The Smiley Smile Message Board

Hello all,

Does anyone know where I can purchase the backing tracks to Love You?  I want to study what I think are many of Brian's finest production efforts.  Any help would be appreciated, I've had no luck searching on my own.

Cheers,
O'Leary

I'd definitely pay good money to have these and I agree this is some of Brian's greatest production work ever! (...with a little help from Carl...)

The Love You Backing Tracks Acetate isn't one that's been booted. I charge $9-1500 for making a copy, depending on whether I like you

Make that "with a LOT of help from Carl".

In that case just another reason to love Carl! :)

When I heard about Carl helping out on Love You I was a little shocked (do we yet know the specifics of his contribution?)  because I've read that one of the reasons the Paley sessions didn't eventuate into an album was because Carl didn't like it when Brian turned his quirk on. It's strange that someone who helped put out one of the quirkiest albums of all time would assume that stance is all.

The situation within the band had changed quite a bit from the late 70s to the mid 90s. Gotta remember that Carl's stuff from BB85 and Beckley-Lamm-Wilson, recorded in the early to mid-90s, sounded like he was trying to go for big, slick, mainstream hits. Carl's work on Love You may have been an attempt to "de-quirkify" the sound, if not the songs themselves.

Where's dequirkifying software when you need it?

There are some pre-Carl Love You tracks doing the rounds (allegedly): they're... less polished. Or so I've been told.

I'm not sure if this is one of the tracks Andrew speaks of, but there is a version of The Night Was So Young with an instrumental section playing the "Is Somebody..." melody. I always thought it would have been nice if the released version had faded out with this part.

Oh, I would pay good money to hear that! When's that BB Central website opening up? Speaking of which, if Cohen wants to get all pessimistic about archival releases being scrapped, why doesn't he pick on something that seemingly has been scrapped/postponed indefinitely rather than the box sets? Eh?

Stephen Fairweather did make a backing track cover version, of the whole / if not 90% of the Love You album.

His instrumental version of Honkin' Down The Highway is very good. However, I can't find it anymore on: http://www.beachboysbritain.org.uk/loveyou.html

People from that  site would know  more about it...

I'd be interested to know what Carl actually did, aside from mixing it down. He probably added the little guitar there is? How about them backing vocals, are they all arranged by Brian, or did Carl arrange/add lots of parts?

There is hardly any guitar on the album, and Brian maybe played a few simple lines?
I believe all songwriting and all arrangements were 90-100% Brian's vision.
But, to Carl's ears,  Brian's vocals were shockingly bad. (imagine Brian's singing on Solar System)

To 'save' the record, Carl probably  
1  replaced some of Brian's voice with other voices
or
2 overdubbed/mixed some of Brian's with others (but I don't remember such combined vocal lines)
or
3 gave Brian some hamburgers to record better vocals again

So Carl's main role was being a 'mixdown producer', sing his parts, and trying to get the best overall vocal blend.

What is an Acetate?

Good he left Brian's vocals on Solar System, Let's Put Our Hearts Togehter and Love Is A Woman. I cannot imagine these songs being anywhere near as good without Brian singing his lungs out in 1977.

Let's put it this way. Pet Sounds takes everything that was great about BW and the BB's and takes it up a notch; Love You takes all the quirky Brian Wilson material that had occasionally slipped through the cracks, puts it into concentrated form, and takes it up a notch. They are both the greatest LPs of their type ever made. About half of Love You could have been rearranged to fit very comfortably into the upper reaches of the BB pantheon; the other half is unrepentantly wacky and is redeemable only in that particular half-light.

Carl's contribution as "Mixdown Producer" was enough to give the album that polish we all admire (the mixing process can radically change the way tracks sound, in this case much for the better, I'm told).  I doubt he did any arranging.  Some of the guitar is him, some is Ed Carter, some is probably Billy Hinsche.  As for his musical taste changing to the, um, shall we say "bland" side...funny how that change pretty much coincided with his '78 detox.  Maybe Carl began to draw a parallell between the exciting, wild side of music to the use of illegal drugs, and (maybe subconsciously, maybe not) played it safe by shying away from the wackier creative, stuff, instead preferring to stick to the Middle Of The Road musically.  Just a theory.

I thought the rough mix of Mona was much better with the saxes mixed up front.

To me they sound more as if Brian is about to cough his lungs out. Horrible songs.

I'm probably missing something obvious, but please explain this to me as you would to a 5 year old. I get that mixes can make a difference, as in the 15BO vs MIU mixes of Peggy Sue (i think), where the instrumentation balance is changed. But it doesn't seem to me like there's much to bury in Love You. Is it just a case of Carl adding overdubs? If not, then what? Thanks!

....

Yup. Some tracks were, ah, 'fleshed out'.

This is very interesting: I've read more than a few accounts saying almost exactly the same thing about Eric Clapton. There was an obvious shift in not only his sound but also his entire style of guitar playing, specifically on his solos. In the 60's he was revered for his screaming solos, fiery solos, whatever they called it. Then at some point in the 70's he rarely showed that side of his playing in that same way, and played cleaner, very low-key and understated compared to, say, the year 1968 for one example. And many listeners, myself included, thought it was too bland and preferred the kind of playing he had done in the 60's.

And as suggested about Carl, Clapton in a way connected that fiery playing with his drug use, and once told a story that he saw fire and demonic imagery as he was tearing up on a solo under the influence of a hallucinogenic, and didn't want to experience that again, so he scaled back on the "fire" so to speak. And we got "Lay Down Sally" and that 70's clean tone versus the 60's Crossroads/Hideaway/White Room and the fire.

And I also feel Carl's solo effort just a few years later suffered a bit from that lack of "fire" and was too bland and processed especially for a style of music that when it is at is best is based on emotion and passion and a degree of fire that all the production of the early 80's just erased. It's too bland for the style, just like Clapton trying to play understated blues solos throughout the 70's instead of cutting loose. But that's just my opinion, of course.

I prefer my Beatles fleshed out ;) ... but i'd love to do an a-b comparison pre- and post-Carl.

Really? I need mine staight. That's just me though...and perhaps AGD as well.

I don't think the songs are bad. It is the instrumentation and the things that slightly resemble an arrangement that make them sound bad.

True, Love is a Woman might have had a shot with a better lead vocal (Brian sounds awful here - one of the worst professional lead performances I've ever heard from anyone) and some decent instrumentation but the other two are beyond hope. For me Solar System is hands down the worst Beach Boys song of all time.

Look at this way - have you got the SOT Smile? Those are straight off the tapes, all the faders up, with no mixing of any kind done to it. Now compare those to TSS. You can radically change things in mixing via effects (such as EQ, compression) or just moving the instruments and vocals around. It's not so much the arranging side.

I should try and find the Love You outtakes in my highly disorganised iTunes. IIRC, they are hardly the crispest quality, so a comparison was difficult.