Who Is the Falsetto Voice in Don't Worry Baby
Episode one hundred and seventeen of A History of Rock Music in 5 Hundred Songs looks at "Don't Worry Infant" past the Embankment Boys, and how the years 1963 and 1964 saw a radical evolution in the audio and subject matter of the Beach Boys' piece of work. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more than information, and a transcript of the episode.
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ERRATA:
I say that the Surfin' Us album was released only four months after Surfin' Safari. It was actually over five months. As well, for some reason I pronounce Nik Venet's proper noun every bit if he were French here. I believe that's incorrect and his name is actually pronounced "Vennit", though I'm not 100% sure.
More chiefly, I say that "Sweet Little 16" wasn't a big hit, when of form it made number 2 on the charts.
Resources
There is no Mixcloud this week, considering there were also many Beach Boys songs in the episode.
I used many resources for this episode, most of which volition exist used in future Beach Boys episodes besides. It'south difficult to enumerate everything hither, because I have been an active member of the Embankment 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. Irish potato is an in-depth look at the grouping's early years, upwards 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 Embankment Boys and Gary Conductor. His books tin can be found at https://payhip.com/CMusicBooks
Andrew Doe'south Bellagio 10452 site is an invaluable resource.
Jon Stebbins' The Beach Boys FAQ is a good balance between accuracy and readability. Stebbins also co-wroteThe Lost Beach Boy, David Marks' autobiography.
And Philip Lambert'southwardInside 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 fix.
Equally a good starting point for the Beach Boys' music, I would recommend this budget-priced 3-CD set, which has a surprisingly adept option of their textile on it.
Transcript
Today, we're going to take our 2d look at the Beach Boys, and we're going to wait at their development through 1963 and 1964, as they responded to the threat from the Beatles past turning to ever more sophisticated music, even every bit they went through a variety of personal crises. We're going to look at a period in which they released 4 albums a year, had three lineup changes, and saw their showtime number one – and at a song which, despite beingness a B-side, regularly makes lists of the best singles of all fourth dimension. We're going to look at "Don't Worry Baby":
[Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "Don't Worry Baby"]
When nosotros left the Embankment Boys, they had only secured a contract with Capitol Records, and released their start national hitting, "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. Simply now nosotros need to double back and wait at what Brian was doing with his master 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 rails that Brian and Gary Usher had written, "Ten Niggling Indians". That runway, a surf-rock version of the nursery rhyme with the grouping chanting "Kemo sabe" in the backing vocals, fabricated but number forty-ix on the charts, and frankly didn't deserve to exercise even that well. Some accept suggested, in fact that the tape was released at the instigation of Murry Wilson, who was both Brian, Carl, and Dennis Wilson'due south father and the group's manager, as a fashion of weakening Usher's influence with the grouping, 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 grouping's next single followed the same pattern as their first hitting. The B-side was "Shut Down", a machine song co-written by Brian and Roger Christian, who you may remember from the episode on "Surf Metropolis" as having been brought in to assistance Brian with auto lyrics. "Shut Downward" is most notable for being 1 of the very small-scale number of Beach Boys records to feature an instrumental contribution from Mike Love, the group'southward pb singer. His two-annotation saxophone solo comes in for some mockery from the grouping's fans, but actually fits the tape extremely well:
[Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "Close Down"]
"Shut Downward" was a acme thirty striking, but information technology was the A-side that was the really big striking. Simply every bit their kickoff hit had had a surf song on the A-side and a machine song on the B-side, so did this single. Brian Wilson had been inspired by Chuck Berry's "Sweet Little 16", and in item the opening verse, which had only listed a lot of places:
[Excerpt: Chuck Berry, "Sweetness Trivial Sixteen"]
He might well as well have been thinking of Chubby Checker'south minor hit, "Twistin' The states", which listed places in America where people might exist twisting:
[Extract: Chubby Checker, "Twistin' United states"]
Brian had taken Drupe'due south melody and the place-proper noun recitation, and with the help of his girlfriend'south brother, and some input from Mike Love, had turned information technology 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' U.s." became a huge hit, reaching number two on the charts, and afterward beingness named by Billboard as the biggest hit of 1963, but unfortunately for Brian that didn't effect 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 i and the Blackness creative person has actually benefited from it. And Berry definitely did benefit — "Sweetness Picayune Sixteen", while a great record, had never been a especially large hit, while "Surfin' USA" is to this 24-hour interval 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 championship vocal of the group'southward second album, released in March 1963 only four months after their beginning, and they would release two more albums before the finish 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 every bit 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 showtime album.
Not simply that, but as well as making the Beach Boys' records, Wilson was too writing for January and Dean, and he had likewise started making records on the side with Gary Usher, doing things similar making a "Loco-Motion" knock-off, "The Revolution", released under the name Rachel and the Revolvers:
[Extract: Rachel and the Revolvers, "The Revolution"]
Co-ordinate to some sources, Usher and Wilson found the vocalist for that track past the simple expedient of driving to Watts and asking the outset Black teenage daughter they saw if she could sing. Other sources say they hired a professional session vocalizer — some say it was Betty Everett, only given that that'due south 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 vocaliser who gets named equally a possibility, who lived in LA and who certainly sounds like the aforementioned person:
[Excerpt: Betty Willis, "Act Naturally"]
Wilson was also in the process of breaking upwardly with his girlfriend and starting a human relationship with a young woman named Marilyn Rovell. Rovell, forth with her sister Diane, and their cousin, Ginger Blake, had formed a daughter group, and Brian was writing and producing records for them as well:
[Excerpt: The Honeys, "The One You Can't Have"]
As well equally making all these records, the Beach Boys were touring intensively, to the indicate that on one twenty-four hour period in June the group were actually booked in for four shows in the same day.
Unsurprisingly, Brian decided that this was besides much for 1 person, and then 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 fellow member of the Embankment Boys on their very first single, but had decided to quit the group to become off to university. A year afterwards, that seemed like a bad determination, and when Brian called him up and asked him to rejoin the ring, he eagerly agreed. For now, Alan was not going to be a proper fellow member of the group, but he would substitute for Brian on the group's bout 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 phase, and he could sing Brian's parts, and so while the Beach Boys still officially consisted of Brian, Carl, and Dennis Wilson, Mike Dearest, and David Marks, the group that was on tour was Carl, Dennis, Mike, David, and Alan, though Brian would sometimes appear for of import shows.
Jardine too 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 as well added to the group's vocal harmonies.
And this was a major change. Up to this betoken, the Beach Boys' records had had simply rudimentary harmonies. While Brian was an first-class falsetto vocalizer, and Mike a very good bass, the other iii members of the grouping were less accomplished. Carl would grow to exist ane of the groovy vocalists of all time, but at this point was withal in his early teens and had a sparse vocalism. Dennis' voice was likewise a picayune thin at this point, and he was backside the drum kit, which meant he didn't get to sing alive, and David Marks was apparently not allowed to sing on the records at all, other than taking a unmarried joint lead with Carl on the offset album.
With the improver of Jardine, Brian now had another singer every bit stiff every bit 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 Iv Freshmen.
You tin can hear this well-nigh startlingly on "In My Room". This is one of the outset songs on which Jardine took part in the studio, though he'south actually not very aural in the vocal arrangement, which instead concentrates on the three brothers. "In My Room" is a major, major, pace frontward in the grouping's sound, in the themes that would announced in their songwriting for the side by side few years, and in the juxtaposition of the lyrical theme and the musical arrangement.
The song'southward lyrics, written by Gary Usher simply inspired by Wilson's experiences, are about solitude, and the song starts out with Brian singing alone, but then Brian moves upwards to the third note of the scale and Carl comes in under him, singing the note Brian started on. And then they both movement up over again, Brian to the fifth and Carl to the third, with Dennis joining in on the note that Brian had started on, earlier Mike and Alan finally likewise join in. Brian is singing most being solitary, but he has his family with him, supporting him:
[Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "In My Room"]
This new lineup of the grouping, with Alan augmenting the other five, might fifty-fifty have lasted, except for a chain of events that started on David Marks' fifteenth birthday. Murry Wilson, who was all the same managing the group at this point, had never liked the idea of someone from exterior the family unit being an equal fellow member, and was especially 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 activity worker, and when Murry Wilson constitute this out — every bit he had to, as he needed to pay their physician'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-twelvemonth-onetime kid he didn't accept the understanding to realise that this might not be entirely true. He said "OK, I quit".
At beginning, the rest of the group thought that he was joking, and even he wasn't at all sure that he wanted to get out 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 — annihilation that Murry wanted to say to David, he said to Carl, who passed the message on.
And fifty-fifty though the rest of the group definitely wanted David to stay — especially Brian, who liked having the liberty not to get out on tour, and Carl, who had been the one who'd lobbied to bring his friend into the grouping in the showtime place — David was still, as the youngest member, the only one who didn't sing, and the only one not role of the family, regarded by the others as somewhat lesser than the rest of the band.
David became increasingly frustrated, specially when they were recording the Little Deuce Coupe album. That album was fabricated up entirely of songs about cars, and the group were so short of textile that the album ended up being filled out with 4 songs from before albums, including two from the Surfer Girl album released simply the previous month. Yet when David tried to persuade Brian to have the grouping record his song "Kustom Kar Bear witness", Brian told David that he wasn't ready to be writing songs for the group.
All this, plus pressure from David'southward parents to make him more of a focal point of the group, led to his resignation somewhen being accepted, and backdated to the original date he quit. He played his last prove with the group on October the fifth 1963, and and then formed his own band, the Marksmen, who signed to A&M:
[Excerpt: Dave and the Marksmen, "Kustom Kar Prove"]
There take 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, only 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 bacon rather than an equal partner for many years — Murry Wilson didn't want to brand the aforementioned fault 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 stride, and that can exist seen nowhere meliorate than on "The Warmth of the Dominicus", a vocal he wrote, with Honey writing the lyrics, around the time of the Kennedy bump-off — the two men take differed over the years over whether it was written the night before or the night afterward 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, modest 6th, minor second, fifth progression that yous get in about a 1000000 songs:
[demonstrates]
"The Warmth of the Sun" starts out that fashion — its showtime ii chords are C, Am, played in the standard arpeggiated way one expects from that kind of vocal:
[demonstrates]
Y'all'd expect from that that the vocal would go C, Am, Dm, Yard or C, Am, F, K. But instead of moving to Dm or F, equally 1 normally would, the song moves to East flat, and *starts the progression over*, a pocket-sized third up, so you have:
[demonstrates]
It so stops that progression after ii confined, moves dorsum to the Dm 1 would expect from the original progression, and stays at that place for twice every bit long equally normal, earlier moving on to the normal M — and and so throwing in a K augmented at the finish, which is a normal G chord but with the D note raised to East flat, so information technology ties in to that original unexpected chord alter.
And it does all this *in the opening line of the song*:
[Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "The Warmth of the Sun"]
This is harmonic composure on a totally dissimilar 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 4 Freshmen that Brian loved than to doo-wop.
The new five-piece lineup of the group recorded that on January the commencement, 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 Embankment Boys, "Fun Fun Fun"]
But while the rest of the track keeps the same feel as the Chuck Drupe song, the verse goes in a dissimilar harmonic direction, and actually owes a lot to "Da Doo Ron Ron". Instead of using a blues progression, as Drupe normally would, the poetry uses the same I-IV-I-Five progression that "Da Doo Ron Ron"'s chorus does, but uses it to very different effect:
[Extract: 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 of a sudden had some real competition. At numbers ane, 2, 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 unmarried. Past this time, while the Embankment Boys themselves were still playing most of the instruments, Brian was bringing in boosted musicians to broaden them, and expanding his instrumental palette. The basic rails was the core members of the ring — Carl playing both atomic number 82 and rhythm guitar, Alan playing bass, and Dennis playing drums, with Brian on keyboards — but there were two farther bass players, Glen Campbell and Ray Pohlman, thickening the sound on half dozen-string bass, plus two saxophones, and Hal Blaine adding percussion.
And the master instrument providing chordal support wasn't guitar or organ, equally it usually had been, but a harpsichord, an musical 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 in that location was a problem with the bassline. Eventually, Brian had enough of his father'southward interference, and fired him as the band's director. Murry would continue to go along trying to interfere in his children's career, but this was the point at which the Embankment Boys finally took control over their own futures.
A few days later, they reconvened in the studio to record the vocals for what would get their first number i striking:
[Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "I Get Around"]
It's fascinating to see that even this early on in the grouping's career, and on i 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 aforementioned old strip/I've got to notice a new place where the kids are hip". The lyrics are Beloved'due south, but as is so frequently 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 practiced plenty that it made the top ten in the Britain, and became a particular favourite in the Mod subculture in London. The grouping would only get more popular over the next few years in the Uk, a new place where the kids were hip.
"I Become Around" is a worthy archetype, but the B-side, "Don't Worry Baby", is if anything fifty-fifty amend. It had been recorded in January, and had already been released on their Shut Downward vol 2 album in March. It had originally been intended for the Ronettes, and was inspired past "Be My Infant", 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 starting time heard the drum intro to that tape:
[Excerpt: The Ronettes, "Be My Baby"]
Brian would play that record over and over, on echo, for days at a time, and would try to absorb every dash of the record and its production, and he tried to come upwardly 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 petty infant", 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 Babe"]
Phil Spector turned the song downwardly, and so the Beach Boys recorded it themselves, and I take to say that this was simply a good matter — Ronnie Spector recorded a solo version of it many decades later, and information technology's a fine performance, but the lyric misses something when information technology's sung by a adult female rather than a man.
That lyric was by Roger Christian, and in it we come across 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 information technology seems to be setting upward precisely the kind of situation that was common in teen tragedy records of the menstruation. The protagonist sings "I guess I should have kept my mouth close when I started to brag about my car, but I tin can't dorsum 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 Human being'southward Bend", or "Tell Laura I Love Her", or in another teen tragedy song nosotros'll be looking at in a couple of weeks, with the protagonist expressionless in a car crash. Simply instead, this is short-circuited. The protagonist'south fears are allayed by his girlfriend:
[Extract: The Embankment Boys, "Don't Worry Babe"]
What we have here is someone trying to deal with a particular kind of anxiety brought nearly by what nosotros now refer to every bit toxic masculinity. The protagonist has been showing off almost his driving skills in front end of his peers, and has now constitute himself in a situation that he can't cope with. He'due south saved past a figure we'll see a lot more than 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'due south as well good for him.
Obviously, one can indicate to all sorts of reasons why this effigy might be considered problematic — the thought that the man is unable to deal with his own emotional problems without a woman fixing him — only at that place's an emotional truth to it that one doesn't go far much music of the era, and fifty-fifty if it's a somewhat flawed view of gender relations, it speaks to a very particular kind of insecurity at the disability to alive up to traditional masculine roles, and is all the more than affecting when it's paired with the braggadocio of the A-side. The combination means we come across the bragging and posturing on the A-side as but a facade, covering over the real emotional fragility of the narrator. Each side reinforces the other, and the combination is i of the about perfect pairings e'er released as a single.
"Don't Worry Babe", released as "I Become Around"'due south B-side, made the charts in its own correct peaking at number twenty-four. The B-side to the side by side unmarried further elaborated on the themes of "Don't Worry Baby":
[Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "She Knows Me Likewise Well"]
This repurposing of the emotional and musical mode of girl-group songs to bargain with the emotional vulnerability that comes from acknowledging and attempting to procedure 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 afterwards comes close to dealing with this very real area of the emotional mural, and Lennon, similar Wilson, often does and so by using the figure of the perfect woman who will save the protagonist.
In 1964, the grouping one time again released 4 albums – Close Downwardly vol.2, All Summer Long, a live album, and a Christmas anthology – and they likewise did most of the piece of work on yet some other album, The Embankment Boys Today!, which would exist released in early 1965.
As these recordings progressed, Brian Wilson was more than and more than aggressive, both in terms of the emotional effect of the music and his arrangements, increasingly using session musicians to broaden the grouping, and trying for a variant on Phil Spector'south production way, but one which emphasised gentle fragility rather than sturm und drang. Possibly the greatest track he created in 1964 ended upwardly not existence used past the Beach Boys, though, but was given to Glen Campbell:
[Extract: Glen Campbell, "Guess I'k 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. Somewhen, they coaxed him off the plane, and he'd managed to get through that night's testify, only 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 equally a singer at this betoken, had flown out at most no discover and for the next five months he replaced Brian on phase for near of their shows, earlier the group got a permanent replacement in.
Brian Wilson had retired from the route, and the hope was that past doing so, he would reduce the strain on himself enough that he could keep writing and producing for the grouping without making his mental health worse. And for a while, at to the lowest degree, that seemed to exist how information technology worked out. Nosotros'll take a expect at the results in a few weeks' fourth dimension.
Source: https://500songs.com/podcast/episode-117-dont-worry-baby-by-the-beach-boys/
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