How Could the Beach Boys Have Kept Themselves Relevant after 1966?

[Phoenix]

The non-delivery of Smile was definitely the biggest blow to their career, image, and relevancy at the time.  Like I said, apart from releasing it then, the best thing would have been just getting up, dusting themselves off, and getting back to what they did best; or more specifically, what the public felt they did best.  I also agree that a set at Montery Pop would have HELPED too.

[Pretty Funky]

Although I was too young to remember them in their heyday (don't get to say that much nowdays BTW ), I would, music quality aside, put it in the perspective of them being the equivalent of some of the boy-bands of the 90s still trying to stay relevant today.

Can't be easy.

[dwtherealbb]

i wrote this on another thread, but I think the post 1966 beach boys would have been most successful as a kind of soft rock group. They probably didn't have the players to be a hardrock group like Led Zep or Black Sabbath but they did have the talent to be sort of a Rundgren/Bread/JT type of group. Something along these lines:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fXq81-cGJr4

[halblaineisgood]

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[Jukka]

It's really nice that you guys have all these helpful ideas, but to be honest, they all sound terrible. I'm just glad things went how they went. The albums didn't sell, but they are filled with great music and they kept their integrity. It's more honorable to flop doing your own thing well than trying to stay relevant by changing your thing after shifting trends.

[Matt Bielewicz]

Off-topic, or certainly only tangentially so, but... what exactly might a 'Smiley-Smile-ised' version of Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band have been like? If SMiLE became Smiley Smile... and all the beautifully arranged, multi-layered Wrecking Crew tracks, all of what Derek Taylor called the 'beautifully designed, finely-wrought, inspirationally welded' pieces of music, became what sounded like a stoned group of barbershop students recording in a living room with a droning electric organ and some bongos... then what's the equivalent for the Beatles? I guess the nearest transition in Beatle history is in going from the opulent and decorous, orchestra & Moog Modular-studded arrangements of 'Abbey Road' to... the next proper musical albums that John and Paul recorded respectively: 'Plastic Ono Band' and 'McCartney'. A guy and a piano screaming out his psychic pain on the advice of his controversial therapist, and a bloke and guitar warbling into a portable tape recorder in a Scottish farmhouse while his wife provides tea and sandwiches and the occasional wonky backing vocal, and remembers to lift Paul's head from his pillow when he's spent so long in bed in a depressed state that he's in danger of smothering himself to death, crazy beard and all.

...hmmm, maybe the Beatles/Beach Boys' stories aren't so *very* different after all...!

So, complete the thought: Imagine a different album. Brian finishes SMiLE to world acclamation, the Beatles are completely wrong-footed, and, after failing to complete their Summer 1967 album and making various incomplete psychedelic experimental recordings instead (which appear on bootlegs with strange titles like 'Baby You're A Rich Man', 'You Know My Name, Look Up The Number' and 'It's All Too Much'), and then quitting Abbey Road for a disastrous rethink and a further long delay cloistered in various home studios, including a makeshift one at George's house in Esher, Kinfauns, they come up with a different album in early 1968: Private Salty's Intimate Telephone Dating Service.

What's on it? And what does it sound like?

Note: much of the time, I hate this kind of counter-factual, 'what if Brian had finished SMiLE in 1967?' stuff, because you can argue about it until you're blue in the face and never get anywhere sensible: fact is, it didn't happen, and if my uncle's thorax was differently constructed, she'd be my aunt. But for once, I thought it might be fun to turn the idea on the Beatles instead...

[Kurosawa]

Off-topic, or certainly only tangentially so, but... what exactly might a 'Smiley-Smile-ised' version of Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band have been like? If SMiLE became Smiley Smile... and all the beautifully arranged, multi-layered Wrecking Crew tracks, all of what Derek Taylor called the 'beautifully designed, finely-wrought, inspirationally welded' pieces of music, became what sounded like a stoned group of barbershop students recording in a living room with a droning electric organ and some bongos... then what's the equivalent for the Beatles? I guess the nearest transition in Beatle history is in going from the opulent and decorous, orchestra & Moog Modular-studded arrangements of 'Abbey Road' to... the next proper musical albums that John and Paul recorded respectively: 'Plastic Ono Band' and 'McCartney'. A guy and a piano screaming out his psychic pain on the advice of his controversial therapist, and a bloke and guitar warbling into a portable tape recorder in a Scottish farmhouse while his wife provides tea and sandwiches and the occasional wonky backing vocal, and remembers to lift Paul's head from his pillow when he's spent so long in bed in a depressed state that he's in danger of smothering himself to death, crazy beard and all.

...hmmm, maybe the Beatles/Beach Boys' stories aren't so *very* different after all...!

So, complete the thought: Imagine a different album. Brian finishes SMiLE to world acclamation, the Beatles are completely wrong-footed, and, after failing to complete their Summer 1967 album and making various incomplete psychedelic experimental recordings instead (which appear on bootlegs with strange titles like 'Baby You're A Rich Man', 'You Know My Name, Look Up The Number' and 'It's All Too Much'), and then quitting Abbey Road for a disastrous rethink and a further long delay cloistered in various home studios, including a makeshift one at George's house in Esher, Kinfauns, they come up with a different album in early 1968: Private Salty's Intimate Telephone Dating Service.

What's on it? And what does it sound like?

Note: much of the time, I hate this kind of counter-factual, 'what if Brian had finished SMiLE in 1967?' stuff, because you can argue about it until you're blue in the face and never get anywhere sensible: fact is, it didn't happen, and if my uncle's thorax was differently constructed, she'd be my aunt. But for once, I thought it might be fun to turn the idea on the Beatles instead...

It's really hard to say. After Peppers and Magical Mystery tour, the Beatles did go to a more striped-down sound on the White Album, but for the most part (excluding Revolution 9), it's still a pretty clean sounding and not too bizarre album, while Smiley Smile is pretty out there. But the White Album and the Get Back sessions are the closest things to Smiley/Wild Honey that the Beatles ever did.

I don't think it's the Beatles comparisons alone, though-and I know that's very, very old hat. A lot of really great mid-60's acts lost popularity from 66-67 on. The Beach Boys were the biggest band that fell off after then, but other groups declined commercially as well.

I really don't think that apart from finishing SMiLE that there was anything else they could have done. And that clearly wasn't possible.

[Jukka]

I don't think it's the Beatles comparisons alone, though-and I know that's very, very old hat. A lot of really great mid-60's acts lost popularity from 66-67 on. The Beach Boys were the biggest band that fell off after then, but other groups declined commercially as well.

Yeah. Think of Herman's Hermits. They were almost as popular as The Beatles, but nobody remebers them anymore. The Beach Boys could have gone their way, but they hung on in there and are still remembered. In a way we/they were lucky to manage through that seismic shift in popular culture alive.

[SufferingFools]

I'm glad they didn't go with the idea of changing their name to "Beach" in the early seventies.  It was not only too late by then, but they might have missed out on the nostalgia wave a few years later.

[harrisonjon]

The Beatles were a self-contained unit whereas the Beach Boys of 1965-66 needed the Wrecking Crew. The Beatles could survive a bad album (such as Let It Be) because they could still make an album like Abbey Road using just their own talents, but The Beach Boys needed a fully functioning Brian + the Wreckin Crew to make an album that was both good and commercial in 1967-69. Sunflower nearly does it but still has non-commercial stuff on it, and the Bruce songs (which I neither like nor dislike) give it a rather corny feel that couldn't have gone down well in the Woodstock era.

I also feel that the home studio idea was a disaster that hasn't been emphasized enough as a factor in the downfall. Putting home-produced tracks on the market in 1967, when music was entering a new age of production, studio wizardry, intellectual musing and "hipness", was just asking to get dumped.

[Phoenix]

I also feel that the home studio idea was a disaster that hasn't been emphasized enough as a factor in the downfall. Putting home-produced tracks on the market in 1967, when music was entering a new age of production, studio wizardry, intellectual musing and "hipness", was just asking to get dumped.

Actually, I think you'll see that's been one of my main arguments in this thread from the start.  We may disagree on some finer points but I think you and I are very like minded indeed. 

[Matt Bielewicz]

...and yet here I come, about to totally DISagree! Still, that's message boards for ya, right?

>snip<

...I also feel that the home studio idea was a disaster that hasn't been emphasized enough as a factor in the downfall. Putting home-produced tracks on the market in 1967, when music was entering a new age of production, studio wizardry, intellectual musing and "hipness", was just asking to get dumped.

...not sure I agree with that last bit, jon. You could just say Brian was ahead of the curve again. Sure, the big albums of 1967 were all about studio trickery (and lots of the singles too - hell, 'Itchycoo Park', released in Summer 1967, actually *invented* a whole new effect, flanging). And yes, music of that year seems relatively festooned with overdubs and effects compared to the more live work of albums up to, say, 1965 — but by just a few months later, there was a reaction to it. John Wesley Harding, parts of the White Album and all that. Plus using studio musicians was becoming seriously passé - just look what happened to the Monkees...

In that light, recording the guys in a home studio singing with minimal instrumentation starts to look like an inspirational idea, not a disaster. I think the Beach Boys' precipitate fall from grace was more to do with their image. To so many, they were still the hip guys of 1964, in their striped shirts and Letterman sweaters - that whole clean-cut look you see on the cover of the Today! album, with the coloured sweaters. But the problem was, it was 1967, 1968, 1969, not 1964 any more. Rock stars looked a whole lot different by then. The best possible illustration of this I know is provided by two images showing the members of what later became The Band, one shot from 1964, the other from 1968. Here ya go:

Levon & The Hawks, 1964
http://theband.hiof.no/band_pictures/levon_and_the_hawks_1964.gif

The Band, 1968
http://theband.hiof.no/band_pictures/landy_vision_01-2003/p63.jpg

Same guys, believe it or not...!

So yeah; there had been a sea change, like you don't really see in popular music much these days, but it did happen again in the UK with punk in 1976-7. A rock star of 1973-4, say one of Emerson, Lake & Palmer, or Yes, looked like a hairy dinosaur alongside Johnny Rotten or Joe Strummer by 1978. However unfair that might *actually* have been to ELP or Yes in hindsight. And so it was with the Beach Boys in 1967-71. They had become seriously uncool, in the USA at least, and that's the kiss of death for pop stars.

Of course, Smiley Smile was *also*... quite strange, which didn't help their diminishing success (much as I personally love, love, *love* that record). But Wild Honey and 20/20 are absolutely not uncommercial-sounding albums. Friends is a bit more 'down-home', sure, but by the time it was released, that kind of sound was more popular. Less had become more. So I think it's not the sound of the albums that did for the Beach Boys in the States in the late 60s. The problems lay outside the music.

Just my two pennies' worth, mind...

[Phoenix]

Plus using studio musicians was becoming seriously passé - just look what happened to the Monkees...

I was actually thinking about them in relation to this very thread today.  And while it's true that they got a ton of sh!t for their use of studio musicians, not only were they already behind the eightball with the hip crowd (for getting their record deal by being "cast" rather than paying their dues in the clubs), the important thing that everyone forgets about that fiasco is that it was self-inflicted.  Fed up, Nesmith called a press conference and blew the whistle on the whole recording process, while Brian and the guys (and everyone one else in the LA music scene) whistled innocently, hoping no one would bring them into the "scandal".  (I always felt it ironic that many of the same trades who praised Pet Sounds spit on the Monkees for doing the exact same thing, WITH EVEN THE SAME MUSICIANS!) 

But I digress.  The other thing to do is indeed look what ELSE happened to the Monkees.

Most of us agree that Brian "dropped the ball" from a commercial stand point by not finishing Smile.  Well something people forget is that in the time between the release Pet Sounds and the scrapping of Smile, the Monkees' debut album was released, featuring "music for Beatles fans' younger siblings"; containing extremely polished, commercial pop songs.  They then followed that album with the biggest seller of 1967 and followed THAT with the artistically vindicating folk/rock masterpiece that had the unfortunate circumstance of being released just before Sgt. Pepper's, thereby being COMPLETELY overshadowed (tho only by ONE chart position on the Billboard Album Chart) for the entire summer of love.  Undeterred, the band soldiered on and finished the year by releasing Pisces, Aquarius, Capricorn & Jones, Ltd., which many people consider to be their finest "album" in regards to the "full listening experience" that really began driving the Pop market around then.

So not only did the Boys blow it (for the latter half of the 60's) with the bungling hat trick of scrapping Smile, bowing out of Motery Pop, and failing to deliver consistent commercial product, but the Monkees (of all people) were right there at the right time and place, with the exact right musical frame of mind, to fill the void the Boys had created.  The niche was (perfectly) filled, resulting in the Prefabs going on to be the biggest selling artist (by far!) during the most important year in the evolution of rock-n-roll!

[Chocolate Shake Man]

The release of Smile is really an either/or situation. I fail to see how Smile would have, at the time, affirmed their place as important artists amongst the hip, serious rock music crowd when Pet Sounds had failed to achieve that. What it could have been was a commercial success but that would mean it would have to rely heavily on the success of Good Vibrations and so Smile would have had to come out fairly quickly - and even that wouldn't have secured anything for Smile. After all, Pet Sounds had Sloop John B. which was a major hit, going to #3 and that didn't necessarily push Pet Sounds into the the top echelons of the charts. Pet Sounds ultimately failed to please in the way that the previous albums didn't at the time because it wasn't the kind of album that the teenyboppers were expecting or wanting nor did the serious rock music fan particularly care to any great extent about what The Beach Boys were doing. This is why I don't think a performance at Monterey would have really helped their chances either, though that has for a long time been the accepted response.

[SunBurn]

It's really nice that you guys have all these helpful ideas, but to be honest, they all sound terrible. I'm just glad things went how they went. The albums didn't sell, but they are filled with great music and they kept their integrity. It's more honorable to flop doing your own thing well than trying to stay relevant by changing your thing after shifting trends.

I think there is merit in both points of view.

The Beach Boys could have recorded exactly the same material and released the exact same albums, but could have made better choices of A-sides. Look at The Beatles: they released some very "out there" material from '66-'70, but the A-sides were almost always more commercial, more fully produced, and less obviously experimental (or at least less strange) than other choices they might have made during this period: "Penny Lane", "All You Need is Love", "Hello Goodbye", "Lady Madonna", "Hey Jude", "Get Back", "The Ballad of John and Yoko", "Something", "Let it Be". I read somewhere that Lennon wanted "You Know My Name (Look Up the Number)" as an A-side in 1970, but "cooler heads prevailed". Unfortunately, it doesn't seem like cooler heads always prevailed when it came to picking Beach Boys A-sides.

[Phoenix]

Hear, hear.

[dwtherealbb]

another thing i've wondered is if rambunctious onstage antics early in their career would have helped them later on. Would they have attracted a larger following if Dennis had made his "quaaludes and cocaine" comment fifteen years earlier.

[halblaineisgood]

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[halblaineisgood]

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[halblaineisgood]

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[hypehat]

The release of Smile is really an either/or situation. I fail to see how Smile would have, at the time, affirmed their place as important artists amongst the hip, serious rock music crowd when Pet Sounds had failed to achieve that. What it could have been was a commercial success but that would mean it would have to rely heavily on the success of Good Vibrations and so Smile would have had to come out fairly quickly - and even that wouldn't have secured anything for Smile. After all, Pet Sounds had Sloop John B. which was a major hit, going to #3 and that didn't necessarily push Pet Sounds into the the top echelons of the charts. Pet Sounds ultimately failed to please in the way that the previous albums didn't at the time because it wasn't the kind of album that the teenyboppers were expecting or wanting nor did the serious rock music fan particularly care to any great extent about what The Beach Boys were doing. This is why I don't think a performance at Monterey would have really helped their chances either, though that has for a long time been the accepted response.

I know you disregard the teen press (and for good reasons), but Pet Sounds was possibly the stepping stone - you had a lot of industry folks, The Beatles, etc, suddenly admiring that as a great 'record' (granted, a lot of people have said that in retrospect), then the Beach Boys got some 'hip' cachet, then Good Vibrations cemented it for them - and more importantly, for the record buying public. That and the articles Derek Taylor was penning was giving The Beach Boys some press momentum...
If Smile had come out even in the most basic, twelve track/no cross fade form, I think people would have gone nuts for it in the sort of event album sense that Sgt. Pepper had simply as The New Beatles Album - it was the hyped new Beach Boys album. Whilst I think the 'people clamouring for Smile all over the place' is a tad overstated by people, people were starting to care about The Beach Boys as an 'artistic' band thanks to that one-two punch of PS and GV and Taylor's writing - it was in the air, at least. Smile would have confirmed it, but we know how this story goes...

[runnersdialzero]

The Beatles were a self-contained unit whereas the Beach Boys of 1965-66 needed the Wrecking Crew. The Beatles could survive a bad album (such as Let It Be) because they could still make an album like Abbey Road using just their own talents, but The Beach Boys needed a fully functioning Brian + the Wreckin Crew to make an album that was both good and commercial in 1967-69. Sunflower nearly does it but still has non-commercial stuff on it, and the Bruce songs (which I neither like nor dislike) give it a rather corny feel that couldn't have gone down well in the Woodstock era.

I also feel that the home studio idea was a disaster that hasn't been emphasized enough as a factor in the downfall. Putting home-produced tracks on the market in 1967, when music was entering a new age of production, studio wizardry, intellectual musing and "hipness", was just asking to get dumped.

Yeah, okay.

[harrisonjon]

There seems to have been a big pop v rock split in 1968, with bands having to choose to go one way or the other. I think with Brian it would have to be pop, albeit with an edge. The acid-soaked feel of Smile would have fit 1967 OK but there would still have needed to be a change of direction afterwards: an edgier Monkees or Mamas & The Papas might have been the only route. I don't see them as a politically conscious band: they just weren't aware enough of those issues. They were essentially detached in something of a California bubble and had to work within those confines. They weren't universal in the way that The Beatles were and they couldn't rock out like The Who or The Stones.

[I. Spaceman]

The reasons The Beach Boys weren't relevant after 1966 are the exact reasons they are relevant now.

[Mike's Beard]

Well said.