The Smiley Smile Message Board

I've noticed this. I've heard every other pop band from that time on a station of some kind. Why not the Beach Boys?

Because (to my knowledge) they haven't been played on the TV show Supernatural which is where most of these stations seem to get their play list ideas from.

because are considered "Oldies" by most stations (at least their hits)...

Not enough guitar riffs and boring jams.

They came before FM radio.

Oldies radio that includes the Sixties or Fifties hasn't existed for years, meaning the kind of stations that play things like the Four Tops or Gary Puckett and the Union Gap.  The people that listened to that type of radio ten years ago got too old for advertisers to be interested in reaching.  Oldies radio now goes back to the 1970's at the latest.  They will sometimes slip in something older like the Beatles but the Beach Boys aren't the Beatles.  They also didn't have any major hits in the 1970's or later except for Kokomo.  I'm sure Kokomo gets played on the type of stations that play Kenny G. but not the types of stations that play classic rock.  It isn't rock.

And all the oldies stations' formats have gone to sh*t in the past ten years, so pretty much the only BB song you hear on said format is Kokomo.

I remember growing up and we had two oldies stations (this was the late 90s), and they both were awesome. 50s/60s and the tiniest bit of 70s. Now it's 60s/70s/80s, focusing mostly on the latter two. Bleh.

The songs that would fit into that format (Sail On Sailor, Feel Flows for example) were not hits.

I don't know if it's just the case of tuning in at the right moments but I've turned the dial several times over the past five years and found "Wouldn't It Be Nice", "God Only Knows", "Help Me Rhonda", "Barbara Ann", and "I Get Around".  I guess it just happens to be when you tune in what you'll find. 

They are not why god made classic rock radio.

Let's face it, very little of what the BBs did in the 60's/70's falls into (what is perceived as) classic rock territory.

i was in the hardware store last week and heard "I Can Hear Music" on some kind of station that played 'oldies'.

Kinda made a man outta me. :afro

I was fortunate to be around two really great classic rock stations in the 80's and one great oldies station. The classic rock station was 94 WYSP in Philly. I still have cassettes of when they played full Beach Boys albums, in sequence with no breaks, like Pet Sounds, Live In London, and various others scattered around. The 'Boys were not in heavy rotation by any means, but on evenings when they'd loosen the format a bit and have some really progressive DJ's from the days when there were such things as free-form FM radio, it was incredible. For Beach Boys, you'd turn to the oldies stations, even in the 80's when the band was releasing new music and something like Kokomo was on top 40, MTV, and some oldies stations at the same time.

Why the lack of their music in general on classic rock formats? Programmers decided sometime in the early 70's that they didn't fit the rock format. "Endless Summer" only made them more of an oldies band, even though the tracks were less than ten years old at the time. Radio is a weird thing. It's unfortunate a lot of listeners didn't hear BB's tracks on rock stations, and that it didn't carry over.

There was an article which I have somewhere from the early 70's, maybe the Surf's Up era if I recall, where the writer did an expose on the radio business and how records were chosen to be played on air. One programmer is depicted getting whatever Beach Boys single was new at that time on his desk, as he was going through a stack of new releases to pick out what to put on his station's playlist. When he saw "Beach Boys", he passed on it immediately, if I recall, without even playing it. And it was because of the band's image. Or perceived image. I guess that carried through several decades among those who made such decisions.

I hear them often on oldies, but especoially in summer I hear California Girls, Good Vibrations, and God Only Knows. That's about all I have heard on ROCK 101.

It's a moot deal, because these are the same horrible ClearChannel programmers that think the only songs Elton John ever did are Bennie And the Jets and Crocodile Rock.

It's barely real radio at all, sadly.

Since God made the radio, He needs to come down from heaven and kick some *ss after seeing what they've done with His handiwork.

Sirius/XM channel Deep Tracks regularly plays SUNFLOWER through HOLLAND era tracks.

we had a satellite oldies station at my old work that would play things like Breakaway, I Can Hear Music and Do It Again along with the older stuff. I also heard the original versions of Gee, Hushabye and Why Do Fools. pretty cool.

These can offer up some pretty neat surprises...through the years and different places of employment, this kind of subscription radio especially on oldies formats has offered up good stuff like this, much better than what commercial radio too often has become. I just told someone this week about the time they started piping in a classical satellite station, and the reaction was so negative and actually angry among the workers on the floor, they changed it back to the rotation oldies-pop-etc. format within a few days. Classical is just fine, but not in a factory environment. :)

But there is still that element of a live DJ and the static and all of that which you get driving in a car with the radio blastin'. It's an experience I hope never gets replaced by digital, programmed subscription radio.

Here in Philadelphia, our local oldies station 98.1 WOGL plays the usual suspects...Surfin' USA, Fun, Fun, Fun, Don't Worry Baby, I Get Around, Help Me Rhonda, California Girls, Barbara Ann, Wouldn't It Be Nice, and Good Vibrations. Some of the adult contemporary stations play Kokomo, but that's a given.

Wasn't aware WOGL was playing all those - I hear Kokomo, and once in a blue moon, WIBN. Not that I listen to that station much anymore. WOGL (along with the other oldies station in the Philly area - forget the call letters) was a great station around ten + years ago.....growing up as a kid it was a godsend that I got to hear all that music on the radio and grow up digging and collecting the 50s and 60s sounds. Program director Tommy McCarthy still emcees some doo wop shows at the Keswick, I chatted with him a couple times about the change in WOGL's direction. Of course, I knew the answer already, that they couldn't make enough money staying with the same demographic. He didn't seem to sad about it, though. I told him what he was playing wasn't "oldies" in the original sense of the word. Oldies is a specific style of music, just because something is __ doesn't mean it's an oldie. He didn't seem to agree with that, but whatever.

Sometimes I can pull in WVLT from Vineland, NJ - it's a long shot. But they play almost exclusively 50s and 60s, lots of Beach Boys in the summer! Now THAT's a station that deserves the oldies tag.

I think most classic rock stations have this playlist:

Stairway to Heaven
Free Bird
Layla
Dream On
We Will Rock You
Money
Won't Get Fooled Again

Deep Cut -- Start Me Up

I may be missing one or two.

A lot of the dudes that love classic rock would probably punch their radios out if it went from "Won't Get Fooled Again" to "Wouldn't it Be Nice."

I'm old enough to remember when FM rock stations were progressive and regularly played entire albums by artists (or four or five cuts from a given album in a row). Even as late as the 1978 or 1979, rock stations would mix in Elvis Costello, Graham Parker or Talking Heads with The Who and Led Zeppelin. By the early 80s, the format just froze and it became the same twenty songs by Zeppelin, The Who, Pink Floyd, Aerosmith, etc. By 1990, these rock stations were rechristened "classic rock" so they could continue to play the same twenty songs from the 70s they played in 1982...a format that remains unchanged to this day.

Anyway, the Beach Boys weren't widely accepted on classic rock radio when the format was really loose in the 70s because they weren't considered "rock" enough and Rolling Stone had deemed them irrelevant in '67. On "Oldies" stations, however, they were always popular...but you would only hear the hits up through "Good Vibrations".

For the Philly-area folks...were you listening from about 1987-1992? There was some GREAT radio going on in Philly. It actually spoiled me a bit because I have compared so much radio since and 99% falls way short of that standard. Let me jog a few memories, see if any of these ring a bell:

94 WYSP (the best...) - Ed Sciaky's "Sunday Night Alternative". When he got away from his Renaissance and Springsteen fetishes ( :-D), he'd play some great stuff. He played Smile tracks one Sunday night. I taped it - blew my mind.

The overnight guy was named Rick Allen, and his show was "The Ricky Mess", a really loose, no-playlist freeform kind of show. I remember being up at some ungodly hour, my alarm went off, and the first song I heard was Ricky playing "Listen To The Band" by the Monkees. Find me another station with that one on their playlist!

The "Sunday Night Sixpack" - 6 albums spun in their entirety. They did Pet Sounds like this more than once, other BB's too. Great album selections. Same with Tuesday nights, at midnight I think they spun a full album as well, no breaks. Another night would be a concert broadcast, usually something like the King Biscuit Flower Hour type of packaged show, and another night was the call-in show "Rockline".

Sunday morning - Andre Gardner spinning his Beatles rarities, he was on WYSP late 80's-early 90's (when all of the Unsurpassed Masters stuff started to come out). He still spins Beatles on 102.9, Sundays from 7 to 9 AM. Great guy, great show, one of my all time favorite radio personalities. I won a John Lennon art print from a trivia contest he had on air. :-D

With 98 WOGL - remember Hy Lit had a flashback type of show where he'd pick a certain week and spin the trecords from that week, along with news items and trivia? He'd play some obscure, non-playlist songs that were a welcome addition to the playlist.

Speaking of playlists, 98 WOGL was always kind of tight with their playlist, yet you would still be able to hear Chuck Berry, 50's Elvis, doo-wop (apart from Street Corner Sunday Night), etc. I knew it was all but doomed when I heard songs from that fucking "Footloose" soundtrack and "Jack And Diane" after switching to 98 one day in the car. That was a few years ago - very sad. Fucking Footloose on an oldies station... ;D

Of course, Rockin' Ron with the Elvis show...still going strong.

Mention Kokomo and every time WOGL advertised their "Vacation A Day Giveaway" contest this year, they'd use the sax solo that Mike pretended to play in the Kokomo video as the background theme. And they looped it, so the words were read over that "brrrrrwheeeee...." first note of the sax solo, then the loop would play for a few seconds, and again "breewheeee...". Ad nauseam.

WYSP was the best, and rarely lapsed into that 'classic rock' syndrome that plagues the format today. It all literally collapsed when some genius programmer in Philly decided listeners would rather hear a "Rock And Jock" format where pundits would get loud and argue about the Eagles and Phillies, and in between all that they'd play schlock metal and hard rock music to get them even more wound up. That was a *much better* choice than being the best music station in Philly... :)

I wasn't born until 1991 so I missed all of that, unfortunately. Sounds like a good time! Funny that you mention Renaissance though - Annie Haslam lives near the Philly and I had lunch with her once. She knew I was a Beatles fan and told me stories about how her brother Michael was a NEMS artist and toured with them. The next holiday season she gave me a signed Paul McCartney acetate of My Love that she got personally in the 70s.

Now *that* is awesome, what a story! It's too bad you missed Ed Sciaky's show - he would play Annie's music all the time, and was a big fan of her work. She was, if I remember, an on-air guest with Ed as well, or maybe I'm just not remembering. But to say Ed was a fan of Annie Haslam and Bruce Springsteen would be an understatement...that was a great show.

WYSP still had traces of the 70's free-form FM thing going on, a lot due to guys like Ed Sciaky who was a part of the original FM scene. It is sorely missed, and I really mean sorely missed. We'd get quite a musical education from a station like that. Can you imagine someone, 20 years ago, playing Smile tracks on a major market station like WYSP? That was how cool it was before the format change.

they must syncopate the factory workers "do be do do be doo do be do"

The place I hear the Beach Boys most these days is over the PA at grocery stores, department and pharmacies, usually it's the 60's hits but one time close to Christmas I was in a Value Village and heard A Child of Winter over the PA which I thought was really out of left field and very cool.

It's a shame the Classic Rock format de-emphasized album cuts/ deep cuts. As others mentioned, stuff from Surf's Up and Holland would fit in well with Rock stations not scared of playing ballads and softer material. I don't know if they still do but while I lived in Ottawa, the Classic Rock station there tended to play one Elton John ballad an hour. 

I'm from Philadelphia too. Never tried that station. I always went with 102.9 WMGK. I can never find anything on the radio so I usually flip back and forth between 102.9 and 104.5. But thank you, i'll check that one out.

Try 88.5 WXPN as well. I had a thread a few weeks ago about hearing "That's Why God Made The Radio" on 'XPN while driving on a Sunday afternoon. I may have heard more unexpected Beach Boys the past few years on 'XPN than on any other Philly station, including Heroes ('67 and BWPS versions), various other deep cuts, and most surprising of all, "I Went To Sleep" on Ben Vaughn's weekend show!

WXPN is as close to free-form radio as you'll hear in Philly, although 104.5 has been my go-to station lately.

Was it 106.9 the Bear? I'm not from that area or anything like that (American, actually), but I've been to Ottawa a few times. And interestingly, there's a small area in northern New York state where you can pick up both my area's classic rock station (106.7 WIZN out of Burlington, VT) and 106.9. 106 seems to be a popular frequency for the "let's play Zeppelin, Floyd, the Who, the Stones, Boston, and a bunch of hair metal songs over and over again" stations. (There's a 106.5 WPYX to the south of me in Albany, NY. And if I'm not mistaken, there is, or was, a 106.1 in Ottawa that also played classic rock. Montreal is an exception with their CHOM-FM at 94).

We've got one classic rock that will occasionally play Beach Boys.  It's usually Wouldn't It Be Nice, God Only Knows, and Good Vibrations.  However, I don't know if it's because I made a request a couple of years ago or not but now they play Sail On Sailor maybe once a week or so!

We've also got an okay oldies station that plays the hits through Good Vibrations plus Heroes and Villains, Darlin', and Do It Again.

That being said, it would be nice to hear lesser known tracks from them once in a while, or any artist for that matter.  I'm turned off by radio due to their limited scope of what constitutes a band's songs.

i don't hear a lot of beach boys in texas, especially not in san antonio; though, I have heard Good Vibrations and California Girls.

if Aerosmith, Van Halen and Guns N' Roses are 'classic rock' then I am perfectly content with them not having airplay there. Classic rock stations churn out endless cheesy 70's and 80's rock and Eye Of The Tiger 24/7. The Beach Boys belong to either oldies (their early hits) or underground/indie radio along with Velvet Underground and other non-mainstream rock acts from the 60's and 70's

My personal radio station would play all of those acts, save Survivor.

I remember listening to the local "classic rock" station on May 16th, 1996...and they did their stupid daily "today in music history" segment and they did NOT mention that on May 16th, 1966...30 years prior...the Beach Boys released the greatest record of all time.  I was really, really peeved.  I don't often listen to the radio (because for the most part it's awful in this part of the country) but that really turned me off.  The stinkin' Eagles will come to town and this station will go on and on and on the next morning about what a transcendent concert it was...but they cannot give Pet Sounds a simple name-check???

Personally, I wouldn't/don't sit through what is played on classic rock stations long enough to see if they will ever play a BeachBoys song.  

There is a station in Northern Kentucky, Cincinatti area, WNKU, that is public radio and has the motto; public radio that rocks".   You'll hear Beachboys there (including SMiLE and TWGMTR) as well as a lot of great "indie" music and a fine of assortment of music that I think posters on this site and kindred souls would love.  You might be able to stream some of the music.

As for the Beachboys not getting played, I wish I had 50 bucks for everytime I've seen a movie in the last 5 years that prominently featured a Beachboys song.  They are definitely out there, just not pigeonholed into a current radio format.

And if you think about it, who needs the radio to hear classic Beachboys?  Based on compilation sales over the last 40 years, nearly everyone in the United States must own a BeachBoys CD.

This used to bother me somewhat but with classic oldies, pop, satellite radio etc. they are on a lot of radio forums. What we don't get from those outlets, however, are some of the deeper cuts that are just great and might "educate" a listener or an audience and broaden their horizons to a greater appreciation of the group.

Yes, we also have an "indie" station that plays the Beach Boys once in awhile.  It's the only decent station in town.

The Beach Boys are not part of the Album Oriented Rock world. The baseball jacket consultants weren't havin' none of that.  Sure, a few tracks from Holland got token adds,  but come on, the group never held a candle to Free, Bad Company, Jethro Tull, Led Zeppelin, and so many others. They couldn't hang (ten) with the heavies in the AOR Pantheon. And that's a good thing. Amen.

Not by much. Tom Donahue was rockin' the free form in the Bay Area by at least 1968.

That IS a good thing indeed.  Amen!

Yup. I actually heard "Strange World" on Deep Tracks this morning.

I have been told that Sail On Sailor gets an occasional play on classic rock stations. Although I've never heard it.

Because they got their most critical success in the early 60's, so it would be the same reason that classic rock stations don't play Chuck Berry, or the Everly Brothers, or even the Righteous Brothers, or the Association, or Johnny  Rivers, or any of the other dozens of fantastic artists from that period. 

I will say though that I have heard a few 70's tracks on Classic rock stations, like Marcella, and Sail on Sailor. 

Absolutely.  I've mentioned this plenty of times in the past, but probably not lately, that when I worked at a big box retailer, I would hear all kinds of weird Beach Boys stuff.  What was especially odd about it is that it'd just be once.  You tend to hear a few things often.  Sail on Sailor was probably weekly.  All Summer Long I heard maybe yearly.  (I worked there for 10 years, often 40 hours plus a week.)  Your Imagination was almost daily, actually.  Auld Lang Syne was played often around Christmas, as were things like Child of Winter and other stuff off the 70s Christmas record.

And then out of the blue, you'd hear, like, I'm Bugged at my Old Man, or something.  Never could figure out how the system worked.

I recall being at one of the Disney hotels at Disneyworld sometime in the early '90's and Island Girl was played at the outdoor pool at the hotel. Surprised the heck out of me even if the general theme of the music being played was "tropical'.

tee hee! I just tried this out on y
ou tube and it actually works pretty well in a post apocalyptic, pick up the pieces way.

I work at a grocery store and muzak plays quite a lot of Beach Boys on the summer/oldies stations. They also have some rock stations that play Sail On Sailor and Surf's Up.

There is an indie classic rock radio station here that played Do It Again a few days ago. I was shocked since it was the first BB song I've heard them play in the 5 + years I've listened to them.

The separation between "oldies" and "classic rock" for radio stations I think happens somewhere around 1967, when the Jimi Hendrix Experience (classic rock), The Doors (classic rock) and Pink Floyd (classic rock, but they never play old Syd Barret stuff) all released their debut albums. The Beatles are an interesting case in themselves; their early period stuff, till about 1965, is almost never played on classic rock radio (unless it's Breakfast With The Beatles or something special), but really only on oldies radio. Much of their singles from about 1967 on are played on classic rock stations.

Note that 1967 was also the year that the general public mostly stop caring about the Beach Boys, at least in the United States.
You're not gonna hear 'Heroes and Villains' or 'Breakaway' on oldies or classic rock radio for pretty much the same reason: what the hell is that?

Of course, when I refer to oldies radio, I mean a format that doesn't seem to exist anymore. My local so-called "oldies" station, KOOL105, played up until several years ago great stuff like 'Wouldn't It Be Nice', 'Build Me Up Buttercup', 'Time of the Season', 'Hanky Panky', 'That'll Be The Day' and lotsa Motown. Now all they play is up to early '70s stuff. I dropped them like a rock after that.

I found an oldies channel locally here a few days ago.  I'd heard it a few years ago, but the signal was weaker then.  Now it's nice and strong. 

Anyways, they play stuff from the 50's, straight through to the early 80's!  I'm takling about FM radio.  Crazy.

Today, driving to, and from work, I heard (swear to god)

1. Rock & Roll Music (Beach Boys)

2. Do It Again (Beach Boys). 

So they're still alive and kicking, at least on certain stations. 

I hear "Do It Again" almost every time I go to teh Superflesh.

I had to listen to two days of Sirius/XM on a recent trip, going to a collective twelve hours or so. I noticed that the few stations we listened to seemed to play the same four or five artists over and over and f***ing over again, bands I really like, to the point that I never wanted to hear those bands ever again by the end of the trip. Their "humorous" station IDs that basically brought to light all the embarrassing, regrettable sh*t of the day wasn't pleasant either.

Unfortunately, it's my only driving option for music for a short while, but I recently tried out the 60s station on a few different trips having exhausted the contents of the other stations in a mere two days. I enjoyed hearing "I Get Around" and "God Only Knows" but did not enjoy the blathering man who rambled for over 10 minutes (no exaggeration) between songs about absolutely nothing. People get satellite radio because it's advertised as commercial free, thus blather free, thus they'll hear music (unless it's specifically talk radio). Talking aimlessly for ten minutes between songs is equally as annoying as ads, especially coming from the mouth of the very large (yes, he was so large you could actually tell through the radio - never a good sign. I could stand to lose some weight, but Jeezus), blathering man whose voice hurt my brain. Good God, I just wanted to die.

Sorry about the basically unrelated rant, but man, I was not impressed with my recent experiences with satellite radio and I needed somewhere to vent. It's a new frontier, anything can happen! You can swear! Enjoy this one "obscure" cult favorite that the CEO said was okay to play in between fifty Green Day and Soundgarden songs, because only ten bands existed in the 1990s. We're the real rebel every God damn day over here.

Sounds like the blathering man you're referring to is "Cousin Brucie." Yea, he never shuts up.

I was in an indie record store yesterday that had a radio station on, must have been an internet station or something, because they played "Funky Pretty" and I nearly lost my sh*t when it started!

One of the muzak stations plays Breakaway quite a bit. It's really nice hearing that one at work.

Today I heard friggin Wipeout on American Top Forty while at work. Ew.  :-\

Hell Yeah!  Fat Boys FTW.

had to drive 90 minutes to a work site this morning. was listening to sirius deep tracks station. buried treasures show was on. suddenly around 8:30am they played sail on, sailor..forever..marcella back to back to back. sounded great. nice start to my 12 hour work day in wellston ohio.

There's two radio stations I listen to. One has never played the Beach Boys as far as I know. The other plays Surfin' USA, I Get Around, California Girls, Wouldn't It Be Nice, Good Vibrations, I Can Hear Music (rarely), and Kokomo. In other words, they only play the usual hits, never the lesser-known or deeper album cuts.

And one radio station I used to listen to plays some of the above songs, plus Cottonfields, Surfer Girl and Sloop John B.

One time while in Las Vegas, I was walking through a casino and heard "Surf's Up" coming through the overhead speakers.
I can't remember what version they played.

Tangentially related, I guess, but it really surprised me.