SMiLE Sessions box set!

[SMiLE Brian]

Honestly, Van Dyke Parks kind of rubs me the wrong way. I just don't like the cut of his jib. I really dislike all that stuff about not being able to explain anything and everything not having any meaning. It seems like an exaggeration to just act like all of it was just absurd nonsense that could never be explained.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tB6JwCmTIEw
Like in this video, he says he doesn't know what any of the lyrics mean. But just before that he says it was "an American Gothic trip". Well which is it? He clearly had something in mind. We'll never know exactly what happened, but it seems like an understanding could have been reached and an explanation could have been offered. In my opinion I think Van Dyke realized the project wasn't going anywhere and he used Mike Love as an excuse to be on his way.

I'm of the opinion that Mike wanted SMiLE to come out. The band had invested quite a bit into the project and as much as Mike didn't like the music I think his overriding concern was simply that Brian do *something*. You can't tell me that after his "victory" in getting SMiLE canned Mike turned around and said "I got it guys! You know all that music I hated and tried to destroy? Let's go rerecord all that for our next album!" For all the talk of "phucking with the formula", it seems they ended up releasing an even stranger album. That alone really makes me wonder.

And all this stuff about "stifling hostility and overbearing family dynamics that came into play whan the band members" seems like an exaggeration. I was under the impression that Carl really admired what Brian was doing. I thought Carl went into the studio for SMiLE sessions whenever he was in town. Certainly Carl was a major advocate of the music in the years after the project's collapse. And what about Dennis? Something tells me he was more concerned with living his rock and roll lifestyle than he was playing mind games with Van Dyke. And then you have Al, who was always tactful, and never seemed to have really upset anybody during the entire run of the band. "overbearing family dynamics" wouldn't be how I'd describe all that.

You should write a whole essay on SMiLE, because your different approach to the history is really interesting and thought provoking.

[drbeachboy]

Honestly, Van Dyke Parks kind of rubs me the wrong way. I just don't like the cut of his jib. I really dislike all that stuff about not being able to explain anything and everything not having any meaning. It seems like an exaggeration to just act like all of it was just absurd nonsense that could never be explained.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tB6JwCmTIEw
Like in this video, he says he doesn't know what any of the lyrics mean. But just before that he says it was "an American Gothic trip". Well which is it? He clearly had something in mind. We'll never know exactly what happened, but it seems like an understanding could have been reached and an explanation could have been offered. In my opinion I think Van Dyke realized the project wasn't going anywhere and he used Mike Love as an excuse to be on his way.

I'm of the opinion that Mike wanted SMiLE to come out. The band had invested quite a bit into the project and as much as Mike didn't like the music I think his overriding concern was simply that Brian do *something*. You can't tell me that after his "victory" in getting SMiLE canned Mike turned around and said "I got it guys! You know all that music I hated and tried to destroy? Let's go rerecord all that for our next album!" For all the talk of "phucking with the formula", it seems they ended up releasing an even stranger album. That alone really makes me wonder.

And all this stuff about "stifling hostility and overbearing family dynamics that came into play whan the band members" seems like an exaggeration. I was under the impression that Carl really admired what Brian was doing. I thought Carl went into the studio for SMiLE sessions whenever he was in town. Certainly Carl was a major advocate of the music in the years after the project's collapse. And what about Dennis? Something tells me he was more concerned with living his rock and roll lifestyle than he was playing mind games with Van Dyke. And then you have Al, who was always tactful, and never seemed to have really upset anybody during the entire run of the band. "overbearing family dynamics" wouldn't be how I'd describe all that.

Good stuff, there. I'm of the same opinion as you on all counts. If there was any contention with Smile, especially with Mike & Carl, it would have been for a lack of a single(s) that could be culled from the album. As for Jardine, you may be correct in your assessment for that time frame, but he was maybe less so "tactful" in the future.

[Dove Nested Towers]

Honestly, Van Dyke Parks kind of rubs me the wrong way. I just don't like the cut of his jib. I really dislike all that stuff about not being able to explain anything and everything not having any meaning. It seems like an exaggeration to just act like all of it was just absurd nonsense that could never be explained.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tB6JwCmTIEw
Like in this video, he says he doesn't know what any of the lyrics mean. But just before that he says it was "an American Gothic trip". Well which is it? He clearly had something in mind. We'll never know exactly what happened, but it seems like an understanding could have been reached and an explanation could have been offered. In my opinion I think Van Dyke realized the project wasn't going anywhere and he used Mike Love as an excuse to be on his way.

I'm of the opinion that Mike wanted SMiLE to come out. The band had invested quite a bit into the project and as much as Mike didn't like the music I think his overriding concern was simply that Brian do *something*. You can't tell me that after his "victory" in getting SMiLE canned Mike turned around and said "I got it guys! You know all that music I hated and tried to destroy? Let's go rerecord all that for our next album!" For all the talk of "phucking with the formula", it seems they ended up releasing an even stranger album. That alone really makes me wonder.

And all this stuff about "stifling hostility and overbearing family dynamics that came into play whan the band members" seems like an exaggeration. I was under the impression that Carl really admired what Brian was doing. I thought Carl went into the studio for SMiLE sessions whenever he was in town. Certainly Carl was a major advocate of the music in the years after the project's collapse. And what about Dennis? Something tells me he was more concerned with living his rock and roll lifestyle than he was playing mind games with Van Dyke. And then you have Al, who was always tactful, and never seemed to have really upset anybody during the entire run of the band. "overbearing family dynamics" wouldn't be how I'd describe all that.

Good points, Fishmonk. I'm all in favor of a middle ground if it seems justified based on what we do know, and to some extent it does. It's obviously not easily quantifiable. Van Dyke has been a little exasperating in his inconsistency about expounding on the meaning of his lyrics and vision for the project, but some of this is undoubtedly due to the pain of a "baby" that he obviously cared about being stillborn and finding that difficult to talk about, as well as his lyrics being genuinely oblique and not entirely literal in their meaning. He has opened up more in trying to explain it all in some recent interviews. He's an abstract kind of guy, I don't think it's an affectation.

Carl always seemed enigmatic with regard to his feelings about Smile, to my mind being even more inconsistent that Van Dyke. He was all over the map in his statements about it though the years, but had strong feelings about the "impropriety" of the music, or the vibe, or situation, or whatever, while also clearly loving it very much, and obviously loved it more and more as the years passed (as Mike may have also). Al was tactful and diplomatic about it all, but was known to be displeased when the long H&V with the animal noises was put on the GV box set, feeling that it made them look unprofessional. Dennis I'm sure was artistically supportive, but was not motivated to be as active an ally as would have been beneficial to Brian and Van Dyke.

Which brings it back to Mike, whom the " overbearing family dynamics" and insular, pressure-filled insistence on Brian-as-provider role comment was mostly directed at. If he was merely in favor of Brian just "doing something", anything, then why would he poison the atmosphere, as he clearly did to a significant degree? Perhaps he realized his miscalculation after Van left, the project lost momentum, and the clamor for their ground-breaking new album, long-awaited, began to grow. He of course was human, sensitive to the band's top-of-the-heap status and fame and desperate to maintain it, and was probably behind the curve that their traditional approach was no longer viable and that some form of experimentation was needed, even though he must have seen which way the wind was blowing to at least some degree. What exactly did he expect Brian to do, if not the Smile direction? He may have belatedly realized that the hipness quotient was more relevant than the old "formula" and regretted antagonizing Van Dyke, but it was too late, and he had to rally behind the far less ambitious and commercial SS. I realize that the chronology might betray this hypothesis in some respects if examined closely, but that's not my strong suit. As far as him wanting Smile to come out in the form that it would have if events (including of course the Capitol breakage clause lawsuit, Brian's general drug-related mania and mental deterioration, but also including Mike's lack of cooperation with Brian and Van Dyke's vision for the album) had not conspired against it, that doesn't exactly compute.

[guitarfool2002]

Are you willing to ignore the accounts given by the "Brian side" of the Smile saga which reported Murry Wilson and a few unnamed band members making a concerted effort to basically convince Brian to stop ***king with the formula, for lack of a better term? Vosse, for one, spells it out quite clear that there was a breakdown after the Inside Pop filming which centered around Murry Wilson. Definite family dynamic at least in that case, and not without precedent because Murry did the same thing with Gary Usher when he was writing with Brian. And Vosse also mentions "factions" developing within the band during this same time (late 66 - early 67). That kind of thing can't be ignored.

It is a little bit of everything which led to the downfall, that's accepted by a lot of people including myself, but at the same time putting out theories and suppositions about Van Dyke Parks' inability to define the project and Mike Love's support of the project, and their roles to explain certain things, might be along the lines of previous generations laying the full blame on Mike Love; it's taking a surface impression instead of peeling back a few layers.

[Dove Nested Towers]

Well said. Forgot about Murry's possible role. It is an interesting exercise however (for me at least), even if it's bound to be inconclusive, to try to analyze a given situation based only on the evidence andinformation at hand, especially if it is a situation the outcome of which carries such resonance for those of us invested in Smile.

[Dunderhead]

Are you willing to ignore the accounts given by the "Brian side" of the Smile saga which reported Murry Wilson and a few unnamed band members making a concerted effort to basically convince Brian to stop ***king with the formula, for lack of a better term? Vosse, for one, spells it out quite clear that there was a breakdown after the Inside Pop filming which centered around Murry Wilson. Definite family dynamic at least in that case, and not without precedent because Murry did the same thing with Gary Usher when he was writing with Brian. And Vosse also mentions "factions" developing within the band during this same time (late 66 - early 67). That kind of thing can't be ignored.

It is a little bit of everything which led to the downfall, that's accepted by a lot of people including myself, but at the same time putting out theories and suppositions about Van Dyke Parks' inability to define the project and Mike Love's support of the project, and their roles to explain certain things, might be along the lines of previous generations laying the full blame on Mike Love; it's taking a surface impression instead of peeling back a few layers.

The most telling thing to me is that Brian wasn't able to meet his deadline. He had upwards of 40 sessions before the end of the year. He recorded Pet Sounds in under 30. Today! in less than 20. I think after Parks left, during the holidays there was probably a lot of pressure on Brian. I don't think this was some malicious thing where evil Mike Love and Murry Wilson wrung their hands together and conspired to bring SMiLE down and keep Brian from "fucking with the formula". I think it was more a "look, this isn't the direction we should be going in, you need to finish this thing". There was a post from Alan Boyd where he said those early '67 sessions sounded like Brian was fishing for inspiration, and Boyd also suggested that Brian had scraped material that he had been working on in the previous year. I think that's really what happened, somewhere during that period Brian was faced with the realization that he didn't know how to finish the album or perhaps hadn't succeeded thus far in achieving his production goals. Perhaps he was faced with discouragement from other parties, but can you really blame them? Things were going off the rails and it seems everyone knew it. Perhaps the reason Mike's comments affected Brian so was that they hit close to home. Perhaps Brian actually valued Mike's opinion has a collaborator and as a friend, and he realized in his heart of hearts that there was some truth in what was being said.  

Like I said, I think if SMiLE had been ready for release on time, it would have gotten released. It was all downhill after the holiday season, and perhaps Mike Love had something to do with that. But I don't think Mike's motives were bad, I don't think his assessment was necessarily wrong, and I don't think he was out of line in questioning Brian and voicing his own opinion regarding the album.

That being said, I would have really liked SMiLE to have been finished. It was just ahead of its time, and the technology required to produce the album wasn't available yet. At the end of the day there is really nobody to "blame" for what happened, things just failed to come together. Brian was unhappy with the direction of things, he didn't believe he was capable of realizing his vision for the project, he was concerned with the reactions he was getting from his friends and family. I think Friends was more in line with what Brian wanted, and the post SMiLE period of Smiley-Honey-Friends represented a radical deconstruction of Brian's production aesthetic and its reassembly as something truer to what Brian really had in mind. People often compare SMiLE with Sgt. Peppers, but to me it's Friends that most closely aligns itself to Pepper/MMT-era Beatles (down to connections like Passing By-Flying which is a classic Brian Wilson type put on).

Maybe the reason SMiLE didn't work out was because it wasn't Brian Wilson music. Maybe there simply came a point where he was listening to the tapes and said "that's not me".

[Mr. Cohen]

What exactly did he expect Brian to do, if not the Smile direction?

Mike wanted more "Good Vibrations". He understood that psychedelic music was becoming more popular, and he was willing to take a chance on it. The dark "American gothic trip" Van was on, however, didn't make sense to him. "Boy/girl" lyrics are where it's at for Mike.

Murry is also a dark horse in these discussions. He definitely contributed to Brian's depression.

[SMiLE Brian]

What exactly did he expect Brian to do, if not the Smile direction?

Mike wanted more "Good Vibrations". He understood that psychedelic music was becoming more popular, and he was willing to take a chance on it. The dark "American Gothic trip" Van was on, however, didn't make sense to him. "Boy/girl" lyrics are where it's at for Mike.

Murry is also a dark horse in these discussions. He definitely contributed to Brian's depression.

Honestly, what the heck is an "American Gothic trip"? I think Mike was right asking what SMiLE means on a creative level, i just think the questions came out in the typical abrasive Mike Love way that the  Van Dyke didn't like.

[Mr. Cohen]

Honestly, what the heck is an "American Gothic trip"?

Who cares, though? Do you need Van Dyke to explain that to be convinced that "Cabinessence", "Heroes and Villains", "Surf's Up", and etc. are good songs?  Mike's only creatives input, from what we can tell, is to turn all songs into either boy/girl stories or tales about cars and amusement parks. Mike has gotten so overrated here it's not funny. Sure, he was a good singer and a good, albeit artistically limited lyricist... but he wasn't irreplaceable. "Little Duece Coupe" and "Surfer Girl" were hits without Mike's lyrics. And ny the time of Smile, he wasn't even singing on all the hits anymore. "Do You Wanna Dance", "Help Me Rhonda", "Barbara Ann", and "Good Vibrations" all had one thing in common: no Mike Love leads.  Yes, there was "California Girls" and "Dance, Dance, Dance", but you get the picture: Mike was being marginalized. That was his real problem. The guy was and is pure ego.

[SMiLE Brian]

Honestly, what the heck is an "American Gothic trip"?

Who cares, though? Do you need Van Dyke to explain that to be convinced that "Cabinessence", "Heroes and Villains", "Surf's Up", and etc. are good songs?  Mike's only creatives input, from what we can tell, is to turn all songs into either boy/girl stories or tales about cars and amusement parks. Mike has gotten so overrated here it's not funny. Sure, he was a good singer and a good, albeit artistically limited lyricist... but he wasn't irreplaceable. "Little Duece Coupe" and "Surfer Girl" were hits without Mike's lyrics. And ny the time of Smile, he wasn't even singing on all the hits anymore. "Do You Wanna Dance", "Help Me Rhonda", "Barbara Ann", and "Good Vibrations" all had one thing in common: no Mike Love leads.  Yes, there was "California Girls" and "Dance, Dance, Dance", but you get the picture: Mike was being marginalized. That was his real problem. The guy was and is pure ego.

I'm not the biggest Mike Love supporter or fan either and love the SMiLE music, but i think Van Dyke should have just told him what the songs ment   so Mike could understand the music or at least kinda it accept to help finish the album. SMiLE has a wonderful concept, when understood fully, that is hard to hate by anyone.

[Peter Reum]

The "American Gothic Trip" that Van Dyke Parks is referring to is the picture painted by Grant Wood of an Iowa farm couple with dour looks on their faces. The woman has her hair pinned up in a bun, and the man is bald with what looks like a comb over. He is holding a pitchfork in his hand. The painting`s title is "American Gothic." "....folks sing a song of the grange...."

[SMiLE Brian]

The "American Gothic Trip" that Van Dyke Parks is referring to is the picture painted by Grant Wood of an Iowa farm couple with dour looks on their faces. The woman has her hair pinned up in a bun, and the man is bald with what looks like a comb over. He is holding a pitchfork in his hand. The painting`s title is "American Gothic." "....folks sing a song of the grange...."

Thanks for the answer, Van Dyke's theme is way clearer to me now, with that that picture in mind.

[drbeachboy]

See that was so easy. If only Van Dyke would have spent that 20 to 30 seconds explaining that to Mike back in 1966. Beach Boys history might have been completely different.

[Jeff]

The "American Gothic Trip" that Van Dyke Parks is referring to is the picture painted by Grant Wood of an Iowa farm couple with dour looks on their faces. The woman has her hair pinned up in a bun, and the man is bald with what looks like a comb over. He is holding a pitchfork in his hand. The painting`s title is "American Gothic." "....folks sing a song of the grange...."

The woman is actually supposed to be the man's daughter.

[Shady]

See that was so easy. If only Van Dyke would have spent that 20 to 30 seconds explaining that to Mike back in 1966. Beach Boys history might have been completely different.

It's good he kept his mouth shut, I'm really excited for this box set 

[drbeachboy]

Yeah, only 44 years in the making, but exciting none the less. It's going to be fun year starting October 4th.

[Chocolate Shake Man]

I'm not the biggest Mike Love supporter or fan either and love the SMiLE music, but i think Van Dyke should have just told him what the songs ment  

No serious artist believes that he or she can be any kind of real authority when it comes to his or her own work. Had Van Dyke told Mike Love "what the songs meant" he would have been reinforcing two stances: that there is one meaning to the text and that the author is the one who knows it, not the audience. Even by 1966, both of those stances were quite antiquated and someone with the literary background of Parks surely would have been reluctant to answer and (as we know is true) somewhat surprised at someone even asking the question in the first place.

Ultimately, there is a reason why books of poetry are not accompanied by essays written by the author explaining what the poems mean. It, of course, defeats the whole purpose of the poem in the first place. Great artistic works are presented specifically to be interpreted by an endless amount of viewers/listeners who all come to the text with different backgrounds that will inevitably add a different shade to the interpretation. They are not presented to have one singular meaning so that if you think hard enough you will get it and if you don't you can just ask the artist to whisper it in your ear.

[Chocolate Shake Man]

The "American Gothic Trip" that Van Dyke Parks is referring to is the picture painted by Grant Wood of an Iowa farm couple with dour looks on their faces. The woman has her hair pinned up in a bun, and the man is bald with what looks like a comb over. He is holding a pitchfork in his hand. The painting`s title is "American Gothic." "....folks sing a song of the grange...."

Erm...did Van Dyke say that he was referring to the painting? If not, I'd be extremely skeptical that this is what he was referring to. The American Gothic is a major literary genre. At the forefront of the genre is Edgar Allan Poe who is all over the Smile album, not just because of the reference to "Pit and the Pendulum" in Surf's Up. Rather, the Smile lyrics are enormously indebted to Poe's poetic style. In fact, AGD posted Poe's The Conqueror Worm a few months ago and called attention to its connection to Surf's Up. It may bear re-pasting:

The Conqueror Worm
 
Lo! 'tis a gala night
Within the lonesome latter years.
An angel throng, bewinged, bedight
In veils, and drowned in tears,
Sit in a theatre to see
A play of hopes and fears
While the orchestra breathes fitfully
The music of the spheres.

Mimes, in the form of God on high,
Mutter and mumble low,
And hither and thither fly;
Mere puppets they, who come and go
At bidding of vast formless things
That shift the scenery to and fro,
Flapping from out their condor wings
Invisible Woe.

That motley drama--oh, be sure
It shall not be forgot!
With its Phantom chased for evermore
By a crowd that seize it not,
Through a circle that ever returneth in
To the self-same spot;
And much of Madness, and more of Sin,
And Horror the soul of the plot.

But see amid the mimic rout
A crawling shape intrude:
A blood-red thing that writhes from out
The scenic solitude!
It writhes--it writhes!--with mortal pangs
The mimes become its food,
And seraphs sob at vermin fangs
In human gore imbued.

Out--out are the lights--out all!
And over each quivering form
The curtain, a funeral pall,
Comes down with the rush of a storm,
While the angels, all pallid and wan,
Uprising, unveiling, affirm
That the play is the tragedy, ``Man,''
And the hero, the Conqueror Worm.

So, it seems to me that this is what Parks meant when he referred to "American Gothic" - the literary style that he was indeed using to express his ideas on Smile.

[Chocolate Shake Man]

Like in this video, he says he doesn't know what any of the lyrics mean. But just before that he says it was "an American Gothic trip". Well which is it?

It can easily be both. Godard could tell you that Alphaville is a science fiction story but I think he would find it laughable if someone asked him to explain what the movie "means".

[Micha]

Would the 1993 boxset with the smile material be a good sampler of the SMiLE Box? Amazon is selling it cheap and i have become a beach boys material completionist now...

You don't have the GV box?

wow, get on that. Not only is the smile material essential but so many classic rare songs too. "Still I dream of it" etc

I got mine cheap too, well worth the purchase. Booklet is useless though

I got all the two-fers, i was just worried for the longest time the box was full of music i already had, which isn't true after a detailed look on amazon of the track listening.

The box is worth having for the pre-1965 mono mixes alone. But the unreleased stuff is the essential thing about it.

[Micha]

'Xactly - I open a thread called, ooooooooooooohhhhhhhhhhh, let's say "Smile sessions box set !" and I don't expect to see pointless feces about soccer and Germany for half a page. The Beach Boys are American and they never played soccer. I think in this instance I'm entitled to get pissy(er).

Don't get upset, Andrew. It's already over. 

Hey Micha, what did you think about the Japanese ladies' soccer triumph?

Token BBs reference: SIP.

Ha, don't tease him, you know he's good. I skip quite a lot of posts that bore me, but I never skip any of Andrew's posts, they're always worth reading. (Actually I assumed he'd just skip the soccer ones too.) I'll send you a PM. 

[Micha]

That being said, I would have really liked SMiLE to have been finished.

No way! I want it never to have been finished, and it should stay unfinished forever! 

No, seriously, do you think anybody here wouldn't want SMiLE to have been finished? 

Boyd also suggested that Brian had scraped material that he had been working on in the previous year.

I've been wondering... the January version of H&V from the GV box set does not feature the BR theme. The BR theme isn't part of the earlier "Humble Harv demo" either. Could it be that when Brian turned the BR theme into the H&V chorus he had already scrapped DYLW?

[The Heartical Don]

Honestly, Van Dyke Parks kind of rubs me the wrong way. I just don't like the cut of his jib. I really dislike all that stuff about not being able to explain anything and everything not having any meaning. It seems like an exaggeration to just act like all of it was just absurd nonsense that could never be explained.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tB6JwCmTIEw
Like in this video, he says he doesn't know what any of the lyrics mean. But just before that he says it was "an American Gothic trip". Well which is it? He clearly had something in mind. We'll never know exactly what happened, but it seems like an understanding could have been reached and an explanation could have been offered. In my opinion I think Van Dyke realized the project wasn't going anywhere and he used Mike Love as an excuse to be on his way.

I'm of the opinion that Mike wanted SMiLE to come out. The band had invested quite a bit into the project and as much as Mike didn't like the music I think his overriding concern was simply that Brian do *something*. You can't tell me that after his "victory" in getting SMiLE canned Mike turned around and said "I got it guys! You know all that music I hated and tried to destroy? Let's go rerecord all that for our next album!" For all the talk of "phucking with the formula", it seems they ended up releasing an even stranger album. That alone really makes me wonder.

And all this stuff about "stifling hostility and overbearing family dynamics that came into play whan the band members" seems like an exaggeration. I was under the impression that Carl really admired what Brian was doing. I thought Carl went into the studio for SMiLE sessions whenever he was in town. Certainly Carl was a major advocate of the music in the years after the project's collapse. And what about Dennis? Something tells me he was more concerned with living his rock and roll lifestyle than he was playing mind games with Van Dyke. And then you have Al, who was always tactful, and never seemed to have really upset anybody during the entire run of the band. "overbearing family dynamics" wouldn't be how I'd describe all that.

I profoundly disagree. I shall try to explain.

Asking an artist (and I believe VDP to be a true artist in the lyrics as well as music department) to ‘explain’ his/her art is an insult. Art is no rational construction that, like a computer, can be ‘explained’. If that were so, everybody could learn how to produce art – and we all know that that’s been a pipedream since the dawn of humanity, and it will be that for ever.

In other words: a famous ballet dancer once, after having completed a devilishly difficult dance, was asked: can you explain that what you just did for us? With righteous indignation, the dancer replied: why, do you really, really think that I would have taken all that trouble to do what I did, if I could here, on the spot, explain it to you???

Poetry comes to one, and one can shape it, re-phrase it, make it more accessible (or less, just as one pleases). But God forbid that this extraordinarily complex process of association and (re)combination ever be made ‘explicable’, just like driving lessons, or some biological process, can be.

Van Dyke was rightfully angry about the questions put to him. Explication can be the death of art. If one would succeed in completely explaining Shakespeare, Beethoven, Bach, or the Bible, it would be the end of these works. They are meant to be assimilated, to be lived with, one has to let them ‘sink in’ to ‘get’ them. And they are not meant to be ‘deconstructed’, the latter activity is one of the very worst, and alas highly fashionable ‘achievements’ of the 20th century. It is a murder attempt on art.

Simply put: in this very matter, Mike Love was wrong (or at least naïve and ignorant), and Van Dyke Parks just observed his rights.

PS: Van Dyke Parks is a man of words. He truly has a way with them, and complex sentences with many side branches come naturally to him (I think that part of the reason for this is that he knows his Latin). This certainly does not mean that his statements are somehow ‘unnatural’, or less truthful. He may strike some folks as ‘nerdy’, which isn’t that important. He does not come over to me as being so at all.

[drbeachboy]

Mike spent the previous 5 years singing about the surf, cars, girls and love. What Van Dyke was writing may be poetic and not need explanation, but The Beach Boys were not Shakespeare, Beethoven or Bach. In school, we spend years reading and listening and putting meaning to an artist's work. Van Dyke was an outsider whose poetry turned the Beach Boys on their head. For a band who was singing to 14 to 20 year olds in a straight forward language, this poetry must have been confusing and tricky to sing. It must of felt like they were singing opera.

[The Heartical Don]

Mike spent the previous 5 years singing about the surf, cars, girls and love. What Van Dyke was writing may be poetic and not need explanation, but The Beach Boys were not Shakespeare, Beethoven or Bach. In school, we spend years reading and listening and putting meaning to an artists work. Van Dyke was an outsider whose poetry turned the Beach Boys on their head. For a band who was singing to 14 to 20 year olds in a straight forward language, this poetry must have been confusing and tricky to sing. It must of felt like they were singing opera.

I have more posts than you do.