Waiting...

I just heard "Beach Burlesque" on the internet. It's an outtake from MIU, 1977. Who does the lead vocal?

Link? And I’ll tell you.

So....  there are other SI tracks in the vault as yet unheard?

Yes, lots.

Well, looking forward to hearing these. Thanks WillJC.   Me thinks Alexandra Morgan needs her cupboards search immediately!?

So....  there are other SI tracks in the vault as yet unheard?

So, the sequence was (apparently):

- original version of Water Builds Up (WBU) (pre-1987)

- parts of WBU morph into Let's Go to Heaven ... (1987)

- WBU is brought back (with modifications) for the SI sessions (1990)

I should also note that a couple of other SI era tunes were released in revised form on Gettin' In Over My Head:

- "Save the Day" became "Fairy Tale"

- "Let's Stick Together" became "The Waltz"

I rather enjoy "Fairy Tale" and "The Waltz", which may place me in the minority of BW fans(?).

In my opinion, another unreleased BW song ("Turning Point') would have been a candidate for "sharpening" (and release) somewhere along the way.  Did that song originate during the Paley Sessions (post - SI)?

I welcome any and all fact checks by the Board readers.  

Turning Point/So Long dates from the Usher sessions, with a nice ‘clipped’ vocal from Brian.. You can also catch a backing track WITH background vocals on the demos section on BW.com..

.?

Love “I wanna be around” so much. Great work here. I think eventually Smile’s legacy will be just as it began: incomplete. Due to the ability to continue tinkering with it so much. I know for a fact there is still more Smile stuff in the vault. Will we get it? Don’t know.

I’m hoping for some Dennis AI to be applied to You’re so Good to Me (a song he originally was going to sing). Or I just wasn’t made for these times (a song he may have had a pass at and could still be present vocally). But most importantly: a day in the life of a tree. The first two would require a different Dennis vocal than Tree, however.

You know for a fact there is more SMiLE stuff in the vault.... how do you know... and how much !...?

 
And the full album:

https://youtu.be/9sFsIlj0RJw

OMG !  No Pier Pressure...  is a classic after all. 

and when he's done anything really good since, I've been suspicious about his real level of involvement.

Couldn't that be said for BW88 gems and sweet insanity too? I get that suspicion...but a song like 'Summer's Gone' is so quintessentially brian (and so fantastic) I think it merits consideration as an all-time great beach boys song.

I'm sure this has all been thrashed out here many times before, but I gather it's understood that Brian's credit on Meet Me In My Dreams is cosmetic, and that Titelman and/or Waronker had a lot to do with the way Rio Grande was pieced together. In most cases from BW88 though, there are demos that make it pretty clear to me that these are essentially Brian's songs, and that the producers' input was just what producers normally do. Not only does the Sweet Insanity material feel authentically Brian to me, it doesn't seem he had anyone particularly talented there to cover him at that point, thanks to Landy. I hope Midnight's Another Day and the last three songs on TWGMTR are mostly Brian ...

I’d say ... no chance to the tracks on TWGMTR.   He has not written like that...  really... ever.   

Is his head upside down?.

Also, stating the obvious, but I think the pandemic/shutdown led to/hastened/forced a fair amount of professionals in some fields to make bigger changes that might have been in the offing at some point down the road.

Some people learned they really wanted to be at home more, and for those that have the luxury of optioning to do just that, I could envision in the early days of 2020/2021 as folks like Totten and Cowsill geared back up to go out on the road, it was a point in time to being winding all of that down.

Had Mike held off longer on going back out on the road, as opposed to being of the first touring acts to go *back out* in 2020 doing isolation pod shows and "drive-in" shows, you might have seen more personnel changes occur during that time.

So... Mike saw the Convid ?

Where is song for children and on a holiday?  Did I miss something?

During a BeachBoys Talk interview, Alan Boyd mentioned there's something that was found that would "blow people's minds". It's from Chuck Britz's collection. Whatever it is, I'd hope they are pushing for that to be released some time in the not too distant future.

Maybe it's something Smile-related, in which case they could release it with stereo mixes of Smile.

The completed Heroes and Villains Part 1 and Part 2 single, which Chuck remembers as being finished and mixed?

Probably just a concert recording that has not been documented.  BUT I hope I’m wrong!

The basic narrative that Brian was cajoled into returning to a modular composing format, and collaborated in many different details with Andy Paley, acceding to many of his ideas and creations, does suggest that the reinforcing presence of a creative partner in the studio (in this case, two of them) is one of the reasons why "Rio Grande" made it onto BW '88 while "Can't Wait Too Long" is still...waiting.

I wouldn't say Can't Wait Too Long is comparable to Rio Grande. That was a simple, commercial song that Brian continually restructured as he worked on it (just presented very confusingly on official releases), while Rio Grande is a conscious attempt to create a suite of unrelated miniature song fragments, something Brian had never really done before. It's more akin to the montage nature of the way 1970 Cool Cool Water was put together, which was Waronker's main point of reference.

And many thanks for the tremendous breakdown of the consituent parts in "Rio Grande," Will. Do we have a session chronology for BW '88--which songs were done when and where?

The broad strokes, few specifics. The AFM contracts only cover select sessions (see AGD's site) and the rest of the current timeline is pulled from rough mixes or anecdotes.

From the spring to early June '87, Brian and Andy worked on There's So Many, Doin' Time on Planet Earth, Night Time, Love and Mercy, another version of The Spirit of Rock and Roll, Saturday Morning in the City, Saturday Evening in the City, I Feel This Love, and early versions of Baby Let Your Hair Grow Long and Let's Do It Again. That was nearing a complete album - and at that point, at Landy's insistence, there were female backing vocalists on every song. It was... odd.

Russ Titelman entered the project when the sessions moved to New York in June, which is also when the Stack-O-Brian approach to backing vocals started... weirdly late into all of his solo career launch attempts. Those sessions introduced One for the Boys, Terri She Needs Me, Walkin' the Line, Little Children, new versions of Let's Do It Again and Baby Let Your Hair Grow Long, and an early version of Melt Away.

Post-New York is when Goodnight Irene, Rio Grande, Heavenly Lover, Carl and Gina, final Melt Away, and Let It Shine were done. The final song selection was whittled down from there and Hotter was a late addition in '88, followed by Meet Me in My Dreams Tonight, which usurped Let's Do It Again on the album assembly at the last minute.

Somewhere in all of that there were versions of Water Builds Up, Christmas Time, a Shortenin' Bread track, apparently Must Be a Miracle, Christine/Living Doll, and of course He Couldn't Get His Poor Old Body to Move. Probably more! A lot of music was amassed over the course of that project.

Great info, thank you. A lot new to me. ....  how’d you know all this ? Interesting.

Those who have been critical of Brian’s solo singing should try singing this… it “sounds” easy but it’s deceptively simple. It’s not the pitch, it’s the phrasing required. As pitchy as latter day Brian is, if you sing certain lines pitch perfect it sounds weird (“frosty the snowman has melted awayyyy”  being a perfect example).

Which leads to something interesting I realized…Brian’s solo songs are generally MUCH harder to sing than Beach Boys songs. Your Imagination is mostly easy, but the “cause you KNOW it’s just “  part, you have to kind of push the “know” just right…. Again , it’s not the pitch , it’s the *way* you have the kind of force it cause otherwise it sounds flat even if it’s directly on the pitch. I always thought the “shouty” vocal delivery was poor technique, and it was…but he wrote  his parts specifically for the way he sang at that time.

This discussion should be its own thread so I’ll make one a bit later on, but it kind of makes it a bit more clear as to how “involved” Brian is solo. If it sounds like the lead melody would be more suited to his younger self, then Brian’s creative contributions likely are elsewhere. It’s why when people thought Brian wrote the tag on solo Sunshine, I couldn’t agree, as the rest of the song has that chill yet somewhat gruff vibe that would’ve sounded like sh*t had he sang it in the 60s. Would’ve sounded great timbre wise in the 70s but phrasing wise he couldn’t have pulled off. The tag, however, sounds like a pastiche of 60s Brian, if that makes sense

‘tag, however, sounds like a pastiche of 60s Brian, if that makes sense’

Much like some TWGMTR tracks....

According to one session musician on Imagination, he never saw Brian at any of the sessions he played on. Apparently Brian was  ‘ unwell ‘. 

Do You Like Worms? - instrumental track needed to be assembled, lead vocal needed to be recorded. This one is a tragedy, in my view, because the Beach Boys could have done this at any point up to the 1980s and given us a track as finished-sounding as Cabin Essence or Surf's Up, two other songs left in fragments and missing vocals in 1967.

Honestly it kinda broke my heart when that small snippet of the original melody for DYLW was unsurfaced when the Smile Sessions came out. It is so different from the BWPS version (and so much better)...it really is a tragedy that the lead vocal was never recorded. I'm so glad that the melody was brought to light, but it also shows us a glimpse of what could have been.

Yep,  tragedy that the fast descending melody that follows the bass line was not discovered before 2004. Also surprised no fan mixer has used it on Worms yet ?!

I mean, yes and no. I strongly agree that the album was close enough to finished that it’s quite possible to *imagine* what a finished album might have sounded like. I also believe that the Brian was absolutely capable of finishing Smile, and that the reason Smile wasn’t finished was because Brian stopped working on it in a way that made sense or matched with how he had always worked up until that point, and began obsessively rerecording Heroes and Villains instead of finishing the other tracks. That said, there was absolutely still a lot of work to be done.

Re: sequence. The Look Listen Vibrate Smile track sequence represents the general fan-consensus from the 1990s, more or less (and probably helped create it!). There is a kind of intuitive logic to how it fits together, which is why, I think, it has provided the rough template for so many fan mixes up to the present day. However—and I would love to be proven wrong on this—I don’t believe I have ever seen any evidence whatsoever that Brian had *decided* on a sequence in 1966 or 67, let alone that we have any way of knowing what it might have been. The only sequence-related evidence I know of is that Our Prayer would have gone first and been unlisted. Everything else is conjecture. Does it make sense for Heroes to go first, Surf’s Up to go last, the “life” songs to go on the A side and the “element” songs to go on the B side? Sure. Do we have evidence for any of those ideas? I’d love to see it if we do.

Re: track list. This is a contentious topic as well. Personally, I believe that Brian was still enough in command of the process in late ’66 and early ’67 that he must have approved the track list given to Capital Records, that he was aware it was being printed on jackets, and that he planned to use it. I also believe that Smile would have consisted of 12 discretely-banded songs with fades (there are just too many fades recorded for it to be otherwise!), although I suspect some of those fades would not have been faded, making them functionally “link tracks”.

So what was left to do when Smile was abandoned, in my view? The vast majority of songs were in literal pieces. They needed to be "assembled" for lack of a better word, from the various session tapes, mixed down to a finished backing track, and have any missing vocals recorded. For most of these songs, Brian could probably have done this in a session or two, had he put his mind to it. But Surf's Up, the Elements, and I'm in Great Shape still needed much more extensive recording, and Child is the Father of the Man needed lyrics.

Track by track:

Do You Like Worms? - instrumental track needed to be assembled, lead vocal needed to be recorded. This one is a tragedy, in my view, because the Beach Boys could have done this at any point up to the 1980s and given us a track as finished-sounding as Cabin Essence or Surf's Up, two other songs left in fragments and missing vocals in 1967.

Wind Chimes - needed to be assembled, very close.

Heroes and Villains - needed to be assembled, also close, although the question of what to include in it seems to have tortured Brian.

Surf’s Up - Second Movement and Third Movement tracks needed to be arranged and recorded, backing vocals needed to be recorded, lead vocal needed to be recorded. It is very important to remember that the 70s version simply does not represent what Brian would have done with this track in 1967. It is unquestionable that parts 2 and 3 would have gotten backing tracks as sophisticated and beautiful as part 1. What we got instead was a sweetened piano demo. Another heartbreaking loss, in my view.

Good Vibrations - finished

Cabin Essence - backing track needed to be assembled, lead vocal needed to be recorded. This was done in '68, but when the project was abandoned this one was left in a similar state to Do You Like Worms.

Wonderful - track needed to be assembled. Unclear (to me, anyway) what the intention was for the fade, though Brian seems to have planned one.

I’m in Great Shape - track needed to be assembled, possibly additional instrumental sessions needed, vocals needed to be recorded. Possible that Brian didn’t actually know what all the pieces were going to be for this one.

Child is Father of the Man - we have a finished backing track for this, but the lead vocal not only needed to be recorded but Van Dyke doesn’t seem to have gotten around to writing the lyrics. The surviving track makes clear enough, in my view, that this was intended to be a proper song with verses.

The Elements - I believe the evidence is incontrovertible that this would have consisted of four short instrumental (or wordless vocal) pieces, one for each element. Fire needed backing vocals. Earth and Air were yet to be recorded. Status of “water” unclear. This one still needed a lot of work.

Vega-Tables - needed to be assembled, but very close.

the Old Master Painter - needed to be assembled. If Brian had used a version of Heroes and Villains (like the Cantina mix) that used the Old Master Painter fade, than it’s a little unclear what the status of this track would have been, but barring that, it was basically finished.

Excellent summary.  For Wonderful, besides the tag it seems clear Brian intended Carl to sing it.  It seems Brian rejected his original attempt that we now all know and love, recorded two new versions of it - the awful Rock with me Henry version, and then a new track with some beautiful backing vocals  in April at the Vegetables sessions, left unfinished.  If he had completed Smile would he have completed the April version, recorded a new version, or reverted back to the August/October Brian lead vocal take?  

I'm in Great Shape - I'm convinced Barnyard would have been part of the song (essentially making this the "Barnyard suite") but as you say what else he would have included, or if other sections were to be recorded (Barnyard Billy?) is unclear.

‘Barnyard Billy loved his chicken’.   Now that’s taken me back to 96, I’d forgotten about that.  Thanks

 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=y12Hd8xtxjI&feature=share&fbclid=IwAR2FsG8sDFnD5EhTWqToKas4kcz1fZp_1C785yYWNJy23FK1lTSRmI7bPx4

Looks as if these will finally soon see release.

Lakeside ... memories... BBS convention those that attended will know.   RIP. Rob.. Proper nice bloke.  Thoughts go to /with family and of course not forgetting Sean Mc.  Proper sad ..     M.S.

I think of this song every time I brush my thinning hair…

Nooooooo. Do not brush it !

Credit where credit is due... Stamos is a mensch.

probably subconscious irritation that Stamos is one of the luckiest* Beach Boys fans to ever live and we wish it were us in his shoes. I'm not saying we'd all love to rock a mullet and be uncle Jesse, but how cool that this guy has been able to rock out on stage with The Beach Boys and be in their circle?

Yes, I think there's definitely something to that theory... I mean, think back to the famous 1990 hotel tape where Stamos is right there in the middle of it as Brian-freakin-Wilson himself and company are jamming in a hotel room.   Heck, at various points, Brian is assigning him parts to sing and saying things like "Stamos, you need a little more bass."  
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QMQBeKTFBO0

As a fan, how jaw dropping would it have been to have been him in just that one moment?

I wish Stamos would share his 2nd generation copy VHS tape that he has in his possession....

Finally, after 2 months .... a reply.  Lol

Any specific tracks from LA (Light Album) that we can pinpoint to being cut at Shangri-La?

Backing vocals on "Goin' South", plus an unreleased backing track for the outtake "I'm Beggin' You Please".
EDIT: I should have said lead vocal on "Goin' South", too.

Backing track to “I B Y P”?  Anyone heard this, any Brian’s lead...? Love the verse..