The Smiley Smile Message Board

If I remember the story correctly, the SOT “underground” releases used material that was acquired by a Capitol employee(?) during the production of the “American Band” film project. Was the party responsible for the coping of the material ever prosecuted?  Does he/she still work in the business?  (Has it ever been verified who was responsible?)

No….I’m not an attorney.

Originally, that was the widely held opinion, but in recent years there's been doubt cast on that theory. Another proposal was that they were somehow connected with Mark Linett, but that's been disproved by what was on the 1993 box set but not in the SOT series. He wouldn't anyway - he not that dumb as to jepoardise his career.

During the making of the 1985 video biog, the producers had to lay hands on 2-, 3-, 4- and 8-track consoles to playback/copy the session tapes so, really, could have been any one of quite a few people, some not actually employed by the production company.

Thank you for the info. 

And music producer/filmographer/musical archival restorer Ron Furmanek has been cleared of any wrong doing and is still very much in the business.

BTW: I always wondered how the 'stealing' of music for bootlegs actually happens. Is someone really walking out of a studio with a box, choc full of tapes, in bright sunlight? Or burglaring a studio in the middle of the night? Or secretly copying masters in the studio on an 8-track cartridge or something? IIRC, the SOT stuff was on tape meant for video, is that right?

(I am thinking of a large scale computer theft at my University. Somewhere in the late '80s, a crew of very normally looking folks stopped by with their truck. They all wore beige work coats, with some emblem to signify something (nothing, actually, as it turned out). They entered the largest building, which then had the state-of-the-art PC line. They greeted the doorman, and quietly disconnected a series of PCs. Took these out, loaded them into the truck, and drove off. No one saw any harm in this... everybody thought it was to renew or clean or update something in the sets.

Of course, they did not ever return.

Shows what belief in authority can do to you...)

Well... in the admittedly individual case of the  second Smile CD boot, the source tape came from a friend of a friend of someone who worked fleetingly on Brian's first solo album who was given it to basically shut them up as they kept asking to hear said music. Or so I've been told.

Good hard factual info. Cheers for that.

Whoever it was, heroes in the BB fan world.
And honestly, who wants to present names here?
Thankfulness should be shown in other ways.

To further expand, even back in the day there were ample opportunities: Chuck Britz routinely ran a 2-track slave during Brian's sessions for his own reference purposes, and for someone to copy that in the studio would be the work of moments. Artists have their own copies of work in progress lying around the house, and, again, I know of one instance when, a few decades ago, the band were out of town over a July 4th weekend and someone in their employ utilised the time to make high-quality cassette copies of everything in the archives they could lay their hands on. And of course, the classic example is the Preiss Smile tape, which was given to him by someone close to the band (semi-officially) for his authorised autobiography. Not so much theft, more... carelessness.

And not to forget they used for these transfers digital 14/16 Bit Sony PCM Betamax machines. That's the reason the sound quality of the SOT discs is so crystal clear. :old

That and coming directly from the raw multitracks with no compression or mastering EQ and almost no generational signal degredation. Oh, and the Ampex tapes that used a whale oil lubricant.  :woot

You made my day, AGD. 'Moby-Dick' is my all-time favourite book. 'Pet Sounds/Smile' are my all time favourite disks.

I just knew there had to be some more or less metaphysical link in all of this...

Yes... whales died that we might one day hear Pet Sounds in stereo. Worth every last harpoon.  :pirate

 :lol quite brilliant, arr arr...

Hahahaaa!!!

Hence the numerous copies circulating in Japan, then?

 :smokin very good, sir! Might have thought of that meself, but didn't...

Alan Boyd has insisted that tapes were signed out and signed back in appropriately by the Am Band producers and that they and/or production company personnel were not responsible for the leaked SOT tapes.  What I got from that is that someone working for the BB tape storage facility at the time must have been responsible - because only they would be able to copy tapes on the sly without documentation, or allow tapes to leave the facility and come back (or not) without documentation.  That person could have worked with someone with the Am Band production, or someone else entirely.

Isn't it well-known that the 40 minute Help Me Rhonda vocal session is from Chuck's reference tapes?

Allegedly.  ::)

Not that I ever partake in the acquisition and perusal of unreleased recordings. That stuff is reserved for cheapskates, thieves, and Republicans.

Al Jardine in a recent interview: “I saw it. There would be people rolling tape behind people rolling tape, secret tape machines running in different rooms when you're mastering. People were running two-track machines while we were mastering in another room, and they were taking it. They were just as good as masters. It's gotta drive poor Capitol Records crazy. I feel sorry for them, but well, hell, they made a shitload of money anyway."

The SOT's are in my top 3 all-time favorite unreleased recordings.  Maybe my favorite.  Wish to heck there were more tracks from the tapes that remain missing.  There are a few holes, but for the most part, a lot of is is still there.

The the Dumb Angel series is also a must-have.   But that's a whole other thread....... 

The "holes" in the SOTs have, in most cases, been booted since the SOTs came out in the late 90s. In particular, the Cabinessence sessions come to mind. Maybe not the same quality, but holes are plugged nonetheless.

Gimme the vocal sessions for Good Vibrations. The SOT set as 3 CD's dedicated to it - most of which include the tracking sessions and the lead vocal with the alternate lyrics.  I would LOVE to hear a CD's worth of vocal sessions for that.

There's also quite a bit missing from a couple of early albums.  I'd like to hear the vocal sessions for "Fun, Fun, Fun" and the recently aquired "Don't Worry Baby". And the "I Get Around" vocal session where Brian threw Murry against the wall.....

The vocal sessions for "Fun Fun Fun", at least some of them, are in SOT.  IIRC, they're doubling the first layer of vocals, while at the same time Carl is doubling the guitar lead in the intro. 

Sure, the vocal overdubs on Fun, Fun, Fun, but no early vocal takes like in "Dance, Dance, Dance" (which is hilarious).  Maybe there wasn't much exciting to hear anyway.......

Sorry for the ignorance but what does SOT stand for?

Sea Of Tunes ;D

I would love to hear the I Get Around session that Mikie has mentioned, wonder if it even still exists?

I haven't got any of the SOT CD's but I have been, errrr, 'obtaining' the Life's A Beach series, is the guy who is putting LAB out using the SOT stuff?

SOT, Dumb Angel, anything he can lay hands on. Er, allegedly.

They'd have only really needed one console - providing the wiring is in place, a 3-track tape can just as easily be played through, say, a 42-input desk as through a three-way mixer.

Certain Ampex and Studer tape machines had interchangeable heads, circuit boards and (in a rare case) tape paths. With the correct hardware and somebody suitably trained to line the machine up post-modification, it is possible to play a 1" 8-track tape on the same transport (machine) as a half-inch, 3-track tape. It's possible it was all done through one or two playback machines. I find it most interesting that the series stopped before the switch to two-inch, 16-track (and more) tape. That may have had something to do with the 2" tapes being inaccessible to the bootleggers, mind.

I love your work, Andrew, but hate to leave somebody so knowledgable under a technical misapprehension.

Well.... this is not quite accurate.

At the time of the AMERICAN BAND project, the facility where the Beach Boys' tapes were being stored (and are currently stored) was / is one of the most secure media vault facilities in LA.  Security is stringent, to say the least, and every item has to be signed out and approved.  The vault documentation from the American Band project is still extant, and it's obvious that the only tapes checked out during the years they were working on that production were masters relevant to the film.  Every item pulled from the racks had to be approved by the group's management. 

There's just no way that anyone from that film would have been able to simply walk out with hundreds of reels.  This had to have been done by someone with an ENORMOUS amount of time on their hands, and access to the appropriate playback gear, not to mention a mixing console, most likely in a studio environment (FYI - there is no audio equipment on site at the vaults).

This did not happen during AMERICAN BAND.  The people involved with that film are not the culprits here.  As a matter of fact, Ron Furmanek, who worked closely with Malcolm Leo and supervised the audio for that documentary, has been a great help to us in recent years, and he's also the fellow responsible for bringing "The Lost Concert" to light. 

We don't know how or when the SOT masters were copied and mixed down, or by whom.  There have been periods, both before and after AMERICAN BAND, when the tapes were moved to other, possibly less secure locations.  Recently I've been going through the SOT CDs and matching the tracks with the tape masters we have in the vaults, and it's been awfully frustrating to discover a number of tracks deriving from tapes which are now missing - in some cases, the tape boxes are there but they're empty.... and according to previous inventory files they've been empty for many years.  That seems to indicate that these SOT dubs were made quite a long time ago.  Argh.

Alan

Here's a crazy thought...maybe Murry copied all those tapes in the late '60s, to archive everything in the Sea Of Tunes catalog before he sold it to A&M...hence the brand name of the series!

Your theory is crazy... but not crazy enough to be true.  ;D

Thanks for setting me straight - I'm embarrassed that I said that considering I just did research on 8-tracks in Hollywood in the 60s and of course read exactly what you just said. I think my dissolute past is beginning to catch up with me...  :brian

There is a very old boot out there called, I believe, "Capitol Punishment", which has some sessions for "Please Let Me Wonder".  It's an alternate version of the song, where most of the background vocals are on the "ahhh" syllable instead of the "oooo" syllable, as in the released version.  It has a partially acapella version of the background vocals (i.e. the fader for the music was pushed down at several points).  In my book, this is one of the most amazing moments I've ever heard from the group.  I could only imagine what it would be like to hear it in pristine audio. 

I'm hoping someone could tell me that the tapes for this are still in the vaults, and did not disappear 20 years ago.  (please?)

 For those who haven't heard, I was able to find it on youtube:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m1rd9I_Wk6I

The Please Let Me Wonder backing vocal overdub session (take 5) is one of my all-time favorite Beach Boys vocal sessions segments. If anyone in this world doubts that the Beach Boys can do great harmony, this is an excellent example. I've heard this part in better audio than on the Capitol Punishment boot, but was surprised it wasn't included on the SOT disc in the same quality as the rest of the session takes. Just outstanding. It's mixed down into the final vocals of the song, so you really can't hear it well unless it's isolated.

most of the beach boys' '60s masters are on Scotch brand type incidentally (look at the cover of stack-o-tracks and you can see the "scotch" logo removed from all the boxes!).  while the tapes may indeed use whale oil, the issue with later era tapes that have "sticky shed syndrome" is the binder material on tapes that have a backcoating.  backcoated tapes did not come out until 1969, so none of the '60s beach boys stock would have this problem.  the tapes do likely have their own set of issues though, scotch 202 and 203 (which many of the beach boys masters are recorded on) have a known problem where the oxide literally will come off the tape itself and you are left with a clear (or partially clear) strip of tape.  this is particularly problematic on areas of tape where a splice was made.   the acetate version of this formula (scotch 201) does not suffer from this issue, although the acetate can curl and become brittle.  202 (1.5 mil) and 203 (1.0 mil) were among the earliest polyester (plastic) tapes instead of acetate.  i personally work with this tape for my own music and it must be handled with care but it is very durable and much more stable than later era tape in my opinion.  

scotch 206 was the first backcoated tape and it does not suffer from sticky shed, even when they switched from whale oil to synthetic lube (due to environmental restrictions).  so i think the whale oil thing is a myth!

Alan - thanks for clarifying.  What I was trying to infer from what you had said previously was that IF the tapes had been copied during their stay in this secure L.A. facility, it had to be done with the help of an "insider" at that facility, bypassing approval from the group's management and bypassing the usual paperwork.  However, if there's material on the SOT's that's been documented as missing from the vaults dating back to the time of American Band (you don't say this exactly, but seem to imply it) then clearly the tapes were copied earlier when they likely were at a less secure location.

While I enjoy having the SOT's to listen to, the removal of master tapes to be lost forever is tragic.  Hopefully whomever has possession of these tapes will eventually return them to BRI.

I worry about this rather a lot, too. It does happen, though, as we did get Don't Worry Baby and other songs back into safe hands last year....

Yeah, too bad we'll probably not hear them any time soon now that they're back in these "safe" hands. :(

Does anybody know if any of the SOT's were 'tampered' with before they were released? As in, did the person (s) who got these out into the public make their own edits or overdubs onto the tapes? One thing that always stuck out in my mind as sounding a bit 'fake' was the 'Look/I Ran' that had drums feature prominently through the song. Didn't know if that was an actual Brian edit, or SOT did it just to add to the 'rareness' of the tracks.

I'm not sure about the other SOT's, but the complete Party! album in stereo was definitely tampered with. A small Asian boy's voice breaks into the middle of it and starts talking. It was an obvious mistake and I'm surprised that the bootlegger let it go. Maybe he had no choice to fix it because the interruption was on his original copy of the tape.

I'd also like to know if this SOT UM Vol. 10 Disc 4 Party! CD is the real deal stereo or fake stereo. It sure sounds good!

Yeah, but it doesn't have the overdubbed "party" sounds...it's a stereo mix of the multi-tracks prior to those sound effects being added.

I don't believe the SOT's were tampered with per se, but the tape source (whomever copied the three, four and eight track tapes) was mixing on the fly, and mistakes were made (perhaps explaining the voice in Party?).  The prominent drums in Look was on an earlier take, before Brian decided to change the arrangement.  That's the fascinating thing about the SOT's - you can hear the arrangements develop and get fine tuned or abruptly change course, although the latter was rare.  The SOT's are edited, and I suspect some of the editing was done by the tapers, and some by the bootleggers to fit the music on the CD's in some logical fashion.  The most editing was on SOT Vol. 16 - the single SMile CD that was supposed to represent what Brian might have released in 1967.  They included stuff copied from Capitol releases and edited it with some of their tapes to try and recreate Smile, not too successfully IMO.

I think SOT Vol's 16 & 17 were/are great! Up to that point the only thing that rivaled them were the Japanese SMiLE and the Vigotone 2-CD set. I still listen to that SOT Smile Sessions box over the others.