The Beach Boys

[darkseid26]

I didn't see a thread.


I always thought the question should've been "Are you a Beach Boys person or a Beatles person?" instead of The Beatles and The Stones.

Any other fans on The Hype?

They just officially release The Smile Sessions. Which has already become my favorite album of the year,

Anyone heard it?

 

[Kurosawa]

I have the box set. it's great, and it's also fascinating. I love hearing Brian and the BB working in the studio.

I grew up a Beatles person, but over the last few years I have really gotten heavy into Brian Wilson/Beach Boys music.

Had things worked out and had SMiLE came out in 67, the history of rock would have been much different. For one, the Beatles would have continued to have an American counterpart. Even the 2011 mix with a few tunes unfinished is just as good as Pepper's.

I think that the fact that the BB music that seems so happy was actually created by a man who was so troubled is ironic. Of course, there are lots of songs that reflect Brian's inner issues, ranging from "In My Room" to "I'm Bugged at My 'Ol Man" where he seems to make light of Murry's horrible abuse.

Also looking forward to the biopic of Denny with Aaron Eckhart. Hope that gets made.

 

[Thebumwhowalks]

I only noticed there was another Smile release this morning, it was featured in a Christmas gifts feature, 5 discs for 12 quid?! Holy crap, about 15 yrs ago they did a BB box set(with a bunch of the official albums), that had 30min of Smile as a bonus disc, and that was in the region of 60-70 quid, I tried tracking that down, but couldn't find it.(edit: ok, i think the newspaper might've made a mistake there, as there is a 2 disc version as well, so i guess that is 12quid)

I ended up listening to those tracks on youtube quite recently, but I had heard most of the stuff already on bootlegs and a radio doc that played original tracks.

and of course, you had the original tracks that were spread out on other albums, cabinessence, surf's up, heroes and villans, good vibrations...
but man, it blew my mind when i heard the original Smile versions of Wind chimes and Wonderful on that radio doc, I mean, he put those re-recorded versions on 'Smiley smile' that sounded like demo versions by comparison.

Also, you probably already know this, but there is that live performance by Brian of 'Surf's Up, when a doc crew visited him in '66, during the making of Smile.
He said the version that was put out on the Surf's Up album was a 'piece of sh**', but, y'know, maybe in comparison to what he envisioned for the album back in 66, but I'd rather hear a vintage version than the Smile album that was made in the 90s with that backing band, with the vocals not as good.
I never bought that 90s album as i heard them doing it live on a tv doc, and much preffered the sound of the original recordings, even the ones that were tampered with.


I have had a few of the albums over the years, all from pet-sounds onwards, when Brian was still contributing good stuff, Pet sounds, Smiley Smile, Wild Honey, Friends, 20/20, Surf's Up, Sunflower...SU is a very underated album, Brian only has 3 songs on there, the rest of them very good compositions by the rest of the group. I need to re-buy 2 of those albums, as i lost em, was listening to em on yt the other day though.

I got into them back when i was just out of school, i sat in the library and read that Brian Wilson 'autobiography' 'Wouldn't it be Nice', which is a hoot, but he claimed years later not have written a word of it, i think it might have been ghost written by his shrink who was mind-controlling him for a few years, for his own personal gain, Eugene Landy. He was trying to get a music career out of him or something.
It is a really great read though, no matter who wrote it.
(edit: I guess it was ghostwritten by another writer, but his shrink had a lot of input into what went in there, as it paints him in a very flattering light of course, which is at odds to the info that came out on him later)

There was a very good doc made by the BBC on the making of Pet Sounds about 10yrs ago, worth tracking down. The BBC one on Smile focused mainly on the new version he did with that backing band he played gigs with though.

 

[Thebumwhowalks]

I always thought the question should've been "Are you a Beach Boys person or a Beatles person?" instead of The Beatles and The Stones.

eh, i was thinking about this, and I can see what you mean in terms of Brian Wilson and Beatles/George Martin both using the studio as an instrument unto itself, but in terms of their body of work, the Beach boys never really hit a stride with consistently great albums like the Beatles and the Stones, so it's a little more difficult to compare them career wise. Pet Sounds is the only BB album to feature on the usual rota of 'all time best albums' charts, whereas the Beatles and stones usually have most, if not all of the below albums featured in such lists.

The Stones hit their unbroken truly great album stride with Beggars Banquet, Sticky fingers, Let it Bleed and Exile on Main street.
The Beatles had Revolver, Sgt Pepper, the White Album and Abbey Road(and if you want to include the pseudo album of the Magical mystery tour ep that was packaged with the singles, which i think is a better collection of songs than Sgt Pepper. I don't think Let it Be is as good as those other albums).

The post-PS BB albums are good, but song by song, each album is very inconsistent in quality, Surf's Up being the closest they had to an album with a consistent high quality of songs imo(apart from the awful riot in cell block no9 cover with the re-done student demonstration lyrics).
the pre-PS albums are generally held in the same regard, lots of great songs on some of them, but padded out with filler material. I'm pretty sure it was hearing Revolver that prompted BW to make an album with no filler, which of course became PS.

 

[Kurosawa]

The failure of SMiLE! to be finished is what finished the BB. With his confidence shaken, Brian's mental issues just got worse and worse. Part of what has made SMiLE! so legendary is because of what it could have been. But the Beach Boys albums leading up to Pet Sounds are badly underrated. The Beach Boys Today! is excellent, especially side 2, and most of Summer Days (And Summer Nights!) is great as well. But music media turned on the Boys quickly, considering them squares and the LA vs San Fransisco music feud didn't help them either, although that never hurt the Doors. But when you have people like Hendrix dismissing you as a "Psychedelic Barbershop Quartet", it's hard to recover.

At his best, Brian is every bit as good as Paul McCartney. But Paul was in a band where he had John Lennon as a equal partner, a band that was so stacked that George Harrison was the #3 option. That's just crazy.

Brian was having to be Paul, John and George Martin. And the crazy thing is, he pulled it off for quite a while.

 

[LuiECuomo]

The Beach Boys Today!/Summer Days & Summer Nights
Pet Sounds
SMiLE
Wild Honey
Friends
Sunflower
Surf's Up
Carl & The Passions - So Tough
Holland
15 Big Ones
Brian Wilson (1988)
Brian Wilson Presents 'SMiLE'
That Lucky Old Sun

These are all essentials. Brian's Gershwin and Disney albums are also excellent.

 

[Thebumwhowalks]

The failure of SMiLE! to be finished is what finished the BB. With his confidence shaken, Brian's mental issues just got worse and worse. Part of what has made SMiLE! so legendary is because of what it could have been. But the Beach Boys albums leading up to Pet Sounds are badly underrated. The Beach Boys Today! is excellent, especially side 2, and most of Summer Days (And Summer Nights!) is great as well. But music media turned on the Boys quickly, considering them squares and the LA vs San Fransisco music feud didn't help them either, although that never hurt the Doors. But when you have people like Hendrix dismissing you as a "Psychedelic Barbershop Quartet", it's hard to recover.

At his best, Brian is every bit as good as Paul McCartney. But Paul was in a band where he had John Lennon as a equal partner, a band that was so stacked that George Harrison was the #3 option. That's just crazy.

Brian was having to be Paul, John and George Martin. And the crazy thing is, he pulled it off for quite a while.

Aye, I know, but what happened was that after Brian had his breakdown, the rest of the BB came on in leaps and bounds with their songwriting. The studio production may not have been as equisite, but there were plenty of songs on those albums that were as good as the early BB stuff, ie stuff not written by Brian, as I was saying, Surf's Up is mostly composed of non-Brian material, and is one of their best albums imo.

Also, the BB were supposed to be one of the headliners at the Monteray Pop festival, but pulled out at the last minute, and we all know what went down there, that festival basically shaped what was to come over the next few years in terms of bringing in the psychedelic era.
and ironically, what Wilson was doing at the time was pretty frickin far out and would have fit right into that era, if he had been able to keep it together and get Smile out.
But even then, we don't know if the BB would truly have been accepted into that era, Pet Sounds was considered a flop at the time of it's release, it only scraped into no10 in the album charts iirc.
The problem was that music fans who would have been into the artistry of PS were put off by the BB's popular image, even their name itself, and the teenyboppers were not interested in listening to an indepth album that was channelling the inner workings of a man's heart and soul.
But, aye, after the critics got tuned into PS, there was a lot of critical hype for Smile, and they were on Brian's side, so maybe the BB would have survived that era if the album had turned out as good as we imagined it would have, but it also might've stalled like PS, due to the general public's perception of the BB.

 

[Motown Marvel]

im far more of a beatles dude, but the beach boys are great. dennis was a killer drummer.

 

[Thebumwhowalks]

dennis was a killer drummer.

man, the way you expressed that opinion reminded me of his association with the Manson family, and the fact that the BB actually did a Charlie Manson song as a B-Side(y'know, before the Sharon Tate murders of course).
They changed the lyrics though, which did not go down well with Charlie, can't recall the lyrical content, but the song title was originally 'Cease to exist', and the BB changed it to 'Cease to Resist'.
Apparently Manson showed up at Dennis' home one evening looking for him to dig him up about that('I don't mind them changing the music, but not the lyrics... the lyrics were sacred man!', actual quote from Manson), but luckily he was not home, I think he may even have showed a bullet that he said was for Dennis to whoever answered the door to him.

But, aye, Dennis got out of that association just before those murders, and I think he would have been one of the next celebrities to be targeted if they had not been caught. The whole episode with the Sharon Tate murders was all about Charlie wanting to be a pop/rock star as well. The house they were murdered in was previously owned by a guy who produced the Byrds who had kb'd Charlie's demos, and I think Manson thought he still lived there.

anyway, in regards to Dennis, he did write some great BB tunes, one on Sunflower in particular being great, 'It's about time' i think it's called.
His solo album 'Ocean Pacific Blue' is supposed to be very good, a friend did me a copy of that album, but it was a pretty bad copy, lots of tape hiss, so i couldn't really listen to it properly.

 

[Motown Marvel]

well....to be fair, manson's album was shockingly good. ha.

 

[Kurosawa]

Aye, I know, but what happened was that after Brian had his breakdown, the rest of the BB came on in leaps and bounds with their songwriting. The studio production may not have been as equisite, but there were plenty of songs on those albums that were as good as the early BB stuff, ie stuff not written by Brian, as I was saying, Surf's Up is mostly composed of non-Brian material, and is one of their best albums imo.

Yeah, and Sunflower is really great too. I think they got a raw deal from the music press and from music fans in general.

Also, the BB were supposed to be one of the headliners at the Monteray Pop festival, but pulled out at the last minute, and we all know what went down there, that festival basically shaped what was to come over the next few years in terms of bringing in the psychedelic era.
and ironically, what Wilson was doing at the time was pretty frickin far out and would have fit right into that era, if he had been able to keep it together and get Smile out.
But even then, we don't know if the BB would truly have been accepted into that era, Pet Sounds was considered a flop at the time of it's release, it only scraped into no10 in the album charts iirc.
The problem was that music fans who would have been into the artistry of PS were put off by the BB's popular image, even their name itself, and the teenyboppers were not interested in listening to an indepth album that was channelling the inner workings of a man's heart and soul.
But, aye, after the critics got tuned into PS, there was a lot of critical hype for Smile, and they were on Brian's side, so maybe the BB would have survived that era if the album had turned out as good as we imagined it would have, but it also might've stalled like PS, due to the general public's perception of the BB.

Absolutely. A performance at Monterry of a similar quality to the Hawaii shows in '67 would have helped an incredible amount.

well....to be fair, manson's album was shockingly good. ha.

Legend has it, Manson came by Denny's house after the Tate murders looking for him, but the BB were out on tour.