This album didn't influence me to eat more honey. But it did influence me to be more wild.

I guess the naughty side of my question would be whether it influenced anyone to eat pussycats like Brian sang about in Hawaii.

[BWPS]

Did anyone else find it sort of... tacky? I bought it when it came out and I immediately disliked the overuse of white. The CD is in the basement and I haven't touched it in years (got the music on my computer) so I am going on memory here. I remember a white box that held the CD case, and between the two was a fairly nicely done booklet with a few pictures of Brian, the lyrics, and a few other things. The CD case had one sheet of the white and logo "Brian Wilson Presents Smile", etc. I never liked it, especially because I had known of the original album cover before getting it.

BWPS is not Smile, ergo the original artwork would be inappropriate.

Doesn't mean the new artwork has to be tacky and bland... which was my main point, really.

AS someone said, it would be really cool of the Frank Holmes artwork made it to the box set which is something that I think will have to happen. Besides it would make really great artwork for a nice fat box set

I've always liked the cover.  I'd like to see it in real life...I forget where it is exactly, but it's a stain-glassed window somewhere....

brian's old house, kitchen window i think

Was anyone else influenced by this album to eat or drink more honey?

I put it in my tea, it's delicious and healthy.

When I make oatmeal I use it instead of sugar.

Honey is an ancient healer, it's been known for ages.

Best album cover they ever had, IMO.

http://download.cnet.com/YouTube-Downloader/3000-2071_4-10647340.html

figured you guys could make use of this

very simple program and useful

Hmm, it's probably poorly-trained.

Additionally, that picture is very disgusting.

Perhaps ... but she's mostly just nervous and stupid.

When she's nervous or lonely she's sh*t and piss on the floor. Sometimes she actually does it to spite others, believe it or not.

And sometimes she just forgets. It's really quite sad, to be honest. I feel bad for her.

In other areas she's well trained. We walk on the lawn sometimes (I don't walk her, but we play outside together) and all I have to say is "inside" and she trots to the front door with no problem.

For the past year I've been in love with an album, well a two volume, two disc album.

Pandit Shivkumar Sharma - Antardhwani: The Song Within (Volumes I & II)



However I've only been able to stream it (and rip it) from the music program Rhapsody. I want to get the CDs but an online search reveals very, very few places where it's in stock. Some places only have one volume and not the other. It seems ridiculous to me because this album is of such high quality, such fine art, that it does not deserve this neglect at all. The album is a performance, namely by Pandit Shivkumar Sharma (santoor) and Zakir Hussein (tabla) of Shivkumar's own raga called Antardhwani. Shivkumar is a beautiful person and also a very spiritual person. Antardhwani is a very meditative and beautiful piece that truly stirs my soul. It is the album I return to when I feel I have slipped and need to rise again to heights I once reigned from. Then, when I again appreciate its beauty, I know I have returned.

I want the CD (or vinyl, if it exists, that would blow my mind) so bad!!!

I'm not a big record collector so I don't know any stores (and in fact there are no real record stores in my immediate area) or how people usually track down releases that barely get any promotion or whatever.

Any good advice on how I can track this thing down? A Google search reveals a few online sellers as I mentioned but they're in India and another in Australia. I want the album but I don't have enormous amounts of cash to pay for it. Amazon didn't have it in stock last time I checked.

Did anyone else find it sort of... tacky? I bought it when it came out and I immediately disliked the overuse of white. The CD is in the basement and I haven't touched it in years (got the music on my computer) so I am going on memory here. I remember a white box that held the CD case, and between the two was a fairly nicely done booklet with a few pictures of Brian, the lyrics, and a few other things. The CD case had one sheet of the white and logo "Brian Wilson Presents Smile", etc. I never liked it, especially because I had known of the original album cover before getting it.

I don't like the packaging either - I think a much better job could've been done if they wamted to do 'retro'. I think most people probably wished that Frank Holmes' original artwork was used. I wonder, psychologically, if less fans would've disliked BWPS if the Homes artwork had been used. I know many people picture the album cover in their heads when they listen to music (or at least I do - I'm sure I'm not alone - Pet Sounds sounds sort of green, right? Surf's Up is sort of moody, blue, indian-slouched-on-horseback type of music?! Anyway, I always picture the BWPS sleeve when I listen to it and I wish I had Homes art in my head instead.

Yeah that's what I was thinking. I also think of the album cover whenever I'm listening to something. When I hear the original SMiLE tapes I see Frank Holmes' stuff in my mind. It's fairly important - if you consider a face to be the doorway to the personality within then an album cover is the same sort of thing.

We have a nervous dog who's also pretty stupid. Just being honest.

Each day is basically a countdown until she shits or pisses on the floor. She never got the hang of going out on the lawn so we use the dog pad paper things for her to go on. However since such things are against a dog's nature, she only goes on them at select times. Like when someone is around and she wants to win their affection (or dog treats) by shitting where they want her to sh*t.

About 15 minutes ago I made my way downstairs to make some whole grain bread toast and peanut butter with my side glass of milk. I smelled something bad.

f***! I came down to make food before going to bed, not to pick up sh*t! So I didn't, f*** it, let it stink up the house, let someone else do it, I'm tired of picking up sh*t.

The dog shits more than I do, and in bigger amounts. She's a small dog no longer than my forearm. I swear to the devil it's true. I sh*t like once every two or three days and not in big amounts. She shits at least four times a day I'd reckon and it's always ridiculously huge. I'm not in charge of feeding her because I'm too much of a hardass and I'd only feed her when she was REALLY hungry, not when her greed for food showed its head. And I'd only give her enough as to fill her belly and keep her alive and kicking, and no dog treats. So everyone else gives her way too much food, more than she needs. So she's also fat.

Basically she's an overweight dog who shits all over the carpet and pisses all over the carpet. Our dining room carpet is totally ruined by sh*t stains for thousands of shits she's shitted. So is the room she sleeps in. Luckily the room I abide in most of my days has a strict no sh*t policy and the few times she's sh*t in here I gave her a smack she would remember.

Perhaps mean ... I don't disagree, and cruel since the dog does not understand and it is only her nature to sh*t and piss when she needs to and where it seems perfectly OK to do so, but I don't care. I don't like a shitty carpet.

She's about four years old I think. How can I stop this nightmare? Seriously, my life is like a David Lynch film. Worse. Lynch would not last five minutes in my reality.

You wanted to discuss something that's in your basement but you can't be bothered to look at. LMFAO. Not.

Give an old man a break. The basement is two sets of stairs away. Plus, I think my memory was fairly accurate, no?

Did anyone else find it sort of... tacky? I bought it when it came out and I immediately disliked the overuse of white. The CD is in the basement and I haven't touched it in years (got the music on my computer) so I am going on memory here. I remember a white box that held the CD case, and between the two was a fairly nicely done booklet with a few pictures of Brian, the lyrics, and a few other things. The CD case had one sheet of the white and logo "Brian Wilson Presents Smile", etc. I never liked it, especially because I had known of the original album cover before getting it.

Did they only actually record 30 second bits? I was under the impression they recorded endless iterations of two or three minute tracks, and then Brian cut them up and mixed and matched.

They did it piece by piece.

Take Cabinessence for example ... they would do the verse sections, that would be one session. Then another session for chorus, etc.

This was part of the difficulty of assembling SMiLE ... a lot of work involved in piecing all those together, splicing all that tape

There's a "special announcement" coming soon, and most people are thinking it's either:

A) a Smile boxset
B) a Beach Boys reunion
C) TLOS deluxe edition autographed bedsheets

Is there any other conceivable thing that it could be? if not, sounds pretty promising, ay? 

When Mykluv gives up the ghost?

It's bound to happen so ... any guesses on what year we can expect such a glorious release?

The Pet Sounds Box Set is great ... although I've only heard it on Rhapsody , I don't actually own it.

But I'd buy a SMiLE box set if it was done well and had EVERYTHING and no silly edited material. Also , it would HAVE TO HAVE the original Smile Shop artwork by Frank Holmes and poster sized prints of all the work he did for it - integral to the music! 

Let's make some bets, and for every year it's not released we'll double our bets. Actually, I am totally broke, I have $0.37 in the bank, so I'll just bluff my bet money and hope to win yours.

Thank you all for your replies so far in this thread , I'm gaining a much deeper perspective on what sort of impact SMiLE would have had on a fan at the time.

Specifically I mean doing small pieces at a time that obviously belong to a bigger thing. Seems like they were more used to going in the studio and cutting full tracks, start to finish, no? I mean, what was the studio atmosphere like (it's hard to tell just from listening to the sessions since no one can be seen)? Since I've never seen a video of those musicians recording with Brian, I only have a mental image of it that's probably so far from the truth. I don't know ... I don't really think of faces being behind the music. Like I can't imagine some guy with his own personality and individuality playing, say, the banjo on Cabinessence. I just hear it being played and that's that.

Anyone got any quotes from any of those musicians on anything like Good Vibes? that was the first track Brian did in that recording style, right? so they must've heard the final product and been well impressed knowing that parts were from various sessions and it all came together so flawlessly.

I'm sure I've told this story before, but the first time I was listening to BWPS, I was in my car. Mrs. O'Leary's Cow freaked me out so bad because I didn't realize the sounds were coming from the CD. I thought there was a horrible chaos happening somewhere up the road.

haha, that's great! lucky you didn't crash. if Brian heard about that he'd kill himself.

Eh. Is Brian supposed to release "his masterpiece" to the press claiming that the original tapes are better?

It's like bands and new albums - every time they have a new album coming out, they say it's their best work.

I think that's definitely a part of it, but also I think that Brian makes these negative comments about the original sessions because they bring back bad memories for him.  It seems to me that Brian allows those bad memories about that time period to permiate into his feelings about the music itself.  Maybe I'm wrong, but I just think there's more to it than Brian wanting to sell BWPS by putting down the original sessions.

The author of that article/interview raised an interesting point, or shed some light on an existing point, which I hadn't fully considered until I read it. In talking about Fire ("Mrs O'Leary's Cow" in the article) he mentioned that Brian was afraid of the power of the music because he had been witness to how quickly things really exploded for him due to his music in the first place. As the article says, from writing songs on his piano at home to being a world wide success and star, all due to music that he created. This really is an interesting point and worth considering for anyone, and when we also remember that Brian was using drugs at the time, not to mention going through the natural phases of development of a human being, it must have been a very difficult issue to resolve. If Fire, which as Brian says in the interview, is the sound of an insane mind (it sounds a lot like intense psychological crisis's and bad psychedelic experiences), encoded into such powerful music, then what influence will it have on the EARTH? If "Surfer Girl" had people all over the world feeling good, what would "Fire" do? Really, literally, burn the planet down? I could see how he seriously thought this. So to his mind the old sessions represent all this uncertainty, a sort of instability in the use of his musical powers. Should it be used for good or bad? If for good, why am I making this track that sounds like a complete psychological breakdown? What if all of these songs are heading in that direction? Etc. So his memories of recording these tracks, i.e., seeing his vision come to life through sound, the musicians wearing firehats in the studio, a burning bucket, etc., it's deeply connected to all that uncertainty and what happened soon after.

One of my major complaints about BWPS is that it has none of the slightly darker edge that the originals had. There is an unmistakable presence there in the old tapes that is not there in the new. And I think that presence is that state of mind which IS unstable, IS weird, IS very eccentric, IS inclining towards madness in many ways ("swedish frog" anyone?) and that state of mind is the one Brian's been trying to recover from ever since it seems, going through hell to get to the manageable state he seems to have been in for a while.

This post was written totally unedited and I haven't re-read a single word so whatever. 

As for Mike's lyrics - they're not bad, but sort of dated and a little cheesy, and not in a good way. Such is Mike Love, though.

What's so dated about them? Other than the heteronormativity?

Lines like "She goes with me to a blossom world" etc. just sound very much like lines out of a 60s pop song. They haven't aged extremely well.

They're not TOO dated, mind you, but enough so that it's noticeable.

i think that particular line is GREAT, i've always loved it. "dated" only has much significance when the particular period whatever it is has come from is dead to public consciousness or times have changed so much that it has become irrelevant. i don't think that sort of 60s sunny flowery perhaps psychedelic lyric has died yet, it's more like we took a dip below it and need to rise back to it. the lyrics to GV are more timeless than, say, "the rain, the park, and other things" (track too) by the cowsills, which i would agree is dated, despite the obvious GV inspiration and influence

great pictures on that video, too

I have to say - Mike is my favorite Beach Boy to look at

i really like his styles, overall, in all their wide varieties

plus, mike had a truly great beard, like the classic manly beard, and he looked like some sort of old american outdoors man with it

........

on the song - the end is great, with the CIFOTM drums

Now Smile as a "Teenage Symphony to God" makes sense, because God is Spector!  Why do you think he loves the Spector Christmas album the best of all? It's religious Spector music.

Aegir, I think you just cracked the Brian Code!

Wow, this is cool, first time I've heard them do it live too

Thanks for the link

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bWICMiHU-Oc&feature=related here's another

[musicianship is far superior to the session musicians that I used back in those days]

Read this:

Quote : Wilson, a famously odd mix of genuine humility, shyness and enormous faith in his gifts, is pleased with the way the new Smile came out. “Oh, I think it’s a masterpiece. On the new album, the pitch is a lot better, the musicianship is far superior to the session musicians that I used back in those days.” http://www.bluefat.com/0905/Brian_Wilson.htm

What's up with this? The original tapes capture something beyond the musicianship (which is great anyway) - doesn't Brian hear it?

“I think of Phil Spector as the god of music, and I think he influenced the way I wrote music to some degree. I’m not saying he wrote my music for me; he influenced the way I thought about music." This is new to me ... has Brian ever thought of himself as a medium for the Great Spirit otherwise known as Spector? Just as Muhammad received the song of the Qur'an from Angel Gabriel, so did Brian receive his songs from Harvey Phillip Spector?

a wonderful song

Pun intended?

there's another one, can you spot it? both totally unintended, but awesome