[Stack o'Tracks]

Sad and shocking news. Derek was one of the pioneers in BB esoterica, a resourceful collector (who had a legendary run-in with Marilyn Wilson), and an all-around great guy with a top-notch pair of ears. I still have some cassettes that I got from him where he'd had an engineer fan isolate vocal and instrumental tracks for a slew of BB songs that went well beyond the likes of Stack o'Tracks...great stuff.

I think it was safe to say that Derek was clearly a Brianista...I remember reading an article on Mike's lawsuit over BWPS and down in the comments was a classic Derek one-liner:

"Mike will do well to make sure that his tombstone has an easily washable surface."

LOL. Rest in peace, Derek.

The outro to Al's lead version of "Out In the Country" seems to have some points of connection with two other released BB songs--very reminiscent of the opening of "Cool Cool Water" (albeit much rougher and far less precise) and it seems to also contain the seeds of the chorus melody (with significantly more gospel energy, to be sure) in "He Come Down."

On Steve Desper's unreleased/released ratio noted in a previous post, a clarifying question, please: does he mean that for every released BB track there are one-and-a-half times more songs still in the vaults than what's released, or does he mean 50% (that is, half as many unreleased songs as currently released songs)?

Very interesting to get more glimpses of the BBs trying out different directions...it gives us a better sense of how much work they were really doing at the time, making a concerted effort to figure out a path through the forest of their exile from the American pop charts.

Always good to have more evidence of Mike's talent as a vocalist--whatever else folks may think of him, he is a great singer. While "Sweet and Bitter" sounds like a work track with a not-quite-finished vocal, the ears tell us that Mike knew just what to do with the track and would have been more than capable of bringing it on home as an LP cut.

Wondering if the banjo in "Out in the Country" might have sparked Brian's use of it on "Mess of Help."

 Late to the party, hope that VDP received a string of birthday visitors from the Spanish and Indian home, and that someone clanged the Yankee Reaper in his honor...

Played POB Legacy CD today after reading Ed's post...hope you did too, Ed. Whenever I start thinking about how sad things turned out for Dennis, listening to his music reminds me that we are so blessed to have what we have from him, and how special it is. Thanks to you and to all those who clung tenaciously to his memory and were so helpful in getting POB the first-rate re-release it so richly deserves. We lost Dennis way too soon, but his music will live forever.

[Still Cruisin']

Oops, sorry for the omission...I've dropped Still Cruisin' back into the list in the earlier post. It's another low scorer (just 2.32).

I had three categories (pre-PS, SS-Holland, post-Holland), which work out as shown up above (post-Holland dips a bit more with SC in the mix, from 2.85 to 2.79).

Breaking it out to match the poll (62-65, 67-present), however, produces different results:

62-65: 3.78; 67-present: 3.42.

After Holland, there are only three LPs rated over 3 out of 5: Love You, LA, and TWGMTR.

Yes, this would be good as a poll, but we need to determine which side Pet Sounds is on (or if it goes both ways, which might make it more difficult to choose!)

So far, I have the count as 13 pre, 11 post,  and 3 folks who (quite correctly, I'd have to say) refuse to choose.

As an inveterate quantifier, I decided awhile back to average all of the album rankings that are here at the board just to see what that looked like:

Pet Sounds 4.89, Today 4.65, Sunflower 4.61, Friends 4.39, SD/SN 4.34;
All Summer Long 4.31, Wild Honey 4.21, Love You 4.21, Holland 4.21, Surf's Up 4.10;
Surfer Girl 4.04, 20/20 4.01, Smiley Smile 3.94, TWGMTR 3.91, Shut Down v2 3.68;
CATP 3.49; Surfin USA 3.47, Little Deuce Coupe 3.37, Stack o'Tracks 3.36, Party 3.35;
LA 3.12, Surfin Safari 2.80, MIU 2.80, BB85 2.51, 15 Big Ones 2.47;
Keepin' the Summer Alive 2.43, Still Cruisin' 2.32, Summer in Paradise 1.38 (!!)

Haven't found that ranking displayed here before, apologies if it's been done already...but it's an interesting list and it leads to another perspective for this thread.

If we average the scores of the pre-PS LPs and the scores of the post-PS LPs up to Holland (with PS left out of both groups), we get the following averages:

pre-PS (including Party): 3.78
post-PS (including Stack'o'Tracks): 4.04
[post-Holland: 2.79]

(Party and Stack'o'Tracks have virtually the same scores, so this just lowers the average a bit, and doesn't change the comp.)

So, by the voters here who ranked the LPs individually, the post-PS material is deemed to be better, but just by a little bit.

Beautiful, Mr. Desper...it's these straight-ahead, human moments that make the BB's music stand out from everyone else's by touching reservoirs of emotion that are rarely tapped by anyone else. As you note, a wonderful job by the videographer in matching the music and visuals. Thanks much for sharing with us, and we are all anxiously awaiting the second edition of your book!

Very nice writeup, RR. I think you meant "homey atmosphere," though, didn't you?? I love that tie-in between WH and the third VU album--very much on-point there, I think.

It took a few years--'bout 20, in fact--but WH would now safely rank in the top 5 of all BB LP's in my estimate.

Off the cuff, as of right now, my ranks:

1. Wild Honey
2. Country Air
3. Let the Wind Blow (particularly the stellar Hawthorne remix)
4. Aren't You Glad
5. A Thing or Two
6. Darlin'
7. I'd Love Just Once to See You
8. How She Boogalooed It
9. I Was Made to Love Her
10. Mama Says
11. Here Comes the Night

Impressionistic art-song, where the listener brings their own perspective to the images painted by VDP and the sublime collision of musical elements welded together by BW. Whether its optimistic or melancholic is in the mind/ear/soul of the audience, IMO. This listener hears the nostalgia of intimacy in the "Home on the Range" section, with what might be "flashbacks" to scenes/situations that occurred at or near the site of the "protagonist" (as represented in Carl's lead vocal). One of the absolute pinnacles of BW's oeuvre, arguably more astonishing and accomplished than GV or SU.

(Apologies if this seems like a cop-out vis-a-vis the question.)

[Sunflower,]

Dennis's songs didn't "save" Sunflower, but they strengthened it considerably. But, as Andrew's comp shows, the additions of "All I Wanna Do" and "Cool Cool Water" were just as important.

Great to land here this year amongst so many passionate fans of the world's greatest band...Merry Xmas to all of you and to Brian, Mike, Al, Bruce, David, the memories of Dennis and Carl, all of the band's support team (family, musicians, etc.) over the years. What a long, strange, but exhilarating ride it's been...as BW buddy Neil Young said: "Long may you run!"

It's an OK track, nothing more or less. Doesn't come close to reaching into the "second level" of emotion that alliows BW's best pre-PS material (to) work its particular magic.

If you want an imitator who's actually managing to get close to that neighborhood, you've got to go with "Time Will Tell" from Flash Cadillac:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RqA8J6DQDOA

Like BW, Kris Moe lets the way the arrangement plays out do the job of raising the emotional stakes.

Someone (quite possibly someone who posts here...) was quick to point out the oversight in the Yahoo article in the comments section. While it was certainly disappointing, ultimately it just doesn't matter that much...and I hope that such slights can be sloughed off in the wake of the good things that happened in 2012. Mike isn't the devil and Brian isn't a saint--but we had a great, great year even with the messed-up headlines in October. Time to turn the other cheek, smile when your heart is breaking, let any chips just slide off the shoulder, and be grateful for all of the unexpected treasures that slipped on through in spite of the BB's penchant for discord and intrigue.

What John Cale sung in his 70s hommage to BW ("Mr. Wilson") is still true today: we "believe ['em] anyway." And that's never going to change, now, is it?? 

I always find it strange that before he joined the Beach Boys, Bruce wrote a lot of surf/car songs... and when he joined the Beach Boys, he wrote The Nearest Faraway Place.

That is strange, but I think that's a lovely song. Do you not like it?

Bruce started writing songs for the BB's when the rest of the band was trying to establish its capability to function with less material from BW. He seems to have decided to focus on a pop-showtune style, which is pleasant enough but (with the exception of "Disney Girls") never really blended into the BB's sound. His subsequent career as a songwriter and producer has shown that he's pretty derivative and somewhat calculating in terms of the trends in the industry. "The Nearest Faraway Place" is pretty enough, but it's seriously MOR and shows little of the inventiveness and arranging genius that BW displayed in his instrumentals.

EDIT: But despite that opinion, I'm definitely interested in hearing the Kustom Kings material.

[Today!]

After 33 ballots, here is a slightly massaged ranking (having to estimate a few of the point totals due to a few ballots that didn't go in strict 1-12 order) for the Today! songs:

Please Let Me Wonder (10.1), She Knows Me Too Well & Kiss Me Baby (9.2), When I Grow Up (8.7), In the Back of My Mind (8.6),

Dance Dance Dance (6.5), Do You Wanna Dance (6.1), Good to My Baby (6.0),

I'm So Young (4.9), Don't Hurt My Little Sister (4.2), Help Me Ronda (3.5),

Bull Session (1.1)

[All]

that's just a silly way of singing, those people after stepping out of the recording booth didn't say, "that was some sick gnar, brah".

also, "HEY BEACH BOYS FANS LISTEN TO THIS SONG I FOUND IT'S CALLED ALLEY OOP", I take it you've never listened to Beach Boys Party?

no. It's all covers. I would compare it to Beatles For Sale - an attempt to cash in for the holiday market. But at least half the songs on BFS were written by them.

All covers ?  I'll bet you the entire US national debt that it's not.

You owe me $16,365,370,575,377.43.  

Will you accept a check, Andrew?? 

Speaking only for myself, I'd much rather have Brian stay at home for the lion's share of 2013 and work on a new album. Write the music, work with lyricists, and record it when Mike and Bruce aren't out on the road (and not performing "I Just Got My Pay")...   

[Smile]

I guess the question that should be asked here is...what tunes in the BB canon does anyone think would be better if Al had sung lead?

The brilliance of having Al in the band was that he could blend in so well, which made it possible for Brian to create differing vocal textures by using Al (and, to a lesser extent, all the others) in various locations.

It strikes me that one of the reasons why Brian gave Al the lead on "Help Me Rhonda" was to boost him into a position of greater prominence. He my have wanted to boost his confidence because he knew that Al would need to do more leads in the live shows. There seems to be some subtext in the infamous "Murry" tape that makes me think that Al was more deferential about his position in the band in the early days, being (until Bruce came in) the lone "non-family" member. It seemed that everyone was supporting someone who hadn't quite the same level of confidence (even Murry, in the midst of his strange behavior, is being supportive).  As other posters have noted, when Brian went into his post-Smile tailspin it was Carl who stepped up to take his place, evolving quickly into a singer with an incredibly diverse range.

I always get the sense that Brian has done a really good job of knowing when Al is best matched to a song in terms of being the lead singer. That extends right up to the present. As Al began to write his own material, he found his own voice, and he's a lot more playful and relaxed with his later leads than he was in the 60s.

Both Luther and Jim are right (say what?). It's important to understand "what happened", and it's extremely enjoyable to explore alternate realities, particularly when they provide opportunities to put the facts into better context.

But of course these activities are mutually exclusive, and people will wind up positioned somewhere on the spectrum in terms of the relative merits of either approach.

Regarding the issue raised by the OP, its a darned good thing that Brian had the Beach Boys to jump-start and focus his creativity...not only would he not be regarded as a modern-day Mozart (by those who need to make such comparisons), but we'd be missing the very reason that we are here together.

I think the answer to the original question is plain as the nose on your face: without the specific formative details of Brian's life--both good and bad, nurturing and abusive--he'd've had a much different life. And so would we, because he almost certainly wouldn't have been the Brian Wilson we know and revere.

Those who like to make these Mozart comparisons, however, really need to get better grounded in "what happened" to Mozart...who was one of the world's greatest child prodigies, writing long-form works before the rest of us started grade school and packing an incredibly prolific composing career into only 35 years. While it's an undeniably alluring analogy, it's also a very tenuous one.

VERY interesting stuff. How are you achieving the isolation? Way back in the day ('72) when I had a particularly nifty receiver with a ton of knobs, you could play left/right channel only and port that into both speakers/headphones. Doing that revealed the insane level of complexity in the mix on "Mess of Help," with left channel (IIRC) being strings, banjo, percussion and Carl's lead, with the right channel carrying lead guitar, drums, and what sounded like Brian or Brian/Carl doubled doing the funky second lead (including the grunts and the "hos"). The piano and backing vocals were spread across both tracks pretty much equally. Never did get another receiver that permitted that type of separation.

Man, you should just remix it and bring up the high backing vocals--they are just effin' KILLER on that first snippet--you must be maxin' the treble or something to get that. Listening to this makes me think that if BW put his mind to it he could still make a rocked-out record that would blow people's minds. And how amazing would THAT be for a 70-year old who was never considered all that interested in rock'n'roll?

Holy moly, do I love this track...it is SO counterintuitively brilliant! Thanks so much! MORE, please!!!

[Beach Boys Today]

Thanks to Time to Get Alone (and those who chimed in) for those comparison lists...am traveling this weekend, so will examine them all in more detail when the "motion blur" comes to a rest. Very interesting lists. Wish we had about ten more of 'em to combine (hint, hint to readers!) as it might "smooth out" some of the intriguing (actually, outright astonishing!!) divergences in what's been posted to date.

And thanks to Alan for those trenchant observations about the BB's--100% on the money with the notion that the group has managed to spawn "mutually incompatible" fan bases, a phenomenon that first came into play with Beach Boys Today and has stayed in force for nearly half a century now. That's still the case as we head into 2013: TWGMTR is just the latest work to reflect this phenomenon.

[Sunflower]

The songs are uniformly great,

Nope, right there. It is an album with a brilliant coat of production sheen, that manages to distract the listener from the fact that it is another mixed bag of tracks spanning a great period of time, not recorded for the same specific project, a third grab into the same bag of master tapes in order to satisfy Warners, who had rejected the band's own intentions, twice over. If ya'll dig the album's final form, send Lenny Waronker a fan letter, then.
I mean, it is fine you all like that album so much and all, and I am happy for you. But I feel that album is grossly overrated by a certain group of Beach Boys fans (as Abbey Road, another phony production effort disguising lack of group interaction and some very mediocre songs) is by most Beatles fans). And those type of fans are generally the same ones who dislike Love You. I think certain people are more into the type of Beatles-influenced sound and production style they think The Beach Boys should have, than a true artistic picture of the band, and Brian Wilson in particular. This also causes substandard, pandering recent solo efforts by Brian to be overrated. The REAL, messy, strange Brian Wilson and the Beach Boys, that music gets slated, or given guarded praise, on a daily basis on this supposed fan board. One will get less stick praising Carl And The frickin' Passions than if one openly celebrates any of the classic early music.
The same thing goes on at Elvis message boards. His 70's music gets wildly overpraised, and the proponents of it constantly bray about how much more "mature" Elvis was, how "adult" the Vegas arrangements were than the "juvenile" 50's material such as Jailhouse Rock and Hound Dog. What goes on here isn't any different.

Sorry, gross over-generalizations all around. The songs are not uniformly great, but there are seven excellent tracks and two solidly enjoyable, melodious and extremely well-arranged songs on Sunflower (ASM and OSL),  with three songs that are competent but average (and which are helped a good bit by the production work).

And I for one am not overly enamored with CATP, my (perhaps) outsized love of "Mess of Help" notwithstanding. I respect the work on CATP as a whole, but I only have real, unbridled love for about half the record. The objections that you raise at the end seem more relevant to those who try to elevate LA and KTSA to a level that's roughly equivalent to CATP and Holland because of one or two good tracks, when it's clear that the BBs were mostly lost and dysfunctional, morbidly circling the wagons and bringing in Bruce (the least of the songwriting talent and a fitful producer at best) to cover for BW's post-Landy swoon.

I also don't think the binary opposition between Sunflower-ites and Love You-ites is really all that accurate. One way to test it out would be for one of our pollsters to start a new one where the two records go head-to-head. Or, better, have them rank the records (0-5 stars). Also, the very intriguing head-to-head track rankings that Time To Get Alone (the poster, not the song!) was doing earlier would be REALLY interesting in this context.

I would also love to see him try to synthesize his list of songs from the two-fers and show what an overall listing would look like. It would be a good starting point for discussion, even if that discussion didn't resolve anything (how could it???).  That's a massive undertaking, however.

And how about a thread for one of the really burning questions left to tackle in BB-land: "Marcella" vs. "I Just Got My Pay"??

[Pet Sounds]

Let's put it this way. Pet Sounds takes everything that was great about BW and the BB's and takes it up a notch; Love You takes all the quirky Brian Wilson material that had occasionally slipped through the cracks, puts it into concentrated form, and takes it up a notch. They are both the greatest LPs of their type ever made. About half of Love You could have been rearranged to fit very comfortably into the upper reaches of the BB pantheon; the other half is unrepentantly wacky and is redeemable only in that particular half-light.

[Sunflower]

Three "average" songs on Sunflower: "Tears," "Dierdre" and "At My Window."

Two "above average" songs: "Add Some Music," "Our Sweet Love."

Three "very good" songs: "Forever," "Got to Know the Woman," "It's About Time."

Four "first-rate" songs: "This Whole World," "All I Wanna Do," "CCW," "Slip On Through."

Of course, YMMV. But that's my story and I'm sticking to it.

I said the songs as a whole don't measure up to the best of the earlier material. But that doesn't mean that all the songs are "average."

And production always mattered with the material, at least up through Holland. After that, things did get spotty...but it wasn't just the production that lost its way, the songwriting in the group suffered--when talking about BB LA, keep in mind that Dennis tossed in a couple of songs from his planned solo material to add some needed quality to what is at best an "average" group of tunes. Those who think the songs on BB LA stand up to the top two-thirds of the tracks on Sunflower should probably rethink their position. Smile-addict's point is a lot more on the money regarding the post-Love You material than he is about the 20-20/Holland period.