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Smiley Smile Stuff / General On Topic Discussions / Re: Mike Love - Unleash the Love - Due November 17 - w/ 2nd Disc of BB Remakes
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on: October 06, 2017, 01:57:58 PM
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What store is actually going to carry this? I don't see physical copies of this existing anywhere beyond his website and Amazon.
Well, I have yet to se an actual physical copy of Sunshine Tomorrow in any record store or department yet, and I've been in quite a few. Surprisingly so, I might add.... As for the re-records, well Brian's "Smile" (more like a faux-Smile to me) album was basically a re-record job. No I don't care much for those, regardless of which BB does it. But the first disk of this set appears to be a rather useful compendium of many unofficially released tracks in one spot. Having said that, I doubt I buy it. Just too much old stuff, previously released or not....
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Smiley Smile Stuff / General On Topic Discussions / Re: Let's compile a 12 track \
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on: September 23, 2017, 12:56:37 PM
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Just off the top of my head, but:
Be True to Your School (album version) Cherry, Cherry Coupe Long Tall Texan Little Deuce Coupe/I Get Around (Party album versions) This Car of Mine Ballad of Ol' Betsey Pom Pom Playgirl Amusement Parks USA Mama Says You're Welcome Transcendental Meditation That Same Song
"Bonus" tracks: Love is A Woman, Passing Friend, California Calling, Let's Put Our Hearts Together, Winds of Change, Belles of Paris, Kona Coast of Hawaii (or whatever it was called), Shortnin' Bread, Sumahama, and too many others to mention. Yeah they did a lot of crappy stuff by volume, but not so much by percentage!
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Smiley Smile Stuff / General On Topic Discussions / Re: The Honeys - Tonight You Belong to Me (1969)
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on: September 19, 2017, 04:39:20 PM
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There was talk about The Honeys album being re-released with extra track including Snowflakes some years ago but the project seems to have fallen by the wayside.
Anyone know what happened to that?
Don't know for sure, but it is quite possible Melinda put the big foot down....regardless, would love to see this released as well as a new release of Spring album...two-fer would be super-hot!
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Smiley Smile Stuff / General On Topic Discussions / Re: \
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on: September 14, 2017, 03:37:14 PM
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I agree with Marcella too. I wonder if there is a Four Seasons board somewhere where a few die hards are hoping to still increase the Seasons' popularity.
Folks, we (fans of the BBs) in general are getting to be a pretty darned old demographic. We've had our say, and shouldn't be re-fighting the battle of the sixties bands ad nauseam. Few care, time moves on, etc. I'm pretty sure not many younger folks are listening to the BBs in any great numbers....
Bing Crosby was massively popular in his time, few think of him or his music now. It is not unlikely a similar fate will befall the BBs music. Does it really matter anyway?
Like a great economist once said, "in the long run, we are all dead". So eat drink and be merry and listen to whatever cult band turns you on....
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Smiley Smile Stuff / General On Topic Discussions / Re: Rolling Stone: The Salvation of Brian Wilson
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on: September 06, 2017, 11:38:49 AM
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Finally got around to reading this....it was embarrassing. Brian really does not have anything to say. The excessive cursing made me wonder just how good his mental state really is at this point. Brian used to say there was no such thing as bad publicity, but after reading this, yeah, I would say there is.
I don't know why I even bother to read these articles anymore, it is always the same damned thing, "I'm depressed, I believe in spiritual love, hope Pet Sounds helped somebody out, wanna do a rock and roll album". It was okay the first hundred times, but these articles really do seem like Groundhog's Day. Didn't that Fine guy just do something really similar like a couple of years ago? Heck, I'd rather hear what Mark Lindsey is up to nowadays, at least I have not read the same article about him over and over and over....
Really, unless he has something new and interesting to say, he really just ought to shun these types of situations, it's sending his mystique or what is left of it straight into the crapper....
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Smiley Smile Stuff / General On Topic Discussions / Re: \
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on: September 06, 2017, 11:30:27 AM
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Sweet! Sounds great! BW: "I'm getting older but I don't give a g*ddamn. I can still sing my ass off. I'm only 74. Which is a f***ed age, but I don't mind it." He can hardly sing his ass off. Even the article noted he was in poor voice in concert. His days of singing well are past him. And what is with all the cussing, he sounds like a Tourette's sufferer....
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Smiley Smile Stuff / General On Topic Discussions / Re: When did Smile become legendary? Was it a marketing ploy for the Surf's Up LP?
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on: September 03, 2017, 02:18:46 PM
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Oh, I also want to say that I think the record market was mostly single oriented up until the release of Pepper's and even for a good period after that, the LP was not totally dominant yet. I don't think Williams Crawdaddy articles and the Bernstein special had that much significance to the general record buying public at that point in time, if Add Some was that far ahead of the curve, then he/she is truly to be congratulated, but I still don't think the non-release of Smile had that much to do with their demise, I don't even think they were yet regarded as that big of an album group in the public mind, I don't remember anyone in junior high or high school anticipating an upcoming BBs album release, in my experience at least, you just walked into a store and these records just showed up, and you bought them or you didn't. I kind of think it was just their time to fade, they got older, the demographic had changed and whereas southern California and surf culture was still pretty popular nationally, that was starting to fade out also around "66, you stopped hearing so much about it and the Frankie and Annette moves and Jan and Dean had died out, etc. There was not much of a rock press per se, at least in my neck of the woods and I suspect the Midwest in general and perhaps large swaths of the country. NYC, Boston and LA and SF I am sure heard much more of the inside record dope than we did though, but the teen demographic really wasn't that focused on insider music news IMHO....I really don't even remember kids talking that much about the next Beatles album, when would it come out, etc, it was just assumed another one would at some point in time and when it did everyone would buy it.
The hits led the charge for most groups at that point in time. Beach Boys albums sold in droves because they were hit packed. However when the hits dried up, so did their popularity and let's not kid ourselves....Smile was never going to be that popular. It was too outré to have made it in a big way. I also don't think Brian could have stylistically followed it up with anything that would have been very commercial or popular. I think his general style of music had become passé, the Spector model using the group and the studio.
He could have only done what he wound up doing....refining the group"s sound, but not really coming up with anything ground-breaking. I think his wad was basically shot with the Smile recordings, though he did some good stuff after that also. But I just don't think Smile or that other good stuff was ever destined to be as popular as their pre-Pet Sounds material. Their time had simply pretty much passed, at least in commercial terms. And that's ok, I enjoyed being the only BBs fan in town or in the dorm, even in 1972 during the supposed comeback....and concert tickets were easy to get and cheap and they came around all the time. Early seventies were a great time to be a fan.
A fave memory was standing beside Al Jardine in the Allen Fieldhouse in Lawrence KS as he gave a mini-lecture to another person about the qualities of various Birkenstock sandals and Mike Love inviting the concert audience to a particular street address after the show where a bunch of meditators were meeting. Never made the latter, but the group did seem awfully accessible back then....an accessible "super-group", how about that?
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Smiley Smile Stuff / General On Topic Discussions / Re: When did Smile become legendary? Was it a marketing ploy for the Surf's Up LP?
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on: September 03, 2017, 01:43:36 PM
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I didn't really become that aware of Smile until the RS articles in I believe 1971 written by Tom Nolan. I have not lived on the coasts so maybe it was written more about it there, but despite being a pretty big fan most of my life, I had never heard of Smile, its cancellation, etc by then. So when Smiley Smile came out I had no theoretical Smile to hold it up against. Despite that, it did seem like a very weird record at the time of its release and I didn't like it very much. I suspect that is the general reaction of most in its time.
I now like it just fine, but still hold that it was very uncommercial and probably just not a good career move to have made at that particular point in time. One wonders why they didn't just lay Lei'd on the record company at the time and said put it out or shut up, we simply don't have the next one ready yet. Perhaps that would have bought extra time until WH or Smile could have been properly recorded.
But in the end, it was probably just a case of both Bri and the group being worn out by it all and just deciding to get that "Smile" monkey off their backs...
I listened to a lot of top forty in the late sixties and never once heard any jock speak derisively of any post-Pet Sounds singles because of the Smile "debacle". In fact, I never heard the group really denigrated at all until like around 1969 and that was by members of the general public, not in the media. I do remember mystifyingly occasionally seeing short articles in the local paper stating stuff like "Beach Boys third most popular group in the UK" per some poll, for like two or three years running there in the late sixties....it did strike me as weird how they could be so apparently popular over there while the same music over here was not exactly shifting units, except perhaps in the cut-out racks...
Speaking of cut-out racks, I remember one time being in Stix Baer and Fuller department store in St. Louis in 1983 and they had a separate record section that contained about sixty copies of Surf's Up, the vinyl album, for about $2.99 apiece. By a separate record section I am not talking about the record department, it was like set up on its own in the middle of the men's clothing department or something (the memory is not what it once was, ha!). This was rather mind blowing and made me wonder, did they really over-estimate its popularity to such an extent that they had a warehouse full of 'em somewhere even at that late date? I've often wished I had bought a couple and kept them shrink-wrapped!
But yeah, I definitely think Smile was used by the group and the media to attempt to resurrect the group's career mainly around the time of the pending Surf's Up release.
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Smiley Smile Stuff / General On Topic Discussions / Re: Can't Wait Too Long on Sunshine Tomorrow
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on: September 02, 2017, 01:01:15 PM
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Read an old interview w/Pete Townsend where he was asked about Good Vibrations and the way it was put together, presumable the "modular thing". This was in the time of GV's release, and he stated that is how he was working and seemed really rather non-plussed about it as a production, which somewhat surprised me as he later came across as a pretty big BBs fan per other quotes of his I have read...
As far as Can't Wait Too Long, I actually can wait quite a while to listen to it as I don't think it has aged that well and really is not that interesting musically as far as I am concerned. It was too long and repetitious for an album track and couldn't have been a single because it didn't go anywhere or have any real hooks. It does tend to dazzle a bit upon early listens, but then you realize there is just not that much going on over time....I now rank it an interesting curio but quite understand its long "officially" unreleased status....Ditto Ol' Man River, another fun curiosity, but just not in the pocket and sounds very demo-ish to me as released....Also ditto We're Together Again too, these things are exactly what they should be, bonus tracks!
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Smiley Smile Stuff / General On Topic Discussions / Re: Who Arranged 'Be With Me'?
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on: September 02, 2017, 12:50:42 PM
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Whatever Carl's merits as a rhythm player, it still just seems a bit odd to me that he never did develop that much as a lead guitarist beyond the surf/C. Berry style. I don't say that as a knock, it is just kind of odd, I think. To be playing the types of leads he did basically when he was just a child, one would think he would have developed further in that regard....Still think it may have hurt their popularity in the late sixties, early seventies that he could not play more contemporary type leads, especially in concert...I think the retro sounding solos may have helped to paint the band into their oldies corner....
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