New York vs. Los Angeles
At the beginning of the ‘60s, the music industry was still centered in New York, whose natives saw L.A. as strange and unsophisticated at best. But the years between 1960 and 1965 saw a remarkable shift. Soon enough, the look and sound of southern California started taking over, replacing Manhattan as the hub of pop music in America.
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For one, famed producer Phil Spector took his talents to L.A. and basically blew up the teen-pop realm to new and epic proportions. Captivated by Spector, The Beach Boys’ Brian Wilson wrote silky smooth melodies to match the beach and car culture that reinvented the Golden State as the teenage paradise that it became. It wasn’t long after that that other L.A. producers started following suit.