According to Valentino -- who answered my question "Was the group experimenting with psychedelics?" with "All of that, sort of ..." -- Triangle was partially inspired by several day trips he took to the Legion of Honor, where he spent time admiring the dark yet incandescent hues emanating from the museum's collection of Flemish portraits and landscape paintings from the 17th century. Indeed, smoking a joint and roaming the halls of that 80-year-old replica of a neoclassical French palace and the gorgeous natural landscape framing it (which I gladly did as "background research") elicits the same dramatic blend of fantasy, antiquity, and nature that courses through this record.
Having said that, the compositions that make up Triangle -- and, to an even greater extent, the songs of the Brummels' next and final record, the more rustic Bradley's Barn -- are radically modern. As a fellow record nerd recently pointed out with astonishment when I played him "Lower Level," the obscure Brummels B-side recorded shortly after the release of Triangle, "This is like house music or something." Now, that sounds like a far-out comment because this isn't proto-electronic dance music or anything of the sort; the Brummels used very little electric instrumentation, much less the trippy studio wizardry that was de rigueur during the age of acid rock. And outside of Waronker's subtle use of reverb on Valentino's vocals, Triangle and Bradley's Barn exude an organic and acoustic feel, the latter even featuring a "guitar orchestra" of five seasoned Nashville session musicians (the same ones Dylan employed for John Wesley Harding and Nashville Skyline). So what my buddy was focusing on were the distinctive song structures that Elliott and Valentino constructed. As with film scores built from sequences of finely honed suites and movements, Elliott's work dispensed with the verse-chorus-verse template common to most pop music. But Elliott also blended melody, harmony, and rhythm while adding a touch of syncopation, which is rock 'n' roll's primary influence upon his songwriting: "Rhythm, syncopation, they're the same in my book. They are both a part of the composition." Emerging from these bold design moves are cinematic pop songs built from multiple, finely arranged layers of percussive melodies and countermelodies, which playfully dance around one another in a faint yet palpable geometric fashion (kind of like the music in a player piano or a music box), which is similar to how modern digital dance-oriented pop music unfolds. Every instrument contributes melody and rhythm simultaneously.
Early Beau Brummels singles like "Just a Little" were Top 10 hits, but later LPs Bradley's Barn and Triangle were commercial failures.
The band called itself the Beau Brummels, a phrase denoting an excessively well-dressed person, a fop.
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Elliott and Waronker (with assistance from Parks and Newman) applied these concepts to the Everly Brothers' 1968 country-rock concept album Roots, a collection of wistful Americana that Elliott arranged into a dreamy sound collage. And Elliott was also a key studio musician playing guitar on Parks' mind-bending debut for Warner Bros., Song Cycle (a record highly revered by numerous modern electronic composers), as well as on Newman's LPs from the late '60s and early '70s, idiosyncratic marriages of Fats Domino's smooth piano-led rock 'n' roll and Broadway show tunes.
But despite numerous critical accolades, this "new wave of psychedelic Tin Pan Alley" was an unqualified commercial bust, for which Warner Bros. is to blame only to a certain extent. You see, the Brummels were in a precarious position in 1967 and '68 (similar to but on a much smaller scale than the Beach Boys' situation after the release of Pet Sounds). Their music was advanced, complex pop that had become way too weird for the mainstream AM-pop audience that originally made "Laugh Laugh" and "Just a Little" national hits. As one L.A. fan from back in the day recently said to me, "With Triangle and Bradley's Barn, the Beau Brummels got total artistic control, and they kind of went off the deep end," which means the only listeners open enough to really get what the Brummels were up to were the freaky hippies of Haight-Ashbury and beyond. But those guys were not nearly as freethinking and free from superficial labels as history has led us to believe: Remember, the Brummels were considered Top 40 "Beatles clones." And to be an American act branded Top 40 during what old Joel Selvin zealously describes in the book It Happened in Monterey as "a transformation in music as the 45 rpm format was broken and pop music became a rock revolution ... when Top 40 died and underground (FM) radio was born" was to be consigned to the losing side of a larger cultural battle. As that quintessential hippie chick Michelle Phillips once stated, summing up the attitude that pervaded the underground, "If you didn't get invited to the Festival, there was something wrong."
When I was a teenager falling in love with Pet Sounds, my mother told me this funny story. In 1967, she was a tall, gorgeous model, actress, and authentic "Copa Girl" living in New York. She had good taste in music and couldn't get enough of the Beach Boys' new single, "Good Vibrations." So she headed over to some hip West Village record store and bought a copy. When the ultrahip record store clerk manning the cash register eyeballed that photograph of the Beach Boys on the picture sleeve, he decided to have a little fun. With outstretched arms like teetering airplane wings, he feigned imbalance like a surfer riding a massive wave as he said to my mom in a faux-surfer dude accent, "Whooooaaaa, the Beach Boys. Far out. Surf music is cool. Hang 10." Well, in 2006, the reputations of "Good Vibrations" and Pet Sounds far eclipse that of the once cutting-edge music of Selvin's "rock revolution." (Who the hell still listens to Country Joe & the Fish?) So maybe modern San Francisco should make up for all those Haight-Ashbury heads who, during their heyday, behaved like that elitist, deluded record store clerk and finally invite the Beau Brummels to the Festival, because they are, without question, one of this city's greatest and most forgotten musical treasures.
