Pocket Symphonies

Pocket symphony: a phrase popularized by an ad-man (Derek Taylor)—a press-man, anyway; journalist, publisher, and producer—popularized, that is, by a man who had been press officer for the Fab Four themselves (“The Beatles Are Coming”), and would be again; who through his own public relations company had introduced the Byrds to America and the Beach Boys to England. It was for the Boys’ “Good Vibrations” (1966) that Taylor revivified the phrase, realizing he needed some way to get across what was nestled inside all the whizbang new studio creations coming from the band’s brilliant-but-fragile composer, Brian Wilson—the rest of the group having become more or less a touring appendage of Wilson’s one-man production laboratory. It was the same advertorial insight that yielded another famous tagline, which several generations since have considered de rigueur, but which didn’t seem quite so publicly obvious in 1966 (unless you were Derek Taylor, or the Fab Four themselves): “Brian Wilson is a genius.”