Chuck,

please take my Smile Shop essay down as soon as possible.

Thanks.

Toby

I use Miranda, which is compatible with ICQ, MSN, AIM and all kinds of chat programs. Nice to have when friends use different programs.

I'm more than likely the person who first brought up Patty Cake in relation to the snippet in the Brian bio documentary. It now turns out that that snippet is not Patty Cake, which is strange, because that was the belief of the documentary's director. I discussed it with my dear Dumb Angel Gazette editor on the phone some three years ago.

Oh well, I guess we all stand corrected.

There IS a song called Patty Cake, though, and written about the gorilla giving birth in a NYC zoo.

Lazy Lizzie.

OOOOOHH!

You don't wanna know.

Lazy Lizzie.

There's also "Rollin up to heaven", the early version of what would become "Ding Dang", and I think it was recorded around '71. Someone else may have better info....

1969.

Yes, VDP wondered (rightfully so) why he was the only collaborator/friend identified by his real name in the movie. The dramatic effect seemed to suggest that Parks was the weirdo who led Brian away from Mike, resulting in Brian losing his talent and sanity. Only in Mike's selfless return as Brian's collaborator could the quality of the music be regained! This whole conceit must seem even wackier now that "SMiLE" has been released and embraced as a masterpiece.

Van Dyke was so upset that he ran a "Mike Love joke contest" for a long long time when the movie came out.

It's an entertaining movie on one level... if you forget about all the terrible historical inaccuracies. And the portrayal of Brian as a mentally handicapped person, barely able to complete a sentence (trying to describe GV to his mom: "Uh... vibrations...umm... dogs....uhhh....y'know....they feel....uh...them") is offensive to say the least.

My daughter "roots through" my iPod the same way she would root through a stack of vinyl. Finds cool stuff, listens to it over and over again, just like in previous generations.

There isn't the LEAST bit of luddite crankiness involved here, is there? 

I agree with the folks above -- there's no difference. About 50% of my music right now is purely downloaded and I still have a major emotional investment in it. I still love to buy things at the store, I still shop at record stores, but I do a lotta downloading, and I've found plenty of gems that have become staples of my listening collection online.

Oh My God - - - Jon made a smiley!

This is possibly the lamest, most reactionary thread I've ever had the displeasure of reading.

Well, that goes without saying.

"OK, Jeff, I  THOUGHT about the 1995 sessions. But I had some serious questions about those 2 songs. First of all, I thought the sessions were too brief to be considered a project. Do you know how long they were in the studio? A day or two (I don't know, that's why I'm asking),"

Basically, yes, because there were only vocals done for three of the songs. Brian and Andy Paley, of course spent many a session on all the other backing tracks.

"and second, although Brian was there and contributing, was he actually producing the sessions, or was it a group production effort?"

In terms of the Beach Boys, Brian definitely was in charge. It was NOT a group effort, and that's perhaps one of the reasons why Carl, of all people, pulled the plug on the project. It's often been said that he thought the new material wasn't good enough, but I don't believe he that was the real problem, as Carl had previously taken part of two BB albums which obviously are a piece of crap compared to Brian's new Paley material. Don Was helped out with a few tracks and the others were produced by Brian and Andy, with no particular input from the rest of the band.

"There is no doubt that many people shoot off on any comment with "Oh, but have you heard the [demo][earlier version]? It's WAY better!""

Sadly, this is often true, especially when we're getting into the late Seventies and the BB studio sound is getting more and more sterile (post-Love You) and the home demos just feel better.

Interesting topic.

Personally, I strive for cohesion. Not on a conceptual level, but I tend to enjoy music - my own, or listening to others - that sounds as if came out of the same process. Maybe it's because my brain is set on "Drone". I just love that heightened feeling when listening to classic 'cohesive albums' like Pet Sounds or Loveless or Mars Audiac Quintet.

Diversity can be interesting but it can also sound really contrived. That was the "postmodern" disease of the 1990s; bands mixing this and that genre,putting the beats under the guitars and have that producer put some techno noises and then do the slow gospel ballad. Sometimes brilliant results (ie Primal Scream's "Screamadelica") but more often pretty lame results (ie any stereotypical trip hop record in 1995).

The mp3 playlist thing is really interesting. I, being an albums man, suffer from it greatly because I'm often too lazy to go and pick out a CD from my collection so I'll just put on some MP3s. But anyways, I've always had the habit of listening to the same song on repeat for hours and hours. There's this Philip Glass track (Part 1 of "Music In Twelve Parts") that I listen to obsessively now, which annoys my gf greatly....

I don't think the album format will go away even though everybody's walking around with Ipods now. The album format has become an institution or tradition because there will always be people influenced by typical album format artists like the Beatles or whoever.

Well, "Adult/Child" is great because it's a great album, unreleased or not.

I was pitching it to Joe Foster a couple of years ago as a Poptones/Rev-Ola release but it fell through pretty quickly.

Nonetheless, the album needs to be released properly, and I might one day give it another go.

Who would've thought that ADULT CHILD would be the last music that Brian Wilson would produce for/with the Beach Boys? Not me. And that was almost 30 years ago...

It wasn't.  He managed to get two tracks done in 1995.  And they were as good as you could have hoped for from the band.  Of course, that means that they couldn't manage to finish the album.

I would also say that "It's Just A Matter of Time" is up there as one of the last great BB songs.

Isn't that the song that was playing on the A&E bio when discussing Murry selling Sea of Tunes?

It's in the A&E bio when, I think, Bruce talks about how Brian would have a number one hit in his living room piano and then not recording it.

Sure a recording of Patty Cake exists. You can hear it in one of the BW documentaries.

"Saturday Morning in the City (Smile era tune, demoed up in the 80s, elaborated in mid 90s with Paley)"

I wouldn't call SMITC a "Smile era tune" - it's just a small fragment of the melody which comes from the Smile "All Day" section.

Keep it up, all. So is "A Friend Like You" the only really new track on GIOMH? What about the others?

Basically, yes... the title track was originally done for Imagination.

Ok, I have a minute to spare, and I'm going from memory:

*BW88
Walkin' The Line - first recorded during the Usher sessions
Little Children - written in 1976 as They're Marching Along
There's So Many - demoed in 1983 as Up In The Sky
Rio Grande - consist almost entirely of fragments written by Brian since the Seventies and onwards, with some new assistance from Paley


*Imagination
She Says That She Needs Me - the same as Sandy/Sherry/Terry She Needs Me
Sunshine - Sometimes you never what version of a fragment was written first with Brian but the tag shows up in Believe In Yourself.
Happy Days - recorded in 1970 and 1980 as My Solution
+ two old BB covers

Roxy:
The First Time - recorded in 1983 as In the Nighttime (and the demo is 1000000 times better than the live version)
This Isn't Love - recorded in 1982 as I Say A Prayer

Well, my gf hates pretty much everything I listen to and I what she listens to so... we have the TV on. Tomorrow's weather can be quite a turn on, y'know.

Shame about the software bug. Prior to that, have you been using the IR-1 a lot? My main reverbs have been the other ones from Waves (True Reverb and Renaissance Verb) but they truly don't stand a chance to the IR-1! I haven't used the IR-1 so much before because it consumed too much RAM but that's sorted out now. Just for the sake of it, I took our well-known LA studio Cello's Echo Chamber reverb and put that over some of my tracks and the sound is HUGE! Huge and clean.

And to think I used the Boss RV-3 as my main reverb 10 years ago...

Interesting thread. I've had Waves' IR-1 Convolution Reverb for awhile without using it, so I'm trying it out now as I'm typing this message and it sounds wonderful. A great function is that you can have any reverb sound reversed by the push of a button. I've never used a reverb unit with this impulse response function that King of Anglia brought up, so this is all really exciting.

Amusement Parks On Fire - "Venus In Cancer"

Never heard 'em.

And you call yourself a music fanatic, tsk tsk.

Mazzy Star is one of those bands that I've been meaning to check out for what... 12-15 years now, but I never get around to it. However, I do love and cherish the album and EPs Hope Sandoval and the Warm Inventions put out.