It's About Time: Beach Boys Poll Results

We could use a big crowd-pleasing single. Dance Dance Dance?

Has "When I Grow Up (To Be A Man)" come up yet? Another I forgot to vote for.

#15

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/c/cd/Beach_Boys_-_Darlin%27.jpg

Darlin' - Wild Honey
241 points, 10 votes

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j6xoJeq-rto
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RJ1WlesVxgc

oddly Mike Love has kept this in their live repertoire

in mike love's head this and Kokomo are the only things the beach boys released after pet sounds

good song tho. Carl really shines.

there's your big crowd pleasing single

I was about to predict this but thought if those other Wild Honey tracks got so high that it would be top 10. "Darlin" must have seemed like a step backward at the time but you have to think it has held up better than most of the hippy dippy shit it was surrounded by.

in the culture, not the album.

that's the only crowd pleasing single left, from hereon it's just love you and miu tracks

"Break Away" got a vote from me.... yeah the production is a bit dryer than it could have been, but even as it is it's great - it's a testament to the usual richness of BW's producing that a song with such elaborate backing vocals, brass instruments, etc. could seem "underproduced".... maybe in comparison to the '65-'66 period Beach Boys but not late-'60s pop music in general.

BTW this song was a major hit in the UK and many other countries, but bombed in the US.

"Girl Don't Tell Me" didn't get my vote but it's a great song. It's neat how you could hear the Beach Boys both influencing and being influenced by the Beatles on numerous songs by both bands.

Wow, Wild Honey popular with this crowd.... "Darlin'" is probably the catchiest song from this set, although I also love the Stevie Wonder cover and "I'd Love Just Once To See You" (dark horse for a top-15 placing here!)

I like the songs on Wild Honey but the production turns me off- sounds "boxy" or something. Like it was recorded in a closet.

nah that was Smiley Smile

I like the production on Smiley Smile!

you best believe i do

I like the songs on Wild Honey but the production turns me off- sounds "boxy" or something. Like it was recorded in a closet.

this is where they started using the home studio right? smiley smile was still Gold Star & Western.

^^^no

Nevertheless, the Beach Boys still needed to complete an album to fulfil their obligations to Capitol Records, so a replacement was hastily recorded, largely at Brian Wilson's new home studio in Bel Air, during June and July.

this is why Smiley Smile has no drums, no echo chamber, etc.

I like the songs on Wild Honey but the production turns me off- sounds "boxy" or something. Like it was recorded in a closet.

> yeah but also in a way refreshing in a way

oops, Dept. of Redundancy Dept....

in a way this is one of the things I love most about the Beach Boys' catalog, their willingness (even eagerness) to make abrupt stylistic changes in the face of near total disdain from their target audience. they typify and embody this conflict that plays itself out repeatedly in the music biz - band captures youthful imagination and audience refuses to accept any further development. even if the subsequent development produces amazing music. the artist who is able to sustain an audience through a host of stylistic shifts is amazingly rare (Beatles, Bowie, Dylan, Stones)

yeah, I want to compare Wild Honey to what came before but it's not going to work. i guess i want to hear all that space.

xpost

because really, Mike Love is right - most of the time people don't wanna hear new and different shit. they want you to do the same thing over and over again.

xp

^^^no

still, Smiley Smile includes stuff that they started tracking at Western, plus a few elements from the Smile sessions, so it wasn't entirely the home studio yet. Also, Smiley Smile is where they stopped using session players

right; & I mean this is still true of the BBs catalog; I think it's widely perceived as "lifestyle music" in a way that the other artists you listed, Bowie, the Stones, etc., aren't. The BBs is beach music. This isn't how *musicians* view the band; but musicians don't get you Rolls-Royces.

because really, Mike Love is right - most of the time people don't wanna hear new and different shit. they want you to do the same thing over and over again.

I think that's kind of a mischaracterization of the situation though. It's not like they were doing the same thing over and over from '62-'67. A song like Good Vibrations proved that people do want to hear new and different shit. It's just that you're not going to have a big hit with a song about chomping your vegetables which is where I think Mike Love was coming from.

'62-'67 is a fairly brief timespan, ie, it's the span of a listener's life as a teenager and the evolution was fairly gradual. Lyrically the leap from Surfer Girl to Good Vibrations was incremental and easy to digest. but after that, once they were "adults" and started going off in different tangents...

I think it's widely perceived as "lifestyle music" in a way that the other artists you listed

hamstrung by their having jumped on several bandwagons earlier (surfing, cars, etc.) audience didn't accept their jumping on other bandwagons (ecology, country rock, disco). audience only allows you one bandwagon!

Now you sound like Mike Love. The audience didn't abandon them because they didn't stick to their original bandwagon. They abandoned them because they stopped making great songs.

the problem with Smiley Smile and Wild Honey are not that they jumped on a new bandwagon, it was that the quality was lower (or alternately, the quality was sufficient but didn't live up to the hype). There was a slow, consistent build to Good Vibrations and then the rug was pulled out from under the ran base with, indeed, songs about chomping vegetables. No wonder people abandoned them.

wk = genius

They abandoned them because they stopped making great songs.

eh this is demonstrably untrue imho

There was a slow, consistent build to Good Vibrations and then the rug was pulled out from under the ran base with, indeed, songs about chomping vegetables.

seeing as how these songs are on the same album and the album STILL BOMBED I think you are missing some caveats. they were hamstrung by their previous image and made an abrupt shift that was too alarming/too random, I think we can agree on that much...?

honestly I think Smiley Smile bombed for a variety of reasons - for a lot of the general listening audience their previous image was still stuck to them and was no longer "cool", and for the other portion of their audience that was expecting Smile, it was a total letdown.

Good Vibrations hit #1 in October 1966 and was then tacked onto Smiley Smile out of sheer desperation in September 1967. GV was old news by that point and the only other track even close to resembling Brian's original intention for Smile is H&V.

I do kind of think that if Smile had actually been completed and released, it still would have bombed.

xp

rather, released in October and hit #1 in December. Still almost an entire year, during which every other major pop act was coming out with amazing new stuff. It must have been offensive to listeners to have a year-old track lead off what was supposed to be the most advanced pop album in history.

>>> this is where they started using the home studio right? smiley smile was still Gold Star & Western.

>> Nevertheless, the Beach Boys still needed to complete an album to fulfil their obligations to Capitol Records, so a replacement was hastily recorded, largely at Brian Wilson's new home studio in Bel Air, during June and July.

> this is why Smiley Smile has no drums, no echo chamber, etc.

And yet, not even the best modern electronic revefberation patches are going to make anything recorded in my bedroom sound as if it were made at Gold Star or Western....

reverberation

OK, so a barrel load of "my" songs have come up since I was last here. Placed "Let the Wind Blow" high, such a weird off-kilter feel to that song, sinister is the wrong word, the strange ascending bassline is what really makes it, I don't know anyone else but Brian Wilson who would have come up with it. And "Break Away", I think the Beach Boys themselves said that song was underproduced or unfinished (and it wasn't Mike Love this time!) but I was listening to it the other day and I don't think it is at all. The lead vocal on it is absolutely gorgeous to boot.

thinking of weird artist moves in 1967: how did Smiley Smile sell in its immediate era compared with John Wesley Harding?

chart performance:

Today! US #4 UK #6
Summer Days... US #2 UK #4
Pet Sounds US #10 UK #2
Smiley Smile US #41 UK #8

Interesting that Smiley Smile didn't "bomb" in the UK at all. Likewise, all of the late '60s albums charted much higher across the pond

#14

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/d/d8/Beach_Boys_-_Dance%2C_Dance%2C_Dance.jpg

The Warmth Of The Sun - Shut Down V2
250 points, 12 votes, One #1 vote

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=70psCljGnXM

I'll say it: this song is overrated

^crazy

you monster.
i think this is classic, think i put it fairly high on my ballot.

like how it fits in with the early beach boys concept w/o being a surfing song.

Didn't vote for this *looks at ground, shame-faced*

hauntingly beautiful. this is the pinnacle of the development of the Surfer Girl / In My Room idea IMO.

I also think it's pretty damn psychedelic

this sounds like it should have been the one hit of some obscure band who then died in a mysterious accident before it was released. only one or two songs in their career are anywhere as dark as this.