The Beethoven Soul - "The Beethoven Soul" (Vinyl, 1967) Dot Records
How can one resist such an album cover while shopping again at my local Record Safari? Two things attracted me; one is the cover, but also the price of $40. I had never heard of The Beethoven Soul, but something about how this band is photographed and its posing with a bust of Ludwig captured my curiosity. And it was released in 1967, a very adventuresome year for records and music-making, and of course, Dot Records. I know Dot only released Country-pop recordings with an occasional Pat Boone disc. But what is The Beethoven Soul?
The back cover says it’s a Snuff Garrett production but is credited as the album being produced by James Arthur Griffin and arranged by Al Capps. Griffin was a musician and once a member of the band Bread, and a solo album, Summer Holiday, was released in 1963 and arranged and conducted by the legendary and always great Jack Nitzsche. As for Garrett, a major record producer, he worked with Nitzsche and a young Phil Spector, Leon Russell and Lenny Waronker. So, as the musicians that make up The Beethoven Soul, the men behind the curtain were substantial in the music industry. Garrett may have the vision of this band because he worked with the Early Monkees but was rejected by the powers-to-be, and he may have started The Beethoven Soul as his version of a manufactured group.
Besides Griffin co-writing a few songs, the only music person I recognize is Al Kooper, who wrote (a very jazzy/brill building type) New York’s My Home, but it seems that the band itself was Los Angeles based at the time. Majority of the songs are written by different songwriters, and none of them have a strong presence on the Internet. The musicians in The Beethoven Soul are a giant question mark. There is very little information on them on the Discogs website, and nothing else comes up when I googled their names. Although not a lost masterpiece, it is, at the very least, a good pop album circa 1967.
The music is pysch-pop, but in a commercial sense, which is a lot more interesting than music being produced in other decades. At times, I don’t think it was even possible to make a truly bad album in 1967. The Beethoven Soul has touches of other bands of that era, with it being hyper-pop with baroque Beatle/Beach Boys arrangements. Almost Sunshine Pop, but more of a rainy-day feeling. Very much a studio-made type of music, but done with a spirit of adventure, as long as it’s in its pop context of something sellable. Alias, a failure, but at the very least a spectacular failure. And I can’t find any traces of Beethoven in their music.