Anybody ever compiled a compleat set of lyrics to "Been Way Too Long"?

[onkster]

Fell asleep listening to a compilation I made of every single version of this I could get my hands on last night...

I still want to do an "ultimate edit" of this track if I can, but I'm trying to figure out the actual structure of the song, if there is one. The one bit I can't quite parse is a spoken bit by Brian mixed wayyyy down under one of the instrumental versions--might be the piano demo version. It doesn't sound like the more audible spoken one over the studio track.

Anybody ever isolated what he's saying there?

Or come across a printed/handwritten version of the complete lyrics?

[joshferrell]

 been way too long. need viagra baby.
been way too long, need to get it up baby
been way too long, I need your help baby
been way too long,to help my shlong baby......

 

[Wrightfan]

I think the spoken/singing section in the GV set version goes like this:
Miss you darlin, I miss you so hard (miss you so hard now)
Miss you darlin (come back baby...and don't break my heart, here it goes)
And now I'm alone lyin' down, looking up at the stars (Stars!)
Relivening(?)...reliving the times we shared when the moon, the stars and the music was all

Always liked that part. Brian kinda predicting David Byrne's style here 

[Matt Bielewicz]

Ah - like the true nature of Brian Wilson's plans for SMiLE in late 1966, I reckon the structure and finished lyrics of a complete Can't Wait Too Long are probably forever beyond our grasp now. All we seem to have are unfinished pieces. Nobody knows exactly how they were supposed to go together, in what order, whether the bits we have are all there was ever going to be or whether bits are missing (either instrumental or vocal overdubs on those sections we DO have, or whether there are also whole further parts of the song — verses, bridges, chorus, tags etc — missing too). We don't even know if the recordings made in 1967 and 1968 were supposed to belong together, or whether the 1968 recordings were attempts at remakes with possibly *different* plans, structures and lyrics. If the latter, then the recordings from 1968 shouldn't really be edited together with recordings from 1967, if you're trying to make a 'historically accurate' CWTL. But on the 1990 twofer where most of the legally available pieces of this track were released, that IS what was done. And as is so often the case with SMiLE stuff, there are things on boots that go beyond what's legally released. And there may be more that only collectors have heard. It's one of those hot messes that the whole SMiLE saga did so well.

Oh, and the one guy who might be able to shed some light on the track, Brian himself, has either forgotten all the details, remembers but won't tell anyone, or, at different times, BOTH.

Like a jumbled, unfinished Kafka novel where we see or hear second-hand, far-off hints of crucial plot developments of huge interest to the protagonist who is then systematically frustrated from ever getting more information or confirmation, with CWTL, we can actually HEAR Brian singing some words, but recorded so badly, so quietly, so off-axis to the mic and in mono (so no isolations, guys), that we can't make them out. (I bet it will be our luck that if anyone ever finds 1966 demo recordings of the verses of Child Is Father Of The Man or Look with vocals, they will sound like this. If any ever do surface, Wilson-O-Logists will scour the recordings with graphic equalisers, but they will remain completely unintelligible, I betcha. There's got to be a whole tenth circle of the Inferno full of SMiLE-o-philes trying to work out Brian's 'true plans for SMiLE in 1966'. At least they have a ready-made soundtrack to listen to on eternal loop in the form of Mrs O'Leary's Cow).

There are a quite a lot of things about SMiLE for which I think answers will only ever be found if you are lucky enough to land the keys to a hot tub time machine which you can pilot back to LA in about March 1966. And unfortunately, knowing the lyrics and structure for CWTL is one of those 'HTTM' mysteries for me...

Oh, apart from the lyrics on the twofer mentioned above, that is. But even they're not complete in that section on that recording. Brian obviously knew them THEN... but probably doesn't now!

[onkster]

Nice analysis, Matt! I pretty well agree with everything you just said.

And in regards to the spoken lyrics provided above--yep, got those. It's those very-hard-to-hear ones on, I think, the piano version that may require that hard-core EQ/isolation treatment...

[JK]

Onkster, I hear the words "in the city" during the ascending piano chords passage and an ex-poster on my other board goes even further:

"in the city, yeah
come on and take me home
i don't want to be all alone"

or:

"in the city, yeah
come on and take me home
i want to get out of here"

He does add that his ears might be playing tricks on him for the second and third lines...

[Mujan, 8@$+@Rc| of a Blue Wizard]

Ah - like the true nature of Brian Wilson's plans for SMiLE in late 1966, I reckon the structure and finished lyrics of a complete Can't Wait Too Long are probably forever beyond our grasp now. All we seem to have are unfinished pieces. Nobody knows exactly how they were supposed to go together, in what order, whether the bits we have are all there was ever going to be or whether bits are missing (either instrumental or vocal overdubs on those sections we DO have, or whether there are also whole further parts of the song — verses, bridges, chorus, tags etc — missing too). We don't even know if the recordings made in 1967 and 1968 were supposed to belong together, or whether the 1968 recordings were attempts at remakes with possibly *different* plans, structures and lyrics. If the latter, then the recordings from 1968 shouldn't really be edited together with recordings from 1967, if you're trying to make a 'historically accurate' CWTL. But on the 1990 twofer where most of the legally available pieces of this track were released, that IS what was done. And as is so often the case with SMiLE stuff, there are things on boots that go beyond what's legally released. And there may be more that only collectors have heard. It's one of those hot messes that the whole SMiLE saga did so well.

Oh, and the one guy who might be able to shed some light on the track, Brian himself, has either forgotten all the details, remembers but won't tell anyone, or, at different times, BOTH.

Like a jumbled, unfinished Kafka novel where we see or hear second-hand, far-off hints of crucial plot developments of huge interest to the protagonist who is then systematically frustrated from ever getting more information or confirmation, with CWTL, we can actually HEAR Brian singing some words, but recorded so badly, so quietly, so off-axis to the mic and in mono (so no isolations, guys), that we can't make them out. (I bet it will be our luck that if anyone ever finds 1966 demo recordings of the verses of Child Is Father Of The Man or Look with vocals, they will sound like this. If any ever do surface, Wilson-O-Logists will scour the recordings with graphic equalisers, but they will remain completely unintelligible, I betcha. There's got to be a whole tenth circle of the Inferno full of SMiLE-o-philes trying to work out Brian's 'true plans for SMiLE in 1966'. At least they have a ready-made soundtrack to listen to on eternal loop in the form of Mrs O'Leary's Cow).

There are a quite a lot of things about SMiLE for which I think answers will only ever be found if you are lucky enough to land the keys to a hot tub time machine which you can pilot back to LA in about March 1966. And unfortunately, knowing the lyrics and structure for CWTL is one of those 'HTTM' mysteries for me...

Oh, apart from the lyrics on the twofer mentioned above, that is. But even they're not complete in that section on that recording. Brian obviously knew them THEN... but probably doesn't now!

Pretty much. Except I'd say you'd have to go back to early 12/66 to get a read on the original plan for SMiLE. After that, it was all up-for-grabs in service of the singles and any plans there may have been were hopelessly altered to the point where even Brian had no sight of the big picture anymore. Before that, I do think there was a plan though. It may not have been set in stone, it may not have been anything like we imagine SMiLE to be, it may have involved some rough ideas laid out in the Psychedelic Sounds skits or it may not have.

Can't Wait Too Long should have been finished. I can understand why SMiLE wasn't with all that was going on at the time and the volume of material involved. But CWTL was just one song, without any pressure or deadline or build up of expectations. How hard could it have been? It's probably the single best song they did post-SMiLE and would have made a great single going off the fragments. I've said this a few times, but if you took the best of Wild Honey and Friends, with CWTL as the centerpiece, you'd have an amazing album worthy of being Pet Sounds' sequel.

[Matt Bielewicz]

I go along with that. I know that recording of Can't Wait Too Long started after SMiLE was canned, but it has something of the larger project's majesty about it for me that goes beyond merely sharing a bassline with the original version of Wind Chimes. Listening to it again for the first time in a while has reawakened in me how damn good it is, and moves me to write something more about it...

For me another odd thing about CWTL, is that it also shares with a lot of SMiLE material an... can I call it 'unknowability'? Is that a word? Its unfinished nature means we can listen to quite a lot of what was probably going to make up this song without ever really getting any solid sense of what the finished thing might have been like. Maybe the word I'm after is 'ineffable', or something like that. I'll come back to that.

I might have lost some readers there, who might not unreasonably be saying 'Course we know what it was going to sound like, you idiot, just listen to track 28 on the 1990 Smiley Smile/Wild Honey twofer...' so I'll try to justify what I'm saying. Let's start with what you'd think would be a fairly easy question to ask: What would the style of the finished track have been like?

The more you think about it, the harder this question is to answer. We've definitely got a beautifully sung intro, which showcases the Beach Boys' amazing harmony vocals, with delightfully restrained, sparse but highly effective guitar and tack piano accompaniment. Sometimes I just want to listen to this section over and over. It's one of Brian's most beautiful little fragments. I can see why Brian, Scott and Darian (or whoever exactly it was...) resurrected this part for That Lucky Old Sun. It's just too damn good to leave on the shelf (but by just taking *this* part for TLOS, there was no need to get into the whole hot mess of how to structure the rest of the song! Smart move...).

If you base your expectations for the song on this part, you might envisage a finished Can't Wait Too Long (as I do) as some kind of sun-kissed production meisterwerk, the kind of thing that might have, in another universe, snuck onto one of the sides of the double album that Brian could have put out *after* beating the Beatles to the punch with his finished SMiLE album in January 1967 (yeah... I am aware things didn't *quite* work out like that). In my fevered imaginings, this extraordinary record, which I'll call Sunflower Honey for the sake of argument, would have included the kind of incredibly produced backing tracks we got on this intro part of Can't Wait Too Long, the bridge of Child Is Father Of The Man, or the April 1967 Tag To Vega-Tables, meshed with the complex, softly sung vocal harmonies on the best parts of Smiley Smile. Something sung as well as Friends, but with slightly more developed production and backing tracks. Lots of percussion, leslie guitar, vibes, and small string sections dancing around multiple, fluidly moving arco, pick-played and fender bass parts. Sometimes, when I'm drifting off to sleep, I can almost hear it, just out of reach...

The next section of the song (or what we think might be the next section, anyway) develops the sound of the intro in an interestingly psychedelic direction, becoming one of those very SMiLE-like, dreamy, repetitive two-chord passages with vibes and bass (the original Wind Chimes bass line, of course). It's harmonically less interesting but very compelling nonetheless (and I'm guessing that it probably sounds pretty amazing on LSD...). If you base your idea of what a finished CWTL might be on this part, you might come up with the sort of track that fans of My Bloody Valentine or Spacemen 3 love: intricately arranged, highly repetitive pieces with dense sonic textures, but not much in the way of harmonic or chordal development. What UK music journalists used to refer to, with tongues very much in cheeks, as 'endlessly echoing sonic cathedrals of sound, man'.

And then there are lots of other sections to CWTL that sound much more like Wild Honey outtakes. There are the parts that only ever made it out as a mono edit on a bootleg years ago, that cut together the short vocal fragment released on Made In California as 'I Believe In Miracles' with an upbeat, clap-heavy, almost Motown-sounding backing track based around the same piano progressions heard on the twofer version of the track. And there's the bridge heard on the twofer and on the Good Vibrations boxed set with a few lyrics as Brian tries to teach the rest of the group the song. These sections have the lo-fi, piano and bass-heavy sound of Wild Honey, and sound very much the product of the home recording environment that Brian worked in post-SMiLE. When I imagine a Can't Wait Too Long completed in this style, I imagine something very different: three minutes long, perhaps, at most, featuring a high-mixed, prominent bassline, white soul vocals and lots of upbeat, bluesy piano: something sounding halfway between 'Wild Honey' (the track) 'Aren't You Glad' and 'A Thing Or Two'.

And there's the outro section from the twofer edit of CWTL, which has the Baldwin organ-heavy and eccentric, offbeat percussion sound of a Smiley Smile outtake. When that was recorded, I don't know — I suspect a bit later, maybe even during Wild Honey or Friends — but it makes me wonder what a version of the song completed in *that* style might have been like. Then I think of slightly wonky harmonies, the 'recorded in a very dry room' drum sound of Smiley Smile or the Heider tracks cut after the Hawaii concerts, but with maybe a few more instruments added, as happened on Friends. I wonder about something off-the-wall like 'Be Here In The Morning' or 'Busy Doing Nothing'. Can't Wait Too Long with a 'Passing By' kind of sound. Very different again.

Of course, maybe these pieces were all intended for one gigantic mega-version encompassing ALL of these styles. Imagine Good Vibrations had never been completed, and was only available to us in pieces with a few unfinished vocals here and there. You wouldn't necessarily imagine all of those styles could be meshed into one track either — and yet Brian did manage it in the Autumn of 1966. But with Can't Wait Too Long, as with so much of SMiLE, there's that 'unknowability' thing again — it WASN'T finished, so we'll probably never get to the bottom of the mystery of how it was going to sound. For example, another alternative explanation is that these pieces were done at different times and were NEVER supposed to belong in a single version of the track. If that's the case, they might have been attempts at different times to re-record Can't Wait Too Long, this unfinished track idea that had been hanging around the place incomplete for many months, to make it sit within the fast-evolving styles the Beach Boys were adopting and discarding on their albums of the time, which were changing so quickly between Spring 1967 and the end of 1969.

Like some of the parts of SMiLE that still remain indistinct after all these years (for example what a 'finished' late 1966 I'm In Great Shape, Child Is Father Of The Man, Do You Like Worms, Look or Heroes and Villains could have been like with all of their vocal parts, counter-melodies and overdubs, or what would REALLY have been in 'The Elements'), I think Can't Wait Too Long is similarly 'unknowable'. I think the word I'm looking for to describe all of these unfinished sections, arrangements, lyrics and songs, actually, in its truest and original sense, is 'incomprehensible'. The word actually means 'incapable of being completely taken hold of', and that's what a lot of these songs are. They never fully emerged from Brian Wilson's imagination: they got stuck, if you like, in the process of becoming real, and as a result, they will be to some extent forever beyond our grasp. The recordings and unfinished sections we do have — what remains of them — merely hint at various, often mutually incompatible possibilities.

My only honest answer, therefore, to the question 'What would a finished Can't Wait Too Long have sounded like?' is that I don't know — I can think of a few possible answers, but nothing definite. The only reason it's still worth thinking about is because the unfinished pieces of the puzzle sound so damn good, one can't help but imagine what the completed whole could have been like...!

[Please delete my account]

It's probably the single best song they did post-SMiLE and would have made a great single going off the fragments.

Not for me. For me, to use a cliché, it doesn't really go anywhere. Maybe a finished version would change my mind. I do agree that, even unfinished, it deserved a place on an album, and I prefer having that bassline here than on Wind Chimes (of which Smiley Smile version all the way!) but it wouldn't be in my top fifty post-Smile tracks.

Did anyone else, on seeing the tracklisting for TLOS, think: "Oh! He's finished Smile, now he's going to gradually work his way through his other unfinished works!" and then get disappointed to find it was only a fragment?

[Chocolate Shake Man]

If you base your expectations for the song on this part, you might envisage a finished Can't Wait Too Long (as I do) as some kind of sun-kissed production meisterwerk, the kind of thing that might have, in another universe, snuck onto one of the sides of the double album that Brian could have put out *after* beating the Beatles to the punch with his finished SMiLE album in January 1967 (yeah... I am aware things didn't *quite* work out like that). In my fevered imaginings, this extraordinary record, which I'll call Sunflower Honey for the sake of argument, would have included the kind of incredibly produced backing tracks we got on this intro part of Can't Wait Too Long, the bridge of Child Is Father Of The Man, or the April 1967 Tag To Vega-Tables, meshed with the complex, softly sung vocal harmonies on the best parts of Smiley Smile. Something sung as well as Friends, but with slightly more developed production and backing tracks. Lots of percussion, leslie guitar, vibes, and small string sections dancing around multiple, fluidly moving arco, pick-played and fender bass parts. Sometimes, when I'm drifting off to sleep, I can almost hear it, just out of reach...

This paragraph is one of the best pieces of writing that I've read on this board.

[Matt Bielewicz]

There are a quite a lot of things about SMiLE for which I think answers will only ever be found if you are lucky enough to land the keys to a hot tub time machine which you can pilot back to LA in about March 1966.

Pretty much. Except I'd say you'd have to go back to early 12/66 to get a read on the original plan for SMiLE.

Weeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeelll... I picked March 1966 'cause of two things - firstly, you'd obviously need some time to get to know Dennis or Brian or someone well enough to become one of the tent-party/sandbox faithful, and secondly, I would SOOOOOO want to be at that first Heroes And Villains session, the one that later got erased, to find out what the hell the track was at that point (the one that, if I remember rightly, Al Kooper thought maybe had You Are My Sunshine in it...?)...!

And that was, what... May 11th at Gold Star, right?

Obviously, I am well aware that the idea of leaping into a hot tub time machine ISN'T exactly a realistic proposition. I'm just saying... if I did happen to have one to hand, March 1966 is where I'd be headed. Prolly put it down right at Fairfax and Third. Easy walking to all the places I'd want to go from there. Not that, you know, I think about this eventuality much.

Or anything     

[The Shift]

Matt, you own this thread. CWTL is one of my favourite pieces and you've helped me know it and love it all the more. It's a mesh of exsquisities from start to finish. Over time I suspect more of these pieces might emerge… and, like Smile, they'll prompt even more questions than they answer. Which can only enrichen the mystery.

[Mujan, 8@$+@Rc| of a Blue Wizard]

There are a quite a lot of things about SMiLE for which I think answers will only ever be found if you are lucky enough to land the keys to a hot tub time machine which you can pilot back to LA in about March 1966.

Pretty much. Except I'd say you'd have to go back to early 12/66 to get a read on the original plan for SMiLE.

Weeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeelll... I picked March 1966 'cause of two things - firstly, you'd obviously need some time to get to know Dennis or Brian or someone well enough to become one of the tent-party/sandbox faithful, and secondly, I would SOOOOOO want to be at that first Heroes And Villains session, the one that later got erased, to find out what the hell the track was at that point (the one that, if I remember rightly, Al Kooper thought maybe had You Are My Sunshine in it...?)...!

And that was, what... May 11th at Gold Star, right?

Obviously, I am well aware that the idea of leaping into a hot tub time machine ISN'T exactly a realistic proposition. I'm just saying... if I did happen to have one to hand, March 1966 is where I'd be headed. Prolly put it down right at Fairfax and Third. Easy walking to all the places I'd want to go from there. Not that, you know, I think about this eventuality much.

Or anything     

Oh damn man, my apologies. I misread your post and thought you said March '67, which by then, I'd argue SMiLE was dead, at least as it was originally conceived.

I agree, I'd love to hear the first H&V session. That would definitely shed light on the original structure before it spiraled into this unmanageable mini-album unto itself.

If I could go back in time to that period, I would just tell Brian one thing: don't pick H&V as the single. It's not worth it. If you like the Bicycle Rider chorus, use Worms. If you want something a little shorter and more commercial, use Cabin. If you want something upbeat, use Vega-Tables. But for the love of God, don't waste 3 months of precious time trying to make a noncommercial song commercial. It defeats its own purpose then, even if you were to succeed.

[sockittome]

I think the spoken/singing section in the GV set version goes like this:
Miss you darlin, I miss you so hard (miss you so hard now)
Miss you darlin (come back baby...and don't break my heart, here it goes)
And now I'm alone lyin' down, looking up at the stars (Stars!)
Relivening(?)...reliving the times we shared when the moon, the stars and the music was all

Always liked that part. Brian kinda predicting David Byrne's style here 

This is almost exactly what I came up with (see my sig. line), except I thought I heard "ours" as the last word.  I could be wrong.

Btw, what a great thread!  I've thought about starting a CWTL thread myself a number of times.  There is so much mystery surrounding this amazing collection of pieces to what would have been a great song.  A hit?  Maybe, maybe not, but a great song nonetheless.  Kudos to Matt for his in depth analysis in this thread.  Some excellent points made, especially in his comparison to the GV sessions.  I think we tend to overlook the fact that Brian would record hours of pieces, and then assemble a small fraction of the best parts into a + or - 3 minute tune.  And I believe that's what CWTL would have been.  We'll never know without hearing a lead vocal if it was intended to be a single or not. 

[Les P]

Onkster, I hear the words "in the city" during the ascending piano chords passage and an ex-poster on my other board goes even further:

"in the city, yeah
come on and take me home
i don't want to be all alone"

or:

"in the city, yeah
come on and take me home
i want to get out of here"

He does add that his ears might be playing tricks on him for the second and third lines...

I know this is an old thread but I didn't see the point in starting a new one.

EQ'ing the bridge part in the CWTL piano track, I hear:

Line 1:  (unintelligible)
Line 2:  I'm gonna (close?) my eyes / hoping to see you   ["open" would seem to make more sense, but it sounds like one syllable, and "close" is more clever, like he is fantasizing]
Line 3:  I'm gonna let my eyes / (crawl all-all over you?)

Thoughts?

[JK]

Onkster, I hear the words "in the city" during the ascending piano chords passage and an ex-poster on my other board goes even further:

"in the city, yeah
come on and take me home
i don't want to be all alone"

or:

"in the city, yeah
come on and take me home
i want to get out of here"

He does add that his ears might be playing tricks on him for the second and third lines...

I know this is an old thread but I didn't see the point in starting a new one.

EQ'ing the bridge part in the CWTL piano track, I hear:

Line 1:  (unintelligible)
Line 2:  I'm gonna (close?) my eyes / hoping to see you   ["open" would seem to make more sense, but it sounds like one syllable, and "close" is more clever, like he is fantasizing]
Line 3:  I'm gonna let my eyes / (crawl all-all over you?)

Thoughts?

No problem about resuming an old thread. That 120-day policy baffles me-----surely it's best to keep as much information on one subject in one place? And if there's anywhere where time needn't be an issue, it's the internet!!! 

Interesting how different your words are to the ones my colleague heard! Sounds very plausible though----the angle is very Brianesque. Maybe someone with better equipment than me can help out more.   

[Les P]

Onkster, I hear the words "in the city" during the ascending piano chords passage and an ex-poster on my other board goes even further:

"in the city, yeah
come on and take me home
i don't want to be all alone"

or:

"in the city, yeah
come on and take me home
i want to get out of here"

He does add that his ears might be playing tricks on him for the second and third lines...

I know this is an old thread but I didn't see the point in starting a new one.

EQ'ing the bridge part in the CWTL piano track, I hear:

Line 1:  (unintelligible)
Line 2:  I'm gonna (close?) my eyes / hoping to see you   ["open" would seem to make more sense, but it sounds like one syllable, and "close" is more clever, like he is fantasizing]
Line 3:  I'm gonna let my eyes / (crawl all-all over you?)

Thoughts?

No problem about resuming an old thread. That 120-day policy baffles me-----surely it's best to keep as much information on one subject in one place? And if there's anywhere where time needn't be an issue, it's the internet!!!  

Interesting how different your words are to the ones my colleague heard! Sounds very plausible though----the angle is very Brianesque. Maybe someone with better equipment than me can help out more.    

It IS interesting how different people hear different things.  I really listened for the words your colleague heard, but couldn't hear them.  I definitely hear "hoping to see-ee you" at the end of the 2nd line.  But then, I have hearing loss and tinnitus, so who knows?!  I really hope one of the extraction wizards who post here will tackle this puzzle...

I've long been fascinated by this song and I've enjoyed this thread and Matt's post.

Edit:  I think Line 3 starts "I'm gonna let my MIND..."  Also makes more sense if he's closed his eyes and is fantasizing.