The Smiley Smile Message Board

I have a question for those of you with more access to the group and its assorted employees and associates over the years: do you have, or have you in the past often had, access to much music that hasn't been (or hadn't been until much later) released, either officially or on boots? And if so, can you talk about what that's like?

This is not to ask you to reveal sources or secrets, or to share, or anything like that. The point behind the question is twofold:

1) Is there still much left available to be heard (not counting alternate mixes and such--I mean different songs)? We had that "Bedroom Years" article relatively recently, for example.
2) (This is the one I am more interested in.) What is it like to have, or to have heard, music that you're really not supposed to talk about or share generally? I know the sharing of musical experiences is really important for me--it's a part of what makes music great--and so it must be tough to either just keep your mouths shut or talk only to some select few.

Anything you're willing to discuss without compromising your integrity would be appreciated. It's interesting to me.

Can we include the footage that's still kept in the vaults too?

i recall drooling over some of PongHit's posts a little while back. I'm pretty sure he's heard some stuff that's not out there yet. Didn't he hear it from Alan Boyd?

I'd wager AGD has heard some really rare stuff too… care to expand?:)

Just to clarify my interests--not speaking for anyone else's, though--I'm less interested in what you have / had than I am in what it was or is like to have / have had something.

I was told recently by someone who would know, that there is unreleased Smile material in the hands of private collectors.

Doesn't seem fair.

I disagree completely and don't see anything unfair about it.

What about songs that aren't SMiLE related?

Yes, I have.  ;D

Exquisitely frustrating. But, if hearing/having it comes with an embargo, you comply.

I'd bet a good amount of people here have heard rare stuff, but just don't post about it because there's nothing they can say.

 not sure that's true, depending on what you mean by "quite a few" and "rare." Most of us have studio and live boots, which are to some extent rare, but I'd bet 95% of what 95%* of us have is in common. My interest was in those with the truly rare stuff, the nearly unique experiences.

*All stats estimated, margin of error is, oh, 95 pts.

I've heard 4 1/2 minutes of the Brian Wilson/Van Dyke Parks composing tape for Sail on Sailor.  It's great to hear, but I much rather hear those Smile bits which haven't every been released.

Where and When?

Do you mean the tape where Van Dyke says, "Cut the sh*t Brian, and sit down here and write this middle-eight"?

That's the one.  It was played to me over the phone about 13 or 14 years ago.  I believe it came from someone that has passed away recently.

I have a reel to reel tape containing a few songs that Brian sang to Lauri Klobas on one of her birthdays. At the time she worked at his home as editor of "Break Away" the fanzine. Her and I had become close friends after I bid on one of her Beach Boys auctions on the old AOL message board. That must have been in 1996 or 1997. We remiained friends until her passing.

Anyway, as a gift to me, she sent me that tape. However, I don't have a reel to reel player, and have never heard it!! The tape sits in a box in my basement.

You may want to do something with it sooner rather than later Jeff.  Like take it somwhere where it can be transferred onto a cd or at least into a file you can play on your computer.  Those old tapes can go 'bad'.   Most of us haven't stored our cassette, reel to reel, and 8 track tapes properly.  They crack, break, stretch, twist and disappoint.  Why take a chance?  Do it sooner rather than later.  Each passing week at this point is your enemy.

Yeah, good point. I really should do something with it.

. Double post sorry

I miss Lauri. She was a really nice person :(

She was one in a million. We talked about almost everything, except not much about Brian, as she had signed a confidentially agreement for her employment there. She was without a doubt my best and closest Internet friend.

I WILL NOT FORGIVE YOU

Jeff, not trying to pry material out of your hands in any way, but I'm sure there are some board members (myself included) who have working reel to reel machines.  You're talking with a bunch of audio geeks on this board.  If you know and trust someone here, you might think about arranging to have someone transfer it over to CD.  I've thrown away a lot of reel to reel tapes over the years that literally fell apart while being played.

Agreed.  I also have a working reel-to-reel deck.  In fact I was just transferring some vintage tapes from the '50s and early '60s (non-Beach Boys; sorry) to CD over the holidays.

Lee

Is there a list of unbooted songs that HAVE been heard, (not just known to exist) available?

I have a dandy of a Technics Reel-to-Reel deck.

Is there audio that no one knows about? And if it was played in the wilderness with no one around to hear it would it still be audio?   ??? :o  ???

I also have a bunch of tape machines  ;D

send it to Australia and i'll take a look at it  ::)

RickB

No, without ears present to transmute it into audio, it would simply be disturbances of vibration in the air.

Has anyone heard 'Oh Lord' from the '85 Steve Levine sessions?
By the way, did the engineer Gordon Milne go on to work on anything else?

.

Spot on.

The Smile acetates from Van Dyke's ex wife that were discovered after the Smile box set was compiled were auctioned off and are in the hands of a collector.  They've been transferred to digital files and some people have heard them - I am not one of them.  On one acetate there is a new Great Shape musical piece that is not in the tape vault edited into sections of Heroes and Villains.  There are some slightly different mixes of some other Smile stuff as well.

Be good to know who the collector is( it's not me) so we can bug him/her for copies...

Assume copyright on those will expire in a year or two…

you sure do.  who would want those opportunities to disappear? 

The single quickest way to turn a source into a former source is to ignore their conditions of... well, being a source. Cohen never seemed to grasp this very simple point.

I'm appreciating the on-topic responses. Can any of you now share past examples more specifically? For example, something then-unreleased that you were dying to talk about with so-and-so (but couldn't)? Some debate you could've resolved or weighed in on, but were prevented? A new impression others couldn't share based on the music you, but not they, had access to?

Seems this line of story isn't interesting to anyone but me, but I do appreciate whatever tales there may be that can now be told.

The frustrating reality about unreleased material is that they're not a lot of us left that care about this stuff.  How may 20 years are dying to hear an unreleased snippet of Smile material?
One wishes that the people who really care about this stuff could still have excess to it.  God do I miss the days of spending a lazy Saturday afternoon looking for bootlegs.  It's still is difficult to describe the buzz that I felt the 1st time I heard the original Wonderful on that 2nd Smile bootleg.

Or the original Wind Chimes on the Japanese boot T-2580-2 with the incredible photo of Brian at the piano on the back and the Smile shop on the CD itself - that really blew my mind.

Going into detail on this would take too much time, but I can say over the past 15 years I have had the privilege of hearing and seeing a great many things that were either unreleased and unbooted at the time, and/or still are. I guess getting to help sift through the POB and Bambu and other DW solo multi-tracks is a highlight for sure. But also, thanks to people like Ed Roach, Alan Boyd, David Marks, Howie Edelson, Tom Murphy, John Hanlon, James Guercio, Gregg Jakobson, Garby Leon, Carl B Wilson, Matt O Casey, Craig Slowinski, Klay, Klaas and many others I've gotten to hear and see some things I'd never have without them. So thanks, you know who you are.

I was fortunate to have had access to some very nice unreleased material through friends I have made over the web and in person over the years.    In recent years, a good bit of this material has been officially released and is available on boxes and compilations.    a lot more is available on widely shared boots.    I suspect  that a lot that has not been distributed  officially or on boots  may be of poor quality or rehearsal chatter with out takes.     I , for one would like to hear more of the high quality studio banter.    Perhaps more of this will become available on some future comp paired with resultant completed songs.

Since you asked...

I was fortunate enough to hear TWGMTR several weeks before release (some here will think, from one of two highly likely sources - neither is correct), and when the opening notes of "FTTGA" hit my ears, I nearly fell off my chair. By the end of the suite, I was almost in tears. I wanted to tell everyone how staggeringly amazing it was, that the whole album was way, way better than it had any right to be. And I couldn't.

It's not just music, though: sometimes information comes with a similar embargo. The whole stream of drivel spouted by Phil Cohen about TSS pre-release was made so much more amusing to me, and doubtless those similarly clued in, because I knew what he was ranting about was utterly, comically without foundation: every last complaint. The capper was his bitching about the non-inclusion of the "million units... in January" clip when the full track listing came out... because we knew it was a hidden track. That, my friends, was a sweet, sweet moment. Even though I couldn't tell him, either on the forum or via PM.  ;D

A final observation: there are, of course, ways of saying something by saying nothing.

Thanks, that's exactly the sort of story I'm interested in.

"From There To Georgia Again"?

On the flipside of all this, I've been fortunate to play actual Beach Boys unreleased music that they've never heard before -- and in a couple of cases, pieces that certain members have SWORN they're not on -- when in fact said piece either was co-written by them and/or they're prominently featured.

One of the coolest moments was the day that Stebbins and I sat Blondie down during the DW doc shoot and blasted a pristine mix of "Carry Me Home" for him -- a tune he hadn't heard since the day he recorded the vocal.

Him looking at Jon and I screaming: "Me?! Is that ME?!"

Major moment.

That's the one. Magnificent.

like that you mention pristine mix... there's something to hope for in the future....  :)

I love it. Thanks, Howie.

I received (via email) a question from someone as to why I participated in the "Soulful Old Man Sunshine" thread and described my experiences hearing that track four years before its release, but didn't participate in this thread.  In my mind, the difference is that Rick Henn gave me full permission to write about "Soulful Old Man Sunshine" in ESQ in 1994, and I tried to describe it in as much painstaking detail as I could after only hearing it twice (I did ask Rick to play it two times in a row!) and considering I didn't have access to a pen and paper to write down notes until several hours later.

In the scenario described in this thread I would be discussing material (or even the experience hearing material) that I was told not to talk about, and as others have described, the result of not honoring that commitment would be a "burnt bridge."

I will say that there have been a couple of times where I have let something slip in reference to an unreleased/uncirculated track on this very board, and it's not a pleasant experience to get a phone call or email about it...

Lee

I was once the recipient of a screamingly irate phone call concerning the leaking of an uncirculated track, and it took me a good ten minutes to convince Joe Doakes (not the real name) that I had most certainly not copied it against instructions on the excellent grounds that I didn't have the bloody thing.  :)

Same here...  In the aftermath of the "Get the Boot" leak I got one of those calls, and I was able to defend myself with a clear conscience because there were things on that collection that I had never heard, much less possessed.

I once mentioned something I had received from a source 2 to a different source 1 and it turned out it was something source 1 had shared with source 2 with the understanding that it not be shared with anyone else. Very awkward. Neither are on this board any longer.

One thing I will add is that sometimes the agenda is exactly the opposite -- the producer/artist/possessor WANTS the public to know about the track/tracks, in order to create demand for their release -- which would in turn benefit them financially and/or reputationally.  Witness Andy Paley playing the tapes of his sessions with Brian to quite a number of folks -- present company included.  That is one set of tapes that, with the exception of 2 or 3 tracks (like "Soul Searchin'" and the original "Gettin' In Over My Head") I will admit I overhyped in ESQ, and now listen to and in general say "meh."

Lee

I once gave a demo CD of my own songs to one of Brian's people.  Thankfully it hasn't 'leaked' yet! ;).