Re: BW

On 2025-06-11 23:22:16 +0000, Geoff said:

Of course RIP to Brian. Wrote, arranged, and produced some catchy songs, some excellent and highly memorable. Some quite sophisticated for their genre.
 But I can't help thinking of The Beach Boys, in the musical band sense, as being the equivalent of today's BTS, New Kids on the Block, Backstreet Boys, NSYNC, One Direction, Boys To Men, Take That, etc. With practically all the music other than vocals done by studio musicians.

They're not the first '60s group I would put in that class, they all played their instruments live. Even The Monkees did but for the studio recordings but the BB, Monkees, Byrds, Mamas & Papas, Grass Roots, and several others often used the studio pros. And it was a good thing considering all the great tracks those bands produced.
Steely Dan had long abandoned a formal band at the height their popularity in the late '70s, and weren't embarrassed by it at all.
From Wikipedia:
Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys produced and co-wrote many of his band's most famous tracks and used the Wrecking Crew's talents extensively in the mid-1960s, including on songs such as "Help Me, Rhonda", "California Girls", and "Good Vibrations" as well as the albums Pet Sounds and Smile. Some reports falsely claim that the Wrecking Crew replaced the Beach Boys on record after their first few hits; however, this misconception derived from incomplete written documentation of the recording sessions. After audio documentation surfaced, it was revealed that the Beach Boys' first ten albums leading up to Pet Sounds and Smile were, by and large, self-contained efforts, and the band members played instruments on most of their singles and key album tracks. It was not until the 1965 album The Beach Boys Today! that Wrecking Crew musicians began to figure heavily on the band's studio recordings, an arrangement that lasted until 1967.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wrecking_Crew_(music)