Episode 146: “Good Vibrations” by the Beach Boys

A history of folk music and five hundred songs

by Andrew Hick

Episode 146

Good Vibrations

by the Beach Boys In ancient Greece, the god Hermes was a god of many things, as all the Greek gods were.

Among those things, he was the god of diplomacy, he was a trickster god, a god of thieves, and he was a messenger god who conveyed messages between realms.

He was also a god of secret knowledge.

In short, he was the kind of god who would have made a perfect spy.

But he was also an inventor.

In particular, he was credited in Greek myth as having invented the lyre, an instrument somewhat similar to a guitar, harp, or zither, and as having used it to create beautiful sounds.

But while Hermes the trickster god invented the lyre, in Greek myth it was a mortal man, Orpheus, who raised the instrument to perfection.

Orpheus was a legendary figure, the greatest poet and musician of pre Homeric Greece, and all sorts of things were attributed to him, some of which might even have been things that a real man of that name once did.

He is credited with the Orphic tripod, the classification of the elements into earth, water, and fire, and with a collection of poems called the Rhapsodiae.

The word rhapsodiae comes from the Greek words rhaptaeon, meaning to stitch or sew, and oede, meaning song, the word from which we get our word ode.

And originally, a rhapsodos was someone who stitched songs together, a reciter of long epic poems composed of several shorter pieces, that the rhapsodos would weave into one continuous piece.

It's from that that we get the English word rhapsodae, which in the sixteenth century, when it was introduced into the language, meant a literary work that was a disjointed collection of patchwork bits, stitched together without much thought as to structure, but which now means a piece of music in one movement, but which has several distinct sections.

Those sections may seem unrelated, and the piece may have an improvisatory feel, but a closer look will usually reveal relationships between the sections, and the piece as a whole will have a sense of unity.

When Orpheus's love, Eurydice, died, he went down into Hades, the underworld where the souls of the dead lived, and played music so beautiful, so profound and moving, that the gods agreed that Orpheus could bring the soul of his love back to the land of the living.

But there was one condition.

All he had to do was to keep looking forward until they were both back on earth.

If he turned around before both of them were back in the mortal realm, she would disappear forever, never to be recovered.

But of course, as you all surely know, and would almost certainly have guessed even if you didn't know, because you know how stories work.

Once Orpheus made it back to our world, world, he turned around and looked, because he lost his nerve and didn't believe he had really achieved his goal.

And Eurydice, just a few steps away from her freedom, vanished back into the underworld.

This time forever.

Lev Sergeevich Terman was born in St.

Petersburg, in what was then the Russian Empire, on the 15th of August 1896, by the calendar in use in Russia at that time.

The Russian Empire was still using the Julian calendar, rather than the Gregorian calendar used in most of the rest of the world, and in the Western world the same day was the 27th of August.

Junglev was fascinated both by science and the arts.

He was trained as a cellist from an early age, but while he loved music, he found the process of playing the music cumbersome, or so he would say later.

He was always irritated by the fact that the instrument is a barrier between the idea in the musician's head and the sound, that it requires training to play.

As he would say later, I realized there was a gap between music itself and its mechanical production, and I wanted to unite both of them.

Music was one of his big loves, but he was also very interested in physics, and was inspired by a lecture he saw from the physicist Abram Yoffey, who for the first time showed him that physics was about real, practical things, about the movements of atoms and fields that really existed, not just about abstractions and ideals.

When Terman went to university, he studied physics, but he specifically wanted to be an experimental physicist, not a theoretician.

He wanted to do stuff involving the real world.

Of course, as someone who had the misfortune to be born in the late 1890s, Terman was the right age to be drafted when World War I started.

But luckily for him, the Russian army desperately needed people with experience in the new invention that was radio, which was vital for wartime communications.

And he spent the war in the Army Radio Engineering Department, erecting radio transmitters and teaching other people how to erect them, rather than on the front lines.

And he managed not only to get his degree in physics, but also a diploma in music.

But he was also becoming more and more of a Marxist sympathizer, even though he came from a relatively affluent background.

And after the Russian Revolution, he stayed in what was now the Red Army, at least for a time.

Once Terman's army service was over, he started working under Yoffi, working with him on practical applications of the Ordeon, the first amplifying vacuum tube.

The first one he found was that the natural capacitance of a human body, when standing near a circuit, can change the capacity of the circuit.

He used that to create an invisible burglar alarm.

There was an antenna sending out radio waves, and if someone came within the transmitting field of the antenna, that would cause a switch to flip and a noise to be sounded.

He was then asked to create a device for measuring the density of gases, outputting a different frequency for different densities.

Because gas density can have lots of minor fluctuations because of air currents and so forth, he built a circuit that would cut out all the many harmonics from the audions he was using and give just the main frequency as a single pure tone, which he could listen to with headphones.

That way, slight changes in density would show up as a slight change in the tone he heard.

But he noticed that again, when he moved near the circuit, that changed the capacitance of the circuit and changed the tone he was hearing.

He started moving his hand around near the circuit and getting different tones.

The closer his hand got to the capacitor, the higher the note sounded.

And if he shook his hand a little, he could get a vibrato, just like when he shook his hand while playing the cello.

He got Yoffy to come and listen to him, and Yoffy said, That's an electronic Orpheus's lament.

Terman figured out how to play Massonet's Elegy and Sans-Sans's The Swan using this system.

Soon the students were all fascinated, telling each other, Terman plays Gluck on a voltmeter.

He soon figured out various refinements.

By combining two circuits using the heterodyne principle, he could allow for far finer control.

He added a second antenna for volume control to be used by the left hand.

The right hand would choose the note, while the left hand would change the volume, meaning the instrument could be played without touching it at all.

He called the instrument the etherphone, but other people started calling it the Terman vox.

Termin's voice.

Termin's instrument was an immediate sensation, as was his automatic burglar alarm, and he was invited to demonstrate both of them to Lenin.

Lenin was very impressed by Terman.

He wrote to Trotsky later talking about Terman's inventions, and how the automatic burglar alarm might reduce the number of guards needed to guard a perimeter.

But he was also impressed by Terman's musical invention.

Terman held his hands to play through the first half of a melody, before leaving the Russian leader to play the second half by himself.

Apparently he made quite a good job of it.

Because of Lenin's advocacy for his work, Terman was sent around the Soviet Union on a propaganda tour, what was known as an adjutprop tour, in the familiar Soviet way of creating portmanteau words.

In 1923, the first piece of music written specially for the instrument was performed by Turman himself with the Leningrad Philharmonic, Andrei Pashenko's Symphonic Mystery for Terman Vox and Orchestra.

The score for that was later lost, but has been reconstructed, and the piece was given a second premiere in 2020.

But the musical instrument wasn't the only scientific innovation that Terman was working on.

He thought he could reverse death itself, and bring the dead back to life.

He was inspired in this by the way that dead organisms could be perfectly preserved in the Siberian permafrost.

He thought that if he could only freeze a dead person in the permafrost, he could then revive them later.

Basically the same idea as the later idea of cryogenics, although Terman seems to have thought, from the accounts I've read, that all it would take would be to freeze and then thaw them, and not to have considered the other things that would be necessary to bring them back to life.

Terman made two attempts to actually do this, or at least made preliminary moves in that direction.

The first came when his assistant, a twenty-year-old woman, died of pneumonia.

Termin was heartbroken at the death of someone so young, who he'd liked a great deal, and was convinced that if he could just freeze her body for a while, he could soon revive her.

He talked with Yoffi about this.

Yoffy was friends with the girl's family, and Yoffi told him that he thought he was probably right and probably could revive her.

But he also thought that it would be cruel to distress the girl's parents further by discussing it with them, and so Terman didn't get his chance to experiment.

He was even even keener on trying his technique shortly afterwards, when Lenin died.

Termin was a fervent supporter of the revolution, and thought Lenin was a great man whose leadership was still needed, and he had contacts within the top echelons of the Kremlin.

He got in touch with them as soon as he heard of Lenin's death, in an attempt to get the opportunity to crowd-preserve his corpse and revive him.

Sadly, by this time, it was too late.

Lenin's brain had been pickled, and so the opportunity to resurrect him as a zombie Lenin was denied forever.

Terman was desperately interested in the idea of bringing people back from the dead, and he wanted to pursue it further with his lab, but he was also being pushed to give demonstrations of his music, as well as doing security work.

Joffey, it turned out, was also working as a secret agent, making various research trips to Germany that were also intended to foment communist revolution.

For now, Terman was doing more normal security work.

His burglar alarms were being used to guard bank vaults and the like, but this was at the order of the security state.

But while Terman was working on his burglar alarms and musical instruments and attempts to revive dead dictators, his main project was his doctoral work, which was on the T V.

We've said before in this podcast that there's no first anything, and that goes just as much for inventions as it does for music.

Most inventions build on work done by others, which builds on work done by others, and so there were a lot of people building prototype T V s at this point.

In Britain we tend to say the inventor of the TV was John Lugie Baird, but Baird was working at the same time as people like the American Charles Francis Jenkins and the Japanese inventor Kenjiro Takayanagi, all of them building on earlier work by people like Archibald Lowe.

Terman's prototype TV, the first one in Russia, came slightly later than any of these people, but was created more or less independently, and was more advanced in several ways, with a bigger screen and better resolution.

Shortly after Lenin's death, Terman was invited to demonstrate his invention to Stalin, who professed himself amazed at the magic mirror.

Termin was sent off to tour Europe giving demonstrations of his inventions, particularly his musical instrument.

It was on this trip that he started using the Romanization Leon Theromin, and this is how Western media invariably referred to him.

Rather than transliterate the Cyrillic spelling of his birth name, he used the French spelling his Huguenot ancestors had used before they emigrated to Russia, and called himself Leo or Leon, rather than Lev.

He was known throughout his life by both names, but said to a journalist in 1928, First of all, I am not Terramine.

I wrote my name with French letters for French pronunciation.

I am Lev Sergeyevich Terman.

We will continue to call him Terman, partly because he expressed that mild preference, though again, he definitely went by both names through choice, but also to distinguish him from the instrument, because while his invention remained known in Russia as the Terminvox, in the rest of the world, it became known as the Thermin.

He performed at the Paris Opera, and the New York Times printed a review saying, Some musicians were extremely pessimistic about the possibilities of the device, because at times Monsieur Theremin played lamentably out of tune.

But the finest stradivarius, in the hands of a tyro, can give forth frightful sounds.

The fact that the inventor was able to perform certain pieces with absolute precision proves that there remains to be solved only questions of practice and technique.

Terman also came to the UK, where he performed in front of an audience including George Bernard Shaw, Arnold Bennett, Henry Wood, and others.

Arnold Bennett was astonished, but Bernard Shaw, who had very strong opinions about music, as anyone who has read his criticism will be aware, compared the sound unfavourably to that of a comb and paper.

After After performing in Europe, Terman made his way to the US to continue his work of performance, propagandizing for the Soviet Revolution and trying to license the patents for his inventions, to bring money both to him and to the Soviet state.

He entered the US on a six-month visitor's visa, but stayed there for 11 years, renewing the visa every six months.

His initial tour was a success, though at least one open-air concert had to be cancelled because, as the Communist newspaper The Daily Worker put it, the weather on Saturday took such a counter-revolutionary turn.

Nicholas Slonimsky, the musicologist we've encountered several times before, and who had become part of Terman's circle in the US, reviewed one of the performances and described the peculiar audiences that Terman was getting.

A considerable crop of ladies and gentlemen engaged in earnest exploration of the Great Beyond.

The mental processes peculiar to believers in cosmic vibrations imparted a beatific look to to some of the listeners.

Boston is a seat of scientific religion.

Before he knows it, Professor Theremin may be proclaimed Krishnamurti and sanctified as a new deity.

Terman licensed his patents on the invention to RCA, who in 1929 started mass-producing the first ever theremins for general use.

Termin also started working with the conductor Leopold Stokowski.

including developing a new kind of theremin for Stokowski's orchestra to use, one with a fingerboard played like a cello.

Stokowski said, I believe we shall have orchestras of these electric instruments.

Thus will begin a new era in music history, just as modern materials and methods of construction have produced a new era of architecture.

Possibly of more interest to the wider public, Lennington Sherwell, the son of an RCA salesman, took up the theremin professionally and joined the band of Rudy Valley, one of the most popular singers of the period.

Valley was someone who constantly experimented with new sounds, and has, for example, been named as the first band leader to use an electric banjo.

And Valley liked the sound of the theremin so much he ordered a custom-built left-handed one for himself.

Sherwell stayed in Valley's band for quite a while, and performed with him on the radio and in recording sessions, but it's very difficult to hear him in any of the recordings.

The recording equipment in use in 1930 was very primitive, and Valley had a very big band with a lot of string and horn players, and his arrangements tended to have lots of instruments playing in unison, rather than playing individual lines that are easy to differentiate.

On top of that, the fashion at the time when playing the instrument was to try and have it sound as much like other instruments as possible, to duplicate the sound of a cello or violin or clarinet, rather than to lean into the instrument's own idiosyncrasies.

I think, though, that I can hear Sherwell's playing in the instrumental break of Valley's big hit, You're Driving Me Crazy.

Certainly it was recorded at the time that Sherwell was in the band, and there's an instrument in there with a very pure tone, but quite a lot of vibrato, in the mid-range, that seems only to be playing in the break and not the rest of the song.

I'm not saying this is definitely a Theromin solo on one of the biggest hits of 1930, but I'm not saying it's not, either.

Terminal also invented a light show to go along with this instrument, the Illumivox, which had a light shining through a strip of gelatin of different colours, which would be rotated depending on the pitch of the theremin, so that lower notes would cause the light to shine a deep red, while the highest notes would make it shine a light blue, with different shades in between.

By 1930, though, Terman's fortunes had started to turn slightly.

Stokowski kept using theremins in the orchestra for a while, especially the fingerboard models to reinforce the bass.

but they caused problems.

As Slonimski said, the infrasonic vibrations were so powerful that they hit the stomach physically, causing near-nausea in the double bass section of the orchestra.

Fairly soon, the theremin was overtaken by other instruments, like the Ond Martineau, an instrument very similar to the theremin, but with more precise control, and with a wider range of available timbres.

And in 1931, RCA was sued by another company for patent infringement with regard to the theremin.

The DeForest Radio Company had patents around the use of vacuum tubes in music, and they claimed damages of six thousand dollars, plus RCA had to stop making thermins.

Since at the time RCA had only made an initial batch of five hundred instruments total, and had sold four hundred and eighty five of them, many of them as promotional loss leaders for future batches, they had actually made a loss of three hundred dollars even before the six thousand dollar damages, and decided not to renew their option on Terman's patents.

But Terman was still working on his musical ideas.

Slonimsky also introduced Terman to the avant-garde composer and theosophist Henry Cowell, who was interested in experimental sounds, and used to do things like play the strings inside the piano to get a different tone.

Cowell was part of a circle of composers and musicologists that included Edgar Varese, Charles Ives, and Charles Seeger and Ruth Crawford, who Cowell would introduce to each other.

Crawford would later marry Seger, and they would have several children together, including the folk singer Peggy Seger, and Crawford would also adopt Seeger's son Pete.

Cowell and Terman would together invent the Rhythmicon, the first ever drum machine, though the Rhythmicon could play notes as well as rhythms.

Only two Rhythmicons were made while Terman was in the US.

The first was owned by Cowell.

The second, improved model, was bought by Charles Ives, but bought as a gift for Cowell and Sladimsky to use in their compositions.

Sadly, both Rhythmicons eventually broke down, and no recording of either is known to exist.

Terman started to get further and further into debt, especially as the Great Depression started to hit, and he also had a personal loss.

He'd been training a student and had fallen in love with her, although he was married.

But when she married herself, he cut off all ties with her, though Clara Rockmore would become one of the few people to use the instrument seriously, and become a real virtuoso on it.

He moved into other fields, all loosely based around the same basic ideas of detecting someone's distance from an object.

He built electronic gun detectors for Alcatraz and Sing Singh prisons, and he came up with an altimeter for aeroplanes.

There was also a magic mirror, glass that appeared like a mirror until it was backlit, at which point it became transparent.

This was put into shop windows along with a proximity detector.

Every time someone stepped close to look at the reflection, the reflection would disappear.

and be replaced with the objects behind the mirror.

He was also by this point having to spy for the USSR on a more regular basis.

Every week he would meet up in a cafe with two diplomats from the Russian embassy, who would order him to drink several shots of vodka.

The idea was that they would loosen his inhibitions enough, that he would not be able to hide things from them, before he related various bits of industrial espionage he'd done for them.

Having inventions of his own meant he was able to talk with engineers in the aerospace industry and get all sorts of bits of information that would otherwise not have been available, and he fed this back to Moscow.

He eventually divorced his first wife and remarried, a black American dancer many years his junior named Lavinia Williams, who would be the great love of his life.

This caused some scandal in his social circle, more because of her race than the age gap.

But by 1938 he had to leave the US.

He'd been there on a six-month visa, which had been renewed every six months for more than a decade, and he'd also not been paying income tax and was massively in debt.

He smuggled himself back to the USSR, but his wife was, at the last minute, not allowed onto the ship with him.

He'd had to make the arrangements in secret and hadn't even told her of the plans, so the first she knew was when he disappeared.

He would later claim that the Soviets had told him she would be sent for two weeks later, but she had no knowledge of any of this.

For decades, Lavinia would not even know if her husband was dead or alive.

When Terman got back to the USSR, he found it had changed beyond recognition.

Stalin's reign of terror was now well underway, and not only could he not find a job, most of the people who he'd been in contact with at the top of the Kremlin had been purged.

Terman was himself arrested and tortured into signing a false confession to counter-revolutionary activities and membership of fascist organizations.

He was sentenced to eight years in a forced labor camp, which in reality was a death sentence.

It was expected that workers there would work themselves to death on starvation rations long before their sentences were up.

But relatively quickly, he was transferred to a special prison where people with experience of aeronautical design were working.

He was still a prisoner, but in conditions not too far removed from normal civilian life, and allowed to do technical and scientific work with some of the greatest experts in the field, almost all of whom had also been arrested in one purge or another.

One of the pieces of work Termin did was at the direct order of Leventi Beria, Stalin's right-hand man and the architect of most of the terrors of the Stalinist regime.

In spring 1945, while the USA and USSR were still supposed to be allies in World War II, Beria wanted to bug the residence of the US ambassador and got Terman to design a bug that would get past all the normal screenings.

The bug that Terman designed was entirely passive and unpowered.

It did nothing unless a microwave beam of a precise frequency was beamed at it, and only then did it start transmitting.

It was placed in a wooden replica of the Great Seal of the United States, presented to the ambassador by a troop of scouts as a gesture of friendship between the two countries.

The wood in the eagle's beak was thin enough to let the sound through.

It remained there for seven years, through the ten years of four ambassadors, only being unmasked when a British radio operator accidentally tuned to the frequency it was transmitting on, and was horrified to hear secret diplomatic conversations.

Upon its discovery, the US couldn't figure out how it worked, and eventually shared the information with MI5, who took 18 months to reverse-engineer Terman's bug and come up with their own, which remained the standard bug in use for about a decade.

The CIA's own attempts to reverse engineer it failed altogether.

It was also Terman who came up with that well-known bit of spycraft, focusing an infrared beam on a window pane to use it to pick up the sound of conversations happening in the room behind it.

Berrier was so pleased with Terman's inventions that he got Terman to start bugging Stalin himself, so Berrier would be able to keep track of Stalin's whims.

Terman performed such great services for Berrier that Beria actually allowed him to go free not long after his sentence was served.

Not only that, but Berrier nominated Terman for the Stalin Award, Class II, for his espionage work, and Stalin, not realising that Terman had been bugging him as well as foreign powers, actually upgraded that to a Class I, the highest honour the Soviet state gave.

While Terman was free, he found himself at a loose end, and ended up volunteering to work for the organization he had been working for, which went by many names but became known as the KGB from the 1950s onwards.

He tried to persuade the government to let Lavinia, who he hadn't seen in eight years, come over and join him, but they wouldn't even allow him to contact her, and he eventually remarried.

Meanwhile, after Stalin's death, Beria was arrested for his crimes and charged under the same law that he had had Terman convicted under.

Berrier wasn't as lucky as Terman though and was executed.

By 1964, Terman had had enough of the KGB because they wanted him to investigate obvious pseudoscience.

They wanted him to look into aliens, UFOs, ESP, and telepathy.

only looked in your eyes.

But I picked up something I just can't explain.

He quit and went back to civilian life.

He started working in the acoustics lab in Moscow Conservatory, although he had to start at the bottom because everything he'd been doing for more than a quarter of a century was classified.

He also wrote a short book on electronic music.

In the late 60s, an article on him was published in the US, the first first sign any of his old friends had that he had not died nearly thirty years earlier.

They started corresponding with him, and he became a minor celebrity again, but this was disapproved of by the Soviet government.

Electronic music was still considered bourgeois decadence and not suitable for the Soviet Union, and all his instruments were smashed, and he was sacked from the conservatory.

He continued working in various technical jobs until the 1980s, and still continued inventing refinements of the thermin, although he never had any official support for his work.

In the 80s, a writer tried to get him some sort of official recognition.

The Stalin Prize was secret, and the university at which he was working sent a reply saying, in part, L.

S.

Terman took part in research conducted by the department as an ordinary worker, and he did not show enough creative activity, nor does he have any achievements on the basis of which he could be recommended for a government decoration.

By this time, he was living in shared accommodation with a bunch of other people, one room to himself, and using a shared bathroom, kitchen, and so on.

After Glasnost, he did some interviews and was asked about this, and said, I never wanted to make demands and don't want to now.

I phoned the housing department about three months ago and inquired about my turn to have a new flat.

The woman told me that my term would come in five or six years.

Not a very reassuring answer if one is 92 years old.

In 1989, he was finally allowed out of the USSR again, for the first time in 51 years, to attend a UNESCO-sponsored symposium on electronic music.

Among other things, he was given, 48 years late, a letter that his old colleague Edgar Varez had sent about his composition Equatorial, which had originally been written for theremin.

Varez had wanted to revise the work and had wanted to get modified theremins that could do what he wanted, and had asked the inventor for help, but the letter had been suppressed by the Soviet government.

When he got no reply, Varez had switched to using And Martineau instead.

In the 1970s, after the death of his third wife, Terman had started an occasional correspondence with his second wife, Lavinia, the one who had not been able to come with him to the USSR and hadn't known if he was alive for so many decades.

She was now a prominent activist in Haiti, having established dance schools in many Caribbean countries, and Terman still held out hope that they could be reunited, even writing her a letter in 1988 proposing remarriage.

But sadly, less than a month after Terman's first trip outside the USSR, she died, officially of a heart attack or food poisoning, but there's a strong suspicion she was murdered by the military dictatorship for her closeness to Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the pro-democracy activist who later became president of Haiti.

Terman was finally allowed to join the Communist Party in the spring of 1991, just before the USSR finally dissolved.

He'd been forbidden up to that point because of his conviction for counter-revolutionary crimes.

He was asked by a Western friend why he'd done that when everyone else was trying to leave the Communist Party, and he explained that he'd made a promise to Lenin.

In his final years, he was researching immortality, going back to the work he had done in his youth, working with biologists, trying to find a way to restore elderly bodies to youthful vigor.

But sadly, he died in 1993, aged 97, before he achieved his goal.

On one of his last trips outside the USSR, in 1991, he visited the US, and in California, he finally got to hear the song that most people associate with his invention, even though it didn't actually feature a theremin.

She's

Back in the 1930s, when he was working with Slonimsky and Veres and Ives and the rest, Terman had set up the Thermin studio, a sort of experimental arts lab.

And in 1931 he had invited the musicologist, composer, and theoretician Joseph Schillinger to become a lecturer there.

Schillinger had been one of the first composers to be really interested in the theremin, and had composed a very early piece written specifically for the instrument, the first airphonic suite.

But he was most influential as a theoretician.

Schillinger believed that all of the arts were susceptible to rigorous mathematical analysis, and that you could use that analysis to generate new art according to mathematical principles, art that would be perfect.

Schillinger planned to work with Terman to try to invent a machine that could compose, perform, and transmit music.

The idea was that someone would be able to tune in a radio and listen to a piece of music in real time as it was being algorithmically composed and transmitted.

The two men never achieved this, but Schillinger became very, very respected as someone with a rigorous theory of musical structure.

though reading his magnum opus, the Schillinger system of musical composition, is frankly like wading through treacle.

I'll read a short excerpt just to give an idea of his thinking.

On the receiving end, phasic stimuli produced by instruments encounter a metamorphic auditory integrator.

This integrator represents the auditory apparatus as a whole and as a complex interdependent system.

It consists of two receivers, ears, transmitters, auditory nerves, and a transformer, the auditory brain center.

The response to a stimulus is integrated both quantitatively and selectively.

The neuronic energy of response becomes the psychonic energy of auditory image.

The response to stimuli and the process of integration are functional operations, and as such can be described in mathematical terms, i.e.

as synchronization, addition, subtraction, multiplication, etc.

But these integrative processes alone do not constitute the material of orchestration either.

The auditory image, whether resulting from phasic stimuli of an exciter or from self-stimulation of the auditory brain centre, can be described only in psychological terms, of loudness, pitch, quality, etc.

This leads us to the conclusion that the material of orchestration can be defined only as a group of conditions under which an integrated image results from a sonic stimulus subjected to an auditory response.

This constitutes an interdependent tripartite system, in which the existence of one component necessitates the existence of two others.

The composer can imagine an integrated sonic form, yet he cannot transmit it to the auditor, unless telepathically, without sonic stimulus and hearing apparatus.

That's Schillinger's way of saying that if a composer wants someone to hear the music they've written, the composer needs a musical instrument, and the listener needs ears and a brain.

This kind of revolutionary insight made Schillinger immensely sought after in the early 1930s, and among his pupils were the swing band leaders Benny Goodman and Tommy Dorsey, and the songwriter George Gershwin, who turned to Schillinger for advice when he was writing his opera Porgy and Bess.

Here comes

the honey bag.

Yes, sir,

it's the honey bag

Another of his pupils was the trombonist and arranger Glenn Miller, who at that time was a session player working in pick-up studio bands for people like Red Nichols.

Miller spent some time studying with him in the early 30s and applied those lessons when given the job of putting together arrangements for Ray Noble, his first prominent job.

In 1938, Glenn Miller walked into a strip joint to see a 19-year-old he'd been told to take a look at.

This was another trombonist, Paul Tanner, who was at the time working as a backing musician for the Strippers.

Miller had recently broken up his first big band, after a complete lack of success, and was looking to put together a new big band, to play arrangements in the style he had worked out while working for Noble.

As Tanner later put it, he said, Well, how soon can you come with me?

I said, I can come right now.

I told him I was all packed.

I had my toothbrush in my pocket and everything.

And so I went with him that night, and I stayed with him until he broke the band up in September 1942.

The new band spent a few months playing the kind of gigs that an unknown band can get, but they soon had a massive success with the song Miller had originally written as an arranging exercise set for him by Schillinger, a song that started out under the title Miller's Tune, but soon became known worldwide as Moonlight Serenade.

The Miller Band had a lot of line-up changes in the four and a bit years it was together, but other than Miller himself, there were only four members who were with that group throughout its career, from the early dates opening for Freddie Fisher and his Schnickel Fritzers, right through to its end as the most popular band in America.

They were piano player Chummy McGregor, clarinet player Wilbur Schwartz, tenor sax player Texpeneke, and Tanner.

They played on all of Miller's big hits, like In the Mood and Chattanooga Choo-Choo.

Read a magazine, and then you're in Baltimore.

Dinner in the diner, nothing could be finer.

Then do have your ham and aches in Carolina.

When you hear the whistle blowing eight to the bar,

then you know that Tennessee is not very far.

Shamel and calling, gotta keep it rolling.

Ooh, ooh, Chattanooga, there you are.

But in September 1942, the band broke up as the members entered the armed forces, and Tanner found himself in the army, while Miller was in the Air Force.

So while both played in military bands, they weren't playing together.

And Miller disappeared over the channel, presumed dead, in 1944.

After the war, Tanner became a session trombonist based in LA, and in 1958 he found himself on a session for a film soundtrack with Dr.

Samuel Hoffman.

I haven't been able to discover for sure which film this was for, but the only film on which Hoffman has an IMDb IMDb credit for that year is that American International Pictures classic, Earth vs.

the Spider.

But nothing sends the cats like the presence of out-of-this-world horror.

A heart-stopping experience.

that defies man's imagination

that shrinks every woman's skin with the intention of terrifying withdrawal, as if a thousand spiders were taking possession of her body.

You'll never believe it until you see it.

You'll never forget the touch.

Hoffman was a chiropodist, and that was how he made most of his living.

But as a teenager in the 1930s, he had been a professional violin player under the name Hal Hope.

One of the bands he played in was led by a man named Jolly Coburn, who had seen Rudy Valley's band with their thereomin, and decided to take it up himself.

Hoffman had then also got a theremin, and started his own all-electronic trio, with a Hammond organ player, and with a cello-style fingerboard theremin played by William Schumann, the future Pulitzer Prize winning composer.

By the 1940s, Hoffman was a full-time doctor, but he'd retained his musicians' union card just in case the odd gig came along.

And then in 1945 he received a call from Miklos Rosa, who was working on the soundtrack for Alfred Hitchcock's new film Spellbound.

Rosa had tried to get Clara Rockmore, the one true virtuoso on the theremin playing at the time, to play on the soundtrack, but she'd refused.

She didn't do film soundtrack work, because in her experience they only wanted her to play on films about ghosts or aliens, and she thought it damaged the dignity of the instrument.

Rosa turned to the American Federation of Musicians, who, as it turned out, had precisely one theremin player who could read music and wasn't called Clara Rockmore on their books.

So Dr.

Samuel Hoffman, Shiropadist, suddenly found himself playing on one of the most highly regarded soundtracks on one of the most successful films of the forties.

Rosa soon asked Hoffman to play on another soundtrack, for the Billy Wilder film The Lost Weekend, another of the great classics of late forties cinema.

Both films' soundtracks were nominated for the Oscar, and Spellbounds won, and Hoffman soon found himself in demand as a session player.

Hoffman didn't have any of Rockmore's qualms about playing on science fiction and horror films, and anyone with any love of the genre will have heard his playing on genre classics like The 5,000 Fingers of Dr.

Tigg, The Thing from Another World, It Came from Outer Space, and of course Bernard Herrmann's score for The Day the Earth Stood Still.

As well as on such less-than-classics as The Devil's Weed, Voodoo Island, The Mad Magician, and of course, Billy the Kid vs.

Dracula.

Hoffman became something of a celebrity and also recorded several albums of lounge music with a band led by Les Baxter, like the massive hit Music Out of the Moon, featuring tracks like Lunar Rhapsody.

Charlie, did you copy our music tender?

Did we copy what, Neil?

Did you copy our music tender?

All right, we sure did.

We're wondering uh who who selected made your selections.

That's an old uh favorite of mine about uh it's an album made about twenty years ago called You the God of the Moon.

But uh it sounded a little scratchy to us, uh Neil either that or your uh tape was a little slow.

That voice you heard there was Neil Armstrong on Apollo 11 on its way back from the moon.

He took a tape of Hoffman's album with him.

But while Hoffman was something of a celebrity in the fifties, the work dried up almost overnight in 1958 when he worked at that session with Paul Tanner.

The Thevermin is a very difficult instrument to play, and while Hoffman was a good player, he wasn't a great one.

He was getting the work because he was the best in a very small pool of players, not because he was objectively the best that could be.

Tanner noticed that Hoffman was having quite some difficulty getting the pitching right in the session, and realised that the theremin must be a very difficult instrument to play, because it had no markings at all.

So he decided to build an instrument that had the same sound, but that was more sensibly controlled than just waving your hands near it.

He built his own invention, the Electrotheramin, in less than a week, despite never before having had any experience in electrical engineering.

He built it using an oscillator, a length of piano wire, and a contact switch that could be slid up and down the wire, changing the pitch.

Two days after he finished building it, he was in the studio.

cutting his own equivalent of Hoffman's 40s albums, Music for Heavenly Bodies, including a new exotica version of Moonlight Sevenade, the song that Glenn Miller had written decades earlier as an exercise for Schillinger.

Not only could the electrothermin let the player control the pitch more accurately, but it could also do staccato notes easily, something that's almost impossible with an actual theremin.

And on top of that, Tanner was cheaper than Hoffman.

An instrumentalist hired to play two instruments is paid extra, but not as much extra as paying for another musician to come to the session.

And since Tanner was the first called trombone player who was likely to be at the session anyway, you might as well hire him him if you want a theremin sound, rather than paying for Hoffman.

Tanner was an excellent musician.

He was a professor of music at UCLA, as well as being a session player, and he authored one of the standard textbooks on jazz.

And soon he had cornered the market, leaving Hoffman with only the occasional gig.

We will actually be seeing Hoffman again, playing on a session for an artist we're going to look at in a couple of months.

But in LA, in the early 60s, if you wanted a theremin sound, you didn't hire a theremin player, you hired Paul Tanner to play as Electrothermin, though the instrument was so obscure that many people didn't realise he wasn't actually playing a theremin.

Certainly Brian Wilson seems to have thought he was when he hired him for I Just Wasn't Made for These Times.

We talked briefly about that track back in the episode on God Only Knows, but three days after recording that, Tanner was called back into the studio for another session on which Brian Wilson wanted a theremin sound.

This was a song titled Good Good Good Vibrations, and it was inspired by a conversation he'd had with his mother as a child.

He'd asked her why dogs bark at some people and not at others, and she'd said that dogs could sense vibrations that people sent out, and some people had bad vibrations and some had good ones.

It's possible that this came back to mind as he was planning the Pet Sounds album, which of course ends with the sound of his own dogs barking.

It's also possible that he was thinking more generally about ideas like telepathy.

He had been starting to experiment with acid by this point, and was hanging around with a crowd of people who were proto-hippies and reading up on a lot of the mystical ideas that were shared by those people.

As we saw in the last episode, there was a huge crossover between people who were being influenced by drugs, people who were interested in Eastern religion, and people who were interested in what we now might think of as pseudoscience, but at the time seemed to have a reasonable amount of validity, things like telepathy and remote viewing.

Wilson had also had exposure from an early age to people claiming psychic powers.

Joanne Marks, the Wilson family's neighbour and the mother of former Beach Boy David Marks, later had something of a minor career as a psychic to the stars, at least according to obituaries posted by her son, and she would often talk about being able to sense vibrations.

The record Wilson started out making in February 1966 with The Wrecking Crew was intended as an RB single and was also intended to sound strange.

Let me hear the organ.

Another stop, please.

At this stage, the song he was working on was a very straightforward verse-chorus structure, and it was going to be an altogether conventional pop song.

The verses, which actually ended up used in the final single, are dominated by Organ and Ray Pullman's bass.

These bear a strong resemblance to the verses of Here Today on the Pet Sounds album, which the Beach Boys were still in the middle of making.

But the Corvuses had far more of an R and B feel than anything the Beach Boys had done before.

It did though have precedent.

The origins of the chorus feel come from Can I Get a Witness, a Holland Dozier Holland song that had been a hit hit from Marvin Gaye in 1963.

Is it like to be left alone?

I'm the one who loved and never home.

I look too hard,

and my friends sometimes say,

But I believe, I believe

that a woman could be loved that way.

The Beach Boys had picked up on that, and also on its similarity to the feel of Lonnie Mack's instrumental cover version of Chuck Berry's Memphis, Tennessee, which, retitled Memphis, had also been a hit in 1963.

And in 1964, they recorded an instrumental which they called Memphis Beach while they were recording it, but later retitled Carl's Big Chance, which was credited to Brian and Carl Wilson, but was basically just playing the Can I Get a Witness riff over 12 bar blues changes, with Carl doing some surf guitar over the top.

The Can I Get a Witness feel had quickly become a standard piece of the musical toolkit.

You might notice the resemblance between that riff and the Talking Bout My Generation backing vocals on My Generation by The Who, for example.

It was also used on The Boy from New York City, a hit on Redbird Records by the Adlibs.

He's really fine.

But today I hope to make him my own mind.

The Beach Boys had definitely been aware of that record.

On their 1965 album, Summer Days and Summer Nights, they recorded an answer song to it, The Girl from New York City.

They took a small apartment down on the beach, Well, you found timber every day.

And I said,

guys, all got your eyes when that group five New York City.

And LA boys are heard the chorus about the group of New York City.

And you can see how influenced Brian was by the Ad Libs record by laying the early instrumental takes of the Good Vibrations chorus from this February session under the vocal intro of The Boy from New York City.

It's not a perfect match, but you can definitely hear that there's an influence there.

A few days later, Brian had Carl Wilson overdub some extra bass, got a musician in to do a jaw harp overdub, and they also did a guide vocal.

which I've sometimes seen credited to Brian and sometimes Carl, and can hear as both of them depending on what I'm listening for.

This guide vocal used a set of placeholder lyrics written by Brian's collaborator Tony Asher, which weren't intended to be a final lyric.

Brian then put the track away for a month, while he continued work on the Pet Sounds album.

At this point, as best we can gather, he was thinking of it as something of a failed experiment.

In the first of the two autobiographies credited to Brian, one whose authenticity is dubious, as it was largely put together by a ghost writer, and Brian later said he'd never even read it, he talks about how he was actually planning to give the song to Wilson Pickett rather than keep it for the Beach Boys, and one can definitely imagine a Wilson Pickett version of the song, as it was at this point.

But Brian's friend Danny Hutton, at that time still a minor session singer who had not yet gone on to form the group that would become Three Dog Night, asked Brian if he could have the song if Brian wasn't going to use it.

And this seems to have spurred Brian into rethinking the whole whole song.

And in doing so, he was inspired by his very first ever musical memory.

Brian has talked a lot about how the first record he remembers hearing was when he was two years old at his maternal grandmother's house, where he heard the Glenn Miller version of Rhapsody and Blue, a three-minute cut-down version of Gershwin's masterpiece, on which Paul Tanner had, of course, coincidentally played.

Hearing that music, which Brian's mother also played for him a lot as a child, was one of the most profoundly moving experiences of Brian's young life, and Rhapsody in Blue has become one of those touchstone pieces that he returns to again and again.

He has recorded studio versions of it twice, in the mid-90s with Van Dyke Parks.

And in 2010, with his solo band, as the intro and outro of an album of Gershwin covers.

You'll also often see clips of him playing Rhapsody in Blue when sat at the piano.

It's one of his go-to songs.

So he decided he was going to come up with a song that was structured like Rhapsody in Blue, what publicist Derek Taylor would later describe as a pocket symphony, but pocket Rhapsody would possibly be a better term for it.

It was going to be one continuous song, but in different sections that would have different instrumentation and different feelings to them.

He'd even record them in different studios to get different sounds for them, though he would still often have the musicians run through the whole song in each studio.

He would mix and match the sections in the edit.

His second attempt to record the whole track, at the start of April, gave a sign of what he was attempting, though he would not end up using any of the material from this session.

Nearly a month later, on the 4th of May, he was back in the studio, this time in Western Studios rather than Goldstar where the previous sessions had been held, with yet another selection of musicians from the Wrecking Crew, plus Tanner, to record another version.

This time, part of the session was used for the bridge for the eventual single.

On the 24th of May, the Wrecking Crew, with Carl Wilson on Fender bass, while Lyle Ritz continued to play string bass, and Carol Kaye, who didn't end up on the finished record at all, but who was on many of the unused sessions, played Dan Electro, had another attempt at the track, this time in Sunset Studios.

Three days later, another group of musicians, with Carl now switched to rhythm guitar, were back in Western studios recording this.

The fade from that session was used in the final track.

A few days later they were in the studio again, a smaller group of people with Carl on guitar and Brian on piano, along with Dom Randy on electric harpsichord, Bill Pittman on electric bass, Lyle Ritz on string bass, and Hal Blaine on drums.

This time there seems to have been another inspiration, though I've never heard it mentioned as an influence.

In March, a band called The Association, who were friends with the Beach Boys, had released their single Along Comes Mary, and by June it had become a big hit.

on me.

And every now and then, I spend my time at climbing for some first load spaci.

And then along comes Mary.

And does she want to give me kicks?

Now the fuzz bass part they were using on the session on the 2nd of June sounds to my ears very, very like that intro.

session produced the basic track that was used for the choruses on the final single, onto which the Electrothermin was later overdubbed, as Tanner wasn't at that session.

Sometime around this point, someone suggested to Brian that they should use a cello along with the Electrothermin in the choruses, playing triplets on the low notes.

Brian has usually said that this was Carl's idea, while Brian's friend Van Dyke Parks has always said that he gave Brian the idea.

Both seem quite certain of this, and neither has any reason to lie, so I suspect what might have happened is that Parks gave Brian the initial idea to have a cello on the track, while Carl in the studio suggested having it specifically played triplets.

Either way, a cello part by Jesse Ehrlich was added to those choruses.

There were more sessions in June, but everything from those sessions was scrapped.

At some point around this time, Mike Love came up with a bass vocal lyric, which he sang along with the bass in the choruses in a group vocal session.

On August 24th, two months after what one would think at this point was the final instrumental session, a rough edit of the track was pulled together.

By this point the chorus had altered quite a bit.

It had originally just been eight bars of G flat, four bars of B flat, then four more bars of G flat.

But now Brian had decided to rework an idea he had used in California Girls.

In that song, each repetition of the line, I Wish They All Could Be California starts a tone lower than the one before.

Here, after after the bass hook line is repeated, everything moves up a step, repeats the line, and then moves up another step.

Good vibration,

and excitation.

I bet I know what she's like.

When I can't feel how do I treat people.

But Brian was dissatisfied with this version of the track.

The lyrics obviously still needed rewriting.

But more than that, there was a section he thought needed totally re-recording.

This bit.

keep those love and good vibrations are happening with her.

Humph,

humming love.

Gotta keep those love and good.

Vibrations are happening with her.

Gotta

keep those love good.

Vibrations are happening with her.

So on the 1st of September, six and a half months after the first instrumental session for the song, the final one took place.

This had Dennis Wilson on organ, Tommy Morgan on harmonicas, Lyle Ritz on string bass, and Hal Blaine and Carl Wilson on percussion, and replaced that with a new, gentler version.

Well, that was almost the final instrumental session.

They called Paul Tanner into a vocal overdub session to redo some of the electrothermin parts.

But that was basically it.

Now all they had to do was do the final vocals.

Oh, and they needed some proper lyrics.

By this point, Brian was no longer working with Tony Asher.

He'd started working with Van Dyke Parks on some songs, but Parks wasn't interested in stepping into a track that had already been worked on so long.

So Brian eventually turned to Mike Love, who'd already come up with the bass vocal hook, to write the lyrics.

Love wrote them in the car on the way to the studio, dictating them to his wife as he drove, and they're actually some of his best work.

The first verse grounds everything in the sensory, in the earthy.

He makes a song originally about extra-sensory perception into one about sensory perception.

The first verse covers sight, sound, and smell.

I hear the sound of a gentleman

on the wind that lifts her perfume through the air.

I'm picking up her vibrations,

she's giving me the excitations.

I'm backing up her vibrations.

Carl Wilson was chosen to sing the lead vocal, but you'll notice a slight change in timbre on the line, I hear the sound of her.

That's Brian stepping in to double him on the high notes.

Listen Listen again.

For the second verse, Love's lyric moves from the sensory grounding of the first verse to the extrasensory perception that the song has always been about.

with the protagonist knowing things about the woman who's the object of the song, without directly perceiving them.

The record is one of those where I wish I was able to play the whole thing for you, because it's a masterpiece of structure, and of editing, and of dynamics.

It's also a record that even now is impossible to replicate properly on stage, though both its writers in their live performances come very close.

But while someone in the audience for either the current Touring Beach Boys led by Mike Love, or for Brian Wilson's solo shows, might come away thinking, that sounded just like the record, both have radically different interpretations of it, even while sticking close to the original arrangement.

The Touring Beach Boys version is all throbbing strangeness, almost garage rock, emphasizing the psychedelia of the track.

While Brian Wilson's live version is more meditative, emphasizing the gentle aspects.

God

keep those love good,

vibrations are happening with her.

Gotta keep those as love good.

Vibrations are happening with her.

Gotta keep those as love good.

Vibrations

But back in 1966, there was definitely no way to reproduce it live with a five-person band.

According to Tanner, they actually asked him if he would tour with them, but he refused.

His touring days were over, and also he felt he would look ridiculous, a middle-aged man on stage with a bunch of young rock and roll stars, though apparently they offered to buy him a wig so he wouldn't look so out of place.

When he wouldn't tour with them, they asked him where they could get a theremin, and he pointed them in the direction of Robert Moog.

Moog, whose whose name is spelled M-O-O-G and often mispronounced Moog, had been a teenager in 1949 when he'd seen a schematic for a theremin in an electronic hobbyist magazine after Samuel Hoffman had brought the instrument back into the limelight.

He'd built his own and started building others to sell to other hobbyists, and had also started branching out into other electronic instruments by the mid-sixties.

His small company was the only one still manufacturing actual theremins, but when the Beach Boys came to him and asked him for one, they found it very difficult to control and asked him if he could do anything simpler.

He came up with a ribbon-controlled oscillator, on the same principle as Tanner's electrothermin, but even simpler to operate, and the Beach Boys bought it and gave it to Mike Love to play on stage.

All he had to do was run his finger up and down a metallic ribbon, with the positions of the notes marked on it, and it would come up with a good approximation of the electrothermin sound.

Love played this woo-woo machine, as he referred to it, on stage for several years.

Good, good, good,

good vibration.

Moog was at the time starting to build his first synthesizers, and having developed that ribbon control mechanism, he decided to include it in the early models as one of several different methods of controlling the Moog synthesizer, the instrument that became synonymous with the synthesizer in the late 60s and early 70s.

Good Vibrations became the Beach Boys' biggest ever hit, their third US number one, and their first to make number one in the UK.

Brian Wilson had managed, with the help of his collaborators, to make something that combined avant-garde psychedelic music and catchy pop hooks, a truly experimental record that was also a genuine pop classic.

To this day, it's often cited as the greatest single of all time, but Brian knew he could do better.

He could be even more progressive.

He could make an entire album using the same techniques as good vibrations.

One where themes could recur, where sections could be edited together, and songs could be constructed in the edit.

Instead of a pocket symphony, he could make a full-blown teenage symphony to God.

All he had to do was keep looking forward, believe he could achieve his goal, and whatever happened, not lose his nerve and turn back.

Smile is the name of the new Beach Boys album, which will be released in January 1967, and with the happy album cover, the really happy sounds inside, and a happy in-store display piece, you can't miss.

We're sure to sell a million units in January.

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