[TWGMTR]

The overall consensus (which, admittedly, is very hard for the more spirited posters here to take seriously...) is that TWGMTR is right in the middle of the pack of all the BB studio LPs, just below Smiley Smile and just above Shut Down Vol 2. Clearly several of the TWGMTR "haters" who've surfaced over the ensuing months did not bother to participate in that poll, as there are no votes below "2 out of 5" in that poll.

I personally give it 3 out of 5, rounded up from 2 1/2. (Averaging out my individual song ratings works out out just under 2.7, with the last three songs salvaging a very saggy middle.)

I'm with Jay. Let's get back to piling on beachboys_fr--much more productive than trying to compare BW and DW.

Dennis: "Holy sh*t, Al, you're finally showing signs of developing facial hair!!!"

Hmmm....so THIS is where Brian first got the idea for "Hey Little Tomboy"....

 

Thanks for all your cheeky perseverance, TM. But please understand that George:

a) is not really all that far off the general historical consensus about the BBs that has built up in rock-critic land over the past 30 years;
b) is just a little too often guilty of the "look at me" style of journalism that hardens hearts (if not entire circulatory systems) when one is exposed to it in overly concentrated doses;
c) seems to waver around a lot between his "critical editions" (the blog that's being pasted here, and the one that's not) leaving us to wonder if he is actually making principled reevaluations or if it's just a different day on a different medication.

The idea that Pet Sounds is only a "13" (merely equal in quality to the Stones' Their Satanic Majesties) while Beggar's Banquet is a "15" is nothing more or less than laughable.

I admire George's energy and ambition, but he's going to have to stop writing on amphetamines one of these days.

Fabulous to have it back on-line, Mr. Desper--I wish that your a capella version would wind up on MIC in all its considerable glory.

Clearly Dennis was more naturally inclined to be a "back door man" than a front man. 

He also was more inclined to intensely emotional material, which meant that he was not the optimal singer for the up-tempo hits. Brian was pretty much on the money when he doled out songs, and he knew which voice was best suited to a given song.

A proper BB show, built along the lines of the C50 structure, would have had three or four places for Dennis to step forward. It would showcase his unique talents as a singer/songwriter, and give Mike some additional respite from all that lead singing. (BTW, did anyone quantify the number of lead vocals done by the various singers on the C50 tour? Is Mike singing 50% of the leads? Anyone have that data??)

Time for a formal poll.... we haven't had any of those for awhile.

IIRC, David Leaf printed Brian's astrological chart in his book. There are many versions of this around on the Net; a series of Google searches will conjure them up.

You can find astrological charts for five of the BB (Brian, Dennis, Carl, Mike and Al) at the following link:

http://www.astro.com/astro-databank/Main_Page

As an astrological agnostic, I'll leave it to someone else to take the "big dip" into interpreting those charts....

[Holland]

I don't know why people like this record so much. It just sounds like a dull 70s rock album to me...

You're no "Lady" for making this statement, Xoc!!! Even though there is more than a grain of truth in it...overall, the songs are a bit too Moog-y and mid-tempo. I would have to say that it's a record that produces one of the most variable responses for me--sometimes I will let it play through and really enjoy it; other times (a good bit more often) I will skip through it and listen to only two or three songs.

I will say that "The Trader" might just be the most underrated great song in the BB canon--Carl's best solo songwriting for the band. Using the "internal to each album" ranking system it grades out in the Top 25 of all BB songs, a ranking level that I suspect would be astonishing to most.

According to the polls, Holland and Love You have identical rankings (4.21 out of 5; oddly, this is also the average for Wild Honey). What I've taken to calling the "Masterpiece Quotient" (MQ)--the percentage of the votes that place the record at 5 out of 5--is 43% for Holland, 54% for Love You (a different kind of 70s record to be sure).

Many happy returns, Darien, may you have at least fifty more!!

Has fantastic harmonies but it doesn't seem like the type of thing that would have worked on an A-Side. There aren't enough lyrics!

In the GV boxed set version Brian is calling out lyrics in the middle section.  To me, that indicates that Brian must have had a lead part rolling around his head at some point!

It would be interesting to know where the lead vocals in the last section were to go.  Was that to be a verse or a chorus?  We may never know.....

It always seemed to me that it was supposed to be a verse, to follow some version of the "Been Too Long" intro, which would have led to the "Can't Wait Too Long" chorus, but YMMV...

Looking over the set lists, I don't see anything from KTSA.

Publication date has always been June 18th, 2013 according to the publisher and Amazon US.

That book is SO pre-ordered already...ready to devour it as soon as it arrives, Jon! The BBs efforts to retool after Brian left the road is just one of the interesting stories that such a book can convey. This side of their story has never been focused on previously and promises to deliver a valuable new perspective on the workings of the band.

We call him "Mike" because "MICHAEL LOVE NOT WAR" just doesn't work on that (in)famous T-shirt. 

But it's way too late for him to be known as Michael to the general public.

He's always been a bit of a "climber" but as he's gotten older his give-back has become more focused and more principled. Some of the credit for that should go to Jacqueline, of course; we should not discount her influence on him in what has easily been his most stable, equal, and enduring marriage.

Fun! You need something for David Marks and for the Maharishi, however.

Excellent post, Peter. We just have to collectively shake off the ongoing "cold war" that keeps threatening to heat up between the factions of the band (and the fans), and take what we get. To expect anything more, or wallow in each turn of phrase reported in the press, is nothing more or less than masochism. As you say, bring on the music!

[Smile]

It strikes me that no one, including Van Dyke Parks, really understood the slippery dynamics of the Beach Boys in mid-1966 and the fact that many forces were coming to a head as a result of Brian's desire to be something akin to the "executive producer" of the enterprise--some of which was founded on his own growing feeling of alienation from his own success. All of that was in play even in the context of the band putting out a radically new sound and new compositional method in "Good Vibrations." What followed that was a lot more esoteric and a lot less based in what a number of folks have called "avant-garde R&B." To this day, even after a completed version of Smile with the assistance of VDP, the "bad vibes" that overtook the project have still not gone away. I think VDP continues to believe that Brian (over)played a lot of mind games with people during the Smile era, which was based on what many have seen as the family business steamrollering his desire to keep moving forward artistically. Now that it's clear to most everyone that Brian was a lot more functional in the 1967-72 time frame (and VDP was still in the picture during much of that), he may just be feeling extra testy about things.

I suspect that he regrets having used the term "buffoonery" (especially after having seen it in headline-sized type) but he's also cantankerous enough to feel justified in using the term. And since a) he lived through all of that and a whole lot more and b) he's an extremely talented composer, lyricist and arranger despite his tendency toward rhetorical excess when talking with members of the press, we might just want to cut him as much slack as the various factions here tend to cut Brian and Mike.

The moral of the story for me is stick to 2 kids and sleep in!

 

Seriously, though, those are wonderful sentiments from Mike. And here's to many more years of life for "Papa" Love.

A good time to cue up one of Mike's sweetest set of lyrics, "All I Wanna Do"...

The first Smiley Smiler here on the board to discover a link and post the track list will be a hero of sorts. Who will it be??? 

He/she will only be a hero if the right tracks are on the track list...otherwise it could be a "shoot the messenger" scenario... 

[Wild Honey]

One of the strengths of the board (IMO) is when it discusses the merits of the songs, which is why I like the "Rank the Tracks" threads and spent some spare time collating most of 'em (all from Smiley Smile to Holland). The consensus rankings are quite interesting, and actually make sense (most of the time)

Disagree SOOO much. It's an awful thing about the board.

I find it really depressing to see songs I'd previously just accepted as by a band I love picked apart, and given gradings...sure there have always been 'lesser songs', but to see it laid out there, making me think about it...nonsense.

And, given the right number of pints, I'd probably end up in a fist fight with anyone who knocked 'Got to know the woman'. It's FABULOUS.

We will, of course, agree to disagree, since I (and many others, I suspect) would enjoy your opinions and your rankings, even if we didn't agree with them. 

But let me say that I completely agree with you about "Got To Know The Woman." I am completely dumbfounded by its ranking and think that the collective has lost its collective mind in this instance. A great, great, joyous, outrageously wonderful track. I don't think I'd end up in a fight about it, but I am amazed at how folks (at least the folks that voted) failed to see how a song like this is such a great way to pull the BB sound into new and different directions. But, then again, they aren't keen on "A Thing or Two" from Wild Honey, either--a track that is arguably "Woman"'s closest relative in the BB canon.

That said, there aren't very many anomalies in the rankings like this one. When they eff it up, however, they REALLY eff it up!

All the original LPs; selected 45s from the golden era;  the 93 box; all 2-fers; many of the more recent remixes; extensive bootlegs; all of Brian, Dennis, Carl and Al's solo stuff. And, of course, TSS.

Two of my favorite LPs--or should I say, sides of LPs--are the British "Best of the Beach Boys," vols. 2 and 3.  The Brits were always more generous in quantity, putting fourteen tracks on their "best ofs" as opposed to 12 in the USA. And their programming/sequencing was more discerning as well, producing two almost perfect side 2s:

Vol 2: (side 2) The Girl From NYC/Girl Don't Tell Me/The Little Girl I Once Knew/Mountain of Love/Here Today/Wouldn't It Be Nice/Good Vibrations

Vol 3: (side 2) Darlin'/Please Let Me Wonder/Let Him Run Wild/Country Air/I Know There's An Answer/Friends/Heroes and Villains

Back when we still had stacking turntables, my GF and I would put those two sides on frequently as the "go to bed" music. If they'd put "Sloop John B." on v2 in place of "Mountain of Love" (it actually appeared on the UK Vol 1) it would have been perfection.

Should note that side 2 of the UK Best of Vol 1 was not exactly a slouch, either: Do You Wanna Dance/Help Me Rhonda/California Girls/Barbara Ann/You're So Good to Me/Sloop John B./God Only Knows

Today, we just program whatever we want, of course. But there was something kind of special about someone, somewhere, having the discernment to put such a wonderful combination of great hits and great deep cuts onto these records. It was a kind of sublime serendipity...

I hope the ladies on the board will not swoop down upon me for saying this, but Alex Jones--right from the start--strikes you as a woman who is convinced that she's much more attractive than she really is, which is about as monumentally annoying as anyone--woman or man--can possibly be. I thought BW did a good job of surviving the particularly odious hipsterism that the two hosts were oozing and I especially loved his very ironic "Yeah...yeh" when answering one of the silliest questions that Alex posed about whether he liked touring. I mean, EVERYONE KNOWS that Brian has troubles with touring even when he's enjoying it!

[Today]

I would have loved it a lot more if it wasn't shuffled together with Kiss my baby and She knows me too well....those 2 songs really outshine PLMW

Some great discussion of the lyrics to this track on this thread: very thought-provoking, thanks. However, I do want to just make the point that the above post is getting into the realms of personal taste — and as the Rank The Tracks threads show, you rarely ever get Beach Boys fans to agree about the relative merits of the tracks on BB albums! Myself, I think She Knows Me Too Well is the best track on Today, and I put Please Let Me Wonder very close behind it... but Kiss Me, Baby is much more '...Meh' to me.

I mean, this is the Today album we're talking about, here, so it's still pretty GOOD '...Meh', very good in fact — but I think it's '...Wonder' and '...Too Well' that shade 'Kiss...'.

But that's just my tuppeny three farthings' worth...

While we'd never expect (or probably even want) everyone to have the exact same rankings of the songs, the results from the "ranking the tracks" exercises are (IMO) worth examining for what they tell us about the consensus. With that in mind, I did some more compiling last night and here is what we have for the Today! LP (this is all normalized to a 1-10 scale):

Please Let Me Wonder (8.4)
---------------------------------------------8
Kiss Me Baby (7.7)
She Knows Me Too Well (7.5)
In the Back of My Mind (7.4)
When I Grow Up (7.1)
---------------------------------------------7
---------------------------------------------6
Dance, Dance, Dance (5.3)
Do You Wanna Dance (5.1)
Good to My Baby (5.02)
---------------------------------------------5
I'm So Young (4.2)
---------------------------------------------4
Don't Hurt My Little Sister (3.4)
---------------------------------------------3
Help Me Ronda (2.98)
---------------------------------------------2
---------------------------------------------1
Bull Session (0.9)

As mentioned elsewhere, the limitations of ranking LP tracks rather than grading (on, say, a 1-5 scale) is that each LP is considered to be equal in quality, but these results are still interesting, particularly if one looks at the info that can be derived from the patterns in the voting (as opposed to merely the average scores). There's also a bigger (and somewhat exaggerated) difference in the numerical values due to the big differences in range.

Of the top-ranked songs, there is a good bit more disagreement about ITBOMM and KMB than with SKMTW. People who like the former two REALLY like them--they put them in the top two more often than SKNTW, but there are more people who rank them lower. (A different, and possibly preferable form of weighted averaging puts KMB and SKMTW in a virtual dead-head, which is exactly how I personally ranked them--a tie.)

What also emerges from the data is that Side 2 of Today (when we eliminate the near-perfect low score for "Bull Session With the Big Daddy") has the highest ranking of any LP side in the BBs albums (through BBLY), at 7.05. Side two of Surf's Up ranks high at 6.88; the only other LP sides averaging over six are Side 2 of 20/20 (6.43), Side 2 of Holland (6.13), and  Side 1 of Friends (6.07). Again, this might be a good bit different if we were grading the songs on some absolute scale rather than ranking them relative to the LP on which they happen to reside.

To return to the topic of PLMW, the really fascinating question is who altered the lyrics from the early version with Mike singing lead? Did Brian ever actually write lyrics without Mike and then let Mike revise? Or did Brian sometimes tweak some of Mike's word choices? One suspects that there's a little of each that happened, with it being mostly that Mike heard a track or was given a melody and would go off and write them, then bring 'em back, at which point Brian might have some level of editorial input.

I don't remember seeing this specific issue explored here at the board--if there's a thread that does so, please let me know.

Re: WIBNTLA...it will be what it will be. A little too much thin skin all around, folks. The cover version performed by Adam's band ought to lay to rest any notions, sardonic or otherwise, that the song is going to be some kind of major disappointment.

Obviously it's tough to "wait and see" under such circumstances, but there's nothing else that can be done. The BBs own the rights to the song and to the recording. We all just need to get over it, move on to other things, and keep our fingers crossed.