The Smiley Smile Message Board

I tried to ask this in another thread a few months ago, but it never really caught on. So I figured I'd see how an entire thread about it goes. It seems to me that there are not a lot of outtakes or session tapes from the self titled 1985 album, Still Crusin, and Summer In Paradise albums. I was just wondering why that is. To be picky about it, it seems like not a lot has surfaced past the Keepin The Summer Alive album. I have heard a version of "At The Hop", and outtakes of "She Believes In Love Again" and "Getcha Back", but that's it. I know that starting with the 1985 album, the group recorded digitally. I think they used pretty much nothing but Pro Tools on "Summer In Paradise". Do actual "session tapes" even exist? Or did they just load demos on to a computer, and overdub it piece by piece?

Seriously... would you want to hear any SIP outtakes ?

For tracks recorded during the sessions for the 1985 album, suggest you check these two pages out:

http://www.esquarterly.com/bellagio/gigs84.html (http://www.esquarterly.com/bellagio/gigs84.html)

http://www.esquarterly.com/bellagio/gigs85.html (http://www.esquarterly.com/bellagio/gigs85.html)

there's a lot of different mixes (single mix) of different BB singles like Rock and Roll To the Rescue, Problem Child, Island Girl, etc.

Wow...Now I've heard it all...S.I.P. outtakes & mixes...All the best in your quest...-)

i also have a bad quality of California Calling with only Al Jardine's vocals. I like it more than the released one ::)

Still cruisin'could have been filled with more recent songs like chasing the sky, lady liberty, problem child etc...

I never heard from any out takes on SIP. I wonder if there are any songs recorded that didnt make it to the album.

Interesting. I guess "And I always will" is the Jardie-number he's putting on his soloalbum, right?

Did they have ProTools for SIP?

... yes? What are you asking?

And apparently it was a beta version of Pro Tools.

I was just curious as to whether ProTools systems were properlly around that long ago :)

Do you mean just Al's lead vocal, or him doing all the background parts?  And is the backing track the same as the released version?

Pro Tools are mentioned in the sleeve notes: this was one of the first CDs recorded using the program (hence the 'beta testing' information).

Let me try to be a little more specific. What I mean to say is, Did the band members go into the studio and actually record the songs "live" in the studio, as was the way they had been doing in the last 20 or so years? Or did each member record their parts separately?

These are the known outtakes from the '85 album -

Down By The Pier, Carl lead vocal
Oh Lord, presumably a Brian lead vocal
Water Builds Up, Brian lead vocal
At The Hop, Michael lead vocal
And I Always Will, Al lead vocal

Only At The Hop circulates, obviously. Oh Lord has been rumored for years. Don't Fight The Sea MIGHT have been worked on at one point in 1984 by at least Carl and Al, although it's not listed on Andrew's site.

There's also an acetate of rough mixes from the '85 album (including Male Ego) that goes around, the differences are minimal. There are also some different mixes for She Believes In Love Again and California Calling; the former has more synths, the latter has Al on all lead vocals.

Thanks for that info. I'm really curios about that Oh Lord session. But then again, having heard the potential in the demo, and having heard the album as the group released it, I'm almost afraid to find out what Steve Levine(Is that his name?) would have done to it.

Levine's original (rejected) mix of the album was sparser, more synth-based.

Who rejected the album, the Beach Boys or the record company?

Both.

Who rejected it? Anyone with the gift of hearing I'd imagine!

John Hunter Phillips posted Carl's "What You Do To Me" last night and I had a mini-binge of listening to Beach Boys '80s stuff on youtube.  It really got me thinking about how the rise of sequencers and digital recording affected every aspect of how music was made.  Not just the obvious stuff that we all know about, but subtle things.  The one that hit me the most was how, when people began to program drums instead of playing them, they often went overboard with sounds and patterns that just didn't make any musical sense.  I was particularly thinking about "Rock 'n' Roll To The Rescue," a track that I happen to like a lot, but the drums just do some really weird things in the chorus.  You can tell someone is programming that on a keyboard or with pads.  25 years later, the track itself sounds cool, but the drums sound weird.  This is true of a lot of the BBs' '80s music....well, except most of it isn't as good as RRTTR in my opinion.

It occurs to me too that with digital technology you're less likely to get actual outtakes than with analog, but I'm not sure why that is, exactly (and I'm speaking as someone who's been neck-deep in both and ought to know).  That's my gut sense of it, but I can't explain it.  I think it has to do with the music being more "in the box" (e.g. a computer or, earlier, in the banks of a sequencer) so you're less likely to be making rough mixes and circulating them.  But even then, I'm not sure why it would make any difference...but my gut is that it does.

The other problem is a complete and total lack of bottom end, but that was even prevalent in analog recordings going back to the mid-1970s. An electric guitar is supposed to rock, not buzz.

Ah don't actually have the CD because everyone says how bad it is haha...thats quite interesting because I think Ricky Martin's Livin La Vida Loca was really the first track to be recorded, mixed etc exclusively within PT and this was some seven or so years later...why I asked really.  So thanks.

Sam

I guess outakes and alternate takes, initial takes to build tracks etc, faded over the years as multitracking became infinite and digital recording took over.    I wouldn't mind hearing early mixes and raw demos of songs such as Maybe, I Don't Know, cause I'm such a CW fan. And I am taken by SNJ and could stand hearing a number of versions and takes of that.  I can be forgiven for wanting to hear more and varied versions of songs by my band.
I keep looking, collecting,  storing, stashing, and listening.  Like looking for gems.  Once in a while you are rewarded and it keeps you searching.

This seems unbelievably unlikely.

I agree with everything you just said. I'll take one step further though. In my opinion, the "digital age"(starting in, roughly, 1983) has been the true downfall of music. Starting with "new wave", on up to the "autotuning" of today. Real, true "rock" bands today(like Wolfmother, for example) are few and far between. We have to rely on the older guys like Neil Young to help us remember what true rock music used to be about.

I won't take this too far (in that it would really get off topic), but I don't think there is any downfall in music in using newly available technology. Change, sure. But there was change in music at every other step of the way, too. Did it ruin music, or change music? From changes in instruments, to recording, to multitrack recording, to effects, to analog synths, to digital samples, to programming, to more modern editing...each is just one step. "True rock"? What would that be? If we're to look at what rock 'n' roll began as, any "true rock" would now be a laughable nostalgia trip, not some new, rebellious spirit. What is a new rebellious spirit (which might be considered the equivalent of rock)? Probably what a fan of "true rock" would dislike, due to its very newness.

Here's a hypothetical -- which is worse --

1.) Someone actually singing a song credited to them, with their voice autotuned to be palatable

or

2.) A studio pro singing the song, then crediting the work to someone else (like Bruce and Terry for the Rip Chords, for instance. Or Motown ditching the rest of the Supremes for "Someday We'll Be Together").

The point is, whenever there's a quick and cheap way to make slick music for the masses, the folks who make their living selling such music will use it. Has nothing to do with digital or computer programs. Has to do with turning a profit.

As for the truly creative folks -- they will take what they can from the available tech and turn it to their own ends. (As they have always done.) The Flaming Lips, for example, have transformed as band because of such tech. Wayne Coyne can actually _sing_ on their records. It has opened new areas for them.

I also think you have a lot more people doing orchestral pop, for instance, than ever before -- because they can now record it on a laptop in their bedroom. They couldn't have afforded it before. And I'm talking about people on this board!

I happen to agree that music took a steep nosedive after 1983, the first year that the mega-sequencer/samplers became available like the Synclavier.  Look no further than Stevie Wonder for evidence of that.

I think there's a simple reason:  it became very easy to make something sound like a record.  Before, it took a lot of work, careful playing and arranging around the raw material of a good song, to get there.  Now, with a perfect beat and everything slick and programmed, almost anything you did sounded like it was "finished."  It made it easy to overlook the actual craft of songwriting...moreover, because a lot of people started writing to drum machines, dynamics tended to go out the window...you kept one beat going at the same level and volume all the way through the song.  OR, you went overboard by getting ridiculously polyrhythmic when you didn't need to be.

It's not an overreaction to say the introduction of sampling and sequencing keyboards changed everything not just about how songs were produced, but how they got written and arranged.  The entire process completely shifted.  By the end of the '80s, people started to dial it back and there were some starting to return to a more organic way of doing things...but most of what we hear on the radio today has its roots in the concept of writing and recording that didn't exist before 1983, because just about anything that's got a drum machine, a keyboard and a reasonable method of recording is going to sound like a record...even just a guy talking over it.  And that's cool...but it means far fewer people are going to sit down and actually "write a record" in the Beatles/Brian Wilson sense of the word.  You have to actually TRY to do it that way.  The technology can be helpful, yes, but it also makes it easier just not to bother.

Mind you, plenty of worthwhile music can and has been made using this method, but it makes it much HARDER to get the kind of records that you had previously.  Also, the skill sets of the musicians themselves tended to change, and the bar got lowered pretty far in terms of what you could get away with playing in a band.  Now you're at a point where there are ProTools studios popping up everywhere (I'm running one myself, for Chrissakes), but hardly any of them actually know how to record a live drum kit.

Well I guess the first major hit anyway which isnt quite the same thing when I think about it.

First #1 to be Pro Tools from the ground up. First commercial version of Pro Tools was marketed in 1991 - 4 tracks, price tag $6,000

6 Gs for 4 tracks  :o

Well, yeah...but you could bounce and ping pong those babies from now until Doomsday with no loss of quality !