Wall of Sound

My favorite anecdote about the Wall of Sound technique is the paralyzing effect "Be My Baby" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jSPpbOGnFgk) had on Brian Wilson, founder of the Beach Boys:

> "Be My Baby" had a profound lifelong impact on the Beach Boys' founder Brian Wilson.

> When he heard "Be My Baby" for the first time through his car radio, he immediately pulled over to the side of the road and deemed it the greatest record he had ever heard. Carlin describes the song as having become "a spiritual touchstone" for Wilson, while music historian Luis Sanchez states that it formed an enduring part of Wilson's mythology, being the Spector record that "etched itself the deepest into Brian's mind ... it comes up again and again in interviews and biographies, variably calling up themes of deep admiration, a source of consolation, and a baleful haunting of the spirit."

> Music journalist David Dalton, who visited Wilson's home in 1967, said that Wilson had analyzed "Be My Baby" "like an adept memorizing the Koran." Dalton later wrote about a box of tapes he had discovered in Wilson's bedroom: "I assumed they were studio demos or reference tracks and threw one on the tape machine. It was the strangest thing ... All the tapes were of Brian talking into a tape recorder. Hour after hour of stoned ramblings on the meaning of life, color vibrations, fate, death, vegetarianism and Phil Spector."

> In the early 1970s, Wilson instructed his engineer Stephen Desper to create a tape loop consisting only of the chorus of "Be My Baby". Wilson listened to the loop for several hours in what Desper saw as "some kind of a trance." Wilson's daughter Carnie stated that during her childhood: "I woke up every morning to boom boom-boom pow! Boom boom-boom pow! Every day." Wilson told The New York Times in 2013 that he had listened to the song at least 1,000 times. In his 2016 memoir, Wilson recalled playing the song's drum intro "ten times until everyone in the room told me to stop, and then I played it ten more times." Bandmate Mike Love remembered Wilson comparing the song to Albert Einstein's theory of relativity. [0][1]

A personal anecdote: Hearing "Be my Baby" in my parents' kitchen radio, recognizing it as this wonderful piece of music I had heard somewhere before, and listening to it very happily, is one of my earliest childhood memories. My daughter, who is 2, saw the single's cover pop up in the YouTube suggestions on my laptop screen a few weeks ago and specifically demanded this song to be played multiple times (she had seen the cover a few months earlier when we played it to her, and remembered it). So maybe Brian Wilson was onto something.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Be_My_Baby

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Wilson

If you need a good example album, and as we're heading into the season, I would recommend: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Christmas_Gift_for_You_from_...

Let it Come Down perfected the wall of sound style imo. Beautiful album.

Not quite 'wall of sound', but there was a lot of echo-y stuff added to early US Beatles albums per Dave Dexter Jr, "for the American market". I suspect there was an attempt to be "wall of sound" like, at least in part, but it was also an easy way to give yourself "production" credits on Beatles' work.

Wow, after reading that legendary endorsement, I listened to it for the first time. I don’t normally think of myself as a philistine, but I’m afraid it didn’t speak to me at all. Maybe you had to be there.