Documentary!

[wavesoflove]

Pretty nice sounding stereo mix of Surfin' Safari in the documentary.

I dunno,  but it sure sounded like a lot of the audio interview clips were off speed, running too fast. 

It sounds like they processed a lot of the clips through audio cleanup software on it's default setting.
Probably just used adobe podcast or some other tool that produces artifacts.
You can hear it a lot in the modern Al Jardine parts.

[Zenobi]

I read some comments on the other Beach Boys forums about the documentary and noticed something really off, in my opinion. Namely, quite some "fans" seem to think that the docu was right in practically ignoring the 1967-1977 stretch because there were no "hits".
What I think, instead, about this subject.

1) Yes, no hits. I get that, thanks. I was there. In my Italy, my Beach Boys literally DISAPPEARED (no kidding!) starting from 1967. Forever. And there was no helping it in the world of guitar noodling, shirtless frontmen, 20-minute suites, and all that came afterwards. Brian or no Brian.
2) But... the Beach Boys 1967-1977 stretch, artistically, is FANTASTIC. Not perfect, of course, but fantastic. That stuff is timeless, and priceless.
3) This has never been really acknowledged, in any case not enough, by a mile.
4) This 2024 docu was maybe the last chance. There will never be a Peter Jackson for the Boys.
5) Chance TOTALLY missed. Most people will keep on thinking that Good Vibrations was the last good/important thing the Boys, and Brian, did.
6) F..k the damn charts. It seems many people aren't inspired by music, but by charts. And mind you, it's understandable when Brian, Carl, Mike, Al, the artists themselves, worry about the charts. But we, after the facts, in hindsight, should NOT.
7) On the other hand, I understand that nothing will ever sway the chart-smokers.

Jerry Garcia, one who knew something about music and owned thousands of albums, said that his second favourite album was... SMILEY SMILE (in case you wonder, the first one was "Folksingers ‘Round Harvard Square" byJoan Baez, Bill Wood and Ted Alevizos).

[MyDrKnowsItKeepsMeCalm]

I read some comments on the other Beach Boys forums about the documentary and noticed something really off, in my opinion. Namely, quite some "fans" seem to think that the docu was right in practically ignoring the 1967-1977 stretch because there were no "hits".
What I think, instead, about this subject.

1) Yes, no hits. I get that, thanks. I was there. In my Italy, my Beach Boys literally DISAPPEARED (no kidding!) starting from 1967. Forever. And there was no helping it in the world of guitar noodling, shirtless frontmen, 20-minute suites, and all that came afterwards. Brian or no Brian.
2) But... the Beach Boys 1967-1977 stretch, artistically, is FANTASTIC. Not perfect, of course, but fantastic. That stuff is timeless, and priceless.
3) This has never been really acknowledged, in any case not enough, by a mile.
4) This 2024 docu was maybe the last chance. There will never be a Peter Jackson for the Boys.
5) Chance TOTALLY missed. Most people will keep on thinking that Good Vibrations was the last good/important thing the Boys, and Brian, did.
6) F..k the damn charts. It seems many people aren't inspired by music, but by charts. And mind you, it's understandable when Brian, Carl, Mike, Al, the artists themselves, worry about the charts. But we, after the facts, in hindsight, should NOT.
7) On the other hand, I understand that nothing will ever sway the chart-smokers.

Jerry Garcia, one who knew something about music and owned thousands of albums, said that his second favourite album was... SMILEY SMILE (in case you wonder, the first one was "Folksingers ‘Round Harvard Square" byJoan Baez, Bill Wood and Ted Alevizos).

Well said, agree 100%.

[Robbie Mac]

I am watching The Beach Boys film on Disney+. Is it my imagination or did they create some of those sound bites with AI? Some of the Brian sound bites sound like they were computer generated.* Ditto for some of the Bruce sound bites. The one sound bite from Paul McCartney talking about Pet Sounds (the quote was from David Leaf’s interview with McCartney for the first Pet Sounds CD) sounded particularly egregious in the AI department.

*Yes, I get why they used old interview footage of Brian.  The one clip you see of current day Brian in the film was very tough to watch.

[HeyJude]

If the requisite for what to cover in the doc was that it had to involve hits, or the "hit era", then they wouldn't have burned time amateurishly and kind of offensively discussing the Manson stuff. 

[Robbie Mac]

Honestly, a better idea (and maybe a less expensive one, perhaps?) would have been to revisit Endless Harmony, update the audio and the visuals for today’s standards and then do that coda at Paradise Cove to cap Endless Harmony off on a higher note than it did.

[Dan Lega]

About SMiLE 1967's demise, the truth has been known since 1993 (liner notes in GV box): Brian had to can the project to save his own life. He was literally imploding.

But what were the reasons causing him to almost literally implode?  Was it The Boys resistance to the lyrics and the ideas behind the album -- and all the emotional baggage that brought?  His mental health problems?  I think it was a mixture of the two.


Love and merci,
Dan Lega 

[Lonely Summer]

I don't know where this would fit in best so I'll just put it here:


"We went blind": The Beach Boys' Al Jardine on recording 'Pet Sounds,' Beatles & Stones, favorite BB song & more

https://www.brooklynvegan.com/we-went-blind-the-beach-boys-al-jardine-on-recording-pet-sounds-beatles-stones-favorite-bb-song-more/?

Recording Pet Sounds and competing with the Beatles made them go blind?
I was told it was something else that would make me go blind!

Too much Stamos?

Obviously you didn't grow up in a religious home.

[Lonely Summer]

I read some comments on the other Beach Boys forums about the documentary and noticed something really off, in my opinion. Namely, quite some "fans" seem to think that the docu was right in practically ignoring the 1967-1977 stretch because there were no "hits".
What I think, instead, about this subject.

1) Yes, no hits. I get that, thanks. I was there. In my Italy, my Beach Boys literally DISAPPEARED (no kidding!) starting from 1967. Forever. And there was no helping it in the world of guitar noodling, shirtless frontmen, 20-minute suites, and all that came afterwards. Brian or no Brian.
2) But... the Beach Boys 1967-1977 stretch, artistically, is FANTASTIC. Not perfect, of course, but fantastic. That stuff is timeless, and priceless.
3) This has never been really acknowledged, in any case not enough, by a mile.
4) This 2024 docu was maybe the last chance. There will never be a Peter Jackson for the Boys.
5) Chance TOTALLY missed. Most people will keep on thinking that Good Vibrations was the last good/important thing the Boys, and Brian, did.
6) F..k the damn charts. It seems many people aren't inspired by music, but by charts. And mind you, it's understandable when Brian, Carl, Mike, Al, the artists themselves, worry about the charts. But we, after the facts, in hindsight, should

Yeah, I don't get the obsession with hits, charts, sales, etc. It's not like they never hit the charts after Good Vibrations. Heroes and Villains, Darlin', Do it Again and I Can Hear Music all hit the top 40 in the late 60's. Surf's Up and Holland did okay on the album charts - but that's not how we should define what is good and what is not. Sunflower was a commercial bomb, but many people love that album. Many people love the equally poor selling Friends. I can honestly say I never, ever heard any Pacific Ocean Blue songs on my radio in the late 70's, yet many people regard it as a masterpiece.
I think the way history will regard the Beach Boys and other groups of their era is pretty much set in stone now. The Beatles continue to attract a level of interest not attained by any act of that - or possibly ANY - era. History will record that the Beach Boys, Kinks, ex-Beatles didn't do any great work after 1973; just as the official history of 60's pop and rock now tells us that after 1966, it was all hard rock and guitar heroes on the charts, even though a look through old issues of Billboard and Cashbox shows that there were plenty of soft rock, pop and MOR acts selling lots of records in that era. Anyone ever heard of Glen Campbell? Carpenters?

[Robbie Mac]

I have to ask this.

An American Family was 2 parts. How is it that John Stamos can get a 2 part miniseries about the BB made yet Frank Marshall and Irving Azoff can only get a less than 2 hour doc made?

[juggler]

The one sound bite from Paul McCartney talking about Pet Sounds (the quote was from David Leaf’s interview with McCartney for the first Pet Sounds CD) sounded particularly egregious in the AI department.

That McCartney clip sounds so bizarre.  It might be AI, but if it is, then whoever coded that AI algorithm should be fired.  It sounds almost nothing like Macca.  Dana Carvey does a better impression of Paul than that.   Does anyone remember the circumstances of Leaf's interview with Paul? Could it be a situation like Leaf recording an audio interview on some cheapo tape recorder not for broadcast but just for his own notes?  And then said lo-fi recording is later run through some digital filters to enhance it with said "enhancement" utterly massacring it?

[Angela Jones]

About SMiLE 1967's demise, the truth has been known since 1993 (liner notes in GV box): Brian had to can the project to save his own life. He was literally imploding.

But what were the reasons causing him to almost literally implode?  Was it The Boys resistance to the lyrics and the ideas behind the album -- and all the emotional baggage that brought?  His mental health problems?  I think it was a mixture of the two.


Love and merci,
Dan Lega 

Thanks to disagreements within the band, Brian's collaborator had left the project. Van Dyke Parks is not an easy person to replace. And Brian was having huge problems with the sequencing. The pressure was enormous. And then the Beatles released Sgt Pepper.

[Zenobi]

I think that even if we could see and hear absolutely everything, to the last bit, about what happened in 1966-1967, we would end knowing exactly what we know now. The matter is so complex, and everybody chooses their favourite narrative.
"Brianistas" will tend to blame Mike.
"Mike Lovers" will say he did no wrong (like, ever).
And so on.
My own narrative is that SMiLE "demise" in 1967 was the end result of everything that happened before, and separating the 100 specific reasons is impossible. What is sure, is that Brian got a mess of "help", by literally everybody, in not completing SMiLE in 1967. He was surrounded by too many people, but he was alone.

[rab2591]

I have to ask this.

An American Family was 2 parts. How is it that John Stamos can get a 2 part miniseries about the BB made yet Frank Marshall and Irving Azoff can only get a less than 2 hour doc made?

Exactly!! I haven't seen the documentary, 50/50 chance that I pony up the money to subscribe to Disney+ for a month to watch it (I realize the fee is equal to a few cups of coffee, but that's pretty much how little I care about seeing this). What is sad is that with 'Get Back' I was subscribing to Disney+ within minutes of that documentary being available. The Beach Boys are without a doubt my favorite band ever and yet I can't seem to be the least-bit enthused about watching this thing. I'm sure I'll get around to it at some point.

The trailer just seemed meh - no magic, the same "insert current one-hit-wonder band personality here" interviews to tell us how inspirational and incredible Brian Wilson is (and, as I've said before, a music personality who released the song 'Water Slide' has absolutely no business being in a Beach Boys documentary...I mean come on guys). The reviews are so lukewarm about this thing. Even people who seem to like this thing sound so tepid about it.

And I keep seeing people say "this documentary was not made for us" - but this is exactly the problem. Maybe if they made a movie for the fans, non-fans would be drawn into the storytelling/magic/music itself. I think of Ken Burn's baseball series, that was clearly made for baseball fans, but yet you can read stories/reviews of non-fans being drawn into the subject because of the amazing filmmaking/story. That's like a 24 hour long documentary from 1994 that is STILL talked about and watched to this day. Imagine if Ken Burns had watered down the story of baseball into an hour and half movie - it would have been forgotten about in a year. Which is likely what will happen with this Beach Boys documentary.

This should have been at least two parts, and not stopping at 1980. On the bright side, it'll introduce people to The Beach Boys. The downside is that so much opportunity was wasted yet again in The Beach Boys realm. At least we have an amazing book and some incredible boxsets from the last few years - which is honestly a heck of a lot more than I would expect from this band. So while the documentary may be disappointing, we're still one of the luckiest/blessed fanbases in music!

[guitarfool2002]

Al Jardine spills the beans again:

“There is some really wonderful footage of our performing,” Jardine said. “But unfortunately, Carl and Dennis are gone, so you don’t have their point of view. You have the narrative, according to Mike Love, and you have me in there somewhere in between, going, uh-hmm, sure. The truth is, we didn’t have enough content the way I would have liked to have done it. The producer did what he could, with what he had.”

https://www.mauinews.com/news/local-news/2024/05/beach-boys-cofounder-reflects-on-career-future/

Just go back to this quote from Al and the direction of this film makes perfect sense. It's the narrative according to Mike Love. If the Smile chapter plays out the way it does, again that makes perfect sense because efforts have been underway for several decades to minimalize the Smile saga and its influence, discredit firsthand eyewitnesses to what was happening, repeat ad nauseum either a whitewashed or false narrative about the how's and why's of what happened, and ultimately dismiss what has been reported and published about it since 1967 by trying to replace it with a narrative which was cartoonishly portrayed on ABC in 2000 via the John Stamos produced biopic...again, the narrative according to Mike. Broadcast twice now by networks owned by Disney.

It's really not hard to suss out why the documentary reads this way and why the narrative is what it is. It's just a shame to see over the past few decades such blatant efforts by some factions to diminish and discredit the individuals who had firsthand, even eyewitness information that would counter the narratives which included Brian being so geeked up on drugs and held back by various leeches and hangers-on that he couldn't do the work and decided to one day wave his hand in the air and scrap everything in his fits of drug-fueled paranoia. It's so laughable, yet if that crap continues to be repeated there are people who will believe it.

And if these narratives go beyond message boards and people with agendas sending false information around the fanbase, and gets broadcast widely to "new" fans on projects like the ABC miniseries and the Disney doc, those new fans will hear it and believe it. Sad.

[feelintheflows]

Unless Taylor Swift is recording/touring with them or dating one of their grandkids, I doubt new fans will care about The Beach Boys.


Jon Stebbins said it best regarding the delayed release of the feel flows set. Look at the history of the band, the answer is obvious. Finding a way to f*** up a beautiful thing. It's in the DNA of the Beach Boys. Sadly this documentary was no exception.

[Zenobi]

Well, I'm glad that I'm not the only one to see why this 2024 documentary is at best a(nother) missed chance, and at worst... nah, I won't say.
The trailer was enough to understand what kind of "project" is.
But, luckily, it's useless. Truth is there for everybody who wants to see it, and the rest don't count. Their loss. The albums are there, SMiLE is there in multiple incarnations, the legacy is there.
As I said, our Beach Boys, and our Brian, have their place in the History of Music, the one with capital H and M. Taylor Swift fans don't listen to them? They don't listen to Mozart, either. Do you think Mozart fans care? "Amadeus" was a horrible revisionistic movie about Mozart, and it's rightly forgotten.

[HeyJude]

I said it up above, but this film is regressive and reductive. Set aside the years/eras it didn't cover. Concerning what it *did* cover, it regressed to old narratives, summations, assumptions, etc.

Congratulations, you correctly recounted the personnel changes in the band. (And not even really, then as the departure of Bruce, Blondie, and Ricky was not mentioned).

I'm trying to write up a big grand review of this thing that touches on as many of the issues as possible.

But in the meantime, I'll also add that that Josh Kun guy being interviewed in this thing was extremely obnoxious. It's like someone Google'd "Academic Music Critic" and went with the first hit. The guy reminded me of the news reports where they bring in a doctor to "diagnose" a celebrity that they've never met or treated. This guy just brought in his filters and prisms and tried to squeeze something to do with the Beach Boys through them. This guy doesn't get, and he completely misses the point. I'm sure I'll have more to say concerning that guy.

[HeyJude]

Could have done without Kokomo over the credits too

"Kokomo" is linked with the film Cocktail, which was released by Disney's Buena Vista / Touchstone pictures. No way Disney's not going to include it in the doc. The credits are the perfect place.

I don't think the inclusion of "Kokomo" was due to the Disney linkage.

It certainly doesn't really promote their brand; I'm not even sure who knows or cares at this point that the song came from "Cocktail", and certainly there aren't too many people who remember that Touchstone Pictures released that film, and also that Touchstone is a subsidiary of Buena Vista Pictures, which is owned by Disney.

I think someone knew it was a big hit of theirs but that the doc cuts off a zillion years before that song came out, and they shoved it in there. At whose behest this was done, well, let's wait and see on that.

[guitarfool2002]

 If they included Kokomo - as mentioned a song with absolutely no historical connection to the timeline nor subject matter covered by the film - but couldn't include 'Til I Die or Surf's Up which are key to the years covered in the film on the soundtrack...there's a major problem here.

I'd also like to hear the backstory of how Kokomo got hammered into the film's content, and which parties may have pushed for it. Any guesses? (sarcasm, there, btw).

[Angela Jones]

If they included Kokomo - as mentioned a song with absolutely no historical connection to the timeline nor subject matter covered by the film - but couldn't include 'Til I Die or Surf's Up which are key to the years covered in the film on the soundtrack...there's a major problem here.

I'd also like to hear the backstory of how Kokomo got hammered into the film's content, and which parties may have pushed for it. Any guesses? (sarcasm, there, btw).

I'm in complete agreement.

Someone on Facebook sarcastically suggested they played Kokomo at the end to hurry up the exit. I agreed with that too.

[Emdeeh]

It's still quite possible that Disney requested that "Kokomo" be included in the doc.

[Rocker]

Well, "Kokomo" is one of only four no. 1 hits the Boys had, so from my point of view it's ok to use it. But I'd be interested to know if they used "Surf City" in any way. Of course this is one of only four no. 1 hits Brian had.

[Justin]

If they included Kokomo - as mentioned a song with absolutely no historical connection to the timeline nor subject matter covered by the film - but couldn't include 'Til I Die or Surf's Up which are key to the years covered in the film on the soundtrack...there's a major problem here.

I'd also like to hear the backstory of how Kokomo got hammered into the film's content, and which parties may have pushed for it. Any guesses? (sarcasm, there, btw).

Huh?

No historical connection?  As Rocker mentions it's their last number one hit and one of their most recognizable songs like it or not.

The fact that the song was just thrown in during the credits should actually dismantle that this was some scheme by Mike the villan which you're insinuating here.   The song and its story would have been part of the actual documentary---as it should be. 

[HeyJude]

Sure, anything is possible. It's possible Van Dyke Parks called in a favor and asked for "Kokomo" to be included (he played the accordion after all).

I just don't think it's very likely that nobody else brought it up, and somebody at Disney (does anybody working at Disney in upper management in 2024 even remember that "Kokomo" is a soundtrack song from a Disney-owned movie?) insisted on including the song, and did so *because* it's a "Disney song." To what end would this gain Disney anything? It wouldn't gain them any money, as they'd be paying *themselves* to license the composition (and that's assuming Disney full owns the publishing; it indicates as such in the credits of the doc, but old pressings of the song show multiple publishers representing the other writers). They almost surely had to *put out* some amount of money to include the song.

It's not impossible that they made a list of songs that Disney or BRI/Iconic owned, and for which sync rights could theoretically be cheaper.

But there are a zillion logical reasons the directors or some band members would think to add the song to the credits. I'm not even complaining about it. I'm not a detractor of the song. I've always said it's a catchy song and was a great shot in the arm for the band in 1988. It *should* be part of the story!

I do think it's kind of weird to put in at the end of the doc in that it only serves to draw attention to eras they *didn't* cover in the doc, but it's not a big deal that it was in the doc. But I don't think Disney would have insisted on the song being in there.

If Disney really had a burning desire to remind the world that "Kokomo" is a Disney song, then you'd think they would have pushed in the editorial stage for the era in which the song was released to be covered in said doc!