Johnny B. Good from the same show.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QjK5wSAF-zI

I Get Around

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rNYI2zoGBVI

Surf's Up would have been a cool name.

Did anyone ever find out the individual(s) who changed their name, and if they considered any other alternatives?

If you mean in the beginning, wasn't it Russ Regan, the DJ, on his own? Or a similar personality?  Too lazy to run to the book shelf to look up something I've known for years.

I always thought it was someone at the record company. I could be wrong.

According to Tobler and White, at least, it was Regan, described by Tobler as a Candix publicist, and by White as an agent for Buckeye Record Distributors, which handled Candix's product locally.

Hmmm, maybe we shouldn't have moved back from Vegas to Texas.  Nahhh, saw him at the Red Rock Casino there in May, that will hold me for a while. But it does sound like fun.

Seriously, what's up with "can't speak to the original key" after it was already posted? Anyway...

Good grief, all I meant was I didn't have the hands-on knowledge of the original key.  Until this thread, as far as I recall, I'd only seen a chord chart with the Dm sequence, and my Irving Music sheet music, copyright 1966, has it in Dm, so that's how I'd always played it. Obviously some of you folk already knew the original key.  I didn't. So that's "what's up" with that.

Knectel plays the Hammond B3 through a Leslie speaker on Good Vibrations, right?  One handed. Ebm, Db, Abm, Bb.

Definitely Hammond through Leslie, but on the chords I hear and play a B major instead of Ab minor. If you listen to the bass line, it's outlining a B major chord with the notes F#-B-F#, B-C#-D# , which is a classic B major triad/arpeggio with the passing tone C# for melodic movement.

That's not saying it sounds wrong to play Ab minor, in fact after your post I grabbed my beater acoustic and ran Ab minor to test it, and it fit, but with the bassline being so strong on B major I still have to go with that. Of course that's just my ears and what I've taught my students who have learned that tune on bass and guitar, I have been wrong before! 

Another interpretation by a pretty good piano player and fan, Francis Greene - says the original key is D# :

Dm................................C.......................................Bb..................................................A7
I, I love the colorful clothes she wears, and the way the sunlight plays upon her hair
Dm...............................C..............................Bb............................................................A7.....C7

I always thought the verse had the chords Eb, Ab, Gb.

It's definitely not in Dm as that transcription says, it's 100% starting on the Eb minor chord. The chorus cycles through, changing keys a whole step up for each key change. He starts on Gb (I'm picking up good vibrations...), changes up to Ab for the next one, then finally gets to Bb for the last, and Bb acting as the dominant chord resolves exactly where it would be expected to go, back to Eb minor.

It's the same kind of compositional and harmonic thing Brian did on the chorus of California Girls, but on that one he changed keys down a whole step every time the chorus hook was sung, going from B maj, to A maj, to G maj, and ending back in B.

Pretty neat thing to have three key changes in a chorus, and since he went up instead of down on GV's chorus, it didn't sound like he was copying himself from an earlier hit's chorus.

I'm a room and a half from my piano and my arms aren't long enough to compensate, but it sounds like Francis just moved the whole thing down a half step for simplicity sake (Ebm down to Dm; Gb down to F, etc.)? i've never played it against the record either on guitar or piano, so can't speak to the original key.

I kinda wish the Dodgers were playing the Giants that night (maybe they were) and the two Brian Wilsons could've posed for a picture together. I'm not sure which Brian Wilson has had more injuries the last couple of years...

That would have been a good pic. I think our (the Giants) Brian Wilson is going to go off to some other team. But we're keeping this one here - even if he does have a  . . . Dodgers jersey. . .  on.

I thought Brian was right handed!

Maybe he got confused and was actually catching it. 

ok i'm probably pissing a lot of when i keep talking about the beatles, but one of the things I've wondered is why the beatles kept producing hits while the beach boys mostly didn't. Even after 1966, the beatles had quite a few hits:
Strawberry Fields Forever/Penny Lane
All You Need Is Love/Baby You're A Rich Man
Hello Goodbye/I Am the Walrus
Lady Madonna/The Inner Light
Hey Jude/Revolution
Get Back/Don't Let Me Down
Let It Be/You Know My Name
The Ballad of John and Yoko/Old Brown Shoe
Come Together/Something

There are only a handful of songs on this list that I enjoy. Penny Lane, Lady Madonna, Get Back, Let It Be, Ballad of John and Yoko, Something. The rest of them, I'll stick to the Beach Boys.

I think the name is fine, really don't think that caused any image damage.  IMO it was the Baywatch lovin', crocodile rockin' 80's cheeze fest. 

Probably as much as anything else, especially after the mid-70's comeback.

Surf's Up would have been a cool name.

Did anyone ever find out the individual(s) who changed their name, and if they considered any other alternatives?

If you mean in the beginning, wasn't it Russ Regan, the DJ, on his own? Or a similar personality?  Too lazy to run to the book shelf to look up something I've known for years.

The Beach Boys has always been a cool name for a band. Its an iconic name, perfect in its simplicity.

Yes.

Wasn't it billed as "A Celebration of California featuring Fifth Dimension, members of the Beach Boys,..." etc. etc.? Something to do with a centenial of some sort for California or some such?

OK, found it on NFL site: "A celebration of music and history of California. Performances by The Fifth Dimension, Lee Greenwood and members of the Beach Boys."

Well, that should stop some of the debate.  But it won't.

'The Beach Boys' is a terrible name, and it really damaged the group's reputation from 1965 onwards. ('The Pendletons' and 'Carl and the Passions' would have been even worse -- too redolent of 50's doo wop.)

I mean,  most of the names of bands formed in the early 60's came to sound a bit dated later in the decade -- Gerry and the Pacemakers, Paul Revere and the Raiders, the Four Seasons, even the Beatles. But the name, 'the Beach Boys', unlike most of those other names, seems too tied down to a particular fad : surfing.

The Beatles were allowed to go from "I Wanna Hold Your Hand" to "Tomorrow Never Knows" without people holding the naivete of those earlier songs against them, in a way that the Beach Boys weren't. 'Surfin' USA' and 'Little Deuce Coup' always loomed too large in the mind of the public, even while they were producing 'Heroes and Villains' -- and for that, I blame the band's name.

Would the Boys have better withstood the battering that their reputation and image underwent in the late 60's, if the group name were 'the Kingsmen',  or 'the Ventures', for instance?

This is a joke, right?

In 1965 I was visiting my aunt and uncle in San Jose during summer vacation and they liked the Concert and All Summer Long albums was I playing for them  But I could never figure out on a map where "Ballport, California" (concert intro) was until my uncle explained the Beach Boys were from "Hawthorne, California", and also I knew of Burlingame on the SF peninsula and figured it was a big town, but I didn't know about Blasingame, then my aunt told me Mike was really singing "I'm not braggin' babe so don't put me down", not "I know Blasingame's an awful big town". Then they played the Getz-Gilberto "Girl From Ipanema" album for me, and had to buy me a copy before I went home to the ranch. That opened up another whole new world of smooth Latin jazz.  And it was good to hear my aunt and uncle tell me about the Beach Boys concert they saw in Lake Tahoe in the mid-80's - - - and knew all the songs, even the one about Blasingame.

 

Don't want to be rude or anything, but what's the deal with 'The Monkeys' in this and other BBs threads?

I personally don't like them, find them boring and overall uninteresting - compared to all the good stuff happening back in the 60s. Why are we comparing them to the band that produced the best record in history? To the band led by an acknowledged musical genius and a TM master Jedi?

If comparisons are made, for whatever reason, please use top names. Not the dull Monkeys.

And sorry, don't mean to offend anyone, but its already difficult enough defending the Boys when Mike & Bruce play Seaworld *sigh*

Yes, I certainly can't see any possible reason whatsoever to draw Beach Boys parallels with the Monkees. After all, the Beach Boys have nothing in common with a band who, for a few years in the mid-60s, were the most popular American band of the time, the Beatles' only serious competition, who after a string of light pop hits started making strange, experimental music that lost them nearly all their fanbase overnight, who recorded in LA using many of the best session musicians but who played on far more of their own records than they're given credit for, who, if they're given credit at all by critics, tend only to get it for one album even though their work after that was far better, who have a member named Michael whose son Christian performs with him, whose work between 1967 and 1970 is pretty much ignored but utterly spectacular, whose 1980s and 1990s work is horrible, who have had remasters produced by Andrew Sandoval, whose lead singer is bald but thinks if he wears a hat no-one will realise this, and who had a reunion tour last year, featuring the eccentric genius and most talented member of the band who hadn't played live with them since the mid-90s, and who hadn't played much with them at all since the 1960s -- a reunion tour that was hugely successful, though many fans wished that the percussion-playing sex symbol of the band, whose name started with D, was still alive to join in, though he was represented by video footage.

Yeah, makes no sense at all for people to bring the Monkees up, does it?

   Love it.  That's great.

Yes, Carl on the "Rhonda" 45 solo.
Contrary to popular belief, Carl played virtually ALL the guitar solos on Beach Boys records in the '60s.  Exceptions would be the instrumentals "Summer Means New Love" (Tommy Tedesco) and "Pet Sounds" (Billy Strange), and of course "Bluebirds" (Eddie Carter...probably also Eddie on "All I Want To Do", as the tone is pretty similar).  Right now I can't think of any other BBs guitar solos from the '60s that weren't Carl. 

Does this include all the instrumentals on Surfin' USA?  I always presumed they were Carl, and figured that was pretty good for a teen-ager, why couldn't I play Honkey Tonk and Miserlou like that myself, after all I was a teen-ager, too, but then later when the whole business about studio musicians and wrecking crews and the allegations that the band didn't really play anything in the studio from the beginning, blah, blah, blah, I began to wonder (and wanted to think "Hah! He wasn't that much better than me after all" - what a joke). Then when the stories began to be torn down by facts, I was back to what I always had believed in the 60's - that was Carl.  Correct?

Yes, correct:  Carl.

Thank you.  My day is complete   I was so let down when I was led to believe he hadn't played any of that.  Great stuff for a young picker and I always wanted to know it was really Carl.  Wish some of their songs in later years had featured more of that, but, things move on . . . . . .

Yes, Carl on the "Rhonda" 45 solo.
Contrary to popular belief, Carl played virtually ALL the guitar solos on Beach Boys records in the '60s.  Exceptions would be the instrumentals "Summer Means New Love" (Tommy Tedesco) and "Pet Sounds" (Billy Strange), and of course "Bluebirds" (Eddie Carter...probably also Eddie on "All I Want To Do", as the tone is pretty similar).  Right now I can't think of any other BBs guitar solos from the '60s that weren't Carl. 

Does this include all the instrumentals on Surfin' USA?  I always presumed they were Carl, and figured that was pretty good for a teen-ager, why couldn't I play Honkey Tonk and Miserlou like that myself, after all I was a teen-ager, too, but then later when the whole business about studio musicians and wrecking crews and the allegations that the band didn't really play anything in the studio from the beginning, blah, blah, blah, I began to wonder (and wanted to think "Hah! He wasn't that much better than me after all" - what a joke). Then when the stories began to be torn down by facts, I was back to what I always had believed in the 60's - that was Carl.  Correct?

Like Al Jardine put it on one of the documentaries, the middle eight (I think that was how he referred to it, maybe the bridge) of Wouldn't It Be Nice would be an accomplishment for many song writers.  Just the middle eight.

I love all of it, and am often drawn to the "other songs", meaning, not WIB or GOK or SJB etc, but rather I Know There's An Answer, That's Not Me, I'm Waiting For The Day. I was particularly drawn to Here Today, Caroline, No, and later in life, I Just Wasn't . . . . . .  (as a teen-ager in 1966 the personal dynamic wasn't apparent, but years later I realized it really had been even then).  I bought this record within the first month it was released and loved it from the first two seconds of the first track. One of the first guitar parts I picked out on my own was following the melody on "Pet Sounds", and Lets Go Away For A While was amazing. I'd followed the band's movement from surfing to hot rods to girls to the changes witnessed in Today and Summer Days, this offering seemed fine to me, and had no idea for years the "problem" the record was. To this day I don't understand what all the hub-bub was about.

The entire band was using iPhone to communicate during the tour, including the old guy principals. Al Jardine even said so and said he had a hard time getting the hang of it but was trying. I really don't understand why some people insist that Mike would never post on Facebook or knows how to use a computer, even.  It's not that hard to believe or that controversial.  But whatever.  I wonder what it would pay to post things about Dorito commercials during the Super Bowl and pretend you're Mike Love. If it wasn't Mike himself, they deserved a bonus for that.

The only reason i questioned whether Mike was now using a personal computer, like a desk-top version, not an iPhone, is because I have read several times over the last several years, attributed to him if not a direct quote, that he never has/had and wasn't interested in doing so. I would have no reason or ability to comment on it otherwise. And no, I can't cite a specific source.

Some interesting points that I hadn't heard previously, like 'Some Of Your Love' originally being 'Mike Come Back To LA'...

Someone patently hasn't read my book. Or seen the Our Team promo video.

Andrew, bear with us.  Not all of us have read your book or seen the Our Team promo. If I had your book, I'd read it.  If I had access to the Our Team promo, I'd watch it.  I'm sure we all would. but we don't all have, or haven't yet had, the opportunity for one reason or another.  So, we comment on or ask questions about things some people already know. That's a good way to learn things. We don't mean to inconvenience anyone.

Mike used to comment how he had never used a computer and implied he didn't really want to.  Has that changed?

Maybe Brian was vaccinated with a phonograph needle. . . . and the music just started pouring out.

Yes.  Lahaina Aloha.  Played it twenty times in a row the first time around. Didn't mind the rest of that album either, as a whole. Some of it not so much, but what the heck.

I'm guessing there's something called "dance music" as a genre.  I'm too old to know that for sure. I was simply thinking of songs you can dance to like we did in the 60's. It has nothing to do with music intellectualism or musical depth or artistic merit or anything.