Glenn Gass leaves local audience with good vibrations

Wednesday, April 13, 2016
Greencastle native Glenn Gass addresses a full house of friends and music buffs Monday night at the DePauw University Music on the Square venue as he talks about the historic year 1966 and its place in rock 'n' roll history.

Bringing along his pet sounds to share, rock 'n' roll professor Glenn Gass came home to Greencastle Monday night and left his audience musically charged by more than two hours of good vibrations.

Focusing on 1966, perhaps the greatest year in rock music history, Gass weaved a multi-media journey through the fabric of that era, detailing the musical oneupmanship going on amongst The Beatles, Bob Dylan, The Beach Boys and others.

Gass, an Indiana University professor who created the first for-credit course on rock history at any music school or conservatory, addressed a full house at the DePauw University Music on the Square facility, where he recalled shopping at the A & P grocery with his mother while growing up in Greencastle.

"This is such a pleasure for me," Gass began as he spotted many familiar faces in the audience, including Mayor Bill Dory and several childhood friends. "I grew up down by the observatory here.

"This is truly bittersweeet for me," he continued. "It's the first time I've done anything in Greencastle without my dad (late DPU Professor Clint Gass) or my mom and dad."

Gass was a teenager in Greencastle in 1966 as the rock 'n' roll world was spinning toward something special just 10 years after Elvis Presley was singing "Heartbreak Hotel." The younger generation was still reeling from adults trying to fit in by dancing The Twist to their music but major changes were on the horizon.

"Pop culture was just expanding in many ways in 1966, ways we couldn't know were coming," Gass said.

Before taking his musical journey into 1966, Gass looked back at 1965, showing a Billboard list of the top songs from Sept. 4, 1965, featuring "Help" by The Beatles at No. 1, "Like a Rolling Stone" by Bob Dylan at No. 2 and "California Girls" by The Beach Boys at No. 3.

"That might be the best top three in history," Gass gushed. "That's how good 1965 was."

Rock and roll music scholar and historian Glenn Gass (left) chats with Michael McClaine of Greencastle and his son Matt and daughter Meghan Armitage following his multi-media presentation Monday night at Music on the Square in Greencastle.

It was also the heyday of soul and "it was all happening on the same AM radio stations," he said, reminiscing about going to bed listening to WLS out of Chicago where a listener might hear an ever-eclectic array of "Green Tambourine" followed by James Brown followed by a Beatles song.

Then along came The Beatles' album "Rubber Soul" -- if "Sgt. Pepper" is the most important Beatles' album of all time, "Rubber Soul" is everybody's favorite and "Revolver" the most revolutionary, Gass said -- and rock music has never been the same.

It was 50 years ago next month that Brian Wilson and The Beach Boys, responding to "Rubber Soul," released the album "Pet Sounds," featuring "Wouldn't It Be Nice" and "God Only Knows," the latter of which John Lennon and Paul McCartney called "the most perfect song ever heard," Gass said.

Inspired by the studio additions to "Rubber Soul," Wilson brought in accordions, two 12-string guitars, tenor saxophones, french horns and more to create the unique voice of "Pet Sounds."

Like The Beatles, Wilson and The Beach Boys were "playing the studio like it was another musical instrument," Gass noted.

And that is where the oneupmanship really took off.

"Without 'Rubber Soul,' there wouldn't be 'Pet Sounds,'" Gass said. "And without 'Pet Sounds,' there wouldn't be 'Sgt. Pepper.'"

While "Rubber Soul" came out in December 1965, "Revolver" made its appearance in August 1966, cementing The Beatles' stature as studio innovators (with the invention of automatic double tracking and more), while McCartney provided tape loops to create interesting sounds that could never be recreated in public appearances behind second base in some giant stadium. Thus 1966 marked the end of The Beatles as a touring band.

"Revolver" featured "Eleanor Rigby," known for its string octet and without any Beatle instrumentation in a "very understated, very masculine, very strident" approach, Gass said, that appears to have mimicked the score to the film "Psycho."

The haunting, album-ending "Tomorrow Never Knows" -- which sounds like more the title of a James Bond movie than a Beatles song -- pulled together many of those innovations after Lennon had longed for the sound of 1,000 Buddhist monks chanting on a hilltop for the tract.

"At the end (of 'Revolver'), you're on the rings of Saturn," Gass said, alluding to the psychedelic nature of "Tomorrow Never Knows" and the influence that drugs were beginning to have on rock music.

Meanwhile, when The Beatles heard Dylan's "Blonde on Blonde" album, they were left to pine, "We've got to up our writing." And when Dylan heard The Beatles' "Rubber Soul" he thought, "I want to be in a band," related Gass, a member of the education advisory board of the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame and Museum in Cleveland.

"Everybody is sort of upping the game for everybody else at this time," he added, saying, "Brian Wilson and The Beach Boys were like, 'Oh, man, we can't do 'California Girls' again."

Gass, who attended DePauw and earned a bachelor's in music from the New England Conservatory of Music, and master's and doctorate in composition from Indiana, suggested it was "just amazing how ambitious music had become" in 1966.

"You couldn't go to school and say, 'I don't really like that new Beatles song,'" Gass smiled. "You had to listen to it until you liked it."

The Beatles' response to "Pet Sounds" and its beautifully orchestrated songs "held together by amazing harmonies," became "Sgt. Pepper," which then inspired Wilson and The Beach Boys to do the amazing "Good Vibrations," which was released in December 1966 and soared to No. 1 on both sides of the Atlantic.

The Beatles' response to that? "Penny Lane."

One major point of the Monday talk by Glenn Gass included how The Beatles' "Rubber Soul" influenced The Beach Boys masterpiece "Pet Sounds," which, in turn, led The Beatles to make "Revolver" and, ultimately, "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band."

Greencastle actually played a small part in the "Pet Sounds" and "Sgt. Pepper" story as Wilson was known to idolize the harmonies of the Four Freshmen, the 1950s-era vocal band quartet formed at Butler University with Bob Flanigan of Greencastle as one of the founding and longest-performing members.

Gass played a cut from "Angel Eyes" by the Four Freshmen, equating it with the Beach Boys' harmonies on "Wouldn't It Be Nice," particularly in the bouncy lyric that begins "Maybe if we think and wish and hope and pray, it might come true ..."

What's interesting, Gass noted, is that when he first began teaching his IU rock music course, few students even knew "Pet Sounds" existed, and now it's widely considered the No. 1 or No. 2 album of all-time.

Gass closed his presentation with a BBC video montage of noted performers joining Wilson in singing "God Only Knows."

At least twice during his latest return to share his rock music expertise with his hometown, Gass related how he hopes some day to retire back here -- hinting that he just needs to sell his wife Julie on the idea first.

Now wouldn't that be nice ...

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  • Thank you to everyone involved for helping bring Professor Gass to Greencastle for this wonderful presentation. It was GREAT and yes after hearing Glenn I agree 1966 might well be the greatest year in the history of Rock and Roll!

    -- Posted by Charles Todd Wagoner on Thu, Apr 14, 2016, at 10:31 AM
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