The Smiley Smile Message Board

Hi experts -

I am wondering: was Pet Sounds the first classic pop album performed live in full? Or were there there others before it? Now that I am typing this, I realize that Pink Floyd (or Roger Waters, more precisely) did 'The Wall' in Berlin.

So: which artists got there first?

wild guess: the Who (Tommy)?

Was Tubular Bells done in it entirety? I think Tommy was performed in full, but out of order.... Didn't Elton play Captain Fantastic live at the same Wrmbley gig that the Beach Boys blew him away at?

Wow, that is a pretty smart guess... :smokin

I would think TOMMY may have been the first. Pink Floyd's DARK SIDE OF THE MOON was performed in its entirety prior to the album being fully-recorded. Of course those two were performed when the recordings where relatively new. Floyd and Roger Waters continued this tradition. I recall Husker Du performed all of WAREHOUSE during their penultimate tour when the album was first released.

As to the retrospective performance of a classic album, I think the Moody Blues may have done all of DAYS OF FUTURE PASSED a decade or so after its release. Cheap Trick did specific nights dedicated to their first three albums back in 1999 which would have beat Brian to the punch as well.

Wow! I dearly love 'Warehouse - Songs and Stories'... I did not know that a fledgling Husker Du did that...

I don't know that I would call them "fledgling"; they were only about 8 months away from breaking up at that point -as fully formed as they were going to be. Since you might appreciate the trivia, Greg Norton's unreleased track from the WAREHOUSE sessions "Everytime" was included in the set to prevent two Bob Mould or two Grant Hart songs from running consecutively; Hart's "Flexible Flyer" (from FLIP YOUR WIG) was added as well for this reason.

Lou Reed "Berlin" and I think The Kinks did a couple in the 70's, "Preservation" and "A Soap Opera".

Oh, since 'Berlin' got a mention (that was in 2007/8 or so, right?), I'd like to add: Forever Changes (Love) and Astral Weeks (Van Morrison). BTW Love used the same Stockholm Strings and Horns group that Brian used for SMiLE. I saw the Swedish guys and girls after the SMiLE show, in the London Travel Inn. Sadly, Markus Sandlund, one of them, passed away during the Thailand Tsunami.

Also, more recent albums in concert...

The Zombies - Oddessy & Oracle

Devo - Are We Not Men

Devo - Freedom Of Choice

Was that recent Heart VH1 special the entire "Dreamboat Annie"?

Spiritualized also did Ladies And Gentlemen, We Are Floating In Space last year

And the Stooges are doing Raw Power in march....

As noted other bands have done entire albums from their past as concert works for awhile.  Only a few, like the Who or Pink Floyd, debuted them while still in the workshop, then that idea stopped for quite a while.  While Brian can't take credit for "Pet Sounds Live" being an innovation, he (and his people) CAN take credit for the new practice of doing a new piece as a concert work first, THEN recording it, as in the finished Smile and TLOS.  Now lots of bands do it (i.e., the Decemberists, and many others I'll think of later).

PS - the last one I can think of who did new material like this was Joe Jackson, back in the 80s, when he "perfected" the songs for Big World in live performances before recording them live to two-track.  More recently - AFTER Brian - Radiohead arrived at the arrangements for the "In Rainbows" songs by trying them out live and seeing what worked.

Thanks for the many fine contributions. For this person it's a bit of an eye-opener... obviously there are pop records that stood the test of time pretty well; so why not perform them in full, after all those years? Perhaps it paves the way for what is normal in classical music: that standard albums will be performed by other artists, when their originators will be way too old, or after they will have passed away.

Now let me make an educated guess: I'd say that Zappa will have done something similar, no? Or, at any rate, his work The Yellow Shark was done (by Ensemble Moderne, methinks).

Finally: Todd Rundgren got a rave review in a main Dutch newspaper. He did A Wizard, A True Star in full, first in the U.K., and today, I believe, in Amsterdam.

Maybe you could add an * (asterisk) next to BWPS because Brian (and especially the Beach Boys) performed most of SMiLE over the previous 35 years.

Well yes, that's why I said the FINISHED BWPS in its three-movement completed version.  As you say, pieces of it had been dusted off in recent years and played by both the BB and Brian.

Apart from an all star show in 1972 the Who never played the entirtey of Tommy live. Underture and Welcome were never played at the Who's own shows. Cousin Kevin was only featured on the '89 Tommy tour.

Yes played the entirety of the Close to the Edge in '72 and on a few of their other 70's tours and again at some of their 00's shows but they have never played all three tracks back to back in order.

Yes also played all of Topographic Oceans in '74 for a few dates but dropped half of it for later dates on the tour due to underwhelming response. Of course Yes and Pink Floyd are seriously album oriented bands.

No. Dark Side of the Moon was fine tuned on stage for months by Pink Floyd, beginning in 1972.

But by 1973 they played the album just like it was with the standard "other" set ("Echoes", "One Of These Days", etc.) and stopped performing it in that fashion by 1975. Then they picked it back up again (minus Roger) in 1994.

I know Bowie's done a few albums in full in clubs, Low and Heathen among them. And Neil Young does it regularly, on the 1992 acoustic tour he did all of his Harvest Moon material out of order, in 2005 he did Prarie Wind in order in Nashville which was filmed for the Heart of Gold film and finally Springsteen recently got a lot of publicity for doing The River, Born to Run, Greetings for Ashbury Park and Born in the U.S.A live in their entirety.

Oops, I missed it. Sorry.

Featuring the Stockholm Strings plus Jeff and Darian!!