The (eventually) MIC spoilers thread

[STE]

"Sail On Sailor - live 1995", so good to hear Carl in pristine quality. But I wonder if he would have approved its release.
"It's A Beautiful Day", new mix, sounds a bit tin and wet.
"This Whole World - A Cappella" is an orgasm for the ears. Just listen to Brian's bridge.

[Mike's Beard]

I hope folks will maintain a sense of proportion.  We're very, very fortunate…

How to suck the fun out of something in one fell swoop.

Anyway keep those initial impressions coming STE.

[STE]

"Meant For You", holy puppy dog! The only time you will really love Mike Love whispering in your ears!  But a pony, Brian? Really??  - <hits replay>

[Dunderhead]

"Meant For You", holy puppy dog! The only time you will really love Mike Love whispering in your ears!  But a pony, Brian? Really??  - <hits replay>

This is one of the few things on the set I'm really interested to hear. Sounds like a lot of fun.

[STE]

"If Guess I'm Dumb": still one of my favorite tracks by anyone anywhere. Even in better quality now.  Damn it Brian, you really had it!

[MBE]

Ok the BIG question. Brian and Dennis vocals 1973-75?

[Quzi]

"Sail On Sailor - live 1995", so good to hear Carl in pristine quality. But I wonder if he would have approved its release.
"It's A Beautiful Day", new mix, sounds a bit tin and wet.
"This Whole World - A Cappella" is an orgasm for the ears. Just listen to Brian's bridge.

Nice to know Brian's take on the bridge of "This Whole World" made it! Is it on the studio version on the third disc or just on the a capella mix?

[PaulTMA]

If somebody PM'd me telling me how to download the album anywhere I'd think it was DISGUSTING and probably CALL THE POLICE

[Ziggy Stardust]

WIBNTLA is purely magical..

Original home demo of California Feelin' is surely interesting.. quite surprising at some point ("CAN'T YOU FEEL IT?!") and with some whistle..

[humanoidboogie]

Someone just put up a link to an mp3 of WIBNTLA on the Hoffman forums... I'm sure it'll be gone soon.

(Did they auto tune Dennis' vocals? It's probably just the transcoding that's the culprit.)

[Matt Bielewicz]

OK, I'm in.

And WIBNTLA is quite good! Not the earth-shattering experience some thought it might be, but it's good. Dennis sounds great. Wish he had still sounded like this when he sang on POB.

Not so wild on the noodly flute bit at the end - very of its time. I like it, though.

I'm running the stream off now. Real-time only, so capturing it will take a while...

Back to Disc 2 now (like STE, I can't get Back Home '63 to stream).

The alt Meant For You is great, although Brian's pony and puppies lyrics are a bit too 'Athena Poster' for my liking - too sentimental and mawkish. I can see why they cut them. But the extended backing vocals are terrific.

Ah, man, Do It Again in stereo... That's effing *great*. Love the horns in the right channel!

Loving the strings on We're Together Again, too. Only heard this on boot before. The strings and extra kick drum lift the last third of the track. But wasn't there a slide guitar overdub for this somewhere as well? No sign of that. Or am I getting confused with Tune X?

On to Disc 6... the really important stuff IMHO...

Wow, so many bluesy vocal overdubs were buried in Slip On Through... the a capella reveals SO much.

Brian sounds great on the alt Don't Worry, Baby (although he goes a bit too high at the end - you can see why he retook the vocal for the final master). Beautiful modern stereo mix, too.

HOLY sh*t!!!! I BELIEVE IN MIRACLES IS PART OF CAN'T WAIT TOO LONG!!!!!!!!!!! That bluesy load of overdubs we heard on one of the CWTL boots!

THAT'S New News. Or it is to me...!!!!

[EgoHanger1966]

Well don't get me wrong, it's a good song, great production, great performance. But it suffers from its own mythological status.
Some people go nuts for "Midnight's Another Day" and "Summer's Gone" too.

WIBNTLA is still great, despite the hype. Multiple listens give you a greater appreciation for it. I do agree that people will be looking for much more than they're gonna get, but it's still really, really good. I dig the backing vocals as much as Dennis' lead.

One thing that will throw you off, though - if you know the Adam Marsland version only, your ears will need to adjust!

[Cliff1000uk]

Someone just put up a link to an mp3 of WIBNTLA on the Hoffman forums... I'm sure it'll be gone soon.

(Did they auto tune Dennis' vocals? It's probably just the transcoding that's the culprit.)

Here's the link:
https://mega.co.nz/#!0w9W0TKK!BeSnNVE0FtAvSdJSbt3lyksbYAQba28uTIVBIWMf5eo

[Cliff1000uk]

Matt-cheers for the real-time review

Can you PM me how you got in? I'm currently working around Finnish VPNs and proxy servers!!
Cheers

[MBE]

Happy to hear this. I had heard maybe the first minute over the phone ten years ago. I think it's excellent.

[Matt Bielewicz]

Ah, clean mixes of Guess I'm Dumb and Mona Kani - these sound better than ever. From what I've heard so far, all these new mixes, even for stuff we've had on boot before, are upgrades even on the clean tracks we got on SOT, and of course they're properly mixed. Totally worth the price of admission, even without all the completely new stuff.

Brian sounds much more in tune than I remember him on Sherry She Needs Me, but it must be over 10 years since I last subjected myself to the 1976 vocal version on boot, I hated it that much...

Barnyard Blues is a riot! Really funny with more animal noises like the original SMiLE Barnyard (to which it doesn't sound related). Dennis in less good voice than on WIBNTLA. I think this sounds a bit like an evolution of I Don't Know, Dennis track from the SMiLE box set.

Why? is a great, great BW shuffle with some cool chord changes.

Shame about Don't Go Near The Water - I was hoping they'd go completely a capella for the vocals at the end. But I guess the released track is close to that already, and it's quite interesting hearing the instruments that are under that on the released version.

I don't think I've ever seriously listened to Brian's 70s version of You've Lost That Loving Feeling. Wow, that's every bit as cool as AGD always said it was. This surely should have been on 15BO, or maybe even on Love You...

I'm still not wild about Transcendental Meditation, even without the vocals. That's some powerful saxes blasting, mind...

I'm loving 'Our Sweet Love'. But I always liked this one. Carl Wilson rocks, and the strings are mixed quite low, so they don't overpower, but are an interesting sonic colour. They left Brian's final 'honey' ad lib at the end.

"Tell me you feel the California Feelin!!!!" yells Brian in the middle of his demo. "Can you feel it??" Well, no actually. I can see why no-one took this song too seriously at first. He does sound like fat Elvis. Underwhelming. The 'finished' version beats the crap out of this.

Ah, man, at last - proper, Baldwin-heavy mixes of the Lei'd In Hawaii 'Heider' 'California Girls' and 'Help You Rhonda'... I'm an absolute sucker for 'Smiley-ised' versions of Beach Boys songs — some days I actually prefer the Endless Harmony version of God Only Knows to the original — so these are slaying me; they're terrific. I always knew these could be great if the occasional dodgy harmony and misplaced drum beat was mixed out from the multitrack. And that's what they've done.

WOW — a late super-standout — My Love Lives On. What a surprise, right near the end of the set. Now THERE'S a Dennis song. Shades WIBNTLA, in my opinion — that was good but not great. MLLO is a *really* knockout song. Dennis's voice is on its way to its Bambu lows, but he's still got it here. I'm hard to impress when it comes to DW's stuff, so I'm all the more surprised by this.

OK, back to Disc 5 to check out some of the live stuff... and the two Was tracks, of course...

[MBE]

When was Barnyard Blues and My Love Lives On recorded?

[Matt Bielewicz]

Cliff - when this stream is done... well, how can I put this?

Good things come to those that wait...   

[Dunderhead]

I'm happy that CWTL fragment is on there, I've been hoping they'd release that for awhile now.

[Matt Bielewicz]

Disc 5

Huh — Why Don't They Let Us Fall In Love might be the first KTSA-era track I can stand to listen to! I never bothered to listen to any boot versions before, and I really like that, a well-executed 50's shuffle in the vein of the Beatles' Oh Darlin' from Abbey Road — Mike's bass vocals are terrific. And best of all, I don't have to listen to KTSA to hear it!!!

Soul Searching is really, really great. Finally, a definitive version. This totally shades the boot mixes, and also leaves Brian's solo version standing, I gotta say.

That's SURELY a new 2010s Brian vocal on You're Still A Mystery. But the track is, I think, the better for it. I always thought this one could be terrific too, if only the mid-90s shouty 'Orange Crate Art' Brian could have been erased and improved on — and now he has! This would have been a brilliant album track. SO good to hear these two mid-90s tracks out properly at last!

I don't have time to go through all the live tracks now... but I just clicked on It's About Time to see what they did with it. Hoo, boy, if you like your Boys rocking, this kicks butt. They were pretty damn good live in the early 70s, weren't they?? And there are some interesting step-down key changes at the end of the track.

OK, that will do for a first listen to the highlights. Now to edit me up some stream...

[Matt Bielewicz]

So I've gone back to the start to hoover up some odds and ends I missed. Brian is cracking me up on track 1, when he threatens Dennis "I swear to you, I'm gonna get Alan Jardine..." "You will NAAHT get Alan...!" "I will, he's more professional, you know..."!!!!

Even on a half a century old recording, Bdub still *folds* me...


And Murry is just as funny on the Surfer's Rule session. "Sweeten it up, David..." The guy was such a no-nothing piñata...

[TV Forces]

Great stuff, Matt Bielewicz.  I'm trying not to spoil the box for myself so I'll live through your words until my box arrives.

Going further, why the hell would you include two Smile Sessions pieces that weren't even good enough to make the standard Two-CD set? Again, probably because they're assuming there's enough people out there that purchased the 2 CD set and this box, but not the full Smile Sessions package. Either way, it's still a waste of time/money. We would've been better off with thirteen minutes of cuts that were on the previous career spanning boxed set that aren't on this one. "Still I Dream Of It" for example...

I agree.  This is why I'm making my own 6-disc "Made in California" box when I'm done mining this one.  I really look forward to the project.  

[The Shift]

Matt - many thanks for your views. I've only skim-read as I want to save the meat and tatties for my own ears but it's good to see such positivity coming through.

[Quzi]

Dear God...the Smile Backing Vocals Montage is 8:32... [snip] ...I had no clue that they were wasting close to 9 minutes on something like that, especially given that it's previously released... [snip] ...The "Good Vibrations" stuff that follows is also another waste of nearly four minutes. The biggest mistake of the boxed set is unquestionably losing 13 minutes of the rarities disc to Smile Sessions stuff. The only people this satisfies are those that are interested enough to purchase this six CD set and delve into the rarities and not interested enough to purchase the deluxe Smile Sessions boxed set. That's probably about 1% of this boxed set's purchasers.

See, I still can't agree with this (while respecting your right to hold that opinion, of course). We're all seasoned followers of the Wilson-Love circus, so OF COURSE we've got TSS and we're also buying MiC. But imagine you were a Wilson noob, or, rather, just a little bit MORE than a noob... someone who'd bought mebbe Pet Sounds and a hits comp, maybe a couple of albums, and wanted to know more.

MiC will be the 'gateway' for people like this. And in that case, you sure as hell want a few versions of H&V on there, and you sure as hell want the SMiLE vocals montage on there. Because that stuff is some of the best stuff the Beach Boys did, it's innovative and cool and totally NOT the 'fun in the sun' stuff that people laziliy pigeonhole them with, and if they're anything like me, it will hook people in like I don't know what, and they'll probably buy TSS at some stage soon after.

Andrew Hickey said in an earlier post how the song licensing fee is done on a per composition basis which is why most of the live tracks have their studio counterparts on the box. If Heroes and Villains Part 1 & 2 and the vocal montage had already paid that fee through other tracks, the compilers are just getting bang for their buck and it wouldn't have been an either/or situation, kudos to them.

However, if they did have to pay extra, I have to agree with Kokono that better tracks could have been selected. If the 5 other TSS tracks on MiC, the Smiley Smile Heroes and Villains and Surf's Up 1971 don't pique curiosity in Smile, I doubt you could throw much more at a person to change that. Personally, I'd see those tracks as missed opportunities in having songs like "She Knows Me too Well" and "That's Not Me" disprove the often held belief that Brian tied his bandmates up and forced them to watch Murry masturbate while he commandeered The Wrecking Crew to glory.

[Micha]

3:32pm, I've got the package in my hand... will return shortly