Rob Mailman, house engineer at the Roxy ©Paul Natkin/Photo Reserve Inc.

However, these scholarly investigations into the nature of his work proved to be not enough. “At the beginning of ‘California Girls,’ there are these prominent baritone saxophones within the intro playing these weird chords,” Mertens relates. “There are at least two, but I can’t tell for sure. There are some low trumpets of an unknown quantity as well, so [trumpet player] Probyn Gregory and I picked out single voices we felt were best suited for just the two instruments we had, and the resulting sound turned out to be amazingly accurate.”

The band’s detective work received an additional shot in the arm when they were given access to a collection of instrumental tracks from actual Beach Boys’ sessions, recorded by engineer Chuck Britz in Hollywood’s Western Studio 3 during the ’60s. “Now we had an instruments-only multitrack record from the old days,” Probyn Gregory says. “This material was from the original sessions. You can hear people like guitarists Glen Campbell, Tommy Tedesco and Billy Strange playing, plus bassist Carole Kaye and drummer Hal Blaine. Armed with this archival material, we could go in and better identify the various instruments used. Beyond that, we talked to people like Hal Blaine, who would fill in the details, telling us ‘Yeah, I was using a Ludwig set on that one, but I damped the kick drum with a towel.’ Based on the recollections we heard, we tried different things, which oftentimes wound up adding even more authenticity to the mix.”

Procuring period-authentic gear was another strategy employed in creating the live record’s unerring sound. In the spirit of the times, both Probyn Gregory and Nick Walusko outfitted themselves with reissue Fender Twins for their guitar work.

“If I had my druthers,” says keyboardist Darian Sahanaja, “I would have had all of the great vintage gear these songs require onstage. But we all know that’s not something that’s logistically possible, especially in a small club like the Roxy, which only holds 450 people. While I did have a Hammond B-3 up there, I relied quite heavily upon my Kurzweil K2500. Most of the sounds I either programmed in or sampled, taking care to use a bare minimum of factory patches.”

Within Sahanaja’s sonic library for the gig are authentic harpsichord samples (heard on “Caroline No”), harp samples (“Wouldn’t It Be Nice”) and a wide range of other acoustic voices needed to reproduce the Wilson aural palette. One of the most famous sounds in Beach Boys’ lore—the ethereal and haunting vibrato of a Theremin heard on “Good Vibrations”—found its way onto the live tracks not as a sample, but from an actual instrument designed and built by Tom Polk expressly for Wilson’s touring and the live CD.

“Actually, based upon my research into the subject, what we all have generally concluded over the years is a Theremin on ‘Good Vibrations’ was most likely a very similar instrument some called the Electro-Theremin,” Sahanaja explains. “The Electro-Theremin was the creation of a Big Band-era trombone player named Paul Tanner, who, frustrated with the Theremin’s inability to be played in a note-specific manner, built his own custom box with a volume switch and a needle-pointer, which could be moved along a stationary rod to hit selected notes as indicated by a standard keyboard reference. The original Theremin, which was ‘played’ by moving your hands around the device’s antenna-like oscillator, was fine for effects, but a real bear when it came to having to play actual notes with any sense of accuracy. Paul Tanner’s mechanical-slide controller remedied this problem fairly effectively, and as a result, his variation of the instrument was widely used in studios around the time Brian was recording ‘Good Vibrations’.”

Tom Polk, a protégé of Paul Tanner, was called in to build the Wilson camp’s Electro-Theremin-inspired device after a genuine Moog Theremin proved, according to Sahanaja, to be “not quite right.” The role of playing the instrument was originally intended for Sahanaja, but shifted to Probyn Gregory when it was determined that Sahanaja just plain had enough to do already. “Not that I don’t have my hands full too,” Gregory adds. “We all just chip in as needed. The band’s overall sound is everyone’s concern; there are no egos onstage.”

Engineer Mark Linett, who has worked with Wilson for the past 13 years—first on Brian’s 1988 solo album, and then on a number of projects centered around Capitol Records’ Beach Boys’ catalog, including the 30th anniversary and Pet Sounds boxed sets—was the man responsible for committing the live record’s tracks to tape. Finding himself hunkered down on both nights of the Roxy shows in a mobile truck supplied by Le Mobile, Linett gathered the sum of both shows’ inputs using a meticulously-maintained Neve 8078 console expanded to 48 inputs fed to a pair of Studer D827 digital, multitrack machines.

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Reprinted with permission from Magazine, September, 2000
© 2000, Intertec Publishing, A Primedia Company All Rights Reserved