A Midsummer’s Day Dream: The Sunshine Pop Sound of Late 60s California
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The thing about sunshine pop is that it must’ve been seen as a little quaint even at the time. Consider the unparalleled squareness of its musical influences: taking from the soft and inoffensive sounds of easy listening music as well as the slickly calculated earworminess of advertising jingles, sunshine pop’s lightly orchestrated arrangements accentuated its spirit of cloying cheer. Even the good, clean, American fun of the godfathering Beach Boys — from whom sunshine pop artists nabbed their lush vocal harmonies and their pervading worldview of carefree naïveté — had already been rendered passé by the British Invasion of the mid-60s as well as by growing societal turmoil.
Naturally, sunshine pop artists were seemingly too busy singing about kites, flowers, beaches, and candy to concern themselves with any of these extraneous circumstances. But underneath all the colorful whimsy, there was a nostalgic wistfulness to it, sometimes even a jagged undercurrent of anxiety that oftentimes betrayed a sense of repressed adolescence. It was a music more concerned with providing a spiritual escape than in trying to embody the tenor of the times, which probably factored into its assumed disposability. The nascent field of rock and popular music criticism, meanwhile, was too busy grasping for any sort of respectability to concern itself with these ostensibly unserious frivolities. In the end, sunshine pop artists left very little in the way of a defined canon — most of them were barely able to leave any sort of recorded legacy — and not even a decade after its inception, sunshine pop had already faded into obscurity.
But though its time in the sun may be over, the very same escapist qualities that were once considered a sign of spiritual weakness continue to fascinate generations of archivists and crate-diggers. Being able to dig through all the cheery muck like a treasure trove is undoubtedly part of the appeal, but if you’re curious about where to start or perhaps just want a quick dose of fun in the sun, this list is as good a place to start as any. Nine tracks, a mixture of genre staples, deep album cuts, and forgotten singles, spanning from 1964 to 1969 and chronologically arranged from peak to comedown — all of which sound a bit like the first blush of summer.
“It’s as Easy as 1, 2, 3” (1964) — Jill Gibson
Despite their shared geographic origins, there was never really any significant crossover between the surf rock of the early 60s and the sunshine pop of the mid-to-late 60s. As early as 1964, however, singer and occasional songwriter Jill Gibson — mostly remembered today for her brief stint as a replacement member for the Mamas & the Papas — happened upon an early version of what would effectively later be dubbed “sunshine pop” via the vocal surf style she specialized in. It’s a nifty little tune, cute and catchy and sensitively sung, but the chorus in particular — a splayed-out, aching descent from an impossibly delicate high note — is simply one of the most marvelous of its era. It’s that very youthful sense of grasping for freedom, and the kindred thrill of feeling untethered — romantically, from the spiritual confines of a season — even if just for a moment.
“Sugar Stone” (1966) — The Candy Company
No discussion on sunshine pop would be complete without mentioning the work of songwriter-producer Curt Boettcher — the kind of enigmatic, tragically unheralded, gone-too-soon figure whose very existence seemed to invite belated veneration. Boettcher is today most famous for his work on the 1968 lost-and-rediscovered classic Begin by the Millennium, probably the most critically esteemed full-length sunshine pop album outside of the Beach Boys in the admittedly scant canon. He’d certainly go further with his talents there, but even at this early stage, it was clear that he was already beginning to approach that brand of idiosyncrasy. The production on this one is full of the kinds of peculiarities that would become emblematic for him — oddball percussive tones (are those temple blocks?), a softly psychedelic female choir, a touch of the avant-garde in the form of a squealing drone — and the chords themselves are woozily and almost childishly off-kilter in a manner evocative of a playground chant…on acid!
“My World Fell Down” (1967) — Sagittarius
It’s arguable as to whether this particular song can even be classified as “sunshine pop” — too doleful, too heavily orchestrated —, but it’d be a shame not to include it. This one was famously included in the seminal Nuggets compilation of “original artyfacts from the first psychedelic era,” which is worthy of consideration on its own: to be a relic only five years after release. There’s a baroque melancholy to the dramatic flourishes that fill out the instrumental breaks, and timing the melodic turn back to sadness in the refrains to coincide with the words “...since you went away…” is a simple but gratifying bit of construction. Two notes: there’s an audio collage breakdown present only on the single version of the song that’s of passing interest as a historical curio, and its parent album — considered something of a “lost classic” by sunshine pop aficionados — has one of the most unintentionally, horrifyingly ugly covers you’ll ever see.
“Butterfly High” (1968) — Paper Fortress
Instant-contact summer. This one was apparently composed by the writer of such minor hits as “Along Comes Mary” by the Association and “Sail On, Sailor” by the Beach Boys, but such details are perfunctory. The very moment you’re hit with those fluttery, heat-singed zaps of high-pitched studio trickery, it’s like you’re right up there traipsing through clouds in the bright blue sky…and then those lazy-day tumbles of piano and those buzzes of jaw harp come in and suddenly the clouds are opening up beneath you to reveal a rolling grassy meadow teeming with insectoid life. It’s sunshine pop as pure escapism — a world where a butterfly “...thinks he’s an aeroplane” and a caterpillar “...read[s] his horoscope in a magazine” and “...you’ll never have to come back down.” But these surface pleasures belie a fascinating complexity of emotion — the transition from the jaunty refrain into the blissed-out delirium of the chorus sounds like the point where curiosity turns to contentment.
“Umbrellas” (1968) — The Free Design
The Free Design was one of those great groups whose delightfully openhearted, childlike fancies lightly veiled a playful manner of complexity. Just the sheer busyness of the vocals themselves on “Umbrellas” evokes an evening downtown bustle, and the transitions between its many melodic segments are as carefully controlled as they come. Note how they tease the first transition at the 0:38 mark about fifteen seconds before — a real token of sophistication, with just the mere knowledge that the melody could resolve in either way making it feel that much more lively. And so much color, too, even on what sounds like an overcast day — the briskness of the organ, the little twinklets of glockenspiel that sound like the sun peeking out from under gray clouds, and all manner of sun-speckled horns. (The climb at the 0:43 mark sounds like a gale of many-hued umbrellas being lifted up into a mad choreographed dance.)
“Suddenly I See” (1968) — Salt Water Taffy
Digging for good sunshine pop feels a bit like getting to unwrap a bunch of different pieces of candy, and Salt Water Taffy was one of the bubblegummiest groups of them all. (There was a good deal of crossover between sunshine pop and the “bubblegum” pop of the period, likely because the knowing innocence and simplicity of bubblegum pop music was easily transmutable to sunshine pop’s general worldview.) Their sole recorded album left behind little evidence of them being a particularly remarkable group, but buried in the middle of the tracklist is this little number. It’s a sweet tune, and well-harmonized as one might expect, but its foundational bossa nova beat signifies an interest by sunshine pop acts in incorporating influences from Brazilian music (check out Astrud Gilberto’s Windy for the inverse — sunshine pop as done in a bossa nova style). And the sweet sadness inherent to bossa nova ends up being a perfect fit for the song’s restrained evocations of turbulence and uncertainty.
“Sunrise” (1968) — The Peppermint Trolley Company
Right in the middle of the tracklist on the obscure sole album by the Peppermint Trolley Company — a band best known for performing the theme song to the Brady Bunch — happens to lie one of the most comprehensively contemplative numbers in all of pop music. It’s quite a simple tune — just two chords being lightly batted back and forth — but both the guitars and the piano have a beguiling wispy-delicateness to them, and listening to him sing about how he’s “...just a fellow used to knowing his place,” one can parse a very peculiar mix of optimism and spiritual resignation. Anyway, it’s all worth it just to hear the moment where color starts to seep in (accordion!), smartly timed to coincide with the vocalist singing about the colors of the sunrise (or is it the sunset?). And the chorus — a mass of harmonized ba-ba-bas, naturally — is a lovely moment of breaking through the clouds.
“Take a Picture” (1968) — Margo Guryan
Outside of the aforementioned Begin by the Millennium, Take a Picture is probably the other “big” pillar in the sunshine pop album canon. Frankly, it’s easy to suspect it as one of those cases where initial obscurity secures immortality, but it really is a charming little album — just over 30 minutes of warm, colorful, melodically-fetching rainy-day tunes, which is just about all you can ask for from something like this. As the story goes, it was the Beach Boys’ iconic “God Only Knows” that piqued Guryan’s interest in music outside of the jazz she studied, though those formative influences remained in both her chords and in her arrangements. Just about every song here is uniformly lovely, but it’s the title track that stands out as having one of her very loveliest sentiments — taking pictures to preserve the happy moments in case of “...cloudy days to come,” and the anxiety that comes with knowing that things won’t always be this way.
“Where Do the Girls of the Summer Go?” (1969) — Mark Eric
A Midsummer’s Day Dream was a gleaming, immaculately polished, unequivocally mellow monument to the mid-60s Californian sunshine pop sound that singer/songwriter/teenager Mark Eric had grown up loving and living. The trouble, of course, was that by 1969, shifting cultural tides had driven public tastes away from this particular brand of escapism. As a result, sunshine pop as a commercial market was on its way out. Nevertheless, the album sports the kind of sumptuousness in melody and in arrangement that helps justify its minor reputation as some of the loveliest music the Beach Boys never made. Eric’s pinched frat-boy voice, meanwhile, carried a sense of incorrigible longing that so often manifested itself in lyrics like these — leaves turn brown, summer fades, the sun goes down, no one stays. Picture-perfect of a period portrait as his music was, it was a portrait in sepia tone — some things aren’t meant to last forever.