Cowboys and Indies: The Epic History of the Record Industry (24 page)

As coincidence would have it, George Martin knew Jane Asher’s mother, who was a professor of oboe at the Guildhall, where he had studied. In recording sessions, McCartney first began taking an interest in George Martin’s hidden talents. As his muse reached toward higher-brow inspirations, McCartney was wondering if he should study classical music. George Martin wisely dissuaded him, arguing that his unorthodox melodies benefited from his self-taught naïveté.

Still, the race for a new brand of classically infused pop music was in the air. It was while stoned, listening to
Rubber Soul
on headphones, that the Beach Boys’ creative force, Brian Wilson, vowed to outwit the Beatles—as such, declaring a creative war against Paul McCartney and George Martin. Like Andrew Loog Oldham, Brian Wilson was a disciple of the Phil Spector school of independent production, except that it was his father and manager, Murray Wilson, who had negotiated the contract by which the Beach Boys’ production company would lease finished masters to Capitol.

Drawing from Phil Spector’s pool of session musicians, Wilson began mixing honky-tonk pianos, organs, harpsichords, French horns, giant-sized bass harmonicas, anything with an unusual texture. Like Spector, Wilson relied on drummer Hal Blaine for happy-feeling rhythms—chimes, bells, and childlike percussive sounds, with occasionally some snare and timpani rolls for dramatic punctuation. However, where Phil Spector had a rather sloppy method of cumulative layering, Wilson, despite the handicap of a deaf right ear, sought a sonic clarity that conjured up images of California sunshine through a psychedelic lens. Above all, Wilson was a highly inventive composer who, like his other guiding reference, Burt Bacharach, had a gift for unusual chord changes held together by catchy melodies.

On this logistically complex project that became
Pet Sounds,
Wilson also began using Columbia’s eight-track facilities for recording vocal harmonies. Byrds front man Roger McGuinn remembered how, at the time, “the eight track was in Columbia’s L.A. studio [but] the engineers were afraid of it—they had a handwritten sign taped on to it that said
BIG BASTARD.
” The fiercest skeptic of Wilson’s experimentation, both sonic and chemical, was fellow Beach Boy Mike Love. “Don’t fuck with the formula” were his fateful words.

Due to Wilson’s laborious perfectionism,
Pet Sounds
was not released until May 1966, and by then, unashamedly trippy sounds were popping up with increasing frequency. In January 1966, the Byrds recorded their unambiguously titled “Eight Miles High,” featuring drones and a dissonant guitar solo inspired by John Coltrane’s free jazz saxophone on “India.” In spring, Bob Dylan’s
Blonde on Blonde
lurched into town with its now-famous opening gambit, “Everybody must get stoned!”

In the first of several clues that Dylan’s effortless roll was coming to an end, at the end of 1965, five recording sessions backed by his touring band had yielded only brash, nervous material. Watching from the control room, Bob Johnston suggested Dylan start anew in the quieter surroundings of Nashville. Dylan got curious and took down just two trusted band members, Al Kooper and Robbie Robertson. Rounding up local session musicians, Johnston put everyone in a tight space without baffles, though according to Kooper, “Johnston pretty much stayed out of the way and let the magic happen.”

Whether it was the friendliness of the local musicians or just a change of scenery, the Hammond organ came out silkier, the guitar parts were sweeter and not always electric, the drums had better shuffle and tone, and Dylan’s voice was grainier and sitting more confidently in the center of the mix. Long criticized for his grating sound, Bob Dylan found a resonant timbre in Nashville. One key factor may have been the piano in his hotel suite. As Kooper explained, “I acted as Bob’s live cassette player and played the song over and over for him on the piano in his hotel room so he could work on the lyrics. It also helped me, as music director of the album, to
know
the songs and teach them to the band before Bob would arrive each day.”

The final result was a dense double album
,
which shone thanks to its beautifully written moodier ballads scented with Southern air in the small hours. Dylan’s proudest creation was an eleven-minute epic, “Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands,” recorded in just one take at 4:00
A.M.
Specially written for Dylan’s biggest fan, there was even a poisoned arrow. “During the recording of ‘4th Time Around,’” said Al Kooper, “I asked Bob if he was worried about the melodic similarity to ‘Norwegian Wood.’ He said curtly, ‘I think they will be more worried about it than I am.’”

Whether out of courtesy or mischief, Dylan played the song to John Lennon in person just before the album’s official release. As expected the perverse game of Dylan copying Lennon copying Dylan, almost like those black minstrels, proved to be too much for the adoring Beatle, who later admitted, “I was very paranoid … I remember he played it to me when he was in London. He said, ‘What do you think?’ I said, ‘I don’t like it’ … I thought it was an out-and-out skit.”

At the time, the Beatles were finishing
Revolver,
another unashamedly druggy body of recordings whose daring finale, “Tomorrow Never Knows,” was a live performance of tape samples complete with Indian drone, tribal drumming, and Lennon singing surreal imagery through a Leslie amplifier. Released in August 1966, in an experimental sleeve mixing illustrations and photographs,
Revolver
was a resounding hit among British critics and fans. Curiously, in America, Capitol was proving to be unsupportive of all this psychedelia. Not only were the American versions of Beatles albums butchered into compilations, Capitol was so convinced
Pet Sounds
had been a mistake that within just eight weeks of its release, the company put out a Beach Boys greatest-hits album featuring all their older surfing anthems.

Realizing that London had become the center of musical innovation, Brian Wilson hired Beatles publicist Derek Taylor to promote the U.K. release of
Pet Sounds
in the summer of 1966. Taylor’s tack was to deconstruct the public preconception of the Beach Boys as a surf band and instead communicate Brian Wilson’s genius as a writer and producer. Articles began appearing in the British press about this fascinating, seminal album, Brian Wilson’s personal masterpiece.

The Beatles had first heard a test pressing of
Pet Sounds
at the Waldorf Astoria in May 1966 just before embarking on their last world tour, all summer long. Physically chased out of the Philippines and symbolically burned by Southern evangelists, in autumn 1966, they took a long-overdue sabbatical in which Paul McCartney got to know the album intimately. He was regularly brought to tears by his favorite song, “God Only Knows.” “It was
Pet Sounds
that blew me out of the water,” he confessed as an older man. “I’ve just bought my kids each a copy of it for their education in life … It’s the classic of the century.” George Martin shared his enthusiasm, declaring, “If there is one person that I have to select as a living genius of pop music, I would choose Brian Wilson.”

The years between 1964 and 1966 had been a period of rapid transformation in which the world’s most powerful hit machine—John Lennon, Paul McCartney, and George Martin—had become obsessed with America’s prodigal sons, Bob Dylan and Brian Wilson. Respectively the lyrical and musical innovators of the day, like Icarus, they were venturing dangerously close to the sun.

Although Brian Wilson would crash hardest, Bob Dylan was the first to catch fire. Due to impossible workloads maintained by amphetamines, Dylan’s relations with the shady Albert Grossman were souring. Gaunt and booed by audiences for his electric transformation, he withdrew into the bosom of his beautiful wife, Sara Lownds, who in January had given birth to their first baby, Jesse. Whether by accident or on purpose, Dylan jumped off the roller coaster on July 29, 1966. “I had been in a motorcycle accident and I’d been hurt, but I recovered,” admitted Dylan forty years later. There may have been a road accident resulting in a minor injury, but there was neither an ambulance called nor any hospitalization. “Truth was that I wanted to get out of the rat race.”

15. TERRA NOVA

Inside the American record industry, a quiet migration from East Coast to West Coast was gathering momentum. Los Angeles already had its own record industry, of course—in particular, Capitol, then getting fat on Beatles hits pouring in from its parent company, EMI. Since the fifties, various independents had sprouted up around Hollywood, notably Warner Bros. Records and its sister label, Reprise.

Throughout the sixties, a colorful new community of migrant record producers was forming. One character with a big future was Jerry Moss, a twenty-five-year-old promotions man from the Bronx, who in 1960 left the Brill Building in search of sunnier adventures out west. “The plane landed, my aunt picked me up, the weather was fantastic,” remembered Moss, who found work as an independent promotions man. Hungrier than the local competition, “I believed in working a full day!” Because he had no friends, he ended up hanging out with disc jockeys day and night. “It was a dreamy time in California. You could park your car in front of the radio station and walk right in. It was not like New York, which was high buildings and going through people. Here was a frontier feeling.”

In those years, Jerry Moss befriended a musician and struggling actor named Herb Alpert with whom he began listening to the exotic jazz-samba records of Stan Getz, João Gilberto, and Brazilian bossa nova genius Antonio Carlos Jobim. Launching their long and illustrious career with Alpert’s Tijuana Brass band, “we gotta be able to make money while we’re sleeping,” vowed Moss to Alpert. “I don’t care if this record is six months old, we gotta keep letting radio stations know this is a hot act.” Right time, right place, right sound. By 1966, their four-year-old label, simply called A&M, was in orbit, selling 13 million Tijuana Brass records—more than the Beatles. Thanks again to their Brazilian inspirations, Alpert and Moss spotted and signed Sergio Mendes & Brasil ’66, who scored a hit with “Mas Que Nada” while supporting Alpert on tour.

Herb Alpert’s former business partner Lou Adler was another happening indie who had relocated from Chicago to Los Angeles. It was Adler, working as manager and producer, who guided the local folk group the Mamas & the Papas to their national breakthrough in early 1966 with “California Dreamin.’” In fact, even Byrds front man Roger McGuinn, the bespectacled face of California cool at the time, was actually a blow-in from Chicago.

When it came to pioneering uncharted musical territory, pushing the wagons deeper into the wild west was Elektra founder Jac Holzman. In the spring of 1965, “I thought I had the Lovin’ Spoonful, and [losing them] really put me on edge,” Holzman recalled. Then came Bob Dylan’s electric set in Newport. “So I just pulled up the stakes and went to California because I thought everybody’s picking over what there is in New York.” Holzman already had a local promotions office in Los Angeles, but by the summer of 1965, was looking at ways to develop it into an A&R unit.

The claustrophobia of New York’s folk scene contrasted with the expansive effect of marijuana, which was radically altering Elektra’s musical tastes and company culture. Beyond his official job in the studio, Elektra producer Paul Rothchild had a profitable side business selling grass among his circle of musicians and hipsters. Jac Holzman began hosting sessions in his Manhattan apartment, equipped with his high-definition stereo sound system, where guests would be served space cookies, then played the latest wow.

In his many visits to Elektra’s Los Angeles office, Jac Holzman shot the shit with local players and noticed how “in California, musicians were finding each other naturally rather than being cobbled together by managers—big, big difference. You’d hang out there, you could get loaded, you’d bond—it was a lot more fun.” With its sunny climate and liberal atmosphere, California was also home to a booming marijuana culture. In these innocent days before baggage inspections and sniffer dogs, Holzman began flying back to New York with large bags of grass packed in his suitcase.

Then, in the autumn of 1965, Paul Rothchild was busted and imprisoned for nine long months. Paying half of Rothchild’s salary throughout, Holzman tightened his gut and intensified his A&R reconnaissance missions into the unfamiliar underground of Los Angeles. “Colleges were really important in the folk scene, but rock was different,” he explained. “It wasn’t smart college kids sitting around in coffee houses. This was a different kind of audience; much more racially integrated … There were dozens of clubs in the heart of Hollywood, near Vine and on the Sunset Strip, from La Cienega on the east to Doheny on the west … I’d pick up a copy of the
Los Angeles Free Press,
I’d go through every listing of every band playing and check off the ones I’ve heard. The ones that seemed interesting to me, I’d check around with friends who’d say ‘oh yeah they’re interesting’ or ‘don’t waste your time.’”

Eventually, in late 1965, Holzman’s first eureka moment struck at a club called Bido Lito’s, where a folk-rock ensemble called Love was performing. Accompanied by his wife, Nina, he stood among the “silken-clad girls with ironed blonde hair moving the kind of shapes you didn’t see in New York.” Nina Holzman recalled how “Arthur Lee got up, and he had these boots with the tongues hanging out, no laces, and his eye glasses had one blue lens and one red, and a funny shape. He was the most bizarre person I’d ever seen in my life, by far.” The Elektra boss was instantly hooked. “When there’s an element of danger, when you don’t know what a band is going to do next, that attracts me,” he explained. The next day, he set in ink a three-year, six-album deal for a $5,000 cash advance. That very day, the drug-crazed Arthur Lee bought a flashy convertible and gave his bandmates the change—$100 each.

As the cookie crumbled, Love’s debut album and accompanying single provided vital experience for Holzman’s next discovery, Elektra’s biggest ever—the Doors, one of the most important acts of the late twentieth century. In early 1966, as Love was fast becoming the new noise in L.A., the Doors, fresh-faced and building up a repertoire, were playing in a Sunset Strip dive called the London Fog. “We were doing it for ourselves,” recalled keyboardist Ray Manzarek of those formative months before bleeping on anyone’s radar. “Most of the time there were about seven people in the club, the four Doors, the waitress, the bartender…, and Rhonda Lane, the go-go dancer.”