This morning I took a look and listen through Carl Wilson’s songwriting, production, and guest performance credits to try to better define his musical identity, and I think one emerges pretty definitively: soft rock, yacht rock, adult contemporary—call it what you will, but I think you get what I mean.
By the time he reached his later 20s, Carl Wilson seems to have been primarily in the orbits of slickly produced, generally very well performed music certainly inspired by rock and roll, but softened (whether by age, maturity, or hopes of radio success).
I would divide his career into three very unequal parts, plus a lengthy prelude that might not really qualify for purposes of the discussion except as background to inform his later work.
Prelude: Baby, Child, R&R Guitarist and Harmony Singer, 1946-1967Not to diminish Carl’s work with, or influence on, the early Beach Boys, because his guitar playing and harmony singing were obviously integral. But it was Brian’s and Mike’s band. He wasn’t writing songs, he wasn’t producing music, he wasn’t even really singing many leads until the latter part of this pre-era. So I’m not really counting it.
Era One: Complementary Artist, 1968-70It’s really with
Friends in 1968 that Carl begins appearing more frequently in the credits. But do they really expose his own musical identity? I don’t think so, for the most part. He co-wrote “Friends,” “Be Here in the Morning,” and “When a Man Needs a Woman” on that album, and then “I Went to Sleep” for
20/20. For
Sunflower, he co-wrote “It’s About Time” and “Our Sweet Love.” As far as I can tell, he was not the primary writer for any of these songs, and so presumably was more involved in a lyric here, a chord there, or whatever it took to get the songs done.
Similarly, he was credited as producer for “I Can Hear Music” and “Time to Get Alone” and co-producer for “Bluebirds Over the Mountain,” “Do It Again,” and “Never Learn Not to Love.” It was the cover of “I Can Hear Music” that has long been understood to be Carl’s first solo production. Regardless of specific credits, he appears again to have been trying mostly to fulfill the ambitions of others on the others.
A hard moment to categorize, and maybe a transition into his first identity, is with his first outside production job on The Flame’s 1970 self-titled album. Now, this clearly isn’t just Carl’s project: the Flame were an established, if domestically unknown, band of strong musicians with their own history and identity. But yet this album doesn’t sound like their earlier work, which comprised mostly (entirely?) covers: check out their 1968 album
Soulfire!, which is cool, but isn’t similar to their s/t 1970 album.
www.youtube.com/playlist?list=OLAK5uy_nDrgQnopkdtOQcGmJO0czvZ_J9xNBPQAcSo whatever blend got them there, I’d say Carl and the Flame ended up with a blend of post-Beatles psychedelia and harder rock and roll, almost power pop plus soul music. It’s somewhere between the Beach Boys’ sound of 1970-71 and their sound of 1972-73. Which makes sense… I think it probably represents Carl’s musical taste at the time.
Era Two: Some People Call Carl the Space Cowboy… 1971-73OK, nobody calls Carl the space cowboy. But he did wear cowboy shirts at the time, and his music was, for lack of a better term, a little spacey. This is when he begins contributing songs that were
his, though with lyrical assists typically from Jack Rieley.
The songs are somewhat psychedelic/spiritual/druggy affairs, generally with multiple sections, with distorted guitars, with sound effects, and with instrumental solos. If they resembled any Beach Boys music, I’d say it turns out to be the unreleased contemporaneous Beach Boys music of Dennis Wilson and Daryl Dragon. Perhaps they really were peas in a pod in those years.
He produced or co-produced about half of
CATP during this era, including all of Brian’s compositions. The production of “Marcella” is credited to him alone.
Carl began guesting on outside records in this era as well, with a few vocal contributions to Charles Lloyd compositions in 1971 and 72 that to some degree fit in with his aesthetic.
There is also a transition one could see through his outside performances into what became a sound I’d identify with him for the remainder of his life. In 1973, he guested (with Billy Hinsche) on a Kathy Dalton album,
Amazing (which has an interesting story on Frank Zappa’s DisCreet Records), and America’s “Hat Trick” on the album of the same name. That marks his transition into…
Era Three: Full Sail (Aboard That Yacht…Rock), 1974-1998Around the age of 28, it seems to me that Carl Wilson settled into a style, or at least a constellation of styles, that would be his home the rest of his life. Call it yacht rock, call it adult contemporary, call it easy listening, call it yacht rock.
Excluding live touring, he wrote with, performed on albums with, and occasionally produced more outside musicians than he did work with the Beach Boys, and they tended to represent a similar group of artists—many of them repeat partners. America. Chicago. Elton John. Warren Zevon. Timothy B. Schmidt. Peter Cetera. David Cassidy. Bob Welch. Christopher Cross. These sorts of big names were all among Carl’s contributors (or rather, vice versa) during that decade of ’74-’84 (and beyond).
He produced Ricci Martin’s album
Beached in 1977, also contributing some cowriting credits and participating with a who’s who of musicians from this world—many named above—that frankly exceeded the quality of the material and featured artist. Through the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, he also collaborated with other musicians less regarded by history, including Angelo, Henry Gross, King Harvest, Sailor, and Lake.
Of course, he went on contributing to the Beach Boys for their records. In fact, his nine songs from
LA through
85 were the most he ever contributed in a three-album stretch. I would argue that while the production (particularly on the lattermost) changed, the overall style did not. Carl had become a yacht rocker.
Sandwiched between the second and third of those three albums, of course, were his two solo albums,
Carl Wilson (1981) and
Youngblood (1983). They included another 15 songs he cowrote. And while he did not produce either album, he clearly was involved in the decision-making, and I think they fit snugly alongside what he had been doing either with the Beach Boys, or hired to do for the aforementioned outside artists.
After
85, Carl would not bring another song to the Beach Boys, but he did cowrite four songs that appeared on the posthumous
Like a Brother album. That project included members of America and Chicago—and I would say it did not represent any sort of dramatic shift in style.
SummaryIn his earlier years, Carl Wilson didn’t contribute enough as a leader to show an identifiable style. And as a young man—like many of us—he may well have not really had his own identity at all, but rather tried them on like clothes. He had the identity of Chuck Berry, of Little Richard, of Brian Wilson.
Finally, while still a relatively young man even by rock and roll standards at 28 (despite over a decade of fame and success), it seems to me Carl Wilson did form a relatively stable musical identity that lasted the final two decades of his life.
I think a compilation including his work beginning around 1974, a la “Good Timin,” and ending with the
Like a Brother material, whether with the Beach Boys, his solo career, or his outside collaborations, almost all fit pretty well together into this soft rock/yacht rock subgenre.
Credit to AGD’s site,
bellagio10452.com/, where the “Guesting” section in particular provided the information to launch YouTube, Spotify, Wikipedia, and Google searches for music and information to develop these ideas.