6/20/2023 0 Comments Brian nolan capitol records![]() ![]() “Steve,” Brian called out, “where are the rest of those fire hats? I want everybody to wear fire hats. ![]() Now it’s rock and roll? Perfect rock and roll, down the chute. A little movie-track lushness? Fine, here comes movie-track lushness. If you wanted swing, they gave you swing. In sport shirts and slacks, they looked like insurance salesmen and used-car dealers, except for one blond female percussionist who might have been stamped out by a special machine that supplied plastic mannequin housewives for detergent commercials.Ĭontrolled, a little bored after 20 years or so of nicely paid anonymity, these were the professionals of the popular music business, hired guns who did their jobs expertly and efficiently and then went home to the suburbs. Out in the studio, the musicians for the session were unpacking their instruments. Brian’s cousin and production assistant, Steve Korthoff was wearing one his wife, Marilyn, and her sister, Diane Rovelle-Brian’s secretary-were also wearing them, and so was a once dignified writer from The Saturday Evening Post who had been following Brian around for two months. Among the hip people he was still on trial, and the question discussed earnestly among the recognized authorities on what is and what is not hip was whether or not Brian Wilson was hip, semi-hip or square.īut walking into the control room with the answers to all questions such as this was Brian Wilson himself, wearing a competition-stripe surfer’s T-shirt, tight white duck pants, pale green bowling shoes and a red plastic fireman’s helmet.Įverybody was wearing identical red plastic toy fireman’s helmets. Until now, though, there were not too many hip people who would have considered Brian Wilson and the Beach Boys hip, even though he had produced one very hip record, “Good Vibrations,” which had sold more than a million copies, and a super-hip album, Pet Sounds, which didn’t do very well at all-by previous Beach Boys sales standards. Not only was Brian going to produce a hit, but also, one gathered, he was going to show everybody in the music business exactly where it was at and where it was at, it seemed, was that Brian Wilson was not merely a Genius-which is to say a steady commercial success-but rather, like Bob Dylan and John Lennon, a GENIUS-which is to say a steady commercial success and hip besides. In four years of recording for Capitol Records, he and his group, the Beach Boys, had made surfing music a national craze, sold 16 million singles and earned gold records for 10 of their 12 albums. There was no doubt it would be a hit because this Genius was Brian Wilson. Now, however, in the very same studio a Genius with a very large capital G was going to produce a hit. Nobody knew it at the moment, but out of that two hours there were about three minutes that would hit the top of the charts in a few weeks, and the record plugger, the disc jockey and the kids would all be hailed as geniuses, but geniuses with a very small g. In the morning four long-haired kids had knocked out two hours of sound for a record plugger who was trying to curry favor with a disc jockey friend of theirs in San Jose. It was just another day of greatness at Gold Star Recording Studios on Santa Monica Boulevard in Hollywood. This article originally ran in Cheetah magazine in 1967. The video clip of Brian Wilson playing portions of “Surf’s Up” is from “Inside Pop: The Rock Revolution” appeared on CBS News in 1967. Smile session music and conversation outtakes were originally recorded by the Beach Boys for Capitol Records and Brother Records. The Smile Sessions Box Set , released by EMI Music, includes five CDs, two LPs, and two seven-inch singles of remastered Smile recordings, along with an incredible collection of archival material related to Smile. It is available in record stores and online. He was also active in the field of book art, with works in the Artist Books Collection of the Museum of Modern Art and other institutional and private collections.īrian Wilson Photos: Michael Ochs and Ray Avery/Redferns, used with permission from Getty Images His articles about Brian Wilson, Bob Dylan, Thomas Pynchon, and other prominent Americans are primary (and often unique) sources of information based on his personal acquaintance and extensive direct interviews with the subjects. Jules Siegel (1935-2012) was a writer and graphic designer whose work appeared over the years in Playboy, Best American Short Stories, Library of America’s Writing Los Angeles, and many other publications. ![]()
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