Send "The Beach Boys " Ringtones to your Cell 
| Pitchfork |
 It's a rite of passage for students of pop music history: At some point, you learn that the Beach Boys weren't just a fun 1960s surf band with a run of singles that later came to be used in commercials; at their best, they were making capital-A Art. The record that convinces most is Pet Sounds, that understated 1966 masterpiece that articulates a specific kind of teenage longing and loneliness like nothing before or since. Once you've absorbed that record, you find yourself going back through songs like "Don't Worry Baby", "The Warmth of the Sun", and "I Get Around", finding a deeper brilliance where you once heard only pop craftsmanship. As you make these discoveries, you come to learn about the auteur at the center of it all, Brian Wilson, who shouldered the burden of being the creative force in one of the most successful and musically ambitious pop bands of the era. And then you find out about SMiLE.Conceived, recorded, and ultimately abandoned in 1966 and 1967, SMiLE was to be something like Brian's Sgt. Pepper's, his attempt to make the great art-pop album of the era. He followed his muse to the ends of the earth, putting a grand piano in a massive living room sandbox, outfitting another room with an Arabian tent, making session musicians wear fireman's hats for the recording of a song about the elements, freaking out when an actual fire broke out down the street from the studio around the time of recording of said track, and, no surprise, taking enough drugs to amplify the whole scene and turn it into something terrifying. But the record was not to be. The music recorded for SMiLE was too far-out for the rest of the band (lead singer Mike Love hated the lyrics penned by Wilson's collaborator, Van Dyke Parks, an opinion he still holds) and Wilson had trouble finishing tracks. Eventually, he shelved the record for good and the band issued the low-key, weird, and supremely stoned Smiley Smile. By setting the record aside, Wilson became afraid to indulge his talent, and his contributions to the Beach Boys would never again be central to the band. If you're wired a certain way, once you learn the SMiLE story, you long to hear the album that never was. It looms out there in imagination, an album that lends itself to storytelling and legend, like the aural equivalent of the Loch Ness Monster. And the songs from the sessions that eventually made it out on other records-- "Surf's Up", "Cabin Essence", "Heroes and Villains", and more, including material on the 1993 Beach Boys career-overview box Good Vibrations-- were so brilliant that the lack of proper release becomes almost painful. So you might start hunting down bootlegs, pouring over the fragments, and finding competing edits and track sequences, which only feeds your desire to know what the "real" SMiLE could have been....full text |
| Pastemagazine |
| Genius. It’s a word that’s been attributed to Brian Wilson, his Beach Boys and his beloved, incomplete masterpiece, SMiLE, for years. As the follow-up to the not-immediately loved, but now-cherished Pet Sounds, Wilson had a bit of leeway after the success of the single “Good Vibrations,” which would eventually become SMiLE’s closing track. “Good Vibrations” was layered with incredible harmonies and a signature theremin part, and it pushed the boundaries of studio recording at the time. But most importantly, it was a huge hit because of its hummable, instantly catchy melodies. And so it gave Wilson the freedom to create his “masterpiece,” which led to tension within the band and Wilson’s eventual retreat away from a public life. Maybe the best way to look at it is through parody: In the John C. Reilly-starring Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story, the protagonist goes through a phase where he mimics Wilson. Dewey Cox is stuck on a project that has him making ridiculous demands that include having “an army of didgeridoos” perform on his masterpiece about cutting his own brother in half before the guy ultimately has a mental breakdown. And although it’s meant to be humorous, legends of the sessions make it seem like it’s not far from the truth. The tales about Wilson’s SMiLE sessions include the songwriter’s fear of a song because of its negative energy (“Mrs. O’Leary’s Cow”), or big arguments between collaborator Van Dyke Parks and wannabe-Beach Boys-leader Mike Love. But as the session reels will show, the importance of SMiLE doesn’t come from the drama or the legends that surround it: It’s in the recorded music alone....full text |
| Guardian |
| Few albums are as mythic as the Beach Boys' Smile. One of the most romantic of the myths holds that, had the album come out as intended in 1967 – instead of being abandoned unfinished until it was ostensibly completed by Brian Wilson and his latterday touring band in 2004 – it would have been acclaimed as a masterpiece, eclipsed the Beatles' Sgt Pepper and changed the course of rock history. Listening to this box set – which assembles a virtually complete version of Wilson and lyricist Van Dyke Parks' grand LSD-fuelled folly from the original tapes, alongside four CDs of outtakes – you find yourself wondering. In the studio, Smile's loudest detractor was vocalist Mike Love, who accused Wilson of wilfully "fucking with the formula" that had made the Beach Boys one of the world's biggest bands. But he had a point about the commercial reception of Smile's predecessor Pet Sounds, at least in the US, and he may well have had a point about how Smile would merely exacerbate the problem. The preceding single Good Vibrations had been a mammoth hit. It perfectly compressed Wilson's new method of writing songs by brazenly splicing together wildly differing sections of music into a pop format, but there's nothing else like it on Smile. You wonder what the kind of fan who'd preferred the gruesome forced jollity of Beach Boys Party! to Pet Sounds's exquisite melancholy would have made of Smile's awesome opening sweep, from the wordless, ethereal Our Prayer to the dark, lurching rumble of Do You Like Worms? via a brief cover of the Crows' 1953 hit Gee and the wilfully episodic version of Heroes and Villains that, depending on your perspective, either pushed the "feel" technique to new heights of awe-inducing audacity or to breaking point, where the song started to sound genuinely disjointed, however spectacular the vocal harmonies on the chorus sounded. Furthermore, there's no guarantee the hipsters would have got it either. Jimi Hendrix dismissed the re-recorded version of Heroes and Villains as "a psychedelic barbershop quartet": a description that fits the Smile original even more perfectly....full text |
The Beach Boys lyrics
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