Now at last we come to the point when the Beach Boys' ability to select the best material they had worked up for annual release in LP format began to waver terribly. In outtakes from 1967 to 1980 -- some of which eventually found release on packages like Hawthorne, CA and Made in California -- you'll find many examples of vaulted material stronger than what made the cut of the band's official releases. Brother and Capitol have promised several times to dip into this wealth of treasures but we've only ever received marginal bits at a time. In this final bootleg post we'll try to touch on the best "lost" music from the Beach Boys' waning years as a creative force.
The Beach Boys: Unsurpassed Masters Vol. 19: Wild Honey (bootleg 1967) [2CD] [r]
Between Smiley Smile and Wild Honey there were the Lei'd in Hawaii rehearsals and a good bit of experimentation in Brian Wilson's home studio. Much of the latter is captured on this generous set's first disc, which is comprised of numerous overdubbed takes of "Cool, Cool Water," a track derived from Smile that would be worked on further and finally released a few years later, and "Can't Wait Too Long," a hypnotic, mantra-like piece that, despite a vocal track that's charmingly incomplete (a breathtaking lead from Carl on the final section notwithstanding), would stand for many years as one of the best unissued Beach Boys cuts, though it made it to the twofer bonus cuts in 1990; the only "official" song to which it can really be compared is probably the impressive, zoned-out "All This Is That" from So Tough. Finally, when the band ultimately settles on a "white soul" approach to the new record, we get a lot of session material related to the Stevie Wonder cover "I Was Made to Love Her," which sparkles in stereo with the elements separated. Similar dissections of other cuts from Wild Honey round out the second disc and are equally interesting; "Here Comes the Night" is analyzed to within an inch of its life, which is a handy example of how layered and elaboate Brian Wilson's later productions still were despite outward appearances and scaled-down instrumentation. "A Thing or Two," "Darlin'" and "Wild Honey" are also represented, casting the muddy sound quality on the finished album in a negative light; unlike every other mono-only Beach Boys album, Wild Honey has never had a complete stereo mix prepared, and it's the one that could actually really benefit from such treatment. [2017 note: This is no longer true with Capitol's release of the compilation 1967 - Sunshine Tomorrow, and as I predicted, Wild Honey is the best of the revisionist stereo BB albums apart from Pet Sounds.] Because the next and final Sea of Tunes set is something of a letdown and because this captures the twilight of Brian's days as the Beach Boys' primary creative force, this one represents a good swansong for the series and can be seen as the capper on an incredibly involved examination of a remarkable run of music.
The Beach Boys: Unsurpassed Masters Vol. 20: Friends etc. (bootleg 1968-69) [2CD]
The end of the Unsurpassed Masters series unfortunately doesn't reveal much about the sessions for the Beach Boys' second-best '60s album Friends, as it's strictly represented (albeit at length) by the title track and lead single. The rest of this disjointed collection gathers up late '60s odds and ends. Sessions for "Do It Again" reveal how close that song came to being unforgivably awful. "I Can Hear Music" offers an opportunity to witness Carl's budding skills as a producer, and you can tell he'd been paying attention for all those years; in this respect and this respect alone, this set is a logical conclusion to the series since it records the passing of the torch, so to speak, but apart from some rehearsal and overdub material from "Time to Get Alone" and "Break Away" and an errant presentation of "Sherry, She Needs Me," this peters out with yet another example of one of rock's most vocally evocative groups' bizarre attraction to terrible outside singers ("A Day in the Life of a Tree," "Teeter Totter Love," Gary Usher, Dick Reynolds, etc.) in the form of a comedy duo called the Pickle Brothers, whose pair of cuts here have nothing to do with anything and aren't funny; what is funny is Steve Kalinich's psychotic poetry reading "America, I Know You," but that's not supposed to be funny and seems to be a sort of covert fuck-you to the Beach Boys by Brian after he was shut out of several opportunities to follow his own creative direction. From 1968 onward, Brian's best work would strictly be that which had no commercial aspiration at all, and this would cause a permanent rift with the rest of the band. It was also during this period that Murry sold the publishing rights to Brian's songs, and that Brian was sent to some sort of invasive therapy during a bout of depression that apparently changed him permanently and turned him into the Brian Wilson we know now as opposed to the sprightlier man who made so many terrific records and had such great command of the studio in the '60s. Up to now, even when Brian wasn't fully in control he was always a breathtaking creative force. But things were changing in the Beach Boys' world, and with the transition from the '60s to the '70s and from Capitol to Reprise, nothing would ever be quite the same.
The Beach Boys: All This Is That (bootleg 1967-80)
After Sea of Tunes wrapped up its Beach Boys series, the label emerged again eventually with a sort of approximation of the much-hyped and never completed or issued "Brother Rarities" collection, which had been projected to gather rare and unreleased Beach Boys music from the '70s and '80s. This is more of a hodgepodge unfortunately, built a bit like one of Capitol's weird catch-all discs of strange variations (a vocals-only "Cotton Fields," a stereo mix of "Country Air," the backing track of "Had to Phone Ya," that sort of thing). And the last half, which runs from 15 Big Ones onward, will quickly try the patience of most anyone who doesn't have an unhealthy fixation on this group. An incomplete take of "Slip on Through" and a totally different version of "All This Is That" offer some insight into the creation of those songs, but the only real listening pleasure comes from a pair of heretofore (and officially still) unavailable So Tough-Holland era songs. "It's a New Day" was written by Dennis and sung by Blondie Chaplin, and is in keeping with Dennis' early '70s work like "Sound of Free." It's quite good, but "Hard Time" -- a Ricky/Blondie cut along the lines of "Here She Comes" and "We Got Love" but much more frenetic, similar to their Abbey Road-inspired hard power pop in the Flame -- is in my opinion the best song still sitting in the Beach Boys' vault. It's possible you have to like the Fataar-Chaplin material as much as I do to really dig it, but I can say that it's probably the best song they wrote for the band, and also that when I very illegally snuck it into my sets as a bar DJ, multiple people queried me about it (and it was fun to see how incredulous they were when I told them the artist, less fun to tell them it was not available to buy). My preferred setting for these two songs is the fan-made expanded albums (see below) but this bootleg deserves some attention because it brought those tracks to our ears in the first place, however unethically.
The Beach Boys: Landlocked (bootleg 1969-71) [c]
Thanks to a number of legitimate sources alleging its existence, it was believed for a number of years that the Beach Boys recorded an album called Landlocked, submitted it for release by Reprise and had it rejected. It seems that the story was conflated with the rejections of early versions of Sunflower and Holland as well as a proposed catch-all "last Capitol album" consisting of finished odds and ends, abandoned in favor of delivering Live in London. What we know as Landlocked is really just a sort of working reel for what would turn into Surf's Up. All of its listenable music has been issued elsewhere, and these days the thing is just a curio.
The Beach Boys & the Flame: The Beach Boys Meet the Flame (bootleg 1970)
The Beach Boys: Do It Again (bootleg 1971) [r]
A pair of interesting live shows from the Beach Boys' best period as a concert attraction. The former was recorded on November 6, 1970 during the band's legendary homecoming residency at the Whisky-a-Go-Go; this was the third show of the week (the first without Brian, alas) and the South African band the Flame (which included future Beach Boys Ricky Fataar and Blondie Chaplin) opened and closed the show; their fine set is included on the disc. Unfortunately the recording quality is rather dire, but both bands seem to be in strong form. Do It Again captures the group at a similar level of enthusiasm on the following May 11 in Syracuse, NY, sans Dennis Wilson (away promoting Two-Lane Blacktop, the Monte Hellman film in which he costarred with James Taylor), with a good taste of the band's endearingly odd setlists from this period: "Vegetables," "Cool, Cool Water," a hybrid of "Riot in Cell Block #9" and its unholy stepchild "Student Demonstration Time," plus an irony-overload cover of Merle Haggard's square anthem "Okie from Muskogee." To state the (probably) obvious: despite Mike Love's unbearable banter, the Beach Boys were a damn good live band in their prime.
As mentioned elsewhere, I'm interested in any Beach Boys live boots from 1969 to 1973 that aren't already available in full on Youtube, if anyone feels like being generous.
The Beach Boys: Sunflower: Bonus Tracks (bootleg 1969-70) [r]
This and the other bonus "expanded" editions below of the '70-'80 Brother Records albums were compiled for the late, lamented Warnakey's Beach Boys Blog back around 2009. Prior to this Purple Chick-caliber task of consolidation, you had to gather up all sorts of disorganized bootlegs to put together a comprehensive collection of the unissued material from the post-Capitol years. Warnakey gathered the rarities and non-album tracks together in the best quality he could find and offered them as MP3 downloads intended to be applied as "bonus tracks" to the corresponding albums. Although these compilations are now difficult to find, it does give us an easy way to tackle the later obscurities. In a deviation from the format elsewhere in these reviews, I'll be providing quick notes on the individual tracks.
1) San Miguel - officially released on Ten Years of Harmony and Good Vibrations: Thirty Years of the Beach Boys
2) Celebrate the News - officially released as b-side to "Break Away"
3) Loop de Loop [early mix] - a version of the song without the finishing touches added by Al for Endless Harmony
4) Break Away - officially released as a single
5) Rock 'n' Roll Woman - a solid live cover (from the spring of 1969) of Buffalo Springfield's song
6) Slip on Through [alternate track] - this instrumental take on the song is a wonderful listen
7) I'm Going Your Way - a soulful, propulsive unreleased Dennis Wilson track
8) Cotton Fields [stereo single version] - officially released as a single
9) Walkin' - a Brian song from the Friends era that its composer grew frustrated with in the middle of recording the vocal; it's not bad, but definitely in the lower tier of material from the period
10) Games Two Can Play - officially released on Good Vibrations: Thirty Years of the Beach Boys
11) Soulful Old Man Sunshine [edit] - not actually an edit, this is a faster mix of the song than the one released on Endless Harmony; apparently it's the version initially assembled by Dennis Dragon in 1969, revised and probably speed-corrected by Mark Linett with a Carl Wilson scratch vocal for the '93 box. Carl vetoed its inclusion then because he didn't like his vocal.
12) Add Some Music [alternate lyrics] - these lyrics are even dopier than those on the released song
13) Back Home [1970 version] - officially released on Made in California, this is very different from both the 1963 and (released) 1976 versions; rhythmically the same but with completely different, somewhat less childlike lyrics; a fine performance, though so are the other two
14) I Just Got My pay - officially released on Good Vibrations: Thirty Years of the Beach Boys
15) Carnival [aka Over the Waves] - a rather distressingly ominous Beach Boys take on "Sobre las Olas" that sounds like it could find a home on the Night of the Living Dead soundtrack
16) Our Sweet Love [track & backing vocals] - just what it implies, different from a vocals and strings mix on Made in California; nice to hear once but that's about it
The Beach Boys: Surf's Up: Bonus Tracks (bootleg 1970-71)
A lot of commonly available material here, but it's nice to have it gathered in one logical place -- and it's hard not to notice how much of it is superior to what actually made it to Surf's Up.
1) 4th of July - officially released on Good Vibrations: Thirty Years of the Beach Boys
2) Barbara - officially released on Endless Harmony
3) Big Sur [1970 version] - one of Mike's very best compositions, in its original 4/4 incarnation before being repurposed for Holland; both versions are quite beautiful
4) H.E.L.P. Is on the Way - officially released on Good Vibrations: Thirty Years of the Beach Boys
5) Sound of Free - A-side of Dennis Wilson & Rumbo single, officially released under the Beach Boys name on Made in California
6) Lady - the (even better) b-side of "Sound of Free," officially released under the Beach Boys name on Summer Love Songs and Made in California
7) Seasons in the Sun - Terry Jacks produced this Beach Boys recording of the dreadful Rod McKuen-Jacques Brel composition, then recorded it himself and made it a huge smash when they decided thankfully not to move forward with it
8) My Solution - one of the most unique unissued Beach Boys songs, a demented Flaming Lips-like Halloween narrative about a reanimated dog, or something; hilarious, scary and nearly indescribable
9) It's a New Day - magnificent Dennis song sung by Blondie Chaplin
10) Searchin' - the Beach Boys onstage with the Grateful Dead; everyone sounds stoned and off-key
11) Okie from Muskogee - Merle Haggard's tongue-in-cheek anthem was a live favorite for the Beach Boys in the early '70s; god knows why, but they do a decent job with it
12) Your Song - Bruce singing an Elton John song on stage; monstrously unappealing
13) Til I Die [alternate mix] - officially released on Endless Harmony
The Beach Boys: Holland: Bonus Tracks (bootleg 1972-74) [r]
Superb, essential complement to the studio record, with several of the best unreleased songs in the Beach Boys' vault (and a few of the best sort-of-released ones), plus at least one of the most fascinatingly horrible things they ever attempted.
1) [Holland radio promo spot] - interesting chance to hear how Reprise promoted the Beach Boys during their lite-funk/prog-ish period
2) We Got Love - actually released on early presses of the album, the Ricky/Blondie-led song left off in favor of "Sail on, Sailor" but included on In Concert; that version is stronger, but this one is worth hearing
3) Carry Me Home - chilling Dennis number, among his most mournful and mature ballads; probably the most beloved song the Beach Boys haven't yet released, vetoed from inclusion on the boxed set, likely because of its grim lyrical content
4) Out in the Country - serviceable Al Jardine song (though he has no recollection of writing it), with a nice minimal production
5) Hard Time - as noted in the writeup of All This Is That, probably my favorite still-unissued Beach Boys, a genuinely gripping and fresh-sounding rocker from Blondie and Rickie's corner
6) Shortenin' Bread - Brian Wilson was somewhat obsessed with this nursery rhyme in the '70s; Iggy Pop recalled being freaked out beyond repair by a Brian-led extended party singalong of it that stretched into the maniacal. This version is better than the one on L.A. (Light Album exclusively by virtue of Carl performing the lead, but the "WTF" factor remains
7) River Song - several years ahead of Dennis' solo album Pacific Ocean Blue, here's its most famous track in incomplete form, meant at the time as a Beach Boys song, meant for the unissued Caribou album (as were the next two cuts on this collection); it did eventually see release on a Beach Boys compilation, Ten Years of Harmony, but in the POB version
8) Good Timin' - the original, somewhat skeletal and brief 1974 take is quite a bit better -- and less audibly synthesized -- than the L.A. (Light Album) single
9) Battle Hymn of the Republic - it's long been rumored that Brian insisted on covering this because he knew it would make Mike, trying desperately to keep up with the rhythm track, sound like a knucklehead; if so, the track is a complete success
10) Rollin' Up to Heaven - accounts differ on the origin date for this X-rated "Ding Dang" variant, but it's unreleasable by default and mostly just annoying
The Beach Boys: 15 Big Ones: Bonus Tracks (bootleg 1975-78) [c]
Most of the outtakes from this album are additional oldies in the style of those that made the cut; at one point it was floated as a double album that would consist of a whole LP's worth covers, then one of just originals. These Brian productions have the same issues of sterility and laziness that mark the familiar tunes. Not to be too pointed about this but good lord, this is some bad music; Brian himself was bored to death by these sessions.
1) Sea Cruise - officially released on Ten Years of Harmony, now out of print
2) Shake, Rattle and Roll - actually not a bad version, with a good Al Jardine lead
3) Michael, Row the Boat Ashore - uh...
4) Honkin' Down the Highway [early version] - this sounds like a demo with a guide vocal
5) Don't Worry Baby [California Music] - the hilariously terrible "revised" version of the song with partially rewritten lyrics by Bruce's sideline project California Music, which involved Brian for a time; this was released as a single in 1975
6) On Broadway - godawful Drifters cover forecasts the band's equally terrible 1992 version of "Under the Boardwalk"
7) Running Bear - see "Michael, Row the Boat Ashore"
8) Mony Mony - also terrible
9) Short Skirts - yeah, still terrible
10) Come Go with Me [version 1] - I slightly prefer this to the MIU Version that later became a minor hit; it was accidentally released on Caribou's 1990 CDs of both MIU and Ten Years of Harmony but is otherwise unavailable
11) Carl's Song - a primitive instrumental attempt at what became "Angel Come Home," one of Carl's best later songs
12) Ten Years Harmony [California Music] - this is "Endless Harmony," only scaled down a bit; released as a single in 1975
13) Brian's Back [early version] - even worse than the final version
14) (Carl interview)/Rock & Roll Music [alternate mix] - this much livelier alternate mix of the lead single from 15 Big Ones finally saw release in better quality on the Made in California box
Brian Wilson / The Beach Boys: Adult Child (bootleg 1976-77)
Unreleaseable, schlocky immersion into Brian Wilson's inner world as of 1976, with several songs boasting elaborate big band arrangements from Dick Reynolds, the same agent Brian had used under very different circumstances for Christmas Album. The best of those, "It's Over Now" and "Still I Dream of It," have since been released; the former in particular shows how incredibly adaptable Brian remained as a composer, effectively appropriating the composition and lyrical style of the crooners that were then influencing him. The version of Adult Child presented to Reprise and rejected was rounded out with a few older cuts ("H.E.L.P. Is on the Way," "On Broadway," "Games Two Can Play"), while the Beach Boys would subsequently revisit "Shortenin' Bread" and (shudder) "Hey Little Tomboy." That leaves five songs, two of which show Reynolds' involvement: "Deep Purple" is just the standard, and Brian's voice isn't really suited to it; "Life Is for the Living" is kind of great, a swinging music-hall extravaganza with Carl chiding you for sitting "around on your ass / smoking grass" before it devolves into a weird commentary on exercise. "Everybody Wants to Live" is an organ and synth-driven midtempo number that's fairly respectable, if too long; maybe they should have taken this all the way. Dennis sings "It's Trying to Say (Baseball)," a mild rocker that benefits from his ever-dependable enthusiasm. "Lines" is somewhat in the vein of Love You but not at all on its quality level. Generally Adult Child feels like a half-finished idea for an album, and not a bad one, but without enough material -- and with too much filler -- to make it really work.
Two Brian songs from this period should be quickly addressed here:
- "Marilyn Rovell" is a song written for Brian's then-wife, from the "oversharing" department, and it strikes me as vaguely sarcastic, knowing how stressful that marriage had become by the mid-'70s (though Marilyn from all available evidence is one hell of a champ), culminating in a disturbing cry of "look at that little child sing!"; some fans like this a lot, but I prefer "Let's Keep Our Hearts Together," a duet with Marilyn that's personal without seeming so self-absorbed
- "Lazy Lizzie" is a terrifying pedophile anthem along the lines of "Hey Little Tomboy" about stalking a schoolgirl; further evidence that Brian needed a filter lyrically (and a lot of therapy), though he and the band wisely kept his more salacious ideas off Love You
The Beach Boys: Alternate Love You (bootleg 1977)
Conveniently gathers most of the outtakes and potential supplements for Love You that have surfaced over the years. The alternate versions are mostly just different mixes (possibly the "rawer" versions Brian completed before Carl polished the record) or vocal takes, or sometimes are just missing finishing touches. I'll only comment on the tracks that require explanation.
1) Roller Skating Child [alternate take]
2) Mona [alternate take]
3) Honkin' Down the Highway [early] - same as the 15 Big Ones outtake above
4) Ding Dang [alternate take] - goes far beyond the fade on the released version
5) The Night Was So Young [alternate take] - instrumentation slightly different, also a different, incomplete vocal take; also has a very nice instrumental tag
6) Let's Put Our Hearts Together [alternate take #1]
7) I Wanna Pick You Up [alternate version]
8) Mona [demo] - Brian alone, singing and playing piano
9) I'll Bet He's Nice [demo] - ibid; we can debate Mike Love's merits as a human being till the end of time, but hearing his reaction to the bridge of this is inescapably moving
10) Let's Put Our Hearts Together [alternate take #2] - a beautiful piano-driven rendition, with Brian doing both parts of the duet; this might be a demo, but it isn't labeled as such
11) Airplane [demo] - Brian alone with a piano again; it sounds like this might be reproduced at the wrong speed
12) Love Is a Woman [demo] - same
13) Roller Skating Child [live 1977]
14) Honkin' Down the Highway [alternate take]
15) Airplane [live 1977]
16) Love Is a Woman [live 1977]
17) Ding Dang [TV special rehearsal]
18) Love Is a Woman [SNL version] - Brian alone; not great but not nearly as bad as it's reputed to be, and it certainly can't be accused of misrepresenting the nature of the concurrent album
The Beach Boys: MIU Album: Bonus Tracks (bootleg 1977)
1) Our Team - officially released on Good Vibrations: Thirty Years of the Beach Boys
2) How's About a Little Bit of Your Sweet Lovin' - a Brian/Mike collaboration, simple and obnoxious, better than most of what's on MIU
3) Lady Lynda [1977 version] - somewhat less florid than the L.A. version, otherwise extremely similar; by the way, can we talk about how fucking weird the line "evolution is drawing us near" is?
4) Life Is for the Living - see Adult Child above
5) Everybody Wants to Live - see Adult Child above
6) It's Over Now - see Adult Child above; officially released on Good Vibrations: Thirty Years of the Beach Boys and with speed corrected on Made in California
7) Deep Purple - see Adult Child above
8) It's Trying to Say (Baseball) - see Adult Child above
9) Lines - see Adult Child above
10) Still I Dream of It - see Adult Child above; officially released on Good Vibrations: Thirty Years of the Beach Boys
11) New England Waltz - a Brian instrumental that is just what it sounds like; sounds like an Adult Child outtake but evidently isn't
12) California Feeling - one of many versions of this awful song, this one with vocals from violent prick Rocky Pamplin and Brian vocal proteges Spring
13) Airplane [live 7/30/77] - some snark against Reprise from Mike here about their failure to promote Love You, a nice show of solidarity
14) Go and Get That Girl - sounds like about a hundred early '80s power pop outfits, which in a way is impressive
15) Alone on Christmas Day - one of the many discarded medicore songs from the MIU/Christmas hybrid sessions; Mike rewrote and released this in 2015
16) Santa's on His Way - dumb Christmas vocals laid over the track for "H.E.L.P. Is on the Way"
17) I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus - a bunch of kids are on this; a revised version was officially released on Ultimate Christmas and the other discs that are just Ultimate Christmas with a different cover
18) Christmas Medley - a bunch of kids and Beach Boys singing Christmas songs as a choir for some reason
The Beach Boys: L.A.: Bonus Tracks (bootleg 1978-79)
1) It's a Beautiful Day - released on the Americathon soundtrack and on Made in California; at least they seem to be awake on it
2) California Feeling - this again, only slower; Carl sings lead this time
3) Santa Ana Winds [version 1] - Al's Keepin' the Summer Alive cut in a scrappier arrangement
4) Looking Down the Coast/Monterey - another tolerable Al song, this one about women's breasts I think?
5) Country Pie [live Feb 1978] - maybe the loosest Mike has ever been on stage, a Ron Altbach song written for Celebration
6) It Could Be Anything - written and sung by Carl, in the vein of his mostly very MOR work from these years
7) I'm Begging You Please - Brian's voice cracks on this demo but good grief, the man could write a song even in his most "off" years
8) A Little Somethin' - another Brian demo, this one childish and pointless in an "All Together Now" vein
9) Almost Summer [liev 9/3/78] - Brian seems to be playing with Celebration here, the only noteworthy aspect of this recording
10) Calendar Girl - lots of synths, sounds more like a 15 Big Ones discard but it's not
11) Skatetown USA - an Al/Mike cowrote that shows their perception of what direction the band should be taking; you wonder how this coexisted with stuff like "Baby Blue" even in theory
12) Why Didn't I Tell You? - actually from the Keepin' the Summer Alive outtake; a very weird Brian thing, basically "Goin' On" with incongrously psychotic drum fills
13) Angel Come Home [live May 1979] - this is actually splendid, and probably better -- certainly rawer -- than the album cut
14) Good Timin' [live May 1979] - Dennis sings lead here ("Carl chickened out")
The Beach Boys: Keepin' the Summer Alive: Bonus Tracks (bootleg 1979-83) [NO]
1) Little Girl - very incomplete cover; only the first couple of lines of the vocal are on it
2) Da Doo Ron Ron - pretty lame version of the Crystals' song (changing "Bill" to "Jill," natch) from Brian's very short-lived return to the production booth in advance of KTSA
3) Oh Darlin' [Brian vocal] - interesting to hear once, though this song is so turgid
4) Goin' to the Beach - just a backing track
5) Merry Minuet [live 7/4/80] - this should be buried someplace where it can never be found
6) Be My Baby - as should this; Mike singing this is a crime against the universe
7) River Deep Mountain High - this at least has the benefit of being very weird
8) Why Don't They Let Us Fall in Love? - Brian's undying Spector obsession here manifests at least in a cover that's slightly more suited to the Beach Boys than the above, but what's the point?
9) My Solution [1980 version] - a shitty synthesizer-based revision of the Halloween 1970 gem, with no vocals
10) Shortenin' Bread [alternate version] - this again, after Brian had already managed to get a version of the damn thing on an album
11) Stevie - the sole redeeming studio cut on this boot, Brian's infectious 1981 valentine to Stevie Nicks; it's too bad about the horns
12) Walkin' on Water - frivolous possible improvisation, but wouldn't it be funny if this was part of The Elements Suite?
13) I Thank You [live April 1981] - surprisingly credible, raucous version of the Sam & Dave song; why didn't Carl tap into his voice's soulful reserves more?
14) Back in the USSR [live 7/4/81] - a weird choice for one of the 4th of July shows; also note that Mike finds another excuse to bring up hanging around with the Beatles in Rishikesh
15) Runaway [live 1981] - Al does a good job on this but it's a very sterile arrangement
16) Rockin' All Over the World [live 11/26/82] - "generic" is the only word
17) California Dreamin' [first version] - sold with a cassette you could buy exclusively at Radio Shack, later overdubbed for the single; blasphemous I know, but I actually slightly prefer this to the arid high school glee club style of the Mamas and the Papas, though I still wouldn't call it good
18) The Boogie's Back in Town - a Brian song that was performed live exactly once; the best part is Brian's spoken introduction
Brian Wilson / Dennis Wilson: The Cocaine Sessions (bootleg 1981)
I'm including this here, tasteless name and all, because it involves the two most musically gifted Beach Boys; unfortunately, this is clearly just about the lowest ebb of both their lives. Basically: tape rolls while the brothers noodle around on organ and piano; there are eight "tracks," only some of which are really songs per se. There are fragments of something worthwhile in "Oh Lord," but it's nearly seven minutes of plodding misery. That said, the driving "City Blues" is very good, eventually revised and released by Brian solo, as was an untitled piano fragment that turned into "This Isn't Love," performed live but unrecorded. "You've Been" is a bit of a Buddy Holly burlesque, ditto "I Feel So Fine" for the Chords' "Sh-Boom." There's also a minute of Brian vamping on the "Heroes and Villains" chorus. All this might attract people seeking audio documents of people on the brink of train-wreck psychological despondency, and it's indeed rather creepy and troubling, but it's also duller than you'd think, not unlike some of Brian's solo piano recordings from the mid-'70s. Those who are big enough fans to be used to sifting through garbage might like it, though! But these two were capable of such greatness, and this is a sad documentary of mutual enabling.
The Beach Boys: [latter-day odds and ends] (bootleg 1984-91) [NO]
I put this together myself back in the Napster / Kazaa era. None of it is any good, but I was a completist and couldn't justify paying $35 for Summer in Paradise unless I had absolutely everything. The disc includes the following uncollected Beach Boys tidbits -- b-sides and soundtrack contributions, mostly -- from the post-Dennis years:
1) Chasing the Sky - one of the slim handful of fairly good post-1979 Beach Boys songs, this one for the Up the Creek soundtrack
2) East Meets West - a collaboration with the Four Seasons, presumably resolving the old "Surfers Rule" rivalry, though I think you might have to actually dig the Four Seasons to appreciate it
3) Happy Endings - my choice for the absolute worst, most embarrassing, most totally wrongheaded and stupid Beach Boys song ever released, and tainting the great Little Richard in the process (as if being on the b-side of "Kokomo" wasn't enough); an unlistenable Diane Warren-like '80s ballad about the eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeaster bunny
4) Lady Liberty - "Lady Lynda," rewritten with new lyrics about the Statue of Liberty, because of either patriotism or divorce
5) Problem Child - like "Make It Big," a latter-day BBs song for a movie made slightly palatable via Carl Wilson
6) Crocodile Rock - one of the few Elton John songs I don't mind (yes, I'm showing my deficiencies here), but a totally superfluous cover
7) Kokomo [Spanish] - probably better than the original; also, Brian's on it!
Sunday, October 9, 2016
The Beach Boys capsules: Bootlegs, part 3 of 4 (SMiLE)
This is by no means an exhaustive list of Smile bootlegs, nor does it come close to addressing the proper "canon" of unauthorized releases related to the Beach Boys' unfinished follow-up to Pet Sounds. But these are the ones I have in my possession. Taken together they form a reasonably balanced picture of a project that seemingly got away from its creator, sometimes too big and vague for the easily distracted Brian Wilson to get his arms around it and steady or control what he'd begun. For all the legend attached to it and its more than occasional moments of transcendent brilliance (mostly the "complete," conventional pop songs: "Wonderful" and "Wind Chimes" are phenomenally beautiful, "Heroes and Villains" is a corker in its best moments before all the meandering chants overwhelmed the idea, and "Cabin Essence" and "Surf's Up" are musically arresting despite clumsy, overwrought lyrics, a generalized problem that's completely conquered solely on "Wonderful"), Smile as a whole, at least as we know it, is an overexcited detour in Brian's output, unfocused and insubstantial, and particularly facile when compared to the inward-looking, personal and less "constructed" Pet Sounds.
A very general history of the collapse of the Smile project can be found on our main Beach Boys Essentials essay as well as in our review of Smiley Smile; for this project I've also added a few new paragraphs to my old review of The Smile Sessions, Capitol's 2011 boxed set that finally brought the original album as close to a finished state as can ever really be possible, addressing most of my specific criticisms of the music of Smile itself. There's no way I can express myself better than Beach Boys historian and sessionographer Craig Slowinski, who put it thusly in 2016 (and who knows all this material more intimately than I ever will):
I've always felt various pieces of Smile [...] are freakin' brilliant, yet as a whole, cohesive work, it pales compared to Pet Sounds or other less ambitious albums like Friends. Looking at the original sessions, the whole is not greater than the sum of its parts, and I believe that's because Brian painted himself into an artistic corner that he couldn't get out of -- which is the main reason he chose to abandon it. Once [Brian Wilson's solo version] was unveiled, it made a bit more sense as a whole, but only through the lens of knowing that Brian was looking back from the vantage point of his later years to the fractured, acid-influenced (yet still brilliant) ambition of his youth.
Speaking of which: not reviewed on this page but very much relevant to it is the 2004 album Brian Wilson Presents Smile, on which Brian ostensibly "finished" the album after almost forty years, writing some new lyrics with Van Dyke Parks and attempting to piece together a proper coherent sequence for new rerecordings of the oft-bootlegged material. The album has an added poignance because of the fracturing of Brian's voice, and a few inspired moments (the new versions of "Fire" and "I'm in Great Shape" intriguingly reframe an album with decades of demons surrounding it as fluffy kiddie fare) but its musical and thematic shortcomings remain hard to skirt past.
At any rate, the fate of Smile permanently changed the Beach Boys' career and reputation and the legend that grew in its wake has undeniably affected their stature as an artistic unit, both in the years immediately after it was shelved and decades hence when unauthorized CDs of this music became common. The mystique and mystery that surrounds Smile bootlegs are a major catalyst for many people to become serious Beach Boys enthusiasts in the first place, myself included, and so on this page we will try to briefly address the Smile story through the lens of several of the most noteworthy and/or easily obtainable sources... with the understanding that Capitol's official set is now the most comprehensive collection of original Smile material by far. But as with the bootlegs, you still will have the same problem Brian did; no matter how much time you spend with Smile, you'll never get a really clear idea of what it is or what it's trying to say and why. "Concept albums" are more often than not a terrible idea, and this was not an exception.
The Beach Boys got as far in the process of completing Smile as submitting an unordered track listing to Capitol, who pressed up cover slicks with it. (Apparently Brian himself didn't write this list of tracks, and was still adding new songs to the project for some time afterward.) These twelve titles can be considered the "core" of the record; though other songs like "Prayer," "Holidays" and "Look" were undoubtedly meant as some form of linking or (sometimes) introductory material, it's generally assumed that the twelve were to be banded separately with no segues. In the order they're listed on the back, they are:
- "Do You Like Worms"
- "Wind Chimes"
- "Heroes and Villains"
- "Surf's Up"
- "Good Vibrations"
- "Cabin Essence"
- "Wonderful"
- "I'm in Great Shape"
- "Child Is Father of the Man"
- "The Elements"
- "Vega-Tables"
- "The Old Master Painter"
"Good Vibrations" and "Heroes and Villains" were finished and released as singles, though the latter was vastly scaled down from original intentions, which at one time had included a "part II" on the b-side, the actual nature of which remains clouded in speculation. "Wind Chimes," "Vega-Tables" and "Wonderful" were wholly re-recorded and included on Smiley Smile, the next proper album, but in all three cases the Smile version was finished or very close. "Cabin Essence" was finished and released as "Cabinessence" on 1969's 20/20 (along with "Our Prayer," which under the title "Prayer" is assumed to have been intended to open the record, as Brian himself says during the recording session). "Surf's Up" was later finished, combined with "Child Is Father of the Man" (there's some argument as to whether this was the original intention) and released on Surf's Up in 1971. We have a good idea of what was involved in "I'm in Great Shape," "Child Is Father of the Man" and "The Old Master Painter," parts of which are either incomplete or missing. Lots of other short pieces -- like "Workshop," aka "I Wanna Be Around," and "Barnyard" -- were meant as segments of other cuts, with "Heroes and Villains" inspiring an almost endless series of "sections." The big wild card is "The Elements": those would be fire, earth, air and water, but apart from the famous instrumental "Fire," what was actually involved in the other three pieces has been hotly disputed for decades. "Water" was long thought to be "I Love to Say Da Da" until a separate piece called "Water" showed up. Brian said "Air" was a piano piece. "Earth"... well, we're not going to settle this here. But that's the rundown, which should help make what follows a little more coherent. Brian of course took his own stab, with a fair bit of help, at completing the album and rerecording it in 2004, but that hasn't stopped fans from speculating and constructing their own mixes and alternative sequences, and they likely never will. There's no "final answer" to how Smile was going to be sequenced and what was going to be included because, plain and simple, it wasn't finished, and that's that.
***
The Beach Boys: Unsurpassed Masters Vol. 15: Good Vibrations (bootleg 1966) [3CD] [r]
Official or not, probably the most exhaustive examination ever put together of a single pop song, roughly three and a half hours of session material for the Beach Boys' most legendary hit. Capitol condensed this down into one disc for their Smile box in 2011, which is still a staggering amount of material for just one tune. It all might sound like overkill, but this song was of course rather unusual, and it's a more varied listen than the uninitiated might expect, since Brian put the song together in fragments and then tied them together, working on it for months and at unprecedented cost. This is an opportunity to hear the master producer -- overflowing with enthusiasm and excitement -- slowly constructing and tweaking what's often considered his masterpiece; for even a person who likes the record but has never connected with it personally, the sound of its formation is fascinating. Even the portions Brian discards are often glorious and memorable; listening to that "hum-be-dum" section is like floating away on a cloud. We don't get to hear the finished vocals being put on, but we get a good idea of what a miraculous task it was to make "Good Vibrations" happen, a singular achievement Brian would never duplicate. It was subsequently intended (perhaps less by Brian than by Capitol) as the feather in the cap of Smile, and part of Brian's intention for that album was for its creation to proceed in a similar incremental fashion, with the hopes that the entire record would prove as towering, impressive, impossible. Thus, onward to the slow crushing of that particular dream.
The Beach Boys: Smile [Vigotone] (bootleg 1966-67) [2CD]
This 1989 two-disc collection of sparkling high-quality outtakes and session material was the biggest source of Smile on CD for a number of years; I've long since lost the cassette bootleg I was sent in 1997 but I believe at least parts of it were dubbed from this set. Not making much of an attempt to coincide with the prospective album order but aligning closely with the list of tunes on the back cover, it contains a good deal of music sourced from a tape Mark Linett mixed and mastered of a prospective Smile release in 1988. "Good Vibrations" and "Cabin Essence" are represented by unfinished vocal overdubs, "Child Is Father of the Man" by an acetate, "Surf's Up" by a series of incomplete versions, "Heroes and Villains" by a sequence of fragments similar to what later showed up on the Good Vibrations box. "Vega-Tables" is mislabeled as containing parts of "I'm in Great Shape," the nature of which may have been unknown at this point. There's also a bit of "Cool Cool Water," left unfinished until Sunflower. After the proper-ish album sequence we get a spooky series of takes on "Prayer" that serve to prove first of all that Brian intended for it to be the album intro, and secondarily that at least a couple of band members were on acid at the time it was recorded. There's the fun novelty "He Gives Speeches," which became "She's Goin' Bald" on Smiley Smile and fits more snugly with the "humor album" concept, followed by a wonderful early take of "With Me Tonight," also a Smiley selection. The first disc closes out with a "Wonderful" overdub, another "Child" acetate, the "Heroes and Villains" b-side "You're Welcome" and another group of "Heroes and Villains" bits and pieces. Disc two gets more heavily into sessions: overdub outtakes of "Good Vibrations," session outtakes of "Surf's Up," "Fire" and "Holidays," track assemblies of "The Old Master Painter" and "Cabin-Essence" (with no vocals on the former). There are also a few of the canonical Smile songs not on the final tracklist: "Workshop," "Holidays," "Barnyard" (instrumental at this point) and "Look." We close out with an alternative "Prayer," the Inside Pop TV performance of "Surf's Up" (Brian forlornly playing piano while Leonard Bernstein waxes about his brilliance), and twenty-five minutes of a party during the Smile era for some reason. This served at the time as a good primer, though it's a lot less useful these days despite a few rare fragments here and there. But it's the only place you can hear all nine minutes of the legendary "George Fell into His French Horn," a bunch of richly entertaining goofing around with Brian in the studio directing the French horn players in an increasingly ridiculous comedy sketch. Part of me is more interested in where Brian was going with the whole "humor" concept (see also: the loopy rant about "smog" he recorded around this time) than in where Smile was headed.
The Beach Boys: Unsurpassed Masters Vol. 16: Smile (bootleg 1966-67)
Sea of Tunes' inevitable take on how Smile would have been laid out in 1967 seems believable insofar as it runs about 43 minutes and includes all of the canonical tracks in an order that makes sense... though it's difficult to overlook the fact that Brian was still tinkering with these songs, especially "Heroes and Villains," so late in the game that this resembles a workprint (with footage still to be shot). Still, it's almost definitely the most coherent pre-2004 version of Smile that exists, and with the highest sound quality aside from the loose construction on the official Good Vibrations box. Several of the takes here are excluded from the larger Sea of Tunes sessions box, apparently with the assumption that anybody who shelled out for one would pick up the other. The most curious decision is to feature the completed 20/20 version of "Cabin Essence" but to include "Good Vibrations" and "Surf's Up" in various in-progress stages. Apparently, this bootleg was consulted frequently during the 2004 preparation of Brian Wilson's solo version of Smile.
The Beach Boys: Smile [Purple Chick] (bootleg 1966-67)
There are about a dozen commonly seen Smile bootlegs on CD and vinyl and there are comprehensive lists and descriptions covering them in places like the Smiley Smile message board; these sessions alone warrant investigations and inventories as complex as some bands' entire discographies. But this was my go-to version of Smile for the several years between my discovery of it in 2008 and the official Beach Boys release in 2011 (with the caveat that I don't listen very often to Smile anyway, except when doing something like this). Never issued in physical form, this comes from the anonymous online bootlegger Purple Chick who's known for their comprehensive collections of the Beatles' released and unreleased work in easily accessible downloadable format with artwork provided for free; there's also a superb ten-disc Purple Chick collection of Buddy Holly's entire output plus peripheral items. The PC assembly of Smile is not really at attempt to "finish" the album, like most fan mixes, or to present each song in the most complete known form available, as with Sea of Tunes, or to resemble the thrill of uncovering a stack of disorganized tapes and acetates like the Vigotone set. Rather, it's really designed for people who dug Brian Wilson's 2004 Smile but wish the Beach Boys were singing it. It attempts to duplicate the tracklist and format of the modern disc with the material that's available from the '66-'67 sessions. Given that it's an amateur production, it's very impressive. The liner notes give some detail of how Purple Chick used various sources -- occasionally including the 2004 album itself, but only for minor tweaks -- to create an interpretation of the album that at least looks somewhat complete... though as ever, how it feels is a different story. The Smile material at its worst is not just grating and insubstantial, it's downright insipid, and hearing it with perfect clarity like this only lets all the excuses for that fall unceremoniously away.
The Beach Boys: Unsurpassed Masters 17: Smile Sessions (bootleg 1966-67) [3CD]
This has now been largely superseded by Capitol's Smile Sessions box... but it does get a little more heavily into the nuts and bolts of how some tracks were constructed, up to the point that they were; the material here is surprisingly listenable and fast-paced, though the endless takes of "Vega-Tables" and twenty minutes of the accompanying Hal Blaine argument (in which Blaine portrays a "get off my lawn" type figure yelling at Michael Vosse and Brian to get their hands off his vegetables; the short sample of this on Hawthorne, CA is all of it you will ever need) wear thin. There are a few alternate versions of "Wonderful," "Look," "Wind Chimes," "Friday Night," "Water" and "The Old Master Painter" that never found official release, but except for "Wonderful" there's nothing radically different; Smile buffs will, however, be interested in the real-time bounces and overdubs of vocal tracks, a Sea of Tunes staple included generously here for several songs and quite fascinating in their way. This set is not nearly on the scale of the Unsurpassed Masters Pet Sounds boxes, both because of the number of missing tapes and unavailable fragments and because the music was simply incomplete. You can't really hear Brian struggling outwardly in the control room. On the earlier sessions, he sounds just as driven and "together" as ever, though as the album's creation drags on he does seem to become a bit more soft-spoken and a bit less single-minded, though never anything other than astonishingly detail-oriented. Capitol does seem to have taken some inspiration from this presentation when preparing the official box.
Quick note: there exist online separate session collections for "Heroes and Villains," as well as a complete source tape for the Sea of Tunes box and a boot called Secret Smile, plus lord knows how many other bits and pieces spread around the galaxy. I was Smile-d out many years ago and have never sought them out, but they do feature material not included on either the official or Sea of Tunes boxes.
The Beach Boys: Lei'd in Hawaii Rehearsal (bootleg 1967)
This famous bootleg has a complicated, confusing genesis. Smile collapsed in early 1967; one single made it to release, followed by the radically reworked, abbreviated and fascinating Smiley Smile. The band's disastrous cancellation of an appearance at Moneterey derailed things further. Bruce Johnston took a leave of absence due to creative differences and as a result Brian -- with organ in tow -- joined the group for a live show in Hawaii that was meant to be recorded. The shows were, according to legend, under-rehearsed and embarrassing, and the bits of them offered on the Vigotone CD seem to bear this out; they come off as terribly anachronistic, badly in need of a setlist upheaval, especially with Mike still opening things up by slaving his way through the old "Little Deuce Coupe" "how the Beach Boys make their records" routine. Immediately scrapping the live album plans, the Beach Boys instead set about tentatively throwing together a low-key "live in the studio" album, which amounts to a set of extremely chilled-out and often sublime scaled-down takes on their own older songs. These days you can find most of the Lei'd material in other places, but it does merit notice that these stark organ-driven takes on "God Only Knows," "Help Me Rhonda" (slightly reformatted as "Help You, Rhonda"), "You're So Good to Me," "Surfer Girl" and the Box Tops' "The Letter" are strikingly beautiful and well in keeping with the vibe of the Smiley Smile-Wild Honey period. The Hawaii material was abandoned altogether in favor of an album of all-new material, which became Wild Honey, but the band really struck modest gold here. Similar rearrangements of "Good Vibrations" and "Heroes and Villains" could have possibly made Smiley even better than it already was; unfortunately, while we have such a take of "Good Vibrations" from a year or so later on Endless Harmony, the scaled-back "Heroes and Villains" is tainted by a horrendously insulting voiceover from Mike slagging off the song and its ambitions, an ill-advised attempt by Brian at making light of the song's relatively mediocre chart performance compared to its predecessor. (It was still a sizable hit, so this all seems rather like sour grapes.) One thing about it, though, is that it does work as strong firsthand evidence that Smile went kaput less because of band or label interference, as was long presupposed, than because of Brian's own unhappiness with it.
Brian would look back on this period with great fondness -- perhaps because the pressure was off and the process by which he made music was dramatically scaled down, with a renewed concentration on elaborate, intimate vocal arrangements laid against far simpler, band-oriented backing tracks. In that spirit, Lei'd in Hawaii as Vigotone presents it works as a sort of bridge between the first and second great eras of the Beach Boys' history. They also throw in "Sherry She Needs Me" in its mid-'70s reincarnation and several takes of the Friends-era outtake "We're Together Again," neither of which have much to do with anything, but hey, it's a bootleg.
The Beach Boys: Unsurpassed Masters Vol. 18: Smiley Smile (bootleg 1967) [r]
Right out of the gate, the big difference here as we spend an hour at Brian's house working through a little over half of the new tracks for Smiley Smile is that the instrumentation is so much barer than on Smile; Brian doesn't sound like he's lost his marbles, nor does the band seem inordinately impatient or stoned. Brian is a bit more relaxed, and stripping things back obviously helps him with focusing; the only fully successful "incremental" track he'd completed was "Good Vibrations," so despite the expense to Capitol he apparently came about the rolled-back approach quite naturally, and 24 year-olds aren't widely known for being super responsible with finances in the first place. This disc deconstructs the Smiley versions of "Wonderful," "Wind Chimes," "Vegetables," "With Me Tonight" and "She's Goin' Bald" (formerly "He Gives Speeches"), plus the new song "Gettin' Hungry." There are more layers to these deceptively sparse records than first meets the ear, though a number of elements you can clearly hear -- piano especially -- were deliberately buried in the final mono mix. At the time they were recording Smiley Smile, the Beach Boys were still a months off their biggest hit ever, and it's fun to imagine the biggest band in America working out this intricately detailed series of half-awake grooves. If only it had turned on as many people as Sgt. Pepper did.
******
A very general history of the collapse of the Smile project can be found on our main Beach Boys Essentials essay as well as in our review of Smiley Smile; for this project I've also added a few new paragraphs to my old review of The Smile Sessions, Capitol's 2011 boxed set that finally brought the original album as close to a finished state as can ever really be possible, addressing most of my specific criticisms of the music of Smile itself. There's no way I can express myself better than Beach Boys historian and sessionographer Craig Slowinski, who put it thusly in 2016 (and who knows all this material more intimately than I ever will):
I've always felt various pieces of Smile [...] are freakin' brilliant, yet as a whole, cohesive work, it pales compared to Pet Sounds or other less ambitious albums like Friends. Looking at the original sessions, the whole is not greater than the sum of its parts, and I believe that's because Brian painted himself into an artistic corner that he couldn't get out of -- which is the main reason he chose to abandon it. Once [Brian Wilson's solo version] was unveiled, it made a bit more sense as a whole, but only through the lens of knowing that Brian was looking back from the vantage point of his later years to the fractured, acid-influenced (yet still brilliant) ambition of his youth.
Speaking of which: not reviewed on this page but very much relevant to it is the 2004 album Brian Wilson Presents Smile, on which Brian ostensibly "finished" the album after almost forty years, writing some new lyrics with Van Dyke Parks and attempting to piece together a proper coherent sequence for new rerecordings of the oft-bootlegged material. The album has an added poignance because of the fracturing of Brian's voice, and a few inspired moments (the new versions of "Fire" and "I'm in Great Shape" intriguingly reframe an album with decades of demons surrounding it as fluffy kiddie fare) but its musical and thematic shortcomings remain hard to skirt past.
At any rate, the fate of Smile permanently changed the Beach Boys' career and reputation and the legend that grew in its wake has undeniably affected their stature as an artistic unit, both in the years immediately after it was shelved and decades hence when unauthorized CDs of this music became common. The mystique and mystery that surrounds Smile bootlegs are a major catalyst for many people to become serious Beach Boys enthusiasts in the first place, myself included, and so on this page we will try to briefly address the Smile story through the lens of several of the most noteworthy and/or easily obtainable sources... with the understanding that Capitol's official set is now the most comprehensive collection of original Smile material by far. But as with the bootlegs, you still will have the same problem Brian did; no matter how much time you spend with Smile, you'll never get a really clear idea of what it is or what it's trying to say and why. "Concept albums" are more often than not a terrible idea, and this was not an exception.
The Beach Boys got as far in the process of completing Smile as submitting an unordered track listing to Capitol, who pressed up cover slicks with it. (Apparently Brian himself didn't write this list of tracks, and was still adding new songs to the project for some time afterward.) These twelve titles can be considered the "core" of the record; though other songs like "Prayer," "Holidays" and "Look" were undoubtedly meant as some form of linking or (sometimes) introductory material, it's generally assumed that the twelve were to be banded separately with no segues. In the order they're listed on the back, they are:
- "Do You Like Worms"
- "Wind Chimes"
- "Heroes and Villains"
- "Surf's Up"
- "Good Vibrations"
- "Cabin Essence"
- "Wonderful"
- "I'm in Great Shape"
- "Child Is Father of the Man"
- "The Elements"
- "Vega-Tables"
- "The Old Master Painter"
"Good Vibrations" and "Heroes and Villains" were finished and released as singles, though the latter was vastly scaled down from original intentions, which at one time had included a "part II" on the b-side, the actual nature of which remains clouded in speculation. "Wind Chimes," "Vega-Tables" and "Wonderful" were wholly re-recorded and included on Smiley Smile, the next proper album, but in all three cases the Smile version was finished or very close. "Cabin Essence" was finished and released as "Cabinessence" on 1969's 20/20 (along with "Our Prayer," which under the title "Prayer" is assumed to have been intended to open the record, as Brian himself says during the recording session). "Surf's Up" was later finished, combined with "Child Is Father of the Man" (there's some argument as to whether this was the original intention) and released on Surf's Up in 1971. We have a good idea of what was involved in "I'm in Great Shape," "Child Is Father of the Man" and "The Old Master Painter," parts of which are either incomplete or missing. Lots of other short pieces -- like "Workshop," aka "I Wanna Be Around," and "Barnyard" -- were meant as segments of other cuts, with "Heroes and Villains" inspiring an almost endless series of "sections." The big wild card is "The Elements": those would be fire, earth, air and water, but apart from the famous instrumental "Fire," what was actually involved in the other three pieces has been hotly disputed for decades. "Water" was long thought to be "I Love to Say Da Da" until a separate piece called "Water" showed up. Brian said "Air" was a piano piece. "Earth"... well, we're not going to settle this here. But that's the rundown, which should help make what follows a little more coherent. Brian of course took his own stab, with a fair bit of help, at completing the album and rerecording it in 2004, but that hasn't stopped fans from speculating and constructing their own mixes and alternative sequences, and they likely never will. There's no "final answer" to how Smile was going to be sequenced and what was going to be included because, plain and simple, it wasn't finished, and that's that.
***
The Beach Boys: Unsurpassed Masters Vol. 15: Good Vibrations (bootleg 1966) [3CD] [r]
Official or not, probably the most exhaustive examination ever put together of a single pop song, roughly three and a half hours of session material for the Beach Boys' most legendary hit. Capitol condensed this down into one disc for their Smile box in 2011, which is still a staggering amount of material for just one tune. It all might sound like overkill, but this song was of course rather unusual, and it's a more varied listen than the uninitiated might expect, since Brian put the song together in fragments and then tied them together, working on it for months and at unprecedented cost. This is an opportunity to hear the master producer -- overflowing with enthusiasm and excitement -- slowly constructing and tweaking what's often considered his masterpiece; for even a person who likes the record but has never connected with it personally, the sound of its formation is fascinating. Even the portions Brian discards are often glorious and memorable; listening to that "hum-be-dum" section is like floating away on a cloud. We don't get to hear the finished vocals being put on, but we get a good idea of what a miraculous task it was to make "Good Vibrations" happen, a singular achievement Brian would never duplicate. It was subsequently intended (perhaps less by Brian than by Capitol) as the feather in the cap of Smile, and part of Brian's intention for that album was for its creation to proceed in a similar incremental fashion, with the hopes that the entire record would prove as towering, impressive, impossible. Thus, onward to the slow crushing of that particular dream.
The Beach Boys: Smile [Vigotone] (bootleg 1966-67) [2CD]
This 1989 two-disc collection of sparkling high-quality outtakes and session material was the biggest source of Smile on CD for a number of years; I've long since lost the cassette bootleg I was sent in 1997 but I believe at least parts of it were dubbed from this set. Not making much of an attempt to coincide with the prospective album order but aligning closely with the list of tunes on the back cover, it contains a good deal of music sourced from a tape Mark Linett mixed and mastered of a prospective Smile release in 1988. "Good Vibrations" and "Cabin Essence" are represented by unfinished vocal overdubs, "Child Is Father of the Man" by an acetate, "Surf's Up" by a series of incomplete versions, "Heroes and Villains" by a sequence of fragments similar to what later showed up on the Good Vibrations box. "Vega-Tables" is mislabeled as containing parts of "I'm in Great Shape," the nature of which may have been unknown at this point. There's also a bit of "Cool Cool Water," left unfinished until Sunflower. After the proper-ish album sequence we get a spooky series of takes on "Prayer" that serve to prove first of all that Brian intended for it to be the album intro, and secondarily that at least a couple of band members were on acid at the time it was recorded. There's the fun novelty "He Gives Speeches," which became "She's Goin' Bald" on Smiley Smile and fits more snugly with the "humor album" concept, followed by a wonderful early take of "With Me Tonight," also a Smiley selection. The first disc closes out with a "Wonderful" overdub, another "Child" acetate, the "Heroes and Villains" b-side "You're Welcome" and another group of "Heroes and Villains" bits and pieces. Disc two gets more heavily into sessions: overdub outtakes of "Good Vibrations," session outtakes of "Surf's Up," "Fire" and "Holidays," track assemblies of "The Old Master Painter" and "Cabin-Essence" (with no vocals on the former). There are also a few of the canonical Smile songs not on the final tracklist: "Workshop," "Holidays," "Barnyard" (instrumental at this point) and "Look." We close out with an alternative "Prayer," the Inside Pop TV performance of "Surf's Up" (Brian forlornly playing piano while Leonard Bernstein waxes about his brilliance), and twenty-five minutes of a party during the Smile era for some reason. This served at the time as a good primer, though it's a lot less useful these days despite a few rare fragments here and there. But it's the only place you can hear all nine minutes of the legendary "George Fell into His French Horn," a bunch of richly entertaining goofing around with Brian in the studio directing the French horn players in an increasingly ridiculous comedy sketch. Part of me is more interested in where Brian was going with the whole "humor" concept (see also: the loopy rant about "smog" he recorded around this time) than in where Smile was headed.
The Beach Boys: Unsurpassed Masters Vol. 16: Smile (bootleg 1966-67)
Sea of Tunes' inevitable take on how Smile would have been laid out in 1967 seems believable insofar as it runs about 43 minutes and includes all of the canonical tracks in an order that makes sense... though it's difficult to overlook the fact that Brian was still tinkering with these songs, especially "Heroes and Villains," so late in the game that this resembles a workprint (with footage still to be shot). Still, it's almost definitely the most coherent pre-2004 version of Smile that exists, and with the highest sound quality aside from the loose construction on the official Good Vibrations box. Several of the takes here are excluded from the larger Sea of Tunes sessions box, apparently with the assumption that anybody who shelled out for one would pick up the other. The most curious decision is to feature the completed 20/20 version of "Cabin Essence" but to include "Good Vibrations" and "Surf's Up" in various in-progress stages. Apparently, this bootleg was consulted frequently during the 2004 preparation of Brian Wilson's solo version of Smile.
The Beach Boys: Smile [Purple Chick] (bootleg 1966-67)
There are about a dozen commonly seen Smile bootlegs on CD and vinyl and there are comprehensive lists and descriptions covering them in places like the Smiley Smile message board; these sessions alone warrant investigations and inventories as complex as some bands' entire discographies. But this was my go-to version of Smile for the several years between my discovery of it in 2008 and the official Beach Boys release in 2011 (with the caveat that I don't listen very often to Smile anyway, except when doing something like this). Never issued in physical form, this comes from the anonymous online bootlegger Purple Chick who's known for their comprehensive collections of the Beatles' released and unreleased work in easily accessible downloadable format with artwork provided for free; there's also a superb ten-disc Purple Chick collection of Buddy Holly's entire output plus peripheral items. The PC assembly of Smile is not really at attempt to "finish" the album, like most fan mixes, or to present each song in the most complete known form available, as with Sea of Tunes, or to resemble the thrill of uncovering a stack of disorganized tapes and acetates like the Vigotone set. Rather, it's really designed for people who dug Brian Wilson's 2004 Smile but wish the Beach Boys were singing it. It attempts to duplicate the tracklist and format of the modern disc with the material that's available from the '66-'67 sessions. Given that it's an amateur production, it's very impressive. The liner notes give some detail of how Purple Chick used various sources -- occasionally including the 2004 album itself, but only for minor tweaks -- to create an interpretation of the album that at least looks somewhat complete... though as ever, how it feels is a different story. The Smile material at its worst is not just grating and insubstantial, it's downright insipid, and hearing it with perfect clarity like this only lets all the excuses for that fall unceremoniously away.
The Beach Boys: Unsurpassed Masters 17: Smile Sessions (bootleg 1966-67) [3CD]
This has now been largely superseded by Capitol's Smile Sessions box... but it does get a little more heavily into the nuts and bolts of how some tracks were constructed, up to the point that they were; the material here is surprisingly listenable and fast-paced, though the endless takes of "Vega-Tables" and twenty minutes of the accompanying Hal Blaine argument (in which Blaine portrays a "get off my lawn" type figure yelling at Michael Vosse and Brian to get their hands off his vegetables; the short sample of this on Hawthorne, CA is all of it you will ever need) wear thin. There are a few alternate versions of "Wonderful," "Look," "Wind Chimes," "Friday Night," "Water" and "The Old Master Painter" that never found official release, but except for "Wonderful" there's nothing radically different; Smile buffs will, however, be interested in the real-time bounces and overdubs of vocal tracks, a Sea of Tunes staple included generously here for several songs and quite fascinating in their way. This set is not nearly on the scale of the Unsurpassed Masters Pet Sounds boxes, both because of the number of missing tapes and unavailable fragments and because the music was simply incomplete. You can't really hear Brian struggling outwardly in the control room. On the earlier sessions, he sounds just as driven and "together" as ever, though as the album's creation drags on he does seem to become a bit more soft-spoken and a bit less single-minded, though never anything other than astonishingly detail-oriented. Capitol does seem to have taken some inspiration from this presentation when preparing the official box.
Quick note: there exist online separate session collections for "Heroes and Villains," as well as a complete source tape for the Sea of Tunes box and a boot called Secret Smile, plus lord knows how many other bits and pieces spread around the galaxy. I was Smile-d out many years ago and have never sought them out, but they do feature material not included on either the official or Sea of Tunes boxes.
The Beach Boys: Lei'd in Hawaii Rehearsal (bootleg 1967)
This famous bootleg has a complicated, confusing genesis. Smile collapsed in early 1967; one single made it to release, followed by the radically reworked, abbreviated and fascinating Smiley Smile. The band's disastrous cancellation of an appearance at Moneterey derailed things further. Bruce Johnston took a leave of absence due to creative differences and as a result Brian -- with organ in tow -- joined the group for a live show in Hawaii that was meant to be recorded. The shows were, according to legend, under-rehearsed and embarrassing, and the bits of them offered on the Vigotone CD seem to bear this out; they come off as terribly anachronistic, badly in need of a setlist upheaval, especially with Mike still opening things up by slaving his way through the old "Little Deuce Coupe" "how the Beach Boys make their records" routine. Immediately scrapping the live album plans, the Beach Boys instead set about tentatively throwing together a low-key "live in the studio" album, which amounts to a set of extremely chilled-out and often sublime scaled-down takes on their own older songs. These days you can find most of the Lei'd material in other places, but it does merit notice that these stark organ-driven takes on "God Only Knows," "Help Me Rhonda" (slightly reformatted as "Help You, Rhonda"), "You're So Good to Me," "Surfer Girl" and the Box Tops' "The Letter" are strikingly beautiful and well in keeping with the vibe of the Smiley Smile-Wild Honey period. The Hawaii material was abandoned altogether in favor of an album of all-new material, which became Wild Honey, but the band really struck modest gold here. Similar rearrangements of "Good Vibrations" and "Heroes and Villains" could have possibly made Smiley even better than it already was; unfortunately, while we have such a take of "Good Vibrations" from a year or so later on Endless Harmony, the scaled-back "Heroes and Villains" is tainted by a horrendously insulting voiceover from Mike slagging off the song and its ambitions, an ill-advised attempt by Brian at making light of the song's relatively mediocre chart performance compared to its predecessor. (It was still a sizable hit, so this all seems rather like sour grapes.) One thing about it, though, is that it does work as strong firsthand evidence that Smile went kaput less because of band or label interference, as was long presupposed, than because of Brian's own unhappiness with it.
Brian would look back on this period with great fondness -- perhaps because the pressure was off and the process by which he made music was dramatically scaled down, with a renewed concentration on elaborate, intimate vocal arrangements laid against far simpler, band-oriented backing tracks. In that spirit, Lei'd in Hawaii as Vigotone presents it works as a sort of bridge between the first and second great eras of the Beach Boys' history. They also throw in "Sherry She Needs Me" in its mid-'70s reincarnation and several takes of the Friends-era outtake "We're Together Again," neither of which have much to do with anything, but hey, it's a bootleg.
The Beach Boys: Unsurpassed Masters Vol. 18: Smiley Smile (bootleg 1967) [r]
Right out of the gate, the big difference here as we spend an hour at Brian's house working through a little over half of the new tracks for Smiley Smile is that the instrumentation is so much barer than on Smile; Brian doesn't sound like he's lost his marbles, nor does the band seem inordinately impatient or stoned. Brian is a bit more relaxed, and stripping things back obviously helps him with focusing; the only fully successful "incremental" track he'd completed was "Good Vibrations," so despite the expense to Capitol he apparently came about the rolled-back approach quite naturally, and 24 year-olds aren't widely known for being super responsible with finances in the first place. This disc deconstructs the Smiley versions of "Wonderful," "Wind Chimes," "Vegetables," "With Me Tonight" and "She's Goin' Bald" (formerly "He Gives Speeches"), plus the new song "Gettin' Hungry." There are more layers to these deceptively sparse records than first meets the ear, though a number of elements you can clearly hear -- piano especially -- were deliberately buried in the final mono mix. At the time they were recording Smiley Smile, the Beach Boys were still a months off their biggest hit ever, and it's fun to imagine the biggest band in America working out this intricately detailed series of half-awake grooves. If only it had turned on as many people as Sgt. Pepper did.
******
The Beach Boys capsules: Bootlegs, part 2 of 4 (Brian's peak years)
This second bootleg post will continue to concentrate on Sea of Tunes' Unsurpassed Masters series of unauthorized "alternate" Beach Boys albums; we're presently in the two-year zenith of Brian Wilson as a writer and producer, with the Beach Boys themselves serving as his willing ambassadors. Despite a brief detour in the shape of Party!, this incorporates the Summer Days and Pet Sounds albums and the attendant singles -- his most accomplished work, with the Beach Boys themselves and, at times, a roomful of exceptional session players now attuned to his quirks and needs.
The Beach Boys: Unsurpassed Masters Vol. 21: Today!/Summer Days Stereo (bootleg 1965)
This boot has obviously been superseded now by official releases of both of these albums -- after years of incremental teasing -- in full stereo versions. Like all stereo versions of Brian's best work -- including the contemporary official ones, which use a lot of flown-in electronically isolated vocals and which I find terribly lacking -- the primary utility here is the separation of elements employed, giving you a good taste of how the multiple tracks of these songs interlock. No stereo version of Today! or Summer Days can truly be seen as the "final draft," so to speak, because the mono mixes are Brian's idealized and intended end result, with some elements even introduced in the final stages of mixing to mono. The Sea of Tunes stereo mixes use whatever is available, so many of them have major missing elements (no vocals at all on several songs) or extra bits (Brian directing on "Please Let Me Wonder" and the like), which if you approach them with the right mindset makes them doubly interesting. Needless to say, most fans will undoubtedly prefer Mark Linett's more complete stereo mixes, available on Spotify -- but I would insist that nothing beats the real thing, and the real thing is mono. Incidentally, Summer Days is missing three cuts here: "And Your Dreams Come True," "I'm Bugged at My Ol' Man" and "Summer Means New Love." In their place are some "bonuses": the lamentably unfinished "Sandy," "All Dressed Up for School," "Graduation Day," "The Little Girl I Once Knew," "Sloop John B" (inexplicably) and, uh, "Three Blind Mice."
The Beach Boys: Unsurpassed Masters Vol. 9: Summer Days (And Summer Nights!!) (bootleg 1965) [4CD] [r]
The first truly great Beach Boys album, one of the defining records of the mid-'60s and a head-spinning tour of Brian Wilson's eclecticism, incisiveness, romance and humor receives a full four discs' worth of attention. Running through Sea of Tunes chronologically, hearing these songs evolving and being put together is the most exciting revelation so far, following through on the "Kiss Me Baby" and "Guess I'm Dumb" sessions earlier on. The vocals for this album were mostly recorded at a different studio (Columbia), which might be the reason why a lot of them aren't here. Thus session musicians dominate the first half of this collection to enough of an extent that labeling "Beach Boys" product seems a misnomer at times. Those first two discs focus on the single version of "Help Me Rhonda," "Let Him Run Wild" (my favorite Beach Boys song, so a highlight for me, like watching a master painter at work, even though Brian initially named it "I Hate Rock & Roll"), "Salt Lake City" (with a great X-rated tangent after Brian accidentally tells Carol Kaye to "whack off"), "California Girls" (then known as "You're Grass and I'm a Power Mower"; the musicians have a lot of trouble with the intro and Brian laughingly complains after one take that the song "keeps getting progressively worse"), and the legendary outtake variously known as "Sandy," "Sandy She Needs Me," "Sherry She Needs Me" and when Brian Wilson rewrote and released it in 1998, "She Says That She Needs Me" -- though its bassline found its way into parts of "Heroes and Villains" well before that. What exists of the Beach Boys' version saw official release on the Made in California box in 2013, but what's collected here isn't nearly so far along yet. The last two discs consist of actual Beach Boys sessions, covering some of their finest songs; take after take of "Girl Don't Tell Me" and "Then I Kissed Her" can get tedious because of the relatively simple arrangements, though it's fascinating to note that the band was perfectly capable of matching the Wrecking Crew fairly closely on a Phil Spector cover, but their interactions and debates while the songs take shape are fascinating and clearly evolved beyond the more adolescent bickering on early volumes in the series. It's enchanting, in fact, to hear Carl's acoustic guitar on "Girl Don't Tell Me" at full volume with no distraction; the song edges close to a finished state by the end of the disc but isn't quite there yet. The last disc gets a similar feeling from endless runthroughs of "You're So Good to Me" and "The Girl from New York City," returns briefly to the Wrecking Crew for "Amusement Parks USA" (also markedly unfinished, with the lyrics yet to be rewritten), and then covers the TV version of "Graduation Day," which captures the group in a testy mood. For fly-on-the-wall advocates and scholars, this is likely the best of the pre-Pet Sounds Sea of Tunes collections, though it's a much less thorough look at the corresponding album than the two Today! boxes.
The Beach Boys: Unsurpassed Masters Vol. 10: Party! (bootleg 1965) [4CD]
This four-disc dissection of Party! has been mostly superseded by Capitol's official release of (essentially) the same material in 2015, though if you're very very hardcore you might still go for the longer version. Even Party! fans I've known have been worn out by four full discs devoted to this ramshackle acoustic covers album, a charming if frivolous stopgap in the Beach Boys' career just prior to their undisputed masterpiece. The Sea of Tunes set does have material not included on the official set but it also has a couple of very unfortunate tape copying errors. Capitol's version is the safer bet for your time, especially if you like the original Party! album; either release includes the alternate version of the album without the chaotic overdubs, which I doubt anyone would deny is superior to the original version.
The Beach Boys: Unsurpassed Masters Vol. 11 (bootleg 1964-65) [2CD]
One of the more bizarre Sea of Tunes bootlegs, this is an attempt at a catch-all grab bag of the "odds and ends" sessions from throughout 1965, though it also includes a slew of instrumental takes for the abandoned All Summer Long outtake "Let's Live Before We Die." By far the best offering here is a fairly complete set of tracking sessions for "The Little Girl I Once Knew," as magic as you'd expect and clearly leading directly into the Pet Sounds era; twelve minutes dedicated to the strange "Three Blind Mice" sessions seem just as much like a proper prelude to Smile. Unfortunately, the remainder of each of the two discs is dominated by orchestral sessions Brian directed for a couple of pop standards sung by Dick Reynolds, a role reversal of sorts as Reynolds had worked up the big band-style arrangements on Christmas Album. Reynolds might have one of the worst voices in the history of recorded music, and both Brian's interest in recording it for posterity (perhaps similar to his later insistence on letting Jack Rieley sing lead on a Beach Boys song) and its presence in such minute detail on this bootleg are a complete mystery to me. I want to say "skip this," but the "Little Girl" sessions are just too valuable to dismiss. I wish they'd been paired with the "Sloop John B" disc instead.
The Beach Boys: Unsurpassed Masters Vol. 12: Sloop John B (bootleg 1965) [2CD]
Another weird pairing, with a full disc of "Sloop John B" sessions arbitrarily separated from Pet Sounds, probably based on the old myth that Brian didn't want it on the album (it was in fact included on the earliest tracklist for the record he submitted to Capitol, and its themes of alienation, isolation and dread fit quite well with the rest of the LP's lyrics, to say nothing of its shimmering arrangement). The tapes are of course fascinating, and you get to hear the finished track evolve in the next best thing to real-time from the multiple takes of the backing track to the various vocal overdubs, some of them eventually discarded. The second disc is the sticking point, a patience-stretching hour of spoken radio spots that consists mostly of Brian and Mike exchanging corny ideas before even they get exhausted and start going through the motions. There are some laughs early on, especially when Brian tries to record a personal message for Roger Christian, but the best moment is a remark from Al: "I hate this worse than anything I've ever done in my life." Even if you don't force yourself to listen to all of this like I did, it's hard to disagree; aside from Grant Gee's Meeting People Is Easy, there might not be a better recorded document of how painfully boring it can be to do the PR rounds as a rock group.
The Beach Boys: Unsurpassed Masters Vol. 13: Pet Sounds Vol. 1 (bootleg 1966) [4CD] [r]
The first of two extraordinary, documentary-like, richly detailed excursions into the Pet Sounds sessions from Sea of Tunes. This is the master at work, Brian calling out orders from the booth and slowly forming "Pet Sounds," "Wouldn't It Be Nice," "You Still Believe in Me," "Caroline, No" and "I Know There's an Answer," plus the discarded "Trombone Dixie," with often exhaustive sets of tracking sessions and vocal overdubs. There are too many highlights to go over in great detail, though it's fascinating to hear Brian scolding the talkative musicians as he gets set to lay down tracks for "Hang on to Your Ego" ("it sounds like everybody's not serious about this"), cheering Tony Asher on while the latter crawls into a piano to craft the intro to "You Still Believe in Me," playfully arguing with Hal Blaine ("The mic is placed differently --" "DON'T GIVE ME SEMANTICS!"), and everyone making fun of Murry Wilson when he calls on the phone during the "Caroline, No" tracking session ("This is music for people over 48"). Best of all may be the full disc devoted to "Hang on to Your Ego," the song that became "I Know There's an Answer," which closes with nearly an hour of fly-on-the-wall material involving Al Jardine singing the opening line, then Mike taking over, and finally Brian filling in the remainder; it's extremely telling, especially given the legend around Pet Sounds, that Al is so deferential to Brian's wishes, and you may find it surprisingly absorbing to listen in on their conversations, even if it feels like we're being a little nosy. (At one point you can hear Brian talking to the others about the song in progress "God Only Knows," a magical moment of foreshadowing.) Like the two Today! sets, this is as close as we'll ever get to hanging out in the studio while Brian Wilson cuts a record. Only problems: the first disc, a set of alternate versions and mixes in LP sequence, feels like an unnecessary space-filler, though it doesn't duplicate anything heard elsewhere on the two boxes; and on my copy of the set, there are serious quality issues on the third disc, with some blank space on the "In My Childhood" ("You Still Believe in Me") sessions (a defect?) and bad distortion on the "Caroline, No" tapes. It would be a woeful missed opportunity if Brother and Capitol never see fit to release this material.
The Beach Boys: Unsurpassed Masters Vol. 14: Pet Sounds Vol. 2 (bootleg 1966) [4CD] [r]
The stunning conclusion to this absolutely peerless audio document, taking us through the complete evolution of "I Just Wasn't Made for These Times," "I'm Waiting for the Day," "Here Today" and -- most memorably -- "God Only Knows." Yes, you can hear the key moments of these songs being created on the official Pet Sounds Sessions box, but if you want to delve into and explore the various backing takes in detail or hear Brian creating his vocal stack overdubs bit by bit, this is an opportunity to hear this phenomenal album with a greater level of depth and involvement than you might have ever deemed possible. The "God Only Knows" sessions, with seemingly all of Brian's family in attendance on the tracking followed by the riveting sound of Carl's stunning vocal being built up piece by piece, richly deserve official release in some capacity. Once again, there's an extra disc that either sweetens or jinxes the deal, depending on your mental state. There are numerous takes of the band recording various promo ads for "Caroline, No," an untitled piano instrumental, and all of the overdubs for the famous KOMA spot, and then it gets a little off-kilter with a seven-minute sequence of Brian directing the Honeys maniacally through a rendition of "Row, Row, Row Your Boat." Then it gets a lot off-kilter: a thirty-minute tape that seems to be a part of Brian's long-proposed "humor album," some elements of which would bleed into the Smile sessions. He and several women exchange bad jokes and he then tries to direct their very staged reaction down to the specific tone of each person's laughter. It's unnerving, but not totally without merit as a weird amusement. This is followed by a long conversation from a party, which devolves into pseudo-philosophical mumbo jumbo and word games, with Marilyn getting amusingly exasperated with the up-its-own-ass route the discussion eventually takes. While this last disc doesn't have as much historical value as the rest of the collection, it does set the stage for the bizarre, confused course Brian Wilson's career was about to take... though conversely, with dawning awareness that they were working with something of a pop master who was beginning to be recognized as such, no one questions the absurdity of recording minutely planned fake laughter or "Row Your Boat"; everybody just goes with it, maybe understandably, maybe not.
***
The Beach Boys: Unsurpassed Masters Vol. 21: Today!/Summer Days Stereo (bootleg 1965)
This boot has obviously been superseded now by official releases of both of these albums -- after years of incremental teasing -- in full stereo versions. Like all stereo versions of Brian's best work -- including the contemporary official ones, which use a lot of flown-in electronically isolated vocals and which I find terribly lacking -- the primary utility here is the separation of elements employed, giving you a good taste of how the multiple tracks of these songs interlock. No stereo version of Today! or Summer Days can truly be seen as the "final draft," so to speak, because the mono mixes are Brian's idealized and intended end result, with some elements even introduced in the final stages of mixing to mono. The Sea of Tunes stereo mixes use whatever is available, so many of them have major missing elements (no vocals at all on several songs) or extra bits (Brian directing on "Please Let Me Wonder" and the like), which if you approach them with the right mindset makes them doubly interesting. Needless to say, most fans will undoubtedly prefer Mark Linett's more complete stereo mixes, available on Spotify -- but I would insist that nothing beats the real thing, and the real thing is mono. Incidentally, Summer Days is missing three cuts here: "And Your Dreams Come True," "I'm Bugged at My Ol' Man" and "Summer Means New Love." In their place are some "bonuses": the lamentably unfinished "Sandy," "All Dressed Up for School," "Graduation Day," "The Little Girl I Once Knew," "Sloop John B" (inexplicably) and, uh, "Three Blind Mice."
The Beach Boys: Unsurpassed Masters Vol. 9: Summer Days (And Summer Nights!!) (bootleg 1965) [4CD] [r]
The first truly great Beach Boys album, one of the defining records of the mid-'60s and a head-spinning tour of Brian Wilson's eclecticism, incisiveness, romance and humor receives a full four discs' worth of attention. Running through Sea of Tunes chronologically, hearing these songs evolving and being put together is the most exciting revelation so far, following through on the "Kiss Me Baby" and "Guess I'm Dumb" sessions earlier on. The vocals for this album were mostly recorded at a different studio (Columbia), which might be the reason why a lot of them aren't here. Thus session musicians dominate the first half of this collection to enough of an extent that labeling "Beach Boys" product seems a misnomer at times. Those first two discs focus on the single version of "Help Me Rhonda," "Let Him Run Wild" (my favorite Beach Boys song, so a highlight for me, like watching a master painter at work, even though Brian initially named it "I Hate Rock & Roll"), "Salt Lake City" (with a great X-rated tangent after Brian accidentally tells Carol Kaye to "whack off"), "California Girls" (then known as "You're Grass and I'm a Power Mower"; the musicians have a lot of trouble with the intro and Brian laughingly complains after one take that the song "keeps getting progressively worse"), and the legendary outtake variously known as "Sandy," "Sandy She Needs Me," "Sherry She Needs Me" and when Brian Wilson rewrote and released it in 1998, "She Says That She Needs Me" -- though its bassline found its way into parts of "Heroes and Villains" well before that. What exists of the Beach Boys' version saw official release on the Made in California box in 2013, but what's collected here isn't nearly so far along yet. The last two discs consist of actual Beach Boys sessions, covering some of their finest songs; take after take of "Girl Don't Tell Me" and "Then I Kissed Her" can get tedious because of the relatively simple arrangements, though it's fascinating to note that the band was perfectly capable of matching the Wrecking Crew fairly closely on a Phil Spector cover, but their interactions and debates while the songs take shape are fascinating and clearly evolved beyond the more adolescent bickering on early volumes in the series. It's enchanting, in fact, to hear Carl's acoustic guitar on "Girl Don't Tell Me" at full volume with no distraction; the song edges close to a finished state by the end of the disc but isn't quite there yet. The last disc gets a similar feeling from endless runthroughs of "You're So Good to Me" and "The Girl from New York City," returns briefly to the Wrecking Crew for "Amusement Parks USA" (also markedly unfinished, with the lyrics yet to be rewritten), and then covers the TV version of "Graduation Day," which captures the group in a testy mood. For fly-on-the-wall advocates and scholars, this is likely the best of the pre-Pet Sounds Sea of Tunes collections, though it's a much less thorough look at the corresponding album than the two Today! boxes.
The Beach Boys: Unsurpassed Masters Vol. 10: Party! (bootleg 1965) [4CD]
This four-disc dissection of Party! has been mostly superseded by Capitol's official release of (essentially) the same material in 2015, though if you're very very hardcore you might still go for the longer version. Even Party! fans I've known have been worn out by four full discs devoted to this ramshackle acoustic covers album, a charming if frivolous stopgap in the Beach Boys' career just prior to their undisputed masterpiece. The Sea of Tunes set does have material not included on the official set but it also has a couple of very unfortunate tape copying errors. Capitol's version is the safer bet for your time, especially if you like the original Party! album; either release includes the alternate version of the album without the chaotic overdubs, which I doubt anyone would deny is superior to the original version.
The Beach Boys: Unsurpassed Masters Vol. 11 (bootleg 1964-65) [2CD]
One of the more bizarre Sea of Tunes bootlegs, this is an attempt at a catch-all grab bag of the "odds and ends" sessions from throughout 1965, though it also includes a slew of instrumental takes for the abandoned All Summer Long outtake "Let's Live Before We Die." By far the best offering here is a fairly complete set of tracking sessions for "The Little Girl I Once Knew," as magic as you'd expect and clearly leading directly into the Pet Sounds era; twelve minutes dedicated to the strange "Three Blind Mice" sessions seem just as much like a proper prelude to Smile. Unfortunately, the remainder of each of the two discs is dominated by orchestral sessions Brian directed for a couple of pop standards sung by Dick Reynolds, a role reversal of sorts as Reynolds had worked up the big band-style arrangements on Christmas Album. Reynolds might have one of the worst voices in the history of recorded music, and both Brian's interest in recording it for posterity (perhaps similar to his later insistence on letting Jack Rieley sing lead on a Beach Boys song) and its presence in such minute detail on this bootleg are a complete mystery to me. I want to say "skip this," but the "Little Girl" sessions are just too valuable to dismiss. I wish they'd been paired with the "Sloop John B" disc instead.
The Beach Boys: Unsurpassed Masters Vol. 12: Sloop John B (bootleg 1965) [2CD]
Another weird pairing, with a full disc of "Sloop John B" sessions arbitrarily separated from Pet Sounds, probably based on the old myth that Brian didn't want it on the album (it was in fact included on the earliest tracklist for the record he submitted to Capitol, and its themes of alienation, isolation and dread fit quite well with the rest of the LP's lyrics, to say nothing of its shimmering arrangement). The tapes are of course fascinating, and you get to hear the finished track evolve in the next best thing to real-time from the multiple takes of the backing track to the various vocal overdubs, some of them eventually discarded. The second disc is the sticking point, a patience-stretching hour of spoken radio spots that consists mostly of Brian and Mike exchanging corny ideas before even they get exhausted and start going through the motions. There are some laughs early on, especially when Brian tries to record a personal message for Roger Christian, but the best moment is a remark from Al: "I hate this worse than anything I've ever done in my life." Even if you don't force yourself to listen to all of this like I did, it's hard to disagree; aside from Grant Gee's Meeting People Is Easy, there might not be a better recorded document of how painfully boring it can be to do the PR rounds as a rock group.
The Beach Boys: Unsurpassed Masters Vol. 13: Pet Sounds Vol. 1 (bootleg 1966) [4CD] [r]
The first of two extraordinary, documentary-like, richly detailed excursions into the Pet Sounds sessions from Sea of Tunes. This is the master at work, Brian calling out orders from the booth and slowly forming "Pet Sounds," "Wouldn't It Be Nice," "You Still Believe in Me," "Caroline, No" and "I Know There's an Answer," plus the discarded "Trombone Dixie," with often exhaustive sets of tracking sessions and vocal overdubs. There are too many highlights to go over in great detail, though it's fascinating to hear Brian scolding the talkative musicians as he gets set to lay down tracks for "Hang on to Your Ego" ("it sounds like everybody's not serious about this"), cheering Tony Asher on while the latter crawls into a piano to craft the intro to "You Still Believe in Me," playfully arguing with Hal Blaine ("The mic is placed differently --" "DON'T GIVE ME SEMANTICS!"), and everyone making fun of Murry Wilson when he calls on the phone during the "Caroline, No" tracking session ("This is music for people over 48"). Best of all may be the full disc devoted to "Hang on to Your Ego," the song that became "I Know There's an Answer," which closes with nearly an hour of fly-on-the-wall material involving Al Jardine singing the opening line, then Mike taking over, and finally Brian filling in the remainder; it's extremely telling, especially given the legend around Pet Sounds, that Al is so deferential to Brian's wishes, and you may find it surprisingly absorbing to listen in on their conversations, even if it feels like we're being a little nosy. (At one point you can hear Brian talking to the others about the song in progress "God Only Knows," a magical moment of foreshadowing.) Like the two Today! sets, this is as close as we'll ever get to hanging out in the studio while Brian Wilson cuts a record. Only problems: the first disc, a set of alternate versions and mixes in LP sequence, feels like an unnecessary space-filler, though it doesn't duplicate anything heard elsewhere on the two boxes; and on my copy of the set, there are serious quality issues on the third disc, with some blank space on the "In My Childhood" ("You Still Believe in Me") sessions (a defect?) and bad distortion on the "Caroline, No" tapes. It would be a woeful missed opportunity if Brother and Capitol never see fit to release this material.
The Beach Boys: Unsurpassed Masters Vol. 14: Pet Sounds Vol. 2 (bootleg 1966) [4CD] [r]
The stunning conclusion to this absolutely peerless audio document, taking us through the complete evolution of "I Just Wasn't Made for These Times," "I'm Waiting for the Day," "Here Today" and -- most memorably -- "God Only Knows." Yes, you can hear the key moments of these songs being created on the official Pet Sounds Sessions box, but if you want to delve into and explore the various backing takes in detail or hear Brian creating his vocal stack overdubs bit by bit, this is an opportunity to hear this phenomenal album with a greater level of depth and involvement than you might have ever deemed possible. The "God Only Knows" sessions, with seemingly all of Brian's family in attendance on the tracking followed by the riveting sound of Carl's stunning vocal being built up piece by piece, richly deserve official release in some capacity. Once again, there's an extra disc that either sweetens or jinxes the deal, depending on your mental state. There are numerous takes of the band recording various promo ads for "Caroline, No," an untitled piano instrumental, and all of the overdubs for the famous KOMA spot, and then it gets a little off-kilter with a seven-minute sequence of Brian directing the Honeys maniacally through a rendition of "Row, Row, Row Your Boat." Then it gets a lot off-kilter: a thirty-minute tape that seems to be a part of Brian's long-proposed "humor album," some elements of which would bleed into the Smile sessions. He and several women exchange bad jokes and he then tries to direct their very staged reaction down to the specific tone of each person's laughter. It's unnerving, but not totally without merit as a weird amusement. This is followed by a long conversation from a party, which devolves into pseudo-philosophical mumbo jumbo and word games, with Marilyn getting amusingly exasperated with the up-its-own-ass route the discussion eventually takes. While this last disc doesn't have as much historical value as the rest of the collection, it does set the stage for the bizarre, confused course Brian Wilson's career was about to take... though conversely, with dawning awareness that they were working with something of a pop master who was beginning to be recognized as such, no one questions the absurdity of recording minutely planned fake laughter or "Row Your Boat"; everybody just goes with it, maybe understandably, maybe not.
***
The Beach Boys: Christmas Sessions (1964)
(bootleg [3CD])
RECOMMENDED
Surprisingly, since Christmas Album is probably by default the weakest Beach Boys album of the '60s, Sea of Tunes' three-disc set of sessions is more interesting and eminently listenable than the shorter investigations of the band's many superior early albums. That's largely because the wealth of material made available here is valuable in a manner wholly separate from the songs being performed, which vary (like the album) between traditionalist pap and fairly rote, haphazardly inspired originals. Apart from "I'll Be Home for Christmas," there's some session material for all of the songs on the record, plus a few outtakes. "Little Saint Nick" doesn't warrant much besides the revelation that Brian swears loudly after the song fades out. We get the backing track and guitar overdub for "The Man with All the Toys," and a couple of mildly diverting vocal takes for "Frosty the Snowman," "White Christmas," "The Lord's Prayer" and "Auld Lang Syne."
But the good stuff is elsewhere, and some of the most undiluted documentary audio of the Beach Boys working together, interacting and goofing off as a group, not to mention Brian's evolving relationship with the other Beach Boys and Chuck Britz, with whom he clearly shares a rapport despite both of them often being cantankerous in the studio. During an endless series of breakdowns of the backing track to the totally innocuous "Santa's Beard," Britz gets increasingly irritated then slowly becomes amused as the band simply cannot get a complete take of the simple song in the can; out on the floor, Brian and the others start to lose their patience as well ("Wait a second, will ya!? Christ!"), and when it comes time for the vocal overdub you can hear Mike, seemingly the source of a lot of the unprofessionalism on the recording dates, straining to get the song out. On the other hand, the Beach Boys are so tight on "Merry Christmas, Baby" they could pass for a stripped-down Wrecking Crew... but the struggle on "Beard" is merely a prelude to "Christmas Day," a song that seems to cause nothing but trouble during the tracking session; having now spent a lot of time working with pro session players, Brian is starting to get audibly irked with his actual band and can't conceal his frustration: "Don't play fucking rolls, Dennis!"; "Twenty-three takes on a fucking piece of shit"; "Let us make the fucker!"
The vocal session is somehow even more amusing. While recording his first lead Al keeps standing too close to the microphone, but otherwise is a good soldier. When the rest of the gang comes in for an eventually abandoned harmony track, though, all hell breaks loose and they are never able to lay down anything useable, at least nothing preserved here. Instead we get the group making fun of Chuck Britz, who responds in kind before both band and engineer begin laying into the absent Murry, with Mike Love giving an eerily perfect impression of the aggressive, out of touch erstwhile father figure. (Immediately after he finishes, Britz one-ups him: "You're off key, Mike.") It's all very much in the holiday spirit... and heaps more fun than the real record.
"Santa Claus Is Coming to Town" takes up a lot of space on this set, and seeing that on the tracklist you're likely to groan a bit, but the numerous takes of the vocal on the intro are an absorbing glimpse of the interplay between the band, and Brian's personality as a leader of musicians and a producer of records; the same goes for the outtakes of "Auld Lang Syne." Then there are the moments when everything falls away and we hear the sound of the Beach Boys working out vocal arrangements among themselves, with Brian taking the lead, and while I've personally never warmed up to rock band interpretations of Christmas music, especially in such a relatively bland atmosphere as Christmas Album establishes, the outtakes and performances of "We Three Kings of Orient Are" offer as persuasive an extended look at the group's mastery as singers as "Our Prayer." When the tape periodically has to stop during the overdubs to return to the sound of Brian directing, Chuck Britz editing and Carl defending himself ("I'm not instigating anything!"), it really is like coming back down to earth abruptly.
In a way it's even more impressive to learn that, before laying down his gorgeous vocal on "Blue Christmas," Brian seems to be eating something. He also has to take Britz to task for a problem with the playback -- "You've got to have that darn thing fixed, Chuck. You've got to have your boss fix that thing cause it sounds like shit when it phases like that. That's a time consumer, I'm not kidding." -- and the contrast of this moment of casual, adult authority with the goofing off and hepless chaos management when he's with the other Beach Boys says a lot about where Brian Wilson was in 1964.
There's just a tiny amount of material from non-Beach Boy tracking sessions for the syrupy side of the album, as arranged by Brian hero Dick Reynolds, including the abandoned "Jingle Bells," which makes sense because Brian Wilson had less involvement than usual in those takes. (In fact, on an early take of "We Three Kings," he seems completely unfamiliar with the arrangement and comes in at the wrong time.) The only really odd choice here is assembling a few outtakes and mixes, generally only slightly different from material on other parts of the set, into a third disc as a sort of alternative version of the album that only runs half an hour. It's just slightly "off" enough to be pointless... but it doesn't negate the engrossing, insider view this collection generally provides.
The Beach Boys capsules: Bootlegs, part 1 of 4 (early years)
By necessity, this post will be based even more on personal experience and taste than the others. There's been a widespread bootleg market for the Beach Boys since the '70s, even if it was never as densely populated as that for the Beatles or Dylan, and there's no chance I can come anywhere close to addressing everything that's available. So this informal listing and set of brief capsule reviews (as well as a not-so-brief review of Christmas Sessions) is based wholly on what I've personally tracked down through the years. I started down the road with a cassette dub someone made me of some Smile stuff in 1997, one of the first things I ever got through an internet connection. (It eventually turned out to be a hybrid of the Vigotone CD and the stuff on the Good Vibrations box, which I didn't yet have.) Since then I've gradually acquired a pretty hefty collection of boots; all my Beatles bootlegs were ripped off the internet but I actually got to have the experience of buying some Smile stuff and a few other things from "behind the desk" at a now-defunct music store in 2003. For the most part, however, the most interesting Beach Boys bootlegs are those I either got via CDR trades or over the internet, and my suggestion in the post-physical media age is for anyone interested in this material to do the same. As Capitol and the band have slowly trickled out rare material since 1990, a few of these releases have grown superfluous, but surprisingly few of them; band politics have prevented a number of their best vault items to stay illegitimate. (As an example, Carl Wilson supposedly kept "Soulful Old Man Sunshine" off the market for decades because he didn't like his vocal on it; the divine "Carry Me Home" was left off Made in California because of discomfort with some of the lyrics Dennis sings.)
This post and the three that follow will cover both studio and live bootlegs, which brings us to this: if you have a line on any free downloads or trades of Beach Boys live shows from the Ricky / Blondie era (roughly 1971 to 1974), I'm interested and you can email me at the address above. I don't think there's any major studio stuff out there that I haven't grabbed at some point, and frankly getting what I've got was enough of a hassle that I don't really want to play the game anymore. The best quality Beach Boys bootlegs for the '60s sessions at Capitol come from the Sea of Tunes label; thanks to some enterprising crook who copied a bunch of tapes sometime in the '80s, they allowed folks to hear a veritable wealth of session material in wildly overpriced boxed sets and single discs. If you're looking for these, the physical copies are pretty much extinct but it's much easier to crawl the bootleg blogs for 'em. I don't know how easy this is now, but I managed to find them all back around 2009. My preferred way to hear the unreleased '70s stuff is through fan-made "bonus tracks" for the individual albums. (I'm not aware of such a collection for So Tough; if you know otherwise, I'd like to hear about it.) These are fairly easy to find on the web. I can't help you with this but trust me.
I can't consistently provide cover art, label information or release years for these, so the dates given just correspond to when the included tracks were recorded. I've listed the bootlegs in vaguely chronological order under this arrangement. Lastly, this is already noted elsewhere, but a much more extensive gathering of information about bootlegs can be found at Bret Wheadon's site.
The Beach Boys: In the Beginning/The Garage Tapes (bootleg 1960-63) [2CD]
Two basically unrelated items thrown together by Sea of Tunes, one far more engrossing than the other. In the Beginning is just another gathering of loose odds and ends. It starts with a pre-Capitol (pre-Capitol demo, in fact) session with the Beach Boys working with and largely backing Gary Usher; the most intriguing part is hearing a paternal partnership forming between Brian and Chuck Britz, with the latter chiding Brian for coughing and yelling into the mic without biting his head off, which he'd have undoubtedly expected from other sources. We then skip forward several months. A Brian-produced version of "Summertime" by Sharon Marie -- released as the b-side to "Runaround Lover" -- is a fairly interesting sideline for Pet Projects fans; the rest of the Brian-produced rarities here were later officially released in better sound quality on The Big Beat 1963. Some leftover outtakes and session material from Surfer Girl, mostly false starts on basic tracks but a few vocal and overdub takes, closes out the first disc, rounding out one of the less satisfying discs from earlier in the series. "The Rocking Surfer," here under its original title "Good Humor Man," features Chuck Britz and Brian both getting vocally impatient with David Marks, who was gone not long after.
But the second disc is where it's at, in terms of historical interest. This is the famous reel-to-reel tape from the Wilson family's garage recording various mundane and miraculous fragments from 1960, and while it's the definition of arcana for hardcores only, it's truly fascinating with a slight air of voyeurism. We start with twenty minutes of the band rehearsing and arguing over "Surfin'," probably immediately after it was written; from there, we have lots of goofing off and oddball conversations, ranging from Brian and Dennis having a playful spat to Murry discussing a car accident with someone over the phone, and uh... Brian and a classmate speaking Spanish for five minutes. Most striking is the sequence wherein Brian and Mike invite a few teenage girls over to sing some songs, one of which is "Sloop John B," which of course the band would later cover on Pet Sounds; like the other musical snippets here, it's not exactly good or impressive, but its fly-on-the-wall moment of undiluted adolescence is endearing and sweet. The main point of interest is that this really does establish and capture the Beach Boys as an intimate family affair of sorts, their background in prosperous postwar "nuclear family" America never more apparent than on these snatches of quintessential suburban life.
The Beach Boys: Unsurpassed Masters Vol. 1: Surfin' Safari (bootleg 1962)
The first in the Sea of Tunes label's Unsurpassed Masters series, delving into exhaustive, undoctored and unissued session material for each of the Beach Boys' '60s albums on Capitol Records via miles of stolen tapes. A general note on this and most of the other Sea of Tunes boots is that you have to be really, really into the Beach Boys to enjoy hearing them plough through take after take after take of the same song; for someone like me it's quite interesting to hear them tweaking arrangements, screwing up and chatting between takes and I really dig hearing the songs take shape, but that's because they're one of my absolute favorite bands. For even most artists I love, such dedicated minutiae would be too much. That goes double for the early "garage" period of the Beach Boys, when they can only barely hold a song together in the first place, and for most people it's likely monotonous to hear them try to crank these primitive songs out, again and again and again. Only around 1965 or so do these outtakes and false starts start to have anything resembling general interest, even then only to Brian Wilson acolytes. So, with that warning in mind: of the nine songs specifically recorded for the band's first album ("Surfin'" was recorded at Hite Morgan's studio and simply sped up, while both sides of the first Capitol single were part of Murry's demo tape), five are represented here. Sorry, "Ten Little Indians" fans, you're outta luck. "Summertime Blues" takes up a lot of the disc, with basic track takes and vocal overdubs all captured seemingly in their entirety. The investigations of "Heads You Win, Tails I Lose" (track and vocals), "County Fair" (track and vocals including "acting"), "Cuckoo Clock" (track and vocals) and "Little Miss America" (track only, disappointingly) are far less exhaustive. The outtakes "Land Ahoy" and "Cindy Oh Cindy" are also documented with some level of what sounds to me like completeness. Lastly there are a couple of stripped-down takes of an unissued version of "The Surfer Moon," which Brian farmed out for two outside productions before using on a Beach Boys album in 1963. One intriguing facet of this first volume is what a cheerful presence producer Nick Venet is, when compared to the sardonic Chuck Britz or even Brian in his most intensely focused, dedicated period (1963-65). A fitfully interesting document, but even serious fans or scholars are unlikely to listen to it more than once.
The Beach Boys: Unsurpassed Masters Vol. 2: Surfin' U.S.A. (bootleg 1963)
This set of session material represents all eleven "new" songs recorded during the Surfin' U.S.A. period, plus the outtake "The Baker Man" (with two takes on the backing track and one vocal take), as well as a demo of the later recorded "Ballad of Ole Betsy" and the unused instrumental "Side Two," both later repped on the official Big Beat compilation. Unfortunately, Surfin' U.S.A. is one of the weakest early Beach Boys albums, downright overrun with instrumental filler. This boot -- in outstanding sound quality that actually improves on most masterings I've heard of the record's original stereo mix -- does offer a reminder that the scattered actual Beach Boys songs on this album are very good, with most of the throwaways actually eclipsing the better-known "Shut Down." The mostly embarrassing instrumentals (all five of them) are each represnted by one take. None of these songs are explored as extensively as a few of those on the first album; we generally get a complete backing track and a set of the vocal overdubs. This is sometimes interesting because you can hear, for instance, Mike single-tracked on "Shut Down," Brian without backing vocal accompaniment on "Farmer's Daughter" and "Lana" (both lovely performances), and the band sans Mike's lead on "Noble Surfer." With "Finders Keepers" fading later you can catch Mike's spoken flub at the very end -- and in case that doesn't stress this enough, this stuff goes very deep into the irrelevant end of the pool and there are no serious revelations. The most enjoyable and "different," rather than just interesting, tracks showed up on other releases later. Again, hardcore fans will enjoy the dissection of the record, but since it's such a weak LP in the first place this is not one of the really essential titles in the Sea of Tunes series.
The Beach Boys: Unsurpassed Masters Vol. 3: Surfer Girl (bootleg 1963)
The first really strong Beach Boys album -- and the first officially produced by Brian Wilson (he also produced Surfin' U.S.A., at the very least, uncredited) -- unfortunately gets a less interesting entry in the Sea of Tunes series than its predecessors, though since it only collects a few takes of most of the album's songs (all of which are represented except "Little Deuce Coupe," and the only taste of "Surfer Girl" is the final take without the fadeout) it's perversely more accessible to casual listeners. With a lot of session material missing at the time this was compiled (some of it later showed up on In the Beginning), this mostly is an exploration of a double tracking: you get to hear the group double down on its own vocals on "In My Room," "Catch a Wave," "Hawaii" and "Our Car Club." That last one is sort of nifty because you can clearly hear Brian's flub in the second bridge that later caused a weird lapse on the final mix, and because when the Beach Boys tape runs out you can hear a remaining fragment of the Honeys' abandoned "Rabbit's Foot," joined unexpectedly then by a tidbit of screaming guitar. That song and "The Surfer Moon" are both pickups of older material, and we get confirmation here that Brian is the only Beach Boy performing on "Moon." He also takes on the vocal track of "Your Summer Dream" by himself and in general takes a more prominent role in the sessions than previously, in part because this album was recorded in the brief period when both Al Jardine and David Marks were full-time touring Beach Boys so Brian could opt out of a number of gigs. Hearing Brian's vocals so intimately is quite nice ("Breathing is very sexual," he announces before laying down "The Surfer Moon"), though the appeal of it is naturally limited. Speaking of Brian, one of his outside productions -- "Run Around Lover" by Sharon Marie -- is also dissected here. But the Beach Boys themselves are all over the rest of the disc. The most documented songs on this release are without a doubt the album's four weakest selections: there's one alternate take of "The Rocking Surfer" and numerous dull runthroughs and overdubs of "Boogie Woodie," during which you get to hear Murry being patronizing as usual in the control booth. There are numerous instrumental takes of "Surfers Rule" and Chuck Britz coaxing the band through it, followed by all of the vocal takes and double tracking. The extremely lame "Swanee River" rewrite "South Bay Surfer," the album's only out and out dud, is represented by two instrumental takes and the second vocal overdub. It's not necessarily the fault of the compilers but this is a pretty disappointing chronicle of a fine album.
The Beach Boys: Unsurpassed Masters, Vol. 4 (bootleg 1963) [2CD]
Despite being billed as a Beach Boys bootleg, this is really Brian Wilson's show in his earliest days working on other artists' records with the Wrecking Crew. It's quite something to contemplate how far he'd come as an arranger and producer in just the two years since the first Beach Boys single on Candix. Unfortunately, it's a bit difficult to hear his discussions with engineers and musicians on many of these sessions, though when he is audible (as on the sessions for "Endless Sleep") he's already showing off a bracing, professional command of the studio, a great artist at work. Pity this revelation comes on such a lame recording. Truthfully, apart from these scattered "genius at work" moments this boot is only really necessary for tracking the evolution of "I Do," a superb rewrite of "County Fair" recorded by the Beach Boys but finally released by the Castells. Five of the other six tunes we hear in progress are more properly enjoyed either on the Brian Wilson Pet Projects compilation (the Honeys' wonderful "The One You Can't Have"; Brian's own one-off group the Survivors with "Pamela Jean," later to become "Car Crazy Cutie"), Capitol's copyright extension comp The Big Beat 1963 (the Honeys' unfinished "Bobby Left Me," Gary Usher's grating "If It Can't Be You") and its sequel Keep an Eye on Summer (Larry Denton's "Endless Sleep," with Brian layered up on backing vocals). The only oddball item is the Honeys' "Go Away Boy," a.k.a. "I Can See Right Through You," which was abandoned but released by the Honeys without Brian decades later, and it doesn't come anywhere close to completion here. The aforementioned songs are generally represented by several instrumental takes followed by the vocal overdubs, which are interesting for those with a heavy interest in Brian's production methods but will test the patience even of many hardcore Beach Boys fans.
However, you could use the "I Do" material as a perfect microcosm of how Brian thought through his records as of 1963. Like so many songs in the Little Deuce Coupe era (and really, like so much of Brian's work in general) it's a refinement of earlier work. On the first disc we hear the Beach Boys tackle a rudimentary, draggy arrangement of it, sounding extremely uncomfortable with it; they do a few vocal takes but Brian was apparently (understandably) unhappy, and he took it to the Wrecking Crew some time later, crafting a sparkling, beautiful Spector-like arrangement over which the Beach Boys recorded soaring vocals. (I've loved this track, issued officially on the Surfer Girl/Shut Down Vol. 2 twofer, for years but not until hearing Brian actually direct the musicians did I notice that the bells during the tag are playing the Wedding March!) For unknown reasons, this version was left unreleased for years and the track was instead used by the Castells for a Warner Bros. single. (You can hear this lovely single on Spotify as part of The Best of the Castells.) The progression on other tracks is less interesting because either the professionalism is such that not a lot changes, or in a couple of cases the songs just aren't particularly good. "Endless Sleep" is badly and bewilderingly sung by one Larry Denton, and though it shows Brian's fondness for off-kilter doo wop evolving from him belting out the Delroys' "Bermuda Shorts" with Mike and Carl on stage at Hawthorne High in 1959, it's really hard to sit through five vocal takes of the thing. Overall, this bootleg hasn't aged well with the wider availability of most of these finished songs.
The Beach Boys: Live in Sacramento (bootleg 1964) [2CD]
This Sea of Tunes release tracks the construction of the Concert live album, collecting both shows as well as rehearsals and the painstaking tweaks made in the studio to cover up the shortcomings of the original recording. The shows themselves have since been officially released in digital form and on streaming services under a virtually identical title. It's missing all but two of the extra studio cuts, though. The only reason to seek this out is to hear the band bashing out "live in the studio" renditions of a few cuts that inevitably sound a little (and sometimes a lot) better than their attempts to overwhelm the screaming fans while actually on stage. By this point, as cruddy as the setlist was, they've started to actually become a tight band, at least a quantum leap beyond how they sound when stumbling through "Surfers Rule" and "I Do" in the studio during the preceding year. This peaks with the second "rehearsal" take on "Papa-Oom-Mow-Mow," during which they rock harder than one might think possible, sounding like a full-on garage band with Brian in full, loosened up rare form in his delightful rock & roll voice. (This cut is so deniable it actually made it to the 2014 official release.) The extra material on disc two gets into the nuts and bolts of polishing Concert; one wonders how they still managed not to make "Johnny B. Goode" acceptable. A bit of a superfluous release now, though I kept it instead of the official version just because there's a bit more material.
The Beach Boys: Unsurpassed Masters Vol. 5 (bootleg 1964)
Bit of a weird one. At the time this was compiled (or stolen, rather) most of the tapes pertaining to Shut Down Vol. 2 were missing, so everything available from the record is related to the single, "Fun, Fun, Fun." Luckily it's an interesting gathering of material, deconstructing the creation of that masterful song. We start with a hilarious slowed-down rehearsal, transforming the song to a slow blues raveup, before a bit of tomfoolery with the organ insert. Then come the really fun parts: several takes of the overdub to record the band's vocal and Carl's guitar, with the unparalleled experience of hearing Mike getting the words mixed up and making an almost perverse point to pronounce "li-BRAR-y" correctly. There are a couple of alternate takes on a different, abandoned backing track, during which you can faintly hear someone (Brian or Carl, I think) saying "That's so bad I can't believe it! The guitar sounds shitty." (He isn't wrong.) Mike is even more nasal than usual here; you can't imagine how close a record as flawless as "Fun, Fun, Fun" might have come to sounding like undistinguished sludge. The rest of this disc is far less revealing, returning -- apart from two takes on "In My Room" in German -- to the well of Brian's outside productions for others. "He's a Doll" and "Thinkin' 'Bout You Baby" are both good songs given to the Honeys and Sharon Marie respectively (the latter was rewritten years later as the classic "Darlin'"), but the takes here are too repetitive, capturing the songs after they were already too well-established for us to sense any evolution besides the overdubbing process itself. This is an essential boot for the "Fun, Fun, Fun" stuff, but unfortunately the rest of it is disposable.
The Beach Boys: Unsurpassed Masters Vol. 6: All Summer Long (bootleg 1964) [3CD]
With the inevitable exception of the filler track "Our Favorite Recording Sessions," this set provides a documentary of every track on the Beach Boys' most confident early album. We track the evolution of each song, some more extensively than others, none more devotedly than "I Get Around" and "All Summer Long," which eat up the entirety of the first disc. It's amusing to hear Brian fighting endlessly with the xylophone for the intro, to hear the other Beach Boys groan (Carl: "oh god, Mike") when Love suggests changing the first line to refer to something more obscene than Coke "all over your blouse," to hear Brian's "fuck it!" just after the master fades, and to learn that Dennis' "not for us now!" was apparently a spontaneous addition. But "amusing" is surprisingly the limit of a lot of these outtakes. All Summer Long is situated perfectly between the Beach Boys' amateurish period in the studio and Brian's assertion of absolute control and mastery. He's in command here, but he's rubbing up against the limits of what his band can really do. For fans, there's some pleasure to be gleaned from listening to a vocal session of "Girls on the Beach" that the band, Brian included, is incapable of taking seriously, though the more telling moments are on the vocal sessions for "Wendy" -- Brian gets agitated with everyone and harshly scolds Mike for laughing and flubbing takes. Aficianados of the band's singing will appreciate the inclusion of a few vocal takes without double tracking that was subsequently layered on; namely, Brian's unadorned vocal on "Hushabye" is lovely, and without the extra tracking "Do You Remember" sounds grittier. Admirers of All Summer Long will enjoy this boot, but with so few remarkable variants on the final released versions of the songs, honestly three discs may be a stretch.
The Beach Boys: Unsurpassed Masters Vol. 7: Today! Vol. 1 (bootleg 1965) [4CD] [r]
The first half of an alarming eight discs dedicated to tracking and vocal sessions for the Today! album, this boxed set of voyeuristic documentation of Brian Wilson's evolving production methods will be fascinating for fans, as it captures him on the brink of transitioning from gifted rock & roll auteur to an actual master of writing and recording. Not that the Beach Boys aren't starting to sound really good in their own right; "She Knows Me So Well," recorded just after All Summer Long was completed but already leaps and bounds over it in sophistication, proves them more than capable of keeping up with Brian's increasingly ambitious balladry. While the instrumentation on his records for other artists had grown ever more elaborate, it was on Beach Boys records that he felt freedom to experiment with more difficult thoughts, both compositional and emotional. "When I Grow Up" (which takes up a whole disc) captures an extremely testy brand trying to cut a vocal track late at night, adding to the feeling that the Beach Boys and Brian in particular were putting themselves through torture to get these records sounding perfect. They're in (mostly) better spirits while exchanging playful death threats with Chuck Britz on "Dance, Dance, Dance," along with a threat to record an obscene "alternate version" called "Fuck, Fuck, Fuck," but those overdub sessions also capture what sounds like a very heated argument over money for personal appearances, with Dennis particularly convicted. Pressures were mounting; it was during the Today! period that Brian suffered a breakdown and retired from touring. The upshot was that he was then able to subsume himself at home in the act of creation. On disc four's takes of "Guess I'm Dumb" and "Kiss Me Baby," you can hear the miraculous results; with expansive use of a large room of session players, these tracks finally marry Brian's ears and heart: the sonic and aural exploration of his most ornate recordings is matched with the probing melancholy of his best early Beach Boys songs. "Guess I'm Dumb" would end up being a Glen Campbell record, produced by Brian with guitar and backing vocals from Carl plus the Honeys, but next to "The Little Girl I Once Knew" it's the most vital step toward Pet Sounds of the tracks he wrote and recorded in 1965, and it really belongs in the Beach Boys' canon -- and the pop canon overall -- as an arresting, sad, towering single and a zenith of Wilson's output. "Kiss Me Baby," one of the ballads destined for side two of Today!, is nearly as strong, and to hear Brian beginning to play the studio like an instrument, employing everything he had learned thus far to lay down the sounds in his head and beginning to powerfully express his fears, longings and insecurities through the Beach Boys' records, is nothing short of remarkable, and a privilege to witness.
The Beach Boys: Unsurpassed Masters Vol. 8: Today! Vol. 2 (bootleg 1965) [4CD] [r]
Though they're best heard in conjunction, this might be the better of the two Sea of Tunes Today! boxes if you can only track down one of them or just want to get the gist of how Brian's production methods evolved during this transitional period. For this is when the Wrecking Crew begins to fully take over, and as a result it's often riveting, and the chunks of verite audio capturing Brian in the driver's seat are just as remarkable as those on the Pet Sounds session boxes. There's a lot of material here, but highlights include the complete evolution of "Please Let Me Wonder" from rehearsal to completion, the tracking for the original "Help Me Ronda," on which "something's wrong with that goddamn ukulele," the opportunity to hear the layering in progress on "Do You Wanna Dance" as well as a botched Carl guitar solo on the vocal take and a remarkably cacophonous instrumental insert that suggests Brian was now becoming, with Phil Spector's influence, as meticulous about the cumulative impact of incongruous instruments as he already was with harmony vocals. I believe the extensive "In the Back of My Mind" sessions, despite some bad edits on the tape, offer the most impressive complete look at a day in the studio with Brian and the musicians pre-Pet Sounds, getting pissed off at the number of takes but still willing to make changes on the fly (like the percussion block pattern in the verses). It's extraordinary to hear this haunting song falling into place; it's a Dennis solo vocal, so on the vocal takes -- the initial one is effortless, the overdub like pulling teeth as always -- we get to hear his lovely, awkward croon unadorned, and it's intriguing how low-key, well-behaved and free of blabber a vocal session is without Mike in the room! The last disc is a bit ponderous, with endless takes of the relatively simple "I'm So Young" ("Chuck mixes a gin and tonic as good as he does a record!" "Better!") followed by the sporadically funny full twenty-minute version of "Bull Session with Big Daddy" -- a logical enough inclusion but not exactly riveting, except in the sense that Brian's feverish optimism and positive attitude, closing dirty jokes notwithstanding, capture a sense of his momentum (and his alignment with the times in the first half of the '60s) that you can't help sensing as ominous knowing how badly his life would derail in the coming decade.
The Beach Boys: (various rare & bootleg items) (bootleg 1964-65)
This set of entries on bootlegs, as noted, only covers stuff I actually have, and I got sufficiently burned out eventually that I never sought out the Dumb Angel series of boots, nor do I have Leggo My Ego, the Sea of Tunes live box with the Milwaukee concert, or Time to Get Alone. You can find lots of information on these boots at BootlegZone, Bret Wheadon's review page and various Beach Boys forums and fan sites, and a lot of '60s material that was once exclusive to the illegal market has since seen official release, but a couple of extracts bear mentioning here. The Beach Boys recorded a theme song for a sitcom called Karen in 1964, only officially released on a compilation of TV songs; it runs forty-six seconds and is amusingly terrible. They also laid down the theme -- backing Annette Funicello -- for the Disney live action feature The Monkey's Uncle a year later; it too is dismal, but it's a hard to find actual Beach Boys recording from their peak period so it should be acknowledged. Most famously -- and I'm not sure why it is missing from the Sea of Tunes discs, likely it just came from a different set of tapes that didn't get copied -- there is the harrowing argument between Brian and Murry Wilson (with Al, Mike, Carl and Dennis audibly uncomfortable on the sidelines) from the vocal overdub session for the "Help Me Rhonda" single. At forty minutes, it's a maddening aural document of verbal abuse and emotional manipulation; Brian invited his dad and several other people down to "relax" and watch the band lay down the finishing touches on the track, but Murry was drunk and became increasingly agitated, and the old resentments came flooding back. Brian does his best to maintain his authority but Murry's outrageous, cold, controlling behavior would be enough to drive the most sane, collected, self-possessed person into a state of tumultuous frustration. Unpleasant and train-wreck terrible as it is, the recording is indispensable for anyone who wants to understand what a tyrant Murry Wilson was, even after he no longer managed the band, and how his persecution complex and strained relationship with his sons cast a permanent shadow over all of the Beach Boys -- he keeps insisting that Al is not "syncopating" the lead vocal, and chides the group over and over again to "loosen up" along with various other meaningless complaints -- but especially Brian, who's audibly caught between adult independence with people who love and understand (but, crucially, depend on) him and his domineering, snide, jealous father.
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We'll cut this here and the next post will cover Brian's continued peak as a studio giant, the 1965-66 run of Summer Days, "The Little Girl I Once Knew" and (of course) Pet Sounds.
This post and the three that follow will cover both studio and live bootlegs, which brings us to this: if you have a line on any free downloads or trades of Beach Boys live shows from the Ricky / Blondie era (roughly 1971 to 1974), I'm interested and you can email me at the address above. I don't think there's any major studio stuff out there that I haven't grabbed at some point, and frankly getting what I've got was enough of a hassle that I don't really want to play the game anymore. The best quality Beach Boys bootlegs for the '60s sessions at Capitol come from the Sea of Tunes label; thanks to some enterprising crook who copied a bunch of tapes sometime in the '80s, they allowed folks to hear a veritable wealth of session material in wildly overpriced boxed sets and single discs. If you're looking for these, the physical copies are pretty much extinct but it's much easier to crawl the bootleg blogs for 'em. I don't know how easy this is now, but I managed to find them all back around 2009. My preferred way to hear the unreleased '70s stuff is through fan-made "bonus tracks" for the individual albums. (I'm not aware of such a collection for So Tough; if you know otherwise, I'd like to hear about it.) These are fairly easy to find on the web. I can't help you with this but trust me.
I can't consistently provide cover art, label information or release years for these, so the dates given just correspond to when the included tracks were recorded. I've listed the bootlegs in vaguely chronological order under this arrangement. Lastly, this is already noted elsewhere, but a much more extensive gathering of information about bootlegs can be found at Bret Wheadon's site.
The Beach Boys: In the Beginning/The Garage Tapes (bootleg 1960-63) [2CD]
Two basically unrelated items thrown together by Sea of Tunes, one far more engrossing than the other. In the Beginning is just another gathering of loose odds and ends. It starts with a pre-Capitol (pre-Capitol demo, in fact) session with the Beach Boys working with and largely backing Gary Usher; the most intriguing part is hearing a paternal partnership forming between Brian and Chuck Britz, with the latter chiding Brian for coughing and yelling into the mic without biting his head off, which he'd have undoubtedly expected from other sources. We then skip forward several months. A Brian-produced version of "Summertime" by Sharon Marie -- released as the b-side to "Runaround Lover" -- is a fairly interesting sideline for Pet Projects fans; the rest of the Brian-produced rarities here were later officially released in better sound quality on The Big Beat 1963. Some leftover outtakes and session material from Surfer Girl, mostly false starts on basic tracks but a few vocal and overdub takes, closes out the first disc, rounding out one of the less satisfying discs from earlier in the series. "The Rocking Surfer," here under its original title "Good Humor Man," features Chuck Britz and Brian both getting vocally impatient with David Marks, who was gone not long after.
But the second disc is where it's at, in terms of historical interest. This is the famous reel-to-reel tape from the Wilson family's garage recording various mundane and miraculous fragments from 1960, and while it's the definition of arcana for hardcores only, it's truly fascinating with a slight air of voyeurism. We start with twenty minutes of the band rehearsing and arguing over "Surfin'," probably immediately after it was written; from there, we have lots of goofing off and oddball conversations, ranging from Brian and Dennis having a playful spat to Murry discussing a car accident with someone over the phone, and uh... Brian and a classmate speaking Spanish for five minutes. Most striking is the sequence wherein Brian and Mike invite a few teenage girls over to sing some songs, one of which is "Sloop John B," which of course the band would later cover on Pet Sounds; like the other musical snippets here, it's not exactly good or impressive, but its fly-on-the-wall moment of undiluted adolescence is endearing and sweet. The main point of interest is that this really does establish and capture the Beach Boys as an intimate family affair of sorts, their background in prosperous postwar "nuclear family" America never more apparent than on these snatches of quintessential suburban life.
The Beach Boys: Unsurpassed Masters Vol. 1: Surfin' Safari (bootleg 1962)
The first in the Sea of Tunes label's Unsurpassed Masters series, delving into exhaustive, undoctored and unissued session material for each of the Beach Boys' '60s albums on Capitol Records via miles of stolen tapes. A general note on this and most of the other Sea of Tunes boots is that you have to be really, really into the Beach Boys to enjoy hearing them plough through take after take after take of the same song; for someone like me it's quite interesting to hear them tweaking arrangements, screwing up and chatting between takes and I really dig hearing the songs take shape, but that's because they're one of my absolute favorite bands. For even most artists I love, such dedicated minutiae would be too much. That goes double for the early "garage" period of the Beach Boys, when they can only barely hold a song together in the first place, and for most people it's likely monotonous to hear them try to crank these primitive songs out, again and again and again. Only around 1965 or so do these outtakes and false starts start to have anything resembling general interest, even then only to Brian Wilson acolytes. So, with that warning in mind: of the nine songs specifically recorded for the band's first album ("Surfin'" was recorded at Hite Morgan's studio and simply sped up, while both sides of the first Capitol single were part of Murry's demo tape), five are represented here. Sorry, "Ten Little Indians" fans, you're outta luck. "Summertime Blues" takes up a lot of the disc, with basic track takes and vocal overdubs all captured seemingly in their entirety. The investigations of "Heads You Win, Tails I Lose" (track and vocals), "County Fair" (track and vocals including "acting"), "Cuckoo Clock" (track and vocals) and "Little Miss America" (track only, disappointingly) are far less exhaustive. The outtakes "Land Ahoy" and "Cindy Oh Cindy" are also documented with some level of what sounds to me like completeness. Lastly there are a couple of stripped-down takes of an unissued version of "The Surfer Moon," which Brian farmed out for two outside productions before using on a Beach Boys album in 1963. One intriguing facet of this first volume is what a cheerful presence producer Nick Venet is, when compared to the sardonic Chuck Britz or even Brian in his most intensely focused, dedicated period (1963-65). A fitfully interesting document, but even serious fans or scholars are unlikely to listen to it more than once.
The Beach Boys: Unsurpassed Masters Vol. 2: Surfin' U.S.A. (bootleg 1963)
This set of session material represents all eleven "new" songs recorded during the Surfin' U.S.A. period, plus the outtake "The Baker Man" (with two takes on the backing track and one vocal take), as well as a demo of the later recorded "Ballad of Ole Betsy" and the unused instrumental "Side Two," both later repped on the official Big Beat compilation. Unfortunately, Surfin' U.S.A. is one of the weakest early Beach Boys albums, downright overrun with instrumental filler. This boot -- in outstanding sound quality that actually improves on most masterings I've heard of the record's original stereo mix -- does offer a reminder that the scattered actual Beach Boys songs on this album are very good, with most of the throwaways actually eclipsing the better-known "Shut Down." The mostly embarrassing instrumentals (all five of them) are each represnted by one take. None of these songs are explored as extensively as a few of those on the first album; we generally get a complete backing track and a set of the vocal overdubs. This is sometimes interesting because you can hear, for instance, Mike single-tracked on "Shut Down," Brian without backing vocal accompaniment on "Farmer's Daughter" and "Lana" (both lovely performances), and the band sans Mike's lead on "Noble Surfer." With "Finders Keepers" fading later you can catch Mike's spoken flub at the very end -- and in case that doesn't stress this enough, this stuff goes very deep into the irrelevant end of the pool and there are no serious revelations. The most enjoyable and "different," rather than just interesting, tracks showed up on other releases later. Again, hardcore fans will enjoy the dissection of the record, but since it's such a weak LP in the first place this is not one of the really essential titles in the Sea of Tunes series.
The Beach Boys: Unsurpassed Masters Vol. 3: Surfer Girl (bootleg 1963)
The first really strong Beach Boys album -- and the first officially produced by Brian Wilson (he also produced Surfin' U.S.A., at the very least, uncredited) -- unfortunately gets a less interesting entry in the Sea of Tunes series than its predecessors, though since it only collects a few takes of most of the album's songs (all of which are represented except "Little Deuce Coupe," and the only taste of "Surfer Girl" is the final take without the fadeout) it's perversely more accessible to casual listeners. With a lot of session material missing at the time this was compiled (some of it later showed up on In the Beginning), this mostly is an exploration of a double tracking: you get to hear the group double down on its own vocals on "In My Room," "Catch a Wave," "Hawaii" and "Our Car Club." That last one is sort of nifty because you can clearly hear Brian's flub in the second bridge that later caused a weird lapse on the final mix, and because when the Beach Boys tape runs out you can hear a remaining fragment of the Honeys' abandoned "Rabbit's Foot," joined unexpectedly then by a tidbit of screaming guitar. That song and "The Surfer Moon" are both pickups of older material, and we get confirmation here that Brian is the only Beach Boy performing on "Moon." He also takes on the vocal track of "Your Summer Dream" by himself and in general takes a more prominent role in the sessions than previously, in part because this album was recorded in the brief period when both Al Jardine and David Marks were full-time touring Beach Boys so Brian could opt out of a number of gigs. Hearing Brian's vocals so intimately is quite nice ("Breathing is very sexual," he announces before laying down "The Surfer Moon"), though the appeal of it is naturally limited. Speaking of Brian, one of his outside productions -- "Run Around Lover" by Sharon Marie -- is also dissected here. But the Beach Boys themselves are all over the rest of the disc. The most documented songs on this release are without a doubt the album's four weakest selections: there's one alternate take of "The Rocking Surfer" and numerous dull runthroughs and overdubs of "Boogie Woodie," during which you get to hear Murry being patronizing as usual in the control booth. There are numerous instrumental takes of "Surfers Rule" and Chuck Britz coaxing the band through it, followed by all of the vocal takes and double tracking. The extremely lame "Swanee River" rewrite "South Bay Surfer," the album's only out and out dud, is represented by two instrumental takes and the second vocal overdub. It's not necessarily the fault of the compilers but this is a pretty disappointing chronicle of a fine album.
The Beach Boys: Unsurpassed Masters, Vol. 4 (bootleg 1963) [2CD]
Despite being billed as a Beach Boys bootleg, this is really Brian Wilson's show in his earliest days working on other artists' records with the Wrecking Crew. It's quite something to contemplate how far he'd come as an arranger and producer in just the two years since the first Beach Boys single on Candix. Unfortunately, it's a bit difficult to hear his discussions with engineers and musicians on many of these sessions, though when he is audible (as on the sessions for "Endless Sleep") he's already showing off a bracing, professional command of the studio, a great artist at work. Pity this revelation comes on such a lame recording. Truthfully, apart from these scattered "genius at work" moments this boot is only really necessary for tracking the evolution of "I Do," a superb rewrite of "County Fair" recorded by the Beach Boys but finally released by the Castells. Five of the other six tunes we hear in progress are more properly enjoyed either on the Brian Wilson Pet Projects compilation (the Honeys' wonderful "The One You Can't Have"; Brian's own one-off group the Survivors with "Pamela Jean," later to become "Car Crazy Cutie"), Capitol's copyright extension comp The Big Beat 1963 (the Honeys' unfinished "Bobby Left Me," Gary Usher's grating "If It Can't Be You") and its sequel Keep an Eye on Summer (Larry Denton's "Endless Sleep," with Brian layered up on backing vocals). The only oddball item is the Honeys' "Go Away Boy," a.k.a. "I Can See Right Through You," which was abandoned but released by the Honeys without Brian decades later, and it doesn't come anywhere close to completion here. The aforementioned songs are generally represented by several instrumental takes followed by the vocal overdubs, which are interesting for those with a heavy interest in Brian's production methods but will test the patience even of many hardcore Beach Boys fans.
However, you could use the "I Do" material as a perfect microcosm of how Brian thought through his records as of 1963. Like so many songs in the Little Deuce Coupe era (and really, like so much of Brian's work in general) it's a refinement of earlier work. On the first disc we hear the Beach Boys tackle a rudimentary, draggy arrangement of it, sounding extremely uncomfortable with it; they do a few vocal takes but Brian was apparently (understandably) unhappy, and he took it to the Wrecking Crew some time later, crafting a sparkling, beautiful Spector-like arrangement over which the Beach Boys recorded soaring vocals. (I've loved this track, issued officially on the Surfer Girl/Shut Down Vol. 2 twofer, for years but not until hearing Brian actually direct the musicians did I notice that the bells during the tag are playing the Wedding March!) For unknown reasons, this version was left unreleased for years and the track was instead used by the Castells for a Warner Bros. single. (You can hear this lovely single on Spotify as part of The Best of the Castells.) The progression on other tracks is less interesting because either the professionalism is such that not a lot changes, or in a couple of cases the songs just aren't particularly good. "Endless Sleep" is badly and bewilderingly sung by one Larry Denton, and though it shows Brian's fondness for off-kilter doo wop evolving from him belting out the Delroys' "Bermuda Shorts" with Mike and Carl on stage at Hawthorne High in 1959, it's really hard to sit through five vocal takes of the thing. Overall, this bootleg hasn't aged well with the wider availability of most of these finished songs.
The Beach Boys: Live in Sacramento (bootleg 1964) [2CD]
This Sea of Tunes release tracks the construction of the Concert live album, collecting both shows as well as rehearsals and the painstaking tweaks made in the studio to cover up the shortcomings of the original recording. The shows themselves have since been officially released in digital form and on streaming services under a virtually identical title. It's missing all but two of the extra studio cuts, though. The only reason to seek this out is to hear the band bashing out "live in the studio" renditions of a few cuts that inevitably sound a little (and sometimes a lot) better than their attempts to overwhelm the screaming fans while actually on stage. By this point, as cruddy as the setlist was, they've started to actually become a tight band, at least a quantum leap beyond how they sound when stumbling through "Surfers Rule" and "I Do" in the studio during the preceding year. This peaks with the second "rehearsal" take on "Papa-Oom-Mow-Mow," during which they rock harder than one might think possible, sounding like a full-on garage band with Brian in full, loosened up rare form in his delightful rock & roll voice. (This cut is so deniable it actually made it to the 2014 official release.) The extra material on disc two gets into the nuts and bolts of polishing Concert; one wonders how they still managed not to make "Johnny B. Goode" acceptable. A bit of a superfluous release now, though I kept it instead of the official version just because there's a bit more material.
The Beach Boys: Unsurpassed Masters Vol. 5 (bootleg 1964)
Bit of a weird one. At the time this was compiled (or stolen, rather) most of the tapes pertaining to Shut Down Vol. 2 were missing, so everything available from the record is related to the single, "Fun, Fun, Fun." Luckily it's an interesting gathering of material, deconstructing the creation of that masterful song. We start with a hilarious slowed-down rehearsal, transforming the song to a slow blues raveup, before a bit of tomfoolery with the organ insert. Then come the really fun parts: several takes of the overdub to record the band's vocal and Carl's guitar, with the unparalleled experience of hearing Mike getting the words mixed up and making an almost perverse point to pronounce "li-BRAR-y" correctly. There are a couple of alternate takes on a different, abandoned backing track, during which you can faintly hear someone (Brian or Carl, I think) saying "That's so bad I can't believe it! The guitar sounds shitty." (He isn't wrong.) Mike is even more nasal than usual here; you can't imagine how close a record as flawless as "Fun, Fun, Fun" might have come to sounding like undistinguished sludge. The rest of this disc is far less revealing, returning -- apart from two takes on "In My Room" in German -- to the well of Brian's outside productions for others. "He's a Doll" and "Thinkin' 'Bout You Baby" are both good songs given to the Honeys and Sharon Marie respectively (the latter was rewritten years later as the classic "Darlin'"), but the takes here are too repetitive, capturing the songs after they were already too well-established for us to sense any evolution besides the overdubbing process itself. This is an essential boot for the "Fun, Fun, Fun" stuff, but unfortunately the rest of it is disposable.
The Beach Boys: Unsurpassed Masters Vol. 6: All Summer Long (bootleg 1964) [3CD]
With the inevitable exception of the filler track "Our Favorite Recording Sessions," this set provides a documentary of every track on the Beach Boys' most confident early album. We track the evolution of each song, some more extensively than others, none more devotedly than "I Get Around" and "All Summer Long," which eat up the entirety of the first disc. It's amusing to hear Brian fighting endlessly with the xylophone for the intro, to hear the other Beach Boys groan (Carl: "oh god, Mike") when Love suggests changing the first line to refer to something more obscene than Coke "all over your blouse," to hear Brian's "fuck it!" just after the master fades, and to learn that Dennis' "not for us now!" was apparently a spontaneous addition. But "amusing" is surprisingly the limit of a lot of these outtakes. All Summer Long is situated perfectly between the Beach Boys' amateurish period in the studio and Brian's assertion of absolute control and mastery. He's in command here, but he's rubbing up against the limits of what his band can really do. For fans, there's some pleasure to be gleaned from listening to a vocal session of "Girls on the Beach" that the band, Brian included, is incapable of taking seriously, though the more telling moments are on the vocal sessions for "Wendy" -- Brian gets agitated with everyone and harshly scolds Mike for laughing and flubbing takes. Aficianados of the band's singing will appreciate the inclusion of a few vocal takes without double tracking that was subsequently layered on; namely, Brian's unadorned vocal on "Hushabye" is lovely, and without the extra tracking "Do You Remember" sounds grittier. Admirers of All Summer Long will enjoy this boot, but with so few remarkable variants on the final released versions of the songs, honestly three discs may be a stretch.
The Beach Boys: Unsurpassed Masters Vol. 7: Today! Vol. 1 (bootleg 1965) [4CD] [r]
The first half of an alarming eight discs dedicated to tracking and vocal sessions for the Today! album, this boxed set of voyeuristic documentation of Brian Wilson's evolving production methods will be fascinating for fans, as it captures him on the brink of transitioning from gifted rock & roll auteur to an actual master of writing and recording. Not that the Beach Boys aren't starting to sound really good in their own right; "She Knows Me So Well," recorded just after All Summer Long was completed but already leaps and bounds over it in sophistication, proves them more than capable of keeping up with Brian's increasingly ambitious balladry. While the instrumentation on his records for other artists had grown ever more elaborate, it was on Beach Boys records that he felt freedom to experiment with more difficult thoughts, both compositional and emotional. "When I Grow Up" (which takes up a whole disc) captures an extremely testy brand trying to cut a vocal track late at night, adding to the feeling that the Beach Boys and Brian in particular were putting themselves through torture to get these records sounding perfect. They're in (mostly) better spirits while exchanging playful death threats with Chuck Britz on "Dance, Dance, Dance," along with a threat to record an obscene "alternate version" called "Fuck, Fuck, Fuck," but those overdub sessions also capture what sounds like a very heated argument over money for personal appearances, with Dennis particularly convicted. Pressures were mounting; it was during the Today! period that Brian suffered a breakdown and retired from touring. The upshot was that he was then able to subsume himself at home in the act of creation. On disc four's takes of "Guess I'm Dumb" and "Kiss Me Baby," you can hear the miraculous results; with expansive use of a large room of session players, these tracks finally marry Brian's ears and heart: the sonic and aural exploration of his most ornate recordings is matched with the probing melancholy of his best early Beach Boys songs. "Guess I'm Dumb" would end up being a Glen Campbell record, produced by Brian with guitar and backing vocals from Carl plus the Honeys, but next to "The Little Girl I Once Knew" it's the most vital step toward Pet Sounds of the tracks he wrote and recorded in 1965, and it really belongs in the Beach Boys' canon -- and the pop canon overall -- as an arresting, sad, towering single and a zenith of Wilson's output. "Kiss Me Baby," one of the ballads destined for side two of Today!, is nearly as strong, and to hear Brian beginning to play the studio like an instrument, employing everything he had learned thus far to lay down the sounds in his head and beginning to powerfully express his fears, longings and insecurities through the Beach Boys' records, is nothing short of remarkable, and a privilege to witness.
The Beach Boys: Unsurpassed Masters Vol. 8: Today! Vol. 2 (bootleg 1965) [4CD] [r]
Though they're best heard in conjunction, this might be the better of the two Sea of Tunes Today! boxes if you can only track down one of them or just want to get the gist of how Brian's production methods evolved during this transitional period. For this is when the Wrecking Crew begins to fully take over, and as a result it's often riveting, and the chunks of verite audio capturing Brian in the driver's seat are just as remarkable as those on the Pet Sounds session boxes. There's a lot of material here, but highlights include the complete evolution of "Please Let Me Wonder" from rehearsal to completion, the tracking for the original "Help Me Ronda," on which "something's wrong with that goddamn ukulele," the opportunity to hear the layering in progress on "Do You Wanna Dance" as well as a botched Carl guitar solo on the vocal take and a remarkably cacophonous instrumental insert that suggests Brian was now becoming, with Phil Spector's influence, as meticulous about the cumulative impact of incongruous instruments as he already was with harmony vocals. I believe the extensive "In the Back of My Mind" sessions, despite some bad edits on the tape, offer the most impressive complete look at a day in the studio with Brian and the musicians pre-Pet Sounds, getting pissed off at the number of takes but still willing to make changes on the fly (like the percussion block pattern in the verses). It's extraordinary to hear this haunting song falling into place; it's a Dennis solo vocal, so on the vocal takes -- the initial one is effortless, the overdub like pulling teeth as always -- we get to hear his lovely, awkward croon unadorned, and it's intriguing how low-key, well-behaved and free of blabber a vocal session is without Mike in the room! The last disc is a bit ponderous, with endless takes of the relatively simple "I'm So Young" ("Chuck mixes a gin and tonic as good as he does a record!" "Better!") followed by the sporadically funny full twenty-minute version of "Bull Session with Big Daddy" -- a logical enough inclusion but not exactly riveting, except in the sense that Brian's feverish optimism and positive attitude, closing dirty jokes notwithstanding, capture a sense of his momentum (and his alignment with the times in the first half of the '60s) that you can't help sensing as ominous knowing how badly his life would derail in the coming decade.
The Beach Boys: (various rare & bootleg items) (bootleg 1964-65)
This set of entries on bootlegs, as noted, only covers stuff I actually have, and I got sufficiently burned out eventually that I never sought out the Dumb Angel series of boots, nor do I have Leggo My Ego, the Sea of Tunes live box with the Milwaukee concert, or Time to Get Alone. You can find lots of information on these boots at BootlegZone, Bret Wheadon's review page and various Beach Boys forums and fan sites, and a lot of '60s material that was once exclusive to the illegal market has since seen official release, but a couple of extracts bear mentioning here. The Beach Boys recorded a theme song for a sitcom called Karen in 1964, only officially released on a compilation of TV songs; it runs forty-six seconds and is amusingly terrible. They also laid down the theme -- backing Annette Funicello -- for the Disney live action feature The Monkey's Uncle a year later; it too is dismal, but it's a hard to find actual Beach Boys recording from their peak period so it should be acknowledged. Most famously -- and I'm not sure why it is missing from the Sea of Tunes discs, likely it just came from a different set of tapes that didn't get copied -- there is the harrowing argument between Brian and Murry Wilson (with Al, Mike, Carl and Dennis audibly uncomfortable on the sidelines) from the vocal overdub session for the "Help Me Rhonda" single. At forty minutes, it's a maddening aural document of verbal abuse and emotional manipulation; Brian invited his dad and several other people down to "relax" and watch the band lay down the finishing touches on the track, but Murry was drunk and became increasingly agitated, and the old resentments came flooding back. Brian does his best to maintain his authority but Murry's outrageous, cold, controlling behavior would be enough to drive the most sane, collected, self-possessed person into a state of tumultuous frustration. Unpleasant and train-wreck terrible as it is, the recording is indispensable for anyone who wants to understand what a tyrant Murry Wilson was, even after he no longer managed the band, and how his persecution complex and strained relationship with his sons cast a permanent shadow over all of the Beach Boys -- he keeps insisting that Al is not "syncopating" the lead vocal, and chides the group over and over again to "loosen up" along with various other meaningless complaints -- but especially Brian, who's audibly caught between adult independence with people who love and understand (but, crucially, depend on) him and his domineering, snide, jealous father.
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We'll cut this here and the next post will cover Brian's continued peak as a studio giant, the 1965-66 run of Summer Days, "The Little Girl I Once Knew" and (of course) Pet Sounds.
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