Crucial Track for December 25, 2025

"Pleasant Valley Sunday" by The Monkees

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A formative song which I suspect is at least partially responsible for my current favored musical sounds was recorded and released before I was born,

My parents had purchased The Monkees' Greatest Hits for me because I really enjoyed watching re-runs of The Monkees on TV in the late afternoons after school. This would have been in the late 1970s or the very early 1980s. I was super dismayed to have my bubble burst in that they weren't currently really a band or making more TV, even in those days.

One of my favorite songs on their Greatest Hits record was Pleasant Valley Sunday, which was probably one of their more famous tracks, but I had no idea about their actual fame, their pre-fab reputation, or the popular influences they might have been incorporating or responding to.

So I knew nothing specifically about wall-of-sound techniques, or how much it had been done, and by whom, prior to that point in my life.

I was a kid. Some afternoons I would sit by myself next to my parent's Montgomery Ward console stereo, plug in a pair of dad's Realistic headphones and play records.

So. Peasant Valley Sunday has a very recognizable guitar riff and a clever lyric and that thing that happens at the end with reverb and repetition where you follow all of the elements of the song into a sort of cacaphony that ends in an orchestral drone. I used to pick an element, the guitar riff, or a vocal element, and see how long I could follow it until I lost track of it in the mix.

I wouldn't learn about Phil Spector and the Wall of Sound techniques or recording techniques and effects at all for another decade.

However, I note with increasing frequency, the music I really love today, shoegaze and nu-gaze and the things that sound that way, I have been thinking of that one track produced by a group of guys on an album where they really did play their instruments and wanted a little bit of credit for being more than goofy actors.

The fun starts with the drum roll at about 2:32.