Another Little Piece of My Heart (13 page)

I remember watching one of the many studio sessions for this song in 1966. When I arrived at around ten
P.M.
, Tina was perched on a high stool, sipping tea. She was a rather uncertain presence, far from the icon she would become. Spector sat behind a glass partition, hunched over the recording console, bringing bits of her vocalizing up and down as snippets of the arrangement surged by. He was easy to mistake for a wiry
nerd. After an almost wordless greeting he barely noticed me, and he didn’t seem very focused on Tina. He kept asking her to redo clusters of bars, and she complied, her hands cupping the mike. I could imagine how difficult that must have been, since she was singing only phrases, like an actor reciting a line of dialogue for a certain shot. I’ve always thought that the emotional valence in Turner’s voice could only be captured in a flowing take, but Spector saw it as an element in a larger composition. He was essentially sampling her live.

This was my first glimpse of a studio master at work, and I didn’t know how to read his attitude. To me it seemed like indifference. I wondered whether he’d felt that way about the girl groups he recorded as a teenager; after all, he’d married one of the Ronettes. I thought it was sexy to manipulate a woman’s voice, to set it like a jewel, but it was also eerie to watch, and the fact that Turner was a black woman being styled by a white man made it even more discomforting. I told myself that it was just the usual way performers were handled by men who made an art of processing “talent.” This was not the only time when I would assuage my conscience by deciding that I was only witnessing professionalism. They went at it for hours; when I left at three
A.M.
they were still working on the same stanza. I didn’t hear the bridge until the record came out.

At some point, even the Grateful Dead lost their optimism about making a recording. “We just don’t have the same fire in the studio,” Bob Weir has admitted. But some producers knew how to stoke the flame. One of them—my favorite of the bunch—was Jerry Wexler. He played a central role in the fortunes of soul music and its greatest singer, Aretha Franklin. She’d begun as a gospel performer, but once she was signed by Columbia Records she found herself snared by the classic strategy of whitening up a black voice for the crossover market. That meant adding strings. For Aretha it was a disaster, like a thick coating of pomade. Her career languished until her contract was bought by Atlantic, where Wexler paired her with R&B-savvy sidemen. He knew how black music should sound the way I knew how to write a story.

Wexler started out as a writer and editor for the trade weekly
Billboard
. During his time there, in the forties, he convinced his colleagues to change the term for black music from “race records” to rhythm and blues. He became a partner in Atlantic Records thanks to its founder, Ahmet Ertegun. They were old friends. As young men, Wexler
told me, the two of them would prowl the music dens of Harlem, and in the wee hours, stoned and sated, they would ride downtown on the Fifth Avenue bus, which still had an open top deck. (In those years, only hipsters and jazz buffs smoked pot.) By 1967 they were very rich. Ertegun was a snazzy socialite, but Wexler stayed pure street. That was probably why, though I met them both, I bonded with Jerry.

With his gruff accent and unruly beard, he reminded me of Allen Ginsberg sans lotus position. I spent a very fruitful afternoon at his home in Long Island. He said he was going to teach me about rock ’n’ roll. I listened intently as he played record after record from his collection, pointing out details I’d missed in very knowing though hardly academic terms. Finally he pulled out an album by a performer from the postwar era named Mama Yancey. I’d never heard of her, but every riff I loved was in her piano playing. I was hearing classic blues overlaid with boogie-woogie, the great matrix of rock ’n’ roll. Jerry’s demonstration was probably a sales pitch, since Mama Yancey’s old discs were being reissued by Atlantic. But he got me to see the power in her technique—it was animate—and he walked me through her rhythmic riffs with great patience. In the end there was no payoff for him, since I never wrote about her. But it was the most important music lesson I ever had, and it made me even more uneasy about the relationship between black blues and its brocaded British heirs.

If I’d been more honest with myself I might have admitted that I needed the racial mediation that groups like the Rolling Stones provided. James Brown, who had the most unregenerately black sound of the sixties, made me uncomfortable, though I never understood why. Now I do. He lacked the signifiers of whiteness that made a black artist like Jimi Hendrix palatable to ears like mine. Brown’s refusal to adapt those signs is part of what made him a great performer. But to me he was a fairly threatening mystery, and I never tried to interview him.

Wexler, I think, understood the commercial paradox of admiring black music until the point when it became really black. His fortune depended on walking that line. But he was pessimistic about the future of R&B, even in its crossover form. He predicted that rhythm tracks would soon be synthesized, and that tonality would become utterly precise, killing the imperfection that was central to soul music. “No more backbeats,” he said sadly, referring to the rhythms that circulated under and around the main one. Of course he couldn’t have imagined
that technology would open up the liberating possibilities of sampling. But he was right about perfect notes and processed voices. Pop singing today, especially by black women, is typically either an orgasmic purr or an anthemic roar, the swoops and flights flawlessly shaped. Performance is often a gloss on prerecorded tracks, and it has to be, since no one could duplicate the sound live. To me it feels as stylized as the moans and cries in a porn film added after the fact. This is nothing new, I guess. Devotees of classic blues complained about the amplified sound of R&B, and I’m sure Mick Jagger’s rendition of Robert Johnson songs (e.g., “Love in Vain”) sounded just as flat to Wexler as dubstep does to me. I think he took so much trouble with my education because he thought I could stem the standardizing tide. Of course, neither of us could have steered the beast we were riding, he on its broad back and me on its swinging tail.

In 1967, rock became a billion-dollar baby, and I added a section to my column about the machinations of the recording industry. I called it “Weird Scenes in the Gold Mine,” a phrase I’d borrowed from the Doors song “The End.” The beast had begun its feast, Cuisinarting everything it couldn’t digest. But there were still outposts of local musical sensibility. I never got to see the studios in Muscle Shoals or Memphis, but I did make it to Detroit, where the greatest factory of black music was located. This was Motown, the only black-owned record label in the sixties, and also the only major black company in entertainment. The label’s founder, Berry Gordy, had plucked a lot of his acts from the city’s housing projects. This gave Motown a rich connection with the doo-wop and girl-group traditions, apparent in the funkiness under its sleek sound. But its presentation of the female body was more conservative than in most black acts—the singers wore gowns, and they were likelier to sway than to shake their booties. These elaborate moves were assembled in one of the many tiny rooms where the Motown sound was made. It was the oddest operation I’d ever come across.

When I got out of the cab on Grand Boulevard I thought I was on the wrong street. All I could see was a row of small private houses. But there was a whole finishing school inside, including a choreography room, a costume department (where the Supremes were given their prom-night look), and of course the recording studios, all contained in a series of
connected basement spaces. It was warrenlike—there was a rumor that Motown used a hole in the ceiling as an echo chamber. I never got to see that, but during my visit I watched Harvey Fuqua, a veteran producer, work the studio console while the Four Tops recorded a song. I think it was “Seven Rooms of Gloom,” but I may be confusing that title with the cramped feeling of the place. When I recall my visit to Motown I see creaky floors and narrow passageways. It reminded me of the writers’ floor at the
Voice
.

I figured it was only a matter of time before Motown closed up shop in Detroit and moved to L.A. (It did, in 1972.) All the major labels had offices there, and the city offered state-of-the-art studios. It was where you had to go in order to meet the new crop of producers, who were young, hip, and sometimes part of the band. The most eccentric of them was Brian Wilson, the genius behind the Beach Boys.

They weren’t exactly darlings of the rock press. Their songs were considered simple-minded and certainly not blues based—hence, not manly enough to be serious rock. But I loved the Beach Boys, even in their earliest incarnation as architects of surf music. To my ears, their car-crazed optimism was the realization of Chuck Berry’s American dream. I don’t think you can beat “Fun, fun, fun (till your daddy takes the T-bird away)” when it comes to the poetics of hedonism. This was a fantasy, of course, and a banal one at that. But then Brian Wilson dropped acid and began to create remarkable elegiac songs, with barbershop harmonies gone psychedelic. I watched the Beach Boys’ evolution with awe.

“Good Vibrations,” their mega-hit of 1966, was as complex as anything the Beatles thought up a year later on
Sgt. Pepper
. It had a multiple melody and a musical palette that included the first use in rock of the theremin, an electronic instrument whose spooky sound had mainly appeared in horror films. When you play Beach Boys tunes from that era it’s hard to believe that the arrangements weren’t MIDI-generated, but of course such programs didn’t exist then. Wilson used the recording technology of the time to maximum effect, but he also played with found sounds. To apply a critical term I didn’t know at the time, he was a rock
auteur
.

In the fall of 1967 I wrote a piece for the
Times
on the Beach Boys’ latest album,
Smiley Smile
. I was struck by its fragile melodies and their relationship to sacred music; those familiar ride-the-curl voices,
now “hushed with wonder,” reminded me of the Fauré
Requiem
, but they were utterly American. I was listening to proof of my belief that pop could produce a mass culture that was at once accessible and profound.

I don’t think my editor at the
Times
bought the Fauré comparison, but he agreed to pay my expenses so I could travel west, and I guess Brian Wilson was impressed by my piece, because he invited me to his home in Bel Air. Judith came along, and we stayed at L.A.’s hippest hotel, the Chateau Marmont, with its Spanish-colonial lobby and windows that actually opened. Our room had a view of Laurel Canyon, but if we craned our necks we could see the Sunset Strip. It was quite a contrast—on one side verdant slopes and on the other a barren avenue with billboards the size of drive-in movie screens. Everything about L.A. seemed incongruous to me, so the interview with Brian fit right in.

His wife, Marilyn, answered the door. One look at her and I could tell that she was another strong Jewish woman with an introverted artist for a husband. Pointing to a limo sitting on the lawn, she said, wearily, “He’s hiding.” I’d heard about that car—it had once belonged to John Lennon, and Brian bought it as a totem of the group toward which he felt the most competitive. He was determined to beat the Beatles at their elevated game, so he’d teamed up with Van Dyke Parks, a member of the L.A. pop avant-garde whose style encompassed everything from Stephen Foster to blank verse. To this remarkable range Parks added a wry affection for the Disneyesque. The open harmonies and quirky touches of the Beach Boys brought out the whimsy of his lyrics, as in:

I know that you’ll feel better

When you send us in your letter

And tell us the name of your … favorite vegetable

Little of what Parks wrote made linear sense, but his lyrics were enchanting, and I championed his solo album,
Song Cycle
. That was when I realized how far my critical taste could stray from the judgment of the record racks. The album was a flop—even rock had its limits when it came to free-form obscurity.

Parks never got very far as a songwriter, but he did co-author the most legendary sixties record that never was. This was
Smile
, Brian Wilson’s uncompleted “teenage symphony to God.” I can only imagine
what that work would have been like if he had ever finished it. But he blew deadline after deadline, and the final product,
Smiley Smile
, was a truncated version of what he intended. The most ambitious piece—a suite based on the four elements: earth, wind, fire, and water—was missing. Later I would hear that Brian had destroyed the master tapes. A fire had broken out not far from the recording studio, and he became convinced that the music would cause things to burst into flame. This was the story that made the rounds, but it seems that he didn’t actually trash the masters; he only said he had, perhaps to avoid admitting that he was uneasy about the work. At the time I accepted his original explanation, because it sounded like something he was capable of.

Brian’s emotional state, which was fragile to begin with, had deteriorated under the pressure from his record label. It must have seemed to him that he would never again be able to produce a hit. I didn’t know anything about that when we met; he kept the details hidden from me. But his instability was evident, and, I think, directly related to his audacity as a producer. He was capable of creating moment of sheer tonal whimsey, pellucid choral interludes (“Wind Chimes”), and cartoony riffs as twisted as the stuff in comix. (Give “Fall Breaks and Back to Winter,” aka “W. Woodpecker Symphony” a listen and you’ll hear the origins of Animal Collective.)

I’ve read monographs on the Beach Boys that describe Wilson as a self-conscious artist, fully aware of musical history. That wasn’t my impression. He came across as a typical rock autodidact, deeply insecure about his creative instincts, terrified that the songs he was working on were too arty to sell. As a result of this ambivalence, he never realized his full potential as a composer. In the light of electronica and minimalism, you can see how advanced his ideas were, but they remain bursts of inspiration from a mind that couldn’t mobilize itself into a whole. This was the major tragedy of rock in the sixties. It set out to shatter the boundaries of high and mass culture, but there was a line, invisible yet rigid, between violating musical conventions and making truly popular music. Anyone who couldn’t walk that line was doomed to a respectful rejection, and a few albums with disappointing sales usually meant silence. The market was a fickle mistress. (What else is new?) You needed a strong ego to read the public’s taste, and an even stronger one to resist it. Dylan succeeded because he was supremely willful, and the Beatles
would have succeeded at anything. But the California performers I admired—and sometimes loved—were deeply insecure. They yearned for fame, as only needy people can, but they also wanted to make art, and when both of those impulses couldn’t be achieved they recoiled in a ball of frantic confusion.