It's About Time: Beach Boys Poll Results

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.

Here's the data I used

1962
38 Surfin' Safari 123
123 points

1963
31 Surfin' USA 146
11 In My Room 338
26 Surfer Girl 184
668 points

1964
6 Don't Worry Baby 531
7 I Get Around 468
14 The Warmth Of 250
15 Darlin 241
27 She Knows Me Too Well 178
36 Fun, Fun, Fun 132
1800 points

1965
8 California Girls 396
19 Girl Don't Tell Me 214
21 Help Me Rhonda 210
23 Let Him Run Wild 203
33 Kiss Me Baby 141
37 Guess I’m Dumb 125
40 Barbara Ann 116
1405 points

1966
1 God Only Knows 788
2 Surf's Up 782
3 Good Vibrations 627
4 Wouldn’t It Be Nice 588
9 Heroes and Villains 374
10 Cabinessence 346
12 Caroline No 302
13 I Just Wasn't Made 274
20 Don't Talk 213
29 I Know There's An 153
30 Sloop John B 149
34 I'm Waiting For The 140
4736 points

1967
16 Let The Wind Blow 225
32 Can’t Wait Too Long 144
369 points

1968
24 Busy Doin Nothin 198
28 Do It Again 173
35 Friends 137
39 Little Bird 122
630 points

1969
18 Break Away 222
25 All I Wanna Do 189
411 points

1970
5 Til I Die 569
22 This Whole World 209
778 points

1971
17 Feel Flows 224
224

not all of the voters were super familiar w/ their later career, so to pretend like this is scientific is silly

ultimately you're trying to convince people who like music not to like that music anymore, and excel graphs probably aren't going to do it

Yeah, I don't know why I said Do It Again was written years earlier. I must have been thinking of something else. I counted it as 1968.
xp

ultimately you're trying to convince people who like music not to like that music anymore, and excel graphs probably aren't going to do it

no way! I'm not trying to convince people out of liking stuff they like. that's stupid. I'm not even saying they didn't make good music in the later years. I'm just trying to counter the people who were acting like I was some kind of insane challopsy Mike Love stan for daring to say that there was a decline in the band's songwriting.

and you're probably not going to convince me otherwise by saying that the voters were dumb and not as down with the BBs as you.

yeah well I never said "voters were dumb" and I attempted to get as many ballots as possible, regardless of their composition. I do think there's a pretty high correlation between 'consider the beach boys one of your favorite bands' and 'spends more time listening to post-pet sounds material' and if you limited the ballots to people who consider the beach boys one of their favorite bands, the later albums fare considerably better than they do w/ casual fans.

You guys are both right. The core period is the artistic peak, but the latter period is just more interesting. The same guy is the creative driving force of the group and the same genius ideas are bouncing around in his head, filtered through not only drugs, mental illness, and one of the strongest and quirkiest personalities in pop, but a decade of experience in making and creating music. For those willing to dig, the post-Pet Sounds period is a gold mine, if a somewhat tainted and incomplete one due to Brian's inability to 'finish substantial radio friendly' works. Personally, I would take the first six albums over the six core post-Pet Sounds albums (Smiley, Wild Honey, Friends, 20/20, Sunflower, Surf's Up) in a heartbeat even if all conceivable bonus tracks were included, but I get why people dive headlong into the latter period.

Christmas Album 1
lol, that was me

Wow I never heard "Do It Again" before. That song is awesome!

Little Saint Nick deserved some love.

it's a pretty good song

also 'lonely sea' which only got a late ballot

another good one, one of my late cuts. Though where were the other votes for No-Go Showboat???

prob not in my top 40 but that's def a song the live-mike-love-boys should brush off

Mark Prindle on Little Deuce Coupe:

three out of the six great songs you'll find on here are songs that you likely already own - "Little Deuce Coupe," "409" and "Shut Down (Turn Off, the b-side of The Little River Band's "Lonesome Loser" Single)." The other three are worth owning, but at what cost? At what cost, I beg of you?

The answer is five billion dollars. For "No-Go Showboat" alone. Anybody who doesn't like that song has the evil of a thousand demons coursing through their very soul.

Wait, I was the ONLY one to vote for "The Lonely Sea"? Given that I feel like it's one of Brian's most perfectly formed ballads that's kind of stunning to me -- and given how early it is, it actually seems to validate skip's theory about "hardcore fans" liking the late period more.

"No-Go Showboat" and "Custom Machine" are both great songs from the LDC album. Love all the lyrical details about hot-rodding culture, set to the most complex music on the album.

I like "Lonely Sea" - probably the first of their slow/introspective songs, it's just that later efforts built on what was done here and were better IMO, like "In My Room" from the next album.

I think alot of us like "Little Saint Nick" but it's hard to think about Christmas songs in the sweltering August heat. Love the second verse where Santa's sleigh is reimagined as a four-on-the-floor candy-apple-red hot rod - "when Santa hits the gas, man, just watch her peel!" - so uniquely Beach Boys

Just caught up on the rollout after a vacation. Thanks iatee - great stuff. My ballot:

1. God Only Knows
2. ‘Til I Die
3. Heroes and Villains
4. Good Vibrations
5. In My Room
6. Forever
7. Don’t Talk (Put Your Head on My Shoulder)
8. Surf’s Up
9. Sail on Sailor
10. Guess I’m Dumb (Glen Campbell)
11. You Still Believe in Me
12. Then I Kissed Her
13. California Girls
14. Long Promised Road
15. Darlin’
16. This Whole World
17. I Get Around
18. I Know There’s an Answer
19. It’s About Time
20. Feel Flows

I seem to dislike most car songs by this band. No Go Showboat is dreadful.

"Honkin' Down the Highway"?

"Fun fun fun" ?

Neither of those count here - Honkin' is late-period and Fun Fun Fun is more about a girl than a car. I'm talking the Shut Down/Little Deuce car songs. Chevy Chevy Coupe and all that dreck.

I'm only against the songs for political reasons

Here's what mine would have been.

1 She Knows Me Too Well
2 Child Is The Father of the Man (Brian Wilson: Smile, if we're citing official releases only)
3 Til I Die (Endless Harmony version)
4 God Only Knows
5 Cabinessence
6 Don't Worry Baby
7 The Little Girl I Once Knew
8 Girl Don't Tell Me
9 Forever
10 This Whole World
11 Never Learn Not to Love
12 Sail On Sailor
13 Wonderful (Good Vibrations box version)
14 Heroes and Villains (Smiley Smile bonus tracks version)
15 Wouldn't It Be Nice
16 The Warmth of the Sun
17 Breakaway
18 I Can Hear Music
19 Good Vibrations (Endless Harmony live rehearsal version)
20 Our Prayer

2 Child Is The Father of the Man (Brian Wilson: Smile, if we're citing official releases only)

man, i dunno if there's been a poll done on smile sessions/bootleg tracks, but the original of that has been doing it for me over the past few days in a big way.

sinister-sounding chord progression

ch-ch-ch

etc.

amazing song

like buzza, i find it hard to appreciate the "finished" version of smile that got released several years ago...but some of the original tracks are something else...

Smile is a bit like Abbey Road in that it's got loads of brilliant little "bits" that work really well as a piece, but I couldn't just vote for a 1:30 min instrumental or whatever in favour of something off of Sunflower or Wild Honey, no matter how much I like it. That's why I tended to go for Smiley Smile vershes.

Was listening to the "official" Smile the other day, for the first time in years, and it is amazing. I know its impact is dulled by the myhtology, by the bootlegs, and by it coming out 35 years late, but it's a remarkable piece of work. Not "best album ever" or anything, but remarkable.

I suspect that had it actually come out it would have completely destroyed the Beach Boys: surely the hipsters would have spurned it and the chart buyers would have been puzzled. And Mike Love would have walked out and formed his own band to sing the old hits at county fairs.

I think the official smile is great

rarely put it on tho

challops time: if it weren't for the voices, it might have turned out 'better' than a messy complete 60s version.

Official Smile is really really amazing. Good job, Brian and Wondermints!

Totally gonna listen to Smile! now...

it gets such a bad rap all-in-all, but it is amazing no matter how you view it.

voices bug me

but anyway

ch-ch-ch

Does it get a bad rap? Reviews at the time were euphoric.

yeah, but everyone moans about the vocals and how it's underwhelming somehow because really it's not all that different from the original demoes save a few bits here and there.

all a bit of a nonsense really. i think it's the fact old Brian and a bunch of guys finally finished it instead of allowing it to carry on in rock mythology forever. Somehow by being able to walk into a shop and buy this album in a nice white CD package with SMiLE written on the front, destroyed the mystique for a lot of people. No matter how good it was, it was never going to be the real Smile. Never ever ever - so it's a psychological issue for a lot of people.

Nah, the voices are fine IMO. Especially when in "Heroes and Villians" Brian sings "I've been in this town so long", and now that he's an old man and you hear it in his voice it makes it an extra extra sweet moment.

xpost for a lot of people

yeah i'm not bothered by the vocals at all. also what's incredible is how close the re-recorded versions sound to the originals. i thought they'd used the OG ones for a long time.

Love the sound of the '04 Smile.

I've never really listened to it, personally