Stack-o-tracks, obviously.



Really though, I think I'm gonna have to go with Surf's Up. It's not the most consistent album (Sunflower is much more even), but it has so many absolutely phenomenal songs on it (Long Promised Road, Feel Flows, Til I Die, the title track of course) that it gets pushed above the rest of their albums of that era for me.

Really late reply here, but how "done" were the lyrics and vocal melody in '66/'67, and were verse vocals ever recorded during the actual SMiLE sessions, or at all before Carl and Dennis in '68 or so?

I love Bruce, even if it's only because he wrote Disney Girls.

CATP's cover art isn't very hip either, and I see a lot of musical differences between that and Surf's Up.

That is definitely true. What's also true is that CATP performed a whole bunch worse than Surf's Up chart-wise (#50 as opposed to #29, I think) and then Holland, with cover art in a similar vein to SU, did much better. The actual quality of the music must have had something to do with it--I think most of us can agree that Surf's Up and Holland are stronger albums than CATP--but it's strange how much influence artwork can seem to have.

This is fantastic! I'm not sure I like it better than without a middle 8, but it sure is better than what they came up with for Smiley Smile. Also, the "children were raised" bit works weirdly well as an intro to Wonderful--the more I think about it, the more I realize that SMiLE could have been composed of nothing but Heroes and Villains.

So this is a little out there, but maybe it had something to do with the artwork? I mean, as much as I love the BBs' '67-'70 material, the album art is honestly kind of horrific (a picture of stained glass? Whatever the hell Friends is? Creepy guys sitting in a field playing with babies? I mean come ON.) Surf's Up has infinitely better cover art, and if I had been around then (I wasn't alive yet) I'm sure I would have been much more inclined to buy Surf's Up than Sunflower based on artwork alone, which is a big part of casual listeners' first impression.

The great breech between counter culture rock (which had now become the mainstream ) and pre-1967 "commercial" rock was healing by 1971. Carole King's 'Tapestry' was key here.

I always wonder about this 'gap' when you have the success of the likes of Simon and Garfunkel and The Mamas and the Papas during this period. I know what you mean though, the BB aren't known for heavy guitar gurning which had - and still has - a huge following and is, in some minds, the definition of 'rock'.

The huge success of Bridge Over Troubled Water versus the commercial failure of Sunflower has always puzzled me but then I wasn't even born yet by 1970 and so I can't relate to whatever subtle differences there might have been in terms of coolness.

My hypothesis is that Simon and Garfunkel, regardless of whatever experimentation they did later in their career as a duo, were a pretty traditional folk-rock group who basically stuck to the formula they had. The Beach Boys, on the other hand, had alienated a pretty good chunk of their audience by the time Smiley Smile came out, and continued to do so even more with Wild Honey and Friends, so by the time more accessible (if completely deviating from their original formula) albums like 20/20 and Sunflower came out, their older audiences wanted nothing to do with them and the newer ones were left in the dark because of (I assume) lack of promotion. And again, Simon and Garfunkel had kept with the formula that made them popular while the BBs, even while making perfectly accessible and commercial music, had drastically deviated from it.

Anyone else notice the similarities between the tag on the Smile Sessions version of Vega-Tables and the bridge on the Smiley Smile version of Wonderful, or am I just making this up? Is there any relationship between the two?

The great breech between counter culture rock (which had now become the mainstream ) and pre-1967 "commercial" rock was healing by 1971. Carole King's 'Tapestry' was key here.

So is that the main reason SU did relatively well commercially, while Sunflower flopped? Or was it Jack Rieley's leadership? The more socially conscious lyrics? Sunflower's abysmal commercial performance compared to SU has always mystified me, considering how similar the two are.

Disney Girls is great in that way - it's not a love song, it's a guy wishing reality were like his fantasies. Actually a rather sad song.

I've always thought that Disney Girls was actually an incredibly non-sappy song in a way; its nostalgia is so overblown that it becomes self-aware and actually incredibly bitter. But, of course, it was written by the guy who wrote Tears in the Morning, so can we really trust this intuition?

Anyway, Long Promised Road and Disney Girls were the songs that gave me the first little inkling about a year ago that the Beach Boys were more than a surf band, and I'd imagine that they must have done the same for teenagers and young adults in 1971. And I'm sure calling the album Surf's Up did help a little with sales from people who were expecting more surf music.

I've often heard that Surf's Up (the album) was the album that turned the Beach Boys back into a critically and commercially somewhat respected group, along with Jack Rieley's general presence. How true is this? Specifically, what did the young, hip crowd in 1971 (who probably rarely, if ever, considered the BBs to be artistically or commercially relevant before that point) react to its release? Was it (and the band in general) actually considered as relevant at the time as it's made out to be now? Obviously it did better than anything by them had in the past 4-5 years (along with having infinitely better album art than, well, any BB album up to that point), but did it actually boost them back into popularity as it's said to have?

Despite what my signature might suggest, I think "Smart Girls" is horrendous and borderline misogynistic. The only real redeeming quality is the completely out-of-place samples, especially the "Good Vibrations" one, which are just barely enough to make this song a "so bad it's good" song instead of a plain awful one.

Also, couldn't they have picked a terrible song by the BBs themselves? Like Summer of Love? Or something else similarly awful? I don't get it.

I wasn't a BB fan (or alive, for that matter) when Kokomo came out, but I can't imagine that anyone was particularly thrilled about it. I mean, it pretty much epitomizes everything wrong with Mike at that point in time, and as far as their really big hits go, it's really about the bottom of the barrel (even if it does have a bit of a cheesy, infectious quality to it that I actually kind of like). When I think about it, I can hardly fathom how it became a hit at all; no one I've ever met has had anything positive about it. I guess the late 80s were a pretty strange time!

The part right after the verse in the Smile Sessions version of Wind Chimes.
The opening string instrument chord right at the beginning of Marcella (what is that instrument?)
The backing vocals in the second verse of California Girls.

Thanks a lot! Al really doesn't get enough recognition as a songwriter, does he?

Apologies if this is too similar to the recent thread about co-writes, but does anyone know who the "main" songwriter (if there was one) on All This Is That was? I've always thought of it as a Carl song, but it's credited to Carl, Al and Mike.

(Also hello everyone how's it going this is the first post that I have made on this here forum)