The Smiley Smile Message Board

I guess I've just missed the news on this one. Did they find the tapes? Is it a true stereo mix? It sounds like it.

Speaking of sound, it seems like Made in California has great sound quality.

Me neither.  Thought the master with the multi's was still rolling aroung Coldwater Canyon and only a mono was possible.  Maybe with this new isolation technology Linett was able to do it?  Dunno.

I vaguely recall someone finding the masters for a track enabling it to be done in stereo for the first time. The track tapes were in a box in someone's storage (garage?)...don't know if it was for Do it Again or a different track. Internet search yielded no results for me....

This is probably what I'm thinking of...sorry, not Do It Again...a good story nonetheless for those who haven't heard it....

http://prince.org/msg/8/317904?pr

Didn't someone say some time ago the multis were found?

Since the story told by Stephen Desper is that the Do It Again reel flew out of the car he and Carl were driving as they were taking them to Capitol, I'd think as Mikie said that reel may still be rolling around somewhere. Unless a backup copy was made, but then why wouldn't they have just used that when the master reel flew out of the car?

Confusing, all this.

No, the master that fell out of the car was the original 1/4" stereo mix, not the multi-tracks. They didn't have time to remix it. The version they ended up using for the master was a mono fold-down of this stereo mix (recorded on a Revox A77), made to test for mono compatibility. So that was the original 45 mix, later re-channeled for stereo on 20/20.

The multi-tracks were supposedly lost during Stack-O-Tracks, so when they went to remix for 20/20, they re-channeled the mono fold-down into fake stereo.

Apparently the multi-tracks were found recently !

Confusion over, that's cool info! Thanks Donny!

I guess deadlines are deadlines but considering the commercial status of the Beach Boys in general when DIA was released in July '68, why couldn't they have just taken another day or so to work up another mix from the multis? But instead they use the fold-down, and take the multis to add onto Stack O' Tracks, in the same summer of '68, and they lose the multis in the process?

Was the single release that vital to need to be done by a certain day that they couldn't have done another stereo mix? That part of the story didn't make as much sense.

ha, yeh I guess Carl and Desper had been up all night mixing it (if I remember correctly from Desper's posts), and it was due the following day. I guess they figured the mono fold-down sounded good, and they obviously worked very hard on the mix (it's got a lot of sonic ear candy in there, including that special drum effect), so I doubt they wanted to go back and try to re-do everything right away. And yeh, deadlines are deadlines ... and it's a single anyway, they probably figured they would just do another stereo mix later if 20/20 was in anyone's mind at the time.

It's odd putting it into the context of the Beach Boys at that time, where even the band members say there wasn't exactly an overwhelming public demand for a new release at that time. But deadlines are deadlines!  :)

Related note: I have some photos from an auction that must have been over 10 years ago by now, where someone was selling what was advertised as the mixing console at Capitol where things like the Do It Again single or at least the 1968 output from groups like the BB's would have been run through at Capitol to get them ready for release. I'd guess it was the board where the tapes like DIA that Carl and Stephen would have been driving to Capitol would have been prepared. I wondered if anyone ever bought that board or where it is today. It's a historical footnote at best but still a pretty cool piece of history.

yeh I think that was the Electrodyne solid state mixer from Capitol in the late '60s. I remember that. Someone bought it ... it was prices really high (like $50,000) ... doubt they got anywhere near that.

I got the impression that when the call was put out for any for people to come forward with anything Smile related they received responses from people for all kinds of stuff. DIA multis, BBC recordings, etc...

Fold-down sounded good?  My ears must be out of phase-- I think DIA (the version we've had until yesterday) sounds horrible.  So horrible that I had a tough time adding it to playlists because it sounded so bad compared to almost any other track.  Which sucked because I love that song.  I loved the live C50 version released on the Isn't It Time EP (more so than the 2012 studio remake).  Haven't gotten to that track on MIC yet, but I'm hoping my ears will be pleased with this new mix.

The stereo mix is great. I love the horns in the beginning and Brian's falsetto sounds better than ever. Yep, the definitive version of the song (IMHO). I was never a big fan of the mono mix.

I love the MiC stereo mix! That being said, I feel that Brian's falsetto (combined with the harmony vocals) somehow worked better in the mono mix. But overall, the stereo mix is far superior. You hear so many more instrumental and vocal details.

I like it ... it's kind of lo-fi though yeh. but it has the power, and it went top 20 ... sounds great on 45

The early mono mix (on Endless Harmony) held me over until now. I really like that one. The sax on this one sticks out like a sore thumb - a little distorted even. One more to add to the stereo canon. Sounds beautiful. Nice and clear, expansive - no Workshop hammering on the fadeout here for some reason....so much for trying to keep it original.  ::)

I've never understood why the workshop stuff was on the fade of Do It Again. Was it a spur of the moment thing? Did they have the IWBA reels out? Or did Brian decide he wanted it o their specifically?

I have been told Carl thought (even as early as 1968) that playing up the Smile mystique would help the group commercially and credibility. Also interesting is that Brian did not mind having the Smile bits on 20/20.

Wow, so it was Carl's decision? And I suppose in some circles, that mystique had been there since Inside Pop aired. Looking back, Carl was really key in keeping the Smile legend alive.

Well, those sound effects actually weren't on the original single mix...as for why they're there on the 20/20 album...my guess has always been that they are there primarily to bring the track into the stereo realm in its final few seconds, to mentally prepare the listener for the stereo landscape of "I Can Hear Music" and all the tracks that follow.  Like, Carl and Desper thought "What can we use for a little stereo snippet to tack on to the end of that track?  Maybe some sound effects...wait, I know!  There's some stereo sound effects amongst all that SMiLE stuff from a couple of years ago!".  I think that's the real reason.

Many years ago, I was given to understand that the inclusion of the "Workshop" tag was nothing more than a joke by Carl.

I have some good quotes on Carl and Smile, but some will have to wait for the book. This is just the general gist but Carl was aware of the buzz surrounding Smile very early on. He saw the value in including snippets of it on various projects for both artistic and commercial reasons. Humor may be part of that of course. It's too bad 1972 Smile didn't happen. If Brian hadn't been starting the hard drugs and frequent session skipping we could have had Smile with finished quality vocals from Brian and Dennis.

Absolutely agree about the 72 Smile. If Cabinessence was a good example of Carl's "tinkering" then it would have been fantastic. If Brian, only 5 years removed form the project had run down to the studio in his dressing gown just a few times with a sequencing idea, we'd have had a real treasure on our hands.

Oh well, "what ifs" are a pointless exercise.

This was the full extent of Carl's 'tinkering' on "Cabin Essence":

1 - sing lead vocal.

Were the three sections edited together then prior to '68? I didn't know that.

And I was using tinkering in reference to TSS and MIC.

And if it was tinkering, then what magnificent tinkering.

I love that they're still finding tapes...the 1967 solo "Surf's Up," and the "Do It Again" multitracks...it all makes me hold out hope that some day we'll get a nice stereo vocals-only "Good Vibrations"...

Allow me to directly quote you, emphasis mine: "If Cabinessence was a good example of Carl's "tinkering"...". Carl died in 1998. TSS was released in 2011, MiC just now.  :)

(BTW, is there any other bunch of fans who use song and album title acronyms like we do ?)

Personally I'm a fan of TWOTS.

As I said in another topic... perverts.  >:D

This is the problem when I'm having the same discussion on three different threads. Somewhere else I'd been discussing the tinkering that has been done to TSS and MIC. I used the word here in relation to Carl because essentially he did the same thing to Cabinessence, i.e, changed / embellished / mucked about with what already existed, as Mark Linnet has done with TSS and MIC. Tinkering is being used as a derogatory thing, so I was putting it in a context where it was positive, i.e Carl finishing Cabinessence.

It's stopped making sense to me as well.

If "Smile" had come out in 1972, or '73, or any of those years, I don't think it would have had anywhere near the reception nor the impact that it had when it did finally come out. So whatever it was that Carl had in mind at that time, or whenever, I'm glad in a way it never amounted to anything but auditioning tapes from the vault.

And does it surprise anyone else but me that they never ran a safety copy or a backup copy of the stereo "Do It Again" master tape in the event that it were to meet a tragic fate like flying out of a car on the way to the record company?

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Yet so much of this board and Beach Boys fandom is made up of "what ifs"

"Stephen, Let's make a copy of this master , just in case we lose it in the canyon while we're sharing a splif...." 
Nahh...  don't see that even coming up. 

 :lol

I think the workshop fragment was put at the end because of the slightly off drum fill ... covers it up and makes it 'make sense'.

There's also a wrong bass note for a second right near the fade (just after the drum fill you mention, actually) which is definitely on the original album mix, but which I never noticed there until I heard the MiC mix, because the Workshop stuff is coming in at that point on the original 2020 album, and it has always successfully distracted me! Maybe that was the idea behind the inclusion of the Workshop overdub, too...!

Me too!  What do you guys think of TWOTS as a whole?

The more, the merrier.