California, 1967. If your mind immediately goes to Jefferson Airplane, Doors, Mothers Of Invention, Quicksilver Messenger Service you are off track, at least for the duration of this playlist. The year is the same, the place too, the influences (in part) too, but the tones are quite different: if the psychedelic rock of the Summer Of Love is impetuous, dilated, mocking, often dark or at least inebriating, its polite and pop counterpart is – to the extent possible for years in which everything was in contact with everything – quite the opposite. The sunshine popthis is the expression with which the style was labeled in retrospect, brings together the baroque intuitions of the Beatles and Beach Boys with Burt Bacharach and the softness ofeasy listening to give life to a sound as radiant, lush, smooth as possible to the point of being sugary. Furthermore, despite frequent references, most of the exponents are not Californians at all.
You certainly know some pieces. Perhaps they are not the most representative, but the titles are very famous: “California Dreamin'” and “Happy Together” are symbols of big Bang of late-Sixties pop as much as “Light My Fire” and “Somebody To Love”. And if you want, they are already enough to get an idea of the basic ingredients of the recipe: phenomenal melodies, arrangements extended to keyboards, strings and wind instruments (but fully integrating them into the composition, avoiding a cloying orchestration), rhythms that draw from pop-rock as much as from folk, jazz and even marches, bittersweet harmonies dotted with about-faces with elusive entrances (minor-major changes, intertwining vocal lines, unexpected chords).
Fans of the genre will be well aware of other big names: Left Banke, Free Design, Harpers Bizarre, Eternity's Children. And above all the bands set up by the producer and arranger Curt Boettcher, Sagittarius and Millennium, emblematic both for their terrible income/revenue balance (“Begin” by Millenium was at the time the most expensive album ever produced by Columbia, as well as a terrifying commercial flop) and for their current status Of cult classic.
Some solo authors complete the cast of the most celebrated names: Van Dyke Parks, Margo Guryan, Roger Nichols and Paul Williams (whose “Someday Man”, written with Nichols, was also recorded by the Monkees). These artists bring, each in their own way, an intimate and songwriting sensibility within a style that is more often associated with choral forms, sometimes highlighting that melancholic streak that is in reality always present beneath the bright colors of the arrangements.
So far, the so-called “mandatory” inclusions to frame the trend. But a compilation would not be satisfactory without some surprises, which could also be a starting point for those who already have a good understanding of the fundamentals. So here are a couple of choices out of the pack: Love (generally associated with the more strictly psychedelic side of post-British Invasion pop) and the Canadian Doug Randle, the only exception to the self-imposed constraint of focusing only on American names (with all due respect to the British Honeybus, Herman's Hermits, Crazy Paving, Zombies). And then a few pearls to represent the most extreme nature of the current, that of studio whim, anti-rock experiment in search of the most convoluted constructions: “Love-in” and “A Whole Lot Of Rainbows” are the product of lineups that existed only for the duration of the recordings, led by ambitious producers supported by songwriter left free to launch into the most daring changes of atmosphere.
Particular attention was paid to the often overlooked “long tail” of the genre. Practically collapsed under its own weight by the end of the 1960s (production costs were sky-high, revenues tended to be low), the sunshine pop it was in some ways a precursor of progressive rock and, in a stricter sense, it represented one of the first complete forms of post-Beatles progressive pop. Direct influences are poorly documented, and perhaps even unlikely, although Left Bank's “Walk Away Renée” and Boston's “More Than A Feeling” are known; if you want to look for them, however, there is no shortage of transitional forms from the canon sunshine pop towards a other very varied. Smoke and Rain mark a sonic reconvergence with the legacy psych rockpointing in a direction decidedly similar to the commonly understood prog; partially assimilable, the Gandalfs bet more on gracefulness and grandeur that on the joints, anticipating West Coast sound and pomp-rock. The Montage, Michael Brown's courageous post-Left Banke adventure, deserve a discussion in their own right before moving on to the power pop with Stories: pushing harmonic experimentation to the max, pieces like “Men Are Building Sand” challenge the typical grace of the genre with arrangements that on occasion voluntarily give up intonation.
Antonio Santini for SANREMO.FM
