"this too shall pass"

captainsalty

captainsalty

Ikon Class
Joined
Apr 28, 2011
sorry for starting a thread for something as insignificant as this, but it escapes me how a person who has been in the "biz" for almost 60 years can release something as amateurish, bland, ridiculous, horrible, appalling.

every little piece of this production stinks so bad, it's amazing.

 
Before opening this thread i had seen familiar title and though that G45central won't resort to discuss latest Mike Love pile of crap, but here it is ;)

The "talents" of Mike Love is well known. Needless to say, he was opposed to releasing Pet Sounds calling it Brian's "ego music" and one of the main reasons why Smile project was shelved and Van Dyke Parks departed project. He is good singer but well known jerk.

Without Brian Wilson involment he is absolute zero so it's explains this "song".
 
Don't wanna defend the Lovester, but blaming the demise of Smile and in parts Pet Sounds on him is widely overblown.

What he did understand was that a group in the early 60s could work like a business. Get product out, get revenue. The Beach Boys had struck gold with their early style, and, from this perspective, there was no need to "fuck with the formula".

Now, with Pet Sounds, Brian Wilson tried to do exactly this. Those ARE "ego songs". Some are great, some only work if you accept the "Wilson Genius" preconception. Apart from two or three catchy pop songs, this record had no commercial energy whatsoever.

And with Smile, things went berserk. It's a hodge-podge of drug-fuelled no-good-ness. Without the Wilson-tag, pretty much nobody would be interested in those recording, as most of them are only art-pour-l'art. Love saw this, and he was worried about the "business".

The big demise of Smile has many factors. I believe that the main one is mental illness. If you listen to the tapes, you can feel a madman rummaging. Somebody who is deeply out of control and very sad.

Well, in the end i think it would have been best if, after the crazy hall of fame speech in 1988 (?), both dylan and springsteen would have given this guy a beating so that he would have fallen silent forever.
 
I totally disagree about Smile. When this sessions finally came out in 2011, i gave it a listen after dismissing Beach Boys as pop band with one fantastic album (Pet Sounds, and yes, i disagree about PS too) and lots of great singles but that's all. I was almost shocked how good those "scraps" were. Initially i bought 2 CD set then gave it away and got 5 CD monster set and didn't regret it all.

After that i got Beach Boys Today/Summer Days two-fer and got hooked forever.


captainsalty said:
Without the Wilson-tag, pretty much nobody would be interested in those recording, as most of them are only art-pour-l'art. Love saw this, and he was worried about the "business".

The big demise of Smile has many factors. I believe that the main one is mental illness. If you listen to the tapes, you can feel a madman rummaging. Somebody who is deeply out of control and very sad.
Click to expand...

You say that nobody would be interested in those recordings? With Good Vibrations topping as number 1 single basically everywhere save for USSR in late 1966 and that "Brian is genius" media hype surrounding the album?

One of the reasons Beach Boys was dismissed by San Francisco rock critics and other rock snobs is their failure to complete Smile and get on the level of Beatles who released dreadful Sgt. Pepper (which Smile totally kills even in unfinished state). They forever got stuck in mass media eyes as that nostalgia surf act in stripped shirts, thanks to Mike Love internal group politics. Love totally failed to see that times were changing and you can't release stuff like Fun Fun Fun in 1967. Imagine if Ringo Starr would be protesting new Lennon songs in 1966 asking where is new She Loves You instead of that drug crap Strawberry Fields?

As for Smile progress, sessions went great and in time until December 1966 when the boys returned from tour and Love started arguing with Van Dyke Parks about lyrics and general weirdness of that project. If you see at timeline, 70-80% of the album were completed by the end of the year. Then something went totally wrong (according to some accounts there was such angry arguments about new stuff that band was almost broke up). Brian shelved LP around January 1967 and started concentrating on Heroes & Villains single and then his obsession of re-recording stuff and problems with drugs kicked in. Someone should had kicked his ass, forcing him to add vocals to 1966 backing tracks and finally releasing it.

To leave in the can Surf's Up and releasing instead Gettin' Hungry as a single was a crime against modern music.
 
i'm happy that you like the smile sessions so much. i can't really get too many kicks out of them. there ARE some great songs from the smile project, that's for sure. off the top of my head, those would be wind chimes, wonderful, surf's up. apart from that, probably with me tonight, but i'm not sure if it stems from a later date. good vibrations is not a smile song, it's a leftover from pet sounds. heroes and villains is really corny and not a strong song by any means. the version released sounded so corny and uncool, so no wonder the beach boys were regarded unhip. because, they were indeed.

love wanted to ride the retro wave. bad idea. wilson was into some kind of jazzy, dad-pop thing after smile. if you compare this with psychedelic (garage) bands from this era, i don't really see the relevance of wilson's music after the initial smile sessions. i give him kudos for re-recording some tracks. smiley smile's takes on wonderful, wind chimes and with me tonight are gorgeous. little pad, i always spun this when i was tripping on salvia divinorum. it's arguably the "coolest" album of the later beach boys.

still, i don't buy the narrative of love "destroying" the smile record. why would wilson give a fuck about him? he had tracks released as a solo single before. the fact that he was suffering from mental illness strangely is almost never considered in his demise. and, let's be honest, wilson has not really done something that would justify his "genius" label since 1967.

also, about smile, i'm no beach boys expert, but i'm pretty positive that the last sessions were late may 1967, so it definitely wasn't aborted january 1967.

also, i'm not a big (later) beatles fan, but what is it that gave sgt. pepper this incredibly bad reputation?
 
I like it. The "square" Mike Love/Al Jardine faction of The Beach Boys have always had their
finger on the pulse of Middle America, no matter how inane it seemed to hippies/hipsters.
What other pop group ever wrote a song celebrating the joys of driving a PT Cruiser? LOL

1593440896739.png
 
With Me Tonight is a Smiley Smile child, they started recording this song in June 1967 at Brian's Bel Air studio (although it might had started out at Western but released version was from Bel Air to where Brian relocated after Smile demise).

I agree that released version of H&V is poor and as whole, it is bad follow up to Good Vibrations. Smile era versions are cool though. Brian finished & mixed much more faster, cooler and shorter version in February 1967 and it was slated for release. But then Brian got paranoid again and shelved the whole thing and started re-recording it from scratch again and again and again... That is definitely mental issues there + Beach Boys filled the lawsuit against Capitol and froze every bit from Smile until the case could been settled (btw the version i'm talking about is a bonus track on Smiley Smile/Wild Honey two-fer).

So, after Smile demise, Beach Boys totally lost direction. Wild Honey is a weird attempt to get into soul/r&b thing, Friends is fine but songs are slight. Then Brian started to withdrew from whole Beach Boys thing and got into mental hospital for a short while.

As for when Smile project was dead, it's debatable. Again, if you see at timeline, after December 1966 Brian never made an attempt to complete such songs as Cabin Essence, Do You Like Worms, Child Is Father To The Man, Elements suite, Surf's Up, Holidays etc. There wasn't a single session in 1967 out of 30 or so devoted to completion of the album. Peter Reum (friend of Brian and from BB inner circle) had told that something terribly bad had happened at December 1966 band meeting and it seems that after that Brian decided to abandon album altogether and focus on single (and none of band members ever commented at this). At first it was H&V, then he started recording Vega-Tables/Wonderful as a replacement for H&V (it was annouced as that in press) and then sessions terminated altogether. One weird one-off excerption is a Love To Say Dada session from May 1967.

And yes, after 1967 Brian was never the same mentally or as writer/composer. That guy was long gone.
 
The answer is simple: two vastly opposing mindsets.
Mike Love - all about business, maintaining the brand name, keeping the revenue flow moving, "if it ain't broke don't fix it"

Brian Wilson - all about the music, evolution of the group, experimentation, growth, taking chances. Making money is less important.

As for Pet Sounds- I always thought it was brilliant. Still do. The Smile tapes, sessions etc are good for what they are but can't compare.
 
MopTopMike said:
The answer is simple: two vastly opposing mindsets.
Mike Love - all about business, maintaining the brand name, keeping the revenue flow moving, "if it ain't broke don't fix it"

Brian Wilson - all about the music, evolution of the group, experimentation, growth, taking chances. Making money is less important.

As for Pet Sounds- I always thought it was brilliant. Still do. The Smile tapes, sessions etc are good for what they are but can't compare.
Click to expand...

Dennis Wilson - Cars/girls/booze/drugs/ballads (and the only BB with authentic 'surfer cred'). The 'Gram Parsons' of Surf? Why not...

Pet Sounds is their masterpiece..."a clinically-depressed but brilliant composer uses Phil Spector's playbook to make his ultimate personal statement without regard to commercial considerations". Musically: Cooler and 'deeper' than Sgt. Pepper. Lyrically: Less scary and bitter than Forever Changes.
 
A trilogy for me:
1) Pet Sounds, 1966
2) Forever Changes, 1967
3) Astral Weeks, 1968

Nor Wilson, nor Lee, nor Morrison ever touched those heighs again in their carreer. Smile is different beast altogether.
 
i'm really surprised of all the love pet sounds and smile are getting from this garage board.

i'm no big fan of psychedelia, but something like "Frozen Laughter" by the Rising Storm is so, so, so much better than what wilson was doing on smile, and was probably recorded in a fraction of the time.

dennis wilson: always thought what a clown this guy is. a chronic, aggresive misogynist that deserves nothing of the overblown praise that he's getting from the historical narrative á la rolling stone magazine. "forever" is a cool song, though:clap:
 
Some parts of Smile are not that far-off of what Elevators did at that time. Do You Like Worms, Fire (Mr. Leary O Cow) are as freaky and weird as Fire Engine or Monkey Island. Wilson is the ultimate case of musical Icarus who flew too close to the sun and been burned. Mindblowing to think that the same guy who recorded Fire in November 1966 recorded Surfin USA or Fun Fun Fun a couple of years ago. You can only go downhill after that.
 
captainsalty said:
i'm really surprised of all the love pet sounds and smile are getting from this garage board.

i'm no big fan of psychedelia, but something like "Frozen Laughter" by the Rising Storm is so, so, so much better than what wilson was doing on smile, and was probably recorded in a fraction of the time.

dennis wilson: always thought what a clown this guy is. a chronic, aggresive misogynist that deserves nothing of the overblown praise that he's getting from the historical narrative á la rolling stone magazine. "forever" is a cool song, though:clap:
Click to expand...

My musical tastes are not limited to "'60s garage", far from it. I've always been a fan of the Beach Boys

I think the Rising Storm LP is good, but falls below the upper echelon of 'great obscure private press LPs.
Spotty...
"Frozen Laughter", just listened to it again, not really a big deal to me. Never was.
 
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