The Smiley Smile Message Board

On the 20/20 2fer CD, Brian writes about I Can Hear Music:

“I wanted the instrumental track of I Can Hear Music to be smooth and subliminal. I used acoustic guitars. Carl wailed on the lead.”

This is one where it’s accepted Brian was absent for, as Bruce has stated in the past.

Anyone have any thoughts on this?

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The two-fer liners are full of errors giving Beach Boys fans loads of incorrect factoids to throw them off of actual understanding of the history of the band. Don't know why but it seems not much fact checking was done as part of the editing process. Shabby and yes weird. I was asked to write liners for one of the late '70's two-fers and when the late Paul Atkinson of Capitol called me to offer the job I said sure as long as I can write that one of them was a mostly crap album. He laughed, said I was right, and I didn't get the job.

There is no doubt that a lot of it was written by David leaf or others-sometimes using info from old Brian interviews. I recall that the pet sounds book incorporated a lot of quotes from 1960s interviews I have but made it seem like they were written now. That was in the last landy years so Brian was probably not that accessible

Hmmm that’s what I always suspected with these linear notes.

Odd that they would do this. Seems like they are in the same style of Brian first “autobiography”.

Disappointing..

I kinda disagree.  I don't know the circumstances under which Brian submitted those liner-note essays (and perhaps only someone like David Leaf might be able to recall that now, 30 years later), BUT I strongly suspect that Brian himself was responsible for them in one way or another (e.g., handwritten notes, oral interviews with a Capitol intern, who knows).  Why?  Well, because if someone were faking it like a WIBN-style autobiography, they'd likely have done a better job of faking it.  Brian's liner notes are all over the map.  They're completely MIA in several of the two-fers (Today/Summer Days & Smiley/WH, off the top of my head).  On the other hand, in the Surfer Girl & SDv2 two-fer, he offers an essay on each album.  In the Surfer Girl essay, he rambles on at the end about taunting the Four Seasons in Surfers Rule, and how his competitive attitude received both positive and negative feedback.  And he's like the Jack Lalanne of music.  It's odd and kind of irrelevant information but that strangeness suggests authenticity.

M.I.U. ?

Is it "liner" notes, like an ocean liner, or a garbage can liner, or "linear" as in linear thought?

"Liner", as in notes that grace the inner sleeve or jacket liner of an album. The term has transferred over to the CD age, and now applies to booklet notes.

My bad, you’re right it’s liner.

The twofers came out in 1990, Brian was still under Landy's care and Wouldn't It Be Nice: My Own Story would come out soon after.  Any written word attributed to Brian from from around that time may as well be anyone.

Paul Atkinson as in the former Zombies lead guitarist, correct?

COMMENT:  As you know, I was the engineer responsible for the primary tracking sweetening of existing basic tracks as well as the vocal tracking and final mixing with Brian or Carl or Alan. Some songs were a hodge-podge collection of unfinished parts, just started parts, fragments, and experimental recordings before being edited to the final version. None of that is documented. Brian was in and out of the process. Many sessions worked on several songs, but were noted as and billed to one song. The union contracts do not tell the entire story. To make historical accounting worse, I carried the 8-track, 1-inch master multi-tracks with me while five of six Beach Boys toured in Europe and the Eastern United States. During this tour, we found some time to work on 20/20 in studios around Europe and Britain such as Paris, Rome, Berlin, and London and also at Capital Studios in NYC. None of this is documented with any accuracy.

From an engineer's point of view, it was a challenge since each studio's tape machines that had to be re-aligned to American or Hollywood standards. This takes time. Also, trying to pull a preview mix that sounded somewhat similar from one location to the next was also taxing, especially for the Boys trying to harmonize while each monitor of unfamiliar sound signature or tonality would throw the inner voice balance off, from one location to the next. What we had recorded in Los Angeles sounded way different in the European control rooms and from each country, one from another. In NYC. the control room at Capital had monitors behind an acoustic curtain so you could not see them. There was no visual reference. That was how they did it there, but was very strange to us. Alan pulled a mix on Bluebirds that sounded OK in NYC, but back in LA sounded awful and was redone.

Not every final mix was done in one location, but at several studios around Hollywood -- which never leads to a coherent sounding album.

All in all, I think 20/20 sounds dull, but some of that is Capital's fault, as they did the final mastering in a closet-sized control room, actually a walled-off end of a hallway. And I don't think it helped matters that The Beach Boys were leaving the label. ~swd

Correct.

Thank you for your insight of the recording of 20/20 Mr Desper.