GG and Pet Sounds

[Bradley P Lehman <bpl@umich.edu>]

CJ Marsicano wrote:
>The other comes from the other day.  I bought the
>reissue CD of the Beach Boys' "Pet Sounds", which
>I had trouble finding, no thanks to the special
>they aired on TNT last week.  When I brought it
>up to the counter, the clerk looked at it and
>said, "This has to be the best thing I've rung
>out all week... no, make that all month!" :)

Agreed, nice album.  A great one for catching personal feelings, which was
Brian Wilson's intention.  That and trying to beat the Beatles at their
own production game: use as many sounds as possible in the mix, for the
effect of sophistication.

I read his biography some years ago and I remember that he deliberately
mixed this album in mono, even as late as 1966 when stereo was more a
norm.  Pretty good reasons, too: if it were in stereo, his careful
balances would be at the mercy of anyone's mis-adjusted stereo system.
And at the mercy of AM radio: no knowing how stereo would be compressed
into mono for AM.  Plus he wanted the album to sound the same for
everybody else as it did for him (he has only one good ear).

Artistically, this is pretty far from GG who _wanted_ listeners to mess
with balances, equalization, etc as much as they would do.

And we know how GG hated the Beatles, as much for their "fill it up with
everything" production as for their musical content.  "Theirs is a happy,
cocky, belligerently resourceless brand of harmonic primitivism.  Their
career has been one long send-up of the equation: sophistication =
chromatic extension.  The willful, dominant prolongations and false tonic
releases to which they subject us, 'Michelle' notwithstanding, in the name
of foreground elaboration, are merely symptomatic of a cavalier
disinclination to observe the psychological properties of tonal
background.  In the Liverpudlian repertoire, the indulgent amateurishness
of the musical material, though closely rivaled by the indifference of the
performing style, is actually surpassed only by the ineptitude of the
studio production method. ('Strawberry Fields' suggests a chance encounter
at a mountain wedding between Claudio Monteverdi and a jug band.)"  - GG,
"The Search for Petula Clark"


Bradley Lehman, Dayton VA
home: http://i.am/bpl  or  http://www-personal.umich.edu/~bpl
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"Music must cause fire to flare up from the spirit - and not only sparks
from the clavier...." - Alfred Cortot