It's About Time: Beach Boys Poll Results

The bridge on "Long Promised Road" is the most gorgeous moment of any Beach Boys song Brian didn't write. Also one of the first completely effective usages of synthesizers in a pop song (following various songs on Abbey Road and Who's Next, of course). Too bad Carl never came close to creating something this good again.

feel flows imo

when the strings(?) come in near the end of ttga and repeat the melody it's one of the most beautiful moments in the beach boys catalog

i like forever but it is a little too corny/wedding song to make my top 20

'feel flows' vs. 'long promised road'

I totally forgot about that thread

yeah I would never turn off forever if it were playing but it's not a personal fav. I think dennis wilson wrote 10 better songs than that.

that said it feels 'complete' in a way that a lot of his songs don't

Forever is a beautiful song but I always thought All I Wanna Do and Tears In The Morning were quite a bit better and touched me a lot more. Sunflower really is such a great album, buying that two albums on one disc set with Surf's up really was one of the best things I bought when I was younger.

Good description of forever as "complete", a lot of Dennis tracks sound like they could use some outside tlc/help.

Time to Get Alone - interesting 3/4 track but it's more frilly than pretty IMO. One of a few really solid songs on an underappreciated album though.

Celebrate the News is killer. I've definitely been sleeping on that one.

but "Wild Honey" and "Darlin'" sound like early '70s AM radio. In 1967.

otm

Many thanks for this thread - this is my first exposure to Time to Get Alone, Celebrate the News, Big Sur and The Trader.

not a big deal for me personally because i don't have much to add, but any chance you could post these a little earier in the day? might get more the the euro vote chiming in? at the moment they're going up overnight here.

yeah I can try not to post them America-latenight

The Little Girl I Once Knew is too low but I didn't vote so I can't really complain. Hope She Knows Me Too Well places high

man looking through all their album covers is a horror show

wish i voted in this

catching up with the latest posts -- some great stuff. and it's about time stamos made an appearance, for christ's sake. where would the beach boys be without stamos!

#46

Little Pad - Smiley Smile
104 points, 5 votes
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pZGPxesVlUo

Came super close to including Little Pad -- but it felt a little too slight at the end of the day.

Did include it. Bit silly but what the hell. Regretting not including "Country Air" btw.

didn't vote for it, but it is lovely. great mixtape song.

Do it!

yeah, no way I could rank this as one of the Beach Boys' 20 best songs. But still fun to listen to, if also a little disturbing.

They were on my shortlist of 40 or so. I needed justifications for cutting stuff, so short instrumentals seemed like a good place to start.

I don't understand. Our Prayer isn't an instrumental, and is one of the least "slight" things the BBs ever did. People go to school for decades and can't write stuff like that. Like, if that's slight, then Bach is AM Gold. :(

voted for Little Pad because when I tried to learn to play it recently I was totally flummoxed by the chord changes, it is a really oddly-constructed song.

also it is purty and the first time they really got the SOUND of Hawai'i down (even though they have earlier songs that are about Hawai'i)

I don't mean that it sounds like a traditional Hawai'ian tune btw, just that it successfully evokes the tropical-island-paradise vibe, where earlier songs with the same subject matter did not

"Our Prayer" is 1:10, though. I think the original poster was just questioning whether it belonged amongst the twenty best things the BB ever did.

the answer is yes!

I have a special place in my heart for their a cappella tracks, and that's probably the second best one

"Our Prayer" is spooky and perfectly titled - sounds like monks in a huge medieval cathedral. Probably would have been #21 or #22 for me.

here's a spotify playlist: http://open.spotify.com/user/sp10000/playlist/36kXCKE1TDnsvQHiUCtfPt

#45

Wonderful - Smiley Smile
105 points, 5 votes
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T5CD40z6S60
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=muSou79UFXQ&feature=related

One oddity I probably should have voted for: "The Old Folks at Home/Old Man River." They don't know the words to the latter, but the arrangement is so wistful and lyrical it doesn't matter.

this is one of those tracks whose life was completely sucked out on Smiley Smile. Love the Smile session work on it though.

"In Fort Worth, Texas there is a drug clinic which takes people off the streets and helps them get over bad LSD trips. They don't use any traditional medical treatment whatsoever. All they do is play the patient our Smiley Smile album and apparently this acts as a soothing remedy which relaxes them and helps them to recover completely from their trip."

... uhhhhhhhhh... perhaps Carl was referring to a secret CIA establishment investigating methods of extreme mental torture.

this is one of those tracks whose life was completely sucked out on Smiley Smile.

It just got really weird and creepy.

Thanks to Mike Love!

(prob)

off topic, but I'm going through that "singles collection" box and it appears there's lots of stuff in mono. Is Hushabye available in mono digitally anywhere else? I can't recall ever hearing it and it sounds great. What is it going to take to get some of those original albums in a mono/stereo twofer?

#43 (tie)

Wendy - All Summer Long
111 points, 6 votes

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fkqhZJTLulQ

hmm, never been crazy about this song. this clip is great though.

yeah I rate it in the lower half of their radio pop hits. not a bad song but nothing that really makes it stand out.

Oh, they're not spectacular but I think there are definitely things that make it stand out.

yeah Wendy is okay but nothing special imho. Brian's falsetto really does approach "Mickey Mouse with a sore throat" territory here, as Mike would say

good things about this track: Brian's vocal, Mike's tag, the amateurish organ solo, the Good Vibrations-esque changes in instrumentation and sound and use of open space, especially near the end. I see where people who slag it are coming from though.

listening to it now, i pretty much like everything about it except the "wennnnndy" part.

It's subtle. There's no chorus. And the refrain line is this beautiful derivative of the first line of the fantastic two-part verse.

The intro is incredible.

I don't understand. Our Prayer isn't an instrumental, and is one of the least "slight" things the BBs ever did. People go to school for decades and can't write stuff like that. Like, if that's slight, then Bach is AM Gold. :(

If you're trying to make me regret not voting for it, you've succeeded!

No, it's not an instrumental, but there aren't any lyrics, and it's just over a minute long. So that's why I called it "slight." But don't get me wrong: I still love it. Honestly, if I'd known it had so much support, I probably wouldn't have given it short shrift. Although I guess the other thing is that I felt like I already had too many Smile tracks.

but there aren't any lyrics

You know what I mean by this: the "mmm"s and "aah"s are vocables.

#43 (tie)

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/0/0b/Beach_Boys_-_Sail_On%2C_Sailor.jpg

Sail On Sailor - Holland
111 points, 6 votes

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FDWyxogL3KM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dMdaFVovbng

man kinda wishing I had a stack of Beach Boys 45s just for the sleeve art alone

yeah another really nice one