ink Spots' success, where the part becomes more prominent: [Excerpt: The Sons of the Pioneers, "Tumbling Tumbleweeds"] That song was a standard of the Western genre, and by 1965 had been covered by everyone from Gene Autry to the Supremes, Bob Wills to Johnnie Ray, and it would also end up covered by several musicians in the LA pop music scene over the next few years, including Michael Nesmith and Curt Boettcher, both people part of the same general scene as the Beach Boys. The other notable thing about "California Girls" is that it's one of the first times that Wilson was able to use multi-tracking to its full effect. The vocal parts were recorded on an eight-track machine, meaning that Wilson could triple-track both Mike Love's lead vocal and the group's backing vocals. With Johnston now in the group -- "California Girls" was his first recording session with them -- that meant that on the record there were eighteen voices singing, leading to some truly staggering harmonies: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "California Girls (Stack-O-Vocals)"] So, that's what the psychedelic experience meant to Brian Wilson, at least -- Bach, orchestral influences, using the recording studio to create thicker vocal harmony parts, and the old West. Keep that in the back of your mind for the present, but it'll be something to remember in eleven episodes' time. "California Girls" was, of course, another massive hit, reaching number three on the charts. And while some Beach Boys fans see the album it was included on, Summer Days... And Summer Nights!, as something of a step backward from the sophistication of Today!, this is a relative thing. It's very much of a part with the music on the earlier album, and has many wonderful moments, with songs like "Let Him Run Wild" among the group's very best. But it was their next studio album that would cement the group's artistic reputation, and which would regularly be acclaimed by polls of critics as the greatest album of all time -- a somewhat meaningless claim; even more than there is no "first" anything in music, there's no "best" anything. The impulse to make what became Pet Sounds came, as Wilson has always told the story, from hearing the Beatles album Rubber Soul. Now, we've not yet covered Rubber Soul -- we're going to look at that, and at the album that came after it, in three episodes' time -- but it is often regarded as a major artistic leap forward for the Beatles. The record Wilson heard, though, wasn't the same record that most people nowadays think of when they think of Rubber Soul. Since the mid-eighties, the CD versions of the Beatles albums have (with one exception, Magical Mystery Tour) followed the tracklistings of the original British albums, as the Beatles and George Martin intended. But in the sixties, Capitol Records were eager to make as much money out of the Beatles as they could. The Beatles' albums generally had fourteen songs on, and often didn't include their singles. Capitol thought that ten or twelve songs per album was plenty, and didn't have any aversion to putting singles on albums. They took the three British albums Help!, Rubber Soul, and Revolver, plus the non-album "Day Tripper"/"We Can Work It Out" single and Ken Thorne's orchestral score for the Help! film, and turned that into four American albums -- Help!, Rubber Soul, Yesterday and Today, and Revolver. In the case of Rubber Soul, that meant that they removed four tracks from the British album -- "Drive My Car", "Nowhere Man", "What Goes On" and "If I Needed Someone" -- and added two songs from the British version of Help!, "I've Just Seen a Face" and "It's Only Love". Now, I've seen some people claim that this made the American Rubber Soul more of a folk-rock album -- I may even have said that myself in the past -- but that's not really true. Indeed, "Nowhere Man" and "If I Needed Someone" are two of the Beatles' most overtly folk-rock tracks, and both clearly show the influence of the Byrds. But what it did do was remove several of the more electric songs from the album, and replace them with acoustic ones: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "I've Just Seen a Face"] This, completely inadvertently, gave the American Rubber Soul lineup a greater sense of cohesion than the British one. Wilson later said "I listened to Rubber Soul, and I said, 'How could they possibly make an album where the songs all sound like they come from the same place?'" At other times he's described his shock at hearing "a whole album of only good songs" and similar phrases. Because up to this point, Wilson had always included filler tracks on albums, as pretty much everyone did in the early sixties. In the American pop music market, up to the mid sixties, albums were compilations of singles plus whatever random tracks happened to be lying around. And so for example in late 1963 the Beach Boys had released two albums less than a month apart -- Surfer Girl and Little Deuce Coupe. Given that Brian Wilson wrote or co-wrote all the group's original material, it wasn't all that surprising that Little Deuce Coupe had to include four songs that had been released on previous albums, including two that were on Surfer Girl from the previous month. It was the only way the group could keep up with the demand for new product from a company that had no concept of popular music as art. Other Beach Boys albums had included padding such as generic surf instrumentals, comedy sketches like "Cassius" Love vs. "Sonny" Wilson, and in the case of The Beach Boys Today!, a track titled "Bull Session With the Big Daddy", consisting of two minutes of random chatter with the photographer Earl Leaf while they all ate burgers: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys and Earl Leaf, "Bull Session With the Big Daddy"] This is not to attack the Beach Boys. This was a simple response to the commercial pressures of the marketplace. Between October 1962 and November 1965, they released eleven albums. That's about an album every three months, as well as a few non-album singles. And on top of that Brian had also been writing songs during that time for Jan & Dean, the Honeys, the Survivors and others, and had collaborated with Gary Usher and Roger Christian on songs for Muscle Beach Party, one of American International Pictures' series of Beach Party films. It's unsurprising that not everything produced on this industrial scale was a masterpiece. Indeed, the album the Beach Boys released directly before Pet Sounds could be argued to be an entire filler album. Many biographies say that Beach Boys Party! was recorded to buy Brian time to make Pet Sounds, but the timelines don't really match up on closer investigation. Beach Boys Party! was released in November 1965, before Brian ever heard Rubber Soul, which came out later, and before he started writing the material that became Pet Sounds. Beach Boys Party! was a solution to a simple problem -- the group were meant to deliver three albums that year, and they didn't have three albums worth of material. Some shows had been recorded for a possible live album, but they'd released a live album in 1964 and hadn't really changed their setlist very much in the interim. So instead, they made a live-in-the-studio album, with the conceit that it was recorded at a party the group were holding. Rather than the lush Wrecking Crew instrumentation they'd been using in recent months, everything was played on acoustic guitars, plus some bongos provided by Wrecking Crew drummer Hal Blaine and some harmonica from Billy Hinsche of the boy band Dino, Desi, and Billy, whose sister Carl Wilson was shortly to marry. The album included jokes and false starts, and was overlaid with crowd noise, to give the impression that you were listening to an actual party where a few people were sitting round with guitars and having fun. The album consisted of songs that the group liked and could play without rehearsal -- novelty hits from a few years earlier like "Alley Oop" and "Hully Gully", a few Beatles songs, and old favourites like the Everly Brothers hit "Devoted to You" -- in a rather lovely version with two-part harmony by Mike and Brian, which sounds much better in a remixed version released later without the party-noise overdubs: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "Devoted to You (remix)"] But the song that defined the album, which became a massive hit, and which became an albatross around the band's neck about which some of them would complain for a long time to come, didn't even have one of the Beach Boys singing lead. As we discussed back in the episode on "Surf City", by this point Jan and Dean were recording their album "Folk 'n' Roll", their attempt at jumping on the folk-rock bandwagon, which included the truly awful "The Universal Coward", a right-wing answer song  to "The Universal Soldier" released as a Jan Berry solo single: [Excerpt: Jan Berry, "The Universal Coward"] Dean Torrence was by this point getting sick of working with Berry, and was also deeply unimpressed with the album they were making, so he popped out of the studio for a while to go and visit his friends in the Beach Boys, who were recording nearby. He came in during the Party sessions, and everyone was suggesting songs to perform, and asked Dean to suggest something. He remembered an old doo-wop song that Jan and Dean had recorded a cover version of, and suggested that. The group had Dean sing lead, and ran through a sloppy version of it, where none of them could remember the words properly: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "Barbara Ann"] And rather incredibly, that became one of the biggest hits the group ever had, making number two on the Billboard chart (and number one on other industry charts like Cashbox), number three in the UK, and becoming a song that the group had to perform at almost every live show they ever did, together or separately, for at least the next fifty-seven years. But meanwhile, Brian had been working on other material. He had not yet had his idea for an album made up entirely of good songs, but he had been experimenting in the studio. He'd worked on a handful of tracks which had pointed in new directions. One was a single, "The Little Girl I Once Knew": [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "The Little Girl I Once Knew"] John Lennon gave that record a very favourable review, saying "This is the greatest! Turn it up, turn it right up. It's GOT to be a hit. It's the greatest record I've heard for weeks. It's fantastic." But the record only made number twenty -- a perfectly respectable chart placing, but nowhere near as good as the group's recent run of hits -- in part because its stop-start nature meant that the record had "dead air" -- moments of silence -- which made DJs avoid playing it, because they believed that dead air, even only a second of it here and there, would make people tune to another station. Another track that Brian had been working on was an old folk song suggested by Alan Jardine. Jardine had always been something of a folkie, of the Kingston Trio variety, and he had suggested that the group might record the old song "The Wreck of the John B", which the Kingston Trio had recorded. The Trio's version in turn had been inspired by the Weavers' version of the song from 1950: [Excerpt: The Weavers, "The Wreck of the John B"] Brian had at first not been impressed, but Jardine had fiddled with the chord sequence slightly, adding in a minor chord to make the song slightly more interesting, and Brian had agreed to record the track, though he left the instrumental without vocals for several months: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "Sloop John B (instrumental)"] The track was eventually finished and released as a single, and unlike "The Little Girl I Once Knew" it was a big enough hit that it was included on the next album, though several people have said it doesn't fit. Lyrically, it definitely doesn't, but musically, it's very much of a piece with the other songs on what became Pet Sounds: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "Sloop John B"] But while Wilson was able to create music by himself, he wasn't confident about his ability as a lyricist. Now, he's not a bad lyricist by any means -- he's written several extremely good lyrics by himself -- but Brian Wilson is not a particularly articulate or verbal person, and he wanted someone who could write lyrics as crafted as his music, but which would express the ideas he was trying to convey. He didn't think he could do it himself, and for whatever reason he didn't want to work with Mike Love, who had co-written the majority of his recent songs, or with any of his other collaborators. He did write one song with Terry Sachen, the Beach Boys' road manager at the time, which dealt obliquely with those acid-induced concepts of "ego death": [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "Hang on to Your Ego"] But while the group recorded that song, Mike Love objected vociferously to the lyrics. While Love did try cannabis a few times in the late sixties and early seventies, he's always been generally opposed to the use of illegal drugs, and certainly didn't want the group to be making records that promoted their use -- though I would personally argue that "Hang on to Your Ego" is at best deeply ambiguous about the prospect of ego death.  Love rewrote some of the lyrics, changing the title to "I Know There's an Answer", though as with all such bowdlerisation efforts he inadvertently left in some of the drug references: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "I Know There's an Answer"] But Wilson wasn't going to rely on Sachen for all the lyrics. Instead he turned to Tony Asher. Asher was an advertising executive, who Wilson probably met through Loren Daro -- there is some confusion over the timeline of their meeting, with some sources saying they'd first met in 1963 and that Asher had introduced Wilson to Daro, but others saying that the introductions went the other way, and that Daro introduced Asher to Wilson in 1965. But Asher and Daro had been friends for a long time, and so Wilson and Asher were definitely orbiting in the same circles. The most common version of the story seems to be that Asher was working in Western Studios, where he was recording a jingle - the advertising agency had him writing jingles because he was an amateur songwriter, and as he later put it nobody else at the agency knew the difference between E flat and A flat. Wilson was also working in the studio complex, and Wilson dragged Asher in to listen to some of the demos he was recording -- at that time Wilson was in the habit of inviting anyone who was around to listen to his works in progress. Asher chatted with him for a while, and thought nothing of it, until he got a phone call at work a few weeks later from Brian Wilson, suggesting the two write together. Wilson was impressed with Asher, who he thought of as very verbal and very intelligent, but Asher was less impressed with Wilson. He has softened his statements in recent decades, but in the early seventies he would describe Wilson as "a genius musician but an amateur human being", and sharply criticise his taste in films and literature, and his relationship with his wife. This attitude seems at least in part to have been shared by a lot of the people that Wilson was meeting and becoming influenced by. One of the things that is very noticeable about Wilson is that he has no filters at all, and that makes his music some of the most honest music ever recorded. But that same honesty also meant that he could never be cool or hip. He was -- and remains -- enthusiastic about the things he likes, and he likes things that speak to the person he is, not things that fit some idea of what the in crowd like. And the person Brian Wilson is is a man born in 1942, brought up in a middle-class suburban white family in California, and his tastes are the tastes one would expect from that background. And those tastes were not the tastes of the hipsters and scenesters who were starting to become part of his circle at the time. And so there's a thinly-veiled contempt in the way a lot of those people talked about Wilson, particularly in the late sixties and early seventies. Wilson, meanwhile, was desperate for their approval, and trying hard to fit in, but not quite managing it. Again, Asher has softened his statements more recently, and I don't want to sound too harsh about Asher -- both men were in their twenties, and still  trying to find their place in the world, and I wouldn't want to hold anyone's opinions from their twenties against them decades later. But that was the dynamic that existed between them. Asher saw himself as something of a sophisticate, and Wilson as something of a hick in contrast, but a hick who unlike him had created a string of massive hit records. And Asher did, always, respect Wilson's musical abilities. And Wilson in turn looked up to Asher, even while remaining the dominant partner, because he respected Asher's verbal facility. Asher took a two-week sabbatical from his job at the advertising agency, and during those two weeks, he and Wilson collaborated on eight songs that would make up the backbone of the album that would become Pet Sounds. The first song the two worked on was a track that had originally been titled "In My Childhood". Wilson had already recorded the backing track for this, including the sounds of bicycle horns and bells to evoke the feel of being a child: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "You Still Believe in Me (instrumental track)"] The two men wrote a new lyric for the song, based around a theme that appears in many of Wilson's songs -- the inadequate man who is loved by a woman who is infinitely superior to him, who doesn't understand why he's loved, but is astonished by it. The song became "You Still Believe in Me": [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "You Still Believe in Me"] That song also featured an instrumental contribution of sorts by Asher. Even though the main backing track had been recorded before the two started working together, Wilson came up with an idea for an intro for the song, which would require a particular piano sound. To get that sound, Wilson held down the keys on a piano, while Asher leaned into the piano and plucked the strings manually. The result, with Wilson singing over the top, sounds utterly lovely: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "You Still Believe in Me"] Note that I said that Wilson and Asher came up with new lyrics together. There has been some slight dispute about the way songwriting credits were apportioned to the songs. Generally the credits said that Wilson wrote all the music, while Asher and Wilson wrote the lyrics together, so Asher got twenty-five percent of the songwriting royalties and Wilson seventy-five percent. Asher, though, has said that there are some songs for which he wrote the whole lyric by himself, and that he also made some contributions to the music on some songs -- though he has always said that the majority of the musical contribution was Wilson's, and that most of the time the general theme of the lyric, at least, was suggested by Wilson. For the most part, Asher hasn't had a problem with that credit split, but he has often seemed aggrieved -- and to my mind justifiably -- about the song "Wouldn't it Be Nice". Asher wrote the whole lyric for the song, though inspired by conversations with Wilson, but accepted his customary fifty percent of the lyrical credit. The result became one of the big hits from the album: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "Wouldn't It Be Nice?"] But -- at least according to Mike Love, in the studio he added a single line to the song: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "Wouldn't it Be Nice?"] When Love sued Brian Wilson in 1994, over the credits to thirty-five songs, he included "Wouldn't it Be Nice" in the list because of that contribution. Love now gets a third of the songwriting royalties, taken proportionally from the other two writers. Which means that he gets a third of Wilson's share and a third of Asher's share. So Brian Wilson gets half the money, for writing all the music, Mike Love gets a third of the money, for writing "Good night baby, sleep tight baby", and Tony Asher gets a sixth of the money -- half as much as Love -- for writing all the rest of the lyric. Again, this is not any one individual doing anything wrong – most of the songs in the lawsuit were ones where Love wrote the entire lyric, or a substantial chunk of it, and because the lawsuit covered a lot of songs the same formula was applied to borderline cases like “Wouldn't it Be Nice” as it was to clearcut ones like “California Girls”, where nobody disputes Love's authorship of the whole lyric. It's just the result of a series of reasonable decisions, each one of which makes sense in isolation, but which has left Asher earning significantly less from one of the most successful songs he ever wrote in his career than he should have earned. The songs that Asher co-wrote with Wilson were all very much of a piece, both musically and lyrically. Pet Sounds really works as a whole album better than it does individual tracks, and while some of the claims made about it -- that it's a concept album, for example -- are clearly false, it does have a unity to it, with ideas coming back in different forms. For example, musically, almost every new song on the album contains a key change down a minor third at some point -- not the kind of thing where the listener consciously notices that an idea has been repeated, but definitely the kind of thing that makes a whole album hold together. It also differs from earlier Beach Boys albums in that the majority of the lead vocals are by Brian Wilson. Previously, Mike Love had been the dominant voice on Beach Boys records, with Brian as second lead and the other members taking few or none. Now Love only took two main lead vocals, and was the secondary lead on three more. Brian, on the other hand, took six primary lead vocals and two partial leads. The later claims by some people that this was a Brian Wilson solo album in all but name are exaggerations -- the group members did perform on almost all of the tracks -- but it is definitely much more of a personal, individual statement than the earlier albums had been. The epitome of this was "I Just Wasn't Made For These Times", which Asher wrote the lyrics for but which was definitely Brian's idea, rather than Asher's. [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "I Just Wasn't Made For These Times"] That track also featured the first use on a Beach Boys record of the electro-theremin, an electronic instrument invented by session musician Paul Tanner, a former trombone player with the Glenn Miller band, who had created it to approximate the sound of a Theremin while being easier to play: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "I Just Wasn't Made For These Times"] That sound would turn up on future Beach Boys records... But the song that became the most lasting result of the Wilson/Asher collaboration was actually one that is nowhere near as personal as many of the other songs on the record, that didn't contain a lot of the musical hallmarks that unify the album, and that didn't have Brian Wilson singing lead. Of all the songs on the album, "God Only Knows" is the one that has the most of Tony Asher's fingerprints on it. Asher has spoken in the past about how when he and Wilson were writing, Asher's touchstones were old standards like "Stella By Starlight" and "How Deep is the Ocean?", and "God Only Knows" easily fits into that category. It's a crafted song rather than a deep personal expression, but the kind of craft that one would find in writers like the Gershwins, every note and syllable perfectly chosen: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "God Only Knows"] One of the things that is often wrongly said about the song is that it's the first pop song to have the word "God" in the title. It isn't, and indeed it isn't even the first pop song to be called "God Only Knows", as there was a song of that name recorded by the doo-wop group the Capris in 1954: [Excerpt: The Capris, "God Only Knows"] But what's definitely true is that Wilson, even though he was interested in creating spiritual music, and was holding prayer sessions with his brother Carl before vocal takes, was reluctant to include the word in the song at first, fearing it would harm radio play. He was probably justified in his fears -- a couple of years earlier he'd produced a record called "Pray for Surf" by the Honeys, a girl-group featuring his wife: [Excerpt: The Honeys, "Pray For Surf"] That record hadn't been played on the radio, in part because it was considered to be trivialising religion. But Asher eventually persuaded Wilson that it would be OK, saying "What do you think we should do instead? Say 'heck only knows'?" Asher's lyric was far more ambiguous than it may seem -- while it's on one level a straightforward love song, Asher has always pointed out that the protagonist never says that he loves the object of the song, just that he'll make her *believe* that he loves her. Coupled with the second verse, which could easily be read as a threat of suicide if the object leaves the singer, it would be very, very, easy to make the song into something that sounds like it was from the point of view of a narcissistic, manipulative, abuser. That ambiguity is also there in the music, which never settles in a strong sense of key. The song starts out with an A chord, which you'd expect to lead to the song being in A, but when the horn comes in, you get a D# note, which isn't in that key, and then when the verse starts, it starts on an inversion of a D chord, before giving you enough clues that by the end of the verse you're fairly sure you're in the key of E, but it never really confirms that: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "God Only Knows (instrumental)"] So this is an unsettling, ambiguous, song in many ways. But that's not how it sounds, nor how Brian at least intended it to sound. So why doesn't it sound that way? In large part it's down to the choice of lead vocalist. If Mike Love had sung this song, it might have sounded almost aggressive. Brian *did* sing it in early attempts at the track, and he doesn't sound quite right either -- his vocal attitude is just... not right: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "God Only Knows (Brian Wilson vocal)"] But eventually Brian hit on getting his younger brother Carl to sing lead. At this point Carl had sung very few leads on record -- there has been some dispute about who sang what, exactly,  because of the family resemblance which meant all the core band members could sound a little like each other, but it's generally considered that he had sung full leads on two album tracks -- "Pom Pom Play Girl" and "Girl Don't Tell Me" -- and partial leads on two other tracks, covers of "Louie Louie" and "Summertime Blues". At this point he wasn't really thought of as anything other than a backing vocalist, but his soft, gentle, performance on "God Only Knows" is one of the great performances: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "God Only Knows (vocals)"] The track was actually one of those that required a great deal of work in the studio to create the form which now seems inevitable. Early attempts at the recording included a quite awful saxophone solo: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys "God Only Knows (early version)"] And there were a lot of problems with the middle until session keyboard player Don Randi suggested the staccato break that would eventually be used: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "God Only Knows"] And similarly, the tag of the record was originally intended as a mass of harmony including all the Beach Boys, the Honeys, and Terry Melcher: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "God Only Knows (alternate version with a capella tag)"] Before Brian decided to strip it right back, and to have only three voices on the tag -- himself on the top and the bottom, and Bruce Johnston singing in the middle: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "God Only Knows"] When Pet Sounds came out, it was less successful in the US than hoped -- it became the first of the group's albums not to go gold on its release, and it only made number ten on the album charts. By any objective standards, this is still a success, but it was less successful than the record label had hoped, and was taken as a worrying sign. In the UK, though, it was a different matter. Up to this point, the Beach Boys had not had much commercial success in the UK, but recently Andrew Loog Oldham had become a fan, and had become the UK publisher of their original songs, and was interested in giving them the same kind of promotion that he'd given Phil Spector's records. Keith Moon of the Who was also a massive fan, and the Beach Boys had recently taken on Derek Taylor, with his strong British connections, as their publicist. Not only that, but Bruce Johnston's old friend Kim Fowley was now based in London and making waves there. So in May, in advance of a planned UK tour set for November that year, Bruce Johnston and Derek Taylor flew over to the UK to press the flesh and schmooze. Of all the group members, Johnston was the perfect choice to do this -- he's by far the most polished of them in terms of social interaction, and he was also the one who, other than Brian, had the least ambiguous feelings about the group's new direction, being wholeheartedly in favour of it. Johnston and Taylor met up with Keith Moon, Lennon and McCartney, and other pop luminaries, and played them the record. McCartney in particular was so impressed by Pet Sounds and especially "God Only Knows", that he wrote this, inspired by the song, and recorded it even before Pet Sounds' UK release at the end of June: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Here, There, and Everywhere"] As a result of Johnston and Taylor's efforts, and the promotional work by Oldham and others, Pet Sounds reached number two on the UK album charts, and "God Only Knows" made number two on the singles charts. (In the US, it was the B-side to "Wouldn't it Be Nice", although it made the top forty on its own merits too). The Beach Boys displaced the Beatles in the readers' choice polls for best band in the NME in 1966, largely as a result of the album, and Melody Maker voted it joint best album of the year along with the Beatles' Revolver. The Beach Boys' commercial fortunes were slightly on the wane in the US, but they were becoming bigger than ever in the UK. But a big part of this was creating expectations around Brian Wilson in particular. Derek Taylor had picked up on a phrase that had been bandied around -- enough that Murry Wilson had used it to mock Brian in the awful "Help Me, Rhonda" sessions -- and was promoting it widely as a truism. Everyone was now agreed that Brian Wilson was a genius. And we'll see how that expectation plays out over the next few weeks.. [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "Caroline, No"]

Please Let Me Wonder? No need. The results you've been waiting for are here.On this episode, we break down how each matchup in our Beach Boy Album bracket shook up, and I gotta say: THINGS! WERE! CLOSE! No real tangents in this episode, but we do talk about why Pet Sounds is the greatest album of all time, our recent experience at Brian Wilson's concert in Long Beach, and one quick mention of MTV's The Challenge. Also, Nia attempts to play God Only Knows on Garageband?!Wyatt Funderburk was our guest on Monday's pod, and if we've whetted your appetite for The Beach Boys, go check out his podcast Sail On: The Beach Boys Podcast :) And in Sail On tradition, there's another lil bonus if you stick around til the end ;) ★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★

Whether you're listening to this on a Summer Day (or Summer Night!!), we hope you'll have as much fun as we (read: Nia) did.On this episode, we break down EVERY. SINGLE. BEACH BOYS STUDIO ALBUM (plus three additional records). We talk about which albums we love, which albums we don't like as much, and why we think Pet Sounds is pretty much unbeatable. Tangents include but aren't limited to: Nia not having ever listened to Still Cruisin', how John Stamos and He Who Must Not Be Named (Mike Love) nearly ruined Dennis's legacy, and Trent's old improv team, Carl and the Passions. If you want to brush up on your Beach Boys knowledge, check out this official Tourney Pod playlist.Our guest this week is Wyatt Funderburk, host of The Sail On Podcast and all-around Beach Boys enthusiast. If you're interested in learning more about these albums, Wyatt and his co-hosts John and Will do serious deep dives of the catalogue on Sail On, so be sure to check them out!First round of voting will take place on Monday 8/30. Sweet Sixteen voting will take place on Tuesday 8/31. Elite Eight voting will take place on Wednesday 9/1. Final Four voting will take place on Thursday 9/2. Championship voting will take place on Friday 9/3 (happy birthday, Al Jardine!). Winner/Pet Sounds reveal on a brand new episode on Saturday 9/4. Link to vote is right here :)Bonus for whoever reads the show notes: Sail On usually hides some blooper at the end of their episodes, so I did that for this episode of our podcast! Hope you all got your Feel Flows boxsets on time ;) ★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★