20/20 through Holland

[Chocolate Shake Man]

Actually, I think your point has a great deal of validity though I'm not sure exactly on who the audience is in your discussion. I think some people would have considered The Beach Boys to be "leaders of the pack" during the 60s and some wouldn't. My dad, for example, who really loved The Beach Boys probably wouldn't have seen them as leaders in the same way that he would have considered The Beatles and The Stones and Bob Dylan to be - I just don't think he would have lumped them in with so-called "serious" music, even though it was through him that I heard Wild Honey when I was 8 years old or so. On the other hand, there was a audience in 1970-72 who would be able to clearly identify a Bread song and probably wouldn't have even heard a Beach Boys song.

I only asked the question because Smile-addict seemed to suggest that the Beach Boys during the post-1968 weren't as strong because they sounded like other music whereas earlier they had a unique sound. I ultimately find the argument weak but I'm not even sure if he is serious at this point.

[SMiLE-addict]

This was the first mention of them on this thread:

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

No, the first mention of Phil Spector in this thread was you, in reply #18. That quote of mine above wasn't until #22.

[SMiLE-addict]

I only asked the question because Smile-addict seemed to suggest that the Beach Boys during the post-1968 weren't as strong because they sounded like other music whereas earlier they had a unique sound. I ultimately find the argument weak but I'm not even sure if he is serious at this point.

Yes, I'm very serious. One of the hallmarks of a great band is the ability to sound as unique as possible. If you sound like any of a dozen other bands ... what's the point? Personally, I'm not going to be as interested in a song that sounds similar to 10 other songs, as I am in a song which, at best, might have a passing reference to maybe 1 or 2 other songs. Likewise,  I'm not going to be as interested in a band that sounds similar to 10 other bands, as I am in a band which, at best, might have some vague similarities to 1 or 2 other bands.

[Chocolate Shake Man]

This was the first mention of them on this thread:

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

No, the first mention of Phil Spector in this thread was you, in reply #18. That quote of mine above wasn't until #22.

OK, I can't respond to you anymore because I can't keep on demonstrating your reading errors to you. It's aggravating. I will do this one last time and then we can put this to sleep.

I know I was the first person to mention Phil Spector in this thread. Knowing that allowed me to make a statement like this in reply #32:

Why do you think I brought up Phil Spector the first time?

The debate was not who brought up Phil Spector first. It was about who brought up his techniques first. Let me remind you:

I agree this isn't about production techniques, so I'm not sure why it was brought up.

I'm not sure why it was brought up either. Since you were the one to bring it up, you are the only one that can shed light on that.

And why would "it" refer to Phil Spector?

Honestly, the thread has not been difficult to follow but because I have had to explain the thread for you, including your own posts, it has become boring. So again, good bye.

[SMiLE-addict]

Well, once times changed and the Beach Boys moved on to other styles, call it soft rock/pop or whatever, they weren't in demand anymore. People didn't need or want the Beach Boys for that particular type of music. There were other groups out there doing it (arguably) as well if not better. All of a sudden, the Beach Boys - and Brian Wilson - weren't leaders of the pack. They were now in the pack, with the likes of Bread.

That's a great way of putting it.

[Chocolate Shake Man]

Yes, I'm very serious. One of the hallmarks of a great band is the ability to sound as unique as possible.

And personally, I find that to be usually a foolish way to evalute art. Yes, artistic endeavours can take on the feel of being unique but that's typically only after you have lived with it for a good, long while, which you have not done with the Beach Boys later material. A lot of music can sound generic on first, second, third, fourth listen but then you begin to see what gives it character.

The fact is though that the Beach Boys, like many great artists, had no fear about sounding too much like others even at their commercial height, and often went out of their way to do so.

[SMiLE-addict]

The debate was not who brought up Phil Spector first. It was about who brought up his techniques first.

Since Phil Spector was a producer who was responsible for a certain sound which was arrived at using certain production techniques, "it" was that sound, which is interchangeable with the production techniques used to make that sound, which is interchangeable with the man who invented the production techniques.

Phil Spector = Wall Of Sound = "It"

[SMiLE-addict]

And personally, I find that to be usually a foolish way to evalute art.

I disagree. If all an artist can do is imitate someone else, I don't find that to be as artistic as someone who is more original. Granted, it can often be difficult to be original, especially after so much of the art in question has already been produced, but they could at least try.

[Sheriff John Stone]

I think we veered off topic from the original thread intent, but what the heck....

I find this subject fascinating and I've mulled it over numerous times. The Beach Boys' fall from grace wasn't like your typical group who had a hit album or two or three and then faded away. The Beach Boys had created some of the greatest popular music EVER, were arguably one of the top two, three bands in the world, had Brian Wilson in the fold, and, in the short span of two years, couldn't sell an album and were dropped by their record company. Why?

Indirectly, I thought SMiLE-addict was hitting on the key reason. Maybe - maybe - they had fallen into creating middle of the road, soft rock/pop, that was no better or worse than many other bands around at the time. Yeah, we BB/BW nuts can tell the difference; we studied it, we majored in it. But, could the average listener? I'm not so sure. Was it the marketing, or the clothing, or the lack of BW songs, or what it wasn't - great rock & roll. Did the Beach Boys become Bread or Spanky & Our Gang or Lobo?

[Chocolate Shake Man]

I think we veered off topic from the original thread intent, but what the heck....

I find this subject fascinating and I've mulled it over numerous times. The Beach Boys' fall from grace wasn't like your typical group who had a hit album or two or three and then faded away. The Beach Boys had created some of the greatest popular music EVER, were arguably one of the top two, three bands in the world, had Brian Wilson in the fold, and, in the short span of two years, couldn't sell an album and were dropped by their record company. Why?

Indirectly, I thought SMiLE-addict was hitting on the key reason. Maybe - maybe - they had fallen into creating middle of the road, soft rock/pop, that was no better or worse than many other bands around at the time. Yeah, we BB/BW nuts can tell the difference; we studied it, we majored in it. But, could the average listener? I'm not so sure. Was it the marketing, or the clothing, or the lack of BW songs, or what it wasn't - great rock & roll. Did the Beach Boys become Bread or Spanky & Our Gang or Lobo?

No - it was something that we don't really want to confront. The Beach Boys were widely seen as novelty band and the public couldn't accept anything that widely veered away from that model. There was one exception - Good Vibrations but even that had the "good times" appeal of a lot of their earlier songs. When The Beach Boys got closer to that model after 1966, they were more successful. Ultimately Mike Love was right.

[SMiLE-addict]

BTW, I'd like to tie together two seemingly disparate thoughts:

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.

And.

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)!

The problem here is that, even with all the key changes, to your typical listener it still sounds like a fairly typical moderate-rock song; the key changes might even detract from the sound because it's too complex a pattern to a genre which typically isn't very complex. To make an extreme illustration, imagine The Carpenters doing a complex song with all kinds of key changes, chromatic scales, lots of diminished minor 7th chords, etc. Musically, it might be an interesting and creative song. But to your typical Carpenters fan it would be so much weird sounding, abstract mumbo-jumbo.

If you're going to do complex musical patterns, you need to put it in a genre whose listeners are largely expecting complex musical patterns. Most soft-rock listeners aren't interested in that - they're going to listen to Bread or Carly Simon instead. On the other hand, people who listen to jazz, or rock-jazz fusion, or progressive rock, or new age, are more likely to appreciate such musical patterns. This is why I suggested above they might have been better off going into a different genre than the one they did (if they were going to switch genres at all). A band which had done Pet Sounds and was on the cusp of doing something "out there" like Smile takes a step backward when they revert to soft rock (even if it's sophisticated soft rock). The proper direction to go, given their musical talents, would have been more along the lines of Yes With Intense Harmonies. The people who listened to Yes, Pink Floyd, Queen, ELP, Jethro Tull, etc. would have paid attention to them (and by the 70's that had become a big audience), and thus, they probably would have done better commercially. Or even if they had done something like a rock band with heavy jazz influences like Chicago, adding in their complex harmonies, that probably would have worked better too.

[Cabinessenceking]

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.

imo Forever has cheesy, pretentious emotional lyrics. The chord pattern had potential though but the instrumentation also failed. I don't at all enjoy the guitar strumming which screams 'annoying student playing saccharine guitar songs to boost ego and get girls'

[I. Spaceman]

There's some real interesting Kool-Aid being consumed by certain members.

[halblaineisgood]

.

[halblaineisgood]

.

[Alex]

No, really, I think you raised a real good topic, one that could bring some good discussion if cool heads prevail. I know that there are a lot of people on this board who prefer 1967-1973 to 1962-1966. But like I posted above, there's gotta be a reason why Friends didn't sell, 20/20 went to around #70, Sunflower bombed, as did Carl & The Passions. I guess marketing did play a part, as did the groups image, but....Hey, it's worth discussing. And, the board's slow anyway. I was praising "Santa's Goin' To Kokomo" earlier tonight for chrissakes.

I think the reason those albums bombed is because the casual music listening public is shallow and concerned more with image and artificial hipness than with actual music.

Yeah, I said it.

[halblaineisgood]

.

[Mike's Beard]

The run from 20/20 to Holland is what changed me from a causal Beach Boys fan to a Beach Boys nut.

[Myk Luhv]

Extend it further back to include Smiley Smile onwards and I think you have one of the most bizarre series of albums by an incredibly popular and successful (though not so much at the time of these albums getting released!) major-label group I've ever heard. They're great albums to me because they don't exactly sound like classic Beach Boys -- think of something like "All I Wanna Do", "Mess of Help", or even "Wild Honey", etc. -- while at the same time not giving up the harmonies and other such "trademarks" that people, if they were listening, would make it obviously still a recording by The Beach Boys. Yet this is also what I find most difficult about recommending albums from Smiley Smile onward: They tended not to sound similar to one another so simply giving someone Friends and Holland does little to capture adequately what The Beach Boys sounded like, in general, post-classic era. And even that fact makes it fascinating to listen, since the sheer stylistic diversity coupled with an unwillingness (or inability?) to fully succumb to mere emulation of their contemporaries (whether the Stones, Stax, or whomever) is remarkable.

[SamMcK]

Let's not forget that even with their declining US success and unconventional album releases the group still managed to do well in the UK where all of there albums from 1965 to 1971 managed to hit the top 15 album charts with the exception of Sunflower. Darlin' hit the top 20, Do It Again was a no. 1, and I Can Hear Music, Break Away and Cottonfields charted respectfully at no. 10, no. 6 and no. 5. They must have been doing something right since the UK public was more able to take notice of their artistic side, and hey if an album like Smiley Smile can reach the top 10!

[Chocolate Shake Man]

Let's not forget that even with their declining US success and unconventional album releases the group still managed to do well in the UK where all of there albums from 1965 to 1971 managed to hit the top 15 album charts with the exception of Sunflower. Darlin' hit the top 20, Do It Again was a no. 1, and I Can Hear Music, Break Away and Cottonfields charted respectfully at no. 10, no. 6 and no. 5. They must have been doing something right since the UK public was more able to take notice of their artistic side, and hey if an album like Smiley Smile can reach the top 10!

Absolutely. The Beach Boys hit the popular culture at a different time in the UK with different songs and hence were not imagined as a novelty band and so they were not trapped in a box, as it were.

[Bubba Ho-Tep]

imo Forever has cheesy, pretentious emotional lyrics. The chord pattern had potential though but the instrumentation also failed. I don't at all enjoy the guitar strumming which screams 'annoying student playing saccharine guitar songs to boost ego and get girls'

[Cabinessenceking]

imo Forever has cheesy, pretentious emotional lyrics. The chord pattern had potential though but the instrumentation also failed. I don't at all enjoy the guitar strumming which screams 'annoying student playing saccharine guitar songs to boost ego and get girls'

You said in the jukebox thread that Surf City was 'gay'. Now you're saying that Forever sounds too much like a song designed for seducing girls. Do you even like Rock And Roll ? Or just songs like Surf's Up, "worthy of classical legacy"..come up with some different observations besides"this one sounds gay' or this ones sounds like a some whiny guy singin to a girl..You're walkin on the fightin side of me.

I love their live albums and that's when the songs 'rocked' more than the studio versions. I enjoy much of their early rock but I'm mighty glad that they never recorded Surf City as I would've viewed that one with more embarrassment than any other of their early songs. Surf City is a very dated song. It might stirr feelings of nostalgia but  doesnt get close to capture what 'Dont Worry Baby' does for instance. Also Dennis made some great love songs on his solo material, 'Cuddle Up' and 'Be With Me'. I just feel 'Forever' has slightly clishéd lyrics which are just a bit too saccharine for my taste (some POB songs are a bit better). The comment on the guitar is more that I didn't like that part of the instrumentation on the song.

[Cabinessenceking]

Let's not forget that even with their declining US success and unconventional album releases the group still managed to do well in the UK where all of there albums from 1965 to 1971 managed to hit the top 15 album charts with the exception of Sunflower. Darlin' hit the top 20, Do It Again was a no. 1, and I Can Hear Music, Break Away and Cottonfields charted respectfully at no. 10, no. 6 and no. 5. They must have been doing something right since the UK public was more able to take notice of their artistic side, and hey if an album like Smiley Smile can reach the top 10!

Absolutely. The Beach Boys hit the popular culture at a different time in the UK with different songs and hence were not imagined as a novelty band and so they were not trapped in a box, as it were.

This just about sums it up. Upvotes to you if I had any!

[Banana]

The run from 20/20 to Holland is what changed me from a causal Beach Boys fan to a Beach Boys nut.

This is a good point...as I'd say it also describes me.  I was initially drawn into the "hit" period and I will admit that I didn't take the time to "get" the middle period at first.  I worked under the assumption that after Brian "lost it" with Smile...that the band essentially became far less interesting.  I know think the opposite.  The recordings make from Smiley Smile through Holland are quite interesting...specifically because they were trying to stretch their sound.  They were chasing an audience that had largely forgotten about them...but there were not yet willing to simply try and recapture the public by pretending it was still 1965.  The sound on these recording is still 100% Beach Boys.  The vocals are still sublime.  The elements that made them great during the early period are still there...maybe a little less unfocused at times...but they are still there.  Brian may have retreated from the helm...but that simply gave us a chance to hear what the rest of the band was capable of.  I disagree that any other band from that era could have made the same music.  It was a times bizarre...goofy...odd...what-have-you...but it never stopped being the Beach Boys.