It's About Time: Beach Boys Poll Results

I also believe that Smile in its original form would have bombed -- there was nothing the Beach Boys could have released in the USA that would have superceded what was in the air.

I've always thought that Smile could have done it. Not that it would have superceded what was in the air, but that its presence would have been this alternate beacon, the ramifications of which are hard to speculate about.

The audience didn't abandon them because they didn't stick to their original bandwagon. They abandoned them because they stopped making great songs.

^^ value judgment over the fact that they stopped having hits.

some classic trolling here

15-11 is quite a run. I guess this means no "When I Grow Up" or "Little Saint Nick".

Honestly don't know if "Here Today" is going to make the top ten or if it didn't make the top 69 at all. I voted for it.

I didn't vote for it, but it popped into my head at some point over the past couple of days reading this thread and I thought "shit, why didn't I vote for that?"

Seriously doubt there are any surprises left aside from the order.

I just made a list of 9 songs that I'm pretty sure will make the top 10 - Here Today and When I Grow Up To Be A Man are both good candidates for the 10th spot. Also, I voted for Girls On The Beach - I thought that would have made the list, but I'm doubting it will hit top 10.

Scratch that - there are 10 shoo-ins, I reckon.

^^ value judgment over the fact that they stopped having hits.

yeah, I think for me there are two separate things going on here. The first is that I was trying to argue that they didn't have any later hits because their later songs weren't hit material. That doesn't necessarily have to mean that it's not still great music. It could just be great music that happens to be uncommercial in some way.

But personally, I also feel that there was a big drop off in quality, and that their later stuff was not great very often. And even the better stuff from later albums pales in comparison to the earlier peaks of their career and I personally can't help but make that comparison.

So I was conflating those two things when I said "they stopped making great songs." But alongside my personal and obviously subjective feeling that their work took a big hit in quality, I think there's a way that you can look at least somewhat objectively at their later material and say that they weren't exactly writing hit material anymore. The subject matter got weirder, the songs were often somewhat depressing, some of the songs have weird chord changes that seem kind of aimless and unfinished at times, the recording quality got worse, they stopped using the greatest session players in the greatest studios, the arrangements were rarely as wildly creative as some of their earlier work, etc.

And again, there doesn't have to be a value judgement implied by the fact that the work got less commercial. All of the stuff I wrote above could equally apply to an album like Oar or There's A Riot Goin On, both of which I think are brilliant. But personally, in the Beach Boys case, the shift in focus doesn't really work for me and so I am placing a value judgement on it. I'm not saying that the later stuff was obviously worse because they didn't have chart hits. I'm saying they didn't have chart hits with the later stuff because it was less commercial, and I personally happen to also feel that it was generally worse.

I'm old enough to remember that Good Vibrations was an enormous, mind-blowing hit, but that the follow-up single, Heroes and Villains, turned a lot of people off at the time - the lyrics were confusing, the chromatic melody was annoying, it was just too weird. Kind of the same effect that "Tusk" had on people who were really looking forward to Rumours Part 2. Other than "Do It Again", I can't recall any subsequent Beach Boys single getting significant AM airplay in my neck of the woods until the "Brian's Back" promo push in 76.

That's actually a diatonic melody! All stepwise motion down about an octave and a half.

Whoops! You're right of course. I was remembering it incorrectly in my head.

Even if they didn't have another God Only Knows or Good Vibrations in them post-1966, I think Smile would have been a logical step forward for their career esp given the context of an album-centric environment. Wilson's inability to recognize his more polished recordings of Our Prayer, Surf's Up, Cabinessence, Wonderful, Wind Chimes as timely singles was his and the Beach Boys downfall. The slow drip method of releasing these songs album by album is frustrating and what ultimately cost them the same luxuries that the Beatles, Stones, Bowie, etc. had (getting the audience to sign on to stylistic shifts). Smiley Smile has got to be the biggest career killing album this side of Metal Machine Music.

eh, heroes and villains is kind of a shit song. and imo none of those songs you mention would have been viable singles. unless we're talking b-sides, then yes. MAYBE you could have passed off surf's up as a second single, if there had been another "good vibrations" on the would-be Smile to precede it. again, heroes and villains is kind of a dud song, for all of the reasons that ρεμπετις, cited. realistically speaking, none of the tracks that would have showed up on Smile are anthemic or bright enough to have made it as potential singles. Smile is worthwhile in its own way; there are great ideas within, but it's more of a smoking with your friends late at night and discussing shit record than it is a hear it on the radio while you're driving home from work or sitting on the beach record.

in a sense, Look is the brightest, most energetic song from the Smile sessions, but it's a. an instrumental and b. reprises melody line from Good Vibrations, so it's not gonna qualify as a candidate for a single, either...

iow, mike love really was right-- bw, however unwittingly or not, truly was fucking with the formula...and as open to experimentation by pop groups as the era was, there is a huge difference between the radio-friendly hits that were crammed onto sgt. pepper's, and the experiments that largely comprised the smile tracks...

Oh, they were both right.

Brian should have been able to concentrate on doing "works of beauty" unencumbered by the demands of touring, hit-single-with-surf-references-only songwriting, and so on. Bring in the lads for vocals, and call the ensemble "Brian Wilson" or some such other.

Whereas Mike Love could go on and stick rigidly to the formula, until the seam was all used up.

I thought it ironic that "Almost Summer" has the line "We're growing up, little by little", I mean how old was he by then?

Interesting comparison re: career-killing albums, from a band that was often compared to the Beach Boys in their early days, released in 1968:

4 Seasons - Genuine Imitation Life Gazette

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XiHfkCkQGg0

And not because of underproduction! (either the music or the packaging, which had me wondering the first time I opened it if there was actually a record buried in there somewhere amidst all the foldouts and newspapers)

This was their first attempt to make a cohesive album-length statement - their previous LPs were rotating collections built around their most recent singles, updated or replaced frequently to feature their latest hits, ususual titled something like (Latest Hit) And 11 Other Great Songs, that make even the erratic early Beach Boys albums look like a stable lot by comparison.

I'd love to get reactions from this group to the album-opening track above....

I've always been interested in Wind Chimes. It's like Brian's own "Doors of Perception Heaven and Hell" - describing these inanimate objects in his room with amplified meaning and clarity. It's fitting that he recorded two versions - a peaceful, relaxed, breezy version and a claustrophobic, unsettling one - kind of reflects the dichotomous qualities of the psychedelic trip. Who else was doing acid songs that reflected the paranoid side of psychedelia?

xp forgot to mention this brought an abrupt halt to a string of thirteen US top-10 hits - the highest-charting single from the four released from the album reached #75; they wouldn't see the top 40 again for another 6 years. I couldn't find chart info on the album itself (it doesn't have a Wikipedia page, what am I supposed to do?)

Who else was doing acid songs that reflected the paranoid side of psychedelia?

Who else was doing acid songs that didn't reflect the paranoid side of psychedelia?

Even "My White Bicycle" has an "oh noooo the police are LOOKING at meeeee" line.

Sgt Pepper has a dearth of terrifying moments.

Wind Chimes (Smiley Smile) version is perfect in its uneasiness though - it only just manages to sound harmonic and often breaks down from chord to chord - like being afraid to move one moment and then calmer and then ERrrrrk!

Dunno, "Good Morning" has a whole procession of animals chasing Lennon....

...in the order they would eat each other. Maybe the most lol moment on the whole album.

Plus Good Morning isn't exactly musically frightening, not like Wind Chimes. Yeah sure, I bet there are countless examples of good acid-paranoia songs, but Wind Chimes is the only one I can think of that reflects the mood of "just being kinda spooked by old trinkets in the attic" kind of thing.

I like that the chicken ate the lot, it seems...

haven't actually sat down and listened to Good Morning Good Morning since I heard about the "food-chain" thing TBH - never particularly enjoyed that one.

Also, I voted for Girls On The Beach - I thought that would have made the list, but I'm doubting it will hit top 10.

At first, "Girls on the Beach" may seem a bit of a rehash of "The Warmth of the Sun" or "Surfer Girl". But it's not - and has lots of nifty attributes that make it unique. They include the heady mix of the "one waits there for you" promise of the lyric, that sudden, unexpected key change smack dab in the middle of each of the three verses (where the title phrase is sung) and equally unexpected change back to the original key near the end of it, and the breathy Dennis solo vocal on just one couplet on the bridge ("the salt in her hair/the warmth of the air") in a song that everywhere else uses five-part harmony. But the crowning touch of brilliance is the (again, incredibly unexpected) upward key change one-quarter of the way through the last verse (on the key word "couples"), followed just a few seconds later by yet another upward key change that was already baked into the middle of every verse at the title phrase, before returning down one key on the last syllable of the phrase "and with their boys tonight" into a vocal/instrumental flourish (which appears nowhere else in the song - but again so skillfully blended in that it can easily go unnoticed unless pointed out) that leads to the outro and fadeout.

The suspense-building last-verse upward key change is a hackneyed songwriting device used that in the hands of the less adroit often sounds trite and cliched - i.e. in that annoying Titanic song after the thundering bass drum kick - but normally the key change is at the beginning of the third verse immediately following the song's bridge. Who else but BW would change the key one-quarter of the way into the third verse, in a song that already has two key changes built into every verse to begin with?

Incredifreakingbrilliant...

I'm not a huge "All Summer Long" fan, but you've just totally 180'd me on Girls On The Beach.

Has the song "All Summer Long" popped up yet? I do like that one.

Can we get a recap pls?

#42

All Summer Long, the album, not as strong as the three studio albums three studio albums that followed it, but anything with "I Get Around" and "Girls on the Beach" is off to a good start, "We'll Run Away" has one of the amazing melodies that Brian Wilson could throw off in his sleep (although nobody who has lived my life could ever get excited about getting married), and although slight I always found "Drive-In" to be fun. "Wendy" is quite good - great intro. The rest of it is rather middling though.

I think I've always skipped that one because there seem to be so many replicant songs from the "Greatest Hits" album, and the rest are a bit weak. I like We'll Run Away.

"All Summer Long" just doesn't have its own "thing" going on really - the songs on it could all have appeared on other albums, whereas I think a lot of Beach Boys albums have their own specific character.

I just wiki'ed Best of the Beach Boys since I never had that album and didn't know what it contained

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Best_of_The_Beach_Boys

Wow, the Brits sure got a better deal here than the Yanks did...

(or did you mean "Endless Summer" or something else, which also had alot of ASL songs)

Yeah, All Summer Long was their least focused effort up to this point.

The Smile LP could have been as weird as Van Dyke Parks' most psychedelic dream as long as there were 2 or 3 radio-ready singles on there. I am happy to listen to 10-minute versions of H&V so I don't quite buy the argument that it couldn't have made a positive impact on the national music scene and the Beach Boys' career arc under the right circumstances (i.e. not after coverage about the collapse of the Smile project and not after the backward-looking release of "Then I Kissed Her"). Perhaps if it had been released on time the reaction would have been different. If "A Day in the Life" could get substantial radio play, I don't see any reason why "Surf's Up" couldn't have been a successful followup single.

"Surf's Up" IMO the Smile track most likely to be a big hit. Compare it to contemporaneous pop/rock - say, "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Heart's Club Band" (the song) or "Eight Miles High" - it's at least as good and as up to date, at a time of frenetic change in popular music.

The version on the bootleg, i.e. the orchestral backing track followed by the solo piano demo..

.. sounds perfect as it is. The vocal doesn't need adding to the first part. Think of it as a long intro.

xp (or I meant "most likely to have been a big hit. Can't imagine it being a hit single at all in 2011.

The Beach Boys vs. Lady Gaga vs. Katy Perry, who knows....)

I read something somewhere about Brian's vocal on the first section of the piano recording being appended to the orchestral backing (overlaying it using digital whateveritis) of the first section as a track on the 2011 (2012?) Smile release, probably just to have something that existing Smile boots don't have.

of course, "Surf's Up" would then have had to be followed by something new and different - Surf's Up, those old times are over now - and maybe this whole song and dance would have happened all over again and the Beach Boys would have been left behind by popular culture in 1968 instead of 1967.

Surf's Up and God Only Knows will place top two - they kind of have to don't they?

There's no way we'll ever know what would have happened next had Smile been finished and released in 1967, whether Brian's mental state would have been better (that's really the whole inference of the "Smile completed in 1967 would have changed everything" argument, isn't it?), and whether something more forward-thinking or elaborate that somehow improved on Pet Sounds and Smile would have followed. I'm glad we have the late-'60s BB albums we do, though.

Re: popularity - actually it's become very difficult to tell what music really is the most popular in 2011 - the days when radio airplay and record-store sales told the whole story are obviously long gone.

Who's on top in music? It's gotten hard to say

Well, hits and flops, fit mental state or not, both the Beatles and the Beach Boys switched to a more rudimentary approach post Smile/Peppers what with Wild Honey and the White Album. Once thigns go beyond the Smile/Peppers model it basically becomes King Crimson/Moody Blues/ELO territory anyway - and those guys were only moderately successful hit-wise in the early 70s.

#10

http://static.rateyourmusic.com/album_images/2c939612942d92be3544473a05dbd450/3523634.jpg

Cabinessence - 20/20
346 points, 14 votes, one #1 vote

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zbAWMc-E5P4

(single cover art's from 2004)

i had no idea singles were released from Smile. Cabinessence is great and that, but I left it off. Mostly because it just doesn't match Surf's Up, but it is a cool collage song and the closest they came to realising Brian's Smile vision of 12 pocket symphonies or whatever.

xp I was just about to point out the same thing re: the White Album - it's very back-to-a-straight=rock-band guitar/bass/drums on alot of songs, without the elaborate productions of the 1967 recordings. Elaborately (sp.?) produced music isn't necessarily better music, although I tend to like rich, lush production, which is not to be confused with glossy or gimmicky production. I also don't think more elaborately-produced music would have had to lead to '70s prog sounding Yes/King Crimson/ELP type stuff either. You can have rich production and tight song structure in the same song, not the 12-minute-long noodlings that ramble on aimlessly etc.