The Smiley Smile Message Board

Our 2nd annual Beach Boys Bash was a great success. The full 3 hour show is here (for a limited time) : http://wfdu.streamrewind.com/bookmarks/listen/89463/the-vintage-rock-pop-shop

But...

If you just want to hear the interviews, here's Al Jardine on recording Cotton Fields, the Holland album and his thoughts on Brian's new solo album: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tvfIEQrmoNY

David Beard and I discuss "All Summer Long" track by track: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-yq_uorZE94

..and Monkees podcaster Ken Mills, a casual Beach Boys fan, listens to and reacts to "The Beach Boys Love You" for the first time: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JKTH269Jt8Q

Thanks for posting! I've only listened to a portion of Al's interview, but I really enjoyed that. Who knew a 50+ year old story/legend would be broken and busted by Al! Won't reveal it, everyone should listen, though. Really neat. Never heard that Cottonfields intro story, either.

Also, through that clip I've found some of my listening material for the next week(s)...wow, I had never checked out the archives. Mention "Naked City", a favorite classic TV show, I can't wait to hear that episode. "Naked City" runs on a cable channel called Me-TV, every Sunday at 1AM EST, and I've been watching for the past year, and will again tonight. A truly great show, based on a great film, and it's been one of my favorites this year. Can't wait to hear that one.

I wanted to offer a compliment, too: I really enjoy listening to a professional broadcasting voice at work, especially in interviews. I've heard so many podcasts and amateur YouTube type interviews where the voice or the technique are simply lousy, full of pauses, weak voices, no resonance, no character in the voice, etc. When you hear a professional at work, you really appreciate the art and skill of broadcasting. Great work, I really enjoyed what I heard so far and can't wait to hear more.

Everyone - take a look/listen at these and at the library of previous episodes. I'm sure everyone will find something of interest.  :)

Thanks so much! Hey, I really appreciate the compliment! Having a great guest(s) helps too.

Yeah, we run features on various classic TV shows too, often with guests from those shows or authors who've written books on them. There are also a slew of Beach Boys-related material in there too.

Great selection of guests and topics! I'm sending the link to Steve Kilbey's segment to two friends who were big Church fans.

Thanks again for posting and sharing all of this!

Fascinating interview! Al is definitely my favorite of the remaining Beach Boys.

Thanks. Great interview!

Al Jardine's description of the "Waves of Love" debacle is truly sad.


(and delusional, imo)

Which part of it is delusional?

Do you think the album would have been the same if Waves of Love was Mike's song and Daybreak was Al's song?

Thanks for this excellent interview with Al. Good questions, very professionally done and a lovely warm, brown voice.  :)

Interesting to hear about Al`s perception of the band politics in the making of the TWGMTR album. I hadn`t heard that version of Waves of Love and it is certainly superior to the one that has been on Youtube for ages. I don`t think Al is necessarily delusional about it as it is certainly a better song than something like Beaches in Mind imo.

I hope Run, James, Run does appear on Brian`s album along with plenty of other Al vocals.

Really enjoyable stuff, Ghostly, thanks man! (and thanks to ESQ editor as well)

At work. Unable to listen for the time being. Anybody wanna sum it up? Especially intrigued with the stuff about the That's Why God Made the Radio sessions and the stuff about Brian's new album.

Really enjoyed that. Thanks!

I agree with Al, at least, about "Waves of Love" sounding like a Beach Boys record. It would have been nice to have a classic BB bouncy shuffley feel on the last album, sorta like "They Can't Take That Away From Me" or even "I've Got Plenty o' Nuttin'". Some of the songs on TWGMR really don't sound like BB tunes - "Private Life of Bill & Sue" should've been a Brian solo, "Spring Vacation" belongs in a '90s Disney movie, and etc.

Also, he's right that it's insane for a group like the BBs to not use the best recording and mastering facilities possible. How was Smiley Smile allowed? Why were Al and Bruce allowed to produce albums? Just craziness.

Listening to this now. 25 minutes in. I am really enjoying it.

I think the problem with "Waves of Love" is that Al, and even moreso Dvoskin in a few blurbs I've seen from him, are simply overselling the song a bit. The song is good. It's not amazing. I don't think it's a "hit single", although that has more to do with the landscape of the music industry than the quality of the song itself.

It's like the friend who tells you over and over and over how great an album is, or how great a movie is, and then when you try it out, it's good but could never have matched how much they sold it to you.

"Waves of Love" is better than at least a few tracks on "TWGMTR", I think it's better than the Mike track, better than "Bill and Sue", and I think it certainly sounds enough like a "Beach Boys" type track that it would have been fine on the album.

The only criticism I could think of as far as putting in the album is that it would have been redundant, as Al has just stuck it on his solo album.

Al's comments seem to be similar to Mike's as far as "TWGMTR"; most of the songs had already been written and due to that and band politics, his stuff couldn't get on the album. The difference apparently between Al and Mike's reaction to this is that Mike seems more perturbed about it (even though Mike did get one of his songs on the album versus Al getting zero; and Mike did get to work on some lyrics and a couple songs from scratch), while Al seems to lament it but got over it and still liked Brian's songs and apparently has found it possible to work with Brian and Joe Thomas subsequently.

Al is only making the "Waves of Love" thing even more confusing, because I can't tell which version he's talking about. THREE different versions have been released. Ironically, based on the one detail he mentions about the "wrong" mix (a longer guitar solo), it appears as though he might be talking about the version/mix of the song that was only made available on the Japanese "SHM" pressing of the album.

I can't say that Japanese CD-exclusive mix is terribly different from the one of the other versions. It simply drops out a few of the lines after the guitar solo, leaving it as an instrumental. The overall mix is slightly different, but not hugely different.

I think Al isn't super detail-oriented when it comes to the releases and mixes. For instance, while I greatly appreciate that the interviewer here is a hardcore fan to the degree of knowing about the incorrect mixes being on the 1990 "MIU" CD, I knew as soon as he asked Al about it that it would only confuse Al *even more.* Al is having a tough time keeping up with which mixes that were put out on his *own* solo CD from 2012. There's no way he's going to remember that 1990 "MIU" CD, if he ever knew about it in the first place.

I listened to the Al interview segment only so far. I can try to sum up:

He was asked about "Cotton Fields" and "California Saga" and we got the same old stories about those: Giving "Cotton Fields" to Brian, not being happy with the 20/20 version, re-cutting it with the touring band. Then the story about moving the studio out to "Holland", etc.

His discussion of more recent events was more interesting. He was asked about "Don't Fight the Sea", and he ended up going off on a slight tangent about how he had to piece together the song from multiple sources because, essentially, the band is broken up. He laments that because the band isn't together, they can't all work together on something like that. I'm sure people will see it as a weird dig on Mike, but I think he was more frustrated with the splintering in general of the group when he made a reference to being together in the studio being preferable to "recording on a laptop in Toronto", which he then relates is what Mike did for his vocal on "Don't Fight the Sea." Al seems to feel the recording quality of Mike's vocal is sub-par because of this. But the overall point seems to be that because they aren't all united working together, things like that happen.

He talks a bit about "Waves of Love" and the "TWGMTR" album. In reference to the song, he basically reiterated what we already knew, which is that he kept asking Brian to finish the song with him but it never happened. He mention that "people in the hallway" and the engineers liked the song and felt it "sounded like the Beach Boys." However, Al did state that the group, or at least part of the group, DID work on the song. He says that he and Bruce did some work on it. He also talked about, as I mentioned in another post, that the album had mostly already been written and due to that and the typical politics, he never got his song on the album (he makes a comparison to Harrison not getting more songs on Beatles albums). He mentions that other tracks are "in the can" as well. Al doesn't seem angry about not getting his song on the album. He sounds more resigned to the politics of the situation. But he also has seemingly nothing but praise for Brian working in the studio. I sense that Al is bummed he didn't get his song on the album, but he's not stewing on it and isn't trying to use it as a reason to minimize the album (as another person has).

As mentioned in another post, he also makes a weird reference to just finding out that Universal put the "wrong mix" of "Waves of Love" on a CD, an incorrect mix with a "longer guitar solo." It's unclear which mix he's referring to, but my best guess is the Japanese SHM mix.

He briefly discussed Brian's new album, but doesn't offer much detail. It's basically the same "I recorded a bunch of stuff in the studio, but I don't know what's going to be on the album when it's released" details. He mentions "Run James Run" by title, referencing it as a "car song." Al seems to like all the material Brian is doing, but also seems to have been told that "Run James Run" "may or may not" be on the new album because there are going to be "guest stars."

So we got a few tidbits about "TWGMTR", but not much else new. I wish they had gotten a bit more into the C50 demise, and maybe not so much the same "Cottonfields" and "Holland" stories.

Listening to the Jardine interview. Regardless of the content and context I always enjoy his interviews! I'll post my thoughts on this specific interview later. Ten minutes in and very pleasant so far.

Of, as he put it, "Love's off with that other band."  :lol

Thanks for the great interview! Incredibly interesting. I got a chuckle at the end of the interview when Al revealed that the broken-leg incident wasn't Brian's fault.

Hey, thanks for the kudos, all. Yeah, I wish we could've gotten into much more but there was a time limit both for me and for Al. I can tell you that my show really focuses on music from 1955-70, so for much of the audience, they've never heard "Cotton Fields" or "California Saga" so consequently they'd never heard those stories. With these kinds of specials you have to walk a fine line between pleasing hardcore fans who may be listening in, and a much larger Oldies music audience who couldn't even name a Beach Boy and don't know any songs after 1965 (I hear from a LOT of those people sadly...but I'm slowly making converts out of them).  :-D 

Gotta love Al...."that must have been traumatic, I know it was for me"
Lol

Very cool interview with Al! Thank you! It's great to have someone ask questions who knows what he's talking about.

Great interview with Al. He seemed really comfortable, with it and excited to talk.

I think there might be more versions of "Waves of Love" than there are of "Heroes and Villains."

It's to the point that I have no idea which one they meant to release. I'm not sure if I've even heard the version he's talking about with Matt Jardine singing the second verse. I wish "Waves of Love" had been included on TWGMTR. It would have been one of my favorite songs on the album, and I think it's cool that Bruce and Al were working on the song together.

Yeah, I don't think even Al knows which ones he wanted to release, let along which ones were actually released. His description is confusing. I'm pretty sure he's talking about one of the three versions we've heard, but Matt doesn't sing anything solo on any version on than one line "on the waves of love" near the end of the song.

It's also confusing because he mentions that Universal put an incorrect mix of the song on one of their pressings, but it's not as if they broke into Al's studio and took an alternate mix. It had to be a mix serviced to Universal at some point by Al.

Here's another theory that offers both a possible explanation and more confusion: The Japanese "SHM" pressing has two mixes of "Waves of Love": It has the "download" version of the song (the punchier version in a higher key with Carl's vocal more audible), which had previously only been available to download on Amazon and iTunes (this was not the version included on the US standard CD, which was a completely different recording). The *second* version of the song on the Japanese CD is the same "download" version, just with minor mix variances. One theory I have is that they meant to include the two variations (download and US standard CD) on the Japanese SHM CD, and someone screwed up and grabbed the download version and then simply a slightly alternate mix of that same version. With many Japanese CD pressings, the Japanese distributor asks for "exclusive" bonus tracks. Al supplied "The Eternal Ballad" or whatever it was called, and then also supplied them with two different versions of "Waves of Love", one of which would be "exclusive" to CD at least.

Man, it stinks we got SO CLOSE to having Al discuss the whole "Waves of Love" thing. Like which version is THE version that he considers the definitive release. I still think the "saxophone" version is the official one. Since it actually sounds like a clean studio recording and not a soundcheck performance with the "Help Me, Rhonda" riff.

Anyways Ghosty, any possible way you could do a follow up email with Al or something just to ask him what is what? Because you guys were supposed to discuss it after it was played, but I guess you got caught up in another direction.

Regardless though, great interview. Super informative.

Great show, loved the Al interview.  Never heard 'Karen' before, now that should've been on MIC!