Goldmine; Feb. 22, 1996
One album had the musicians and live
animals on the cover; the other had the musicians and slabs of raw meat on the
cover. They were contemporaries, released within weeks of each other. By the
same label, too: One's serial number
was 2458, and the other's 2553.
And today, 30 years after The Beach Boys'
''Pet Sounds'' album became the unheralded jewel in the rock group's
repertoire, its commercial fate appears to have been tied to The Beatles'
"Yesterday and Today" American package, enough so to explain a series
of otherwise brain-dead decisions by Capitol Records executives way back in
June of 1966.
Sequence the events on Vine Street that
June, and it becomes clear that, as much as The Beatles' "Rubber
Soul" had inspired Brian Wilson to make "Pet Sounds," the snafu
of "Yesterday and Today" caused Capitol employees to under-promote
and otherwise undermine the album.
Filling in the dates and context requires
several references, including Brian Wilson's 1991 autobiography, "Wouldn't
It Be Nice;" Steve Gaines' "Heroes and Villains: The True Story of
the Beach Boys;" Tom Schultheis' day-by-day Beatle diary, "The
Beatles: A Day in the Life;" Joel Whitburn's various books compiling the
Billboard magazine pop singles and albums charts, and the week-by-week chart
listings in Harry Castleman and Walter J. Pdrazik's "All Together Now: The
First Complete Beatles Discography, 1961-1975" and Brad Elliiott's
"Surf's Up: The Beach Boys on Record, 1961-1981."
It was a curious, even a troubling
time to be a white American popular musician recording for the teen or youth
market -- and particularly a Southern Californian musician. For going on three
years, the "British Invasion" led by The Beatles had dominated the
pop consciousness with groups such as The Animals, The Rolling Stones, The
Zombies, The Dave Clark V and Herman's Hermits.
Just three weeks earlier, Phil
Spector -- in Brian Wilson's mind the producer Wilson most directly competed
with -- had released his over-the-top attempt at moving Ike and Tina Turner on
to the pop charts, the single "River Deep Mountain High." It stalled
at No. 88 on Billboard's Hot 100. Jan and Dean, the vocal duo so closely
associated with Wilson's Beach Boys in crafting the Southern California Sound,
had suddenly become unable to crack the Top 100 on Billboard's albums chart.
Even Los Angeles's young turks, The Byrds, were having a hard time getting on
the radio after a Southwest disc jockey started spreading the rumor that the
group's spring single, "Eight Miles High," was a paean to drug use.
As the leader, songwriter, producer and
bassist of The Beach Boys, Wilson had made some signficant changes in how rock
records sounded. His knack for vocal harmonies and chord sequences had already
transformed the image of "surf music" from staccato guitar over basic
rhythm section to soaring falsetto over close-harmony vocals. The Four Freshman
meet Chuck Berry.
But by the summer of 1966, artistic
license in teen popular music came from Britain and was more frequently being
stamped with ideas from Indian music and European classical music. The Beatles'
"Rubber Soul," with its sitar solo on "Norwegian Wood" and
its Bach-like harpsichord break on "In My Life," had inspired Wilson
to make an album that was "all good songs." When he completed it, he
learned Capitol had a double standard.
"Pet Sounds" was released
in late May of 1966 without a concurrent single release, partly because Capitol
included -- at Wilson's objection -- The Beach Boys' adaptation of the folk
song "Sloop John B," which was in its fifth week on the Top 10 when
the album was released. It took "Pet Sounds" four excruciating weeks
to crack the Top 20 on June 18 -- the same week "Sloop John B" ended
a 12-week run on the singles chart.
To Wilson, the former was a
validation for his most personal album to date and one he had had to fight with
Capitol executives, his fellow Beach Boys and his father to release. To the executives, the lack of a current hit
single spelled doom for a down-beat song cycle about lost youth. At a weekly
sales meeting, Wilson was told promotional efforts would be pulled away from
"Pet Sounds" and that Capitol would release that fall "The Best
of The Beach Boys," the first of more than a dozen collections over the
years that repackaged hit singles from The Beach Boys' commercial peak years,
1962-1965.
As high-profile decisions go, this one has
been vilified along the lines of John McNamara leaving Bill Buckner in at first
base for the bottom of the 12th in Game Six of the 1986 World Series. Look at
the what happened in hindsight, and you're bound to second guess: Why wasn't
"Wouldn't It Be Nice" ready to go as a summer single? How can a
company not be able to sell an album that has four charted singles
("Caroline No" at No. 38 and "God Only Knows" at No. 39
were the others)?
However, the "Pet
Sounds"/"Best of the Beach Boys" decision wasn't made in a vacuum.
The same week "Sloop John B" dropped off the charts, Capitol released
and then quickly pulled from release a Beatles album that collected hit singles
cuts with songs left off the group's previous two American albums.
"Yesterday and Today" was pulled from release on June 16, the day
after its official release, because of a "butcher cover" The Beatles
supplied Capitol. That cover has been interpreted as a criticism of the
American record company for its cut-and-paste "butchering" of the
British Beatle albums -- which was, among other things, a slap at the Los
Angeles office that came on the heels of John Lennon complaining that Capitol
A&R man Dave Dexter was vandalizing the Beatle albums when he compressed
the sound on the songs so they would sound better on pocket-sized transistor
radios.
(This obviously stung; 15 years later the
late Dexter wrote about it in a generally negative Lennon obituary for
Billboard magazine. His article reportedly led to a brief record-industry
advertising boycott against the trade magazine.)
As of 1966, The Beatles and The Beach
Boys had combined to rescue a flagging Capitol Records' fortunes after the
early '60s exodus of Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin and Sammy Davis Jr. to
Sinatra's Reprise label. Nat "King" Cole's death in 1965 and the
decline in popularity of Jackie Gleason's mood music albums further isolated
Capitol from the "adult" pop market.
The Kingston Trio had also been a popular
act with both the youth and adult markets, and had seemed to maintain its popularity
into 1964 despite banjo player Dave Guard's departure in 1961. But after the
Beatles broke, its albums quit reaching the Top 10, and by 1965 the Trio had
left the label.
Kyu Sakamoto's "Sukiyaki" was
the only No. 1 single Capitol had in the '60s before "I Want to Hold Your
Hand." The "teen" market was viewed as a singles market then,
and although The Beach Boys and The Beatles had each established themselves as
"album" groups, both groups had had as many as six albums each on the
charts at one time in 1965. When "The Beach Boys' Party" dropped off
May 14, 1966, after only 24 weeks on the chart (the previous four Beach Boys
albums had spent 49, 62, 50 and 33 weeks respectively), the group was down to
zero.
The Beach Boys hadn't been totally off the
albums chart since April 27, 1963 -- the week before "Surfin' USA"
first charted. As the album market started to grow during the mid-'60s, the
group had more than kept up with that growth. "Surfin' USA" stayed on
the charts for 78 weeks, dropping off during the summer of 1964 only to
reappear on the low end at summer's end.
At that year's end, "Beach Boys
Concert" would be the bestselling album during the holiday season --
although it was probably aided by the split sales between The Beatles' "A
Hard Day's Night" soundtrack and the "Something New" album that
included most of the soundtrack songs and a half dozen others in place of the
George Martin instrumentals. "Beatles '65," culled from the British
"Beatles for Sale" album, did not reach American stores in time to
chart until the first week of 1965.
At any rate, throughout 1965 Capitol had
from three to six Beatles albums on the chart and between two and four Beach
Boys albums as well. This in addition to moderate success for albums by
(roughly in order of success) Buck Owens, The Lettermen, Wayne Newton, Nancy
Wilson, Peter and Gordon and Al Martino, not to mention a 51-week run for the
original cast album to "Funny Girl."
Fast forward to 1966. Peter and Gordon's
"Woman" album peaked at No. 60. Owens remained a popular country
artist, but he would not match the crossover success of his 1965 album,
"I've Got a Tiger by the Tail." Newton's "Red Roses for a Blue
Lady" album had peaked at No. 17 in 1965. His "Summer Wind" would
stall at No. 114.
"The Hit Sounds of The
Lettermen" in 1965 was the highest charting album that harmony group had
had since its 1962 debut, and it's safe to assume that the larger album market
in 1965 meant that it actually outsold "A Song for Young Love."
"Hit Sounds" included the biggest hit of The Lettermen's career,
"(Theme from) a Summer Place." Neither of the group's first two
albums of 1966 -- "A New Song for Young Love" or "More Hit
Sounds of the Lettermen!" -- would crack the top 50. Capitol followed them
with a greatest-hits package.
Nancy Wilson had had four Top 10 albums in
1964-65, but her first 1966 release, "From Broadway With Love,"
peaked at No. 44. Her three 1966 releases tended to stay on the charts for
about the same time as her three 1965 releases, but with lower peaks.
Martino's "Spanish Eyes" would
prove to be his bestselling album, but Capitol did not chart a single
soundtrack album in 1966, and such cast albums as "The Great Waltz"
(which peaked at No. 118), and "Skyscraper" (No. 128) had nowhere
near the success of "Funny Girl," which owed more to the presence of
Columbia artist Barbra Streisand than to institutional value the Capitol
imprint had.
Meanwhile, when "Rubber Soul"
dropped to No. 2 in the Feb. 19 Billboard after spending six weeks at No. 1, it
actually under-performed the previous album, the American version of
"Help!" that included seven songs and five soundtrack instrumentals,
by three weeks.
From May 14 through that June sales
meetings, The Beatles were down to two albums on the Billboard charts, the
lowest level since the week before the Fab Four first performed on the "Ed
Sullivan Show." The "Yesterday and Today" recall meant that it
wouldn't chart until July 9, and the week before Billboard's Hot Albums
included only "Rubber Soul."
What all this added up to was a bad, bad
first quarter for Capitol, and every sign that the second quarter would be
worse. Steve Gaines reports in his somewhat tabloidy Beach Boys biography,
"Heroes and Villains," that Capitol started to prepare a "Best
of The Beach Boys" package in the spring because of fears Wilson would not
complete "Pet Sounds" in time for summer release.
So what happened? Someone panicked. Since
the previous best-selling Beach Boys' album, "Concert," happened to
have lots of hits on it, Capitol opted for the familiar rather than attempt to
create more hits. "Wouldn't It Be Nice" wouldn't chart until the end
of July, and by pairing it with "God Only Knows" as a double-sided
single, Capitol pretty much assured itself of not having a fourth single to
carry "Pet Sounds" into the fall.
Double-sided hits were still a big deal in
1966, not just because of the Beatles but also because of Herb Alpert and the Tijuana
Brass, which got airplay for both "A Taste of Honey" and "Third
Man Theme" in the fall of '65, and "Zorba the Greek" and
"Tijuana Taxi" at the beginning of '66.
Perversely, the release of a new single in October -- the masterful "Good Vibrations -- probably also had the unintended affect of pushing "Pet Sounds" further down the charts after it pulled back into the Top 30 in late September.
In retrospect, the "Pet Sounds"
under-promotion rather than the 1967 "Smile" fiasco was the beginning
of the end for The Beach Boys as America's No. 1 pop group. Art and commerce
couldn't co-exist, and in hurting art, commerce also hurt itself.
But in retrospect, it's clear that
Capitol's staff wasn't as evil as it was short-sighted. Modern album marketing
didn't yet exist. No one really had much confidence that the emerging youth
market had any demographic longevity.
With its inclusion of six single cuts and a title drawn from the group's "adult market" single, "Yesterday and Today" can be viewed as a hits album itself, joining 1966 summer hits packages for the American market only by The Rolling Stones ("High Tide and Green Grass") and the Animals ("Best of the Animals"). Remember: Capitol would also release a Lettermen "Best of" that summer.
So the sales and promotion folk -- who tended to look at a teen-music generation lasting from sophomore to senior year -- opted to cash in on the Beach Boys while they could.
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