Love 'em, particularly the country stuff in the late '60s.

Great story! Thank you, Mr. Desper.

I'm downloading now and excited to watch. Thanks so much!

One of the finest albums ever written and recorded. I can't even imagine what it would have been like to hear it "cold," having not already seen it live (twice) and heard so many of the songs from other sources.

Jesus, no...

Sounds good to me. I saw them in what I think was their first ever Minneapolis appearance on Halloween 2003, after DCW. Great show, and a band of maybe 14-16 people (including strings, etc.). Great show.

By the way, nice avatar.

Well, I guess if you merged our tastes on the band, we'd have quite the uber-fan.

Any fans around here? I love them, especially the past two albums (well, one of the two I'm referring to won't be released for a bit over a month, I suppose, so the past one album and the forthcoming one). I think that on Dear Catastrophe Waitress and the upcoming The Life Pursuit, Stuart Murdoch proves himself to be one of the top writers and arrangers in the current pop music scene.

I like the earlier albums, too, but they feel less concise to me, possibly overambitious (although maybe that isn't the word).

Anyway, I love them--and they're great live, too. Anyone else?

Call me crazy, but I like this album better than '85. By a lot. I really can't name a bum track on it. Nothing great on it, but nothing bad either.

OK. Crazy.

Not a favorite, but it is the disc (after Pet Sounds) that shoved me out of my little condescending "Beach Boys are a silly, simple surf group" mentality.

With the exception of Student Demonstration Time and, to a lesser extent, Disney Girls (which I like, in an odd, Beach-Boys cheesy kind of way), this is a really good album. I like Al's silly production tricks on things like Take Good Care of Your Feet, and the final trio of songs is brilliant (particularly my favorite of those three recordings, A Day in the Life of a Tree). Consider that Long Promised Road is also here, and in my book it's a heck of an album. Could've been better, but (as many other 70s Beach Boys albums proved) it could have been much worse.

You can tell I'm a true scrooge at heart when my first thought was, "How is this thread a "General On Topic Discussion?"

Bah humbug to me, but happy holidays to all of you.

Yuck. As is the case with pretty much every single second of released Beach Boys material from the 80s onward, this does nothing for me.

As if the Christmas album genre were much of a formidable one...

Sleepyhappygrumpydopeysneezybashfuldoc.

Great stuff.

As with any Christmas album (and, for that matter, BB-related album), there's a certain cheese factor. But the production is good, I think, and I like the new songs. Best of all, the band sings background vocals, thus avoiding another GIOMH tragedy.

I give it an "eh..."

With old concert reviews lost, here is something to kick things off: a review I did of Smile as seen in March 2004, written for a webzine I contribute to. I did this right away upon my return, months before the album (or even official word of the album). I would do it differently now, but hey, that's life.

http://www.30music.com/etc.php?feat=13&action=searchFeat&term=

I don't mean dated as an insult. But the samples I listened to -- at least those from the '67 album ("Are you Happy" was a song title, and there was one that has VDP on harpsichord, too) certainly are very instantly recognizable as of those times.

I love this album. Cool song selection, and I like the instrumentation of this band more than the "In Concert," synth-heavy stuff. (I like that, too, just less.) In my book, the presence of "Wake the World" makes it a good album all by itself.

I have proved myself yet again to be uneducated in too many good things. I had heard the name Beau Brummels before, but never knew anything about them. In fact, the name struck me vaguely as probably some indie rock band of the modern era. I just looked them up and learned a few things about them, and listened to the samples of tracks on allmusic.com.

I guess I have some shopping to do. Sounds like pretty good (albeit dated) stuff.

Mr. Desper -- first, welcome to the new board. I've really enjoyed and appreciated your thread, and thought I'd start off the new one by finally asking you a question.

This isn't an attempt to get you to criticize anyone else's work, but is there a Beach Boys or Brian Wilson song that you didn't work on, but really wish you had? This might be for technical reasons, such as that you thought you could've gotten a different sound that particularly appeals to you, or for a more sentimental one, such as that you just love a particular song or record. Maybe you think some song deserved better or different treatment than it got.

And, if so, how might you have approached it?

Thanks in advance.
LH

I agree that Mike couldn't have possibly been so singularly responsible for the conflicts often attributed to him. But I'm sure that, as strong a personality and influence as he clearly had to have been, it would have removed a powerful force that leaned the way he did.

I really wonder how Bruce and Al, sometimes referred to as in the Love "camp," might have changed. Al, in particular, seems to me to have been on the fence all along. On one hand, he reportedly liked Smile, he clearly enjoyed bigger productions (although they leaned toward sound-effects laden, "humorous" ones), etc. On the other, he also allegedly sided with Love, and clearly was into revisiting nostalgic sounds in the later 70s.

I'd take a "Lookin At Tomorrow," or even a "Take Good Care of Your Feet" anyday over the trash like "Peggy Sue" remakes...

Really? You think if Mike had left, the band would have continued as it did? I think it might have relieved a large part of the internal stress of which way to go--backward or in new directions. I'd like to think so, anyway...

In my grand tradition of asking "what if?" questions (that generally make people respond with "That isn't what happened. You're wrong. You're dumb. Shut up," and similar such sentiments of either misunderstanding or annoyance at me), imagine this:

What if Mike Love, so fed up with Pet Sounds breaking from the formula, had left the Beach Boys immediatley thereafter? It would seem that the touring band, led by Carl and Al, could have continued (albeit without the odd chicken-dancing of Mr. Love). Would it have prodded Brian to remain more involved in the working? Would Smile have come out? Would the nostalgia thing have still happened in the mid-70s, or might they have continued down the way they began with C&TP:ST and Holland?

What do you think?