It's About Time: Beach Boys Poll Results

1. All I Wanna Do
2. 'Til I Die (7:32 version I linked to in the voting thread)
3. I Was Made to Love Her
4. When I Grow Up (To Be A Man)
5. God Only Knows
6. Let The Wind Blow
7. You're Still A Mystery
8. Feel Flows
9. Celebrate The News
10. Country Air
11. The Man With All The Toys
12. Hang On To Your Ego
13. Good Vibrations
14. She's Goin' Bald
15. Here Comes The Night
16. Gettin' Hungry
17. Trader
18. Their Hearts Were Full Of Spring
19. Lookin' At Tomorrow
20. Lady

Only 11 of my picks placed. People rediscovering The Beach Boys should get the Smiley Smile/Wild Honey twofer with the bonus tracks

I always liked Transcendental Meditation though. I don't really get the hate for that one

yeah, that track is boss imo

in fact i voted for it

I had no problem w/ its existence in the world, but I think it's a crappy ending for 'friends'

Except for their big hits I'm unfamiliar with the Beach Boys, and while I still think those happy sunny surf songs are pretty annoying, I'm so happy that I discovered Till I Die thanks to this thread. What a gorgeous song! Thank you guys.

I think I'm happiest about people discovering new stuff

so many dope live videos on youtube

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8vJT5TyMEwI

wow great clip - who's playing bass there...?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j1EPXBQV3yM

I didn't vote or contribute but have listened to at least 10-15 tracks or versions for the first time ever or in years thanks to this poll, so thanks!

omg is that brian on the left?

ha, yes

no idea who's playing bass but that concert has 3 more clips on youtube shakes. I think it's pretty much the whole concert.

omg on Brian in that clip

What are they doing singing California Girls as the third song in the set? Must have seemed awful square in 1969

they were in france

I just noticed that. That stuff was not released in continental Europe until the late 60s right?

they also play break away, do it again and ... the nearest far away place

I have no idea

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Grj7sjQ0_p4

the 60s really were such a weird decade

ready to throw my baggies into my woody after that clip

those pants are something else.

http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?chf=bg,s,548000&chxl=0:|1962|1963|1964|1965|1966|1967|1968|1969|1970|1971&chxs=0,F7F7F7,14.5,1,lt,FFFFFF&chxt=x&chs=560x280&cht=lxy&chco=FFCC33&chds=15,100,0,4736&chd=t:-1|123,668,1800,1405,4736,369,630,411,778,224&chdlp=b&chls=6&chma=5,5,0,25&chtt=ILM

nope, no drop off in quality there at all

lol when you have "experts" like crut voting surprised the peak wasn't 1964

Obviously 1965 was their peak!

Got the most votes from me, edging out 1966. '64 placed third....

(points out that numbers skewed by only one album & one single released that year vs. 3 albums each in '64 and '65)

Kinda surprised Sandy/Sherry/She Says That She Need Me didn't get any votes. I strongly considered it. Like "Good Timin'", probably another case of the ultimately released version being less interesting than the earlier mock-ups heard only on bootlegs.

I prob woulda voted for it if I thought someone else would

only looking at the top 40 is misleading. lol yeah pet sounds got a lot of votes. but here's the vote breakdown by album:

album votes
Pet Sounds 119
Surf's Up 63
Smiley Smile 60
Summer Days 46
20/20 44
Sunflower 39
All Summer Long 38
Shut Down V2 37
Wild Honey 37
Other 34
Today! 34
Friends 33
Surfer Girl 33
Single / B-side 19
Holland 13
Surfin' USA 11
Love You 10
Party! 8
Surfin' Safari 8
Holland 5
Little Deuce Coupe 5
Smile 5
Carl and the Passions 2
LA 2
15 Big Ones 1
Christmas Album 1
Keepin' the Summer Alive 1
MIU 1
Still Cruisin' 1

post-pet sounds votes: 317
pre-pet sounds votes: 221
other (pet sounds + other): 172

same thing done by points:

other 4089
post 7054
pre 4964

the pre/post splits are mindboggling to me

wait I fucked up the holland combine the 13+5

I was counting by points and I was counting by when songs were first written or recorded, not released. So Surf's Up counts as '66, not '71. At least for the purposes of the debate over whether or not the Beach Boys songwriting took a decline. I only did the top 40 because after 40 songs I got tired of looking up the year for each one.

I mean it seems pretty unambiguously clear to me that Brian was at the peak of his powers around 1966 and then hit a major slump and never recovered. It's not just "lol people like Pet Sounds" but that basically every song from later albums that was highly ranked was something left over from the Smile era sessions or a song like Do It Again that he had written years earlier.

well, he lost his marbles pretty much for good around that time, which made it difficult to create comparably 'complete' works. if you look at the post-pet sound albums, relatively few songs fit the description 'new, complete brian wilson work' and the ones that do tend to have gotten votes in this poll.

late beach boys material is interesting because a. he lost his capability to deal w/ the world but not his musical talents b. the rest of the band, esp dennis were talented in their own right, and started to contribute substantially. the albums are chaotic, messy but still have brian wilson's touches. there's just more material to sift through.

I'm not gonna argue that 'had to phone ya' is a better song than 'california girls', but there're a lot of strange things to find in it.

basically if you weighed the results by *quantity* - brian's quantity of released output pre-pet sounds to the votes it got prob isn't substantially higher than post-pet sounds. you're approaching this from the POV that he ran out of ideas / lost his touch instead of, ya know, went crazy. while remaining uniquely talented. that's why I've always been so obsessed w/ rare stuff - his ear for melody never left him, just his capacity to 'finish' substantial, radio-friendly works.

could this song (given better production) be playing on classic rock radio station right now? absolutely

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1rNLiHVQsU0

could this song (given better production) be playing on classic rock radio station right now? absolutely



I'm not sure I buy the theory that everything post '66 that we liked/voted for was written pre '66. "'Til I Die" is 1971, and that's top 5. "Sail on Sailor" is 69 or 70 IIRC, as is "This Whole World" (which I didn't vote for but which is awesome). "Break Away," "Busy Doin' Nothing"...the list goes on. The Smile stuff aside, this isn't Rick Nielson who had some bag of songs he reached into (and was "Do It Again" really an older cut? I hadn't read that anywhere).

I'd say the well dried up closer to 1974-75.

After six weeks of very little or no work done in the studio (as the band was busy touring), the band got back to work on May 26, 1968, when they first began working on "Do It Again" at Brian's home studio in Bel Air, California. The session, produced by Brian and Carl, first listed the song as being called "Rendezvous". After Brian had run the band through a demonstration of the song, the band began recording the track using guitar, organ, bass and drums, with Mike singing his vocal during the initial takes of the track. At first Mike sings the lyric "and surf again", however this is later amended to "and do it again". After the band recorded the basic track, they overdubbed backing vocals as well as adding a guitar and organ insert and a new guitar solo. Further vocal work by Brian, Carl, Wilson, Dennis Wilson, Bruce Johnston and Al Jardine was done on the track on June 6 again at Brian's home studio.
Further overdubs to the instrumental track were made at Brian's home studio on June 10. John Guerin playing drums, tambourine and wood blocks on the overdubs, Ernie Small provided saxophone overdubs and John E. Lowe provided woodwind overdubs.
Reportedly[citation needed], during the mixdown Stephen Desper, the engineer on the album came up with the drum effect heard at the beginning of the track. Many believe that this sound added to the commercial success of the single. Desper explained that he had:
"commissioned Philips, in Holland, to build two tape delay units for use on the road (to double live vocals). [he][who?] moved four of the Philips PB heads very close together so that one drum strike was repeated four times about 10 milliseconds apart, and blended it with the original to give the effect you hear."
On the fade of the song there are some hammering sounds which originated from the Smile workshop session.

last line is interesting!

Noted it upthread!

I'd say the well dried up closer to 1974-75.

love you is 77 and it's not even controversial at this point to say that there's some great stuff on that album

I absolutely adore Love You -- but more as a piece than as an example of top notch Brian songwriting.

Also, I'm not saying Brian didn't have his own bag or that he didn't pull from it occasionally -- just that he kept adding stuff to it until the drugs (and then Landy) took over.

http://www.youtube.com/user/BehindTheSounds#p/u/8/ofByti7A4uM

more youtube stuff - this series using pet sounds sessions is pretty watchable

I'm not sure I buy the theory that everything post '66 that we liked/voted for was written pre '66.

I never said it was everything. I made a graph ffs! Showing exactly how the points were distributed by year.

I may have misread the chart then -- I thought it was the year songs came out. My bad if so.

well, he lost his marbles pretty much for good around that time, which made it difficult to create comparably 'complete' works.

well of course! which is why I thought it was absolutely crazy that people have been arguing that there wasn't a decline in output.

basically if you weighed the results by *quantity*

No, not really. The results of the poll are essentially a measure of quality too, right? Which is why I ranked them by points. People like some of the post-Smile stuff but not nearly as much as they like what came before. If I only counted the number of votes for each song while ignoring the ranking then that would be a measure of quantity, but we've already qualitatively ranked them as best as we can.

I may have misread the chart then -- I thought it was the year songs came out. My bad if so.

Basically I took the top 40 tracks, figured out when they were first written or recorded, then sorted them by those dates, and added up the points for each year. So each year gets a score that also takes into account how we ranked the songs.