I just posted most of this in... another place, but it should go here too...

Been super busy the last coupla days... and had only been checking in here every few days, wondering when something was gonna happen with the 'new' Wild Honey release. Just logged in to look again, and CANNOT. BELIEVE. MY. EYES.

Two minutes ago, I was reading, got to the end of the first disc tracklisting and thought that was all. I went 'yeah, that's a cool release. I'll have that. I'm pretty pleased with that, I guess.' And then I realised... there was more. And within ten seconds of that, I was literally WHOOPING. "It's f***in' Smiley Smile outtakes and alt mixes TOO?? You are KIDDING ME???!!!!"

And of course, new stereo mixes of the whole album, Heider session highlights, CWTL alt mix, stuff we've known as 'Lei'd In Hawaii' and I guess, er, 'A Vocal Element' for years now... ALL of that too.

This is, like, a dream release for me. Literally, as in I HAVE actually dreamt of having something like this since about 1997.

I cannot wait to hear this mutha. Capitol, take my money. Right now.

Mr Linett, Mr Boyd, Craig S, whoever else is responsible... thank you. You have basically managed to have legally released what we've all wanted for bloody YEARS. That must have taken unending patience, perseverance and effort.

Oh yeah... And thanks to those, er, Beach Boys guys too, I guess. Cheers!

Begone, May. Begone, June. Gimme. Just... gimme.

PS As a final note, yeah, I guess this IS the 1967 copyright extension release a few months early. I mean, with this coming out, the BB vault cupboards are pretty much cleaned out of 1967 material we want to hear, aren't they? I can't think of anything that's missing apart from 'Good Time Mama' 'Good News' and 'Hawaiian Song'... and I'll wager we'll find out what happened to them in the liner notes. I have no 'inside' telling me that... that's just a guess. But basically this release gives us all the tracks we want, and I'm betting the liners will give us the *information* we've all been wondering about for years. The team behind this are arch-fans like us, remember? And so I'll bet, like a lot of others have previously said here, that those three Smiley era 'tracks' were just section titles for bits of She's Going Bald and Little Pad, before those tracks got their final titles.

...er... probably.

PPS And yeah, Cabinessenceking. Yeah. Best release since SMiLE came out. No contest.

Does anyone have any idea why Denny chose the title (as well as the spelling) "Bambu"? Interestingly, all the boots I'd had years ago entitled the project "Bamboo", but I assume that the "Bambu" spelling was completely intentional.

For years, I assumed that the title was simply, uh, a reference to Dennis's, um, favourite nickname for himself. Or rather, er... a part of himself. The name of which, perhaps unsurprisingly, he also used to refer to the, ah, whole of himself.

And then we learned that it was supposed to have been Bambu all along, not Bamboo. Which prolly makes the rolling papers connection more likely. Actually, how did that change come about? Was it based on something in the documentation for the sessions, or did the folks behind the 2008 reissue retitle it?

I'm guessing the latter is unlikely, as all the guys behind that set had such regard for Dennis, I can't imagine they would have retitled it unless they had evidence that the man himself had wanted it that way. But now I stop to think about it... I don't actually know the story of how Bamboo became Bambu. If there is one!

Ah, y'see, Lee... it's my opinion (and of course, that's all it is; I'm not pretending it's the cold hard truth or anything) that there are lots of possible other explanations for different master numbers like that. And not just the explanation that the January session is for Surf's Up part II. It could be all sorts of other things.

Brian often did remakes of songs. Lots of remakes, particularly during this period of his recording history (off the top of my head, think of all the different versions of 'Wonderful' recorded between Summer 66 and a year later). Different master numbers were racked up like I don't know what during the Good Vibrations sessions. The existence of a separate master number doesn't mean much, and certainly not something as specific as "this is a different master number from what we have come to know as part 1 of Surf's Up - therefore it must be the session for Part 2". It could have been for a complete track remake, or another section that wasn't used... we just don't know.

Someone (maybe Cam Mott) did say round these parts once that the session labelled as 'Part One' might not even necessarily have been specifically for Part One of the song Surf's Up at all, and that it was ambiguous that it WAS for that song... but perhaps that is old information and the link to Surf's Up for that session has now been proven. But even if that's wrong, that goes to show the level of uncertainty that exists around these sessions and their often spotty documentation. It's definitely a mistake to say 'we know of these sessions [a pile of session sheets], and these recordings [a pile of tapes] - so all we have to do is match one to the other'. There were lost sessions. There were undocumented sessions. There were sessions that took place, but the tapes are now gone for whatever reason: lost, erased, stolen.

Years ago, when I first got interested in SMiLE in the mid-90s, no-one except super-well-connected fans knew what 'I'm In Great Shape' was. There were lots of theories, one of which was that it was the 'Eat A Lot, Sleep A Lot' bridge from Vega-Tables, because it was a booted section that didn't seem to particularly belong to a known song and it clearly had a lyrical theme of physical well-being. But the theories were clearly wrong, as became clear to fans outside the innermost SMiLE circles in the late '90s when (part of?) I'm In Great Shape turned up in the H&V Humble Harv demo and then (some of?) the sessions for a more developed version of the track became available. THAT's the kind of mistake we could be making here. We have a session log for a Surf's Up session, and a lost recording for part of Surf's Up... so the session log must refer to the lost recording. Well, it ain't necessarily so.

In short, to assume that the Surf's Up session that doesn't directly match to any of the existing known recordings is the one for the recording we're also obviously missing — the backing track to part 2 of the song, from 'Are You Sleeping, Brother John' to the start of the final CIFOTM reprise ending — could well be a mistake. It's an attractive idea, and a seductive one, but there are other things it might have been and we can't make assumptions like that without further information. In my opinion, of course!

I get very little time to keep coming back here these days; it's eminently possible I've missed something big. So please excuse me asking dumb 'let's back up a second here...' type questions!

Lee... when and where was there ever a description of what was in part 2 of Surf's Up? Genuine question. I remember Darian saying that Paul Mertens had asked Brian what he could recall about that part, and that Brian had said there were strings. That was supposedly why we got strings (a Mertens arrangement) in the live SMiLE in 2004. But I don't recall anything else ever about what else was supposed to have been in Part 2, much less concrete knowledge that Brian's solo piano recording was overdubbed to create part 2, and, even more specifically, that it was overdubbed with Hal drumming, trumpets and saxophones, and that there were also harps and horns that ended up not being used.

If that's come out lately about the second part of Surf's Up... that's big news. So... what's the source?

If it's just the sessionography, then I think, as sonic l. noize has just said, that those instruments were the sweetening for the first part, not overdubs for the second. But please correct me if I'm wrong. I have been... so, so many times...!

Also, although Brian recorded the solo piano version straight through, and this is what was used for the second movement in the subsequent versions of Surf's Up, my understanding was that this was just because nobody ever found any other kind of backing track for the second part, and that in fact, it's not clear that one was ever recorded. Certainly there was a separate recording made with a full arrangement (Hal, horns, percussion, trumpets etc) for the first part, and so the logical assumption has always been that originally, there were going to be similarly fully arranged recordings of the backing track sections for the other parts of the track, and they were the recordings that were originally going to get vocal overdubs to form the finished track. The impression I got was that the piano recording was just to demonstrate how the whole track went, but that the 'finished' studio track was going to be made up of the more arranged backing track sections with vocal overdubs, as indeed the first section was in the end. But logical as that might seem, SMiLE is frequently extremely ILLOGICAL, so... basically, assume nothing that isn't nailed down. Maybe Brian *was* going to do that... but didn't get round to it. Or maybe he preferred the piano track after he did that, and WAS going to overdub that version. Or maybe he had several plans which kept changing, and in the end, he got around to doing none of them, which just left the part 1 backing and the complete double-tracked solo piano version. All of those events would have left us with the tape library in the state it's in now.

Or... maybe Brian did make those more developed backing track sections back in the day, and lost or destroyed the tapes... or they were stolen. But certainly it seems like if they ever did exist, they were gone by the time of the Surf's Up album, and when Carl tried to pull SMiLE together in the early 70s... because they used Brian's solo piano recording as the basis for all the bits of the song that weren't the first part up to 'are you sleeping, Brother John'. And that's all we have today, too.

All of these things are possible, and I don't think it's possible to say which of them did or didn't happen.

Unless... new info or tapes have come to light?

I've never heard this before - is it from 'The Cocaine Sessions'? I tried to download that once but gave up when I heard how bad the recordings were.

And indeed, the recording quality here is awful... but as with so much BW stuff from this, uh, *difficult* time, there's the spark of something interesting lurking in there. Some of the chords are great!

Anyway, I'd say that JK got it mostly right. The only amendments I would table are that the line "How you could just be like me" is actually, I think:

"How you could best be like me"

...and the troublesome line "One singer is wasn't tonight"

...is actually "One singer is **wondering** tonight".

The words still don't make much sense, but then we're clearly listening to a work in progress that, er, didn't subsequently progress. Or, not that I can tell - it doesn't sound particularly like any subsequently released tunes I can think of.

...I'll address Speeches/Goin Bald in a bit.

Say, guitarfool, I was looking forward to coming back to this point, and keep looking back in every couple of days to see if you're 'there'.

Is it 'in a bit' yet? 

No worries if not - I haven't had a chance to come back to leetwall97 yet, either... busy busy and all that...

Will be interested to see what you have to say, though...

Seems to be more along the lines of "that never happened' in the sense of he never got his head blown off (which is obvious as he was writing about it)

Yeah, actually Billy, that makes total sense too. And IS funny as well!

But actually, the bit that made me laugh most about the Carol Mountain story was the bit of the line that went:

"...before I left I put my hand on her leg. It wasn't completely innocent - it was still a great leg - but it was mostly innocent."

Again, you can *so* imagine Brian saying that out loud

The Carol Mountain story ...ends it with "That never happened". Facetious Brian is hilarious

I've been emailing the best of them to a friend as I come across them. That's one I sent. I laughed so hard.

Bit late to the party on this comment, but... although the book is full of some super-funny 'Brianisms', I didn't read this comment as one of 'em myself. I thought the 'That never happened' comment at the end of the sentence wasn't some clever-clever "I've just told you this whole anecdote, but now I'm calling it entirely into question at the very end, aha, am I just an unreliable narrator...?" thing (if it was, Brian doesn't seem to employ that device anywhere else in the book, unlike say Ray Davies in his books about his life)... but instead literally just a shorthand way of saying "the guy threatened me if I ever went near his wife again... so obviously THAT never happened again". Or in other words, "I didn't want to get my head blown off, so I didn't ever go near her again."

But maybe it was a gag; what do I know?

I like the FedEx pizza story a whole lot - I can SO imagine Brian doing that. Let's not forget, this is the guy who talked about opening a telescope shop (it was telescopes, wasn't it...?) just so he could go and get one at 3am if he wanted to... !

I always do my best to respect and love all opinions about SMiLE. I think it's fair to say that no-one really knows very much in the way of concrete facts about it, even people who were there at the time, because it never got beyond a work in progress. Even Brian's ideas about it were far from nailed down and kept changing. Given that this 'prone to change pending further inspiration' mindset was how he was at the time (just look at how many changes Good Vibrations went through in Summer 1966 when he got fresh ideas...!), and all the other confusion (drug-related, business-related, and otherwise) that was going on his head in 1966-7 anyway, we can't even necessarily trust contemporaneous statements HE made at the time, let alone people like David Anderle and Michael Vosse who were at least one stage removed from the creative process (and possibly also, uh, at least a little befogged, shall we say, when they were listening to tracks and Brian talking about his plans for them). To give an example of what I mean: certainly we hear Brian himself on tape saying 'Prayer' is going to be a little intro to the album, which leads to many SMiLE-O-Philes saying, 'well, at least that's ONE thing we know for sure about the sequencing... we have the big guy himself saying it on tape!'. BUT - that was in Autumn 1966. Brian might have changed his mind about Our Prayer the next day, the next week, and several times after that for all we know. After all, we do know he was certainly extensively recasting and restructuring Heroes and Villains (and very probably other tracks) in a fairly major way in the months following that Prayer session. Why assume the track listing and order was nailed down so early when we know that so many other bits of SMiLE were in serious flux after that date?

So anyway, I accept all of that uncertainty and these days I figure that there isn't really much hope of ever figuring out 'how the album was supposed to go' - and I put that phrase in scare quotes because, like Mark Linett, I reckon that if BW — the man himself — never quite got to the stage of knowing 'how the album was supposed to go', then how can anyone else? Which means that pretty much any opinion can be interesting and worthy of consideration, particularly if you put in the kind of hard musical effort that leetwall97 undoubtedly is throughout this thread.

However, I do think that there is some serious reaching in some of the posts here, and possibly the erroneous association of matters that didn't, or couldn't ever have, belonged together back in 1966-7. Anyone who's looked deeply into SMiLE over the years has done this at some point, myself absolutely included... we all have our pet ideas of how things might have gone based on bits of evidence here and there, conclusions that we've reached that we feel 'sure' about for a while.

By way of example of the 'reaching': I just can't get on board with the suggestion that the above-cited bits of Brian's new book 'prove' that there were lyrics, even unfinished ones, for 'Look' and 'CIFOTM', other than what we hear on the extant tapes. Sure, there may have been, but I don't see those passages from the new book as 'proving' that. Consider EXACTLY what's written:

"Sometimes, we started working on songs and they didn't get very far past instrumentals with no lyrics or at most fragments of lyrics. "Look" was like that. "Child Is Father Of The Man" was like that. It was based on something written by Karl Menninger..." etc etc

"Instrumentals with no lyrics" - well, that perfectly describes Look as it is on the session tapes. "...or at most fragments of lyrics". That perfectly describes CIFOTM as it is on the session tapes — no lyrics on the verses, and just the one phrase repeated in the chorus. So the following sentences, ""Look" was like that. "Child Is Father Of The Man" was like that." could just mean that what we heard on the SMiLE boxed set is all there *ever* was. Sure, we know that there were extra vocals of some kind at some point that were deleted and can be heard as 'headphone bleed' melodies, but perhaps that were just wordless backing vocals — it doesn't mean that there were necessarily more lyrics as such. There have been lots of rumours over the years that there are vintage CIFOTM verse lyrics (or that there were, but they've been forgotten or lost), but I don't know if any of those have any substance to them. And just because Brian and/or Van Dyke had ideas as to what the track was GOING to be about (Menninger's theories, mental health, maybe also the ideas in Wordsworth's poetry...) as per Brian's new book, that doesn't mean that Brian and Van Dyke ever actually got down to writing those verse lyrics to show and develop that theme back then. And if they didn't... that's utterly consistent with what Brian writes in that section too. Once again, consider exactly what's being said here:

"Sometimes, we started working on songs and they didn't get very far past instrumentals with no lyrics [that describes Look as we know it today beautifully...] or at most fragments of lyrics [and that describes CIFOTM as we know it today beautifully]. "Look" was like that. "Child Is Father Of The Man" was like that."

Of course, all of the above is just MY opinion, should be regarded as such and in no way definitive or authoritative (heaven forbid! what right do I have to make those kind of statements...?), and is in no way an attempt to do this thread down, either. For one thing, it's fascinating reading... I feel like I could discuss SMiLE endlessly, if I only had the time, which I really don't these days compared to, say, 1997, when I thought about little else and, yeah, I admit it, spent most of my spare time pondering its possible structure and form.

But I feel like it's not too outrageously out of line to challenge some of the assumptions every now and then. That's all I'm doing here. Hey, the scientific method relies on challenges, right? You have a theory... then some new evidence challenges it, so you adapt and improve your theories. Right, leetwall97?

Wow; this is a really good book IMO - I speed-read through most of it yesterday. Having read a lot of Brian interviews over the years, I think the book does a really good job of capturing his 'voice'. That's fine work by the Ben Greenman guy, and not to be underestimated as a difficult task — as we all know here, Brian is not the easiest of interviewees.

There are some nice insights into SMiLE - many more than I thought there would be. I thought Brian would be as vague about that as 'he' was in the Todd Gold book. I mean, there are no game-changing revelations that will shock anyone here who has closely followed the SMiLE saga for decades. But there is some good detail about the general ethos behind the project, what Brian thought he was trying to get across with it in 1966-7, and how he thinks it fell apart. What is there is more about his emotional approach to creating the music for that album, not the nuts and bolts of what track was planned to go where or how the sections were supposed to connect. I would have loved that kind of detail too, but what is there is on the subject is fascinating nonetheless, and I don't think I've ever read Brian giving that much detail about the project. It's kind of like the kind of stuff you might have hoped he would say in an interview about SMiLE one day, if he was on good form, the interviewer struck a chord with him, and they ended up getting into the details. As we all know, it's really hard to reach that level with Brian - I think I've only ever read maybe 10 interviews by him where he really opens up on a subject or on the detail of an album. I always hoped that one day that would happen in an interview about SMiLE - even in the promo interviews he did in 2004 and 2011 about the album, he stayed quite 'surface', I thought. I reckon the stuff in this book is as much detail as we'll ever get direct from Brian on the subject of he sees SMiLE, how he saw it back then in the 60s, in 2004 when he and Van Dyke finished it, and now.

Of course, the book isn't just about SMiLE (that's just what I was really interested to read about, I guess...); I'd say Brian is equally forthcoming about the emotions and creativity he was feeling in other fascinating periods of his songwriting history. In fact, that kind of sums up what I think about the book. Imagine a really long, amazing interview with Brian where he gets on well with the interviewer and is having a good Brian day, really firing on all cylinders. And that's what I found reading this to be like.

Oh, and he's funny as all hell at times, as well. But that has already been noted here!

PS Like I said, I speed-read it yesterday and I'm sure I will circle back and pick up more details on further readings, but a couple of points did stick in my mind. One really quite detailed SMiLE anecdote absolutely baffled me. Brian talks about using the Eltro speed/pitch-shifter on Smiley Smile at one point. There was a thread about this device on here years back - it was basically an analogue machine that allowed you to change the length of a recording without changing the pitch, which is easy as anything now with digital recording and processing technology, but was quite a technical challenge back in the all-analogue 60s. As I understand it, the machine was a bit of a clunky old beast and was used to create the weird effects on the Boys' voices on the 'What A Blow' section of 'She's Going Bald'. I was delighted to see the man himself confirm that they used an Eltro... but the way he talks about it, he makes it sound as though they needed to recreate the effect of it for SMiLE in 2004. He mentions that 'She's Going Bald' was known as 'He Gives Speeches' during the SMiLE period specifically, so it's pretty clear what he's talking about.

...except, of course, as we ALL know... neither 'He Gives Speeches', nor 'She's Going Bald', nor anything like EITHER composition, made it IN to SMiLE in 2004, either in the live stage performances, or in the recorded album. The only place He Gives Speeches appears at all is, as we would expect, on the SMiLE Sessions box set... and of course there it's the historical late summer 1966 recording, for which nothing needed to be recreated at all!

It's really confusing. There's so much good detail there... but it's about something (a 2004 version of HGS, I guess) that, as far as we know, didn't actually happen. Or if it did, it has never seen the light of day. Or made it into any of the live versions of SMiLE. In Summer 2004, Darian went as far as to say, specifically in response to a question about He Gives Speeches, that that was one of the sections Brian didn't want to include, and that it would forever remain one of the 'out-take' sections of the project that never made it into a finished version. But here's Brian talking about it in detail as if it's something we all know and have in our record collections...

All of which leaves me thinking... what the *hell* was Brian talking about there? (Not the first time I've wondered that, mind...!)

[...footsteps returning as Matt comes back from studying his box set]

OK, I didn't do too badly: looks like, in addition to the above, Brian played pianos on the sessions for Child Is Father Of The Man (which I'd forgotten). He was also on sundry bits and pieces of SMiLE that probably wouldn't have made the final album if it had been finished (but then again, who knows...?) such as DaDa (the original idea from December 1966, not the 'developed' arrangement recorded as I Love To Say Dada six months later), He Gives Speeches, and electric harpsichord on Cool Cool Water (but that's from June 1967, so he was probably more into Smiley Smile sessions by then, although that's another 'can of worms' situation I'm not getting into here either...!).

As far as I can see, BW played tack piano on a section of Good Vibrations that ended up being the choruses in the final version, but that's it for his instrumental contribution to GV. I think we can forgive him that, though, as it's fair to say he was *pretty* involved in the writing, production and mixing of the track... just a bit!

This is an interesting point, though - instrumentally speaking, he wasn't actually heavily 'on' a lot of the albums that are considered his finest work. Of course, he's all over those records in plenty of other very important ways, but it shows that he was happy not to dominate the playing when he was at the height of his game.

I have the box, but in order to provide a speedy reply off the top of my head, in the interests of courtesy and friendliness, I seem to recall that Brian plays piano on parts of H&V (the most obviously piano-driven sections, which may have been for part two of the song [sound of can of worms being creaked open and quickly slammed shut]), and the main SMiLE-era recording of Vega-Tables at least (where again, the piano is a significant part of the arrangement). I think he only played piano on the Inside Pop version (and the associated studio recording) of Surf's Up, but of course part of that studio recording ended up being used in the 'final' version, as that was all the Beach Boys had available to use in the early 1970s as backing for the second section (and the same is true of Alan Boyd and Mark Linett in 2011, for that matter). From memory, the prominent piano in the first section of the song is members of the Wrecking Crew, I think [EDITED LATER TO ADD: it's Al De Lory on that session, it seems].

I think most of the other piano and keyboard parts actually ON the album, as with Pet Sounds, were played by the session guys for the most part (with honourable exception of the organ bridge in Good Vibrations played by Dennis, as the OP has already noted). Of course, Brian would have been playing the piano a lot in the studio before the recording, to demo the parts to those guys and teach them what to play, but in terms of what was recorded and actually ended up on the album (or the sessions box, in the case of SMiLE), it's mostly the session guys, I think.

I'm off to have a look at my box now, to see whether the above, written from memory, actually stands up!

I hadn't heard that story about the title before - that is really great. The funny thing is that without knowing it *was* Brian, I always thought it sounded like a Brianism anyway...!
He comes out with these little gems occasionally... a bit like Ringo back in the day with 'A Hard Day's Night' and 'Tomorrow Never Knows'.

It just seemed like the kind of thing BW might say (and it seems he did!) loving that era of mono AM radio as he did and does... Remember that some of his greatest experiences were in cars (musical ones, I mean... calm down at the back there)... hearing the Beach Boys on the radio for the first time... hearing Be My Baby for the first time with Marillyn and having to stop the car because he thought it was so great... and, later (not such a pleasant experience) hearing Strawberry Fields with Michael Vosse and knowing SMiLE had 'missed the boat'.

Awesome, anyway, that this little Brian comment ended up being the name of the comeback single (and the whole album!).

I recall that in his 'Landyography' (page 86 in my edition), 'Brian' talks about having heard horrible noises in his *sleep* from late 1963. His description is that they were "Loud, terrifying screams... like goblins in a haunted house".

Of course, I know most of the book is a heap of made-up junk, but if I remember rightly, SOME of it did come from interviews with Brian... and this claim would be consistent with what was said in Love and Mercy, on which the Wilsons were consultants. Of course, that's far from proof, but it chimed with me when I heard that date in the film. I have a nagging feeling I've heard him use that date in other interviews, too, but can't place them right now.

Of course, hearing screams in your sleep is not quite the same thing as what most of us would, I think, take to be the meaning of 'hearing voices', which I would think requires you to be fully conscious in order for the experience to be truly as disturbing as it undoubtedly is for those that suffer it. If I heard screams in my sleep, it would definitely disturb me, but when I woke, I think I'd be so relieved ("Phew, it was only a dream!") that I'd soon forget about it. But suddenly hearing voices during the day that you realise no-one else could hear would seriously disturb me.

But who knows - maybe that is how it started for Brian and it progressed to voices talking coherent words and sentences to him during his waking state later on in the 60s?

Just thinking aloud... don't mind me...

Slightly off-topic, as this is an example of a REAL use of Beach Boys stuff in a soundtrack... but of a more obscure and inappropriate usage I couldn't conceive!

In the early 2000s UK comedy film Calendar Girls (about a load of middle-aged ladies in a chintzy English village who make a nude calendar featuring themselves to raise money for a good cause), a few bars of the Stereo instrumental version of Sloop John B could be heard at some triumphant, punch-the-air moment in the film. I nearly fell out of my seat.

So: wrinkly ladies remove kit for calendar, in Miss Marple-style English village, all hollyhocks, sundials and neatly manicured privet hedges... and you illustrate this in sound using the instrumental version of a song originally about a fishing trip in the Caribbean that doesn't go well, sung by a bunch of sliced-bread 1960s Californians, and played by a load of US West Coast jazz musicians. MMMM-mmmm. Great fit, right there!

I guess the director must have just really, really liked Pet Sounds...?

.... the Good Vibrations (Master Take with Partial Vocal) is probably the stand-out track on the set. There's even a hidden surprise at the end for the die-hard of the die-hards... 

So... I got my set on Friday, played the GV Partial Vocal track through, enjoyed that, let the disc play to the end, and thought 'ho hum, no extra content'. Just everything that was on the 1997 set seemed to still be there.

This morning, I caught up on posts here, and saw this. Thought "Oh! Perhaps I missed something after all!". Played the track again, but... I still can't hear anything extra.

I mean... the isolated vocals from the Here Today bridge, of Brian (?) chatting with a photographer about his flash, are there positioned right at the end of the disc, and so are the isolated vocals from the IJWMFTT chorus, so you can hear what those words are clearly... but they were on the 1997 set. I was thinking there was something new to 2016...?

Or did I STILL manage to miss something??

I really can't remember for sure, but I thought it had been pretty comprehensively researched, and the conclusion is that none of the surviving multitrack tapes have a Brian lead on them.

Now, of course, that doesn't mean that Brian didn't record one. He might have done, as a demo to show Glen how the song was supposed to go. But if he did, it would seem that it hasn't survived.

There is, of course, still a way in which the suggested 'Brian lead' might have survived (if it ever existed at all). If he recorded it to the multitrack tape, then did a mixdown from that tape, and that mixdown survived, that would preserve his lead even if his voice was subsequently erased from the multitrack. That, of course, is how we have some vocals preserved for some songs that aren't still on the source multitrack tapes today (see: Dennis's vocal on The Old Master Painter, those extra overdubs on the chorus of Child Is Father Of The Man that were only on one acetate and made it from there onto the SMiLE Sessions box set that no-one had ever heard before then... Mike's 'when skies are grey' vocals on the False Barnyard tag... etc etc).

But - and I can't stress this enough - that's only how such a lead might have survived, IF IT EVER EXISTED. I don't know of any evidence that such a lead existed, much less that it survived via a mixdown if it did.

Brian might have just recorded the backing track and backing vocals and then sung live at Glen in the studio before the session to show him how the melody was supposed to go. Still, I agree that it is odd that he did the whole backing track for Glen, went to the bother of recording the BVs, but didn't demo the lead for Glen as well...

I wouldn't be utterly amazed if it was one day revealed that there *was* a surviving acetate with a BW demo vocal, and that it had been securely in the hands of some mega-collector for decades, and that that was the source of all the rumours that there was once a BW lead on the track. There is, of course, also the seriously unattractive intermediate possibiilty — that Brian DID record a demo vocal to show Glen how to sing it, but it was never mixed down to anything, and then when Glen recorded his lead, he did so OVER Brian's lead on the tape, rendering it lost for ever. Or there might even be another possiblity — that there WAS an mixdown, an acetate or something, made before Glen wiped Brian (so to speak) but it was thrown away or has been otherwise lost since it was made. These are all possibilities, but there's no evidence that I know of that any of them are what actually happened.

On the other hand, people would so like there to be a record of 1964 Brian singing this very personal song, that it could just be wishful thinking that has become rumour that has become 'accepted fact'... without there actually being a shred of truth in any of it...!

I did smile at Yuka Honda's comments. "The six bar intro of “Don’t Talk (Put Your Head on My Shoulder)” is worth a thousand books. I consider it to be one of the greatest chord changes ever written."

Surely she (not he) merely means "the first six bars"! It's just oddly worded. And it is a fabulous sequence of chords...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yuka_Honda

Oops - that's totally my bad on Yuka Honda, assuming she was a he. I only just saw this, having not been back into this thread for a while. That was stupid of me, and I should have checked. Feel a bit embarrassed now...!

And yeah, I guess she just meant 'the start of the song' when she said 'intro'.

At least there's no debate about the quality of the 'Don't Talk...' chords. I think everyone here is probably agreed that it's one of Brian's most amazing works. It might even be my favourite song of his ever, in terms of being a groundbreaking, original-sounding composition that is also intensely beautiful and very skilled at conveying some really deep, complex emotions.

He and Tony *really* hit it out of the park with Don't Talk, IMHO.

The article is what it is... some of the choices of contributor (which I'm sure was down as much to who Pitchfork could get to contribute in time as it was the result of any great masterplan of selection) are odd, and not everyone is as much a fan of Brian, or of the album, as we are. But the comments seem heartfelt - particularly Sean Lennon's comments, which didn't bother me at all. In fact I thought they were rather sweet. Yes, he sees everything through the prism of his own life (in his particular case, as a musician, and of course also as the son of one of the most famous musicians of all time)... but don't we all do that?

I did smile at Yuka Honda's comments. "The six bar intro of “Don’t Talk (Put Your Head on My Shoulder)” is worth a thousand books. I consider it to be one of the greatest chord changes ever written."

Err... there IS no six-bar intro to that song. It goes straight into the verse!

I mean, I agree that the chord sequence is one of the best Brian ever wrote, and you COULD write a thousand books on it... but those changes aren't in the intro. Because there isn't one!

UNLESS: he means the vocal harmonies from 'Unreleased Backgrounds', which I've always thought were probably recorded with the intention of splicing them on the front on the track, as an intro. But as far as we know, Brian never ACTUALLY tried that out (perhaps, I speculate, because that would have made the start to album track 3 too much like the start of track 2?). So the track as released, in all its versions, has no intro at all!

Also: even 'Unreleased Backgrounds' (or whatever you call it...) is only five bars long...!!

I SEE your Chris Eccleston reference, John... and I salute you!  

I'm guessing the 2-CD versh will do what the old box did: instead of 'instrumentals', we'll get the basic track minus one overdub for Pet Sounds (the track) and Let's Go... or maybe a headphone-only mix revealing the ghost remnants of the erased vocal on the latter. Or perhaps the set will come with a free alto flute and viola, with an authentic Brian signature: "THIS is what it was, tha cloth-eared numpties! Now go and learn to play them! ...love and mercy, Brian"

Regarding the set... well, tragically (as I have ZERO interest in old 70s and 80s versions of Pet Sounds tracks - the studio originals simply cannot be improved upon, in my view), I'm going to have to spring for the big version, for the GV partial vocal thingy. And I know that's playing EXACTLY into what Capitol hoped for, but I cannot resist the pull of that track.

Plus, I never bought any of the hi-res DVD-Audio stuff, so I can scoop that and all the good stuff on there now by buying this as well. I actually only have two versions of Pet Sounds (1990 CD and 97 box), so the overkill isn't too bad for me.

Plus, we're not talking MiC levels of expense here. £54.99 actually seems pretty reasonable to me for what's in the big set...

...oh - I give up. I admit it. I am in eternal thrall to this album, a hopeless addict; there is no escape...  

It's so hard to talk about art and music and the creative impulse without sounding insufferably pretentious. But I was always fascinated by the idea that really great artists often can't do anything *but* create. They have to do it; they're literally compelled to create, to paint, to write, to make music, whatever it is they do. And when they're on form, and their heart is in what they're doing, these truly first-rate artists, they seem to achieve groundbreaking results at a speed the rest of us can only imagine.

Dennis Hopper, I think it was, said something like 'you're not an artist unless you would literally die if you weren't doing your art'. That sounds preposterous by itself - but the thing is, I can actually imagine Brian Wilson being like that in his most productive periods. You get that sense of desperation and obsession, almost, in the tale of him trying to get these evanescent song ideas out of his imagination and recorded before they disappeared. Running off a street into a brothel in Amsterdam just because they had a piano, and he had an idea he had to work out — and not, it seems, for any other, more prosaic reason. Running off with Al Jardine's idea and sketchy re-arrangement for re-recording 'The Wreck of the John B' and coming back in less than 24 hours not only with a really incredible, groundbreaking arrangement, but a fully recorded backing track. Nagging away, over months, at an idea that wasn't quite right, that was, in fact, so *wrong* to his way of thinking, that he was going to give it to another artist, *worrying* away at little pieces of it with different players and arrangements and studios and then editing, and mixing, re-editing, mixing again — until one day in Autumn 1966, there was Good Vibrations, in mono, finished — a great example of what Ian MacDonald, writing about some other lasting music created in the same year, called 'imperishable popular art of its time'. That's creativity working at full tilt, right there — an example of Brian Wilson moving, as David Anderle said, "like a tank through wheat", simultaneously unsure of exactly what to do, but also determined to get to his artistic goal, and moving so fast, and in directions so unexpected by anyone around him, that it seemed as though, for a while, no-one would ever catch him up. It explains the commercial and artistic left turn that is Pet Sounds and even what SMiLE might have been — as Mike and Capitol Records kept trying to tell him, they really weren't the most commercial ideas around, compared with what The Beach Boys had been doing — but they were what Brian felt he just had to do artistically at the time. And when he stopped feeling so certain about what he was creating and where he was going artistically... well, that's when it all started to fall apart.

I thought David Marks hit it absolutely square on when he said in an early 80s interview that the early albums were so successful because, as honest and naive as it sounded, Brian really believed in the stuff he was creating. His heart was really in it. There's something in that, that runs right through from the gauche but insanely catchy absurdity of Cuckoo Clock and Chug-A-Lug to The Lonely Sea, Catch A Wave, and In My Room, to Wouldn't It Be Nice, You Still Believe In Me, Caroline No, Our Prayer, Cabinessence, This Whole World, Surf's Up, and 'Til I Die. The irresistible urge, an obsession to create, coupled to belief in what he was creating. It's something indefinable that those songs have that is missing in his weaker material. Later, when he had lost that momentum, when it was less about creating for creation's sake, and more about just giving the Beach Boys another album with some tracks on it, because, well, their contract said they had to do that... the music often seems so... shrunken by comparison, so reduced.

I rarely encounter musicians or music that I feel has that unbridled, almost helplessly passionate quality about it, like the people who made it just had to get it out of themselves somehow, and were almost swept along themselves in the undertow of creating it. Tony Wilson once said, of one evening in Manchester in the late 70s when he sat and watched a battle of the bands competition, that he saw an endless procession of people that were only on stage because they wanted to be rich and famous, and then he saw one band that were there because they had NO CHOICE but to be there, creating — and they were the only ones he was interested in. Now, whether you like the band he signed on the basis of that evening or not, there's no denying that they sounded quite unlike anyone else at the time, and that they pushed music forward. I had that feeling from their music when I first listened to it, anyway. And then I had it again with Amy Winehouse's second album. The first one left me absolutely cold, but when I heard 'Rehab', I knew I wanted to hear more. Right away. And the rest of that album… well, you know the rest.

That kind of stuff seems to come along so very rarely. So often, especially today, new music is powerfully marketed to us, but I hardly ever hear that quality in it, the thing that makes your heart leap up, like the opening riff to Surfin USA, the handclaps in I Get Around, the cello and Tannerin in Good Vibrations, so that within seconds, you want to leap in the air and shout "What's this? WHAT IS THIS? I MUST HEAR MORE!!!"

Well, I had that experience today. I was introduced to a track by a 19-year-old Norwegian singer-songwriter called Aurora. If you're in the UK, you'll probably know something she did last year, which got a lot of exposure nationally here, but my goodness, that thing she did then — which showcased her to the nation as a very capable and pleasant-sounding singer, but didn't really tell you much more — just doesn't begin to represent what she's capable of. In so far as I was aware of her at all before, I was very indifferent — after all, there are a lot of people with nice voices around — but after hearing one of her own tracks, I did something I very rarely do. I found as much of her music as I could on-line and listened to it. She, and it, seem to me to have that artistic quality that Brian's best stuff does. It doesn't sound like the Beach Boys at all, really (well, there are interesting harmonies here and there… that's about it, though) but I get that same sense, as on Pet Sounds, of the artist being completely, quietly confident of what they're doing, however strange it might seem at first, and also of their being compelled to do it like this, to make this music, as though it's not actually their choice — and creating something that goes far beyond what everyone else is doing in the process. She even sounds a bit like Brian did when talking about music in the mid-60s, in the latter part of the beautifully filmed promotional video at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3AbrDWIwBO4. I think during that time, he had feelings about creating music in the studio that are very similar to the ones she expresses there.

Ah, who knows, perhaps it's just me. When I listened to the first couple of songs, I initially thought 'Mmm, yeah. Not bad. A bit like a rather better version of Lana Del Rey. A stronger voice, but a bit arty, breathy and weird'. And *then* it hit me full force. So perhaps others will disagree, or get stuck at the Lana Del Rey comparison. Or even think she's worse than that. And regarding marketing… well, there's no doubt that a lot of money is being spent moving Aurora around the planet so she can perform to people right now — in the last few months, she's played gigs in the States and all over Europe. And that beautifully filmed promotional video didn't just create itself on someone's iPhone without a lot of hard work and money being spent, that's for sure. So perhaps I'm fooling myself. But then I listen to the music again… and all of my concerns drop away. Did you ever, you know, put on Surfin' USA or Fun Fun Fun, or Prayer or H&V or Surf's Up (the track, not the album)… and just HAVE to play it again, as soon as it had finished, because it seemed so DAMN good? That's what I'm talking about, right there.

I don't work for Aurora, I don't have an agenda to push. I'm just a chap with an Internet connection, a computer keyboard, some headphones and some ears. But when I heard this music, it made me think of the best music I know, and I just had to write the above.

Oh, no. Just... no.

That man was a true gentleman, a connection to a kinder age now passed. And a seriously creative, musical fellow to boot. Even The Beatles, in my opinion, underrated him and what he did for them. Maybe Paul came to realise it, a bit, later on. Not sure John ever really did, though.

Funnily enough, I've been seriously obsessed with Mr Martin's soundtrack for Yellow Submarine the last couple of weeks, after years of it sitting on a shelf in my house almost unplayed. What a weird coincidence. (and the soundtrack is incredible stuff, by the way, dismissed by sniffy rock critics for years as contractually obligated junk that the Beatles shouldn't have allowed onto one of their albums — but it's *amazing*)

I will put on 'Love' today sometime, listen to his extraordinary arrangements and mixing work on I Am The Walrus and the arrangement for 'the other George's' slow version of While My Guitar... and feel very sad.

"The lights are going out, all over Europe... we shall not see them lit again in our lifetime."

Coke. LOTS of coke.



...OK, I'm kidding — actually they were towards the end of recording Surf's Up (the album)... but my first statement is probably still true. Especially in Brian and Carl's case, as nothing is listed in terms of sessions or gigs for that day. If I remember rightly, Brian was, er,  'going out a lot in the evening with Danny Hutton' at this time (and we all know what that meant)... and Feel Flows was recorded the next day. Back in the day, I seem to recall Jack Rieley, when he was still alive, reminiscing about all the bug powder dust he and Carl got through while writing the lyrics for that one. So like I say, a joke... that probably has a kernel of truth to it!!

Seeing as they are unofficial items not made by the band, I never understand why anyone would place any kind of substantial monetary value on a boot, at least once the era of the internet came around. Just my opinion. I'm sure all the tracks on these CDs can be found free online with a little detective work.

Well, yes - I've seen most of the contents of the SOTs on-line. But the quality of the on-line files is often sheee-ite compared with the SOT silver discs. 128kbps rips aren't much cop compared to the originals.

If you can refer to boots as 'originals'...!

The first SOT sets I bought - and they're AMAZING stuff. High-quality recordings of the master at work. After this, I had to have them all!

Plus, the Today sets are STILL the only place on disc where you can get, unedited, in stereo and in pretty much official release quality, the full backing track for In The Back Of My Mind...

It's all mind-blowing stuff, though. Prior to hearing these, I was pretty much only a Wilson fan from 1966 onwards. There were a few things from before that date that I liked, but I still had 61-65 down as the Beach Boys' cheesy, disposable 'fun in the sun' era. These sets, starting with the Today SOTs, made me realise the error of my ways...!