Podcasts about Little Deuce Coupe

El recopilatorio “Why don’t you smile now” (Light In The Attic) recoge parte del trabajo de Lou Reed para Pickwick Records en los dos años previos a la formación de The Velvet Underground. En 1964 Reed fue contratado por esta disquera como compositor, músico de sesión y ocasional intérprete. Un trabajo a destajo en donde aprendió el funcionamiento de la industria de la música comercial, co-escribiendo decenas de canciones de todos los estilos, las cuales eran grabadas por bandas ficticias de estudio o artistas emergentes que aspiraban a convertirse en estrellas del pop.(Foto del podcast por Matthew Kloss)Playlist (Todas las canciones de “Why don’t you smile now” salvo donde indicado;(sintonía) LOU REED “I’m waiting for the man (demo mayo 1965)” (Words and Music)THE PRIMITIVES “Sneaky Pete”LOU REED “Merry-go-round” (single 1962)SPONGY and THE DOLLS “Really really really really really love”THE ALL NIGHT WORKERS “Why don’t you smile”ROBERTHA WILLIAMS “Tell mamma not to cry”THE J BROTHERS “Ya running, but I’ll getcha”BEVERLEY ANN “We got trouble”RONNIE DICKERSON “Oh no don’t do it”THE PRIMITIVES “The Ostrich”THE ROUGHNECKS “You’re driving me insane”THE BEACHNUTS “Cycle Annie”JEANNIE LARIMORE “Johnny won’t surf no more”THE SURFSIDES “Little Deuce Coupe”THE HOLLYWOODS “Teardrops in the sand”THE HI-LIFES “Soul City”RONNIE DICKERSON “What about me”THE BEACHNUTS “Sad, lonely, orphan boy”THE HI-LIFES “I’m gonna fight”LOU REED “Heroin” (demo mayo 1965)” (Words and Music)Escuchar audio

Estamos inmersos en plena ola de desplazamientos con motivo de las vacaciones veraniegas. El ansia de huir, la velocidad y la música que se asocia a las cuatro ruedas han inspirado miles de canciones que hablan de coches y de carretera. De las ganas de conducir, bien sea por un desamor, por un futuro mejor, por delirios de grandeza, por abandonar lo que nos rodea o por regresar a lo que añoramos. En este capítulo, disfrutamos con esta fascinante relación entre conducción y música acompañados de algunas canciones icónicas sobre coches y carretera. Te brindo una colección de dos docenas de canciones para que te acompañen en tu viaje, que espero sea feliz, sin sobresaltos y que llegues perfectamente a tu destino para disfrutar de tus vacaciones o de tu regreso al curro. Buen viaje con: On the Road Again - Willie Nelson - Honeysuckle Rose Nervous on the road (But Can´t Stay at Home) - Brinsley Swartz – Nervous on The Road Radar Love - Golden Earring - Moontan Born to Be Wild - Steppenwolf - Steppenwolf Rocking Down the Highway - The Doobie Brothers - Toulouse Street Cadillac solitario - Loquillo y los Trogloditas – El Ritmo del Garaje Mustang Sally - Wilson Pickett - The Wicked Picket Maybellene - Chuck Berry – Single Route 66 - The Rolling Stones - December's Children (And Everybody's) The Passenger - Iggy Pop – Lust for Life Passenger Side - Wilco – A.M. Road to Nowhere - Talking Heads – Little Creatures Turn This Car Around - Tom Petty - Highway Companyon Pisa el Acelerador - Joaquín Sabina y Viceversa -Ruleta Rusa (directo con Viceversa) I can´t Drive 55 - Sammy Hagar - VOA Fast Car - Tracy Chapman - Fast car Roll on 18 wheeler - Alabama – Roll On Drive - The Cars – Heartbeat City Car Song - Elastica - Elastica I´m in love with my car - Queen – A Night at the Opera Born to Run - Bruce Springsteen - Born to Run Highway Star – Deep Purple - Machine Head Con la Compañía de Drive my Car de Beatles y Little Deuce Coupe de Beach Boys

Estamos inmersos en plena ola de desplazamientos con motivo de las vacaciones veraniegas. El ansia de huir, la velocidad y la música que se asocia a las cuatro ruedas han inspirado miles de canciones que hablan de coches y de carretera. De las ganas de conducir, bien sea por un desamor, por un futuro mejor, por delirios de grandeza, por abandonar lo que nos rodea o por regresar a lo que añoramos. En este capítulo, disfrutamos con esta fascinante relación entre conducción y música acompañados de algunas canciones icónicas sobre coches y carretera. Te brindo una colección de dos docenas de canciones para que te acompañen en tu viaje, que espero sea feliz, sin sobresaltos y que llegues perfectamente a tu destino para disfrutar de tus vacaciones o de tu regreso al curro. Buen viaje con: On the Road Again - Willie Nelson - Honeysuckle Rose Nervous on the road (But Can´t Stay at Home) - Brinsley Swartz – Nervous on The Road Radar Love - Golden Earring - Moontan Born to Be Wild - Steppenwolf - Steppenwolf Rocking Down the Highway - The Doobie Brothers - Toulouse Street Cadillac solitario - Loquillo y los Trogloditas – El Ritmo del Garaje Mustang Sally - Wilson Pickett - The Wicked Picket Maybellene - Chuck Berry – Single Route 66 - The Rolling Stones - December's Children (And Everybody's) The Passenger - Iggy Pop – Lust for Life Passenger Side - Wilco – A.M. Road to Nowhere - Talking Heads – Little Creatures Turn This Car Around - Tom Petty - Highway Companyon Pisa el Acelerador - Joaquín Sabina y Viceversa -Ruleta Rusa (directo con Viceversa) I can´t Drive 55 - Sammy Hagar - VOA Fast Car - Tracy Chapman - Fast car Roll on 18 wheeler - Alabama – Roll On Drive - The Cars – Heartbeat City Car Song - Elastica - Elastica I´m in love with my car - Queen – A Night at the Opera Born to Run - Bruce Springsteen - Born to Run Highway Star – Deep Purple - Machine Head Con la Compañía de Drive my Car de Beatles y Little Deuce Coupe de Beach Boys

The Jokermen debut a very special new segment of the program. There's a little Beach Boys talk somewhere in here too. SUBSCRIBE TO JOKERMEN ON PATREON

John Hartz joins Matthew and Adam as they break down the Beach Boys album Little Deuce Coupe. www.matthewhartzmusic.com

Welcome to the Instant Trivia podcast episode 788, where we ask the best trivia on the Internet. Round 1. Category: a christmas carol 1: City in which the story is set. London. 2: This bird Scrooge sent the Cratchits for Christmas dinner was "twice the size of Tiny Tim". turkey. 3: "A partridge in a pear tree". "The Twelve Days of Christmas". 4: "Good tidings we bring to you and your kin, we wish you good tidings for Christmas and a Happy New Year". "We Wish You A Merry Christmas". 5: "And heav'n and nature sing, and heav'n and nature sing, and heav'n and heav'n and nature sing". "Joy to the World". Round 2. Category: pins 1: Louis Henry and Bruce Ancona hold a patent on one of these that'll hold your undies on the line. clothespin. 2: A dowel pin is used by these health professionals to support crowns. dentists. 3: Aye, matey, it's what's normally belayed on a belaying pin. line/rope. 4: In a gun, it strikes the cartridge, setting off the propelling charge. firing pin. 5: Ooh! Ooh! Horshack knows it has a split end that's spread after being put through a hole. cotter pin. Round 3. Category: school's out! 1: This summer I might try to hike this scenic trail that runs about 2,100 miles from Maine to Georgia. Appalachian Trail. 2: Before my job interview, I'd better polish up and type up this document, from the French for "summarize". Resume. 3: I'm working on Dad's old Saab so I can drive it, and I just learned it's a car from this country. Sweden. 4: With classes in this field next term, on the break I'm reading books by Meisner and Stanislavsky. Acting. 5: Let's go! I'm heading to this popular spring break city in Florida that's home to "Bike Week". Daytona Beach. Round 4. Category: nashville 1: This president's home, the Hermitage, is located on Rachel's Lane. Andrew Jackson. 2: In 1873 Central University was renamed this for the "Commodore" who gave it a $1 million gift. Vanderbilt. 3: This singer's museum near Nashville has a section featuring the Carter family. Johnny Cash. 4: From 1943 to 1974, Ryman auditorium was the broadcast site of this radio program. the Grand Ole Opry. 5: Nashville's Parthenon has a 42-foot replica of this goddess. Athena. Round 5. Category: car tunes 1: Prince drove this tiny title auto to No. 6 in 1983. "Little Red Corvette". 2: This "Little" Beach Boys vehicle can "do a hundred and forty with the top end floored". "Little Deuce Coupe". 3: He had a 2-part request in the title of his 1988 No. 1 hit: "Get Outta My Dreams, Get Into My Car". Billy Ocean. 4: As a metaphor for her Southern childhood, Lucinda Williams sang of "Car Wheels On" this type of road. a gravel road. 5: In 1976 Rose Royce did the dirty work and went to No. 1 "employed" here (Whoa Whoa Whoa Whoa!). "Car Wash". Thanks for listening! Come back tomorrow for more exciting trivia! Special thanks to https://blog.feedspot.com/trivia_podcasts/

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.

I dette afsnit af 'Rockhistorier' dedikerer Henrik Queitsch og Klaus Lynggaard intet mindre end to timer og tyve minutter til 'The Beach Boys'. Vi skal derfor igennem en playliste med hele 30 numre, der blandt andet indeholder ”Surfin' USA”, ”Kiss me baby” og julenummeret ”Little Saint Nick”.Playliste: 1. "Surfin'" (1961) 2. "Surfin' Safari" (1962)3. "Surfin' USA" (1963)4. "Lonely Sea" (1963)5. "Misirlou" (1963)6. "Surfer Girl" (1963)7. "Little Deuce Coupe" (1963)8. "In My Room" (1963)9. "A Young Man Is Gone" (1963)10. "Little Saint Nick" - Single Version (1963)11. "Fun, Fun, Fun" (1964)12. "Don't Worry Baby" (1964)13. "The Warmth of the Sun" (1964)14. "I Get Around" (1964)15. "Girls on the Beach" (1964)16. "All Summer Long" (1964)17. "When I Grow Up (To Be a Man)" (1964)18. "She Knows Me Too Well" (1965)19. "Please Let Me Wonder" (1965)20. "Kiss Me, Baby" (1965)21. "Help Me, Rhonda" (1965)22. "Let Him Run Wild" (1965)23. "California Girls" (1965)24. "Girl Don't Tell Me"  (1965)25. The Little Girl I Once Knew" (1965)26. "Wouldn't It Be Nice" (1966)27. "I Just Wasn't Made for These Times" (1966)28. "God Only Knows" (1966)29. "I Know There's an Answer" (1966)30. "Caroline, No" (1966)

Bruce Meyer loves 1932 Fords. He owns 10. It may seem excessive unless you're a founding member of the Petersen Auto Museum in Los Angeles and it just unveiled an exhibition honoring the 90th anniversary of the vehicles and their iconic legacy as hot rods. Meyer, 90, founding chairman of the museum, is our guest this week on The Weekly Driver Podcast. Co-hosts Bruce Aldrich and James Raia discuss with Meyer the country's most well-known museum and its celebration of the cars often known by their moniker, "Deuce." The exhibit began earlier in June with a celebration and honor given to Billy Gibbons, the lead guitarist and primary vocalist of the rock band ZZ Top. Gibbons is also a Deuce enthusiast as well as a collector of other vintage cars of the era. Four of the band's videos include a 1933 Ford Coupe. One of the 1932 Fords on display at the Petersen Auto Museum in Los Angeles in a new exhibit celebrating the car's 90th birthday. Images courtesy of the Petersen Auto Museum. "My family didn't have a lot of money and my grandparents couldn't afford a car," said Meyer. "In my family, cars were the biggest waste of time and resources. "But I was born loving cars. I have been a car guy my entire life; my family just couldn't understand it. They told me to get off of it and go get a job." According to the Petersen Auto Museum exhibit information, nearly 275,000 of the cars were sold despite debuting in one of the worst years of the Great Depression. The 1932 Ford's popularity was largely connected to its V8 engine and modest price. Petersen Auto Museum: Beach Boys' Influence The car's popularity further expanded when the Beach Boys released Little Deuce Coupe, the band's fourth album, in 1963. The lead single had the same name. The Petersen Auto Museum exhibit, Ford Fever: The Deuce Turns 90, is Meyer's joy. It includes the McGee Roadster, Flathead Roadster, Victoria Sedan and many other Deuce examples. Many body styles of '32 Fords are on display in a new exhibit at the Petersen Auto Museum in Los Angeles. "This is a big deal," said Meyer of the exhibit. "The '32 Ford, in my world, is really the genesis of hot rodding. That's the one that matters to me. We have a fabulous display." Please join Bruce and me for episode #230 of the podcast as we embrace Meyer's expertise about his collection and the legacy of the Petersen Auto Museum. The Weekly Driver Podcast encourages and appreciates feedback from our listeners. Please forward episode links to family, friends and colleagues. And you are welcome to repost links from the podcast to your social media accounts. The idea of more eyeballs on more content works for us. Support our podcast by shopping on Amazon.com. A graphic display at the bottom of the post links to automotive selections of the online retailer. But there's also a search function for anything available directly from the site. If you shop via this site, we receive a small commission. It helps us continue to produce independent content. The site began in 2004 and includes more than 700 reviews. The podcast is in its fourth year, and we've had a diverse collection of guests — famous athletes, vintage car collectors, manufacturer CEOs, automotive book authors, industry analysts, a movie stuntman and episodes from auto shows and car auctions. Please send comments and suggestions for new episodes to James Raia via email: james@jamesraia.com. All podcast episodes are archived on theweeklydriver.com/podcast Every episode is also available on your preferred podcast platform. Several of the more prominent platforms are listed below. Amazon.com iheartradio Spotify RELATED CONTENT #228 Newport Auto Museum Artist David Glover #168 Hersey World Class Auto Museum Reopens #151 Interstate 80 Auto Museum Honors Military History

Cars and motorbikes have forever been a key part of rock'n'roll songs and lifestyle. In the Western world, kids had cars, sometimes borrowed from their parents but increasingly their own.   Cars offered status, escape from daily life, and, of course, a means to sex!! When you're in your car, you want to hear songs about cars and driving, and rock'n'roll was happy to deliver. In this episode, we look at songs  that talk about cars, the artists who made those songs, and some strange stories about both. References:  Joe Cocker, “The Letter”, The Box Tops, “Mad Dogs and Englishmen”, Austen Tayshus, “Australiana”, "I bet she's seen a cockatoo", Black Sabbath, Paranoid,  J Mascis, Dinosaur Jr, Ted Mulry, “Jump in my Car”, Madness, Janis Joplin, Beach Boys, "Little Deuce Coupe",  "Baby, You Can Drive my Car", The Beatles,  John Lennon, Keith Moon, Brian Johnston, Nick Mason, Roger Taylor, "I'm in Love With my Car” , A Night at the Opera, John Cale, Elvis Presley, “Cars”, Gary Numan, “Unknown Legend”, Neil Young, “Highway Star”, Deep Purple", “Motorcycle Mama”, Stan Ridgway, "Drive, She Said” , "Radar Love”, Golden Earring, "Pink Cadillac", Springsteen, "Blinded by the Light", Manfred Mann's Earth Band, "Little Red Corvette", Prince, "Get Out of my Dreams and into my Car”, Billy Ocean, David Bowie, “Always crashing in the same car”, Low, REM, "Drive” , "Rock On”, David Essex, The Cars, “Drive”, B-52's, “Love Shack”, Bob Seger, “Turn the Page”, The Wiggles, "Big Red Car”, Kraftwerk, “Autobahn” 

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"]

“Odysseus”  ― Rémi Geffroy “Black Velvet Band”  ― Paddy Reilly “Odysseus”  ― Rémi Geffroy “Black Velvet Band”  ― Paddy Reilly “Johnny Tarr”  ― Gaelic Storm “The Little Beggarman”  ― The High Kings “Dancing in the Street”  ― Rockapella “My Girl”  ― The Harvard Opportunes “Cecilia”  ― Tonic Sol-Fa “All My Loving”  ― University of Rochester YellowJackets “A Little Less Conversation”  ― Tonic Sol-Fa “Chain Gang”  ― The Persuasions “When the Saints Go Marchin' In”  ― The Whiffenpoofs “Eleanor Rigby”  ― Tonic Sol-Fa “King of Spain”  ― Moxy Früvous “Operator”  ― The Whiffenpoofs “Faith”  ― The Singing Pinguins “Man of Constant Sorrow”  ― Tonic Sol-Fa “Time Of The Season”  ― The Nylons “Loves Me Like a Rock (Acoustic Demo)”  ― Paul Simon “Bop Til You Drop”  ― The Nylons “409/Little Deuce Coupe”  ― MC6 A Cappella “Brown Eyed Girl”  ― Tonic Sol-Fa “Barbara Ann”  ― 4:2:Five “Are You Gonna Be My Girl - Acoustic”  ― Jet “Voodoo”  ― Street Corner Symphony “Summer Of '69 - MTV Unplugged Version”  ― Bryan Adams “What Are the Chances”  ― DUSK (GR) “Fairy Tales”  ― Cayetano “Despacito”  ― Madilyn Bailey, Leroy Sanchez “Walpurgisnacht”  ― Faun “Jest Oldu" - Anneke van Giersbergen “Blood & Bone”  ― Vaudeville Etiquette “Trouble in Mind”  ― The Bumper Jacksons

Episode NotesYes indeed, folks, Christmas time is here again!  We at What the Riff!?! want to wish you and yours a very Merry Christmas, and here are a few rocking songs of the season for you to put on your playlist.“Merry Christmas (I Don't Want to Fight Tonight)” by the RamonesThe founders of the punk movement offer this take on a Christmas song, with the rapid tempo and rough lyrics we've come to know and love as a classic Ramones style.  Christmas is a time to be together with family,  but some families are a little less together than others!“Little Saint Nick” by the Beach BoysA little bit more sand than snow, this well-known Christmas classic takes inspiration from the surfin' genre of the Beach Boys in songs like "Little Deuce Coupe".“I Believe in Santa Claus” by REO SpeedwagonREO Speedwagon produced an album of Christmas standards in 2009.  The re-release in 2010 included three bonus tracks, one of which was this original song penned by Cronin and Hall.“You're a Mean One, Mr. Grinch” by  Thurl RavenscroftRavenscroft's bass voice is iconic for this classic song from the animated special, "How the Grinch Stole Christmas."  He also contributed his voice to Tony the Tiger for Kellogg's Frosted Flakes commercials.“Santa Claus is Comin' to Town'” by Bruce SpringsteenHow we missed this song in the first three Christmas episodes is a mystery, but Springsteen's rendition of this Christmas standard has been heard on rock radio stations everywhere since the mid-70's.  This rendition has made lists of both the best and the worst Christmas songs of all time.“Blue Christmas” by Elvis PresleyBrian wouldn't let us get through another episode without taking on this iconic song.  Doye O'Dell may have recorded this sad Christmas tune in 1948, but Presley's version is without a doubt the most famous one.“Mele Kalikinaka” by Bing Crosby & The Andrews SistersThe name of this song is a phonologic translation of the word "Merry Christmas" into the Hawaiian language.  Bing Crosby and The Andrews Sisters sang this song in 1950, but it made us think of its appearance in "National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation."“Up on the Housetop” by Gene AutryWhile Autry sang this classic in 1953, it actually originated much earlier.  Benjamin Hamby wrote it in 1864, and it is the second-oldest secular Christmas song, after "Jingle Bells."   “I Want A Hippopotamus for Christmas” by Gayla PeeveyBruce thought this was sung by Bernadette Peters, but it was actually performed by then 10-year-old child prodigy Gayla Peevey in 1953.  The song inspired a fundraiser which resulted in the Oklahoma City Zoo acquiring a baby hippo named Matilda..“Soulful Christmas”  by James BrownWhile it is definitely a Christmas song, it is also a song of Thanksgiving, with the Godfather of Soul expressing his thanks for his fans coming to his shows and buying his albums.“Another Lonely Christmas” by PrincePrince penned this original Christmas song during his "Purple Rain" days, and it appeared as the B-side to the single "I Would Die 4 U."  The initial recording took place on February 18th, 1984 when Prince was essentially operating solo, and it tells the story of a man whose lover died on Christmas Day.“The Christmas Song” by Nat King ColeRobert Wells and Mel Torme wrote this standard in a hot July, and it had its beginnings as a psychological way for Bob Wells to think of cold things during the heat wave.  Nat King Cole recorded the most famous version of this song in 1946, adding a small string section over the objections  of Capitol Records.“'Zat You Santa Claus” by Buster Poindexter & His Banshees of BluePoindexter and his band cover this lesser-known Christmas tune originally sung by Louis Armstrong and the Commanders in 1953.  It tells the story of a guy frightened by a knock on his door while hanging up his stocking.“Another Christmas Song” by Stephen ColbertIngrid brings us a track by comedian Stephen Colbert, who parodies a Christmas song with the intention of becoming rich off its popularity.“Have a Holly Jolly Christmas” by Burl IvesThis song was featured in the Rankin-Bass Christmas Special "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer."  Ives provides the voice for Sam the Snowman, the narrator of the show.  This song finishes off that special, and also finishes off our special podcast.Merry Christmas, y'all!

Celebrating their 50th, includes Do It Again, Little Honda, Heroes and Villians, Sail On Sailor, Surfin' Safari, Surfer Girl, Sloop John B, Wouldn't It Be Nice, California Girls, Help Me Ronda, Surfin USA, Kokomo, I Get Around, Little Deuce Coupe, 409, Barbara Ann, Fun Fun Fun, and Good Vibrations

The KISS Show!! With Gilbert Neal and Ken Ray Wilemon:   Wicked Lester - She (1972) Lips - Beck (1971?) The original version of “Beth”, obviously from a cassette. This band never released anything. Lips was born the night Criss's previous band Chelsea died.  While the material they would develop was similar to the material Chelsea had done, several later KISS songs were born in this period.  "I know you love complainin'..." Crazy Joe and the Variable Speed Band - Eugene (1981) Co-written and produced by Ace Frehley. "Crazy Joe" was actually Joe Renda, White Plains NY producer and recording studio owner linked to the local Ren-Vell Records and North Lake Sound studio. He is perhaps best remembered for...this..., but his roots extend back to early 60s garage rock. Gilbert Neal and Ken Ray Wilemon - Beth  Gene Simmons - Black Tongue (2004) Garbage. Utter trash.  Kiss - Bad Lovin' (1978) (“Dr. Love” demo) Peter Criss - Hooked On Rock and Roll (1978) Gilbert Neal and Ken Ray Wilemon - I Was Made For Loving You Kiss - Watchin' You (1972-73) Paul Stanley - Tracks Of My Tears (2021) Wicked Lester - Too Many Mondays (1972) Turn up the volume to hear at comparable volume. It speaks to how Kiss would have turned out if they hadn't decided on the gimmick we all know.  Gilbert Neal and Ken Ray Wilemon - Dr. Love   Potpourri featuring some bad Jan and Dean:   The Free Design - You Could Be Born Again (1968) Bernie Waldon - Bright Lights And Go-Go Girls (1968) Obituary: Bernard E. “Bernie” Waldon, age 77, passed away June 27, 2012, in Brooksville, Fla. He was born in Crawfordsville to Floyd and Agnes Waldon. He graduated from Crawfordsville High School and moved to Indianapolis in 1965. Bernie worked in radio for several years at WILO, WHOW and WIRE in Indianapolis, and WZIP in Cincinnati. He was a musician working with several Country and Bluegrass groups mainly the Indiana Band and Bluegrass Partners. He appeared on radio and television, was a guest on the Grand Ole Opry and Renfro Valley Barn Dance. Bernie retired from Emery Worldwide in 1977, prior to that he worked for Purolator Courier. Bernie was a private pilot and past president of the Indiana chapter of the Antique Airplane Association of which he was a national lifetime member. He also belonged to the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Associations, the Experimental Airplane Association and the Luscombe Association. He served eight years in the Indiana National Guard. Billy Dee Williams - A Taste Of Honey (1961) This was the first version of what would become a very popular war-horse for singers all over the world. Another trivia question! Who did it first? Lando California.  Jean DuShon - For Once In My Life (1966) This was the first version of what would become a very popular war-horse for singers all over the world. Another trivia question! Who did it first? Jean DuShon.    Jerry Jeff Walker - Mr. Bojangles (1968) This was the first version of what would become a very popular war-horse for singers all over the world. Another trivia question! Who did it first? Jerry Jeff Walker. He also wrote it.  Rod Rogers & The Swinging Strings - Beatle Crawl (1965) Tony Bruno - Rhoda Mendelbaum (1969) How I love Tony Bruno.  Gianfranco & Gian Piero Reverberi - Nel Cimitero Di Tucson (1968) From the movie "Django, Prepare a Coffin". Starring Terrence Hill.  The Jackson Five - Doctor My Eye (1973) Jan and Dean - Laurel and Hardy (1966-1969) In response to market forces, Jan and Dean decided to go all out and record a psychedelic album of their own. In the process, Jan got into a car crash that left him somewhat debilitated. The album was finished by 1969. While presented as a Jan and Dean album, Jan Berry (even though he wrote and produced the material) only played and sang on a few songs due to complications from his car accident. Dean Torrence, who by that time had become disillusioned with the duo's prospects, only appears on one song. Glen Campbell made some contributions to the sessions, and singer Tom Bahler performed lead vocals on several songs. Tom Bahler wrote "She's Out of My Life" for Frank Sinatra. He never sang it, but Michael Jackson did on Off The Wall. Bahler also wrote the Bobby Sherman hit "Julie, Do Ya Love Me". A song I wrote and sang in my mind for Julie Pawlowski of Emporium Avenue, West Seneca, NY, 14224. This song was co-written by Roger Christian, who co-wrote several songs for The Beach Boys, mostly about cars, including "Ballad of Ole' Betsy", "Car Crazy Cutie", "Cherry, Cherry Coupe", "Don't Worry Baby", "In the Parkin' Lot", "Little Deuce Coupe", "No-Go Showboat", "Shut Down", and "Spirit of America", all of them penned with Brian Wilson. And Roger Christian was from Buffalo, NY. We rule.  Jan and Dean - The Universal Coward (1965) You have to hear this to believe it.  Jan and Dean - Yesterday (1965) Kathy McCord - She's (I'm) Leaving Home (1970) Kathleen McCord was born to Bill and Ann McCord. Both of them were in the show business: Bill was a radio and television announcer at NBC, whilst Ann was a singer who sang backup on Perry Como's TV show and hit records like "Catch a Falling Star", "Round and Round" and "Magic Moments". She was introduced to Chip Taylor by her brother, Billy Vera (who had a big weepy hit with "If I Could Just Hold You Again") when she was 16 years old. She has something to do with Kiss. I forgot. 

Welcome to the Instant Trivia podcast episode 135, where we ask the best trivia on the Internet. Round 1. Category: Ghosts 1: The 999 ghosts at the mansion in this Anaheim landmark tell visitors “There's always room for 1 more”. Disneyland. 2: Creators of “Casper” say this film's logo plagiarized 1 of their characters. Ghostbusters. 3: Silver City, Idaho and Bodie, California for example. ghost towns. 4: In the Superman TV series, editor Perry White frequently invoked this spirit. great Caesar's ghost. 5: In Shakespeare's play, ghost who sat in Macbeth's place at the banquet table. Banquo. Round 2. Category: Cruisin' The Caribbean 1: When you pull into Guadeloupe, you may have to change your dollars into this official currency. euros. 2: Princess Cruises shipped in tons of this to keep its private Caribbean island beach looking pristine. sand. 3: As you'd expect, it was the first company to launch a fleet exclusively in the Caribbean. Royal Caribbean. 4: Destiny and Liberty are 2 of this line's "Fun Ships". Carnival. 5: If you're cruising on the Royal Clipper, it will most likely be under this power. wind. Round 3. Category: Superman 1: He played Jesse James in 1943's "The Kansan" before donning the cape of Superman on TV in the 1950s. George Reeves. 2: (Hi, I'm Michael McKean.)My guest appearance as Perry White made this show successful; my wife, Annette O'Toole, may also have helped. Smallville. 3: In "Superman III" this comedian uses the "Salami Technique" to steal tiny sums of money from many bank accounts. Richard Pryor. 4: Kate Bosworth was Lois Lane in this 2006 man of steel movie. Superman Returns. 5: 1978's "Superman" was scripted by this New York author famous for mafia tomes. Mario Puzo. Round 4. Category: Pop Goes The Ballet 1: The rock and roll ballet "Blue Suede Shoes" celebrates the music and the spirit of this legendary star. Elvis Presley. 2: "Deuce Coupe" is danced to "Little Deuce Coupe", "Catch A Wave" and other songs made famous by this group. The Beach Boys. 3: The 1988 ballet "A Fool For You" is performed to this star's hits, including "I Got A Woman" and "Hit The Road Jack". Ray Charles. 4: "Sex" and "Horror" are compositions this member of the Marsalis family wrote for the ballet "Them Twos". Wynton Marsalis. 5: "Laura's Women" was inspired by the music of this singer-songwriter who wrote for Streisand and Three Dog Night. Laura Nyro. Round 5. Category: Cookies 1: "Sesame Street" character whose catchphrase is "Me want cookies". Cookie Monster. 2: Debbi is the first name of this woman whose name is on over 700 cookie franchises. Mrs. Fields. 3: In 1934 this pair from the funny pages had a baby son named Alexander; daughter Cookie was born in 1941. Blondie and Dagwood. 4: A machine that is a funnel within a funnel fills this cake-like cookie with fig jam. a Fig Newton. 5: Founder Margaret Rudkin named this brand for a property her family owned in Connecticut. Pepperidge Farm. Thanks for listening! Come back tomorrow for more exciting trivia!

It's a special edition of Not Your Mother's Goose, highlighting all the hilarious parody songs from the show, plus an interview with show singer Andrew Mitchell (where we learn that he is actually the son of "King Kazoo"). We've also got a brand new song to complete our Beach Boys tandem, as we've turned Little Deuce Coupe into a tune about Little Bo Peep and her fellow fairy tale shepherds.

Episode one hundred and seventeen of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at "Don't Worry Baby" by the Beach Boys, and how the years 1963 and 1964 saw a radical evolution in the sound and subject matter of the Beach Boys' work. 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 "You're No Good" by the Swinging Blue Jeans. 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/ ----more---- ERRATA: I say that the Surfin' USA album was released only four months after Surfin' Safari. It was actually over five months. Also, for some reason I pronounce Nik Venet's name as if he were French here. I believe that's incorrect and his name is actually pronounced “Vennit”, though I'm not 100% sure. More importantly, I say that "Sweet Little Sixteen" wasn't a big hit, when of course it made number two on the charts.    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. Becoming the Beach Boys by James B. Murphy is an in-depth look at the group's early years, up to the end of 1963. 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. Stebbins also co-wrote The Lost Beach Boy, David Marks' autobiography. 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. The Beach Boys' Morgan recordings and all the outtakes from them can be found on this 2-CD set. As a good starting point for the Beach Boys' music, I would recommend this budget-priced three-CD set, which has a surprisingly good selection of their material on it. Transcript Today, we're going to take our second look at the Beach Boys, and we're going to look at their evolution through 1963 and 1964, as they responded to the threat from the Beatles by turning to ever more sophisticated music, even as they went through a variety of personal crises. We're going to look at a period in which they released four albums a year, had three lineup changes, and saw their first number one – and at a song which, despite being a B-side, regularly makes lists of the best singles of all time. We're going to look at “Don't Worry Baby”: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "Don't Worry Baby"] When we left the Beach Boys, they had just secured a contract with Capitol Records, and released their first national hit, "Surfin' Safari" backed with "409". Since then we've also seen Brian Wilson working with several songwriting collaborators to write hits for Jan and Dean. But now we need to double back and look at what Brian was doing with his main band in that time.  After "Surfin' Safari" was a hit, in one of the many incomprehensible decisions made in the Beach Boys' career, Capitol decided to follow it up with an album track that Brian and Gary Usher had written, "Ten Little Indians". That track, a surf-rock version of the nursery rhyme with the group chanting "Kemo sabe" in the backing vocals, made only number forty-nine on the charts, and frankly didn't deserve to do even that well. Some have suggested, in fact that the record was released at the instigation of Murry Wilson, who was both Brian, Carl, and Dennis Wilson's father and the group's manager, as a way of weakening Usher's influence with the group, as Murry didn't want outsiders interfering in what he saw as a family business.  After realising the folly of deviating from the formula, the group's next single followed the same pattern as their first hit. The B-side was "Shut Down", a car song co-written by Brian and Roger Christian, who you may remember from the episode on "Surf City" as having been brought in to help Brian with car lyrics. "Shut Down" is most notable for being one of the very small number of Beach Boys records to feature an instrumental contribution from Mike Love, the group's lead singer. His two-note saxophone solo comes in for some mockery from the group's fans, but actually fits the record extremely well: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "Shut Down"]  "Shut Down" was a top thirty hit, but it was the A-side that was the really big hit. Just as their first hit had had a surf song on the A-side and a car song on the B-side, so did this single. Brian Wilson had been inspired by Chuck Berry's "Sweet Little Sixteen", and in particular the opening verse, which had just listed a lot of places: [Excerpt: Chuck Berry, "Sweet Little Sixteen"] He might well also have been thinking of Chubby Checker's minor hit, "Twistin' USA", which listed places in America where people might be twisting: [Excerpt: Chubby Checker, "Twistin' USA"] Brian had taken Berry's melody and the place-name recitation, and with the help of his girlfriend's brother, and some input from Mike Love, had turned it into a song listing all the places that people could be surfing -- at least, they could "if everybody had an ocean": [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "Surfin' USA"] "Surfin' USA" became a huge hit, reaching number two on the charts, and later being named by Billboard as the biggest hit of 1963, but unfortunately for Brian that didn't result in a financial windfall for him as the songwriter. As the song was so close to "Sweet Little Sixteen", Chuck Berry got the sole songwriting credit -- one of the only times in rock music history where a white artist has ripped off a Black one and the Black artist has actually benefited from it. And Berry definitely did benefit -- "Sweet Little Sixteen", while a great record, had never been a particularly big hit, while "Surfin' USA" is to this day regularly heard on oldies radio and used in commercials and films. But that success meant extra work, and a lot of it. "Surfin' USA" was the title song of the group's second album, released in March 1963 only four months after their first, and they would release two more albums before the end of the year -- Surfer Girl in September and Little Deuce Coupe in October. Not only were they having to churn out a quite staggering amount of product -- though Little Deuce Coupe featured four songs recycled from their earlier albums -- but Brian Wilson, as well as writing or co-writing all their original material, started producing the records as well, as he was unhappy with Nik Venet's production on the first album. Not only that, but as well as making the Beach Boys' records, Wilson was also writing for Jan and Dean, and he had also started making records on the side with Gary Usher, doing things like making a "Loco-Motion" knock-off, "The Revolution", released under the name Rachel and the Revolvers: [Excerpt: Rachel and the Revolvers, "The Revolution"] According to some sources, Usher and Wilson found the singer for that track by the simple expedient of driving to Watts and asking the first Black teenage girl they saw if she could sing. Other sources say they hired a professional session singer -- some say it was Betty Everett, but given that that's the name of a famous singer from the period who lived in the Mid-West, I think people are confusing her for Betty Willis, another singer who gets named as a possibility, who lived in LA and who certainly sounds like the same person: [Excerpt: Betty Willis, "Act Naturally"] Wilson was also in the process of breaking up with his girlfriend and starting a relationship with a young woman named Marilyn Rovell. Rovell, along with her sister Diane, and their cousin, Ginger Blake, had formed a girl group, and Brian was writing and producing records for them as well: [Excerpt: The Honeys, "The One You Can't Have"] As well as making all these records, the Beach Boys were touring intensively, to the point that on one day in June the group were actually booked in for four shows in the same day.  Unsurprisingly, Brian decided that this was too much for one person, and so in April 1963, just after the release of "Surfin' USA", he decided to quit touring with the group. Luckily, there was a replacement on hand. Alan Jardine had been a member of the Beach Boys on their very first single, but had decided to quit the group to go off to university. A year later, that seemed like a bad decision, and when Brian called him up and asked him to rejoin the band, he eagerly agreed. For now, Alan was not going to be a proper member of the group, but he would substitute for Brian on the group's tour of the Midwest that Spring, and on many of the shows they performed over the summer -- he could play the bass, which was the instrument that Brian played on stage, and he could sing Brian's parts, and so while the Beach Boys still officially consisted of Brian, Carl, and Dennis Wilson, Mike Love, and David Marks, the group that was on tour was Carl, Dennis, Mike, David, and Alan, though Brian would sometimes appear for important shows. Jardine also started recording with the group, though he would not get credited on the covers of the first couple of albums on which he appeared. This made a huge change to the sound of the Beach Boys in the studio, as Jardine playing bass allowed Brian Wilson to play keyboards, while Jardine also added to the group's vocal harmonies. And this was a major change. Up to this point, the Beach Boys' records had had only rudimentary harmonies. While Brian was an excellent falsetto singer, and Mike a very good bass, the other three members of the group were less accomplished. Carl would grow to be one of the great vocalists of all time, but at this point was still in his early teens and had a thin voice. Dennis' voice was also a little thin at this point, and he was behind the drum kit, which meant he didn't get to sing live, and David Marks was apparently not allowed to sing on the records at all, other than taking a single joint lead with Carl on the first album. With the addition of Jardine, Brian now had another singer as strong as himself and Love, and the Surfer Girl album, the first one on which Jardine appears, sees Brian expanding from the rather rudimentary vocal arrangements of the first two albums to something that incorporates a lot more of the influence of the Four Freshmen. You can hear this most startlingly on "In My Room". This is one of the first songs on which Jardine took part in the studio, though he's actually not very audible in the vocal arrangement, which instead concentrates on the three brothers. "In My Room" is a major, major, step forward in the group's sound, in the themes that would appear in their songwriting for the next few years, and in the juxtaposition of the lyrical theme and the musical arrangement.  The song's lyrics, written by Gary Usher but inspired by Wilson's experiences, are about solitude, and the song starts out with Brian singing alone, but then Brian moves up to the third note of the scale and Carl comes in under him, singing the note Brian started on. Then they both move up again, Brian to the fifth and Carl to the third, with Dennis joining in on the note that Brian had started on, before Mike and Alan finally also join in. Brian is singing about being alone, but he has his family with him, supporting him:  [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "In My Room"] This new lineup of the group, with Alan augmenting the other five, might even have lasted, except for a chain of events that started on David Marks' fifteenth birthday. Murry Wilson, who was still managing the group at this point, had never liked the idea of someone from outside the family being an equal member, and was particularly annoyed at David because Murry had tried to have an affair with David's mother, which hadn't worked out well for him.  But then on Marks' fifteenth birthday, he and Dennis Wilson both caught a sexually transmitted infection from the same sex worker, and when Murry Wilson found this out -- as he had to, as he needed to pay their doctor's bills -- he became furious and started screaming at the whole group.  At that point, David had had enough. His mother had been telling him that he was the real talent in the group and he didn't need those Wilsons, and as a fifteen-year-old kid he didn't have the understanding to realise that this might not be entirely true. He said "OK, I quit". At first, the rest of the group thought that he was joking, and even he wasn't at all sure that he wanted to leave the group altogether. He remained in the band for the next month, but Murry Wilson kept reminding his sons that Marks had quit and that they'd all heard him, and refused to speak directly to him -- anything that Murry wanted to say to David, he said to Carl, who passed the message on.  And even though the rest of the group definitely wanted David to stay -- especially Brian, who liked having the freedom not to go out on tour, and Carl, who had been the one who'd lobbied to bring his friend into the group in the first place -- David was still, as the youngest member, the only one who didn't sing, and the only one not part of the family, regarded by the others as somewhat lesser than the rest of the band.  David became increasingly frustrated, especially when they were recording the Little Deuce Coupe album. That album was made up entirely of songs about cars, and the group were so short of material that the album ended up being filled out with four songs from earlier albums, including two from the Surfer Girl album released only the previous month. Yet when David tried to persuade Brian to have the group record his song "Kustom Kar Show", Brian told David that he wasn't ready to be writing songs for the group.  All this, plus pressure from David's parents to make him more of a focal point of the group, led to his resignation eventually being accepted, and backdated to the original date he quit. He played his last show with the group on October the fifth 1963, and then formed his own band, the Marksmen, who signed to A&M:  [Excerpt: Dave and the Marksmen, "Kustom Kar Show"] There have been rumours that Murry Wilson threatened DJs that the Beach Boys wouldn't co-operate with them if they played Marksmen records, but in truth, listening to the records the Marksmen made during their two years of existence, it's quite obvious why they weren't played -- they were fairly shoddy-sounding garage rock records, with little to commend them. Indeed, they actually sound somewhat better now than they would have done at the time -- some of Marks' flatter and more affectless vocals prefigure the sound of some punk singers, but not in a way that would have had any commercial potential in 1963. Meanwhile, the Beach Boys continued, with Alan Jardine buying a Stratocaster and switching to rhythm guitar, and Brian Wilson resigning himself to having to perform live, at least at the moment, and returning to his old role on the bass. Jardine was now, for publicity purposes, a full member of the group, though he would remain on a salary rather than an equal partner for many years -- Murry Wilson didn't want to make the same mistake with him that he had with Marks. And there was still the constant need for new material, which didn't let up. Brian's songwriting was progressing at a furious pace, and that can be seen nowhere better than on "The Warmth of the Sun", a song he wrote, with Love writing the lyrics, around the time of the Kennedy assassination -- the two men have differed over the years over whether it was written the night before or the night after the assassination. "The Warmth of the Sun" is quite staggeringly harmonically sophisticated. We've talked before in this podcast about the standard doo-wop progression -- the one, minor sixth, minor second, fifth progression that you get in about a million songs: [demonstrates] "The Warmth of the Sun" starts out that way -- its first two chords are C, Am, played in the standard arpeggiated way one expects from that kind of song: [demonstrates] You'd expect from that  that the song would go C, Am, Dm, G or C, Am, F, G. But instead of moving to Dm or F, as one normally would, the song moves to E flat, and *starts the progression over*, a minor third up, so you have: [demonstrates] It then stops that progression after two bars, moves back to the Dm one would expect from the original progression, and stays there for twice as long as normal, before moving on to the normal G -- and then throwing in a G augmented at the end, which is a normal G chord but with the D note raised to E flat, so it ties in to that original unexpected chord change. And it does all this *in the opening line of the song*: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "The Warmth of the Sun"] This is harmonic sophistication on a totally different order from anything else that was being done in teen pop music at the time -- it was far closer to the modern jazz harmonies of the Four Freshmen that Brian loved than to doo-wop. The new five-piece lineup of the group recorded that on January the first, 1964, and on the same day they recorded a song that combined two of Brian's other big influences. "Fun Fun Fun" had lyrics by Mike Love -- some of his wittiest -- and starts out with an intro taken straight from "Johnny B. Goode": [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "Fun Fun Fun"] But while the rest of the track keeps the same feel as the Chuck Berry song, the verse goes in a different harmonic direction, and actually owes a lot to "Da Doo Ron Ron". Instead of using a blues progression, as Berry normally would, the verse uses the same I-IV-I-V progression that "Da Doo Ron Ron"'s chorus does, but uses it to very different effect: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "Fun Fun Fun"] That became the group's fourth top ten hit, and made number five on the charts -- but the group suddenly had some real competition. At numbers one, two, and three were the Beatles. Brian Wilson realised that he needed to up his game if he was going to compete, and he did. In April 1964 he started working on a new single. By this time, while the Beach Boys themselves were still playing most of the instruments, Brian was bringing in additional musicians to augment them, and expanding his instrumental palette. The basic track was the core members of the band -- Carl playing both lead and rhythm guitar, Alan playing bass, and Dennis playing drums, with Brian on keyboards -- but there were two further bass players, Glen Campbell and Ray Pohlman, thickening the sound on six-string bass, plus two saxophones, and Hal Blaine adding percussion.  And the main instrument providing chordal support wasn't guitar or organ, as it usually had been, but a harpsichord, an instrument Brian would use a lot over the next few years: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "I Get Around (backing track)"] The recording session for that backing track was also another breaking point for the band. Murry Wilson, himself a frustrated songwriter and producer, was at the session and kept insisting that there was a problem with the bassline. Eventually, Brian had enough of his father's interference, and fired him as the band's manager. Murry would continue to keep trying to interfere in his children's career, but this was the point at which the Beach Boys finally took control over their own futures. A few days later, they reconvened in the studio to record the vocals for what would become their first number one hit: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "I Get Around"] It's fascinating to see that even this early in the group's career, and on one of their biggest, summeriest hits, there's already a tension in the lyrics, a sense of wanting to move on -- "I'm getting bugged driving up and down the same old strip/I've got to find a new place where the kids are hip". The lyrics are Love's, but as is so often the case with Brian Wilson's collaborations, Love seems to have been expressing something that Wilson was feeling at the time. The Beach Boys had risen to the challenge from the Beatles, in a way that few other American musicians could, and "I Get Around" was good enough that it made the top ten in the UK, and became a particular favourite in the Mod subculture in London. The group would only become more popular over the next few years in the UK, a new place where the kids were hip. "I Get Around" is a worthy classic, but the B-side, "Don't Worry Baby", is if anything even better. It had been recorded in January, and had already been released on their Shut Down vol 2 album in March. It had originally been intended for the Ronettes, and was inspired by "Be My Baby", which had astonished Brian Wilson when it had been released a few months earlier. He would later recall having to pull over to the side of the road when he first heard the drum intro to that record: [Excerpt: The Ronettes, "Be My Baby"] Brian would play that record over and over, on repeat, for days at a time, and would try to absorb every nuance of the record and its production, and he tried to come up with something that could follow it. Wilson took the basic rhythm and chord sequence of the song, plus melodic fragments like the line "Be my little baby", and reworked them into a song that clearly owes a lot to its inspiration, but which stands on its own: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "Don't Worry Baby"] Phil Spector turned the song down, and so the Beach Boys recorded it themselves, and I have to say that this was only a good thing -- Ronnie Spector recorded a solo version of it many decades later, and it's a fine performance, but the lyric misses something when it's sung by a woman rather than a man. That lyric was by Roger Christian, and in it we see the tension between the more emotional themes that Wilson wanted to explore and the surf and car lyrics that had made up the majority of their singles to this point. The lyric is ostensibly about a car race, and indeed it seems to be setting up precisely the kind of situation that was common in teen tragedy records of the period. The protagonist sings "I guess I should have kept my mouth shut when I started to brag about my car,  but I can't back down now because I pushed the other guys too far", and the whole lyric is focused on his terror of an upcoming race.  This seems intended to lead to the kind of situation that we see in "Dead Man's Curve", or “Tell Laura I Love Her”, or in another teen tragedy song we'll be looking at in a couple of weeks, with the protagonist dead in a car crash. But instead, this is short-circuited. The protagonist's fears are allayed by his girlfriend: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "Don't Worry Baby"] What we have here is someone trying to deal with a particular kind of anxiety brought about by what we now refer to as toxic masculinity. The protagonist has been showing off about his driving skills in front of his peers, and has now found himself in a situation that he can't cope with. He's saved by a figure we'll see a lot more of in Brian's songs, whoever the lyricist, the supernaturally good woman who understands the protagonist and loves him despite, or because of, his faults, even though she's too good for him. Obviously, one can point to all sorts of reasons why this figure might be considered problematic -- the idea that the man is unable to deal with his own emotional problems without a woman fixing him -- but there's an emotional truth to it that one doesn't get in much music of the era, and even if it's a somewhat flawed view of gender relations, it speaks to a very particular kind of insecurity at the inability to live up to traditional masculine roles, and is all the more affecting when it's paired with the braggadocio of the A-side. The combination means we see the bragging and posturing on the A-side as just a facade, covering over the real emotional fragility of the narrator. Each side reinforces the other, and the combination is one of the most perfect pairings ever released as a single. "Don't Worry Baby", released as "I Get Around”'s B-side, made the charts in its own right peaking at number twenty-four. The B-side to the next single further elaborated on the themes of "Don't Worry Baby": [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "She Knows Me Too Well"] This repurposing of the emotional and musical style of girl-group songs to deal with the emotional vulnerability that comes from acknowledging and attempting to process toxic masculinity is something that few other songwriters were capable of at this point – only some of John Lennon's work a couple of years later comes close to dealing with this very real area of the emotional landscape, and Lennon, like Wilson, often does so by using the figure of the perfect woman who will save the protagonist. In 1964, the group once again released four albums – Shut Down vol.2, All Summer Long, a live album, and a Christmas album – and they also did most of the work on yet another album, The Beach Boys Today!, which would be released in early 1965. As these recordings progressed, Brian Wilson was more and more ambitious, both in terms of the emotional effect of the music and his arrangements, increasingly using session musicians to augment the group, and trying for a variant on Phil Spector's production style, but one which emphasised gentle fragility rather than sturm und drang. Possibly the greatest track he created in 1964 ended up not being used by the Beach Boys, though, but was given to Glen Campbell: [Excerpt: Glen Campbell, "Guess I'm Dumb"] Campbell got given that track because of an enormous favour he'd done the group. The mental strain of touring had finally got too much for Brian, and in December, on a plane to Texas, he'd had a breakdown, screaming on the plane and refusing to get off. Eventually, they coaxed him off the plane, and he'd managed to get through that night's show, but had flown back to LA straight after. Campbell, who was a session guitarist who had played on a number of the Beach Boys' recordings, and had a minor career as a singer at this point, had flown out at almost no notice and for the next five months he replaced Brian on stage for most of their shows, before the group got a permanent replacement in. Brian Wilson had retired from the road, and the hope was that by doing so, he would reduce the strain on himself enough that he could keep writing and producing for the group without making his mental health worse. And for a while, at least, that seemed to be how it worked out. We'll take a look at the results in a few weeks' time.

Episode one hundred and seventeen of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Don’t Worry Baby” by the Beach Boys, and how the years 1963 and 1964 saw a radical evolution in the sound and subject matter of the Beach Boys’ work. 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 “You’re No Good” by the Swinging Blue Jeans. 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/ —-more—- ERRATA: I say that the Surfin’ USA album was released only four months after Surfin’ Safari. It was actually over five months. Also, for some reason I pronounce Nik Venet’s name as if he were French here. I believe that’s incorrect and his name is actually pronounced “Vennit”, though I’m not 100% sure. More importantly, I say that “Sweet Little Sixteen” wasn’t a big hit, when of course it made number two on the charts.    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. Becoming the Beach Boys by James B. Murphy is an in-depth look at the group’s early years, up to the end of 1963. 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. Stebbins also co-wrote The Lost Beach Boy, David Marks’ autobiography. 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. The Beach Boys’ Morgan recordings and all the outtakes from them can be found on this 2-CD set. As a good starting point for the Beach Boys’ music, I would recommend this budget-priced three-CD set, which has a surprisingly good selection of their material on it. Transcript Today, we’re going to take our second look at the Beach Boys, and we’re going to look at their evolution through 1963 and 1964, as they responded to the threat from the Beatles by turning to ever more sophisticated music, even as they went through a variety of personal crises. We’re going to look at a period in which they released four albums a year, had three lineup changes, and saw their first number one – and at a song which, despite being a B-side, regularly makes lists of the best singles of all time. We’re going to look at “Don’t Worry Baby”: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, “Don’t Worry Baby”] When we left the Beach Boys, they had just secured a contract with Capitol Records, and released their first national hit, “Surfin’ Safari” backed with “409”. Since then we’ve also seen Brian Wilson working with several songwriting collaborators to write hits for Jan and Dean. But now we need to double back and look at what Brian was doing with his main band in that time.  After “Surfin’ Safari” was a hit, in one of the many incomprehensible decisions made in the Beach Boys’ career, Capitol decided to follow it up with an album track that Brian and Gary Usher had written, “Ten Little Indians”. That track, a surf-rock version of the nursery rhyme with the group chanting “Kemo sabe” in the backing vocals, made only number forty-nine on the charts, and frankly didn’t deserve to do even that well. Some have suggested, in fact that the record was released at the instigation of Murry Wilson, who was both Brian, Carl, and Dennis Wilson’s father and the group’s manager, as a way of weakening Usher’s influence with the group, as Murry didn’t want outsiders interfering in what he saw as a family business.  After realising the folly of deviating from the formula, the group’s next single followed the same pattern as their first hit. The B-side was “Shut Down”, a car song co-written by Brian and Roger Christian, who you may remember from the episode on “Surf City” as having been brought in to help Brian with car lyrics. “Shut Down” is most notable for being one of the very small number of Beach Boys records to feature an instrumental contribution from Mike Love, the group’s lead singer. His two-note saxophone solo comes in for some mockery from the group’s fans, but actually fits the record extremely well: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, “Shut Down”]  “Shut Down” was a top thirty hit, but it was the A-side that was the really big hit. Just as their first hit had had a surf song on the A-side and a car song on the B-side, so did this single. Brian Wilson had been inspired by Chuck Berry’s “Sweet Little Sixteen”, and in particular the opening verse, which had just listed a lot of places: [Excerpt: Chuck Berry, “Sweet Little Sixteen”] He might well also have been thinking of Chubby Checker’s minor hit, “Twistin’ USA”, which listed places in America where people might be twisting: [Excerpt: Chubby Checker, “Twistin’ USA”] Brian had taken Berry’s melody and the place-name recitation, and with the help of his girlfriend’s brother, and some input from Mike Love, had turned it into a song listing all the places that people could be surfing — at least, they could “if everybody had an ocean”: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, “Surfin’ USA”] “Surfin’ USA” became a huge hit, reaching number two on the charts, and later being named by Billboard as the biggest hit of 1963, but unfortunately for Brian that didn’t result in a financial windfall for him as the songwriter. As the song was so close to “Sweet Little Sixteen”, Chuck Berry got the sole songwriting credit — one of the only times in rock music history where a white artist has ripped off a Black one and the Black artist has actually benefited from it. And Berry definitely did benefit — “Sweet Little Sixteen”, while a great record, had never been a particularly big hit, while “Surfin’ USA” is to this day regularly heard on oldies radio and used in commercials and films. But that success meant extra work, and a lot of it. “Surfin’ USA” was the title song of the group’s second album, released in March 1963 only four months after their first, and they would release two more albums before the end of the year — Surfer Girl in September and Little Deuce Coupe in October. Not only were they having to churn out a quite staggering amount of product — though Little Deuce Coupe featured four songs recycled from their earlier albums — but Brian Wilson, as well as writing or co-writing all their original material, started producing the records as well, as he was unhappy with Nik Venet’s production on the first album. Not only that, but as well as making the Beach Boys’ records, Wilson was also writing for Jan and Dean, and he had also started making records on the side with Gary Usher, doing things like making a “Loco-Motion” knock-off, “The Revolution”, released under the name Rachel and the Revolvers: [Excerpt: Rachel and the Revolvers, “The Revolution”] According to some sources, Usher and Wilson found the singer for that track by the simple expedient of driving to Watts and asking the first Black teenage girl they saw if she could sing. Other sources say they hired a professional session singer — some say it was Betty Everett, but given that that’s the name of a famous singer from the period who lived in the Mid-West, I think people are confusing her for Betty Willis, another singer who gets named as a possibility, who lived in LA and who certainly sounds like the same person: [Excerpt: Betty Willis, “Act Naturally”] Wilson was also in the process of breaking up with his girlfriend and starting a relationship with a young woman named Marilyn Rovell. Rovell, along with her sister Diane, and their cousin, Ginger Blake, had formed a girl group, and Brian was writing and producing records for them as well: [Excerpt: The Honeys, “The One You Can’t Have”] As well as making all these records, the Beach Boys were touring intensively, to the point that on one day in June the group were actually booked in for four shows in the same day.  Unsurprisingly, Brian decided that this was too much for one person, and so in April 1963, just after the release of “Surfin’ USA”, he decided to quit touring with the group. Luckily, there was a replacement on hand. Alan Jardine had been a member of the Beach Boys on their very first single, but had decided to quit the group to go off to university. A year later, that seemed like a bad decision, and when Brian called him up and asked him to rejoin the band, he eagerly agreed. For now, Alan was not going to be a proper member of the group, but he would substitute for Brian on the group’s tour of the Midwest that Spring, and on many of the shows they performed over the summer — he could play the bass, which was the instrument that Brian played on stage, and he could sing Brian’s parts, and so while the Beach Boys still officially consisted of Brian, Carl, and Dennis Wilson, Mike Love, and David Marks, the group that was on tour was Carl, Dennis, Mike, David, and Alan, though Brian would sometimes appear for important shows. Jardine also started recording with the group, though he would not get credited on the covers of the first couple of albums on which he appeared. This made a huge change to the sound of the Beach Boys in the studio, as Jardine playing bass allowed Brian Wilson to play keyboards, while Jardine also added to the group’s vocal harmonies. And this was a major change. Up to this point, the Beach Boys’ records had had only rudimentary harmonies. While Brian was an excellent falsetto singer, and Mike a very good bass, the other three members of the group were less accomplished. Carl would grow to be one of the great vocalists of all time, but at this point was still in his early teens and had a thin voice. Dennis’ voice was also a little thin at this point, and he was behind the drum kit, which meant he didn’t get to sing live, and David Marks was apparently not allowed to sing on the records at all, other than taking a single joint lead with Carl on the first album. With the addition of Jardine, Brian now had another singer as strong as himself and Love, and the Surfer Girl album, the first one on which Jardine appears, sees Brian expanding from the rather rudimentary vocal arrangements of the first two albums to something that incorporates a lot more of the influence of the Four Freshmen. You can hear this most startlingly on “In My Room”. This is one of the first songs on which Jardine took part in the studio, though he’s actually not very audible in the vocal arrangement, which instead concentrates on the three brothers. “In My Room” is a major, major, step forward in the group’s sound, in the themes that would appear in their songwriting for the next few years, and in the juxtaposition of the lyrical theme and the musical arrangement.  The song’s lyrics, written by Gary Usher but inspired by Wilson’s experiences, are about solitude, and the song starts out with Brian singing alone, but then Brian moves up to the third note of the scale and Carl comes in under him, singing the note Brian started on. Then they both move up again, Brian to the fifth and Carl to the third, with Dennis joining in on the note that Brian had started on, before Mike and Alan finally also join in. Brian is singing about being alone, but he has his family with him, supporting him:  [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, “In My Room”] This new lineup of the group, with Alan augmenting the other five, might even have lasted, except for a chain of events that started on David Marks’ fifteenth birthday. Murry Wilson, who was still managing the group at this point, had never liked the idea of someone from outside the family being an equal member, and was particularly annoyed at David because Murry had tried to have an affair with David’s mother, which hadn’t worked out well for him.  But then on Marks’ fifteenth birthday, he and Dennis Wilson both caught a sexually transmitted infection from the same sex worker, and when Murry Wilson found this out — as he had to, as he needed to pay their doctor’s bills — he became furious and started screaming at the whole group.  At that point, David had had enough. His mother had been telling him that he was the real talent in the group and he didn’t need those Wilsons, and as a fifteen-year-old kid he didn’t have the understanding to realise that this might not be entirely true. He said “OK, I quit”. At first, the rest of the group thought that he was joking, and even he wasn’t at all sure that he wanted to leave the group altogether. He remained in the band for the next month, but Murry Wilson kept reminding his sons that Marks had quit and that they’d all heard him, and refused to speak directly to him — anything that Murry wanted to say to David, he said to Carl, who passed the message on.  And even though the rest of the group definitely wanted David to stay — especially Brian, who liked having the freedom not to go out on tour, and Carl, who had been the one who’d lobbied to bring his friend into the group in the first place — David was still, as the youngest member, the only one who didn’t sing, and the only one not part of the family, regarded by the others as somewhat lesser than the rest of the band.  David became increasingly frustrated, especially when they were recording the Little Deuce Coupe album. That album was made up entirely of songs about cars, and the group were so short of material that the album ended up being filled out with four songs from earlier albums, including two from the Surfer Girl album released only the previous month. Yet when David tried to persuade Brian to have the group record his song “Kustom Kar Show”, Brian told David that he wasn’t ready to be writing songs for the group.  All this, plus pressure from David’s parents to make him more of a focal point of the group, led to his resignation eventually being accepted, and backdated to the original date he quit. He played his last show with the group on October the fifth 1963, and then formed his own band, the Marksmen, who signed to A&M:  [Excerpt: Dave and the Marksmen, “Kustom Kar Show”] There have been rumours that Murry Wilson threatened DJs that the Beach Boys wouldn’t co-operate with them if they played Marksmen records, but in truth, listening to the records the Marksmen made during their two years of existence, it’s quite obvious why they weren’t played — they were fairly shoddy-sounding garage rock records, with little to commend them. Indeed, they actually sound somewhat better now than they would have done at the time — some of Marks’ flatter and more affectless vocals prefigure the sound of some punk singers, but not in a way that would have had any commercial potential in 1963. Meanwhile, the Beach Boys continued, with Alan Jardine buying a Stratocaster and switching to rhythm guitar, and Brian Wilson resigning himself to having to perform live, at least at the moment, and returning to his old role on the bass. Jardine was now, for publicity purposes, a full member of the group, though he would remain on a salary rather than an equal partner for many years — Murry Wilson didn’t want to make the same mistake with him that he had with Marks. And there was still the constant need for new material, which didn’t let up. Brian’s songwriting was progressing at a furious pace, and that can be seen nowhere better than on “The Warmth of the Sun”, a song he wrote, with Love writing the lyrics, around the time of the Kennedy assassination — the two men have differed over the years over whether it was written the night before or the night after the assassination. “The Warmth of the Sun” is quite staggeringly harmonically sophisticated. We’ve talked before in this podcast about the standard doo-wop progression — the one, minor sixth, minor second, fifth progression that you get in about a million songs: [demonstrates] “The Warmth of the Sun” starts out that way — its first two chords are C, Am, played in the standard arpeggiated way one expects from that kind of song: [demonstrates] You’d expect from that  that the song would go C, Am, Dm, G or C, Am, F, G. But instead of moving to Dm or F, as one normally would, the song moves to E flat, and *starts the progression over*, a minor third up, so you have: [demonstrates] It then stops that progression after two bars, moves back to the Dm one would expect from the original progression, and stays there for twice as long as normal, before moving on to the normal G — and then throwing in a G augmented at the end, which is a normal G chord but with the D note raised to E flat, so it ties in to that original unexpected chord change. And it does all this *in the opening line of the song*: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, “The Warmth of the Sun”] This is harmonic sophistication on a totally different order from anything else that was being done in teen pop music at the time — it was far closer to the modern jazz harmonies of the Four Freshmen that Brian loved than to doo-wop. The new five-piece lineup of the group recorded that on January the first, 1964, and on the same day they recorded a song that combined two of Brian’s other big influences. “Fun Fun Fun” had lyrics by Mike Love — some of his wittiest — and starts out with an intro taken straight from “Johnny B. Goode”: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, “Fun Fun Fun”] But while the rest of the track keeps the same feel as the Chuck Berry song, the verse goes in a different harmonic direction, and actually owes a lot to “Da Doo Ron Ron”. Instead of using a blues progression, as Berry normally would, the verse uses the same I-IV-I-V progression that “Da Doo Ron Ron”‘s chorus does, but uses it to very different effect: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, “Fun Fun Fun”] That became the group’s fourth top ten hit, and made number five on the charts — but the group suddenly had some real competition. At numbers one, two, and three were the Beatles. Brian Wilson realised that he needed to up his game if he was going to compete, and he did. In April 1964 he started working on a new single. By this time, while the Beach Boys themselves were still playing most of the instruments, Brian was bringing in additional musicians to augment them, and expanding his instrumental palette. The basic track was the core members of the band — Carl playing both lead and rhythm guitar, Alan playing bass, and Dennis playing drums, with Brian on keyboards — but there were two further bass players, Glen Campbell and Ray Pohlman, thickening the sound on six-string bass, plus two saxophones, and Hal Blaine adding percussion.  And the main instrument providing chordal support wasn’t guitar or organ, as it usually had been, but a harpsichord, an instrument Brian would use a lot over the next few years: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, “I Get Around (backing track)”] The recording session for that backing track was also another breaking point for the band. Murry Wilson, himself a frustrated songwriter and producer, was at the session and kept insisting that there was a problem with the bassline. Eventually, Brian had enough of his father’s interference, and fired him as the band’s manager. Murry would continue to keep trying to interfere in his children’s career, but this was the point at which the Beach Boys finally took control over their own futures. A few days later, they reconvened in the studio to record the vocals for what would become their first number one hit: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, “I Get Around”] It’s fascinating to see that even this early in the group’s career, and on one of their biggest, summeriest hits, there’s already a tension in the lyrics, a sense of wanting to move on — “I’m getting bugged driving up and down the same old strip/I’ve got to find a new place where the kids are hip”. The lyrics are Love’s, but as is so often the case with Brian Wilson’s collaborations, Love seems to have been expressing something that Wilson was feeling at the time. The Beach Boys had risen to the challenge from the Beatles, in a way that few other American musicians could, and “I Get Around” was good enough that it made the top ten in the UK, and became a particular favourite in the Mod subculture in London. The group would only become more popular over the next few years in the UK, a new place where the kids were hip. “I Get Around” is a worthy classic, but the B-side, “Don’t Worry Baby”, is if anything even better. It had been recorded in January, and had already been released on their Shut Down vol 2 album in March. It had originally been intended for the Ronettes, and was inspired by “Be My Baby”, which had astonished Brian Wilson when it had been released a few months earlier. He would later recall having to pull over to the side of the road when he first heard the drum intro to that record: [Excerpt: The Ronettes, “Be My Baby”] Brian would play that record over and over, on repeat, for days at a time, and would try to absorb every nuance of the record and its production, and he tried to come up with something that could follow it. Wilson took the basic rhythm and chord sequence of the song, plus melodic fragments like the line “Be my little baby”, and reworked them into a song that clearly owes a lot to its inspiration, but which stands on its own: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, “Don’t Worry Baby”] Phil Spector turned the song down, and so the Beach Boys recorded it themselves, and I have to say that this was only a good thing — Ronnie Spector recorded a solo version of it many decades later, and it’s a fine performance, but the lyric misses something when it’s sung by a woman rather than a man. That lyric was by Roger Christian, and in it we see the tension between the more emotional themes that Wilson wanted to explore and the surf and car lyrics that had made up the majority of their singles to this point. The lyric is ostensibly about a car race, and indeed it seems to be setting up precisely the kind of situation that was common in teen tragedy records of the period. The protagonist sings “I guess I should have kept my mouth shut when I started to brag about my car,  but I can’t back down now because I pushed the other guys too far”, and the whole lyric is focused on his terror of an upcoming race.  This seems intended to lead to the kind of situation that we see in “Dead Man’s Curve”, or “Tell Laura I Love Her”, or in another teen tragedy song we’ll be looking at in a couple of weeks, with the protagonist dead in a car crash. But instead, this is short-circuited. The protagonist’s fears are allayed by his girlfriend: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, “Don’t Worry Baby”] What we have here is someone trying to deal with a particular kind of anxiety brought about by what we now refer to as toxic masculinity. The protagonist has been showing off about his driving skills in front of his peers, and has now found himself in a situation that he can’t cope with. He’s saved by a figure we’ll see a lot more of in Brian’s songs, whoever the lyricist, the supernaturally good woman who understands the protagonist and loves him despite, or because of, his faults, even though she’s too good for him. Obviously, one can point to all sorts of reasons why this figure might be considered problematic — the idea that the man is unable to deal with his own emotional problems without a woman fixing him — but there’s an emotional truth to it that one doesn’t get in much music of the era, and even if it’s a somewhat flawed view of gender relations, it speaks to a very particular kind of insecurity at the inability to live up to traditional masculine roles, and is all the more affecting when it’s paired with the braggadocio of the A-side. The combination means we see the bragging and posturing on the A-side as just a facade, covering over the real emotional fragility of the narrator. Each side reinforces the other, and the combination is one of the most perfect pairings ever released as a single. “Don’t Worry Baby”, released as “I Get Around”’s B-side, made the charts in its own right peaking at number twenty-four. The B-side to the next single further elaborated on the themes of “Don’t Worry Baby”: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, “She Knows Me Too Well”] This repurposing of the emotional and musical style of girl-group songs to deal with the emotional vulnerability that comes from acknowledging and attempting to process toxic masculinity is something that few other songwriters were capable of at this point – only some of John Lennon’s work a couple of years later comes close to dealing with this very real area of the emotional landscape, and Lennon, like Wilson, often does so by using the figure of the perfect woman who will save the protagonist. In 1964, the group once again released four albums – Shut Down vol.2, All Summer Long, a live album, and a Christmas album – and they also did most of the work on yet another album, The Beach Boys Today!, which would be released in early 1965. As these recordings progressed, Brian Wilson was more and more ambitious, both in terms of the emotional effect of the music and his arrangements, increasingly using session musicians to augment the group, and trying for a variant on Phil Spector’s production style, but one which emphasised gentle fragility rather than sturm und drang. Possibly the greatest track he created in 1964 ended up not being used by the Beach Boys, though, but was given to Glen Campbell: [Excerpt: Glen Campbell, “Guess I’m Dumb”] Campbell got given that track because of an enormous favour he’d done the group. The mental strain of touring had finally got too much for Brian, and in December, on a plane to Texas, he’d had a breakdown, screaming on the plane and refusing to get off. Eventually, they coaxed him off the plane, and he’d managed to get through that night’s show, but had flown back to LA straight after. Campbell, who was a session guitarist who had played on a number of the Beach Boys’ recordings, and had a minor career as a singer at this point, had flown out at almost no notice and for the next five months he replaced Brian on stage for most of their shows, before the group got a permanent replacement in. Brian Wilson had retired from the road, and the hope was that by doing so, he would reduce the strain on himself enough that he could keep writing and producing for the group without making his mental health worse. And for a while, at least, that seemed to be how it worked out. We’ll take a look at the results in a few weeks’ time.

Surf's up as the Lyric Boys dive into 10 of the wildest Beach Boys lyrics, touching upon root beer addiction, illegal street racing, a sadistic corn-stealing boat captain, WAP, Meatloaf the singer and meatloaf the loaf, the genius of Pet Sounds, and a dangerous Charles Manson encounter. Songs featured: Little Deuce Coupe, Be True To Your School, Pom Pom Play Girl, I'm So Young, Chug-A-Lug, She Knows Me Too Well, I Get Around, When I Grow Up (To Be A Man), California Girls, Sloop John B, Find the Lyric Boys online at www.TheLyricBoys.com. Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thelyricboys Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thelyricboys/ Tik Tok: https://www.tiktok.com/@thelyricboys Twitter: https://twitter.com/thelyricboys YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCS6Xws01HxTY7PYQsAgO9Mw

Tonight we talk about music that changed a generation! My guest is David Marks. David played guitar with the Beach Boys and performed on the band's first four albums: "Surfin' Safari," "Surfin' U.S.A.," "Surfer Girl," and "Little Deuce Coupe." After the Beach Boys, David formed the group "David Marks & The Marksman," which was one of the first acts signed by Herb Alpert's A&M Records in 1964. We talk to David about working with the Beach Boys, including joining them on their 50th Anniversary tour, and creating music that forever influenced contemporary music for years to come!! https://www.davidleemarks.com/

Tonight we talk about music that changed a generation! My guest is David Marks. David played guitar with the Beach Boys and performed on the band's first four albums: "Surfin' Safari," "Surfin' U.S.A.," "Surfer Girl," and "Little Deuce Coupe." After the Beach Boys, David formed the group "David Marks & The Marksman," which was one of the first acts signed by Herb Alpert's A&M Records in 1964. We talk to David about working with the Beach Boys, including joining them on their 50th Anniversary tour, and creating music that forever influenced contemporary music for years to come!! https://www.davidleemarks.com/

The Listener's Series continues as Pat and Kyle welcome Kevin Hartbarger to the Guest Co-Host seat to discuss one of his favorite bands... The Beach Boys!! Get ready because this one is epic in length!

A detailed look at black, African-American, culture during the "Sixties". (1960-1969) (Bonus Artists: hidingtobefound & Luck Pacheco)   Overview   "The Sixties":  the counterculture and revolution in social norms about clothing, music, drugs, dress, sexuality, formalities, and schooling – or - irresponsible excess, flamboyance, and decay of social order.   Also labeled the Swinging Sixties because of the fall or relaxation of social taboos especially relating to racism and sexism that occurred during this time.   Also described as a classical Jungian nightmare cycle, where a rigid culture, unable to contain the demands for greater individual freedom, broke free of the social constraints of the previous age through extreme deviation from the norm.   The confrontation between the US and the Soviet Union dominated geopolitics during the '60s, with the struggle expanding into developing nations in Latin America, Africa, and Asia characterized by proxy wars, funding of insurgencies, and puppet governments.   In response to civil disobedience campaigns from groups like the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), U.S. President John F. Kennedy, pushed for social reforms. Kennedy's assassination in 1963 was a shock.   Liberal reforms were finally passed under Lyndon B. Johnson including civil rights for African Americans· and healthcare for the elderly and the poor. Despite his large-scale Great Society programs, Johnson was increasingly reviled. The heavy-handed American role in the Vietnam War outraged student protestors around the globe.   The assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., anti-Vietnam War movement, and the police response towards protesters of the 1968 Democratic National Convention, defined a politics of violence in the United States.   The 1960s were marked by several notable assassinations:   12 June 1963 – Medgar Evers, an NAACP field secretary. Assassinated by Byron de la Beckwith, a member of the Ku Klux Klan in Jackson, Mississippi.   22 November 1963 – John F. Kennedy, President of the United States. Assassinated by Lee Harvey Oswald while riding in a motorcade through Dealey Plaza in Dallas, Texas.   21 February 1965 – Malcolm X. Assassinated by members of the Nation of Islam in New York City. There is a dispute about which members killed Malcolm X.   4 April 1968 – Martin Luther King, Jr., civil rights leader. Assassinated by James Earl Ray in Memphis, Tennessee.   5 June 1968 – Robert F. Kennedy, United States Senator. Assassinated by Sirhan Sirhan in Los Angeles, after taking California in the presidential national primaries.   Social and political movements (counterculture)   Flower Power/Hippies In the second half of the decade, young people began to revolt against the conservative norms of the time. The youth involved in the popular social aspects of the movement became known as hippies. These groups created a movement toward liberation in society, including the sexual revolution, questioning authority and government, and demanding more freedoms and rights for women and minorities. The movement was also marked by the first widespread, socially accepted drug use (including LSD and marijuana) and psychedelic music.     Anti-war movement The war in Vietnam would eventually lead to a commitment of over half a million American troops, resulting in over 58,500 American deaths and producing a large-scale antiwar movement in the United States. Students became a powerful and disruptive force and university campuses sparked a national debate over the war. The antiwar movement was heavily influenced by the American Communist Party, but by the mid-1960s it outgrew this and became a broad-based mass movement centered in universities and churches: one kind of protest was called a "sit-in".   Civil rights movement Beginning in the mid-1950s and continuing into the late 1960s, African-Americans in the United States aimed at outlawing racial discrimination against black Americans and voting rights to them. The emergence of the Black Power movement, which lasted roughly from 1966 to 1975, enlarged the aims of the civil rights movement to include racial dignity, economic and political self-sufficiency, and anti-imperialism. The movement was characterized by major campaigns of civil resistance. Forms of protest and/or civil disobedience included boycotts such as the successful Montgomery Bus Boycott (1955–1956) in Alabama; "sit-ins" such as the influential Greensboro sit-ins (1960) in North Carolina; marches, such as the Selma to Montgomery marches (1965) in Alabama.; and a wide range of other nonviolent activities. Noted legislative achievements during this phase of the civil rights movement were passage of Civil Rights Act of 1964, that banned discrimination based on "race, color, religion, or national origin" in employment practices and public accommodations; the Voting Rights Act of 1965, that restored and protected voting rights; the Immigration and Nationality Services Act of 1965, that dramatically opened entry to the U.S. to immigrants other than traditional European groups; and the Fair Housing Act of 1968, that banned discrimination in the sale or rental of housing.   Hispanic and Chicano movement Another large ethnic minority group, the Mexican-Americans, are among other Hispanics in the U.S. who fought to end racial discrimination and socioeconomic disparity. In the 1960s and the following 1970s, Hispanic-American culture was on the rebound like ethnic music, foods, culture and identity both became popular and assimilated into the American mainstream. Spanish-language television networks, radio stations and newspapers increased in presence across the country.   Second-wave feminism A second wave of feminism in the United States and around the world gained momentum in the early 1960s. While the first wave of the early 20th century was centered on gaining suffrage and overturning de jure inequalities, the second wave was focused on changing cultural and social norms and de facto inequalities associated with women. At the time, a woman's place was generally seen as being in the home, and they were excluded from many jobs and professions. Feminists took to the streets, marching and protesting, writing books and debating to change social and political views that limited women. In 1963, with Betty Friedan's revolutionary book, The Feminine Mystique, the role of women in society, and in public and private life was questioned. By 1966, the movement was beginning to grow and power as women's group spread across the country and Friedan, along with other feminists, founded the National Organization for Women. In 1968, "Women's Liberation" became a household term.   Gay rights movement The United States, in the middle of a social revolution, led the world in LGBT rights in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Inspired by the civil-rights movement and the women's movement, early gay-rights pioneers had begun, by the 1960s, to build a movement. These groups were rather conservative in their practices, emphasizing that gay men and women are no different from those who are straight and deserve full equality. This philosophy would be dominant again after AIDS, but by the very end of the 1960s, the movement's goals would change and become more radical, demanding a right to be different, and encouraging gay pride.   Crime The 1960s was also associated with a large increase in crime and urban unrest of all types. Between 1960 and 1969 reported incidences of violent crime per 100,000 people in the United States nearly doubled and have yet to return to the levels of the early 1960s. Large riots broke out in many cities like Chicago, Detroit, Los Angeles, New York City, Newark, New Jersey, Oakland, California and Washington, D.C. By the end of the decade, politicians like George Wallace and Richard Nixon campaigned on restoring law and order to a nation troubled with the new unrest.   Economics The decade began with a recession and at that time unemployment was considered high at around 7%. John F. Kennedy promised to "get America moving again." To do this, he instituted a 7% tax credit for businesses that invest in new plants and equipment. By the end of the decade, median family income had risen from $8,540 in 1963 to $10,770 by 1969. Minimum wage was $1.30 per hour / ~$2,700 per year (~$18,700 in 2018)   Popular culture   The counterculture movement dominated the second half of the 1960s, its most famous moments being the Summer of Love in San Francisco in 1967, and the Woodstock Festival in upstate New York in 1969. Psychedelic drugs, especially LSD, were widely used medicinally, spiritually and recreationally throughout the late 1960s, and were popularized by Timothy Leary with his slogan "Turn on, tune in, drop out". Psychedelic influenced the music, artwork and films of the decade, and several prominent musicians died of drug overdoses. There was a growing interest in Eastern religions and philosophy, and many attempts were made to found communes, which varied from supporting free love to religious puritanism.   Music   British Invasion: The Beatles arrive at John F. Kennedy International Airport, 7 February 1964   "The 60's were a leap in human consciousness. Mahatma Gandhi, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Che Guevara, Mother Teresa, they led a revolution of conscience. The Beatles, The Doors, Jimi Hendrix created revolution and evolution themes. The music was like Dalí, with many colors and revolutionary ways. The youth of today must go there to find themselves." – Carlos Santana.     As the 1960s began, the major rock-and-roll stars of the '50s such as Chuck Berry and Little Richard had dropped off the charts and popular music in the US came to be dominated by Motown girl groups and novelty pop songs. Another important change in music during the early 1960s was the American folk music revival which introduced Joan Baez, Pete Seeger, The Kingston Trio, Harry Belafonte, Bob Dylan, Odetta, and many other Singer-songwriters to the public.   Girl groups and female singers, such as the Shirelles, Betty Everett, Little Eva, the Dixie Cups, the Ronettes, and the Supremes dominated the charts in the early 1960s. This style consisted typically of light pop themes about teenage romance, backed by vocal harmonies and a strong rhythm. Most girl groups were African-American, but white girl groups and singers, such as Lesley Gore, the Angels, and the Shangri-Las emerged by 1963.   Around the same time, record producer Phil Spector began producing girl groups and created a new kind of pop music production that came to be known as the Wall of Sound. This style emphasized higher budgets and more elaborate arrangements, and more melodramatic musical themes in place of a simple, light-hearted pop sound. Spector's innovations became integral to the growing sophistication of popular music from 1965 onward.   Also during the early '60s, the “car song” emerged as a rock subgenre and coupled with the surf rock subgenre. Such notable songs include "Little Deuce Coupe," "409," and "Shut Down," all by the Beach Boys; Jan and Dean's "Little Old Lady from Pasadena" and "Drag City," among many others.   While rock 'n' roll had 'disappeared' from the US charts in the early '60s, it never died out in Europe and Britain was a hotbed of rock-and-roll activity during this time. In late 1963, the Beatles embarked on their first US tour. A few months later, rock-and-roll founding father Chuck Berry emerged from a 2-1/2-year prison stint and resumed recording and touring. The stage was set for the spectacular revival of rock music.   In the UK, the Beatles played raucous rock 'n' roll – as well as doo wop, girl-group songs, show tunes. Beatlemania abruptly exploded after the group's appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show in 1964.   As the counterculture movement developed, artists began making new kinds of music influenced by the use of psychedelic drugs. Guitarist Jimi Hendrix emerged onto the scene in 1967 with a radically new approach to electric guitar that replaced Chuck Berry, previously seen as the gold standard of rock guitar. Rock artists began to take on serious themes and social commentary/protest instead of simplistic pop themes.   A major development in popular music during the mid-1960s was the movement away from singles and towards albums.   Blues also continued to develop strongly during the '60s, but after 1965, it increasingly shifted to the young white rock audience and away from its traditional black audience, which moved on to other styles such as soul and funk.   Jazz music during the first half of the '60s was largely a continuation of '50s styles, retaining its core audience of young, urban, college-educated whites. By 1967, the death of several important jazz figures such as John Coltrane and Nat King Cole precipitated a decline in the genre. The takeover of rock in the late '60s largely spelled the end of jazz as a mainstream form of music, after it had dominated much of the first half of the 20th century.   Significant events in music in the 1960s:   Sam Cooke was shot and killed at a motel in Los Angeles, California [11 December 1964] at age 33 under suspicious circumstances.   Motown Record Corporation was founded in 1960. Its first Top Ten hit was "Shop Around" by the Miracles in 1960. "Shop Around" peaked at number-two on the Billboard Hot 100 and was Motown's first million-selling record.   The Marvelettes scored Motown Record Corporation's first US No. 1 pop hit, "Please Mr. Postman" in 1961. Motown would score 110 Billboard Top-Ten hits during its run.   The Supremes scored twelve number-one hit singles between 1964 and 1969, beginning with "Where Did Our Love Go".   John Coltrane released A Love Supreme in late 1964, considered among the most acclaimed jazz albums of the era.   In 1966, The Supremes A' Go-Go was the first album by a female group to reach the top position of the Billboard magazine pop albums chart in the United States.   The Jimi Hendrix Experience released two successful albums during 1967, Are You Experienced and Axis: Bold as Love, that innovate both guitar, trio and recording techniques.   R & B legend Otis Redding has his first No. 1 hit with the legendary Sitting on the Dock of the Bay. He also played at the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967 just before he died in a plane crash.   The Bee Gees released their international debut album Bee Gees 1st in July 1967 which included the pop standard "To Love Somebody".   1968: after The Yardbirds fold, Led Zeppelin was formed by Jimmy Page and manager Peter Grant, with Robert Plant, John Bonham and John Paul Jones; and, released their debut album Led Zeppelin.   Big Brother and the Holding Company, with Janis Joplin as lead singer, became an overnight sensation after their performance at the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967 and released their second album Cheap Thrills in 1968.   Gram Parsons with The Byrds released the extremely influential LP Sweetheart of the Rodeo in late 1968, forming the basis for country rock.   The Jimi Hendrix Experience released the highly influential double LP Electric Ladyland in 1968 that furthered the guitar and studio innovations of his previous two albums.   Woodstock Festival, 1969   Sly & the Family Stone revolutionized black music with their massive 1968 hit single "Dance to the Music" and by 1969 became international sensations with the release of their hit record Stand!. The band cemented their position as a vital counterculture band when they performed at the Woodstock Festival.   Film Some of Hollywood's most notable blockbuster films of the 1960s include: 2001: A Space Odyssey, The Apartment, The Birds, I Am Curious (Yellow), Bonnie and Clyde, Breakfast at Tiffany's, Bullitt, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Carnival of Souls, Cleopatra, Cool , and Luke, The Dirty Dozen, Doctor Zhivago, Dr. Strangelove, Easy Rider, Exodus, Faces, Funny Girl, Goldfinger, The Graduate, Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, , Head, How the West Was Won, The , Hustler, Ice Station Zebra, In the Heat of the Night, The Italian Job, It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, Jason and the Argonauts, Judgment at Nuremberg, The Jungle Book, Lawrence of Arabia, The Lion in Winter, The Longest Day, The Love Bug, A Man for All Seasons, The Manchurian Candidate, Mary Poppins, Medium Cool, Midnight Cowboy, My Fair Lady, Night of the Living Dead, The Pink Panther, The Odd Couple, Oliver!, One Hundred and One Dalmatians, One Million Years B.C., Planet of the Apes, Psycho, Romeo and Juliet, Rosemary's Baby, The Sound of Music, Spartacus, Swiss Family Robinson, To Kill a Mockingbird, Valley of the Dolls, West Side Story, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, The Wild Bunch.   Television   The most prominent American TV series of the 1960s include: The Ed Sullivan Show, Star Trek, Peyton Place, The Twilight Zone, The Outer Limits, The Andy Williams Show, The Dean Martin Show, The Wonderful World of Disney, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, The Beverly Hillbillies, Bonanza, Batman, McHale's Navy, Laugh-In, The Dick Van Dyke Show, The Fugitive, The Tonight Show, Gunsmoke, The Andy Griffith Show, Gilligan's Island, Mission: Impossible, The Flintstones, The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet, Lassie, The Danny Thomas Show, The Lucy Show, My Three Sons, The Red Skelton Show, Bewitched and I Dream of Jeannie.   The Flintstones was a favored show, receiving 40 million views an episode with an average of 3 views a day.   Some programming such as The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour became controversial by challenging the foundations of America's corporate and governmental controls; making fun of world leaders, and questioning U.S. involvement in and escalation of the Vietnam War.   Fashion   Significant fashion trends of the 1960s include:     The Beatles exerted an enormous influence on young men's fashions and hairstyles in the 1960s which included most notably the mop-top haircut, the Beatle boots and the Nehru jacket.   The hippie movement late in the decade also had a strong influence on clothing styles, including bell-bottom jeans, tie-dye and batik fabrics, as well as paisley prints.   The bikini came into fashion in 1963 after being featured in the film Beach Party.   Mary Quant invented the miniskirt, which became one of the most popular fashion rages in the late 1960s among young women and teenage girls. Its popularity continued throughout the first half of the 1970s and then disappeared temporarily from mainstream fashion before making a comeback in the mid-1980s.   Men's mainstream hairstyles ranged from the pompadour, the crew cut, the flattop hairstyle, the tapered hairstyle, and short, parted hair in the early part of the decade, to longer parted hairstyles with sideburns towards the latter half of the decade.   Women's mainstream hairstyles ranged from beehive hairdos, the bird's nest hairstyle, and the chignon hairstyle in the early part of the decade, to very short styles popularized by Twiggy and Mia Farrow in Rosemary's Baby towards the latter half of the decade.   African-American hairstyles for men and women included the afro.       James Brown "Papa's Got A Brand New Bag" (1965) "I Got You (I Feel Good)" (1965) "Say It Loud--I'm Black and I'm Proud" (1968)     Ray Charles "Georgia On My Mind' (1960) "Hit the Road Jack" (1961) "I Can't Stop Loving You" (1962)     Marvin Gaye "Ain't That Peculiar?" (1965) "I Heard It Through the Grapevine" (1968) "Too Busy Thinking About My Baby" (1969)     The Temptations "My Girl" (1965) "Ain't Too to Beg" (1966) "I Can't Get Next to You" (1969)     Bobby "Blue" Bland "I Pity the Fool" (1961) "Turn On Your Lovelight" (1961) "Ain't Nothing You Can Do" (1964)     Aretha Franklin "I Never Loved a Man (The Way I Love You)" (1967) "Respect" (1967) "Chain of Fools" (1967-68)     The Supremes "Where Did Our Love Go?" (1964) "Stop! In the Name of Love" (1965) "Love Child" (1968)     Smokey Robinson & The Miracles "Shop Around" (1960-61) "You've Really Got a Hold On Me" (1962-63) "The Tracks of My Tears" (1965)     The Impressions "Gypsy Woman" (1961) "It's All Right" (1963) "People Get Ready" (1965)     Brook Benton "Kiddio" (1960) "Think Twice" (1961) "Hotel Happiness" (1962-63)     Jackie Wilson "Doggin' Around" (1960) "Baby Workout" (1963) "(Your Love Keeps Lifting Me) Higher and Higher" (1967)     Sam Cooke "Wonderful World" (1960) "Bring It On Home To Me" (1962) "A Change is Gonna Come" (1965)     Otis Redding "These Arms of Mine" (1963) "Try a Little Tenderness" (1966-67) "(Sittin' On) The Dock of the Bay" (1968)     Jerry Butler "He Will Break Your Heart" (1960) "Never Give You Up" (1968) "Only the Strong Survive" (1969)     Wilson Pickett "In the Midnight Hour" (1965) "Land of 1000 Dances" (1966) "Funky Broadway" (1967)     Stevie Wonder "Fingertips, Part 2" (1963) "Uptight (Everything's Alright)" (1965-66) "I Was Made to Love Her" (1967)     B.B. King "Beautician Blues" (1964) "Waiting on You" (1966) "Paying the Cost To Be the Boss" (1968)     Joe Tex "Hold What You've Got" (1964-65) "A Sweet Woman Like You" (1965-66) "Skinny Legs and All" (1967)     The Marvelettes "Please Mr. Postman" (1961) "Beechwood 4-5789" (1962) "Too Many Fish in the Sea" (1965)     Mary Wells "Bye Bye Baby" (1960-61) "The One Who Really Loves You" (1962) "My Guy" (1964)     The Four Tops "Baby, I Need Your Loving" (1964) "I Can't Help Myself (A/K/A Sugar Pie, Honey Bunch)" (1965) "Reach Out, I'll Be There" (1966)     Martha & The Vandellas "Heat Wave" (1963) "Dancing in the Street" (1964) "Nowhere to Run" (1965)     Dionne Warwick "Don't Make Me Over" (1962-63) "Anyone Who Had a Heart" (1963-64) "Walk On By" (1964)     Solomon Burke "Just Out of Reach (Of My Two Open Arms)" (1961) "Everybody Needs Somebody To Love" (1964) "Got To Get You Off My Mind" (1965)     Etta James "At Last" (1960-61) "Tell Mama" (1967-68) "I'd Rather Go Blind" (1967-68)     The Shirelles "Will You Love Me Tomorrow? (1960-61) "Dedicated to the One I Love" (1961) "Baby It's You" (1961-62)     Chuck Jackson "I Don't Want to Cry" (1961) "Any Day Now (My Wild Beautiful Bird)" (1962) "Beg Me" (1964)     Gene Chandler "Duke of Earl" (1962) "Rainbow" (1963) "I Fooled You This Time" (1966)     The Drifters "This Magic Moment" (1960) "Save the Last Dance for Me" (1960) "Up on the Roof" (1962-63)     Jr. Walker & The All-Stars "Shotgun" (1965) "(I'm A) Road Runner" (1966) "Home Cookin'" (1968-69)     Gladys Knight & The Pips "Every Beat of My Heart" (1961) "I Heard it Through the Grapevine" (1967) "Friendship Train" (1969)     Carla Thomas "Gee Whiz (Look at His Eyes)" (1961) "B-A-B-Y" (1966) "Another Night Without My Man" (1966)     Chubby Checker "The Twist" (1960) "Pony Time" (1961) "Dancin' Party" (1962)     Sam & Dave "Hold On! I'm A Comin'" (1966) "When Something is Wrong With My Baby" (1967) "Soul Man" (1967)     Joe Simon "My Adorable One" (1964) "Nine Pound Steel" (1967) "The Chokin' Kind" (1969)     The Dells "There Is" (1967-68) "Stay in My Corner" (1968) "Oh, What a Night" (1969)     Little Milton "So Mean To Me" (1962) "We're Gonna Make It" (1965) "Grits Ain't Groceries" (1969)     Ben E. King "Spanish Harlem" (1960-61) "Stand By Me" (1961) "That's When it Hurts" (1964)     Betty Everett "You're No Good" (1963) "The Shoop Shoop Song (It's in His Kiss)" (1964) "There'll Come a Time" (1969)     Hank Ballard & The Midnighters "Let's Go, Let's Go, Let's Go" (1960) "Finger Poppin' Time" (1960) "Nothing But Good" (1961)     Major Lance "The Monkey Time" (1963) "Um, Um, Um, Um, Um, Um" (1964) "Investigate" (1966)     Booker T. & The MGs "Green Onions" (1962) "Hip-Hug-Her" (1967) "Time is Tight" (1969)     The Intruders "Together" (1967) "Cowboys to Girls" (1968) "(Love is Like a) Baseball Game" (1968)     Ike & Tina Turner "A Fool in Love" (1960) "Goodbye, So Long" (1965) "River Deep--Mountain High" (1966)     Johnnie Taylor "I Got to Love Somebody's Baby" (1966) "Who's Making Love" (1968) "I Could Never Be President" (1969)     The Orlons "The Wah Watusi" (1962) "Don't Hang Up" (1962) "South Street" (1963)     Barbara Lewis "Hello Stranger" (1963) "Baby, I'm Yours" (1965) "Make Me Your Baby" (1965)     Maxine Brown "All in My Mind" (1960-61) "Oh No, Not My Baby" (1964) "One in a Million" (1966)     Garnet Mimms & The Enchanters "Cry Baby" (1963) "Tell Me Baby" (1964) "I'll Take Good Care of You" (1966)     Ramsey Lewis "The In Crowd" (1965) "Hang On Sloopy" (1965) "Wade in the Water" (1966)  

A detailed look at black, African-American, culture during the "Sixties". (1960-1969)   Overview   "The Sixties":  the counterculture and revolution in social norms about clothing, music, drugs, dress, sexuality, formalities, and schooling – or - irresponsible excess, flamboyance, and decay of social order.   Also labeled the Swinging Sixties because of the fall or relaxation of social taboos especially relating to racism and sexism that occurred during this time.   Also described as a classical Jungian nightmare cycle, where a rigid culture, unable to contain the demands for greater individual freedom, broke free of the social constraints of the previous age through extreme deviation from the norm.   The confrontation between the US and the Soviet Union dominated geopolitics during the '60s, with the struggle expanding into developing nations in Latin America, Africa, and Asia characterized by proxy wars, funding of insurgencies, and puppet governments.   In response to civil disobedience campaigns from groups like the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), U.S. President John F. Kennedy, pushed for social reforms. Kennedy's assassination in 1963 was a shock.   Liberal reforms were finally passed under Lyndon B. Johnson including civil rights for African Americans· and healthcare for the elderly and the poor. Despite his large-scale Great Society programs, Johnson was increasingly reviled. The heavy-handed American role in the Vietnam War outraged student protestors around the globe.   The assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., anti-Vietnam War movement, and the police response towards protesters of the 1968 Democratic National Convention, defined a politics of violence in the United States.   The 1960s were marked by several notable assassinations:   12 June 1963 – Medgar Evers, an NAACP field secretary. Assassinated by Byron de la Beckwith, a member of the Ku Klux Klan in Jackson, Mississippi.   22 November 1963 – John F. Kennedy, President of the United States. Assassinated by Lee Harvey Oswald while riding in a motorcade through Dealey Plaza in Dallas, Texas.   21 February 1965 – Malcolm X. Assassinated by members of the Nation of Islam in New York City. There is a dispute about which members killed Malcolm X.   4 April 1968 – Martin Luther King, Jr., civil rights leader. Assassinated by James Earl Ray in Memphis, Tennessee.   5 June 1968 – Robert F. Kennedy, United States Senator. Assassinated by Sirhan Sirhan in Los Angeles, after taking California in the presidential national primaries.   Social and political movements (counterculture)   Flower Power/Hippies In the second half of the decade, young people began to revolt against the conservative norms of the time. The youth involved in the popular social aspects of the movement became known as hippies. These groups created a movement toward liberation in society, including the sexual revolution, questioning authority and government, and demanding more freedoms and rights for women and minorities. The movement was also marked by the first widespread, socially accepted drug use (including LSD and marijuana) and psychedelic music.     Anti-war movement The war in Vietnam would eventually lead to a commitment of over half a million American troops, resulting in over 58,500 American deaths and producing a large-scale antiwar movement in the United States. Students became a powerful and disruptive force and university campuses sparked a national debate over the war. The antiwar movement was heavily influenced by the American Communist Party, but by the mid-1960s it outgrew this and became a broad-based mass movement centered in universities and churches: one kind of protest was called a "sit-in".   Civil rights movement Beginning in the mid-1950s and continuing into the late 1960s, African-Americans in the United States aimed at outlawing racial discrimination against black Americans and voting rights to them. The emergence of the Black Power movement, which lasted roughly from 1966 to 1975, enlarged the aims of the civil rights movement to include racial dignity, economic and political self-sufficiency, and anti-imperialism. The movement was characterized by major campaigns of civil resistance. Forms of protest and/or civil disobedience included boycotts such as the successful Montgomery Bus Boycott (1955–1956) in Alabama; "sit-ins" such as the influential Greensboro sit-ins (1960) in North Carolina; marches, such as the Selma to Montgomery marches (1965) in Alabama.; and a wide range of other nonviolent activities. Noted legislative achievements during this phase of the civil rights movement were passage of Civil Rights Act of 1964, that banned discrimination based on "race, color, religion, or national origin" in employment practices and public accommodations; the Voting Rights Act of 1965, that restored and protected voting rights; the Immigration and Nationality Services Act of 1965, that dramatically opened entry to the U.S. to immigrants other than traditional European groups; and the Fair Housing Act of 1968, that banned discrimination in the sale or rental of housing.   Hispanic and Chicano movement Another large ethnic minority group, the Mexican-Americans, are among other Hispanics in the U.S. who fought to end racial discrimination and socioeconomic disparity. In the 1960s and the following 1970s, Hispanic-American culture was on the rebound like ethnic music, foods, culture and identity both became popular and assimilated into the American mainstream. Spanish-language television networks, radio stations and newspapers increased in presence across the country.   Second-wave feminism A second wave of feminism in the United States and around the world gained momentum in the early 1960s. While the first wave of the early 20th century was centered on gaining suffrage and overturning de jure inequalities, the second wave was focused on changing cultural and social norms and de facto inequalities associated with women. At the time, a woman's place was generally seen as being in the home, and they were excluded from many jobs and professions. Feminists took to the streets, marching and protesting, writing books and debating to change social and political views that limited women. In 1963, with Betty Friedan's revolutionary book, The Feminine Mystique, the role of women in society, and in public and private life was questioned. By 1966, the movement was beginning to grow and power as women's group spread across the country and Friedan, along with other feminists, founded the National Organization for Women. In 1968, "Women's Liberation" became a household term.   Gay rights movement The United States, in the middle of a social revolution, led the world in LGBT rights in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Inspired by the civil-rights movement and the women's movement, early gay-rights pioneers had begun, by the 1960s, to build a movement. These groups were rather conservative in their practices, emphasizing that gay men and women are no different from those who are straight and deserve full equality. This philosophy would be dominant again after AIDS, but by the very end of the 1960s, the movement's goals would change and become more radical, demanding a right to be different, and encouraging gay pride.   Crime The 1960s was also associated with a large increase in crime and urban unrest of all types. Between 1960 and 1969 reported incidences of violent crime per 100,000 people in the United States nearly doubled and have yet to return to the levels of the early 1960s. Large riots broke out in many cities like Chicago, Detroit, Los Angeles, New York City, Newark, New Jersey, Oakland, California and Washington, D.C. By the end of the decade, politicians like George Wallace and Richard Nixon campaigned on restoring law and order to a nation troubled with the new unrest.   Economics The decade began with a recession and at that time unemployment was considered high at around 7%. John F. Kennedy promised to "get America moving again." To do this, he instituted a 7% tax credit for businesses that invest in new plants and equipment. By the end of the decade, median family income had risen from $8,540 in 1963 to $10,770 by 1969. Minimum wage was $1.30 per hour / ~$2,700 per year (~$18,700 in 2018)   Popular culture   The counterculture movement dominated the second half of the 1960s, its most famous moments being the Summer of Love in San Francisco in 1967, and the Woodstock Festival in upstate New York in 1969. Psychedelic drugs, especially LSD, were widely used medicinally, spiritually and recreationally throughout the late 1960s, and were popularized by Timothy Leary with his slogan "Turn on, tune in, drop out". Psychedelic influenced the music, artwork and films of the decade, and several prominent musicians died of drug overdoses. There was a growing interest in Eastern religions and philosophy, and many attempts were made to found communes, which varied from supporting free love to religious puritanism.   Music   British Invasion: The Beatles arrive at John F. Kennedy International Airport, 7 February 1964   "The 60's were a leap in human consciousness. Mahatma Gandhi, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Che Guevara, Mother Teresa, they led a revolution of conscience. The Beatles, The Doors, Jimi Hendrix created revolution and evolution themes. The music was like Dalí, with many colors and revolutionary ways. The youth of today must go there to find themselves." – Carlos Santana.     As the 1960s began, the major rock-and-roll stars of the '50s such as Chuck Berry and Little Richard had dropped off the charts and popular music in the US came to be dominated by Motown girl groups and novelty pop songs. Another important change in music during the early 1960s was the American folk music revival which introduced Joan Baez, Pete Seeger, The Kingston Trio, Harry Belafonte, Bob Dylan, Odetta, and many other Singer-songwriters to the public.   Girl groups and female singers, such as the Shirelles, Betty Everett, Little Eva, the Dixie Cups, the Ronettes, and the Supremes dominated the charts in the early 1960s. This style consisted typically of light pop themes about teenage romance, backed by vocal harmonies and a strong rhythm. Most girl groups were African-American, but white girl groups and singers, such as Lesley Gore, the Angels, and the Shangri-Las emerged by 1963.   Around the same time, record producer Phil Spector began producing girl groups and created a new kind of pop music production that came to be known as the Wall of Sound. This style emphasized higher budgets and more elaborate arrangements, and more melodramatic musical themes in place of a simple, light-hearted pop sound. Spector's innovations became integral to the growing sophistication of popular music from 1965 onward.   Also during the early '60s, the “car song” emerged as a rock subgenre and coupled with the surf rock subgenre. Such notable songs include "Little Deuce Coupe," "409," and "Shut Down," all by the Beach Boys; Jan and Dean's "Little Old Lady from Pasadena" and "Drag City," among many others.   While rock 'n' roll had 'disappeared' from the US charts in the early '60s, it never died out in Europe and Britain was a hotbed of rock-and-roll activity during this time. In late 1963, the Beatles embarked on their first US tour. A few months later, rock-and-roll founding father Chuck Berry emerged from a 2-1/2-year prison stint and resumed recording and touring. The stage was set for the spectacular revival of rock music.   In the UK, the Beatles played raucous rock 'n' roll – as well as doo wop, girl-group songs, show tunes. Beatlemania abruptly exploded after the group's appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show in 1964.   As the counterculture movement developed, artists began making new kinds of music influenced by the use of psychedelic drugs. Guitarist Jimi Hendrix emerged onto the scene in 1967 with a radically new approach to electric guitar that replaced Chuck Berry, previously seen as the gold standard of rock guitar. Rock artists began to take on serious themes and social commentary/protest instead of simplistic pop themes.   A major development in popular music during the mid-1960s was the movement away from singles and towards albums.   Blues also continued to develop strongly during the '60s, but after 1965, it increasingly shifted to the young white rock audience and away from its traditional black audience, which moved on to other styles such as soul and funk.   Jazz music during the first half of the '60s was largely a continuation of '50s styles, retaining its core audience of young, urban, college-educated whites. By 1967, the death of several important jazz figures such as John Coltrane and Nat King Cole precipitated a decline in the genre. The takeover of rock in the late '60s largely spelled the end of jazz as a mainstream form of music, after it had dominated much of the first half of the 20th century.   Significant events in music in the 1960s:   Sam Cooke was shot and killed at a motel in Los Angeles, California [11 December 1964] at age 33 under suspicious circumstances.   Motown Record Corporation was founded in 1960. Its first Top Ten hit was "Shop Around" by the Miracles in 1960. "Shop Around" peaked at number-two on the Billboard Hot 100 and was Motown's first million-selling record.   The Marvelettes scored Motown Record Corporation's first US No. 1 pop hit, "Please Mr. Postman" in 1961. Motown would score 110 Billboard Top-Ten hits during its run.   The Supremes scored twelve number-one hit singles between 1964 and 1969, beginning with "Where Did Our Love Go".   John Coltrane released A Love Supreme in late 1964, considered among the most acclaimed jazz albums of the era.   In 1966, The Supremes A' Go-Go was the first album by a female group to reach the top position of the Billboard magazine pop albums chart in the United States.   The Jimi Hendrix Experience released two successful albums during 1967, Are You Experienced and Axis: Bold as Love, that innovate both guitar, trio and recording techniques.   R & B legend Otis Redding has his first No. 1 hit with the legendary Sitting on the Dock of the Bay. He also played at the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967 just before he died in a plane crash.   The Bee Gees released their international debut album Bee Gees 1st in July 1967 which included the pop standard "To Love Somebody".   1968: after The Yardbirds fold, Led Zeppelin was formed by Jimmy Page and manager Peter Grant, with Robert Plant, John Bonham and John Paul Jones; and, released their debut album Led Zeppelin.   Big Brother and the Holding Company, with Janis Joplin as lead singer, became an overnight sensation after their performance at the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967 and released their second album Cheap Thrills in 1968.   Gram Parsons with The Byrds released the extremely influential LP Sweetheart of the Rodeo in late 1968, forming the basis for country rock.   The Jimi Hendrix Experience released the highly influential double LP Electric Ladyland in 1968 that furthered the guitar and studio innovations of his previous two albums.   Woodstock Festival, 1969   Sly & the Family Stone revolutionized black music with their massive 1968 hit single "Dance to the Music" and by 1969 became international sensations with the release of their hit record Stand!. The band cemented their position as a vital counterculture band when they performed at the Woodstock Festival.   Film Some of Hollywood's most notable blockbuster films of the 1960s include: 2001: A Space Odyssey, The Apartment, The Birds, I Am Curious (Yellow), Bonnie and Clyde, Breakfast at Tiffany's, Bullitt, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Carnival of Souls, Cleopatra, Cool , and Luke, The Dirty Dozen, Doctor Zhivago, Dr. Strangelove, Easy Rider, Exodus, Faces, Funny Girl, Goldfinger, The Graduate, Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, , Head, How the West Was Won, The , Hustler, Ice Station Zebra, In the Heat of the Night, The Italian Job, It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, Jason and the Argonauts, Judgment at Nuremberg, The Jungle Book, Lawrence of Arabia, The Lion in Winter, The Longest Day, The Love Bug, A Man for All Seasons, The Manchurian Candidate, Mary Poppins, Medium Cool, Midnight Cowboy, My Fair Lady, Night of the Living Dead, The Pink Panther, The Odd Couple, Oliver!, One Hundred and One Dalmatians, One Million Years B.C., Planet of the Apes, Psycho, Romeo and Juliet, Rosemary's Baby, The Sound of Music, Spartacus, Swiss Family Robinson, To Kill a Mockingbird, Valley of the Dolls, West Side Story, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, The Wild Bunch.   Television   The most prominent American TV series of the 1960s include: The Ed Sullivan Show, Star Trek, Peyton Place, The Twilight Zone, The Outer Limits, The Andy Williams Show, The Dean Martin Show, The Wonderful World of Disney, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, The Beverly Hillbillies, Bonanza, Batman, McHale's Navy, Laugh-In, The Dick Van Dyke Show, The Fugitive, The Tonight Show, Gunsmoke, The Andy Griffith Show, Gilligan's Island, Mission: Impossible, The Flintstones, The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet, Lassie, The Danny Thomas Show, The Lucy Show, My Three Sons, The Red Skelton Show, Bewitched and I Dream of Jeannie.   The Flintstones was a favored show, receiving 40 million views an episode with an average of 3 views a day.   Some programming such as The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour became controversial by challenging the foundations of America's corporate and governmental controls; making fun of world leaders, and questioning U.S. involvement in and escalation of the Vietnam War.   Fashion   Significant fashion trends of the 1960s include:     The Beatles exerted an enormous influence on young men's fashions and hairstyles in the 1960s which included most notably the mop-top haircut, the Beatle boots and the Nehru jacket.   The hippie movement late in the decade also had a strong influence on clothing styles, including bell-bottom jeans, tie-dye and batik fabrics, as well as paisley prints.   The bikini came into fashion in 1963 after being featured in the film Beach Party.   Mary Quant invented the miniskirt, which became one of the most popular fashion rages in the late 1960s among young women and teenage girls. Its popularity continued throughout the first half of the 1970s and then disappeared temporarily from mainstream fashion before making a comeback in the mid-1980s.   Men's mainstream hairstyles ranged from the pompadour, the crew cut, the flattop hairstyle, the tapered hairstyle, and short, parted hair in the early part of the decade, to longer parted hairstyles with sideburns towards the latter half of the decade.   Women's mainstream hairstyles ranged from beehive hairdos, the bird's nest hairstyle, and the chignon hairstyle in the early part of the decade, to very short styles popularized by Twiggy and Mia Farrow in Rosemary's Baby towards the latter half of the decade.   African-American hairstyles for men and women included the afro.       James Brown "Papa's Got A Brand New Bag" (1965) "I Got You (I Feel Good)" (1965) "Say It Loud--I'm Black and I'm Proud" (1968)     Ray Charles "Georgia On My Mind' (1960) "Hit the Road Jack" (1961) "I Can't Stop Loving You" (1962)     Marvin Gaye "Ain't That Peculiar?" (1965) "I Heard It Through the Grapevine" (1968) "Too Busy Thinking About My Baby" (1969)     The Temptations "My Girl" (1965) "Ain't Too to Beg" (1966) "I Can't Get Next to You" (1969)     Bobby "Blue" Bland "I Pity the Fool" (1961) "Turn On Your Lovelight" (1961) "Ain't Nothing You Can Do" (1964)     Aretha Franklin "I Never Loved a Man (The Way I Love You)" (1967) "Respect" (1967) "Chain of Fools" (1967-68)     The Supremes "Where Did Our Love Go?" (1964) "Stop! In the Name of Love" (1965) "Love Child" (1968)     Smokey Robinson & The Miracles "Shop Around" (1960-61) "You've Really Got a Hold On Me" (1962-63) "The Tracks of My Tears" (1965)     The Impressions "Gypsy Woman" (1961) "It's All Right" (1963) "People Get Ready" (1965)     Brook Benton "Kiddio" (1960) "Think Twice" (1961) "Hotel Happiness" (1962-63)     Jackie Wilson "Doggin' Around" (1960) "Baby Workout" (1963) "(Your Love Keeps Lifting Me) Higher and Higher" (1967)     Sam Cooke "Wonderful World" (1960) "Bring It On Home To Me" (1962) "A Change is Gonna Come" (1965)     Otis Redding "These Arms of Mine" (1963) "Try a Little Tenderness" (1966-67) "(Sittin' On) The Dock of the Bay" (1968)     Jerry Butler "He Will Break Your Heart" (1960) "Never Give You Up" (1968) "Only the Strong Survive" (1969)     Wilson Pickett "In the Midnight Hour" (1965) "Land of 1000 Dances" (1966) "Funky Broadway" (1967)     Stevie Wonder "Fingertips, Part 2" (1963) "Uptight (Everything's Alright)" (1965-66) "I Was Made to Love Her" (1967)     B.B. King "Beautician Blues" (1964) "Waiting on You" (1966) "Paying the Cost To Be the Boss" (1968)     Joe Tex "Hold What You've Got" (1964-65) "A Sweet Woman Like You" (1965-66) "Skinny Legs and All" (1967)     The Marvelettes "Please Mr. Postman" (1961) "Beechwood 4-5789" (1962) "Too Many Fish in the Sea" (1965)     Mary Wells "Bye Bye Baby" (1960-61) "The One Who Really Loves You" (1962) "My Guy" (1964)     The Four Tops "Baby, I Need Your Loving" (1964) "I Can't Help Myself (A/K/A Sugar Pie, Honey Bunch)" (1965) "Reach Out, I'll Be There" (1966)     Martha & The Vandellas "Heat Wave" (1963) "Dancing in the Street" (1964) "Nowhere to Run" (1965)     Dionne Warwick "Don't Make Me Over" (1962-63) "Anyone Who Had a Heart" (1963-64) "Walk On By" (1964)     Solomon Burke "Just Out of Reach (Of My Two Open Arms)" (1961) "Everybody Needs Somebody To Love" (1964) "Got To Get You Off My Mind" (1965)     Etta James "At Last" (1960-61) "Tell Mama" (1967-68) "I'd Rather Go Blind" (1967-68)     The Shirelles "Will You Love Me Tomorrow? (1960-61) "Dedicated to the One I Love" (1961) "Baby It's You" (1961-62)     Chuck Jackson "I Don't Want to Cry" (1961) "Any Day Now (My Wild Beautiful Bird)" (1962) "Beg Me" (1964)     Gene Chandler "Duke of Earl" (1962) "Rainbow" (1963) "I Fooled You This Time" (1966)     The Drifters "This Magic Moment" (1960) "Save the Last Dance for Me" (1960) "Up on the Roof" (1962-63)     Jr. Walker & The All-Stars "Shotgun" (1965) "(I'm A) Road Runner" (1966) "Home Cookin'" (1968-69)     Gladys Knight & The Pips "Every Beat of My Heart" (1961) "I Heard it Through the Grapevine" (1967) "Friendship Train" (1969)     Carla Thomas "Gee Whiz (Look at His Eyes)" (1961) "B-A-B-Y" (1966) "Another Night Without My Man" (1966)     Chubby Checker "The Twist" (1960) "Pony Time" (1961) "Dancin' Party" (1962)     Sam & Dave "Hold On! I'm A Comin'" (1966) "When Something is Wrong With My Baby" (1967) "Soul Man" (1967)     Joe Simon "My Adorable One" (1964) "Nine Pound Steel" (1967) "The Chokin' Kind" (1969)     The Dells "There Is" (1967-68) "Stay in My Corner" (1968) "Oh, What a Night" (1969)     Little Milton "So Mean To Me" (1962) "We're Gonna Make It" (1965) "Grits Ain't Groceries" (1969)     Ben E. King "Spanish Harlem" (1960-61) "Stand By Me" (1961) "That's When it Hurts" (1964)     Betty Everett "You're No Good" (1963) "The Shoop Shoop Song (It's in His Kiss)" (1964) "There'll Come a Time" (1969)     Hank Ballard & The Midnighters "Let's Go, Let's Go, Let's Go" (1960) "Finger Poppin' Time" (1960) "Nothing But Good" (1961)     Major Lance "The Monkey Time" (1963) "Um, Um, Um, Um, Um, Um" (1964) "Investigate" (1966)     Booker T. & The MGs "Green Onions" (1962) "Hip-Hug-Her" (1967) "Time is Tight" (1969)     The Intruders "Together" (1967) "Cowboys to Girls" (1968) "(Love is Like a) Baseball Game" (1968)     Ike & Tina Turner "A Fool in Love" (1960) "Goodbye, So Long" (1965) "River Deep--Mountain High" (1966)     Johnnie Taylor "I Got to Love Somebody's Baby" (1966) "Who's Making Love" (1968) "I Could Never Be President" (1969)     The Orlons "The Wah Watusi" (1962) "Don't Hang Up" (1962) "South Street" (1963)     Barbara Lewis "Hello Stranger" (1963) "Baby, I'm Yours" (1965) "Make Me Your Baby" (1965)     Maxine Brown "All in My Mind" (1960-61) "Oh No, Not My Baby" (1964) "One in a Million" (1966)     Garnet Mimms & The Enchanters "Cry Baby" (1963) "Tell Me Baby" (1964) "I'll Take Good Care of You" (1966)     Ramsey Lewis "The In Crowd" (1965) "Hang On Sloopy" (1965) "Wade in the Water" (1966)  

Another jam packed episode with Hot Rod Scrambles, Cheerleaders, and a thrilling tale of musical discovery from one of our listeners!   Oh, and the Little Deuce Coupe album review of course!   Thanks for listening! Wyatt and Jason   www.sailonsounds.com sailonpodcast@gmail.com (615) 606-3887 Music by Will C  www.willcmusic.com

For more than 40 years the Beach Boys have been the embodiment of the all-american rock band, promoting surfing, cars and girls -and especially California. The 3 Wilson Brothers, Brian, Dennis and Carl - along with their cousin Mike Love, grew up in Southern California singing together at family gatherings. Brian added his school buddy Al Jardine and the band was complete. In the fall of 1961 they recorded their first single "Surfin'" which hit #2 locally and #75 nationally. In the spring of 1962 The Beach Boys were signed to Capitol Records on the strength of a demo tape recorded by their father, Murry. That tape contained the two singles to follow, Surfin Safari and 409. Surfin Safari hit the top 20. They followed up with the great tunes Surfin USA and Surfer Girl. At this point there was no stopping the great sound that the Beach Boys were creating. Many hits were to follow: Little Deuce Coupe, Catch a Wave, Be True To Your School, Fun Fun Fun and I Get Around. So let's get going with some of their early hits from 1962 to 1966

Shrunken Head Lounge Surf Radio Show Running Time: 29 minutes 30 seconds Beach Boys Special Part 2 Surfin USA, Fun Fun Fun, Little Deuce Coupe - that's just one side of the Beach Boys. But what about the introspective and experimental side which they display on their later works? This show will feature songs showing the bands maturation in the late '60s as Americas best and most versitile recording acts. The Beach Boys started out as a family - three brothers, Brian, Carl and Dennis Wilson and their cousin Mike Love. The addition of Brians school friend Al Jardine filled out the picture. The hallmark of these recordings are the groups vocal harmonies, a new approach to arrangements and Brian's incorporation of the Wall Of Sound, originally created by Phil Spector and refined in a way that only Brian could. "Pet Sounds" is the pinnicle in this sound, considerred the greatest album ever recorded (and inspiring The Beatles Paul McCartney to create Sgt. Pepper) . To bring his ideas to life, Brian hired top studio musicians, most notable Hal Blaine and Carrol Kaye. By this point Brian decided not to tour any longer and found a replacement in Glen Campbell and later Bruce Johnson. Though these songs never charted as well as the earlier hits, they are just as well known and will remain in our minds and on our radios for ever. Here is Part 2 of the Beach Boys on the SHL!

Shrunken Head Lounge Surf Radio Show Running Time: 29 minutes 30 seconds Beach Boys Special Part 1 For more than 40 years the Beach Boys have been the embodiment of the all-american rock band, promoting surfing, cars and girls -and especially California. The 3 Wilson Brothers, Brian, Dennis and Carl - along with their cousin Mike Love, grew up in Southern California singing together at family gatherings. Brian added his school buddy Al Jardine and the band was complete. In the fall of 1961 they recorded their first single "Surfin'" which hit #2 locally and #75 nationally. In the spring of 1962 The Beach Boys were signed to Capitol Records on the strength of a demo tape recorded by their father, Murry. That tape contained the two singles to follow, Surfin Safari and 409. Surfin Safari hit the top 20. They followed up with the great tunes Surfin USA and Surfer Girl. At this point there was no stopping the great sound that the Beach Boys were creating. Many hits were to follow: Little Deuce Coupe, Catch a Wave, Be True To Your School, Fun Fun Fun and  I Get Around. So let's get going with some of their early hits from 1962 to 1966 The Beach Boys!

Click to Play Playlist;Hot-Rodders Dream, Ray BurdenHot Rod Shotgun Boogie, Tillman FranksSpeedway Rock, Jerry WoodardBig Wheel, Walt Benton & The SnappersBallad of Thunder Road, Robert MitchumConvertible Car, Wally HughesHot Rod Model-A, Hot Rod TrioBig Green Car, Billy CarrollTransfusion, Nervous NorvusStick Shift, The Duals Cadillac Baby, Bill SherrillCadillac Man, The JestersBig Black Cadillac, King KurtPink Cadillac, Hal WillisRed Cadillac & A Black Moustache, Hank C BurnetteBrand New Cadillac, Wayne Hancock59 Cadillac, Crazy RockersCadillac, Sun CatsPink 'n' Black Cadillac, Rockabilly WildcatsBlack Cadillac, Three Bad JacksPhantom Cadillac, The HeptanesBrand new Cadillac, phantom rockersKRLA Top Eliminator, Bobby Fuller FourHot Rod High, The KnightsCheater Slicks, The Four SpeeedsBoss Barracuda, The SurfarisBucket T, Jan and DeanThis Little Woodie, The Rip ChordsDraggin' Wagon, The Surfer GirlsG.T.O., Ronny and The DaytonasMove Out Little Mustang, The Rally PacksBurning Rubber, Gene "The Draggin' King" MolesRam Charger, The Del-VettsMag Wheels, Gary UsherLittle Deuce Coupe, De-FendersDragster, Johnny FortuneDrag Race, Link Wray & the Ray MenFender Bender, The Original StarfiresLittle Street Machine, Hot Rod Rogsteering wheel stuck, The BlastersHot Rod Racer, Dick DaleHot Rod Mercury, Don WalserHot Rod Lincoln, Pat TraversHot Rod Ford, Swingin' DemonsThe Fastest Shift Alive, Mr. Gasser & The WeirdosCruisin', Gene VincentOne Piece At A Time, Nuke And The Living DeadJimmy's Hot Rod, The Coffin NailsDodge Veg-O-Matic, Jonathan Richman And The Modern LoversSquad Car, P.J. & ArtieNitrous Burn Out, Man or Astro-ManGasoline, Mr. BadwrenchLet's Go To The Dragstrip, NomadsJesus Built My Hotrod, MinistryHill Country Hot Rod Man, Junior Brown