I don't want you getting tired of me asking questions. You all seem to know just about everything. Why did Dennis get with shaun? He knew she was mike love's daughter. Did he love her, or was it to get back at mike? What's the story there.

You should check out Gaines bio if you haven't already, if I recall it had a lot of answers to these kinds of questions...almost to the point of being distasteful at times...although its been a very long time since I've actually read it myself...

And I always think of that amazing youtube clip of Brian listening to Ronnie Spectors version of Don't Worry Baby and looking like he's just gone to heaven. 

From the 2000 Tour Video? The one where she's sitting next to him and starts singing, and he gets up quickly and starts going downstairs? If anything, it looked like he was annoyed!

I think there' s a different clip though where someone plays it for him...that might be what you're referring to.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9JMdw__a77A

Also, I was under the impression that the Gershwin album was more or less a Brian Wilson production.  And (imho) a brilliant one at that! 

I should have commented that he re-record "The Monkey's Uncle" with Annette!

Sadly, I think Annette is in far from good health... but I wish he would rerecord all these disney songs with outside vocalists.  Not that his Gershwin vocals weren't wonderful, but listening to the old phil spector record with Darlene Love singing Zip a dee  doo da the other day made me think how great it would sound to have Brian Wilson produce a record of Disney songs sung by people like Darlene Love, Ronnie Spector, and LaLa Brooks.  I feel like it might energize Brian too, to be producing other artists.  And I always think of that amazing youtube clip of Brian listening to Ronnie Spectors version of Don't Worry Baby and looking like he's just gone to heaven. 

That was a really gorgeous cover! 

It's interesting that no one is mentioning that I Wanna Be Around/Friday Night were labeled on the session sheets as belonging to I'mIn Great Shape.  I think it's a big mistake to simply dismiss that listing as an error, without any evidence that it was in fact erroneous.  Why couldn't the track consist, at least in part, of the "great shape" lyrics, followed by the tape explosion, I Wanna Be Around and the woodshop noises?  That order sounds to me like it works, and it was in that sequence on BWPS.  Without other evidence, it seems to me that is by far the most likely possibility.

As for the Barnyard Suite, I agree with the earlier poster that it was most likely the same as The Old Master Painter--meaning Barnyard, followed by The Old Master Painter, followed by You Are My Sunshine, followed by the cantina fade with YAMS overdubs.  Of course, Brian later used the cantina fade for H&V, so he may well have abandoned this track altogether, but I think the above sequence probably was used at one point in the process.

Not questioning, just curious: what is the evidence for barnyard going to old master painter?

I'll be an optimist and say: we know the parks, bruce, and al acetates exist.  Alan Boyd, in his own words, has been "working with Brother Records and Capitol Records to organize, catalog, and preserve the mass of vintage Beach Boys tapes in their archives."   Do you really think that the person employed to document the bands career and put their library and archive into shape hasn't asked the band members themselves what important tapes they might have?  And that those band members would then say lie or refuse access to their own archivist?!  I could be wrong, but it seems to me that the far most likely scenario is that there exist a number of additional smile materials safely copied and locked away (perhaps next to those infamous manson sessions?) in a deep vault miles below the capital tower in the heart of Los Angeles, and awaiting (to be blunt) the passing on of the remaining participants before they will see the light of day.  We know acetates exist.  The incentives to preserve them are huge, the incentives to tell fans about them when they're not going to be released anytime soon anyway: much smaller. 

Just my opinion.   

When Brian said he destroyed the Smile tapes, who else thinks that what he really meant is that he erased all of the test/final vocal takes, so that it would be impossible for other people to figure out how to finish it without him?

Small problm wth that theory. If Brian erased all the finished vocal takes, then he himself would not be able to finish it. Let's assume for a minute that Brian had never had any type of drug addiction or mental health problems whatsoever, and that his voice today is the same as it was in 1964. Even in the absolute best possible circumstances, I doubt that Brian would be able to remmber every minute detail of the original versions in order to recreate it today.

I think its a compelling theory, because so many songs were missing lead vocals: cabinessence, do you like worms, child is the father of the man, etc., but ultimately I think there is a much more obvious explanation.  Brian was waiting to record lead vocals until he had decided on the order of the sections and assembled them.  Cabinessence, for example, wasn't just missing a lead vocal, it also needed to be assembled from its constituent pieces (Carl did both for 20/20).  Child is the Father of the Man had a finished backing track mix, but wasn't it just a test mix?  Do you like worms doesnt totally fit this theory, because he could have easily recorded those verse vocals, but Surf's up certainly wasn't assembled (and in fact, it seems that Brian made an effort to ensure that the song was preserved in demo form, perhaps suspecting that it would never be finished in any other.)  I'm in Great Shape/Barnyard suite etc., was far from assembled, and lead vocals were probably waiting on an assembly and an order for the different sections.  Vegetables, Wonderful, and You were my Sunshine all had lead vocals, as did Windchimes and Heroes.  So I'd say the evidence for that theory is pretty thin, since so many lead vocals were not wiped, and since the songs without lead vocals were still in sections for the most part.  The most frustrating one for me is Child is the Father of the Man, because I just can't shake the sense that it would have had a melody and lead vocal along the lines of the songs from pet sounds: that it would have felt more song like.  But the chances of that melody being recovered, if it ever existed, seem pretty miniscule, and I doubt that's because Brian wiped them...far more likely that he never wrote them, even if he intended to.   

There are stories that went around at the time... but they were all second hand, so I wouldn't vouch for the accuracy of any of them.

Interesting point, however: the paternity case that her mother brought against Mike was reportedly resolved with Mike paying child support until she was 18, at which point she was allowed to use his surname - although the actual ruling was that it was possible, but not proven, that Mike was indeed her father. But, when her birth was registered, it was as Shawn Marie Love.

Shawn Marie Love...was Shawn Love the daughter of Sharon Marie? 

Lets say, entirely hypothetically, that Charles Lloyd is playing a show at my university, and that given my contacts in the music dept., at the venue, etc., I might possibly be able to ask him a few questions about his time with the Beach Boys.  What kinds of things might people want to know or ask?  If you could ask Charles Lloyd one questions, what would it be? 

Also, have any Beach Boys researchers/biographers/fans interviewed him about his time with the Beach Boys?  Could anyone point me towards these kinds of things?  Lloyd was a relative outsider playing with the Beach Boys during some very interesting times in their career, and seems to have been on very good terms with both the Mike/Al "faction" and the Carl/Dennis "faction," so I feel like he might have some interesting insights.

[SMiLE]

I guess it really doesn't matter anymore what Brian may have thought about what belonged where in 1967. Because in 2003 or 2004 he decided the order of SMiLE and that is that. I know I made a thread about what everybody thinks would have been on there or whatever, but the facts are Brian "presented" us the album in '04 and he also said it is "finished". Whether or not any of us agree is not of any consequence. The artist behind the work said it is done, and released it. And thats that.

Absolutely the best post ever written about Smile or BWPS.

Well, the unspoken assumption behind that post is that Smile was 100% a Brian Wilson album and 0% a Beach Boys album.  BWPS, wonderful though it is, is not a Beach Boys record, and therefore not a finished version of the 67 album so much as a re-imagination of it. 

This is probably the  Carl interview you're thinking of, done by Billy Hinsche in 1981, where Carl definitely calls it Hogan's:  http://brianwilsonfans.com/a_cw.php

Of course, AL, in this interview taken from Golmine mag(2000) adds some changes to  the Rental story once again( and some other "nice" changes to history:   http://brianwilsonfans.com/page11.php

"When our folks went to Mexico on business, we would take the food money they had left us and rent instruments from Hogan's House of Music on Hawthorne Boulevard."

This is probably insignificant, but Carl pretty clearly implied here that the folks went away more than once...  Otherwise he would have said "we took."  Obviously not hugely significant on its own, but could be another small support for the idea that there was more than one business trip. 

I tried to figure out some very approximate cost estimates:

if we take the $1,685 worms session as average (rounded to 1,500) and further assume that, not counting Good Vibrations and Heroes and Villains, Brian worked on about 12 songs, with about four sessions per song, that comes to 72,000 dollars (just to pay the musicians). 

Good Vibrations was supposedly given a budget of 50,000 dollars (according to wikipedia).  If we assume Heroes and Villains had about an equal cost, that's 100,000 for the two singles, plus at least 72,000 for the rest of the tracks.

Adjusted for inflation, 172,000 1967 dollars is $1,093,042 in 2009 dollars. 

Add to that the cost of tape, studio time, etc. for the other tracks (presumably those costs were included in the 50,000 dollar good vibes estimate), the cost of designing and printing up thousands of record sleeves and booklets, the costs of the promotion they were doing, and you've gotta be looking at at least a few million 2009 dollars. 

I thought people might be interested in this interview (from 1984) I stumbled upon where the producer of Thing are Changing for the Better talks about the track.  I had always thought Phil had produced it, and that Brian had played piano on it, but it seems that neither is true.  What this interview with the songs actual producer makes clear though, at least in my head, was that the track which Phil famously kicked Brian off of as piano player can't have been the public service announcement, since Spector didn't have anything to do with it really, and must have been an actual attempt at Don't Hurt My Little Sister.  Oh the tapes that may or may not exist out there!! 

The relevant portion of the interview: 
What can you tell us about the public service song 'Things Are Changing'?

My goodness! My wife has been working for Dr Landy, who is Brian Wilson's shrink, and I've been telling her about this song that I wrote with Phillip and Brian, but I couldn't remember the title of it! Phillip originally started the song with Brian, but it was just a chorus or something, nothing to do with the lyrics. I made the track and produced one version, with Darlene, I believe.

From what's been said, Brian wrote a song called 'Don't Hurt My Little Sister'.

Yes, that's right.

Was that version ever recorded?

I don't know about that. I know it started out as a piece Brian had written and Phillip had worked on it with him. But then the government wanted this piece, so I took it and rewrote it and produced the track on it, which is very much a 'Spector' type of track.

In the studio, did you set up the instruments and the people the same way Phil did?

Oh, yes. He used about twenty rhythm. He used four keyboards, all playing the same thing. He used two or three bass players, all playing the same thing. Several rhythm guitars, all playing the same strum. It makes for such a huge 'Wall Of Sound'. Several drummers, several people playing tambourines! Just tambourines! The sound was mostly dependent on the right amount of echo blend, the right amount of doubling of instruments. But instead of doubling them like we do nowadays, playing them twice, because we only had three tracks in those days, we did it all at once.

How did you get the 'Things Are Changing' assignment?

Well, basically I was working with Phillip and he didn't want to deal with it. He kept saying, "You take the call, you talk to them". So finally, not only did I end up dealing with the government for him, I ended up producing the track and taking over the whole deal.

http://www.spectropop.com/HOTB/HOTBpart3.htm

Thoughts?

Not an exact quote (don't have the doc around me right now): "Phil had these layered sounds... But it sounded angry. Phil's thing was anger. Brian's was love."

I don't think Spector's music was really about anger.  More a sense of desperation.  Also, "Do I Love You," in my opinion, is one of the most love-filled records I've ever heard.  The overall sound just seems infused with love.  And some of his ballads, like When I Saw You, are really very gentle.

John Stamos is also trying to get a BB episode or at least a song on Glee..

I don't like how the future is shaping up 

As probably one of the only people in the world who is obsessed with the Beach Boys and also watches Glee, this would actually not necessarily be a bad thing.  One of the subplots of Glee is often that they take music which has a certain reputation and seems "uncool" to the high school protagonists, and show how its relevant to their (and implicitly, the shows teenage viewers) lives.  I could easily imagine an episode of Glee along the lines of "you know how everyone thinks the Beach Boys are just fun in the sun...well actually they had intense and emotional lives" with some of the band's darker/more serious songs included. It could really bring a new generation to the Beach Boys.  Not to say they might just sing I Get Around or whatever, but its definitely possible, given the tone of the show, especially if Stamos is involved, since he actually is a big fan and must know the catalogue. 

just my two cents. 

I think Guess I'm Dumb is insanely hard to sing. Something about the way the melody fits over the chords, it sounds so amazing, but singing it is so hard.  I've often wondered to myself if Brian himself had trouble singing it to his satisfaction, and that that's why it didn't make it onto the second side of the Beach Boys Today. 

I love Jack Rieley's lyrics.  They flow beautifully with Carl's voice; as mike's beard said, they don't look great on paper, but that's true of almost all wordy lyrics.  Even Dylan at his best often looks awkward on paper...visions of johanna comes to mind; song lyrics and poetry just aren't the same thing.  And I think the meaning definitely comes across in both songs.  In Long Promised Road the sense of how life can drag you down but you somehow find the will to keep going and even to succeed, and how that is powerful and beautiful, and also a little sad, because there's definitely a part of you that wants to give up. 

I think Trader, though, is one of the greatest songs ever written, music and lyrics.  Really. 
Here you have a band, which spent a good part of their career celebrating a vision of california which was very much a twist no the frontier myth in the United States, this idea of endless possibility, building a new life in california, a middle class expanding to include everybody, etc.  And part of what made their music so powerful was in celebrating this distinctly american ideal, they tapped into a universal joy and love, and also tapped into a deep sense of sorrow and longing, rooted in part in the fact that the american dream was and is a mirage in many ways.  And then you have this same band, a few years later, looking back at this myth, and saying, well, what were the costs, what does it mean that entire peoples were literally exterminated to make room for this ethic of progress and manifest destiny.  And the Beach Boys do a better job of confronting this question, as white people, as americans, than almost any one else I've ever heard.  In the first part of the song they tell the story with words, and as you listen to it the story propels along and you get in your head what happened, and all the questions it raises about colonialism and the cost of american expansionism etc. etc., and then there's a momentary pause, and Carl Wilson tries to answer those questions, and because they're such hard questions, and they don't have good answers, he answers them spiritually.  At this point the lyrics seek to matter, they stop telling a story and start going on about making it softly and finding reason to live, and there are these amazing harmonies and it just, makes the politics real, and tries to confront these issues spiritually in a way no other popular artist of the time, to my knowledge, ever did. 

In my opinion, if the Beach Boys reputation rested solely on this song and it was all they ever released, they would still be an incredibly important band, because of all the musicians who then and to this day have written about poverty and political issues, no one has succeeded they way they did at taking an incredibly difficult political topic, and confronting it musically so that the music actually tried to address the question, rather than the usual approach which was to graft political lyrics on ordinary songs. 

So yea, I think pretty highly of the Carl Wilson/Jack Rieley partnership. 

If anything, the piano coda for Layla sounds like something Dennis would do.

The piano coda to Layla was actually written by Derek and the Dominos drummer, Jim Gordon, who played percussion on Pet Sounds as a member of the wrecking crew!  Unfortunately, he came to a very sad end, murdered his mother, and is in an insane asylum now...

The Derek and the Dominos stuff is really driven as much by Duane Allman as by Clapton, he was the better guitarist in that band (hard as it is to imagine Clapton not being the best guitarist in his own band!) but if anything, there's more of a Phil Spector influence than a brian wilson one.  Although it is clearly a blues record, it has a really fat wall of sound sort of production that reminds me a little of All Things Must Pass...which makes perfect sense, since Derek and the Dominoes were a large part of the backing band on All Thing Must Pass earlier that very year, and so they had been working with Spector...in fact, Spector produced their first single, Tell the Truth, which was released and then immediately pulled...they rerecorded it for the album. 

The Beach Boys connections are getting even more tenous now, but I believe Jim Gordon and Dominos bass Carl Radle also played on the Mad Dogs and Englishman Tour with Joe Cocker, which, if I've got my stories straight, means they may have shown up at one David Mark's house in Boston and caused quite a stir!! 

As for the rest of Clapton's stuff, I don't think that his 60s work was really overtly Wilson influenced, I think he just liked the records.  And his post Dominos work is pretty boring so far as I'm concerned...I don't know if it has a Beach Boys influence because I havn't listened to much of it, but he really lost his touch... 

On a related topic, I think it's really interesting how it seems many of the members of this board have non beach boys musical interests that are pretty weird and that they have delved pretty deeply into...someone, if I recall, collects rare ska records or something of that sort?  I know that I for a long time liked Duane Allman and the Allman Bros. almost as much as the Beach Boys (hence my knowledge about Derek and the Dominos) and that's really saying something! 

I also collect John Fahey records. 

bj

Another possible explanation for the "shoutyness" is that it was a way to hit notes.  Think about how narrow Dennis's range had gotten by the end of his life...he can't have had more than an octave.  I think Brian subjected his voice to similar abuse (minus the famous punch, I know), but insisted on hitting a wider range, which meant just pushing and pushing until a note came out...hence the shoutiness.  Although I also hear the change in phrasing someone mentioned.  I think Oh Lord is the best example of how soulful and really thoughtful and also spontaneous Brian's phrasing could be even when his voice was at its worst tonally, and by 85 thats all gone. 

These seems to me like the last beach boys/brian related recording that actually could have been a hit at the time of its release!  It sounds so...90s...and at the same time so great!  imho

Did Carl just STOP writing completely after 72 until 78ish? Dennis obviously didn't, but there seems to be no Carl tunes until he starts contributing boring pap for L.A/M.I.U era. Did Rieley staying in Holland put him off? Was he better at hiding his sessions from bootleggers? Did drink and drugs screw up his creativity?

"Angel Come Home" dates back to about 1976, but offhand, that's about the only title I know of that hails from the 72-78 period. Of course, 1976-78 wasn't the best period of his life...

Does this mean Angel Come Home was a contender for the "originals" disc of the double album version of what became 15 big ones?  Yet another tune to add to my alt. reality 15 big ones play list!!  (Man that could have been a good record!) 

Also, I seem to recall that in a number of interviews/press from the 15 big ones and just prior period, it is mentioned that Carl is "working on new material" or something along those lines.  I feel like Dennis mentions at some point that both he and carl have a bunch of songs, but that they're sort of holding back and trying to let brian take the reins.  I could be remembering wrong, of course, but I've always wondered what exactly Carl was working on during that period, and how it would have sounded....sadly perhaps, not all song writers commit every idea they have to tape the way Dennis and Brian sometimes seemed to...it's totally possible that Carl wrote songs, kept them in the back of his head for a while, never demoed them, and then eventually forgot how they went.

Honestly, I find this conversation a bit perplexing.  The idea that I, personally, went to the store last week and bought a new brian wilson album, and it was friggin awesome...well, that's about as much of a miracle as I can imagine!!  The idea that there is still, after 50 years, great NEW beach boys related music for me to get excited about, that's a miracle.  Of course no one bought it!!  People haven't been buying the Beach Boy's music in any serious, non-nostalgic sense since 1966.  I don't care that Sunflower hit 152 anymore than I care that Beach Boys Concert hit 1. 

I don't want to start a war here, but I'd like to say, 'All This Is That' seems like a bit of a freak occasion, if we think that Brian had absolutely nothing to do with it. Not to say that Carl, Alan and Mike weren't capable of good stuff - but All This... stands apart IMO. 

I beg to differ...I think the thing that confuses people is that all this is that is often attributed strongly to mike and al, when really, to my ears, it is the logical successor to feel flows and long promised road, and has carl's fingerprints all over it!!  It certainly has more in common with feel flows or trader than with mess of help or funky pretty, which seem to represent brian's state of mind at the time - the four above mentioned carl wilson songs are in themselves a bit of a freak occurrence.  Carl's contributions elsewhere in the catalogue are often very good, but those four songs rise to an incredible level, and stand with the best music of the 70s, imho

Brian does the ba-ba-bas on "Long Promised Road".

Are you sure? It doesn't sound anything like him to me.

It's in the David Marks/Stebbins book.

for some reason i thought this was marilyn?

The best group is Brian's/ Mike's/ Al's. The most recurring and boring argument of this message board.

Can we just enjoy the three with out feeling the need to justify your choice please? 

I actually absolutely love all three groups (although the mike and bruce show I saw suffered from a serious overdose of john stamos...but even that, based on the crowd reaction, I can understand and sympathize with).  I like to make a point of showing my support for Al's band because it seems like it is often left out when people talk about Brian's band vs. mike's band, when all three bands definitely belong in the conversation!!