Prog bands influenced by The Beach Boys' SMiLE

SteveG wrote: Dean, great suggestion. I remember being a young music fan that, along with my friends, that tried so hard to reconstruct the lost Smile album from outtakes, bootlegs, and the like, that we probably never even seriously considered the music!! So, I can clearly see how someone could have been influenced by the myth or idea of Smile. Again, well done.

^ There's nothing strange about it--  it's just other people seeing what you do not.   They were the first rock band to take the form seriously.   Up to then it was Buddy Holly, Everly Brothers, the bubblegum pop-act-of-the-week, (some quite brilliant I might add), until Brian and brothers decided to treat rock as a real art form even though it was a largely snickered-at young person's fad.  

"Smiley Smile makes Pepper look like commercial trade music" may indeed be, as Lemming has suggested, defensive, but it is in defense of a group laughed-at even though they were responsible for the earliest form of Art Rock as we understand it today, produced with love and far more musical ambition than the Beatles or Hendrix or f*cking Genesis for that matter.   Yes Brian was crazy, yes the music sounds dated and tween-oriented, yes they were a product of the early '60s before psychedelia became the norm.   But they were also artists; serious, adult, ambitious, and it was because of what Brian saw was possible that we have modern rock in the evolutionary state it is.   Or was.


Edited by Atavachron - June 17 2014 at 20:39

Dean wrote: For many years (erm... 40?) SMiLE was more a myth than a reality so the number of bands that could have even remotely been influenced by it would be pretty small. Of course some may have been influenced by the myth of SMiLE, or at least the idea of SMiLE, but more would have been influenced (at the time) by Pet Sounds.

Yes and no; Smiley Smile was widely distributed in '67, it just was so bizarre and unlike typical Beach Boys, no one knew what to make of it.   I think some thought it was a joke--  a novelty like the Beatles Fan Club issues, Christmas Albums, etc.

^ Yes but it existed, and was fairly close to a complete vision in outline and some completed material.   Smiley Smile was Smile in spirit, was undoubtedly heard by anyone who knew any work by the band was worth hearing, and therefore had to have had influence.   An ethereal influence perhaps, but a real one.

But the myth was a reality, just a deeply mis-produced one.   As for the rest you see differently, all I can say is maybe one day everyone posting here will have a chance, accidentally or not, to sit down, listen to both the original and the remake, and be able to not only compare them but fully take them in.   Maybe no one will change their mind, or maybe they'll hear what Paul McCartney always did: a musician's record made by a people's band.

Atavachron wrote: But the myth was a reality, just a deeply mis-produced one.   As for the rest you see differently, all I can say is maybe one day everyone posting here will have a chance, accidentally or not, to sit down, listen to both the original and the remake, and be able to not only compare them but fully take them in.   Maybe no one will change their mind, or maybe they'll hear what Paul McCartney always did: a musician's record made by a people's band.

Hearing The Beach Boys singing depressing, bizzare lyrics , even delusional aspects to the content....in a' barber shop or1920 's vocal style is very 10CC

Edited by TODDLER - June 18 2014 at 07:40

^ I thought Tony Asher wrote a lot of the Beach Boys lyrics e.g. God Only Knows (like so many of their songs, a pop masterpiece non pareil including the Beatles) starts with a title that threatened to have it banned from US radio (God was verboten circa '66 it seems) and a first line unique in any famous and purported love song: I may not always love you (now that IS revolutionary but it didn't come from Wilson) I agree with Atavachron that the Beach Boys cop considerably more flak for their earlier take on generic pop idioms than the Beatles. This is clearly unfair as it would be very hard to argue that In My Room is any less innovative and prescient than I Wanna Hold Your Hand i.e. both songs exploit conventional Tin Pan Alley structures and harmonic conventions but both turn the prevailing notion of what popular music can achieve and communicate completely on its head. The 'barber shop' harmonies that many cite as redolent of a nostalgic music completely miss the point. Listen to In My Room and Yes It Is (the Beatles) and just marvel at melodic and harmonic choices that are as modern and unprecedented as those we celebrate from the so-called pioneering trailblazers of Prog Rock.

^ so you retract the description of 1920's barbershop harmonies right?

The phrase "barbershop harmonies" is only disparaging if you treat it as such - it is synonymous with close-harmony where the individual voices are within an octave of each other. The Beach Boys didn't invent or popularise it, but they certainly used it to great effect.