That’s Why God Made The Radio — Full Album First Impressions
Before I start this, a brief note — my opinions on Beach Boys records often change *drastically* in the year or so after I first hear them. This is not my definitive word on this album, and I’ll revisit this when I write volume three of my Beach Boys book. This is just what I think now.
Next week, the Beach Boys release That’s Why God Made The Radio, their first album in twenty years (other than 1996′s Stars And Stripes Vol 1, a collection of remakes of their old hits with country singers on lead vocals). The signs for the new album have been very mixed — the ‘reunited’ band is a line-up that has never actually played together before, and is a sort of Frankenstein concoction of surviving members from different line-ups, consisting of Brian Wilson (who led the band throughout their most commercially and critically successful period, but has had little involvement with the band since the early 80s and none since 1996), Mike Love (the nasal-voiced lead singer, lyricist on many of the hits and only continuous member for the band’s whole fifty year career), Al Jardine (who was on the band’s first single in 1961, quit, rejoined in 1963 and remained until 1998), Bruce Johnston (who joined in 1965, quit in 1971, and rejoined and remained in the band from 1979), and David Marks (who was in the band from 1961-63, rejoined from 1997-99, and briefly rejoined again in 2008). Jeff Foskett (a falsetto vocalist with the Beach Boys in the 80s and with Brian Wilson’s touring band from 1998 on) is a de facto sixth member, covering the high vocal parts that were covered in the past by either Brian Wilson (who’s lost a lot of his voice) or his brother Carl (who died in 1998).
The problem with this line-up, of course, is that other than Brian Wilson the two most talented members of the band were Brian’s brothers, Dennis and Carl Wilson, both of whom are now dead. This means that what we have here is the combination of a visionary genius with three collaborators he knows well but who are musically very conservative, along with Marks who is a genuinely great guitar player but has no real track record as a singer or songwriter.
Luckily, then, this album was made the way that the best Beach Boys albums always were — Brian Wilson and his chosen collaborator wrote the songs, with Mike Love adding extra lyrics to three, and produced the tracks without the involvement of any of the band, and the band then sang parts that Brian told them to, with little or no creative input. Thankfully, the reports of new songs by Jardine, Johnston and Marks being added to the album proved false. Jardine and Johnston have both written the occasional decent song, but both are at best occasionally semi-inspired journeymen. Mike Love gets to add a few lyrics, but in general is also kept on the sidelines.
The instrumental tracks were cut first, then Wilson would sing the vocal arrangements to Foskett, who would record every vocal line, and then Wilson, Love, Jardine and Johnston would drop in replacements, line by line, for their parts. Essentially, this is a Brian Wilson solo album by any other name, with the Beach Boys acting as his hired vocalists in a way they haven’t since at least Pet Sounds.
Unfortunately, though, Wilson’s chosen collaborator for the album was Joe Thomas. Joe Thomas had previously produced the last Beach Boys album (the country music collaboration) and had also produced Brian’s 1998 solo album Imagination. While he was chosen largely because everyone involved knew and liked him, he is not the most artistically sympathetic of collaborators. The best way to describe him is to list the other collaborators he brought in to work with Wilson and himself on the songwriting — Jim Peterik, who wrote Eye Of The Tiger for Survivor, Larry Millas, who played in a band with Peterik in the 60s, and Jon Bon Jovi.
Exactly.
The result is a curate’s egg. It’s definitely the best Beach Boys album since at least 1979, but that’s the very definition of ‘damning with faint praise’. The garage band I was in when I was sixteen with a bass player who couldn’t play bass at all sounded better than most of what the Beach Boys have released in my lifetime. Vocally, this is superb — modern recording technology allows Brian Wilson to create vocal arrangements he couldn’t have done in his prime, with many, perhaps most, of the ‘solo’ vocal lines actually being unison vocals by two or three band members but with one more prominent — but which one is more prominent can change on a syllable-by-syllable basis, creating a perfect “Beach Boy” lead vocalist with elements of several of the band. And the instrumental arrangements, by Wilson and his longtime collaborator Paul Von Mertens, are often as good as anything the band have done.
But sonically, this is stuck in mid-90s AOR, but with the occasional intrusion of processing horrors, like autotune-as-effect, that will date this album as badly to precisely this moment as a Phil Collins drum sound would date it to 1983. Lyrically, the songs are inept, ranging from banal at best to unbelievably bad at worst. And the compositions vary in quality, but never rise to the heights of Wilson’s recent best work.
The songs apparently date from two different bursts of composition — one from 1998, during the writing of Wilson’s mediocre solo album Imagination, and one from 2010 and 2011 — and the later material is in general (with one or two exceptions either way) far superior, suggesting they may have been better just scrapping the old material and starting fresh. Capitol apparently signed the band to a three-album deal, so if albums two and three are fresh material, they may be significantly better.
Beach Boys fans will buy this and cherish it for what it is — a half-decent record by a band that haven’t even managed a half-decent record since the Carter administration — but there’s absolutely no need for anyone who doesn’t know and love everything the band’s previously done to buy this.
Track by track:
Think About The Days, the opener, is based on a piano instrumental by Thomas, with Brian adding the wordless vocal melodies. Jardine takes lead (I’m told by Someone Who Should Know that Someone Else Who Should Know says it’s Brian Wilson, but if it is then there’s a new ProTools plugin, the Jardineifier, which makes people’s voices sound exactly like Al Jardine) and Johnston is prominent in the harmonies. Had I listened to this without the songwriting credits I would have *sworn* this was written by Johnston on one of his better days. Nice french horn at the end by Probyn Gregory, but this is a little too Enya for my liking.
That’s Why God Made The Radio This is remixed from the single version — much less compressed, with a better vocal balance and what sounds like an extra keyboard line, though I’ve not A-B’d the two versions. It sounds *much* better, but it’s still fundamentally unoriginal, being pieced together from bits of the old Beach Boys songs Your Summer Dream and Keep An Eye On Summer and the John Barry themes You Only Live Twice and Midnight Cowboy, along with a rather jarring 80s AOR bridge (which I am informed sounds more like Journey than Survivor). This one was written by Wilson, Thomas, Peterik and Millas, and is mostly sung by Wilson and Foskett in unison, with Foskett taking several of the more prominent vocal lines and Johnston and Jardine taking the occasional line. It’s grown on me, and is actually quite pleasant now, but is nowhere near the masterpiece people were claiming prior to its release.
The genesis of the song also seems rather convoluted. It was written in 1998, and Millas has claimed it was written by him, Thomas and Peterik. Wilson, when asked in an interview who wrote it, said “Joe Thomas”, while Thomas, in this very interesting interview, said the title and chord sequence came from Wilson.
Isn’t It Time This is the best thing on the album by miles, and the second single. I could believe that this dated from Wilson’s collaborations with Andy Paley, but in fact it was written last year by Wilson, Thomas, Peterik, Millas and Love. The arrangement is almost like something from the Smiley Smile era — just a ukulele played by Peterik, two basses and some percussion, with everything else done vocally. Lyrically it’s drivel, but it’s a fun pop song, so lyrical drivel is acceptable. Wilson, Love and Jardine take the lead vocals, though as with all the songs on this album it’s hard to claim there’s a specific ‘lead vocalist’ in any traditional sense.
Spring Vacation, on the other hand, is horrible. This dates from 1998, and was originally a ‘gospel’ song called Lay Down Burden, written for Carl Wilson to sing. When Carl Wilson died, Brian Wilson and Thomas reused that title for a song on Imagination, and so this has new lyrics by Mike Love.
Joe Thomas has talked about being amazed at how quickly Love wrote the lyrics, and people have laughed at this because the lyrics are doggerel — “Spring vacation/Good vibrations/Summer weather/We’re back together”, but truthfully the lyrics fit the terrible music just fine. This song sounds like it was written for the title sequence of a bad mid-90s US sitcom, and conjures up images of Greg Evigan and Joey Lawrence hanging out with their wacky neighbour in an unfeasibly large apartment, with a credit at the end saying “Executive producer Linwood Boomer”. Just pitifully poor.
The Private Life Of Bill And Sue is another one from the new writing sessions, and is much better. This is a vaguely tropical song (sounding exactly like a Boney M record, I can’t remember which one, apart from the first few bars which sound just like a song by Carolyn Edwards, a friend of Brian’s band) about a couple of reality TV stars who fake their own disappearance to boost their ratings, starting with the perfectly Brian couplet “The private life of Bill and Sue/Can you dig what I’m telling you?”. Joe Thomas apparently wrote the chorus, a Mike Love style listing of place names (“California to Mexico/Everybody’s just gotta know/Dallas Texas to Monterey/Wasting time on a summer day”) which doesn’t really fit the song lyrically but meshes perfectly musically. This is cheese, but it’s prime-quality cheese, a good strong stilton or gorgonzola.
Wilson and Foskett sing lead.
Shelter is another new Wilson/Thomas song, with Wilson singing lead on the verses and Foskett and a heavily-processed Love on the chorus. This has a very retro-fifties feel, with a lovely chorus, and a verse which is just a straight lift from Save The Last Dance For Me, but the bridge, while pleasant, doesn’t really connect all that well with either verse or chorus — you can see the joins on this one. It’s the most obviously Beach Boys sounding song on the album, and one of the better ones, but it sounds like it needed some more songwriting work.
Daybreak Over The Ocean is the only non-Brian-Wilson song on the album. This is one that Mike Love wrote in the late 70s, and this recording is the one that Love made for his unreleased 2005 solo album Mike Love Not War, with a thin layer of Beach Boys backing vocals added to the pre-recorded track, featuring poor falsetto vocals by Adrian Baker (who was the falsetto singer in Mike Love’s touring Beach Boys band at the time) and some rather nice vocals by Love’s son Christian, who sounds spookily like the late Carl Wilson (his father’s cousin). The song itself is drivel, though, and it has an even worse drum sound than the rest of the album.
Beaches In Mind, by Wilson, Thomas and Love, is shit. “We’ll find a place in the sun, where everyone can have fun fun fun”, apparently. Love sings lead (like you couldn’t have guessed), and this is essentially where he disappears from the album to all intents and purposes, having no particularly prominent vocal lines for the rest of the record.
Strange World, by Wilson and Thomas is one of the more interesting songs, and I’m not yet sure if I like it. It’s a weird combination of different types of bombast — bits of Beethoven in the string arrangement, Phil Spector dynamics and a general 80s AOR feel — with lyrics that sound very like Brian and reference the It’s A Small World song from Disneyland. It’s either awful or a masterpiece, and I’m honestly not sure which. Wilson sings lead, and takes about three separate vocal parts — the other Beach Boys are barely there. This one was started in 1998 and finished last year.
From There To Back Again is another new song by Wilson and Thomas, and is one of the most interesting things on the record. Al Jardine sings a great lead (though sometimes it’s a little robotified by the autotune effects), but the song sounds more like Paul Williams than like Brian Wilson. That’s not necessarily a bad thing — Paul Williams is a great songwriter — but it’s odd. This is very much in that early-70s soft-pop feel, with a lovely orchestration by Mertens, but it’ll take a few more listens to decide if the song (which has multiple different sections) is great or all flash and no substance.
Pacific Coast Highway by Wilson and Thomas is essentially just a link track between the two songs either side of it, which make up part of a suite Wilson’s been working on. “My life, I’m better off alone/My life, I’m better on my own”, he sings.
Summer’s Gone by Wilson, Thomas and Bon Jovi, was originally a single verse by Wilson written in 1998, intended as ‘the last song on the last Beach Boys album’, and was apparently expanded by Bon Jovi to its near-five-minute length. To be honest, it probably would have worked much better as a single verse, as its nursery-rhyme simplicity and the plodding backing track pall halfway through. Literally everyone else I’ve seen talking about this song describes it as the best thing Brian’s done since Surf’s Up in 1967, but on the first couple of listens it doesn’t have a thousandth of the imagination and interest of that song, though it’s still in the better half of the songs on this album. Maybe it’ll grow on me — Midnight’s Another Day, the highlight of Wilson’s last album of original material, took a few months before I realised how good it was, even though everyone else was raving about it straight away.
If you like the Beach Boys’ material from the 1980s and early 90s, this is the same sort of thing but done much better, but the pre-release quotes from Jardine and Johnston saying this sounded ‘like Pet Sounds‘ or ‘like Sunflower‘ are sadly off. If it turns out to be the band’s last album — which given that they’re all in their late sixties or early seventies seems sadly likely — it’s a much better way to go out than Summer In Paradise was, but if they release any more albums it’ll quickly be thought of as ‘one of those later, less good, Beach Boys albums’ and only listened to by the hardest of the hard-core fans.
Why I’m Excited About The Beach Boys Tour
I’m not at all excited about the new Beach Boys album. People who’ve heard it have been saying good things about it — it’s the best since LA (Light Album), or the best since Holland apart from Love You — but frankly if you put out half an hour of me busking old Monkees songs on the banjo and having to keep stopping because I can’t remember the chords, that’d still be better than any Beach Boys album after 1979 (as opposed to Brian Wilson solo albums, which have occasionally hit greatness). And the snippets that we’ve heard (the single That’s Why God Made The Radio and a few seconds of Spring Vacation) have been, respectively, dull and whatthehellaretheythinkingmygodmakeitstop. I’ll get the album, and listen to it with an open mind, but I’m not excited.
The reunion tour, on the other hand…
THAT they seem to be doing right. Two thirds of the set is pretty much what you’d expect, all the hits, many of which I love (Good Vibrations, Don’t Worry Baby, many more), but almost as many of which I could quite happily never hear again (Barbara Ann, Kokomo, Be True To Your School).
But fully a third of the 45-song (and growing — it started as 42) setlist is the more artistic stuff, and as a proportion that’s growing daily. Which means that there is a good hour of the show dedicated to stuff like this:
THAT’S worth travelling to Italy for. Even if they do play bloody Barbara Ann.
That’s Why God Made The Radio…
EDIT 23/04 video replaced with official copy
The video above leaked a while ago — a promo for the Beach Boys’ new single (the first in twenty years), with the band being interviewed over the track.
Thoughts:
It’s *deeply* unimpressive, at least at first listen. Not terrible, but there’s no ‘there’ there. And hugely derivative — it’s Keep An Eye On Your Summer Dream, Midnight Cowboy, Because You Only Live Twice. If this is the song everyone’s been raving about, then the rest of the album is going to be pretty poor.
That’s Jeff Foskett doubling Brian on the verses. It’s done subtly, but it still sounds odd to me, like a Frankenbrian. It works — it’s what they did on a couple of tracks on Smile, too — but it confuses my ears as they try to decode which of them is singing. Doubt that’ll be a problem for the average listener, though.
Harmonies are nice, but there’s a *LOT* of Foskett in there and very little of anyone else. This could have been put out as a Brian Wilson solo track and from the evidence we’ve got here no-one would know any different (actually I *strongly* suspect there’s a middle eight that’s been cut out for this video, I’d guess with a Mike Love lead). In fact, from this I can’t pick out a single Beach Boy on vocals other than Brian, just a Wall O’ Fosketts. But I quite like Jeff Foskett’s voice, unlike many…
The production sounds like Brian rather than Joe Thomas, which can only be a good thing. No acoustic guitars with pickups, no horrible snare sound and ‘sonic power’. It’s the best *sounding* thing released under the Beach Boys’ name since at least 1979.
So, the glass is half-full. I just won’t know what it’s half-full *of* until the single’s actually out, some time in the next few days…
A Beginners’ Guide To The Beach Boys
The Beach Boys are a hard band to get into. When Mike Taylor asked a while back in the comments to one of my posts which Beach Boys albums someone should try, I actually drew a blank. This is because the Beach Boys rarely made consistently good albums. They started their career when singles, not albums, were the important thing, made one big Album As Statement (Pet Sounds), and fell apart before what would have been their second (Smile).
The band’s work after that, from 1967-74, contains some of the best music ever recorded, but also some of the worst, because they were operating as a democracy. Brian Wilson, the songwriting and production genius responsible for their best music, became less and less interested, and the rest of the band tried to pick up the slack. Unfortunately, while Brian’s brother Dennis turned out to be a great songwriter/producer, and their brother Carl was pretty decent, the other band members really weren’t up to much. (They occasionally hit on something listenable, but more by accident than design).
So this means that for one reason or another, all the Beach Boys’ actual albums are patchy, and you have to do a certain amount of digging in order to find the good stuff.
So where does a beginner start?
First, you’ll probably want the hits. If so, the best of the many, many compilations available is one released in 2003, Sounds Of Summer. Amazon US currently have an offer on to get this with a free T-shirt for $20, incidentally. It’s a 30-track collection, with every track being a top 40 US hit. It contains most of the hits you’ll know (I Get Around, Help Me Rhonda, California Girls and so on), and at least some of these hits are also among the band’s best work – In My Room, Don’t Worry Baby, God Only Knows, Heroes & Villains, Wild Honey and Good Vibrations are great records by any standard.
But after this, you’ll want to get into the band’s artier side. There are various compilations that are meant to introduce this, but all are flawed in one way or another. The best thing to do is dive in at the deep end. The box set Good Vibrations: Thirty Years Of The Beach Boys can be picked up dirt cheap – if you’re OK with MP3s, in fact, you can buy the entire 5-CD, 130-track box set for twenty-one quid from Amazon, which may well be the best deal in the world.
That box set contains all the hits, most of the better album tracks, a half-hour-long selection of the best music from the Smile sessions, most of Pet Sounds, and the handful of decent tracks from the post-1977 albums. It’s not perfect – every Beach Boys fan will have their own list of a dozen or so songs that should be on there – but everyone will agree that what *is* on there is mostly essential, and everyone will differ as to those other dozen songs.
If you don’t want to go for the box set, or if you’ve already got it and still want more, the next step is the compilation Endless Harmony. This is a rarities collection put together as the soundtrack for a documentary on the band, and it says something about the perversity of the band that they would leave some of their best music unreleased.
After this, you want two essential solo albums – Brian Wilson Presents Smile (a reconstruction of a finished Smile album, newly performed by Wilson and his backing band) and Dennis Wilson’s Pacific Ocean Blue (get the two-CD deluxe version of this – it’s well worth it).
After you’ve heard all that, you’ll know whether you want to investigate any further or not. You’ll have an idea of the shape of the band’s career and which albums you should pick up. You’ll know if you want the full Smile Sessions box set, or if Brian Wilson’s version is enough for you. You’ll know if you want to hear more of the R&B-flavoured mid-70s stuff or the whimsical soft-psych late-60s.
One piece of warning, though – the Beach Boys’ albums are available on CD as two-albums-on-one-CD packages. Mostly this is OK, but in the late-70s the bands highs and lows were higher and lower than before. The Beach Boys Love You is one of the greatest albums the band ever did, but it’s paired with the frankly feeble 15 Big Ones. LA (Light Album), the last listenable album the band released, is paired with MIU, an album which is torture to sit through. And don’t buy anything (other than Brian Wilson solo albums) from 1980 on. Those albums (Keepin’ The Summer Alive, The Beach Boys, Still Cruisin’, Summer In Paradise and Stars & Stripes Vol 1) range from soulless competence (The Beach Boys, with its drum machines and Culture Club covers) to soulless incompetence (Summer In Paradise, a good argument that all sound recording and reproduction equipment in the universe should be destroyed, and everyone deafened, just in case they might accidentally hear the song Summer Of Love).
Don’t say I didn’t warn you.
Brief Notes On Last Night’s Beach Boys Reunion Performance
The most notable thing, first of all, is that this sounds like the Brian Wilson band. Each of the various Beach Boys touring bands has their own sound, and even though to the average listener they’d all sound ‘like the record’ there are clear differences. On Good Vibrations, Al’s band (none of whom other than Al and Dave are present) have a 70s rock feel, almost like a jam band. Mike and Bruce’s band, on the other hand, have a garage-psych feel that very much emphasises the strangeness of the track, all thudding bass, clanging guitars and screeching theremin. Brian’s band emphasise the beauty of the song, and play very precisely, and it’s this latter version that we have here.
This was probably going to be the case anyway, because there are seven of Brian’s backing band there to two of Mike and Bruce’s, but it does show that this tour will sound more like a Brian Wilson tour than any of the recent Beach Boys tours.
However, John Cowsill is, as I suspected, a wonderful addition to the band. His rapport here with Nelson Bragg is quite stunning – Cowsill does some lovely cymbal work, and of all the drummer-plus-percussionist combinations Brian has worked with (at various times his drummers have been Todd Sucherman, Jim Hines and Mike D’Amico, with D’Amico, Bragg and Andy Paley on percussion) this is the best. Cowsill gave the band an energy they’ve sometimes lacked.
Brian was obviously down in the mix to the point of being mixed out altogether, with Foskett singing the lead. Sadly, this makes sense. Brian can sound good when he’s comfortable – in front of his own audience, with time to warm up. However, whenever he’s done a big TV performance he’s sounded, frankly, appaling. A Brian in the same state that he was in at the Queen’s Silver Jubilee in 2002 would have made the reunion a target of every bad comedian ever. You can guarantee that he’ll be perfectly audible on the actual tour. He sounded fine in the harmony sections, where he was more audible.
Bruce is completely inaudible in the mix, but Dave Marks works well on the ‘ba ba ba’ sections – he really does add something to the band. But it’s Al’s voice that was most prominent in the harmony blend, unsurprisingly – he’s the only one of them who possibly sounds even better now than he did in the sixties.
So yes, this is tacky and showbiz, but that’s to be expected for the Grammys. Given the context, it’s about as good as we were going to get, and does give us some hope.
Incidentally, this is the first time *ever* that these five Beach Boys have ever performed together – even though they are all proper Beach Boys. David Marks left the band in late 1963, but Bruce Johnston didn’t join until 1965, and while Dave has performed with the band at various points since, especially in the late 90s, he’s never done so with Brian.
We’ve also learned a little more about the upcoming album, and we have another song title – That’s Why God Made The Radio – to go with the one Brian mentioned a while back, The Private Life Of Bill And Sue. This gives me a surprising amount of hope for the new album – those both sound like Brian Wilson song titles, as opposed to what I was fearing, which was a bunch of songs called things like Still Surfin’ In Kokomo, USA. I doubt the album will be a great one, but it sounds at least as if they’re *trying* to do something creative, which will make it better than any Beach Boys album released since 1979.
For those who don’t know, the five Beach Boys on stage are, from left to right as we look at them, Al Jardine (rhythm guitar, vocals), Bruce Johnston (vocals), Brian Wilson (piano, vocals), Mike Love (vocals) and David Marks (lead guitar, vocals).
The backing band for this show is the same one announced for the tour, with the addition (hopefully permanent) of Nelson Bragg:
Jeff Foskett – rhythm guitar, falsetto vocals
Probyn Gregory – guitar, tannerin, vocals (he’ll play a lot more instruments on the tour)
Paul Mertens – woodwinds, harmonica
Brett Simons – bass
Darian Sahanaja – keyboards, vocals
Scott Bennett – keyboards, vocals
Nelson Bragg – percussion, vocals
John Cowsill – drums, vocals
Scott Totten – lead guitar, vocals
That is pretty much exactly the band I would have picked for this tour.
The younger people with microphones pratting about at the front of the stage are apparently members of Foster The People and Maroon Five, who are apparently young person’s skiffle musicians of the day.
For those who don’t know, tour dates will be announced on Wednesday.
Beach Boys Reunion line-up
For those who, like me, are interested but haven’t seen it yet, there’s a list of who’ll be playing on the Beach Boys’ reunion tour at the Beach Boys Band website. Incidentally, the rumour at the moment is that the tour dates will be announced the day after the Grammys, about two weeks from now. The site announces the band as:
THE BEACH BOYS
featuring Original Members:
Mike Love, Brian Wilson, Al Jardine, Dave Marks & Bruce Johnston
with
* John Cowsill, Jeffrey Foskett, Scott Totten, Darian Sahanaja, Paul Von Mertens, Scott Bennett, Probyn Gregory
All dates are subject to change without notice. Most shows go on sale 90 days before concert.
*Backing band subject to changes.
For those who don’t know who these people are, as some of the people reading this won’t:
Mike Love – nasal-voiced frontman, wrote the lyrics for some of the biggest hits, has been the only consistent member of the band.
Brian Wilson – used to sing the falsetto parts but doesn’t any more. Wrote, arranged and produced nearly everything the band did that was any good. One of the two or three greatest living songwriters.
Al Jardine – rhythm guitarist, and strongest vocalist of the living members. Sang lead on Help Me, Rhonda, Cottonfields, Then I Kissed Her and Lady Lynda
David Marks – guitarist, played on the band’s first four albums before leaving in late 1963. Rejoined briefly in 1997-99 and toured with the band in 2008.
Bruce Johnston – joined the band in 1965, and is the only Beach Boy other than Mike Love to be in the currently-touring ‘Beach Boys’ band. Most audible on backing vocals on California Girls and God Only Knows. Also wrote I Write The Songs, for Barry Manilow.
John Cowsill – wonderful drummer and very good singer. Currently tours with the Mike/Bruce Beach Boys, but used to play with his family band The Cowsills, famous for hits like The Rain, The Park And Other Things. The best drummer ever to play with any version of the band, and a genuinely lovely bloke too.
Jeffrey Foskett – onstage band-leader, falsetto vocalist and rhythm guitarist with Brian Wilson’s band. Great singer, but also something of a security blanket for Brian Wilson.
Scott Totten – lead guitarist, musical director and one of two falsetto vocalists for the Mike/Bruce Beach Boys. Very talented man who has improved the touring Beach Boys a great deal since he became musical director.
Darian Sahanaja – Musical director of Brian Wilson’s band and keyboardist. Will probably be in charge of rehearsing the band and ensuring they sound as close to the record as possible. Also a hugely talented songwriter in his own right, with his band the Wondermints.
Paul Von Mertens – Woodwind player with Brian Wilson’s band, also provides all the string and horn arrangements for Wilson’s recent records and live shows. If there are any additional strings on stage he’ll conduct them.
Scott Bennett – keyboardist and vocalist with Brian Wilson’s band. Also co-wrote much of Wilson’s most recent album of original material with him.
Probyn Gregory – insanely talented multi-instrumentalist. Can play guitar, but given the number of guitarists on stage will probably mostly play trumpet and French horn, with maybe a bit of banjo, keyboards, tannerin or glockenspiel thrown in. Member of the Wondermints with Sahanaja.
This is pretty much exactly the band I’d have chosen. I’d maybe have chosen Matt Jardine in place of Foskett, and I’d add Nelson Bragg or Mike D’Amico on percussion and Nick Walusko on guitar, but this is a band that knows and respects the music and can play it well. It’s also a band that wouldn’t have been put together just to go through the hits – though they can play those.
This will be good.
BEACH BOYS REUNION!
New album “under Brian Wilson’s musical direction”!
50-date international tour!
Line-up – Mike, Brian, Al, Bruce, David
From the video (which I’ve only seen once and which rightly focuses on the band members), it looks like the other people at the session for the recording of Do It Again were Jeff Foskett, Scott Totten, Nick Walusko and John Cowsill. I’m assuming we’ll also see Christian Love and Matt Jardine on stage with that lineup. Add Darian and Probyn and that’s my perfect Beach Boys backing band.
For those who worry that this might be a step back for Brian artistically, for the last few years Mike’s band have actually been doing more rarities and interesting things live than Brian’s. And I’d be very surprised if, in keeping with the ‘fifty’ theme, they didn’t do fifty songs. So we’ll almost certainly hear most of Pet Sounds, a few Smile tracks, Til I Die and so on in the mix.
Video:
The Beach Boys On CD: Sunflower
The band’s first album for Warner Brothers, and first of the 1970s, was the first – and in some ways the only – truly collaborative Beach Boys album. Originally put together as a contractual obligation album for Capitol under the working titles Reverberation and The Fading Rock Group Revival, before being submitted to Warners under the title Add Some Music, the album as released features near-equal contributions from all six band members – the only time when one member wouldn’t dominate either in number or quality of songs.
This was in fact something of a creative flowering for the band, who recorded the best part of another album’s worth of material during this time, much of which was released on later albums. But while the finished album is regarded as one of the band’s best – Johnston among others saying that while Pet Sounds was Brian Wilson’s masterpiece Sunflower was the Beach Boys’, to my mind there’s something a little insubstantial about the finished product, and listening to the whole album is a little like trying to eat one’s bodyweight in marshmallows. But for all that, it’s an album that sounds like an album, rather than a disconnected set of semi-solo tracks like 20/20.
Partly this is because, unlike the previous album, this is more the work of a band. By this point the Beach Boys were augmenting themselves live with several extra musicians, including the Dragon brothers (Daryl (keyboards), Dennis (drums) and Doug (keyboards)) plus guitarist/bassist Ed Carter. These musicians played on much of what became Sunflower, although the Beach Boys themselves didn’t play all that much and some session musicians play on some tracks, and it gives the whole affair a more coherent feel.
One point I should make about this and further albums – it is far easier to discuss the Beach Boys’ 60s work in terms of artistic progression, influences and so on than it is with their later work. Where the 60s work was the overall responsibility of one man, the 70s material is the work of up to eight different people, pulling in different directions. Sometimes it rises to a level of genius that is greater than the sum of its parts, but equally often it collapses into a lowest common denominator mush.
But for the early part of the 70s, at least, this worked surprisingly well, with Dennis (as a songwriter) and Carl (as producer and increasingly lead vocalist) achieving occasional peaks as high as their brother’s, while the rest of the band turned in competent work.
From this point on, the Beach Boys start becoming relevant again.
line-up
Brian Wilson, Carl Wilson, Dennis Wilson, Al Jardine, Mike Love, Bruce Johnston
Slip On Through
Songwriter: Dennis Wilson
Lead vocalist: Dennis Wilson
A Dennis Wilson solo composition, this is the first real sign for several years that the Beach Boys were aware of the wider zeitgeist. Rather than the nostalgia that was everywhere in 20/20, this sounds absolutely of its time. A funky rocker based around an incredibly simple set of chord changes, with just four chords in the whole thing, this has a huge drive and energy to it. Propelled by several layers of percussion (notably a bongo part low down in the mix) and Dennis’ strongest ever vocal, one can hear the influence of Tim Hardin in this, as in many of Dennis’ songs from this period, but there’s a lusty swagger to this that’s totally Dennis.
This was released as a single but didn’t chart.
This Whole World
Songwriter: Brian Wilson
Lead vocalist: Carl Wilson
At 1:58, the B-side to Slip On Through is one of the band’s shorter songs, but this Brian Wilson solo composition packs more harmonic movement in than many bands get through in their entire careers.
Starting in C, the first four bars are fairly straightforward changes, before we suddenly get a return of the old Pet Sounds staple – a key-change down a minor third. On the second line (“lots of different people everywhere”) we get standard doo-wop I-vi-ii-V7 changes before a move to iii (C#m). This changes to C# and suddenly we’ve changed key up a major third, ending up a semitone above where we’ve started.
We then get a scalar descending bassline (the first of several of these to appear on the album), while the chords move upwards in a I-IV-V movement in the new new key of C#, so the bass and chord changes meet on the V7. The rise continues in both the chord changes and the bass for a moment, taking us to vi, then the bass starts a descent again and the two meet again on the V7 at the end of the verse. Note that all of this has happened in a single 32-second verse.
For the contrasting eight bar section, we have another Pet Sounds change down a minor third (for those who’ve lost track, this now puts us in B-flat, a semitone down from where we started). These eight bars stay relatively harmonically stable, staying in the same key for a whole sixteen seconds before rising back into C and throwing us into the whirlwind that is the verse again. We get another verse, a wordless alternate section, and then fade on an a capella verse.
The remarkable thing about this is that every individual change makes sense on its own terms – the song goes through four different keys in half a minute, and yet it doesn’t sound disorienting at all. In fact it sounds almost childishly simple, in part because of the lyrics, which rarely rise above the monosyllabic. Carl turns in one of his best performances, the rest of the band chant “oom-bop-didit” and the whole thing is a perfect pop record.
Certainly Brian appears to have been pleased with it, having returned to the song on a number of occasions – he produced a cover version by American Spring (his wife and sister-in-law) that included yet another section (a round based on the old “star light, star bright, first star I see tonight” rhyme) and recorded versions of the song on his solo albums I Just Wasn’t Made For These Times and Live At The Roxy.
Add Some Music To Your Day
Songwriters: Brian Wilson, Mike Love and Joe Knott
Lead vocalists: Mike Love, Bruce Johnston, Al Jardine, Brian Wilson and Carl Wilson
This is one of several songs on this album where my opinion is in sharp contrast with that of the mainstream of Beach Boys fandom. Most people consider this a highlight of the album, but I consider it an abject failure. Harmonically there’s nothing of interest here, there’s no air in the vocal arrangement, with everyone in more or less the same range (and too much thickening with multitracking), Carl sounds bored on his lines, and either Brian or Al is off-key at several points.
Lyrically, the song is not only banal in itself, it’s actually a celebration of the banal, praising music heard while ‘in a dentist’s chair’ or ‘faintly in the distance when you’re on the phone’.
Add Some Muzak would be a better title. This was released as a single with Jardine’s equally poor Susie Cincinnati on the B-side, and reached number 64 in the US.
Got To Know The Woman
Songwriter: Dennis Wilson
Lead vocalist: Dennis Wilson
This is a ridiculously over-the-top, idiotically simple groove-based rocker. The lyrics sound almost improvised, and the whole thing works only because of Dennis Wilson’s huge personal charm on the vocals (and Mike Love’s wonderfully ridiculous bass vocal part, very similar to the one we’ll later hear in Cool, Cool Water). However, while this aims low, it manages to comfortably hit its target. The one criticism I’d make of the track is that the overly-thickened layers of backing vocals buried in the mix (something that happens on almost every song on the album) really don’t suit it.
Deirdre
Songwriters: Bruce Johnston and Brian Wilson
Lead vocalist: Bruce Johnston
At best, this can be described as inoffensive. Johnston would later go on to write I Write The Songs, and while this is not as bad as that, it’s definitely heading toward muzak territory, with its bland lyrics and fluttering flute part. In the context of the album, it’s not too dreadful, but there’s no real reason for this to exist. The song bears a slight resemblance to the then-unreleased We’re Together Again, but is smothered under layers of orchestration and backing vocals.
While Brian Wilson is credited as a co-writer of the track, this was apparently to give the impression that he made a greater contribution to the album than he had. According to Johnston, most of Wilson’s input was to suggest lyrics like “my friend Bob/he had a job” which never made the finished song. [FOOTNOTE: This seems entirely plausible, as that line sounds very like the lyrics to Wilson's contemporaneous song Good Time, later released on The Beach Boys Love You].
It could have been much worse, though. Johnston recorded a disco version of this for his solo album Goin’ Public in 1977. It’s very, very, very bad.
It’s About Time
Songwriters: Dennis Wilson, Carl Wilson, Bob Buchman and Al Jardine
Lead vocalist: Carl Wilson
Now this is more like it!
There’s basically no song here – it’s just an excuse for a riff by Dennis Wilson, and the lyrics are the worst kind of hippy nonsense (“And now I’m just a child who art erect in humility/Serving out of love for everyone I meet in truth who are really me”). But this is the funkiest the Beach Boys ever got, and easily the most exciting record they ever made. Earl Palmer’s drum and percussion part, in particular, is so outstandingly good that it’s been widely bootlegged on its own and makes a wonderful track even without the guitars, organ and vocals.
This is an astonishingly exciting, enjoyable track, and while there’s not much to say about it it’s clearly a highlight of the album. It was released as the B-side of Tears In The Morning, but didn’t chart.
Tears In The Morning
Songwriter: Bruce Johnston
Lead vocalist: Bruce Johnston
Side two begins with this horrible, horrible maudlin sappiness. Johnston does a great job on the vocal, but this pseudo-European waltz (with accordions and bad strings) is quite the most mawkish thing the band ever recorded, with lines like “Hope you love the baby I’m never gonna see”.
This belongs, of course, to the genre of divorce-rock that was so popular in the early 70s, but is a poor example even of that. Many of the lyrics are utterly meaningless, making neither literal nor metaphorical sense (“Well you know I lit a candle/It’s in my heart now where it glows/Day and night feel my light it’s gonna stand till/My heart believes in what you chose”) and there’s a surprising lack of craft for someone as practised as Johnston. The line “I won’t let nobody carry this load for me”, for example, requires Johnston to sing load as two syllables – “lo-oad”. Substituting in the word ‘burden’ would improve the scansion without affecting the meaning (it might even work slightly better given the generally overwrought nature of the lyrics). Meanwhile the music has no flow, instead lumbering and staggering along like a self-pitying drunk about to collapse.
Astonishingly, this was released as a single.
All I Wanna Do
Songwriters: Brian Wilson and Mike Love
Lead vocalist: Mike Love
This is a really strange, and quite innovative, track. Primarily written by Love, this track, with its prominent bass, mechanical-sounding drums and heavily-reverbed and delayed nasal vocals, sounds like nothing so much as New Order, the 1980s post-punk/electropop band. The bridges, in particular, have a very New Order melodic shape, but everything about the melody, its conversational phrasing broken into very short phrases, sounds exactly like them. This is spookily premonitory of music more than a decade in the future.
Not to be confused with All I Want To Do from the album before this, 20/20.
Forever
Songwriters: Dennis Wilson and Gregg Jakobson
Lead vocalist: Dennis Wilson
A lovely, gentle, simple ballad, this is based on the same basic pattern as A Whiter Shade Of Pale, with which it shares its stately rhythm and vague Bach influence. In both cases the chord sequence of the main section of the song is one that can be found quite simply by anyone on a keyboard instrument.
Starting with a simple triad, (in D in this case), just play a descending scale with one finger in the bass while holding the main triad down, and you have the verse sequence for this (except that when the bass reaches G and E the chord switches to G and Em7 to avoid dischords). You get a sense of movement with the minimum of actual changes, and the cycle can repeat indefinitely, and that’s what Wilson does for the most part here. The simplicity of the changes works perfectly with the heartfelt lyrics (“If every word I said could make you laugh, I’d talk forever”).
Brian Wilson apparently loved the song, and contributed the gospel-tinged vocal arrangement (which includes possibly the last example of him singing in a strong falsetto – although he sounds thinner here than in earlier years, he hits higher notes than on any other recording).
The song remained a favourite of the band, being rerecorded by Brian Wilson for American Spring, and by the Beach Boys with John Stamos on their terrible 1990s album Summer In Paradise. Both Brian Wilson and the touring Beach Boys also included it in their live sets in the 2000s, as a tribute to Dennis.
Forever was released as a B-side to Cool, Cool Water.
Our Sweet Love
Songwriter: Brian Wilson, Carl Wilson and Al Jardine
Lead vocalist: Carl Wilson
This is another song where I am afraid I disagree with majority opinion. This is generally considered a highlight of the album, and is often compared to God Only Knows, with which it does share a few features (the rhythm, the use of minor sixth chords, Carl Wilson’s gorgeous vocals), but I have very little time for it.
The song is actually rather similar to Forever in the way it’s constructed, as well. This time the bass descends as a chromatic, rather than a major, scale in the verse (until getting to a fourth below the starting point, when it briefly becomes more mobile before the chorus) and in a diminished scale in the chorus. Again, the chords themselves change as little as possible while still accommodating these changes. Both Brian and Dennis were, for different reasons, fundamentally lazy songwriters at this point, and this kind of trick is a good way to get effective, interesting changes without even bothering to move your hands very much (John Lennon did the same kind of thing a lot).
But interesting as the chord sequence is, the lyrics, melody and arrangement are all more of the bland mush that dominates too much of this album.
At My Window
Songwriters: Brian Wilson and Al Jardine
Lead vocalist: Bruce Johnston
A rather lovely little slice-of-life ballad, much in the manner of some of the material on Friends, this features Brian Wilson attempting to speak French, with possibly the worst accent ever heard. For those who are wondering, he’s attempting to say “le moineau se poser sur ma fenetre”, French for “the sparrow landed on my window”.
This was mostly by Jardine, and as with many of Jardine’s songs the melody is based on a folk song, in this case the Kingston Trio song Raspberries, Strawberries.
Cool Cool Water
Songwriters: Brian Wilson and Mike Love
Lead vocalists: Mike Love, Brian Wilson and Carl Wilson
The final track on the album, and easily its highlight, is a bit of a Frankenstein creation. This song was originally recorded, without lead vocals, as I Love To Say DaDa during the Smile sessions. It was then rerecorded with the lyrics “add some cool cool water” chanted over and over, as a roughly two-minute track, during the Wild Honey sessions. This has led to suggestions that the track was originally intended as the ‘water’ part of The Elements (a section of Smile about which all we know for sure is that one track was “Fire”).
The Wild Honey era track was then pulled out of the vaults during the Sunflower sessions, and crossfaded into the ‘water chant’ (an a capella chant consisting of the word ‘water’ repeated over and over, recorded during the Smile sessions) which then crossfaded into a new, Moog-driven, recording of the basic DaDa musical material, this time with new lyrics by Love, and lead vocals traded off between Brian Wilson in falsetto and Love in his bass range.
Surprisingly, the track works extremely well, and despite the simplicity of the song itself, with its almost mantra-like chanting, it closes the album quite beautifully. Released as a single, though, it didn’t chart.
Overall, Sunflower is half a very good album, coupled with a lot of drivel. It’s nowhere near as good as its reputation suggests, but it’s a sign that the band were able to work together as a coherent unit, and a step in the right direction. The next album would be better…
This will eventually appear in The Beach Boys On CD vol 2. If you like this, why not consider buying volume 1? Hardback Paperback PDF Kindle (US) Kindle (UK) Kindle (DE) All other ebook formats
Smile Sessions – A Considered Review
I *will*, as promised, have some non-Smile material up here later today, but I realised I’d never posted a considered view of The Smile Sessions, just my linkblog.
For disc one, which is what most casual listeners will care about, Mark Linett and Alan Boyd had to reconcile two irreconcilable objectives. Firstly, they had to make an album that was listenable to the people who would be buying just the one- or two-disc sets and expecting a great Beach Boys album. Second, they had to follow the template laid down by Brian Wilson Presents Smile, Brian Wilson’s 2004 re-recording.
This is problematic because Brian Wilson Presents Smile was much longer than an actual 1960s album would have been, and contained a lot of material that was never recorded in the 1960s. It had lead vocals on six songs – a third of the album – that never had vocals recorded in any form when Smile was originally recorded. It also had newly-composed linking material to segue between the more fragmentary tracks.
My own choice would have been to make a much tighter, ten or twelve-track, album for disc one, and not follow Wilson’s sequence at all. I’d probably have chosen a tracklist something like:
Our Prayer
Heroes & Villains
The Old Master Painter/You Are My Sunshine
CabinEssence
Wonderful
Child Is Father Of The Man
Surf’s Up
Vegetables
Wind Chimes
Fire
Love To Say DaDa
Good Vibrations
Everything else I would have made a bonus track – still available, still on the CD, but not part of the sequenced listening experience for the casual fan.
But I can see why they chose this route – the 2004 line-up is the closest thing to an actual finished Smile there can ever be, and was signed off on by Brian Wilson and Van Dyke Parks. Especially given Parks’ understandable refusal to be involved in this box set, that’s as good as you’re going to get.
And given those two conflicting choices, Linett and Boyd have done a remarkable job. By flying in bits of vocals from demos, or in some cases from other songs (the ‘child’ vocals added to Look from Child Is Father Of The Man and the vocals from the Smiley Smile version of Wind Chimes and Fall Breaks And Back To Winter), they have made these pieces sound far more finished than they ever have before.
It will still, frankly, be a bit of a slog for the typical non-fan listener to get through the third movement – always the weakest and least coherent, and far scrappier than the first two – but they’ve done a remarkably good job.
As for the music itself… Smile has five songs (Good Vibrations, Heroes & Villains, Cabinessence, Wonderful and Surf’s Up) which are the equal of any music ever made. It’s not hyperbole to place them with the best of Bach, or Stravinsky, or the Beatles or Duke Ellington. There are a couple of utterly lovely little mini-tracks too – You Are My Sunshine and Our Prayer – and Fire, which is not *quite* up to the level of those five, but is still a stunningly impressive piece of music.
The rest of the album can be split roughly into silly fun songs like Vegetables and Holidays and backing tracks that hint at greatness but are clearly unfinished (Do You Like Worms, Child Is Father Of The Man).
Possibly the best way to explain this is to compare it to the Beatles’ Abbey Road – a similar combination of repeated themes and motifs, big experimental pieces, and small silly fragments. Imagine if side one of Abbey Road was pretty much complete except for the vocals on I Want You, but the long medley on side two had never been completed, and had been reconstructed with Lennon’s demos for his songs, an instrumental version of Golden Slumbers/Carry That Weight/The End, and the live version of You Never Give Me Your Money where McCartney pretends to forget the words – and none of George Martin’s orchestrations had been recorded.
If you stack this semi-completed Smile up against something like that, it emerges far and away the better listening experience, and its high points, with the pristine Beach Boys voices of 1966 and 1967, are as beautiful as anything I’ve ever heard, but it’s not a finished album and really can’t be reviewed as such.
The sessions recordings that make up the rest of the box set are invaluable for anyone who is interested in the way music is made. Hearing Wilson guide the musicians and singers through take after take, subtly altering the music each time, and hearing the isolated parts, is a wonderful education. The bulk of that material had been available before on bootlegs, but never in sound quality anything like as good as this. Linett and Boyd have also done a great job of editing out the longeurs while still preserving the essence of the sessions – nobody really needs ten minutes of tuning, but it can be instructive to hear Wilson explain to Jim Gordon or Hal Blaine how to change their snare drum pattern. We get the latter, but not the former.
On sound quality – there have been some complaints on various message boards about some fairly minor problems with the sound (an increase in hiss on the choruses on Cabinessence, a click in Heroes & Villains, an electronic whine in Love To Say DaDa). I don’t want to dismiss these problems – they could affect some people’s listening experience – but most of them are *incredibly* minor, and won’t be audible to people listening on normal equipment with normal ears. I still can’t hear some of them, even knowing what I’m listening for (though I don’t have wonderful hearing).
The ones I can hear, though, are all on the original recordings, not things that have been newly introduced for this release. 1960s recordings were far noisier, and far more likely to contain bad edits, tape hiss, and background noises than anything recorded in the last couple of decades. Given that Linett and Boyd were working with materials of hugely varying quality, ranging from at one end professionally-recorded multitracks in good condition, to at the other rough mixes that had been mixed down to acetate and then left in people’s garages for decades, the overall quality is nothing short of miraculous.
The packaging for the box set is extraordinary, too – a beautiful box, with a 3D die-cut version of Frank Holmes’ original artwork, a double vinyl album in a reproduction of the original sleeve from the 60s, a copy of the photo booklet that would have been included with the original album, a sixty-page hardback book with interviews with almost everyone involved (no interviews with Parks or the session musicians, but everyone else, down to Brian Wilson’s ex-sister-in-law) and a complete sessionography detailing who played on what and which bits were used for the finished tracks.
The very nature of this project makes it hard to rate – the full 5-CD, 2-album, 2-single box is not something anyone but the most obsessive fan or scholar will ever want. But anyone who *does* want something like this will *really* want it.
The single or double CD sets should probably get, on an objective rating, four out of five stars for a casual listener – it contains some of the best music ever made, but it’s necessarily fragmented. Brian Wilson’s 2004 reconstruction, by comparison, would get a clear five on that basis.
But for collectors, Beach Boys obsessives, and anyone interested in the making of music, the box set is a clear five-star, best-release-of-the-year slab of pure joy. It sets a new standard for what an archival release should be, just as the best music on it set a new standard for what pop music should be.
Liveblogging The Smile Sessions
I’m writing this introductory material on the night of the thirtieth of October. If all goes well, I should be receiving my copy of The Smile Sessions tomorrow morning, the thirty-first. I’m going to hit ‘post’ on this introductory section at 8:30 AM, and then as soon as the box set arrives I’m going to start listening to it.
What order I listen depends on whether the new stylus for my record player arrives before or after the box, but my initial plan is to listen to the two singles, commenting after each side, then to the two vinyl albums, again commenting after each side, then listen to the CDs in order, reading the two books during the nineteen-song overlap between CD1 and the vinyl, commenting after each CD.
So right now, I’m going to talk a little about what we already know about this.
I’m already very familiar with a lot of the basic musical material here, through official releases, bootlegs and Brian Wilson’s solo reconstruction of the album (if anyone here still hasn’t heard that masterpiece, there’s a live performance here – the first half of the show isn’t especially worth your while, but the second half is the whole album performed note-perfect live). The interesting thing (apart from any totally new discovered stuff) about the completed album part of this will be the choices the producers have made.
Smile, you see, was not only never finished, it was recorded modularly – little sections, often no more than a few bars long, that were to be spliced together. That splicing was never done, and in some cases it’s unclear exactly which pieces belonged to which song, or what order they would have gone in.
Mark Linett and Alan Boyd, the producers of the box set, have chosen to more-or-less follow the tracklisting that Brian Wilson and Van Dyke Parks settled on when they completed the re-recorded version of Smile in 2004 (with the help of Darian Sahanaja and Paul Mertens).
In some ways, this is a worrying decision – many of the songs included on Brian Wilson Presents Smile were unfinished in the 60s, and had new lyrics and vocal parts added, which won’t be on the ‘finished album’ part of the new Smile release. This might well lead to people who’ve not heard this material before getting bored during what will seem on first listen to be longeurs. I’d have chosen a tighter ten- or twelve-track album, myself, and put the rest on as bonus tracks.
But on the other hand, it *is* how Brian Wilson and Van Dyke Parks chose to present the material when they completed it and re-recorded it. And it’s probably the ‘conservative’ decision, in that it doesn’t require Boyd or Linett to create their own running order, which would undoubtedly have every single Beach Boys fan in uproar. Deferring to the completed version is the sensible decision here.
It also makes me more curious how they’re going to sequence this – when Wilson, Parks and Sahanaja sequenced the 2004 version, they used newly-composed linking material by Paul Mertens, which highlighted repeated motifs in the music (for example his introduction to I’m In Great Shape, which repurposed the Cantina section from Heroes & Villains and showed it’s musical similarity to the song it was introducing). Without those, it will be *incredibly* difficult for them to make this work anything like as well as a listening experience.
However, I trust Boyd and Linett more than anyone else with this. Boyd produced the documentary and CD Endless Harmony, the CD version of which is the best Beach Boys rarities collection ever – so much so that it’s my standard recommendation for a first Beach Boys album – and he’s a fine musician himself, as well as being friendly with several of my friends. And Mark Linnet has worked with Wilson on all his studio and live recordings from the last twelve years (and his 1988 solo album), including the reworked Smile, and was also responsible for remastering all the Beach Boys’ music for CD, as well as co-producing the Good Vibrations box set (the definitive Beach Boys retrospective).
So these two are exactly the right people to do this. This is going to be as close to definitive as it’s possible to get, and while I’ll undoubtedly question some of their choices, I’m sure I’ll respect them all.
So now I’m off to bed. I’m going to hit post on this when I get up first thing in the morning, and then I’ll update after the first thing I listen to…
Update 1 It is now 11:38 AM. My box set was loaded onto a van in Rochdale at 9:33. It should be here any time now…
Update 11:49 The box set has arrived. My stylus hasn’t, yet, so it shall be CDs first.
Update 13:38 Wow.
First things first. This sounds extraordinary. None of this music, whether it’s been officially released or not, has ever sounded this clear.
Boyd and Linett have made the very wise decision not to go for historical authenticity, but to cobble together a Frankenstein creation from whatever’s at hand. For example, on the track Surf’s Up, they’ve used the original Smile backing track for the first half, taken Brian’s vocal from the piano demo and time-shifted it to make it fit the track, then added in Carl’s vocal from 1971 (and the backing vocals recorded at the same time) for the missing lines. It’s not ‘how it would have sounded’, but it’s the best possible job of making something listenable out of the materials at hand. Something like 95% of the music on the ‘finished album’ is from the Smile sessions, but the other 5% comes from Smiley Smile, 20/20 and Surf’s Up sessions. But that 5% *fits*
There are also constant little surprises – elements in the mix that I’ve never heard before. On the tag of You Were My Sunshine, for example, they edit in a piece of music we’ve always assumed was a Heroes & Villains session (I *think* the bit known as ‘False Barnyard’, but while I’ve always kept up enough with Smile scholarship to recognise all the music, I can’t remember all the labels that have been attached to different fragments) – but Mike Love is clearly singing fragments from You Were My Sunshine in the background!
These constant surprises – some on the original master tapes, others painstakingly created by Boyd and Linnet – make this music fresh again. I’m very familiar with the raw materials, but there are little snatches of never-bootlegged music, and decisions made in the mixing, that draw the attention back every time I start to think “Heard it before”.
One of the effects of this is to turn it from a Brian Wilson album into something that is definitely a *Beach Boys* album. There’s a lot more vocal on here than on the bootlegged versions – some flown in from other recordings, others just raised in the mix – but it’s gone from being a primarily-instrumental album to being one which sounds much more like the Beach Boys.
And it sounds *SO GOOD*. Mike Love’s vocals, in particular, are no longer buried – there’s a lot more bass in this mix than in any of the bootlegs. And my God that man could sing when he wanted to.
The third movement still has much less to offer than the first two, but having listened through the ‘finished album’, I can safely say that the only problems I have with it are very minor:
There’s a rough edit at the end of the tag of Vegetables, to stick on another section. It’s jarring and unpleasant and should have been left to fade with the tag.
Fire sounds somewhat toned down compared to some of the raw-sounding bootlegs.
And the additions to Good Vibrations, though tastefully done, seem almost blasphemous. They sound good, but Good Vibrations is the one part of Smile that was absolutely, undoubtedly, incontrovertibly *finished* at the time, and was a massive success. It should have been left as it was.
As for the bonus tracks – a lot of it’s stuff we’ve heard before, but the montage of backing vocals is still gorgeous. And the 1967 piano recording of Surf’s Up may be even better than the 1966 one. Beautiful, beautiful music.
As for other aspects, the packaging is beautiful. The book that comes with it is great, and I’m particularly glad that no punches are pulled when it comes to Mike Love – it’s made very clear that he had a problem with the lyrics and found them inappropriate, though he also says he enjoyed the music. I was also pleased to see a lot of my oldest friends thanked in the booklet, especially the thanks to the late Bob Hanes and Greg Larson, who would have loved this.
It’s incredibly disappointing, though, that Van Dyke Parks had no active participation in the booklet. Given that they managed to interview every other figure involved in any way – all the Beach Boys, Brian’s ex-wife, Brian’s ex-sister-in-law, Dean Torrence, Mark Volman, Uncle Tom Cobley And All – there should have been some way found of involving VDP. I have no idea who’s to blame for this omission, or what the politics behind it are, but *something* should have been done.
That’s taken me 32 minutes to write. I’m going to eat now, before starting on the other four discs…
Update 15:48
Disc two there’s less to say about. Almost all sessions for Heroes & Villains and the various other tracks that started as part of that song (I’m In Great Shape, Barnyard etc), most of this material won’t be new to anyone who’s heard the various bootlegs. That said, this is in at least two generations better sound quality than I’ve heard before, and they’ve done a great job of showing the way this material evolved in the studio, and the utter professionalism of all concerned.
Disc three next.
Update 17:43 While the highlights of disc two were mostly vocal, here the highlights are instrumental – the backing track for the first half of Surf’s Up, the tag of Cabinessence, with all its bouzouki, mandolin and banjo lines weaving in and out of each other, the piano and harpsichord parts on Wonderful. Much of this stuff has been heard before of course, but never in such quality.
Another thing that you notice as you go through this material in one big session is that themes, obsessions seem to emerge. Like people being inside musical instruments or equipment – we all remember George Fell Into His French Horn, but we also have Brian in the piano, Brian in the microphone… it reminds me curiously of the people living in the piano in Zappa’s Lumpy Gravy from a year or so later than this.
Unlike the first disc, I wouldn’t recommend discs two or three to anyone who isn’t as obsessed as I am with this music. But for those who are, they’re fascinating.
Update 19:08 Of the ‘sessions’ discs, disc four is probably the most interesting as a listening experience to the non-musician, because here, as well as sessions for Smile itself, we go into the stuff surrounding Smile. So we have sessions for You’re Welcome and With Me Tonight (two Smile leftovers), for Dennis and Carl’s contemporary attempts to make music like their brother, I Don’t Know and Tones/Tune X, for Three Blind Mice (actually an outtake from before Pet Sounds, but included on Smile bootlegs so often they presumably thought it had to be there) and for Cool, Cool Water (a post-Smile reworking of some Smile material) and we have Teeter Totter Love, a track Brian wrote and produced for photographer Jasper Dailey, who has an almost Wild Man Fisher quality to his vocals.
This makes it the most varied of the discs, and the one least concerned with repeated slightly different takes of small snippets.
It also has three ‘hidden’ extra tracks, including a totally different edit of Heroes & Villains, compiled entirely from sections that weren’t used in the main edit on disc one, with different verse and cantina vocals. Well worth listening to.
And now… to disc five. The last disc (unless my stylus arrives now, which is unlikely) and one composed entirely of one song… Good Vibrations.
Update 20:38
And so 12 hours after I hit publish on this, we come to an end.
Truth be told there’s little on disc five of this that will come as a surprise to anyone. There’s been more session material released for this track – both legitimately and otherwise – than for any other, and the main thing I noticed about this is that the sessions are far less edited down. Which, given how well I know this material, was disconcerting – “Wait, that’s not where he says ‘that really felt good, let’s hear it’” and so on.
But what we have here is essentially the ‘Good Vibrations (sessions)’ bits from the Good Vibrations box/Smiley Smile – Wild Honey CD/Hawthorne, CA CD/Pet Sounds Sessions box writ large. We hear attempts at the song from every existing session for it, of which there were many. We hear sections that don’t make it onto the final track, and we hear, slowly but surely, how Brian Wilson sculpted the perfect pop single out of what started as a couple of simple riffs.
Much like disc four, the disc ends with a Frankenstein version of Good Vibrations, with the alternate verse lyrics by Tony Asher going into the chorus from the Rarities version, then into a stereo version of the “I don’t know where but she sends me there” bit missing a few crucial vocal overdubs, then into the fuzz-bass/fast ‘hum-de-ah’ section. It’s interesting, but it’s not a patch on the single.
I’ve still not got my new stylus, so I can’t yet listen to the vinyl, but on the basis of the five CDs totalling more than six and a half hours of music, and the superb packaging, I’d say that while this isn’t something I could recommend to anyone who isn’t as obsessed with the Beach Boys as I am, anyone who’s even considering buying this box set will love it.
For some of you who aren’t, I’ll recommend the 2-CD version, but with the following caveat (which my regular readers, at least, will get) – Smile is the greatest album in the world in the same way that Evil Of The Daleks may be the best Doctor Who story. With Evil Of The Daleks we have one surviving episode, a soundtrack, a bit of film footage shot on set, a load of still photographs and a novelisation. From that, we can tell it was great, but you’re not going to convince anyone who only quite liked David Tennant. In the same way, The Smile Sessions, in whatever form, is a wonderful collection of all the evidence we need to show that had Smile been finishable in 1967, it would undoubtedly have been the best album released up to that point. But those of you who just want something nice to listen to should stick with Brian Wilson’s 2004 completed version.
Polished as it has been, this is still music that requires a great deal of work on the part of the listener. The amazing thing is, it repays that work.
The Smile that you send out returns to you.
Ends
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