Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Wake The World....., 14 Jun 2002
Most armchair music fans would say to you that, Pet Sounds aside, the Beach Boys never produced an album of any substance. True, they were a great singles band, but in an age where the Beatles were knocking out the goods record after record, is it any wonder that the Californians' back catalogue has been completely overlooked?Well, let's redress the balance. Prior to Pet Sounds, most of the Beach Boys' albums sounded like a collection of hit songs, hastily packaged (as was the fashion in the early 1960s) to satisfy an unsatiable public. Post-Pet Sounds, nothing sounded as good, as together. That is, apart from Friends, the brightest lost gem of an album in all of music history. Considering the internal wranglings and strife that was rampant in the band during the period of the album's creation, not to mention the lackadaisical approach to songwriting employed by chief Beach Boy Brian Wilson, Friends is a magical, blissful and altogether tranquil trip. The Beach Boys were older, wiser (in most cases), married, fathers - and it shows. Hedonism was out the window, songs about little birds, massuesses and child birth were in. Crucically the album hangs together in two ways - the harmonies and instrumentation of the Pet Sounds' era return (albeit in a far subtler way, as with "Passing By"), and all the tracks (Transcendental Meditation aside) follow a similar vibe. Highlights? Pretty much the whole thing, but especially Dennis' sublime "Little Bird", Carl's voice on "Wake The World" (which, after less than 90 seconds, just fades) and Brian's auto-biographical "Busy Doin' Nothin'". 20/20, essentially an odds-and-sods compilation (and Capitol's last Beach Boys release), is not in the same league. Classics like "I Can Hear Music" and the Smile out-take "Cabinessence" stand out, but otherwise it sounds like Beach Boys-by-numbers fare. It's no real surprise, though, for you know that a Beach Boys' album cover without Brian means that the disc inside isn't gonna make the grade. Fantastically remastered and brilliantly packaged, this two-fer is utterly essential. Friends easily deserves five stars alone - Pet Sounds fans take note.
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6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Post-Smile Recovery, 24 Aug 2005
Where do you go after you have made Pet Sounds? Where do you go after you have made Forever Changes, or Sgt Pepper, or Blonde On Blonde, or In Utero, or OK Computer? It's the culmination of your life's work, but the hungry machine demands another one of equal or greater stature a year later, and worse, you demand it of yourself too. It would seem to be an unanswerable question. Derailment seems inevitable, either through drugs, disintegration, a motorcycle crash, a suicide or a change of direction to subvert comparison. Brian Wilson tried to feed the machine, tried to surmount his own greatest achievement, tried also to surpass Sgt Pepper, with a project called Smile, burning himself out with a huge nervous breakdown and allegedly destroying the tapes in a fire. He dropped out of the group although he continued to produce and contribute to the albums, of which Friends (1968) was the third and 20/20 (1969) the fourth after Pet Sounds.
Friends was named after a waltz-time single that had come out earlier in the year, inspired by transcendental meditation. Like the single, it was a lightweight and under-produced album, though musically sophisticated, and did not chart in America, although it reached the UK Top Twenty. It was also very short, clocking in at under 26 minutes with songs fading out just as they are getting going, as Brian seemed to have abandoned the Wall Of Sound approach and adopted a perverse less-is-more ethos. However, there is a charm and tranquility to the record and is regarded by him as his favourite album. It was recorded at his Bel Air mansion using the Beach Boys and an array of outside musicians.
Brian's retreat within the group meant that other talents had to emerge and both Dennis and Carl Wilson sang lead vocals and composed for the album, although without his finely-honed musical sensibility. Brian's love of sounds is demonstrated on the instrumental Diamond Head, named after the landmark in Hawaii, probably the biggest production number on the album and featuring Al Vescozo's Hawaiian guitar; and his song about inconsequence and indolence, the bossa-nova based Busy Doin' Nothin', has one of his cleverest lyrics, as evocative as Sheryl Crow's All I Wanna Do. However, with a marketplace full of Jimi Hendrix and Jefferson Airplane, Friends just wasn't made for those times.
By 20/20, a last "contractual obligation" to Capitol, Brian had also handed over the producer's chair to other band members, producing only his own songs, including the retro-sounding single Do It Again and a cover of Leadbelly's Cottonfields that Al Jardine suggested they do, as they had Sloop John B before (dissatisfied with Brian's version he later produced the version that came out as a single in 1970). Bruce Johnston had taken Brian's place in the live band and also produced two tracks, a version of Bluebirds Over The Mountain and a cloying instrumental Pet Sounds pastiche called The Nearest Faraway Place. Carl Wilson produced I Can Hear Music, one of the singles from the album, returning to the earlier Spector-influenced Beach Boys sound on a Ronettes cover (albeit the Ronettes original produced not by Spector but by Jeff Barry). Dennis Wilson wrote, sang and produced two songs (one was allegedly written by or with Charles Manson) and produced another which Mike Love sang, the all out rocker All I Want To Do. Oddly, Mike Love, who had tried to suppress Pet Sounds on the grounds that it was too avant-garde, is strangely sidelined on this backwards-looking album. The album is filled out with some leftovers: Time To Get Alone was the Beach Boys own version of a song Brian had originally written and produced for a band called Redwood, who later became Three Dog Night. I Went To Sleep had originally been planned to be the closing track on Friends, and the closing two tracks, Our Prayer and the extraordinary and rather wonderful Cabinessence, were recordings from October-December 1966 that were salvaged from the Smile sessions, a tantalising glimpse of what could have been, and by far the two most interesting pieces on the album.
The bonus tracks include the swansong Capitol single Breakaway and its B-side, another Friends outtake and some incomplete fragments of standard tunes
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7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Celbrate the Boys, 2 Oct 2002
It almost shouldn't be allowed - there is so much glorious music here! Two albums plus bonuses for a modest price: and what albums! what bonuses! In some ways, this stuff represents the Beach Boys and Brian Wilson at their most creative - a kind of productive tension between early surfer-innocence, the glorious experimentation of Pet Sounds and the later classicism of Holland and Surf's Up (and Brian's own welcome renaissance of recent times). In other ways, these tracks feel more restrained and "true" to their spirit than any other material; and whilst this "dabbling" phase has a few misses (and was certainly not too commercially successful at the time) the moments that hit the mark are many and sublime. Maybe the biggest revelation is that they do "simple" and "mature" just as brilliantly as they do "complex" and "exuberant" (compare, contrast - and revel in - "I Went to Sleep" and "Cabinessence"). I personally find most of these tracks the most human of their output, with their native talent, influences from Bacharach and Beatles alike, plus the amazing input of Van Dyke Parks, all held in a fine and inspiring balance. Well-informed track notes, plus a commentary from the great man himself, all help to put things into perspective, and it's lovely to hear that some of Brian's favourite moments are the ones that always struck me so specially, too - for example, Al Jardine's expert vocal pacing on the simpler version of Cotton Fields found here ("came along a nice old man with a, he had a hat on..."). The track notes also cite what I agree to be one of the best bars of music and voice they ever achieved, in the phrase "deep and wide" on the gorgeous waltz "Time to Get Alone." Exquisite! Fantastic value on this disc - whose ultimate joy for me is the chance to hear again, as a "bonus," the magnificent B-Side "Celebrate the News"!
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