Last night a Mixtape saved my life

California, 1967. If your mind immediately jumps to Jefferson Airplane, Doors, Mothers Of Invention, Quicksilver Messenger Service, you're on the wrong track, at least for the duration of this playlist. The year is right, the place too, and even the influences (partly), but the tones are quite different: if the psychedelic rock of the Summer Of Love is fierce, sprawling, mocking, often dark or at least intoxicating, its well-mannered, pop-leaning counterpart is - as much as that's possible in years when everything bled into everything else - its exact opposite. Sunshine pop, as the style was retroactively labeled, brings the baroque instincts of the Beatles and Beach Boys together with Burt Bacharach and the softness of easy listening, giving rise to a sound that's as radiant, lush and polished as possible, to the point of sounding downright sugary. What's more, despite the frequent references, most of the genre's exponents weren't Californian at all.

You'll definitely know a few of these tracks. They may not be the most representative, but the titles are extremely famous: "California Dreamin'" and "Happy Together" are as much symbols of the late-Sixties pop big bang as "Light My Fire" and "Somebody To Love". And if you wanted, they'd already be enough to get a sense of the basic ingredients of the recipe: phenomenal melodies, arrangements expanded with keyboards, strings and horns (but fully integrated into the composition, avoiding cloying orchestral excess), rhythms drawing as much from pop-rock as from folk, jazz and even marching band music, bittersweet harmonies dotted with elusive twists (minor-major shifts, intertwining vocal lines, unexpected chords).

Fans of the genre will already be well acquainted with other big names: Left Banke, Free Design, Harpers Bizarre, Eternity's Children. And above all the bands put together by producer and arranger Curt Boettcher, Sagittarius and Millennium, emblematic both for their dreadful cost-to-revenue ratio ("Begin" by Millennium was at the time the most expensive record ever produced by Columbia, as well as a terrifying commercial flop) and for their current status as cult classics.

A handful of solo songwriters round out the cast of the most celebrated names: Van Dyke Parks, Margo Guryan, Roger Nichols and Paul Williams (whose "Someday Man", written together with Nichols, was also recorded by the Monkees). Each in their own way, these artists bring an intimate, singer-songwriter sensibility into a style that's more often associated with choral arrangements, occasionally bringing out the melancholic streak that's actually always lurking beneath the dazzling colors of the orchestration.

So far, these are the so-called "mandatory" inclusions needed to frame the genre. But a compilation wouldn't be satisfying without a few surprises, ones that can offer something new even to those already well versed in the essentials. So here are a couple of choices off the beaten path: Love (usually linked to the more strictly psychedelic side of post-British Invasion pop) and Canadian artist Doug Randle, the sole exception to the self-imposed rule of focusing only on American names (no offense to British acts like Honeybus, Herman's Hermits, Crazy Paving, Zombies). And then a few gems representing the genre's most extreme nature, that of the studio whim, the anti-rock experiment in search of the most convoluted constructions: "Love-in" and "A Whole Lot Of Rainbows" are the product of outfits that existed only for the duration of the recording sessions, led by ambitious producers backed by songwriters given free rein to indulge in the boldest shifts in mood.

Particular attention has been paid to the genre's often overlooked "long tail". Having essentially collapsed under its own weight by the end of the Sixties (production costs were astronomical, returns generally scarce), sunshine pop was in some ways a forerunner of progressive rock and, more specifically, represented one of the first fully-formed shapes of post-Beatles progressive pop. Direct influences are poorly documented, and perhaps even unlikely, although the influence of Left Banke's "Walk Away Renée" on Boston's "More Than A Feeling" is well known; if you go looking, though, there's no shortage of transitional forms leading from the sunshine pop canon toward an other, decidedly more varied, direction. Smoke and Rain mark a sonic reconvergence with the psych-rock legacy, pointing in a direction clearly akin to prog as commonly understood; partially comparable, Gandalf bet more on airiness and grandeur than on intricate arrangements, anticipating the West Coast sound and pomp-rock. Montage deserve a chapter of their own, Michael Brown's bold post-Left Banke venture before he turned to power-pop with Stories: pushing harmonic experimentation to the limit, tracks like "Men Are Building Sand" defy the genre's typical grace with arrangements that at times willingly abandon proper intonation altogether.

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04/12/2025