“Flute Loop” by the Beastie Boys and “Mogwai Fear Satan” by Mogwai are two examples of fearless sonic adventures that invited the flute along with them for the ride. But these rare ’90s appearances of the reedless wonder would seem to be anomalies: The flute in rock is at once blessed and cursed, beautiful and banal, and never without a story behind it, as you will hear in this whistling woodwind edition of the Origin of Song.

Alto saxophonist Bud Shank was primarily a jazz player, but in 1965, he laid down one of rock’s best-known flute solos in “California Dreamin’.” As the story goes, Shank was invited to the session and breezed through his improvisation in just one take. Shank’s is probably the gold standard in rock flute solos, an oxymoronic idea if ever there was one. And yet, not long after Shank’s bar-setting performance, others would dare to sneak the flute into rock studios. Saxophonist Steve Douglas was retained to blow a flute note or six as the opening to the Beach Boys’ “Sloop John B” from the famously innovative 1966 album, Pet Sounds. That same year, the Blues Project did its own “Flute Thing” (the part the Beasties yanked for “Flute Loop”). The Beatles piped up on their experimental 1967 single with a piccolo trumpet on “Penny Lane” and the mellotron breaths that mark “Strawberry Fields Forever”, but when they went full flute on Magical Mystery Tour, using it to signify foolishness, as in “The Fool on the Hill”, they risked severing rock’s association with flutes altogether. But the little flute could not be crushed; it has remained an element, if not a dominating one, in rock ever since.

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