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RECORD PRODUCTION AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF AUTHENTICITY IN THE BEACH BOYS AND LATE-SIXTIES AMERICAN ROCK Jan Butler, BA, MA Thesis submitted to the University of Nottingham for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy April 2010 F Jniversity of Nottingham Hal!ward Library Abstract This thesis explores the paradox that occurred at the time that rock emerged as a new genre in America in the mid-1960s. Recordings were becoming increasingly manipulated in the studio, but at the same time there emerged a growing ideology of authenticity that developed as the decade progressed, first focussing on records, but ending by privileging live performance. The study falls into three parts. The first traces the development of authenticity in relation to music through history and explores its possible nature in order to illuminate the development of authenticity in relation to rock in the 1960s. The second section writes a history of the record industry in the 1960s, focussing on organisational practices, which I argue were strongly influenced by an ideology of authenticity related to beliefs about the conditions necessary to create art in a commercial framework. These organisational changes lead to the adoption by the industry of the figure of the entrepreneur producer. The final section looks at how the industry interacted with the conflicting ideologies of authenticity that were developed in the counterculture in relation to rock, employing rock cultural intermediaries both to bring rock bands into the industry, The and to sell their music back to the counterculture from which they came. more theoretical points of my discussion are exemplified through the use of a case study of the Beach Boys, whose career spans the decade, and who, despite early success as a rock band, experienced difficulty negotiating the changing ideologies of authenticity that emerged as the decade progressed. 2 koobI I206 1-, Acknowledgements Firstly, I would like to thank the AHRC for providing me with the necessary financial support to undertake this study. I am especially thankful for their speedy processing of my requests for financial support for frequent research trips rather late in the day. I would also like to thank Professor Adam Krims, my supervisor, for his constant encouragement, support and confidence in me over the past few years. In particular, I would to thank him for his attempts to make me stop reading and keep writing, and for swiftly reading through the huge chunks of prose I would occasionally surprise him with. This project would never have been completed without the support and interest of friends and colleagues, at Nottingham and elsewhere. I am particularly grateful to Sarah Hibberd, who read the entire manuscript at a late stage and provided general encouragement and cups of tea, and to Robert Adlington who has encouraged me from the earliest stages to become an academic. My sister, Carol, also gave gratefully received direct input, providing invaluable research and recreational assistance on the Californian leg of my research trip. I would also like to thank my family, friends and the occupants of the postgraduate room who have all managed to keep an appearance of interest in my work throughout and provided me with distraction or jovial cajoling as required. Finally, I would like to thank Harry, whose patience, love and unending faith in my abilities has changed everything. 3 Table of Contents Introduction 5 ......................................................................................................................... Section One: The Development Nature Of Authenticity 18 And .................................... Chapter One: The Development in Relation Music 18 of Authenticity to ......................... Chapter Two: Multiple Authenticities Emerge 43 .............................................................. Section Two: Records Record Production 63 and ............................................................ Chapter Three: Authenticity the Record Industry 63 and the Organisation of ................... Chapter Four: Authenticity, Technology the Rise the Entrepreneur Producer 97 and of ... Chapter Five: Pet Sounds: Brian Wilson and The Beach Boys as Rock Studio Auteurs121 Section Three: Consumption Counterculture 128 and the .............................................. Chapter Six: Authenticity, Cultural Intermediaries 128 Counterculture and ...................... Chapter Seven: The Rise Rock Cultural Intermediary 162 of the ...................................... Chapter Eight: `Heroes Authenticity defines Rock 186 and Villains': ............................... Conclusion 214 ....................................................................................................................... Illustrations 221 ...................................................................................................................... Bibliography 235 .................................................................................................................... Discography 245 ..................................................................................................................... Filmography 250 ....................... ......................................................................................... 4 Introduction Introduction This thesis sets out to explore the paradox that occurred at the time that rock emerged as a new genre in America in the mid-1960s, growing out of rock n' roll and then rock and roll. ' Recordings were becoming increasingly manipulated in the studio, but at the same time there emerged a growing ideology of authenticity that developed as the decade progressed, first focussing on records, but ending by privileging live performance. This thesis sets out to explore and explain this paradox, assessing the impact of the record industry and the media on rock and its perception, and the way that these responded to the new ways of thinking about rock that emerged at this time, ways that ultimately still affect the way that we think about popular music today. Assessing authenticity in relation to music in an academic context is a complex task particularly because not only is there little agreement on what authenticity in music might be, but different musics have different concepts of authenticity related to them. In the case of this thesis, the issue is further complicated by the fact that as the genre of rock as we now know it emerged in the late 1960s, the ideas of authenticity that became attached to it changed over time, sometimes leading to bands being imbued with one type of authenticity that acted to conceal others, sometimes making bands that had previously been seen as authentic be now seen as inauthentic, or sometimes coalescing together to make bands seem indisputably authentic in every way. In starting to explore the development of authenticity in 1960s rock, it became clear that this would be further complicated due to a general lack of detailed studies of the institutions of rock music in the 1960s. Despite several books that study individual bands from the 1960s, and many books on various aspects of the Beatles, a close look at how rock functioned in relation both to the record industry and broader culture in the 1960s has not been carried out, this despite the fact that it was a time of great flux resulting in the development of record company organisational strategies that are still in use today. 'A note on terminology: The term "rock n' roll' was the first term used to describe the new music emerging from around 1950, from which rock eventually developed. This music disappeared from the charts around 1958 and was replaced with white artists' following a rock n' roll derived style, usually referred to as "rock and roll". The term "rock" was generally in use to describe derivations of rock n' roll from 1964 onwards (although interchangeably with "rock and roll" and sometimes boundaries rock `n' roll still). These general period are outlined by Charlie Gillett in The Sound of the City: The Rise of Rock and Roll, Souvenir Press, New York, 1970, p. 1. A similar classification system is used in Carl Belz, The Story of Rock, Oxford University Press, New York, 1969, p. xii, who describes three stages of rock, 1954-1957,1957-1963 and from 1964 onwards, respectively, although he does not use the terms "rock and roll" and "rock n' roll", describing all three types of music as rock. 5 Introduction This also means that, despite the fact that it is often argued that the problem of the status of the record is fundamental to rock, as it was the first genre to have the record as its primary object, the development of discourse surrounding the issues this raises, discourse which usually centres on ideas related to authenticity, has not been explored? The omission of detailed studies of the cultural context and development of rock in the 1960s seems to be common in accounts of various cultural aspects of the 1960s in ' general. The development and cultural relevance of rock's precursor, rock and roll, has been studied in detail by academics and journalists alike, but music in the 1960s specifically has been treated to detailed study mainly by journalists, who usually focus on tales of excess, either in terms of money made or drugs taken, or both, and on the tragic early demise of many of the musicians of the era. The exception to this is Sheila Whiteley, a musicologist who sets out to explore the relationship between what she terms progressive rock and the counterculture in the late 1960s,