20/20 through Holland

[Banana]

I've been getting pounded at work today and the Boys have kept me company.  I've listened to 20/20, Sunflower and Surf's Up and currently I'm into So Tough.  I'll get through Holland before I'm done.  Man, what a solid run of recordings.  I know they've been mostly ignored by the general public and even many music fans...but these recordings represent a vital band...hitting on all cylinders.  Yes...I could get nit picky and pull out a few clunkers...but by and large these are such great recordings.  I know this has been said probably countless times before on this board...but it's worth saying again!!!

[Wah Wah Wah Ooooo]

I agree this is a great run of albums. It's probably my favorite multi-album stretch from any musician(s) ever.  When I get in a Beach Boys listening mode (which often lasts for months on end), I have three phases: 1968-1973 Beach Boys, 1965-1967 Beach Boys, Everything Else.

[Jukka]

I'd stretch that to begin with Smiley Smile and go from there to Holland. My favourite period in their history. In my opinion, their fall from fame happened at the same time their music really got interesting!

[Mike's Beard]

I've been getting pounded at work today and the Boys have kept me company.  I've listened to 20/20, Sunflower and Surf's Up and currently I'm into So Tough.  I'll get through Holland before I'm done.  Man, what a solid run of recordings.  I know they've been mostly ignored by the general public and even many music fans...but these recordings represent a vital band...hitting on all cylinders.  Yes...I could get nit picky and pull out a few clunkers...but by and large these are such great recordings.  I know this has been said probably countless times before on this board...but it's worth saying again!!!

I'm not sure if it applies in other countries but in England the term pounded has several meanings. Makes me wonder what you do for a living.

[gxios]

The term "pounded" has a few meanings in the States as well.

[Aegir]

omg guys call the homonym gestapo

[Theydon Bois]

Smell My Beard.

Dear Mike's Beard,

I have always taken delight at this signature.  The only way in which it could be improved would be to precede it with: "Can I say this?"

Best regards,
Theydon Bois

PS I love all of these albums too.  HTH.

[Banana]

The term "pounded" has a few meanings in the States as well.

True!  In this case, however...it means getting hit over and over again with jobs I don't have time to finish!  I work in advertising.  That said...the day is ALMOST over...and I've got "Love You" blasting over the speakers right now...so things are shaping up for the better!!!

[EgoHanger1966]

If you listen to Love You while working, those advertisments are gonna come up mighty funky.

[SamMcK]

FYI, I love The Beach Boys 1968-1973 period and listen to it in equal measure with the 1964-1967 recordings. Look at these songs I tells ya!

(Post-SMiLE To 1973)

Wild Honey
Aren't You Glad   
Darlin'
Let The Wind Blow
Friends   
Little Bird   
Do It Again
Time To Get Alone
I Can Hear Music
Break Away
Add Some Music To Your Day
Cotton Fields (The Cotton Song)
This Whole World   
All I Wanna Do
Forever   
Cool, Cool Water
Long Promised Road   
Disney Girls (1957)
Feel Flows   
'Til I Die      
Marcella   
All This Is That   
Sail On, Sailor   
California Saga/California   

You could make a great 24 track CD there!

[Phoenix]

I concur.  Next to Today through Smile, my next favorite period is 20/20 through In Concert.  It is indeed, a fantastic run of albums!  And when you think about it, that run continued with Endless Summer and Spirit Of America.  When you add in the fact that Pet Sounds was re-released with CATP in the states and many of those albums included key tracks from Smile, a person of my tastes would have only needed "Good Vibrations" and "Heroes And Villains" to cover "everything" AND got the added bonus of the main surf and car songs too!   All that makes it even worse that they followed that run with 15 Big Ones.  

How ironic that Brian's return was put a (temporary) halt to all the creativity that preceded it?

[Dave in KC]

This period, 20 through Concert, proves alot. When 20/20 came out, they were at the low point of their careers thus far. Obviously they went to work very hard to make that period so wonderful. Only the best can pull themselves out of such a hole to rise to the top again. Those live concerts, 1971 through 1973, were truly awesome. 

[The Shift]

The 73!live double album was the recorded culmination of the band's maturity as a rock act. I hope we gets a big bite of live recordings from that era in the box. Imagine Mess of Help live, eh? Wouldn't THAT be nice?

[Sheriff John Stone]

FYI, I love The Beach Boys 1968-1973 period and listen to it in equal measure with the 1964-1967 recordings. Look at these songs I tells ya!

(Post-SMiLE To 1973)

Wild Honey
Aren't You Glad   
Darlin'
Let The Wind Blow
Friends   
Little Bird   
Do It Again
Time To Get Alone
I Can Hear Music
Break Away
Add Some Music To Your Day
Cotton Fields (The Cotton Song)
This Whole World   
All I Wanna Do
Forever   
Cool, Cool Water
Long Promised Road   
Disney Girls (1957)
Feel Flows   
'Til I Die      
Marcella   
All This Is That   
Sail On, Sailor   
California Saga/California   

You could make a great 24 track CD there!

It does help when you can look at the songs as a group, as a body of work, and, yes, it makes a great comp. Very fulfilling.

It's amazing at how ironic the Beach Boys' career has been. Again, viewing those songs would make you think that the band was prospering, when in fact, as those songs were being produced, the concert attendance was dwindling, the albums were mostly tanking, actually the albums were being rejected by their record company, then the group was dropped by their record company, the group was near bankruptcy, they felt the need to add new members, couldn't even sniff a Top Ten record, and Brian was backsliding into oblivion.

Then more of the oldies started to be requested in concert and the rest is history. How ironic...

[Theydon Bois]

The 73!live double album was the recorded culmination of the band's maturity as a rock act. I hope we gets a big bite of live recordings from that era in the box. Imagine Mess of Help live, eh? Wouldn't THAT be nice?

I'm totally with you on this.  In Concert is without doubt my most well-played Beach Boys album and I'd go quite silly over a whole hunk of contemporaneous concert recordings.

[SMiLE-addict]

OK, at the risk of getting massively flamed ...

I've now listened to Sunflower 3 times, Holland twice, Surf's Up once, and the Wild Honey through 20/20 sequence at least 3 times.

20/20 is an OK album, the best of the bunch IMO. Wild Honey and Friends are "meh." But I just don't get the appeal of Sunflower, Surf's Up and Holland. Most of the songs on those albums are so ... ordinary ... almost like some Broadway musical's imitation of period music. There's a few OK songs on them, but for most of them, if I could show somebody what generic early-70's soft/medium rock sounded like, I would point that person to those 3 albums. Don't get me wrong - none of the songs are notably bad, but aside from the leftover Smile songs, there were very few outstanding songs either.

For example, the most striking thing I thought about Surf's Up was, was how much better the title song was than the rest of the album. It stuck out like a sore thumb - 5 times better than any of the other songs on the album, I thought. And of course that's because it was a leftover from the Smile sessions. Same thing (more or less) with Cool Cool Water on Sunflower. At My Window was at least entertaining because it was so different, almost like a kid's song. A couple other songs were OK, but not great. Most of the rest was "meh." Bruce Johnston seemed to be writing the best songs during this time, but few of them were anything I thought I'd be missing out on if I had never heard them before I bit the dust. Sail On Sailor is a notable exception, but that seems to be because it was so much different from their other songs in that era.

I plan on giving these albums more of a chance, but so far most of the songs on them seem so generic I can't imagine them ever starting to jump out at me.

To each his own, I suppose.

FWIW, I don't just accuse the BB's of going downhill suddenly, there are quite a few bands from the 60's who seemed to have hit a brick wall once the year 1970 hit.

*awaits flames*

[EgoHanger1966]

No flames. You just need to listen to those albums more. There is nothing wrong with not liking certain albums just because many others like them, but I feel if you let those records (the ones you mentioned only having listened to a handful of times) permeate your soul, you will find much to love. It also helps if you're really looking to expand your horizons beyond the Beach Boys music you already know. I you're enamored with the group who made Pet Sounds and SMiLE, the ones that follow are really cool to listen to because they went in so many directions, sometimes as far away as they'd ever been, but it's always unmistakeably The Beach Boys.

[SMiLE-addict]

OK, here's an example of what I mean.

What's the difference between, say this and, say, this?

Not much, when you get down to it (in fact, the latter song is much better, IMO). The songs they were doing could easily have been songs by Bread, or any other of a number of other bands of that era.

And how many songs in the early 70's sounded like this ?

A lot! I could spend probably hours fishing up songs on youtube which were generic-sounding, semi-bluesy rock songs. There's nothing wrong with them, but when you've heard three dozen songs which sound more or less like that, it gets to be ... yawn.

On the other hand ...

What song, somewhere else - anywhere else!! - sounds like this ?

NOTHING!!!! At least not that I know of!

The great thing about the pre-1968-ish BB was that pretty much nobody else sounded like them, aside from a handful of other bands who were imitating them (such as Jan and Dean).

On the other hand, starting around 1968-ish, they gave up their unique sound and became just another ordinary soft/medium rock band. Some of the stuff was OK, but because they gave up that unique sound in favor of a more generic sound, it became a case of ... yawn.

IMO they would have been much better off if they had done something like ... become a progressive rock band while keeping their unique sound. Imagine Yes or ELP, but with a lot of orchestrated arrangements instead of electric guitars, bass and drums, and with super-complex harmonies in odd chords instead of solo voices. Or something like that. Combine CSN (x2!) with Yes, Pink Floyd and ELP, and you get the idea. There would have been no one else who sounded like that and they probably would have done a lot better commercially.

[Chocolate Shake Man]

Have you heard much Phil Spector?

[SMiLE-addict]

Have you heard much Phil Spector?

Yes.

Funny you should mention that. In general I like mid-60's music over late-60's music, and I think the "Phil Spector effect" is one reason for that. The Beatles are a great example - Abbey Road is a great album, but both Rubber Soul and Revolver were 5 times better. I like the "full" sound you get in a lot of mid-60's music (much of which was undoubtedly Spector influenced, conciously or not), whereas by the late 60's that sound had disappeared. Jefferson Airplane is another example. Surrealistic Pillow is 10 times better than Volunteers, even though Volunteers is a decent album.

[gfac22]

Have to agree with the OP, 20/20 through Holland is a pretty amazing stretch of music.  Too bad '15 Big Ones' had to come along and put a stop to it.

[Chocolate Shake Man]

Have you heard much Phil Spector?

Yes.

Well, then, how can you say that "nobody else sounded like" The Beach Boys before 1968? I am assuming you are talking specifically about the sound of the music since they still basically retained their signature vocal sound after 1968.

[SMiLE-addict]

^
I said, nobody else sounded like the Beach Boys before 1968. After 1968 they gave up most of their unique sound.

They might have done Phil Spector-esque production techniques during that time, but that doesn't mean they sounded like the other bands who were doing the same. A variety of bands were doing that sort of thing.

The Mama's and the Papas, for example, might have tried to get some of that Phil Spector sound along with the Beach Boys, but that doesn't mean the Beach Boys sounded like the Mamas and the Papas.

[EgoHanger1966]

And how many songs in the early 70's sounded like this ?

A lot! I could spend probably hours fishing up songs on youtube which were generic-sounding, semi-bluesy rock songs. There's nothing wrong with them, but when you've heard three dozen songs which sound more or less like that, it gets to be ... yawn.

I don't think there's any song that sounds like This Whole World. What is bluesy about that song beyond the first few seconds. Irregardless, it stands apart from all that early 70s rock stuff. It packs so much punch into less than two minutes, and changes key more times than I can count (hyperbole, but still)! I suggest you do a little background reading of this stuff, and that may help you gain a better appreciation for this period of their music. There is more than what's on the surface.

I think you mentioned Friends as one of the albums you don't get. Go out on a summer's day when you have half an hour of free time and take a walk in suburbia. You'll get it.

[EgoHanger1966]

Bread is cool, but....there is absolutely no comparison between "Who draws the crowd and plays so loud, Baby it's the guitar man" and "If every word I said could make you laugh, I'd talk forever". None.