Paul Simon (& Garfunkel) vs the Beach Boys

 

"He Gives Speeches", "Friday Night", "Holidays"  with the sound of ping pong games and chainsaws for good measure is quite an affair musically and stylistically of The Residents. As strange as Simon & Garfunkel's BOOKENDS seemed to be...with all it;s bizzare tape recordings of patients in a rest home, animals at the zoo etc...which was a duplicate of what Beaver & Krause pulled off on In A Wild Sanctuary...it is still not as Avant-Garde as the original SMILE tapes. And I believe that is Paul Beaver on "Save the Life of my Child" from BOOKENDS, but it still doesn't compare to the level of SMILE. If you listen to the Brian Wilson 2004 re-recorded version it does not by any means represent what Wilson was trying to accomplish. You can put the tracks from the original Smile in the order of the Brian Wilson version and it works but remains to be not that impressive at all. The reason being that many of the songs written for SMILE were not included on Wilson's 2004 version. Another detailed aspect to compare with Simon is this: Wilson was just a powerful songwriter as Simon and especially with ballads of a dark gloom and doom depressing nature. And many people in the world have yet to hear these original versions of Wilson's ballads. No doubt that the ballads off the original SMILE like "Wind Chimes", "Wonderful" and "Surf's Up" are completely much, much more amazing than the versions off SMILEY SMILE AND SURF'S UP. Many versions of these songs were re-recorded on 20/20, Friends, Wild Honey, and Sunflower and do not represent the progressive side to SMILE.

 

 I f you listen to the original Smile and for many years...it puts things into perspective in the sense that the original Smile was closer to being an Avant-Garde opera and more progressive than anything Simon & Garfunkel could come up with. And I make this point base on the knowledge that BOOKENDS had many progressive elements throughout. Even though it was still folk....the album had a strange twist to it. Almost like a Procol Harum release. However again...beyond that it could not compare to the original SMILE regarding the structure of composition and strangeness it contained from within. I mean some of it is electronic....which I found baffling the first year I stumbled onto the original tapes.  I think Brian Wilson had reached this higher peak and led the Beach Boys to it. I believe they were more progressive and somewhat darker with lyricism and arrangements.