The Beach Boys
How Skrillex Influenced The Weeknd’s “Dawn FM” Album
In the music industry, there’s seemingly only a few degrees of separation between Skrillex and any given hit. One such track on The Weeknd‘s new Dawn FM album stands as a prime example. The story of how Bruce Johnston of The Beach Boys came to be involved with the project is something of a butterfly effect—with Skrillex playing a pivotal role. Johnston, now 79, tells the Los Angeles Times that he was out surfing at Zuma Beach and decided to stop in at the nearby Shangri-La Studios afterwards. There, the legendary musician met Skrillex, who was working with multi-Platinum producer Rex Kudo and renowned guitarist Heavy Mellow at the time. Johnston explains that Skrillex and the artists in his orbit at Shangri-La have an unrelenting work ethic, likening them to “the Wr...
The Beach Boys Amplify Their Legacy With Feel Flows
By late 1969 the Beach Boys were in deep trouble. The sunshine surf rock sound that skyrocketed the band to international fame was now firmly out of fashion, replaced by harder rock. Their long-running distribution deal with Capitol for their Brother Records imprint was over. It had been three years since their last big hit, 1966’s “Good Vibrations,” a transcendent piece of psychedelic pop, co-written by primary songwriter Brian Wilson and frontman Mike Love. That song should have set them on a new course from Pet Sounds towards Wilson’s long-gestating masterpiece SMiLE. Instead, the band famously lost steam, in part due to Wilson’s well-documented struggles with mental health. Their 15th studio album, 20/20, released in early 1969, was mostly a patchwork of castoff material. In a grim foo...
To Live and Die in L.A.: Our 1996 Red Hot Chili Peppers Cover Story
This article originally appeared in the April 1996 issue of SPIN. “Los Angeles is my favorite city in the world!” declares super foxy Red Hot Chili Peppers guitarist Dave Navarro, offering as proof of his conviction the city’s name tattooed on the back of his neck. “I would never live anywhere else.” Navarro, drummer Chad Smith, and I are wedged into Newsroom, a trendy Beverly Hills restaurant/coffee house/media mill where omnipresent TV monitors serve up the latest from the E! network with your rice-milk cappuccinos. “But I feel like the bad is taking over,” says Smith, an unadulterated rock dude and Detroit native who, Navarro says, wrote the book on that city’s infamous evening of arson known as Devil’s Night. “I wouldn’t want my kids growing up here,” admits Smith, who at age 33 s...
The 50 Best Albums of 1971
It’s become a cliché, even for post-Baby Boomers, to look back wistfully on the early ’70s as some kind of untouchable golden age for popular music. But when you survey all the era’s best albums in list form, it’s hard not to trust that instinct. I mean…holy shit. In 1971, the psychedelic era hadn’t completely wilted; prog was nearing its popularity apex; Motown was still a revolutionizing soul music; the folk-rock movement was in full flight. The possibilities were limitless. You know it’s a banner year when 50 albums don’t begin to scratch the surface — when both John Lennon and Paul McCartney release definitive LPs and neither make the top 10. Was 1971 the greatest album year ever? We’ll save that debate for another time (or maybe another list). For now, we present 50 stone-cold cl...
Skrillex Spotted in the Studio with Bruce Johnston of The Beach Boys
Skrillex was recently spotted in the studio with Bruce Johnston, one of the members of legendary band The Beach Boys. Johnston and the fabled producer, who has collaborated with The Doors, Damian Marley, and Korn, among other iconic acts, was featured on the Instagram of recording engineer Colt B. Joining them were fellow musicians Heavy Mellow and Rex Kudo, who recently joined forces with Skrillex to produce Juice WRLD‘s “Man of the Year” from the late Chicago hip-hop artist’s posthumous Legends Never Die LP. Colt B shows the progression of a jam session between the artists via a series of Instagram stories, beginning with the legendary Johnston “passing the baton” to Skrillex and ending with everyone involved crooning to an unr...
