Wild Honey has always been my favorite post Smile album by The Beach Boys. That said, Capitol's phony stereo has always been an abomination for my ears. After a few false starts, the Beach Boys canned Lei'd in Hawaii and Lei'd at Wally Heider's. The group, with Brian active and writing with Mike Love, then began the studio work for what became Wild Honey. Having had problems in the two Hawaiian shows performance-wise, and having had trouble at Wally Heider's studio in Los Angeles over dubbing audience response, Brian decided to shelf the two live recordings, and entered the studio to begin Wild Honey.
In other articles, I have quoted Brian stating that he became completely emotionally worn out after the initial recording for Wild Honey (Brother 9003) began. Before asking Carl Wilson to take over studio leadership for Wild Honey, a number of tracks had been begun by Brian. Two prominent tracks are Cool Cool Water and Can't Wait Too Long.
It became evident that Brian's post Pet Sounds and Smile drive to make finished music had become exhausted. Several reviews of Sunshine Tomorrow have remarked about the group's cohesion and democratic decision-making during the Wild Honey sessions. It is no coincidence. Carl Wilson was a leader who respected each member's suggestions throughout the time he was the lead producer for the Beach Boys. This resulted in nearly every group member writing and co-producing their songs in the years that followed. A close listen to Friends, 20/20, Sunflower, Surfs Up, Carl and the Passions, and Holland will bear out this trend and group growth during Carl's years as lead producer. Carl's willingness to take Brian's work as it was, even incomplete, and either finish it or polish it for release resulted in numerous memorable songs from 1967 to 1973.
The Beach Boys came to a realistic perspective regarding Brian's exhaustion with the Wild Honey sessions. Brian had gamely tried to produce Smiley Smile and Lei'd in Hawaii, with results that were innovative for Smiley Smile, in that he successfully changed the scope of Beach Boys' recordings from grand and complicated during Smile to unfettered and humorous during Smiley Smile. Many reviewers, including myself, have offered the opinion that Smiley Smile as an album was closer to Brian's expression of humor in music than Smile. After Smiley Smile hit the charts peripherally in the summer of 1967, failing to achieve the spectacular results that previous Beach Boys albums had garnered, Brian realized that his ear for music had undergone significant change after Smile was shelved.
The insular pot humor of Smiley Smile was ahead of its time. The failure of the Hawaiian shows to meet the group's high standards for concert related performance albums brought a WTF??? reaction from the group as a whole and possibly Capitol Records as well. For Capitol, it justified their "Best of..." reissues philosophy as the top vehicle for Beach Boys album sales. For Brian, his focus on recording "perfect" songs in home sessions was compromised by the American Entertainment need for the mixing board on the road in live Beach Boys concerts.
The answer for the Beach Boys was to limit Brian's studio efforts to Beach Boys records exclusively, thereby losing the group called "Redwood" who later morphed into Three Dog Night. This nullified Brian's creative motivation, and led to him eventually to what Bruce Johnston called "Brian's living room greatest hits." Brian's version of Time to Get Alone for Redwood is an example of his having studio chops when he was in a creative time and space. The Honeys' Tonight You Belong to Me single from 1968 is another example of beautifully produced pop music outside of The Beach Boys. As timed marched on, most of Brian's musical ideas stayed unrecorded, with very few exceptions. The Spring album offered some Brian productions that were finished, with the rest of the album being recorded by David Sandler and Stephen Desper.
The Brian Wilson promise to write a whole album of songs with Mike Love was finally fulfilled by the excellent set of their tunes on Wild Honey. This resulted in relative calm during the Wild Honey period with concomitant results. Wild Honey became an album about male/female relationships, which is often overlooked in essays and critical appraisal by music writers and critics. As the Beach Boys got older, relationships took center stage in lyrical content on Beach Boys albums. There were no songs about bicycle riders, cornfields and wheat fields, or deeply autobiographical themes, such as Surfs Up or Wonderful.
Some of Brian's first phase Wild Honey tunes were later finished in subsequent albums. The most prominent of these is Cool Cool Water, finished in 1970 by The Beach Boys at the insistence of Mo Ostin and Lenny Waronker. The 1967 Beach Boy sessions documented on Sunshine Tomorrow and covered in album notes, prepared excellently by Howie Edelson, are illustrative of a change of guard in production of albums that resulted in seven more productive years of Beach Boys studio and live lps, primarily overseen by Carl Wilson. The Beach Boys became a more democratic type of band in their decision-making, and this change also helped move every group member to compose songs and to produce them.
The stereo Wild Honey is a revelation, offering new dimensions soundwise that the mono version does not have. As was customary in the late Sixties, Wild Honey was mixed in monaural sound for the benefit of the AM section of the radio dial. The Capitol "Duophonic" version, supposedly designed to emulate true stereo, was a disaster for the Beach Boys and any listener who purchased it. The true stereo mix on 1967 Sunshine Tomorrow of Wild Honey is a listener's delight, offering some subtle and not so subtle sounds that neither a mono or a "duophonic" mix could even approach. Songs that sounded "flat" in the old Wild Honey mixes, are clear and have new dimensions added that essentially rework the entire tune. Two examples of this phenomenon are How She Boogalooed It and Darlin'.
This writer has already covered the content from the Lei'd in Hawaii and Lei'd in Wally Heider Sound Studio in a separate article on this blog. The Hawaiian tapes reveal a Beach Boys group that included the original five members. Brian's organ dominates the instruments and the tunes have a "stoned" sound that many bands would share in their live albums over the five years or so after The Hawaiian concerts. There are highlights, a rehearsal version of Their Hearts Were Full of Spring, for example, and three Beach Boys covers of Beatles, Mindbenders, and Box Tops tunes, With a Little Help From My Friends, The Game of Love, and The Letter. The Wally Heider Sessions offer almost a sterile approach to some of the Hawaiian Concert songs, and also sound like those sessions were "herbal" as well. Still, the live highlights of the proposed live album are excellent, such as a great version of Gettin' Hungry, performed as the single by Brian and Mike was being released, the Hawthorne Boulevard introduction to the concert, and an eye-opening version of Heroes and Villains live that delivered all the studio version promised.
Personally, I love Brian's sketches of tunes during late 1967, such as Cool Cool Water, Can't Wait Too Long, and Time to Get Alone. Brian seemed to fold during these early Wild Honey Sessions, possibly due to being told that he could not share his compositions and/or produce them with groups outside of The Beach Boys. This seemed to have a negative effect on Brian, and his contributions to Beach Boys albums dwindled over the next nine years, until 15 Big Ones, by which time anti-psychotic medications and self-abusive overuse of substances had altered his day by day functioning, mostly in a deleterious manner.
The incomplete productions on 1967 Sunshine Tomorrow date from the canning of Smile through the second half of 1967. The unfinished "sketches" of ideas for tunes offer tantalizing glimpses in the subtle yet creative process that took a group member's idea from inception to what amounted to incomplete status in the group's creative process.
Some of the fragments are complete versions that have been "pruned" to a shorter, more concise final version. Examples of this "pruning" process on Sunshine Tomorrow are Stevie Wonder's I Was Made to Love Her from Wild Honey and Vegetables from Smiley Smile. Some selections on Sunshine Tomorrow are Wild Honey tracks without vocals, such as Honey Get to Home and Hide Go Seek.
The sessions from which several Wild Honey tracking sessions were developed are deceptively simple sounding and offer some insight into Brian and Carl's studio work methods. As on many other Beach Boy tracking sessions, the work done by Brian and Carl on the pieces done on sessions work and the effect of their clarity made Wild Honey an immediately accessible album.
Songs like Wild Honey, Darlin', Country Air, Let the Wind Blow, and Aren't You Glad in the sessions presented on Sunshine Tomorrow illustrate the "complicated simplicity" that Brian and the Beach Boys' best work exhibits.
The live show tunes presented on disc 1 of this set dating from 1967 through 1970 are examples of how Beach Boys tunes played live in those years retained their infectiously melodic arrangements but did not show any difficulty in live performance that Brian's more complex songs had. The group had expressed their frustration to Brian about performing tunes in concert such as Good Vibrations and Heroes and Villains during the Smile recording sessions. Tunes from Smiley Smile, Wild Honey, and 1968's Friends albums amply demonstrate the ease that the Beach Boys tunes could be played live.
Sunshine Tomorrow's second cd covers some sessions from Smiley Smile and the various tries at recording a live record which would help reduce the number of album's that The Beach Boys owed Capitol. The group's united desire to be done with the onerous Capitol Records contract which burned out Brian and the group united them in studio work in the late Sixties.
The selections showing Brian and the group's work on tunes from Smiley Smile comprise one of the most fascinating parts of Sunshine Tomorrow. Brian's track for the single version of Heroes and Villains is as amazing as his work on Heroes during the Smile sessions. Backing tracks are also presented for Wonderful and Little Pad. The track for Little Pad easily illustrates the modular approach that began with Good Vibrations. The Smiley Smile album is the first successfully completed album using modular recording, a method that is nearly universally used in today's recording process, often on huge soundboards. There was no protools software in 1967. Brian simply rehearsed the group ad nauseum until he could get the harmonic blend he heard in his head.
The tracks selected for illustration of how Smiley Smile was recorded are quite insightful. The two most fascinating segments are a different soundmix of Fall Breaks and Back to Winter and a tiny segment labelled "Redwood" which is quite different from anything else on this set. My personal favorite is the Fall Breaks and Back to Winter alternate mix, which inverts the note heard on the fourth note of the repeating theme. The note is high, rather than the lower note heard on the fourth beat of the repetitive theme. The snippet of tape labelled "Redwood" offers some unusual clicking sounds that are unlike anything Brian recorded with The Beach Boys. The alternate versions of All Day All Night are mostly unusual artifacts, as is the chant titled With Me Tonight, done in a more interesting version by Sandy Salisbury on Together Records in 1968.
My friend Fred Vail introduces the Lei'd' in Hawaii shows on tape, and the tracks that follow are pulled from the Honolulu concerts, a separate session that I like to call Lei'd in Wally Heider's Studio. The array of tracks from the Hawaiian Shows and the Heider Studio sessions is unique. For example, the group does Surfin' live with Brian announcing that they will do it in commemoration of The Beach Boys' Anniversary. The anniversary that is so young for the group is an undisputed 6th anniversary.
Having written an extensive article on the Lei'd in Hawaii shows in this blog, I will say that the versions of The Letter and the two versions of With a Little Help From My Friends are interesting artifacts cut at Wally Heider's Studio and are very good cover versions of those two tunes. I wondered why the versions of The Game of Love might not sound as great as the others. I 'll
suppose that radio people would appreciate the more fm stereo radio sounds these types of tunes potentially offer.
There are some clear and unique sounds on this double CD set, illustrating the creativity and the originality that Brian still had, despite his emotional condition. Lyrically, Brian's utilization of Mike Love brought a consistent theme to Wild Honey. Harmonically, Brian's use of different blends of sounds was a positive addition to the album. Clearly, Carl Wilson's growth as a lead singer added a dimension to vocals that was new and unprecedented. His production skills, honed by watching Brian produce, brought a fairly rapid change in participation in songwriting and production that had been Brian's domain until Wild Honey.
As an album, 1967; Sunshine Tomorrow stands as as one of the most well assembled and illuminating reissues in the Beach Boys catalog. It answers many questions regarding The Beach Boy's transition into a more diversified and productive group. The obvious growth of the other five Beach Boys in songwriting, production, and adult lyrical themes is close by.....check out the songwriting credits on their next studio album-Friends from 1968.
Copyright 2017 by Peter Reum-All Rights Reserved
In other articles, I have quoted Brian stating that he became completely emotionally worn out after the initial recording for Wild Honey (Brother 9003) began. Before asking Carl Wilson to take over studio leadership for Wild Honey, a number of tracks had been begun by Brian. Two prominent tracks are Cool Cool Water and Can't Wait Too Long.
It became evident that Brian's post Pet Sounds and Smile drive to make finished music had become exhausted. Several reviews of Sunshine Tomorrow have remarked about the group's cohesion and democratic decision-making during the Wild Honey sessions. It is no coincidence. Carl Wilson was a leader who respected each member's suggestions throughout the time he was the lead producer for the Beach Boys. This resulted in nearly every group member writing and co-producing their songs in the years that followed. A close listen to Friends, 20/20, Sunflower, Surfs Up, Carl and the Passions, and Holland will bear out this trend and group growth during Carl's years as lead producer. Carl's willingness to take Brian's work as it was, even incomplete, and either finish it or polish it for release resulted in numerous memorable songs from 1967 to 1973.
Beach Boys' 1967-Sunshine Tomorrow CD Cover Art
The Beach Boys came to a realistic perspective regarding Brian's exhaustion with the Wild Honey sessions. Brian had gamely tried to produce Smiley Smile and Lei'd in Hawaii, with results that were innovative for Smiley Smile, in that he successfully changed the scope of Beach Boys' recordings from grand and complicated during Smile to unfettered and humorous during Smiley Smile. Many reviewers, including myself, have offered the opinion that Smiley Smile as an album was closer to Brian's expression of humor in music than Smile. After Smiley Smile hit the charts peripherally in the summer of 1967, failing to achieve the spectacular results that previous Beach Boys albums had garnered, Brian realized that his ear for music had undergone significant change after Smile was shelved.
The insular pot humor of Smiley Smile was ahead of its time. The failure of the Hawaiian shows to meet the group's high standards for concert related performance albums brought a WTF??? reaction from the group as a whole and possibly Capitol Records as well. For Capitol, it justified their "Best of..." reissues philosophy as the top vehicle for Beach Boys album sales. For Brian, his focus on recording "perfect" songs in home sessions was compromised by the American Entertainment need for the mixing board on the road in live Beach Boys concerts.
The answer for the Beach Boys was to limit Brian's studio efforts to Beach Boys records exclusively, thereby losing the group called "Redwood" who later morphed into Three Dog Night. This nullified Brian's creative motivation, and led to him eventually to what Bruce Johnston called "Brian's living room greatest hits." Brian's version of Time to Get Alone for Redwood is an example of his having studio chops when he was in a creative time and space. The Honeys' Tonight You Belong to Me single from 1968 is another example of beautifully produced pop music outside of The Beach Boys. As timed marched on, most of Brian's musical ideas stayed unrecorded, with very few exceptions. The Spring album offered some Brian productions that were finished, with the rest of the album being recorded by David Sandler and Stephen Desper.
The Brian Wilson promise to write a whole album of songs with Mike Love was finally fulfilled by the excellent set of their tunes on Wild Honey. This resulted in relative calm during the Wild Honey period with concomitant results. Wild Honey became an album about male/female relationships, which is often overlooked in essays and critical appraisal by music writers and critics. As the Beach Boys got older, relationships took center stage in lyrical content on Beach Boys albums. There were no songs about bicycle riders, cornfields and wheat fields, or deeply autobiographical themes, such as Surfs Up or Wonderful.
Some of Brian's first phase Wild Honey tunes were later finished in subsequent albums. The most prominent of these is Cool Cool Water, finished in 1970 by The Beach Boys at the insistence of Mo Ostin and Lenny Waronker. The 1967 Beach Boy sessions documented on Sunshine Tomorrow and covered in album notes, prepared excellently by Howie Edelson, are illustrative of a change of guard in production of albums that resulted in seven more productive years of Beach Boys studio and live lps, primarily overseen by Carl Wilson. The Beach Boys became a more democratic type of band in their decision-making, and this change also helped move every group member to compose songs and to produce them.
The stereo Wild Honey is a revelation, offering new dimensions soundwise that the mono version does not have. As was customary in the late Sixties, Wild Honey was mixed in monaural sound for the benefit of the AM section of the radio dial. The Capitol "Duophonic" version, supposedly designed to emulate true stereo, was a disaster for the Beach Boys and any listener who purchased it. The true stereo mix on 1967 Sunshine Tomorrow of Wild Honey is a listener's delight, offering some subtle and not so subtle sounds that neither a mono or a "duophonic" mix could even approach. Songs that sounded "flat" in the old Wild Honey mixes, are clear and have new dimensions added that essentially rework the entire tune. Two examples of this phenomenon are How She Boogalooed It and Darlin'.
This writer has already covered the content from the Lei'd in Hawaii and Lei'd in Wally Heider Sound Studio in a separate article on this blog. The Hawaiian tapes reveal a Beach Boys group that included the original five members. Brian's organ dominates the instruments and the tunes have a "stoned" sound that many bands would share in their live albums over the five years or so after The Hawaiian concerts. There are highlights, a rehearsal version of Their Hearts Were Full of Spring, for example, and three Beach Boys covers of Beatles, Mindbenders, and Box Tops tunes, With a Little Help From My Friends, The Game of Love, and The Letter. The Wally Heider Sessions offer almost a sterile approach to some of the Hawaiian Concert songs, and also sound like those sessions were "herbal" as well. Still, the live highlights of the proposed live album are excellent, such as a great version of Gettin' Hungry, performed as the single by Brian and Mike was being released, the Hawthorne Boulevard introduction to the concert, and an eye-opening version of Heroes and Villains live that delivered all the studio version promised.
Personally, I love Brian's sketches of tunes during late 1967, such as Cool Cool Water, Can't Wait Too Long, and Time to Get Alone. Brian seemed to fold during these early Wild Honey Sessions, possibly due to being told that he could not share his compositions and/or produce them with groups outside of The Beach Boys. This seemed to have a negative effect on Brian, and his contributions to Beach Boys albums dwindled over the next nine years, until 15 Big Ones, by which time anti-psychotic medications and self-abusive overuse of substances had altered his day by day functioning, mostly in a deleterious manner.
The incomplete productions on 1967 Sunshine Tomorrow date from the canning of Smile through the second half of 1967. The unfinished "sketches" of ideas for tunes offer tantalizing glimpses in the subtle yet creative process that took a group member's idea from inception to what amounted to incomplete status in the group's creative process.
Some of the fragments are complete versions that have been "pruned" to a shorter, more concise final version. Examples of this "pruning" process on Sunshine Tomorrow are Stevie Wonder's I Was Made to Love Her from Wild Honey and Vegetables from Smiley Smile. Some selections on Sunshine Tomorrow are Wild Honey tracks without vocals, such as Honey Get to Home and Hide Go Seek.
The sessions from which several Wild Honey tracking sessions were developed are deceptively simple sounding and offer some insight into Brian and Carl's studio work methods. As on many other Beach Boy tracking sessions, the work done by Brian and Carl on the pieces done on sessions work and the effect of their clarity made Wild Honey an immediately accessible album.
Songs like Wild Honey, Darlin', Country Air, Let the Wind Blow, and Aren't You Glad in the sessions presented on Sunshine Tomorrow illustrate the "complicated simplicity" that Brian and the Beach Boys' best work exhibits.
The live show tunes presented on disc 1 of this set dating from 1967 through 1970 are examples of how Beach Boys tunes played live in those years retained their infectiously melodic arrangements but did not show any difficulty in live performance that Brian's more complex songs had. The group had expressed their frustration to Brian about performing tunes in concert such as Good Vibrations and Heroes and Villains during the Smile recording sessions. Tunes from Smiley Smile, Wild Honey, and 1968's Friends albums amply demonstrate the ease that the Beach Boys tunes could be played live.
Sunshine Tomorrow's second cd covers some sessions from Smiley Smile and the various tries at recording a live record which would help reduce the number of album's that The Beach Boys owed Capitol. The group's united desire to be done with the onerous Capitol Records contract which burned out Brian and the group united them in studio work in the late Sixties.
The selections showing Brian and the group's work on tunes from Smiley Smile comprise one of the most fascinating parts of Sunshine Tomorrow. Brian's track for the single version of Heroes and Villains is as amazing as his work on Heroes during the Smile sessions. Backing tracks are also presented for Wonderful and Little Pad. The track for Little Pad easily illustrates the modular approach that began with Good Vibrations. The Smiley Smile album is the first successfully completed album using modular recording, a method that is nearly universally used in today's recording process, often on huge soundboards. There was no protools software in 1967. Brian simply rehearsed the group ad nauseum until he could get the harmonic blend he heard in his head.
The tracks selected for illustration of how Smiley Smile was recorded are quite insightful. The two most fascinating segments are a different soundmix of Fall Breaks and Back to Winter and a tiny segment labelled "Redwood" which is quite different from anything else on this set. My personal favorite is the Fall Breaks and Back to Winter alternate mix, which inverts the note heard on the fourth note of the repeating theme. The note is high, rather than the lower note heard on the fourth beat of the repetitive theme. The snippet of tape labelled "Redwood" offers some unusual clicking sounds that are unlike anything Brian recorded with The Beach Boys. The alternate versions of All Day All Night are mostly unusual artifacts, as is the chant titled With Me Tonight, done in a more interesting version by Sandy Salisbury on Together Records in 1968.
My friend Fred Vail introduces the Lei'd' in Hawaii shows on tape, and the tracks that follow are pulled from the Honolulu concerts, a separate session that I like to call Lei'd in Wally Heider's Studio. The array of tracks from the Hawaiian Shows and the Heider Studio sessions is unique. For example, the group does Surfin' live with Brian announcing that they will do it in commemoration of The Beach Boys' Anniversary. The anniversary that is so young for the group is an undisputed 6th anniversary.
Having written an extensive article on the Lei'd in Hawaii shows in this blog, I will say that the versions of The Letter and the two versions of With a Little Help From My Friends are interesting artifacts cut at Wally Heider's Studio and are very good cover versions of those two tunes. I wondered why the versions of The Game of Love might not sound as great as the others. I 'll
suppose that radio people would appreciate the more fm stereo radio sounds these types of tunes potentially offer.
There are some clear and unique sounds on this double CD set, illustrating the creativity and the originality that Brian still had, despite his emotional condition. Lyrically, Brian's utilization of Mike Love brought a consistent theme to Wild Honey. Harmonically, Brian's use of different blends of sounds was a positive addition to the album. Clearly, Carl Wilson's growth as a lead singer added a dimension to vocals that was new and unprecedented. His production skills, honed by watching Brian produce, brought a fairly rapid change in participation in songwriting and production that had been Brian's domain until Wild Honey.
As an album, 1967; Sunshine Tomorrow stands as as one of the most well assembled and illuminating reissues in the Beach Boys catalog. It answers many questions regarding The Beach Boy's transition into a more diversified and productive group. The obvious growth of the other five Beach Boys in songwriting, production, and adult lyrical themes is close by.....check out the songwriting credits on their next studio album-Friends from 1968.
Copyright 2017 by Peter Reum-All Rights Reserved
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