Last night, I listened to all of the post-Pet Sounds Beach Boys stuff - thank you Apple Music (there’s even a playlist for this stuff set up). Most of it is arty junk that just lies there. It includes my favorite BB song: Do It Again, which was self-consciously looking backwards. But a few things come through:
- I believe Brian when he says he's been plagued by noises in his head for decades. Along with all the other stuff - Landy, the feuds, the dad - he's dealt with mental illness.
- I think a few things show in the music about pace and rhythmic tempo. I compared some of the songs to Stones tunes and though they tend to have similar, even the same underlying tempo the Stones songs at their best have more energy because - and this is subjective, not musical analysis - there's urgency in the guitar playing which doesn't exist in Brian's orchestral, keyboard (including organ) arrangements. In these BB songs, guitar is a fill. Even on Do It Again, the guitar is a self-conscious recreation of older surfer sounds which fills the space in the break. In the Stones songs, the guitar pushes the music forward.
- Totally my opinion, but I think Brian's issue with noise, etc. show in his somewhat droning arrangements. Compare the Beatles: an element in their sound was that even slower songs had a rapid underlying tempo and sometimes you can literally hear a piano or something banging away at 140+ beats a minute. That to me was also drug/noise inspired and I compare that kind of stuff - see Revolver - to Brian's hits, which tended to have a banging piano core (Sail On Sailor, etc., even Wouldn't It Be Nice). I think if he'd done more banging tunes the rest of the material would have been better accepted. Take a listen to Sticky Fingers: if not for Brown Sugar, if not for the fame of the band and that single, I think people would have tended to look at that record as a nice bluesy thing and we'd be talking about how it was under-appreciated. Same with Let It Bleed: take out Gimme Shelter and maybe You Can't Always ... and you have songs that most people would classify as bluesy stuff they don't listen to. In other words, a few more banging hit type songs and Brian could get away with the rest being artier.
- I think early Beatles is a great example of how singing changed: their trademark was unison singing, with Paul and John matching voices or at least singing closely together. Imagine Brian taking those songs and putting in George below as Mike, Paul up high as Brian and John doing Carl's part. The Beatles even double-tracked so much they asked their engineer to figure out how to do it electronically, which became automatic double tracking. That style carries energy, which dripped off the Beatles. Brian came from a style of Mills Brothers and Four Freshmen and the like where unison singing was for sweetness and the higher art was a modernized "barber shop" quartet form. Beatles vocal harmony tended to be very high accompaniment to the melody line, not part of it.
Some of you may be interested in this version of God Only Know, produced by the BBC:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XqLTe8h0-jo
It’s a collaboration among many singers and musicians, including the wonderful trumpet player, Alison Balsom. Brian Wilson appears in it, in a Rousseau-like setting.
Thanks for that @NYMomof2, I had seen it before and still think it is a crazy mix of performers (Stevie Wonder! One Direction! Chrissy Hynde! Dave Grohl! Pharrel Williams and those crazy cuffed short pants!), but nice to see a broad selection of singers appreciating the song.
“1. I believe Brian when he says he’s been plagued by noises in his head for decades. Along with all the other stuff - Landy, the feuds, the dad - he’s dealt with mental illness.”
I didn’t think that was ever in doubt – that he had auditory hallucinations for years, consisting of voices (that often sound like his father) that said that he was a failure, they were going to kill him, etc. His paranoia seems to have been very well documented. So sad, such a sensitive soul in such a horribly dysfunctional and abusive family. His mental illness would have been hard enough to have dealt with even with a “normal” family and without extensive drug use.
“5. I think early Beatles is a great example of how singing changed: their trademark was unison singing, with Paul and John matching voices or at least singing closely together. Imagine Brian taking those songs and putting in George below as Mike, Paul up high as Brian and John doing Carl’s part. The Beatles even double-tracked so much they asked their engineer to figure out how to do it electronically, which became automatic double tracking.”
This is the stuff I’m trying to get at! 
I am no music theorist, but it seems to be that the BB used a lot of sixth and seventh chords and suspensions, as well as a lot of counterpoint, whereas the Beatles tended to use thirds and fifths and not as much counterpoint (though you’ve got notable exceptions - typically McCartney driven, such as in parts of Eleanor Rigby and of course solo in Silly Love Songs.
It also seems as though the BB layered a bass voice into their mix precisely because they had a real bass voice in the presence of Mike Love, whereas the Beatles didn’t layer on a bass voice – they achieved their “bassness” through McCartney’s actual bass.
I really wish I knew more about music because I like to “break it down” to understand the reasons why! My ear is pretty untrained and I could very well be mistaken in what I’ve written above.
I’ve never seen an actual BB chart so I have no idea if Brian wrote out actual parts or, as I suspect, the sounds simply developed. Because he used experienced studio musicians, that they ended up with a bunch of augmented chords and other more elaborate harmonies isn’t that much of a surprise. If the number of hours recorded for Good Vibrations is an example, they worked out a lot of stuff. (Compare Steely Dan: I gather they hired guys and handed them charts. I assume there were rewrites but they started with actual charts with those complex bits written out.)
The Beatles worked much faster. If you look at the books about their recording history, they’d take a song idea and work on it for a few days and it would generally be done unless there was a problem and it sat. This leads to stories like Lennon’s frustration with the Obli-di-obli-da sessions because the essence of the song is the tempo and they couldn’t get it right until he came in fairly plastered and started banging the piano chords saying this is the bleeping tempo.
But in terms of musicality, Paul largely invented the rock free bass line - the more dope he smoked, the freer it got. And they did record sections backwards - rather than tape reverse - like in Rain’s final verse just because it was cool. The difference is they were a live band that took their abilities into the studio while the BB’s became a touring act whose music was composed separately by a guy who no longer toured, played by musicians who weren’t in the band.
So yeah, I’ve read that over 190 of the Beatles’ songs are in major keys and that C is by far the most common chord. I think influences matter there: BB’s more out of the vocal heritage, Beatles more out of the rock-n-roll/classic tune heritage (and the Stones out of the R&B/blues heritage). I don’t care much about “difficult” harmony because Irving Berlin played in F Major and transposed everything using a keyboard lever that shifted the keys so he could still play in F Major but it would come out in a different key. You can’t beat his songs though! I sometimes think of Meredith Wilson’s The Music Man: the Beatles covered “Til there was you” but the BB’s would have covered the barbershop quartet number.
I also think the Beatles didn’t have the same art notions that Brian had. That is, I think the Beatles liked to take genres and make them their own - When I’m 64 is a music hall song updated in a charming and somewhat offbeat way. They occasionally went into real experimentation - I am the walrus, etc. - but most of their material fits comfortably into the main genres. As Lennon noted, they largely invented hard rock with Ticket to ride, and you can see how that heavier sound fits into their earlier stuff with its dance hall rock-n-roll origins. By the time you get to She’s so heavy they’ve taken blunt, extremely simple genre and blown it away through sheer brilliant execution. Brian seemed to push more into something undefined, which is one reason I use “arty” and why I think there was a limited market: genre sells but “arty” doesn’t.
Lergnom - this is just the discussion I’m hoping to have Have you read the Alan Pollack series on Beatles songs? You just have to google “Alan Pollack” and the title of the song and you can find it. It takes each song and analyzes it from a musical theory perspective. I wish I could find a similar series for the BB (or that Alan Pollack had done so).
I think songs like Eleanor Rigby are certainly arty / baroque pop and have classical influence. I do also agree that the “thick” BB harmonies are sometimes less accessible - sometimes you just want to hear one clear voice, know what I mean? And certainly Brian and Carl had wonderful solo voices, in some regards “purer” voices than Lennon / McCartney.
So why did LSD not ruin the Beatles, but it ruined Brian Wilson?
OTOH, I suppose one could make a case that heroin ruined John Lennon (exhibit A: Cold Turkey) and cocaine ruined George Harrison (exhibit B: Dark Horse Tour). And Ringo struggled with alcohol. I think the lesson is that if you’re going to take drugs, stick with pot like Paul
I’ve never read the Pollack stuff. Thanks.
It brings up 2 essential differences from BW:
- They had a classical arranger as producer.
- They couldn't read music and yet had a deep practical understanding of how songs sounded and were performed.
We know the earlier Beatles recordings were done quickly and that they’d say to Martin “we need something like …” and he’d fill it in, from a keyboard break (which he actually played) to the string arrangement for Eleanor Rigby. Did Paul know the music was in some mode? I don’t know. But he certainly knew how he wanted it to sound and I think they worked from practical experiences with songs to say “we want it to sound different but similar”. [url=<a href=“http://www.beatlesbible.com/features/hard-days-night-chord/%5DHere%5B/url”>http://www.beatlesbible.com/features/hard-days-night-chord/]Here[/url] is a link to the discussion of the opening chord of Hard Days Night: it isn’t any chord when you put all the pieces together but they wanted something clanging and big to grab you so they came up with this brilliant noise. In other words, I’d say the Beatles were the ultimate by ear guys. John started playing guitar with banjo chords because that’s what his mum taught him and it took Paul to teach him actual guitar parts. They’d sing or play the parts for Martin to transcribe and then they’d correct him until it sounded the way they wanted. A classic example: the way Strawberry Fields is 2 songs - something no one knew until many years later - because John did 2 versions in different keys and asked Martin to put them together, which he did by subtly changing speeds at the shift point. I think it’s important to remember they reached this point of musical experimentation only because they were so well grounded in the history of songs. I guess that’s what they call “tacit” musicology.
Paul has said many times he can’t think of music as a bunch of dots and George said he thought knowing more about the technical stuff would ruin his songwriting. Others note that song like Good Morning have such weird time shifts that maybe it would hard for someone trained in theory and thus rooted in traditions to do that.
I immediately thought of Dave Brubeck when mentioning time shifts so I thought I remembered and found this: he couldn’t read music either! So the guy most known for unusual time signatures and shifts played by ear too!
"Brubeck enrolled at what’s now University of the Pacific in 1938 with plans to study veterinary medicine. He eventually switched his major to music, though, and he tore through his classes until he had to enroll in keyboard instruction his senior year. At that point, Brubeck had to admit to his professor that he couldn’t read a single note of music, even though he played jazz as well as anyone.
Brubeck’s professor and dean informed him that they couldn’t let a student graduate with a music degree if he couldn’t read music. Brubeck shrugged off their worries by saying he didn’t care about reading music; he just wanted to play jazz. Brubeck’s other teachers protested that he was a very gifted musician even if he couldn’t read music, so the dean cut a deal with the jazz man: Brubeck could graduate, but only if he promised never to teach music and embarrass the school by revealing his shortcoming. Brubeck later laughingly told the website JazzWax, “I kept that promise ever since, even when I was starving.”"
As for Brian’s issues with noises in his head, he says they began a week after first doing LSD so I have to believe him but his experiences are those of a schizophrenic. (Note: just looked him up and he has a schizoaffective diagnosis, so he hears things and has mood disorders.) LSD won’t cause that. It may help bring it out, but I don’t know.