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| March 29, 2024, 11:40:13 AM |
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Smiley Smile Stuff / General On Topic Discussions / Re: New Brian music this Friday ?
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on: September 17, 2021, 09:58:07 PM
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Hoping for a sequel with the same concept but other people's songs - instrumental covers.
A new original as a bonus track wouldn't go astray!
Love (almost) anything Brian does, and clearly it's him. Woo-hoo!! - this plus whatever surprises any copyright extension ("Feel Flows 2") or live shows December package holds - it just gets to be more fun being a Beach Boys fan.
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Smiley Smile Stuff / General On Topic Discussions / Re: Feel Flows box set
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on: September 06, 2021, 01:24:21 PM
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“Sail On, Sailor” UNINSPIRED??? Yikes!
To be fair to the OP, it's not ever said that the song "Sail On Sailor" is uninspiring, merely that the use of that title for a box set is uninspired. I read that as unimaginative, and I think it's a fair call. I'd prefer "Funky Pretty" or "Spark In The Dark" or even something that comes from the fairy tale 'lyrics'. Not trying to drag this back into a debate or anything, but the original post in question said: "Is the next set really going to be titled "Sail On Sailor"? Kind of uninspired, much like the song itself." I don't know how that can be read any other way than saying the title is uninspired, and also that the "song itself" is inspired. To each their own of course, but somebody does appear to feel the *song* is uninspired. You got me - I should read a bit more carefully.
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Smiley Smile Stuff / General On Topic Discussions / Re: A newbie to the Beach Boys----advice needed
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on: September 03, 2021, 07:21:11 PM
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That's the quote! I don't see where it says they used the ELTRO in 2004. If you cannot extrapolate that from " when we were doing Smile again in 2004, people who heard it thought about HAL" then... I dunno. I'm not the only person who interpreted the text this way. We'll have to agree to disagree. If you're going to tell people who haven't read it that it was 15% of this, and 1% of that, and 80% of this...it suggests you actually did tally all that up, or that you know more than the average fan about how the book came together in order to give that much detail. Did you, or do you? All I did was read the Wikipedia articles in the mid-2010s and cross reference them with the thousands of interviews, books, and articles written about the Beach Boys. From this, I found that various topics in the book were summarized with verbage that was particular only to the Wiki articles. I also noticed that a lot of claims and observations that had only been printed in the form of unsourced Wiki statements were reprinted in the book. So I guess, yeah, I do know more than the "average" fan? It's not too different from the astute fans who read My Own Story and realized that some sentences were copied almost verbatim from, say, Goodbye Surfing, Hello God. Thus, I take issue when anyone claims that I Am Brian Wilson should be elevated over My Own Story. There's probably a reason that Brian lost one co-(ghost-)writer and another had to be found during the process of writing this. What you raise terrei may be a symptom of the problems with interviewing Brian and getting proper answers to the extent that would be necessary to write an autobiography.
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Smiley Smile Stuff / General On Topic Discussions / Re: Feel Flows box set
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on: September 03, 2021, 02:05:36 PM
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“Sail On, Sailor” UNINSPIRED??? Yikes!
To be fair to the OP, it's not ever said that the song "Sail On Sailor" is uninspiring, merely that the use of that title for a box set is uninspired. I read that as unimaginative, and I think it's a fair call. I'd prefer "Funky Pretty" or "Spark In The Dark" or even something that comes from the fairy tale 'lyrics'.
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Smiley Smile Stuff / General On Topic Discussions / Re: Feel Flows box set
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on: September 03, 2021, 12:24:57 AM
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I can't recall if it was Jerry who got very emotional over Sunflower in a Beach Boys documentary
Fred Vail. When he went into the radio station and asked the promoter and his old friend to play add some music to your day or whatever it was and the guy looked at him and said the beach boys aren’t hip anymore which is when Fred Val got emotional This was in the first Brian Wilson Songwriter documentary for anyone interested. It is such a sad but powerful moment - emotional is the right word to describe that moment, but it cuts much deeper - you can really tell just how deeply that moment affected him. After all these years and he is still very broken up it. Goes to show just how much he cared about those guys and their music. That clip was always disturbing to me. Especially when Fred goes “well, my friend is dead and the BB are still here.” Like, is Fred saying that the DJ dying was karmic punishment for not playing a new BB record on the radio in 1970? I think that's a bit of a drastic interpretation. I suspect he's just making the point that the Beach Boys well and truly survived that low point in their career.
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Smiley Smile Stuff / General On Topic Discussions / Re: Feel Flows box set
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on: September 02, 2021, 08:10:47 PM
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Just curious...
Why are Marcella and You Need A Mess Of Help To Stand Alone included? Weren't they recorded in 1972?
Sessions for both songs commenced 1971. Plus it makes a nice teaser for what's to come in the future. Not Mess of Help. Per Alan, their inclusion didn't have anything to do with when they were recorded. Okay - thanks - hadn't heard/read that Alan had said that it didn't have anything to do with when they were recorded. Is this info below wrong? Beatrice from BaltimoreBrian Wilson and Tandyn Almer song, recorded December 6–10, 1971 and January 31, 1972. According to Debbie Keil, a verse was "She got a hole in her stocking, she does a whole lot of rockin'. She do the shake down a Bumbles, she do the chicano rumble. Little Beatrice from Baltimore." - from https://beachboysdb.fandom.com/wiki/Unreleased_Songs“Beatrice from Baltimore” – A tapebox for “Beatrice from Baltimore” is in the Beach Boys' vault, though it features no vocals and eventually became, “You Need a Mess of Help to Stand Alone” on Carl & the Passions. - from https://www.laweekly.com/brian-wilsons-secret-bedroom-tapes-a-track-by-track-description/In a way, the early title / lyrics for the song explain why the song transitions abruptly from talking about the protagonist, switching to the "She don't know . . . ." lyrics, talking about a girl who has not been previously mentioned in the song. There's good contemporaneous evidence in the form of comments from Carl, and I think Mike, to support "Beatrice" being from very early '72, and not having been started by the time '71 ended. It may not quite be definitive, but it's convincing. Over at the nearest faraway place, one of the more valuable threads that surfaced with info not also available here--one with many translations from Dutch media interviews (a number of them with Carl)--pinpoints a "jam session" that fleshed out "Mess of Help" (still apparently called "Beatrice" at that point) and that Carl was clearly highly enthusiastic about. That interview was from late February '72, when the band was on a short European tour before returning to LA for the second round of sessions that would culminate in the tracks for CATP. The jam session had apparently occurred shortly before the tour, so it can be probably be placed in early-mid February. So what about those 12/6-12/10/71 dates? They get listed as "sessions" in the data at AGD's site (I call it "do-si-Doe") but it seems as though this was taken almost verbatim from Badman, a good bit of whose material has been "superseded." We don't really know the provenance of that session info, but it could be from some kind of log that doesn't discriminate between "recording sessions" and "writing sessions." We have precious little data about when songs were actually written, but one guess is that some of the tracks we are talking about here and that are part of Badman's activity log could be referring to writing sessions, and that "Beatrice" was conceived and fleshed out during that time frame. Carl is still referring to it as "Beatrice" in the Dutch interview, and the question one could ask Alan and Mark about the track/backing vocals version of "Mess of Help" is whether they have any idea when that was recorded. The finished track may well be built out of the "jam session" to which Carl refers, which would then follow up to the rewrite of the lyrics, and possibly added parts which followed in March-April. The high "fiddle" part is not prominent on the track/backing vocal version that's just appeared on FEEL FLOWS, but that could be due to Mark's remix, which brings the backing vocals way up from what was heard on the '72 release, and seems to be spiraling through a range of the more complex backing vocals in the tag, dropping out to a capella at the end, and finally isolating on Mike's goofing around with some "alternate lyrics" at the tail end of the tape (and prompting Al's tongue-in-cheek reference to "I Get Around"). There's almost no dated documentation on anything recorded for So Tough apart from the AFM contracts, which at that stage of the group's career are fairly touch and go for reliability. But with Mess of Help, Carl's recollection of the 'jam session' a few weeks earlier and players like Doug Dillard getting a mention do appear to back the Jan 31 Beatrice AFM's credibility as the date of the basic tracking session. There's nothing further, officially. All we know is that it didn't turn from Beatrice into Mess until the later sessions in April after a tour. Mike and Al spent most of January and February on a TM course in Majorca before directly flying out to the Grand Gala Du Disque, so that puts all of the vocals in April, including "she don't know". (btw, the voice at the end is Mike commenting on his own round-ing, not Al) On the other hand, the Feb 17 AFM for Marcella, Out in the Country and Body Talk might be a case of filing paperwork to cover for tracks recorded a few months before. Out in the Country clashes a lot with Don Goldberg's memory of recording the track. The later Feb 20 sweetening session for that song does seem to check out. In that same interview mentioned above, Carl stated that recording for the album began in mid-December. The album sleeve says the same thing. Marcella was being talked about in the press as a potential single as early as October (as 'One Arm Over My Shoulder'), so a late 1971 beginning to the recording is plausible. Badman's info was otherwise basically made up by himself. Thanks for your contributions guys. Seems there's a bit of a pickle in the ointment here - trying to sort this out [the mixed metaphor catches the worm, don't you know!]. I think that a lack of documentation/strong evidence doesn't really mean that no earlier sessions took place. That quote from Debbie Keil is pretty specific, and yet on the version of events that now seems to prevail, the lyrics were changed before they were ever recorded (except I guess maybe at the "Jam"). Like a lot of things, maybe the truth is somewhere in between - and maybe we'll never know for sure. Maybe a writing session or demo recording happened in 1971, and has not survived. Maybe not - maybe the dates are just wrong. In any event, hopefully the next box set will shed some more light, and if not that then at least provide us with continued fascinating listening.
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Smiley Smile Stuff / General On Topic Discussions / Re: Feel Flows box set
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on: August 31, 2021, 06:41:36 PM
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Just curious...
Why are Marcella and You Need A Mess Of Help To Stand Alone included? Weren't they recorded in 1972?
Sessions for both songs commenced 1971. Plus it makes a nice teaser for what's to come in the future. Not Mess of Help. Per Alan, their inclusion didn't have anything to do with when they were recorded. Okay - thanks - hadn't heard/read that Alan had said that it didn't have anything to do with when they were recorded. Is this info below wrong? Beatrice from BaltimoreBrian Wilson and Tandyn Almer song, recorded December 6–10, 1971 and January 31, 1972. According to Debbie Keil, a verse was "She got a hole in her stocking, she does a whole lot of rockin'. She do the shake down a Bumbles, she do the chicano rumble. Little Beatrice from Baltimore." - from https://beachboysdb.fandom.com/wiki/Unreleased_Songs“Beatrice from Baltimore” – A tapebox for “Beatrice from Baltimore” is in the Beach Boys' vault, though it features no vocals and eventually became, “You Need a Mess of Help to Stand Alone” on Carl & the Passions. - from https://www.laweekly.com/brian-wilsons-secret-bedroom-tapes-a-track-by-track-description/In a way, the early title / lyrics for the song explain why the song transitions abruptly from talking about the protagonist, switching to the "She don't know . . . ." lyrics, talking about a girl who has not been previously mentioned in the song.
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Smiley Smile Stuff / General On Topic Discussions / Re: A newbie to the Beach Boys----advice needed
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on: August 29, 2021, 01:53:10 PM
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I do NOT recommend Gaines' Heroes & Villains, which leans heavily towards tabloid fodder.
Unfortunately to get to know this band, really, you've got to be prepared for some muck raking. There's a fine line between tabloid fodder, and the space this band has occupied over the years. I stand by my recommendation. I agree with Emdeeh. Gaines gave the Beatles the same treatment. The Preiss book is much more factual. And I still have a soft spot for David Leaf's book. Those two did it for me. I accept the point the two of you are getting at.
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Smiley Smile Stuff / General On Topic Discussions / Re: Feel Flows box set
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on: August 25, 2021, 08:21:01 PM
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Chapter 2: Awesome - so much new footage - what else are they sitting on? 3.34 footage of Carl singing Long Promised Road!!??
Less than 18 hours to go ... (here in Oz)
Right on Tony! - the advantages of living close to the International Date Line!!
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Smiley Smile Stuff / General On Topic Discussions / Re: Production quality of the Sunflower/Surf's Up era
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on: August 17, 2021, 03:28:17 PM
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I bow to nobody in my love of a track like "All I Wanna Do." "All I Wanna Do" is great in part because of that ethereal sound. But one thing I've *never* said to myself when listening to it is "man, that is the most crisp and clear track I've ever heard!"
+1 I really used to have a strong distaste for this track, until I listened to it properly one day and the fact that the doubled (tripled?) leads combined to bring out the vocals in an overlapping, slow evocation (so hard to describe - one channel starts, then the other, then the dance between the two leads) - in some ways it almost achieves what is later done better with the 'reverse echoed' parts on "Feel Flows".
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Smiley Smile Stuff / General On Topic Discussions / Re: Feel Flows box set
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on: August 14, 2021, 01:57:33 PM
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Dennis was so productive during these years yet he's hardly present on Surf's Up and Holland. It's nothing short of a real shame Steamboat is one of my all time favorite beach boys songs though. I love that song dearly. I think beach boys history would be a lot different (in a good way) had Dennis gotten his songs on Surf’s Up - what a phenomenally powerful album it could have been. I guess when we hear the long version of "Wouldn't It Be Nice To Live Again" we might have a better perspective on the track sequencing debate that occurred at the time, but having dropped the song from Surf's Up it has always floored me that it didn't come up for consideration for Carl & The Passions. I can see that it's a new band by then, and a different project, but that song was screaming out to be released.
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Smiley Smile Stuff / General On Topic Discussions / Re: The US Capitol 45rpm Release Of Fun Fun Fun: Songwriting Credit Variations?
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on: August 11, 2021, 04:30:38 PM
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I think the result of that lawsuit should be taken with a grain of salt.
At the time, nobody cared enough to stand up for Brian's side of things, and he was obviously an unwilling participant in those proceedings. We all know what Brian could be like -
I remember reading that Mike Love would sit in the witness box and sing parts of songs explaining how he wrote them - seriously, half the people on this board could've done that.
While undoubtedly some credits were not originally given that were arguable or stronger (California Girls) - there are clearly very many others where that was not the case. When the lawsuit started there were many many more songs included in the claim, and the list was reduced, I believe, at least twice. What's the explanation for that?
The reality is that songwriting is a very personal process, and unless you're in the room when it happens, you're not going to know the truth of it.
All I'm really saying is that Brian just didn't seem to care to fight that lawsuit for whatever reason - and it's not the type of claim that would ordinarily succeed - because there's never going to be hard evidence, unless you can produce a recording of the writing session, which will rarely be the case. I find this whole songwriting credits issue within the band fascinating. If you set the bar as low as what Mike Love would like for getting credit, then why isn't Dennis credited for "Surfin'"?
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