The Smiley Smile Message Board

Has an audience recording/soundboard ever emerged from the night that "Here Comes The Night" was booed by the audience?  Also - anyone know how far into the song they got?  And what the hell was the deal with the crowd - weren't they playing a hit single??

I've heard a recording of them doing it live. The audience boos when Mike is trying to introduce the song, but everybody claps at the end, just like every other song.

How anticlimactic.

It was booed all four nights that it was played, however, recordings have only come out of the shows on March 1st and March 3rd of 1979. I think "unfairly booed" is accurate to a point. There are lots of cries of "this song sucks!" and "you sold out!" and "don't buy it!" but nothing worse than any bar band has endured. Needless to say, being booed must not have sat well with Carl, since the song was dropped after March 4th.

"Nothing worse than a bar band" is a relative term when you're the Beach Boys and used to constant adoration! Thosse reactions are funny, though. Would they rather they play their cult classics like California Girls or Be True To Your School?

A bizarre but funny anecdote from one of the Radio City shows (I think it was the first one) is that you can very clearly hear a guy requesting a song throughout parts of the show: "Tears in the Morning!" he says in a thick New York accent.

What you say may have been true in 1979, but in the US, I think they went through worse in the 1968-70 era. At that time (1979), the classics are all most concert goers wanted to hear. Luckily, by then they had a merda load of em.

By 1979, between Top 40, AC, and the UK chart, The Boys' had 37 hits that on records runs over 97 minutes long. Throw in a few select album cuts and you have a full two hour concert (about average back then). How many Bands have/had that luxury? That's pretty amazing!

I think calling it a "hit" single is a bit of an exaggeration. It made it to #44 with more promotion than practically any Beach Boys single ever...definitely not what I'd call a hit. More like a dud.

Come on Jon, for that time #44 wasn't that bad. Even Good Timin' only hit #40. Only Rock & Roll Music did better on the charts. I was living Phoenix in 1976 and It's OK rarely got played down there. I think I heard it a couple times and then poof, it was gone.

I just don't know  the f*** they were thinking by doing a disco song let alone remaking a good song into a shitty disco song. They should've done a punk song, I guess Roller Skating Child was pretty close. But a lot of bands went disco at that time, the Stones, Kiss etc. That was just a sad time for rock in general.

They were trying to cash in on a fad. Two problems though, they did it when disco was starting to decline and they underestimated the fan reaction to the change.

By the time "Here Comes the Night" was released, disco was experiencing a sizable backlash, hence the boos from people who hated disco.

I would have much rather heard them play the Wild Honey arrangement of HCTN (love that "hiccup" chorus).

Yeah, you have remember just how hated the disco genre was in '79. Around this time future Brian Wilson collaborator Steve Dahl organized a massive "let's burn disco records" publicity stunt in Chicago (feel the hate here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Xsrz-6U_hc).

Also, I remember attending a Talking Heads concert in November of that year where the crowd roared its approval when David Byrne sang "This ain't no disco..." in "Life During Wartime", even though the line is clearly not meant to demean disco, but to suggest that the anxiety and paranoia of the times has squelched simple fun.

"It's OK" charted at a peak of #29.  As Jon stated, give the push from Caribou - check out the various promo edits and DJ reservices - a chart figure of #44 was a comparative disaster

I understand what Jon was saying, but overall throughout the 70's just getting a single to chart decent in the US had to be considered something of a success.

It got a ton of airplay where I lived.  I was surprised when I found out later it wasn't a bigger hit than it was.

I was in Philly visting from the end of May to mid-August. I never heard it once on the radio. When I got back to Phoenix, I heard it there a few times over a week's time and then it was gone. I was on both sides of the country that summer, and in neither city saw much airplay. Makes me wonder what cities it was big in to garner an overall #29 chart position?

i was told that the beach boys themselves pulled the plug on the 45 hctn. they pulled it off the market. in late march 1979 the 45 was climbing the single chart with a star.  by late april it had stalled and off the chart and good timin' was on the 45 chart.
but all these years i thought the group pulled the 45 which would explain it falling off the chart so fast.
guess i was told wrong  it seems.