The Smiley Smile Message Board

I think it's a great tune. Perhaps not the single the Boys wanted in their attempt to reclaim the charts. The instrumentation is pretty solid but as with Marcella maybe there is not enough gritty guitar?

The lead vocals are very strange imo. Why did they double track it in two different style. This confuses me. Was this planned or did Carl record either then decided that it needed to be more gruff/less gruff (based on which he recorded first).
Was Carl the right lead for this song? Could Dennis or Mike rocked this one harder?

Would give my non-existent third testicle to hear a mix without the extremely exaggerated "gruff" vocal. It's kind of amusing, and I love Carl's more "gruff" style on other songs, but it just feels very ill-fitting here and ruins the song. Just me.

The gruff vocal is Brian, I thought? It's a dual lead between them.

That's definitely Carl's super-exaggerated gruff voice heard elsewhere ("Let Us Go On This Way", for instance, where it works beautifully). I think. Brian didn't have much in the way of gruffness in his voice by this point, either.

I also once thought that.

I didn't think it until I read it here, oh well.

one of my favorites. the lyrics suffer a little bit from the Rieley treatment, same as Sail On Sailor. I'd love to hear Brian sing the original version "Beatrice From Baltimore".

either way, it's a great tune and i love the banjo and fiddle thrown in there. I love just about anything they did with a country/bluegrass/Americana flavor.  The Beach Boys are about as Americana as it gets if you ask me.

The 'gruff' Brian vocal on this album was on He Come Down, not this track. Brian's backup harmonies are all over this cut, and he's singing in his early 70s style.

Gorgeous song. If the BBs had settled into this groove for the next decade I'd've been a delerious man and I reckon their 70s legacy would have been soooooo much richer.

I still really, really wonder if that's even him. It'd be a total anomaly for the time period if it is him. It was clear his voice was changing during these times, but for his voice to suddenly sound full on 1977 Brian on this song but not on "California", "Funky Pretty", the Mount Vernon EP, the Spring album etc. would be really odd.

hey you, mrs DOUBTfires have you ever glanced a gnarly fully-detailed thread regarding definitive vocal credits? it's all that you need, i'll tell ya. now i truly hope nobody will come up with endless needless 'who sang on what' or 'is it really brian (dennis, carl..)?! i didn't know that!' questions. thanx

It is a great tune!  Funky, earthy...just stumbled on a YouTube for an Old Grey Whistle Test of "You Need a Mess of Help to Stand Alone."  Daryl Dragon is on what looks like a tack piano?  Someone will know that...

It was indeed him, although it was a put-on voice. It
matched some of his backups on Spring as well

And for the record I had always thought it was Carl and Blondie on Mess for the longest time

Carl was inebriated, on purpose, to get that gruffness in his voice for the song I remember reading somewhere.

Yeah he could still sing very clear in 1971-74 he just used the gruff voice when he felt like it early on. Notice he is pitched much better then say the 1976 recordings.

I had Pet Sounds but in some way, it was Hefner who got me properly into the Beach Boys.  For my 2nd purchase picked up the 2fer as this song was obviously track 1 on C&TP and I remembered a review which said good things about Holland.  Today I still prefer Hefner's version.  Darren clearly hasn't referred to the lyric sheet, it doesn't matter really.  The first time I saw them live (in 1999) they encored with this cover.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h4qAQf1Q9kQ (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h4qAQf1Q9kQ)

We're 100% certain that the "EEEEEE"ness (for lack of better description) is confirmed to be Brian? Also, what Spring vocals are you thinking of? I'm not super intimately familiar with the album offhand, but I know he doesn't sound like that anywhere on the tracks I know well. Even his lower-register bass vocal on "Sweet Mountain" totally sounds like the guy who sang "Good Time" or "'Til I Die" - same overall child-like tone, same texture, everything. "He Come Down", not even a little like that guy.

Brian's on "HCD", vocally and instrumentally.

I have spoken, it is so.  :old

Oh I have no doubts that he's there, I just wonder if the part everyone says he's most prominent on is really him given that it's so inconsistent with the sound of his vocals elsewhere during this time.

Huge, huge fan of this track...proof positive (along with its CATP companion "Marcella") that the BBs could rock as well as anyone, with Brian still standing out as a unique songwriter (turning the "She don't know a thing" middle-eight into a tag is something that only he would've done).

Reports on the genesis of this track remain murky, and I'd love to hear from some of the real experts (AGD, Alan Boyd, etc.) concerning any other info about it. What seems to be the case is that it was part of a batch of songs BW worked on with Tandyn Almer in an effort to push past the "singing choirboy" monicker. We'd all love to unearth the full set of original lyrics when the song was entitled "Beatrice From Baltimore"--a title that indicated that BW and Almer were out checking out the young "talent" around the Sunset Strip and straying a bit from what some term "domestic bliss."

Jack Reiley, as was his wont at this point in time, rewrote the lyrics--but what's odd here is that he doesn't seem to have touched the original lyrics from the middle-8. It sure seems as though the "She don't know a thing" line would refer back to the blissfully oblivious Beatrice (and not, apparently, in an especially complimentary way--seems that B from B was all beauty and no brains!). Left unchanged in the switchover to a more abstract set of "needs" that Reiley constructed into a plea for "post-hippie communitarianism", the tag line makes little (if any) sense, but in the end it just doesn't matter...it's the massed complexity of the vocal/instrumental combination that brings the song home in one of the most amazin' forty seconds in the band's career. So much contrary motion! And the way the fiddle swoops down and up and down and up again--mindblowin' stuff when cranked up in your headphones.

Of course, the idea that "Mess of Help" was a lead single for CATP was nuts...but one suspects the BBs were leery of starting off with "Marcella" because it might have seemed they were trying to "Do It Again" again (though, as most of us here would say: what's wrong with that??). So they baffled a lot of folks who'd been lured back by Surf's Up--when they listened to this track, they needed a "mess of help" to recognize who the band was. It's a great track, but it isn't for everyone. It's kind of Wild Honey meets Little Feat--the BBs as rock'n'roll trapeze artists flying without a net.

I think "Mess of Help" is one of the key reasons Bruce Johnston decided to jump ship at that time. He apparently hated the vocals, and was very uncomfortable with the band pursuing a more rock-based direction. They'll never ever play it live again, and that's a cryin' shame. But, what the hell, BW pulled it apart, simplified it, re-arranged it, and made it into "It's OK"--a track that clearly sounds like the BBs but is really "Mess of Help Jr."

This song is super cool, one of my favorites...I never heard the "It's OK" connection till you mentioned it, and that's one of my favorites too.

It is, but it was a 'forced' vocal, meaning he was trying to sound gruff. As for the Spring comparison, give me a few on that...I don't have the CD anymore but had isolated Brian's vocals on it previously. I just have to go through my stuff to find it.

Love it.  The middle 8 as noted is the Brian factor, making a creatively arranged and well performed (yes the "gruff" vocal too) rocker into...something else entirely!

It's a neat track.  I liked the banjo appearance.  Song probably could have benefitted from being fleshed out a little more (of course you could say the same for the entire album)...