BTW....Billy Joel, a very young Billy Joel, was playing piano for a few of the studio productions, Remember(Walking in the Sand) and Leader of the Pack. Apparently Betty Weiss used to flirt with Billy. He was a just a kid while Betty was just a street smart, hanging on the corner, kind of girl from Queens. Mary Weiss still records and still does concerts. The Ganser twins are unfortunately dead. The Shangri-Las could rock and roll. There are a few live songs on the double CD. Their versions of Shout and Twist and Shout ( Isley Brothers) were wailing versions with a very good tight back up band. "Good beat and you could dance to it" as they use to say on American Bandstand ( my next door neighbor, she would go often with her friends to AM when it was still in Philly)
I am not sure what Brian Wilson was trying to do, after "I Get Around", I lost interest in the Beach Boys/Jan and Dean after that; I heard J&D did some of the back up for the Beach Boys and the Beach Boys for Jan and Dean, and of course Brian wrote most of Jan and Dean's material anyway.
As far as the Beatles are concerned, read my 2000/2001 posts on the Beatles. Hated them. Still hate them. Could not sing very well, could not play their instruments very well, and their songwriting was good enough to fool people into thinking they were great song writers. Boring pop
music. Everyone says they were innovative like using the sitar, Brian Jones and Jeff Beck where doing it months before them. Somewhere I have a sitar recorded version of the Yardbirds "Heartful of Soul". I wanted Teenage Angst Music....I wanted the Animals, the Kinks, the Yardbirds, and of the course the Rolling Stones. I wanted immediate gratification, I wanted immediate identification, I wanted the Sonics playing a frantic version of Louie, Louie! I wanted my parents to hate it, if they hated it that meant I would immediately like it. My Mom, "why don't you like the Beatles, like Yvonne next door. They are so cute in their outfits" "Why do you have to like those ugly, dirty looking groups like the Rolling Stones. They look like they are from NorthEast Philly." ;-)))
If you wanted music as art as an aesthetic experience, then you could listen to something like Schubert or Beethoven. There are more interesting things happening (aesthetically speaking and musically speaking) in 2 minutes of the Adagio in Schubert's 15th String Quartet then in all of the Beatles music. And Paul writing "classical" music, what a joke; 3rd rate Brahms at best. If I wanted Brahms music I'd listen to Brahms!!! Not a hack. Heck he isn't even writing 20th century classical like music. I cannot imagine him thinking in terms of a Webern, who was a genius, or Schnittke or Part, and the newest of the new composers, Auerbach. I have some of her piano works, heavenly stuff.
Oh did I mention Machaut, 14th century doo-wop composer???
Hey, don't get me wrong, doo-wop music is fun music to listen to, just like the Shangri-Las are fun music or the Rolling Stones. I just take pop, rock, rock and roll, metal (death or black or otherwise), hip-hop, rap, soul, blues, c&w, bluegrass,jazz and other cultural musical artifacts as they were meant to be: entertainment. To entertain oneself and if good enough entertain others. And for a good enough musician, a way to make some money and have a little fame. It is when an entertainer thinks he is making music as art as an aesthetic experience that they run into trouble. When it should be the other way around music as art as an aesthetic experience that excites the imaginative mind. My two greatest concerts: Muddy Waters in 1970 at the MainPoint on the MainLine in Philly.( Muddy's slide guitar was sublime that night, it was a crying shame that Little Walter was lone gone dead, along with his harmonica playing) And Gideon Kremer performing Schnittke's 2nd Violin Sonata.( perhaps one of the most dissonant violin sonatas around, when the accompanying pianist, after a rash of harsh dissonance by Gideon comes in on C major the V chord loudly, it sounds so out of place, you say wow, where did that come from, pianist smiling while playing the chord!) One was a soaring entertaining high and the other was a soaring aesthetic high. Which do you thing was which??
