California Dreaming: The LA Pop Music Scene and the 60s: Guides to Music

Moon Dawg

Nobody knows for sure who the Gamblers were – the passage of time has added to the legend, and sources conflict as to who did what, but let’s listen and try to hear who the players are at the start of our story.

It starts with the drums, of course.

It’s a primal, rolling sound, one that has led many to say it must have come from the man who said let there be drums.

But while the legends that surround the session have everyone who is anyone there, to witness the pre-birth of a craze, it seems that Sandy Nelson was not the drummer. No, that sound is the sound of Rod Schaffer, a drummer who will pass out of our story very quickly, but who has as good a claim as any to have started it all. But he’s playing in an imitation of the style of Nelson, who was the local boy made good.

Then the rhythm guitar enters, and from our lofty perspective more than fifty years in the future, we’re in familiar territory. This is surf music and, contra Hendrix, we’ve been hearing it again and again and again.

Except this is a year before surf music, before Dick Dale and His Del-Tones start playing music like this to surfers, gremmies and even the odd hodad, and before the sound of a reverbed Fender becomes synonymous with the waves.

This is, rather, the sound of Link Wray or Duane Eddy, as stripped down and reinvented by a gang of teenagers. Just hammer away at that single note as frantically as you can, dang-dang-dang-dang dang-dang-dang-dang. This is a young Elliot Ingber, who will go on to be a Mother before becoming Magic. Dang-dang-dang-dang dang-dang-dang-dang. Elliot has recorded this kind of thing before – the Gamblers used to be called the Moon Dogs, and he had recorded Moon Dog with them – but this is "Moon Dawg"…

Then enter the bass – just a low rumble here from Larry Taylor, no hint yet of the virtuoso who would play with everyone from the Monkees to Tom Waits, just holding the low end down, adding a bit of throb.

And then those staccato piano chords come in, and as they clang away we have to admit that here is where our stories start to conflict. Is this Howard Hirsch, the unknown keyboardist who played on the later Gamblers singles, or is it Bruce Johnston? Johnston was, after all, close friends with Sandy Nelson and Kim Fowley, both of whom are often credited here, but neither of whom had anything to do with it.

But despite that, my ears tell me it’s Johnston, and most of the sources I can find tend to agree. But maybe they, like me, are swayed by the incongruity of the man who wrote I Write the Songs hanging out with a bunch of reprobates like this, the kind of band whose B-side would be called LSD-25, in honour of a drug that the rest of rock music wouldn’t start noticing for another seven years.

But no, it’s Johnston. I’d recognise the sounds of the most clean-cut rock pianist this side of Neil Sedaka anywhere, doing his best Jerry Lee Lewis impression.

And if I had any doubts, they’d be swept away when those harmonies come in, with Johnston’s voice to the front. Just a simple three-chord aah, block harmonies, following the rest of the track.

And forty seconds in we finally have the lead guitar, from Derry Weaver. This is the birth of surf guitar right here. It’s not born fully-formed – it’s a thin, wiry sound, without the reverb and distortion that would define the genre – but the phrasing is all there. This is John the Baptist, paving the way for the Dick Dale that is to come. Derry Weaver was so lost to rock history that I have reference books – good ones – that say he never existed, but he was a real person, all right, a friend of Eddie Cochrane who Eddie had taught to play the blues.

And then the final element – producer Nik Venet, howling at the moon.

This High Fidelity World Pacific Record, number X815, was only a hit in LA, but it didn’t have to be a hit anywhere else. A year later, it was covered by a young garage band called the Beach Boys, who were produced by Venet (and who may have had some help on their cover from Weaver); their version is ‘accidentally’ credited to Nik Venet rather than to Derry Weaver. And two years later, out in Cucamonga, in PAL Studios (the first independent recording studio on the West Coast), a cover version would be performed by the Hollywood Tornadoes. Their recording was engineered and produced by a young guitarist/producer/composer named Frank Zappa.

Everything this book is going to look at begins here, in this seemingly-unremarkable two minutes and sixteen seconds of vinyl and its B-side. The players we have assembled here will be, if not our principals, then the supporting artistes throughout this story, appearing again and again in various guises.

The surf music fad was only a short-lived one, and we will not be devoting much space to it in this book, but it was as important to the LA scene as the skiffle craze had been a few years earlier to Britain. It was primitive, but exciting, music that anyone could make. And soon anyone was. We’ll be looking at some of those who were in the next essay.

Heart and Soul

Jan Berry may not have been the most original musical force ever, but he definitely knew how to knock off someone else’s sound successfully.

He’d been hanging around on the edge of the music business for years, first as a member of The Barons, a doo-wop group that got no further than playing a handful of high school hops, but which had featured Sandy Nelson on drums and Bruce Johnston on piano, and then from 1958 on as a duo with his schoolfriend Arnie Ginsberg.

Jan and Arnie had one massive hit, Jennie Lee, which had reached number three on the Cashbox chart. But the follow-up had only reached number eighty-one, the single after that hadn’t charted at all, and Ginsberg had given up on the music business. Another former member of the Barons had just got out of the army, and so despite Dean Torrence’s manifest lack of singing ability, Jan and Arnie quickly became Jan and Dean.

But the new duo had an almost entirely parallel career trajectory to the old: a top ten hit with their first single, "Baby Talk", and then a bunch of flops (with one fluke single just scraping the top forty).

They kept going for a few years, putting out singles with any label that would have them – Doré, Ripple, Challenge – with no success. These singles were nominally produced by two young men named Herb Alpert and Lou Adler, but Jan Berry was smart (he was studying at UCLA at the time, soon to transfer to the California College of Medicine to pursue a medical career in parallel with his musical one), and was watching and learning, as well as making sure that he got his fair share of the songwriting credit.

They’d even managed to release an actual album, on Doré records, on the back of their one hit. The Jan & Dean Sound had a cover photo of the two crewcut teens wearing their best sweaters, and contained songs like White Tennis Sneakers’ and My Heart Sings. It didn’t sell much, even by the small standards of the singles-dominated rock and roll market.

By April 1961 it had been almost two years since Baby Talk. Jan and Dean needed another hit. And so they got one by Jan’s favourite technique – copying someone else.

In February that year, a doo-wop group called the Marcels had a massive hit with an uptempo cover version of the old standard Blue Moon, speeding it up and basing it around a new hook – bass singer Fred Johnson’s insanely fast bom bop a dom, b-dang b-dang dang vocal part.

Two months later, on the seventh of April, the Cleftones released a doo-wop cover version of Heart and Soul, another old standard – a song by Hoagy Carmichael and Frank Loesser that had been performed by almost everyone at one time or another. Their version was rapidly rising up the charts when Jan and Dean went into the studio.

Heart and Soul is based around the same I-vi-ii-V chord sequence as Blue Moon (and a million other songs – it’s the standard chord sequence used in almost every doo-wop ballad, which is why those two songs had been suitable for doo-wop revivals), so Berry took the basic arrangement idea from the Marcels’ single (the fast bass vocals, here bom ba bom-bom ba dip-da dip-dip da du-da-da-dun-dun da dingidy dingidy) and applied it to the other song, churning out a quick knockoff with very little musical merit – the most notable features being the honky-tonk piano break and the fact that both Berry (who sings the bass part and the abrasive lead) and Torrence (who harmonises and takes the brief falsetto) had quite unpleasant voices.

It is, by any reasonable measure, a far, far worse record than either of the Marcels or Cleftones tracks. The tempo drifts quite sloppily, neither Berry nor Torrence can stay on key, and the whole thing has a muddy sound from too much bouncing down for overdubs. It’s an amateur-sounding record, and certainly doesn’t sound like the work of a man with three years’ experience in the music business and several hits behind him.

But Jan and Dean also had a secret weapon – whiteness. While the Marcels were an integrated group, and the Cleftones were black, Jan and Dean were both clean-cut blonde-haired white boys with crewcuts. So while they didn’t overtake the Cleftones in the charts, they did suddenly have another hit – the single went to number twenty-five on the Billboard chart, and sixteen on Cashbox.

Soon they were signed to Liberty Records, a genuinely big label which had acts like Julie London, Henry Mancini, and Bobby Vee. Liberty had turned down Heart and Soul, but had soon realised its mistake, andRE in 1961 and 62 Jan and Dean released a whole string of new tracks – a cover version of Who Put the Bomp?, a follow-up to Baby Talk entitled She’s Still Talkin’ Baby Talk, anything that would allow Berry to do his low bass scat vocals.

None of them charted. By August 1962 Liberty was releasing a greatest hits album – their career was over for a third time.

Jan Berry needed to find a new model to copy, and quickly – and he found that model in a band whose first single had borne more than a little resemblance to Jan and Dean’s own sound…

Surfin’

Surfin’ is the only life, the only way for me, now surf, surf, with me

The Pendletones weren’t a real band. They’d never even played a gig together before their first recording session.

Hite and Dorinda Morgan knew the young men who auditioned for them in August 1961. Alan Jardine had seen them several times over the previous year or so with his folk group, The Islanders. They’d been impressed enough to call him back, but not enough to commit to recording anything with him.

This time, though, he’d turned up with another familiar face. Brian Wilson was the young son of Murry Wilson, an aspiring songwriter whose material the Morgans had published. He was a good singer and a decent pianist, and Dorinda Morgan had actually got him an audition for Original Sound records a few years earlier, but he’d been unsuccessful.

The two aspiring singers were joined by some relatives of Brian’s: his younger brothers Dennis and Carl, and his cousin Mike Love.

Opinions differ about what they performed at that August audition; it was either a song written by the Morgans’ son, Bruce, called Rio Grande, or it was a folk song that had been performed previously by the Kingston Trio.

But the Morgans knew that that song, Sloop John B, was not the kind of material these young men needed to be recording. Did they have any material of their own?

Dennis Wilson spoke up. Brian and Mike have been writing a song about surfing.

They hadn’t, of course, and one imagines that Brian instantly regretted having let Dennis join the group – his mother had told him he had to let his younger brother join in. But they dissembled, saying it wasn’t quite ready yet, and made arrangements to come back the next month.

Brian and Mike quickly got to work and knocked out something based on the same formula as Jan and Dean’s hits – a bom, bom, dit-ba-dit-ba-dit bass vocal and nasal lead, both supplied by Mike, and a certain amount of swagger as their basic three-chord song extolled the virtues of the surfing fad. This was a subject neither knew much about – Brian was scared of the ocean, and while Love did occasionally go surfing later, he was more busy looking after his wife and baby. Luckily, Dennis, who spent as much time at the beach as he possibly could, was there to help them with the slang.

The Wilsons’ parents, Murry and Audree, went away for Labor Day weekend, and left their sons some money for food while they were gone. Borrowing some extra money from Al’s mother, they rented musical instruments, rehearsed, and had a party instead.

When Murry and Audree returned to find that their money had been spent on musical instruments, they were angry right up until the point where they heard the music, after which Murry, who had always wanted a career in the music business (he’d even once written a song that Lawrence Welk had performed), decided he was going to be the new band’s manager.

The new group, calling themselves the Pendletones, auditioned again on the fifteenth of September, and so impressed the Morgans that they offered Brian and Mike a publishing contract, and arranged a professional session for the boys with Candix Records.

And they were boys. Their ages ranged between fourteen (Carl, the baby of the group) and twenty, and for all their recording session was supposedly professional, it had none of the sophistication of the youthful veterans we’ve been discussing so far. The instrumentation consisted of Carl strumming an acoustic guitar, Al plucking an upright bass, and Brian hitting either a single snare drum or a dustbin lid (reports vary).

The sound of the record had nothing to do with the ‘surf music’ that was then being made by people like Dick Dale and the Del-Tones, which was primarily instrumental music based on heavily reverbed electric guitars. Instead, this owed more to the Kingston Trio – simple, acoustic, folky music, with strong harmonies – but with the addition of that Jan-and-Dean-esque bass vocal.

That combination – block harmonies singing a repeated chant (Surfin’, surfin’), while a mobile bass vocal does something different underneath (Bom, bom, dit-ba-dit-ba-dit) – owes something to doo-wop, but more to Brian Wilson’s unique style of piano playing. Wilson has been described as having the best left hand in the business, and unlike most people when he plays piano he carries the melody in the bass range, while just blocking out simple chords with his right for the most part. These parts were transferred, more or less directly, to the band’s vocals.

Once Wilson got the idea to add a second mobile voice on top – his own falsetto – the band’s vocal sound would be complete, but for now the Pendletones were unformed.

But this simple song, with its basic verse/chorus alternation, clearly had potential. The only thing wrong was the name. The band had called themselves the Pendletones because Murry Wilson thought that they might be able to get sponsorship from Pendleton, the manufacturers of the shirts they planned to wear onstage. But this was clearly not the right name for the band that recorded "Surfin’".

So when the Pendletones’ new record came out, Candix records had made the unilateral decision to rechristen them. The only question was what to call them. The Surfers was considered for a while, before Russ Regan hit on the perfect name for the band, and had it stuck on the label of Candix single 331 when it was released in November. The first the band knew about their change of name was when they opened a box of their singles.

And since the song was a big local hit, and a minor one nationally, reaching number seventy-five, the name stuck.

The Pendletones were now the Beach Boys.

409

The Beach Boys didn’t really capitalise on their initial success. "Surfin’" was released in November, and they did two shows in December (one of them a two-song set in the intermission of a Dick Dale show, which apparently went badly) before going into a studio in January to record a few more songs about surfing, in their newer electric style.

But then Alan Jardine left the band, deciding he’d rather concentrate on his studies and his folk group than on a pop group. His departure was perfectly amicable – he would record a single with Brian and Audree Wilson under the name Kenny and the Cadets that March – but it left a gap in the band’s line-up.

The gap was quickly filled by David Marks, a thirteen-year-old neighbour of the Wilson family who had been learning guitar along with Carl. Marks was not the singer Jardine was, but he was an accomplished guitarist for his age, and knew the family well.

But one further big change had taken place; one which would have big results for the band over the next few years. Brian Wilson had found his first outside collaborator.

Gary Usher was three years older than Brian Wilson, and had released a single himself a couple of years earlier, an unsuccessful track called "Driven Insane", a startlingly odd combination of reverbed Fender guitar, a sobbing Gene Pitney-esque vocal, and a high, almost theremin-sounding, female backing vocal. He and Wilson quickly hit it off and began collaborating on songs, both for the Beach Boys and for other side projects.

One song they came up with was a variant on the formula Brian and Mike had hit upon with "Surfin’. Brian and Mike had already written another song, Surfin’ Safari", that was a virtual clone of their original hit, but which had tightened the formula. That song opened with almost unadorned vocal harmonies singing the hook, before going into a repeated twelve-bar blues pattern, over which Love sang the verse in his tenor range, and using the same pattern for a chorus, but with Love singing a bass melody while the rest of the band chanted the title before they all came together for the last line.

It’s the same basic structure as "Surfin’", but tighter, with twin electric Fender guitars providing much more drive than the single acoustic guitar of the earlier song, and with a prominent Chuck Berry influence on the guitar style.

Usher and Wilson took that same structure, and instead of writing about surfing, decided to write about the cars Usher loved so much, and in particular the Chevrolet Impala SS car Usher was desperate to buy, which had Chevrolet’s latest top-of-the-range engine, one with a 409-cubic-inch capacity.

Mike Love, who has since gained a co-writing credit for this song following a lawsuit in the early 1990s, apparently added the opening She’s real fine, my 409 hook and the giddy-up backing vocal idea. Love has often claimed that the reason for writing car songs along with the surf songs the band had been doing was a commercial one – that while the people on the coasts enjoyed surfing, the landlocked middle states all had cars as well – but it’s notable that while Love was Wilson’s principal collaborator, he worked on relatively few of the car songs. Usher (and Roger Christian, who later collaborated with both Wilson and Usher) clearly knew and loved cars.

This led to a rather odd situation – the song itself manages to clearly communicate its lyricist’s passion for the subject, precisely because its relatively short lyric contains the almost incomprehensible phrase my four-speed, dual-quad, positraction 409. Only someone who really loved cars would talk about them in such detail, and the enthusiasm is infectious even for those of us who barely know one end of a car from another.

Usher was also encouraging Wilson to stretch himself as a producer. When the band went into Western Studios with engineer Chuck Britz to record this song as a demo, along with a new version of "Surfin’ Safari", Wilson and Usher’s ballad The Lonely Sea, and the old Four Freshmen song Their Hearts Were Full of Spring, they took with them a tape recording, made on a reel-to-reel recorder, of the engine of Usher’s car revving up. The addition of this sound effect at crucial points in the track turned it from just a Surfin’ Safari rewrite into something more.

Brian Wilson’s father Murry was credited as the producer of the session, but Brian was calling the shots in the studio from the beginning, and the results are wildly more exciting than the rather tentative "Surfin’".

Nik Venet agreed. Venet had recently moved from World Pacific Records to become Capitol Records’ head of A&R [1] . Venet had been in at the birth of surf music with Moon Dawg, and decided that the Beach Boys were going to be big. He bought the demos of Surfin’ Safari and 409 and released them as a single in June 1962, and Surfin’ Safari quickly rose to number fourteen in the charts. 409 did less well, but still made the Hot 100 on its own merits, and by September the band were in the studio, recording five more Wilson/Usher songs and one more Wilson/Love one, along with a couple of covers of popular hits and a remake of Moon Dawg (credited to Venet rather than its composer), for a quick album release to capitalise on the single’s success.

The Beach Boys were no longer one-hit wonders, and they’d already expanded from just singing about surf to cars as well. Where could they go from here?

Golden Gridiron Boy

Randy Newman was probably destined to become a musician. Three of his uncles were film composers, and between them won ten Academy Awards. He was classmates in high school with Bruce Johnston, Jan and Dean, Nancy Sinatra, and Kim Fowley. And his best friend, Lenny Waronker, was the son of the chairman of Liberty Records. In reading his biography, one wouldn’t be surprised to see a paragraph start On his way home from school one day, Newman tripped over and let out a yell. That yell was heard by a young singer named Elvis Presley, who decided to base his vocal style on the sound…

It was only because of Waronker’s insistence, however, that Randy Newman actually took his first steps into the music business. When he was in his late teens, Waronker persuaded Newman to record a demo for a song they’d co-written, which got Newman a job as a staff songwriter for Metric Music, a small publishing company which paid him $150 per month.

When he was seventeen, in 1962, the doo-wop group The Fleetwoods (famous for Come Softly To Me) recorded his They Tell Me It’s Summer as the B-side for their top forty hit "Lovers By Night, Strangers By Day". It was a fairly mawkish song (They tell me it’s summer/But I know it’s a lie/’Cause summer is for laughing/So why do I cry?) but it led to the Fleetwoods recording a number of Newman’s other songs, and making him, while still in his teens, a moderately successful songwriter.

Oddly, for one of the few songwriters who didn’t sing on his own demos (Newman hated his own voice, and so got cheap, unknown session singers like Glen Campbell and Jackie DeShannon to perform the vocals on them), Newman came to the attention of Pat Boone at Dot Records as a potential performer for Boone to produce.

The combination of Newman and Boone seems a ludicrous one now, but it made more sense at the time. Before his talent had matured, Newman was writing exactly the kind of bland material that Boone was building the later stages of his career on.

But there was a fundamental difference there, too. While Newman was influenced by black New Orleans musicians like Fats Domino, Boone had had many of his earlier hits by recording insipid, unsympathetic cover versions of those musicians’ work. Boone’s character can probably be summed up by the fact that, when he was recording his cover of Domino’s magnificent Ain’t That a Shame, he asked if he could change the lyric to isn’t that a shame instead.

But Boone nonetheless decided that Randy Newman was worth recording, and so Newman ended up recording Golden Gridiron Boy, a song whose inspiration came from Waronker, with production by Boone and Jimmie Haskell (an award-winning composer and arranger who one suspects did most of the actual production work), and a backing band led by Boone’s regular keyboard player Gene Garf.

Written from the point of view of a schoolboy, Golden Gridiron Boy is a typical story of unrequited love. Newman’s character is in love with a cheerleader, but she only has eyes for the football hero who looks ten feet tall in his uniform, while the narrator plays in the band because he’s too small to make the team, although he’s big enough to have a dream that one day she’ll understand.

The song doesn’t sound too impressive at first listen, but there’s a caustic wit there that hints that perhaps the writer-performer doesn’t identify all that closely with the nebbishy narrator. In particular, the backing vocals are performed in the style of cheerleaders. This makes a kind of sense – the Beach Boys would use the same gimmick the next year for their Be True To Your School, which similarly deals with high-school (American) football – but here they seem to be mocking the narrator, sometimes echoing his words, but often, well… cheering.

When Newman sings She’s in love with him, they respond Yay, yay!. To she talks of nothing but him, the reply is hooray!, and after She goes wild with joy there’s a positively orgasmic woo! – even Newman’s own backing singers are far more interested in the handsome sports hero than the person they’re backing. The song fades out to the cheerleaders chanting Woo! and go go go! – for all the narrator’s protestations that one day the girl will see what she means to him, it’s quite clear that he won’t be getting the girl any time soon.

Unsurprisingly, though, the combination of Newman’s unconventional, slightly flat, vocal with the marching band snare and cheerleaders designed to conjure up the feeling of a high school sports event was not