It's About Time: Beach Boys Poll Results

Great Mike vocal on "That's Not Me."

two great mike vocals in a row, actually

yes yes and yes! that crystalline mike love sound. i don't care how adolescent the lyrics might come across; this song is devastating on so many levels

the organ, the percussion, the background vocal harmonies. it's situated in-between a bunch of emotionally resonant songs such that it feels almost lightweight by contrast, but man

aren't you glad was my #8, love that song

forgot about you're so good to me, wouldn't have voted for it but solid tune

guitar figure reprised on 'the night was so young', if i'm not mistaken

background vox in that's not me are positively unreal. seriously wonder if those guys ever sounded so sublime before or since then

like, cannot listen to 1:40 to 1:50 or so w/o getting total chills

only one of the bottom 10 i'm not familiar with is california saga but that sounds pretty good and i like/love the other 9, picked 2/10 so far

i feel really lucky, b/c i "discovered" pet sounds when i was 19, and listened to it every night for a month, it was like a ritual, i just soaked it up...i don't think i had ever been so blown away by a record before that. just listening to what they sounded like when they all sang together, it was so affecting. you hear the stories about brian wilson supposedly praying to make a beautiful record or whatever. i dunno, but whatever mojo he had going on at that time was obv. extremely effective

gonna do one more tonight

#60

Wind Chimes - Smiley Smile / Smile
76 points, 4 votes

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Crcq3G18JLc
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r2VkxzhWbxI

2004 version vastly superior imo but the part where the drums come in at about 2:00 bugs me to no end, a tasteless addition to the song

surprised that didn't finish a bit higher, that's the one song i kicked myself for not including after i submitted my ballot

if i walked into a church and heard ppl singing like the vocals on that's not me, i'd so quickly be like 'where do i sign up?'

2004 version vastly superior imo but the part where the drums come in at about 2:00 bugs me to no end, a tasteless addition to the song

yeah, get what you mean, that fill is so naff

i can't listen to the 2004 Smile because of the vocals

eh, i like the rockin' part of windchimes.

weirdly, the first version i heard was by baby lemonade. does anyone remember that band?
http://powerpopcriminals.blogspot.com/2010/10/baby-lemonade-wonderful-ep-1993-baby.html

Sure, saw them when they were Arthur Lee's backing band once.

baby lemonade is the wondermints of arthur lee
xp

Great Mike vocal on "That's Not Me."
--timellison

yes! i dunno if i've ever thought about it quite that way, but i'm thinking you are totally otm

^cosign this, and also this

like, cannot listen to 1:40 to 1:50 or so w/o getting total chills

― dell (del), Saturday, 13 August 2011

There's also another version of "Wind Chimes" on the box set (which is my favorite), and there's an instrumental bootleg too.

Here's the version that's on the box set:
youtu.be/sRFE-24ucxc?t=2m20s

ha i put you're so good to me at #1

I voted for it too... not #1 though. Poll results lookin' good so far!

#59

http://www.sergent.com.au/beachboys/addsomemusic.jpg
Add Some Music To Your Day - Sunflower
78 points, 4 votes

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PBkA4-U4MPk

see, sunflower has never quite lived up to its promise for me. bit of a mystery, b/c i have an enormous soft spot for "sunshine pop" in all of its forms, and this record, with Deirdre, etc., occupies that territory more than anything else in their catalog . but i don't know. whenever i listen to this record it just runs right past me without ever satisfactorily settling in. that being said, i love the way they run through ridiculous vocal acrobatics in this song that you just know they more or less tossed off, but would take hours upon hours of studio time for other acts to replicate

Poll results lookin' good so far!

yeah, new u.s. citizens or just ppl in general should be presented with a comp containing these results. already completely devastating, and we're not even a dozen songs in. i remember telling an ex-gf that i LOVED the beach boys, and of course she was like "oh, Aruba, Jamaica, ooh i want to take her..." can be really tough to overcome people's ingrained prejudices regarding certain artists. but have a feeling whatever songs end up here would go a long way towards dispelling all those preconceptions

#58

Cool, Cool Water - Sunflower
79 points, 4 votes
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=niktpOfb79w

Weekend results! Cool! For some reason I thought you were going to do the next batch on Monday.

decided to do about 10 a day for a week

this song. oh man.

add some music to your day was on my shortlist. A bit schmaltzy but I listened to it over and over again as part of a self-made GV CD3-esque loop a few years back.

Aren't You Glad is kind of cool, but I keep waiting for "wah wah, ho wah" to come in. I don't know, it just sounds like they took Water and made it more conventional and less interesting.

2004 version vastly superior imo

that's just baffling to me

huh. i like it precisely b/c it takes on that pop song trajectory. tbh sometimes get bored with the smile-era workouts that anticipate stereolab's career

yeah, I could just get lost in Smile bootlegs forever. I love all of the half-formed ideas, different arrangements, sudden radical shifts, etc.

in fact, I think Smiley Smile is way better than 2004 Smile for that reason. It's probably my favorite album of theirs taken as a whole, although not many tracks from it made my ballot (and I didn't do an album ballot). I kind of wish Wilson would have just taken all of his various demos and ideas and bits and pieces and edited them together into a sprawling mess of a double album in '67. I don't think it's nearly as interesting in its "finished" form.

i love sunflower but add some music and cool cool water are ones i usually skip

The finished Smile is somewhere around 52 minutes, though, right? I don't think it leaves much out.

xp

you skip cool cool water??!! i don't even know, man.

i like that youtube version posted above which is from warmth of the sun as compared to the sunflower version

The finished Smile is somewhere around 52 minutes, though, right? I don't think it leaves much out.

he may not have left anything out, but he cleaned it all up, and smoothed over the rough edges to the point where he removed everything that was interesting about it. the two wind chimes versions posted above are a great example. Or compare a bootleg version of the original Mrs. O'Leary's Cow to the re-recorded version.

i like that youtube version posted above which is from warmth of the sun as compared to the sunflower version

couldn't agree with you more!

wk offtm

it's slower and spacier, i should download that

Yeah, wk, can't agree with that at all. I think most of the 2004 Smile was remarkably true to the original arrangements.

(The original Smile arrangements, that is. Obviously the Smiley Smile versions of "Vege-Tables," "Wind Chimes," etc. were much different.)