The Smiley Smile Message Board

So I've been listening to "Old Folks At Home/Ol' Man River" a bit lately from the Friends/ 20/20 twofer and I realized what an awesome creative slice of late '60s Brian Wilson it is. And then when I found out via this board that Brian and his band have been doing "Ol' Man River" lately I took that as a shock. Never seemed like they'd do that one. I guess when Paul from Brian's band pitched it to Brian and Al even they scratched their heads. It's cool that Brian has people in his band that really know his work inside and out.

Anyways, I know there's a bit in Peter Ames Carlin's book about Brian recorded "Ol' Man River" a lot, but overall I'm just kinda unsure of what he was going for when he was working on it. Was it planned to be a medley with "Old Folks At Home" as it is on the twofer, or something different? And also, how it was presented on the twofer, how unfinished was it? More vocals to be done? Was it just a composite where they threw all the coolest stuff they could find together like "Can't Wait Too Long", or was that a working version that Brian left?

And lastly, I wonder how long he actually worked on variations of the song. Carlin's book made it sound as though he worked on it pretty obsessively.



Then you have the vocal section from Hawthorne, CA with the organ or whatever.

I too would LOVE to know more about this song. The bits and bobs we have heard are ace but I am sure I read somewhere that it was something of an obsession for BW for a while and that several different versions were worked on. The backing track on the twofer version is fantastic, I would love to hear a live version. I will be gutted if the MIC vocal section is just a lazy repeat of the vocal section we already have...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8y3i28HHNjE

The story is basically he kept tinkering with it and Mike eventually got pissed about having to do it. Still great stuff, but it had partially to do with Brian being on 20/20 less than previous albums/

Does Jeff not understand the idea of subtlety?


I thought Carl was said to be the one to put his foot down on this?

I may recall it wrong, but I swore in the Catch A Wave book it said Mike. Either way I hesitated to share the story (which I personally think is a normal band occurrence) as people are far too tough on the others opinions if they differ from Brian's.

I'm not certain either, but I really thought I read it was Carl, who was not so much down on the song but frustrated with slaving over it with seemingly no clear direction from Brian.

I think it said Mike.

Carlin, p139/140:

"The guys eventually tired of that … and one day Mike announced that he'd had it, thank you very much, and now they were done wasting their time and money on Brian's 'Ol' Man River' experiments. Brian left the studio with his eyes stinging."

Book also quotes SWD as saying they spent plenty of recording sessions on that tune.

Box set tracklisting gives no indication of the version included being a previously unreleased track, only states: "Old Man River (Vocal Section)".

I asked Stephen Desper about it on here, and said they worked mostly on the upbeat sections and arrangements of the theme, rather than the slower stuff.

Although we don't have much stuff, what we have I absolutely love. Beautiful arrangements and fabulous singing by the boys. Personally I'd love to have a album around this concept (or what appears as a concept). Like TLOS, an old song as the thematic centerpiece and new songs written around it.

Guessing it's the slow version that was previously on Hawthorne.

I prefer the twofer version easily.

Got it:

It was put to really good use, I thought, on Fantastic Mr. Fox.

I love this song and the idea of it - Brian continuing the "Americana" theme of Smile.  It should have made it on 20/20 - Cottonfields, Old Man River/Old Folks at Home, Cabinessence - makes a great American trilogy.  Too bad they hadn't recorded Battle Hymn of the Republic yet!

Agree that, to my ears, it reeks of that whole SMiLE essence. Brian reworked a good number of American classics/oldies during the Smile/Smiley Smile era – Old Master Painter, Gee, You Are My Sunshine, Get A Job - and musically evoked the spirit of many many more – Home On The Range, 12 St Rag, Cool Water (sons of the Pioneers) etc etc.  Ol' Man River, like Can't Wait Too Long, seems to be carrying the Smile torch on for a while beyond the accepted end of that "era".

That movie also used H&V pretty well.

Damn it, Mike.

Next session was for "do it again".... ;D

It's a gosh darn BEAUTIFUL song and a terrific listening experience.  It's this type of recording that makes me think Friends & 20/20 are still underappreciated to this day, by the mass public anyway.

The Beach Boys never sounded better than they did on the Friends and 20/20 albums.

I think The Beach Boys sounded their best on anything engineered by Steve Desper. He really captured such beautiful sounds from the sessions, vocally and instrumentally.

He raised the bar when he joined them, and they NEVER EVER sounded as good after he left. That for me was one of the biggest shames of the BB world, the loss of Desper's skills.

This is great insight and maybe points at why it was abandoned.  The main mystery of this track seems to be: if they did so much work on it, why isn't there anything even close to a finished track?  This suggests the workflow was something like Brian just making the group sing the tune over and over while he worked out these experimental, chromatic or maybe even microtonal (!) pitch variations in the vocal blend, so from their perspective they were doing all this repetitive work, but not actually progressing towards a usable finished track. 

Yeah, totally - clearly the most finished version of their work on the fast stuff is on the twofer, and it's littered with mistakes!

....'Music by Brian Wilson'...... yeah, very funny  ;D  ya have a helluva good sense of humor  :thumbsup :thumbsup :thumbsup

the version on the twofer coupled with Old Folks At Home is a totally realized medley and arrangement. aside from Brian's vocal flub on the first verse, it is a finished track. and a brilliant one at that. it is not "littered with mistakes"

so happy to hear BAD break this out, just wish they had done the full arrangement with all FIVE key changes like the twofer version.

Weren't there more vocals to be laid down on the second half of the track?  Sounds unfinished to me.

I haven`t listened to this one in a while but doesn`t the backing track sound very obviously bolted together from different takes?

I'm not sure what exactly Brian was planning on doing with this tune, but yeah I'm pretty sure he left it in an incomplete state. Fortunately for us, incomplete Brian Wilson works like "Do You Like Worms", "Child Is Father Of The Man", and "Old Folks At Home/Ol' Man River" are usually even more enjoyable than finished works by a lot of other artists. Shows just how good his stuff is.

i diasagree. i think the twofer version is basically complete. i don't think more vocals were necessarily intended or needed.

Don't get me wrong. I personally love it the way it is. But I'm also pretty sure that it's mentioned in the liner notes for Friends/ 20/20 that it's unfinished. Maybe Brian was done with it back then. But from the story in the Carlin book along with the liner notes, it sounds like there was still more work to do.

This piece is SO Smile, that I have to wonder if he was working on this as a possible addition to a post Smiley Smile version of Smile. Pure conjecture, but I wonder.

I sometimes think "Smile" should refer more to a style, or essence, than an era or an unreleased album.

I think I'll have to agree here. Friends in particular is quite stunning in terms of its overall sound, probably one of the best-sounding pop records by anyone.