The Smiley Smile Message Board

music genre that predominated? I think of something like America, John Denver, Todd Rundgren, JT or even Chicago. It was very soft rock but it wasn't necessarily "square" either as it sounded nothing like the music of the early 60s. I would almost say it was very "new-age" and at times hedonistic in their worship of nature and what not.

I for one sort of saw elements of that on Carl and the Passions, Holland or even Surf's Up. Do you think Carl, Blondie and Ricky could have left the group to from a new group similar to America that would have gotten a lot of FM airplay?

I would say this trend that you noticing could have indeed been anticipated with the first Dylan albums of the early 60s. As the 60s went on, musicians who got into the business because of Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Muddy Waters, and then The Beatles began to find older roots music and so embraced a more folksy or country style of music.

Freeform radio turned into AOR radio and became hugely popular and influential. When AOR radio found the winning formula for making money it was Stairway to heaven, Fleetwood mac, Hotel California....this kind of stuff. From that point on rock bands would try to adapt to the AOR format and you got Chicago, Denver, REO Speedwagon.

Carl and passions, Holland, Surfs up were doomed in that regard. It was the wrong music in the rock decade, with the wrong set of attitudes. There was no way...

I think you have to consider the natural maturation of both artists and their audiences, too. Rock Band A grows up, has families, has kids, mellows, releases new types of music. Audience is now professional class and likes to think of themselves as rock 'n' roll, but likes it professionally packaged in such a way that fits into their new lives. Presto. New thing going on. (New groups rebel, are loud and crazy, elders hate, repeat process.)

I heard Feel Flows and Sail On Sailor tons of times on AOR radio, through the 70's and 80's. I once heard the entire Surf's Up album played on one of these station's full album shows.

Who cares? You  can always find  anecdotes like that but you know those songs were stables of AOR radio and that the albums and singles didn't sell.

I do, f***head, so quit with your definitive statements, they're lame, untrue and boring. Surf's Up was a Top 40 album and received a lot of radio play. Get your facts straight before tangling with me, and hit your space bar more sparingly when you're typing a sentence. And the word is "staples". Fan since 2011? Laughable.

Keep it coming with the anecdotes and maybe you will stumble upon something significant.

For the record, it was hearing "Feel Flows" on the local "underground" station in 1971 that got me back into the Beach Boys after a 3 year hiatus (I was 15).  This would be just before the transition to "AOR" where playlists became increasingly tighter and less adventurous.  This would have been exactly the market they were shooting for in the Jack Rieley era, though their success was moderate.  But "Surf's Up" and "Holland" were both played -- "CATP" I don't recall getting as much attention.

I think what it comes down to is just that singer/songwriters had more artistic freedom in the 70's.  I would chalk it up to the culture or even the drug culture at the time, singing folk music is a little more 'real' or trippy than over commercialized shiny music that's tradionally pop. 

Good example would be Neil Sedaka.  Early 60's, he was making perfect pop songs, really polished, had a formula down, etc... then the 70's rolls around, and he has a resurgence with a rework of "Breaking up is Hard to Do" played as a piano sonata, and then the folk/singer songwriterish "Laughter in the Rain".  One example of how an artist changed with the times by switching his style up.