Good to know.
Thanks for the heads up.
IIRC, I have an old copy of Endless Summer that sounds surprisingly good.
Album-wise, I suppose I’d like a good analogue copy of Beach Boys Today! or Pet Sounds. Never owned one before. I have a so-so mono reissue of Pet Sounds and have never owned a good analogue copy of Beach Boys Today!.
Because I still only truly love 4, maybe 5 tracks, so I’m not sure if a full-on fancy-pants analogue purchase necessary for me.
Get 'em while you can!
Chad Kassem's last Analogue Productions YouTube video included him stating that AP would not be pressing any more copies of The Beach Boy LP's. That has apparently led to a flood of fomo (fear of missing out) purchases of their remaining stock, as those albums comprise most of Acoustic Sounds' Top 40 sellers list!
If you've procrastinated buying any of them, better do it now; when they go out-of-print their price with skyrocket (AS has already raised the price of some titles). The best sounding of the lot is the Surfer Girl album---demo sound quality. I particularly like the Sunflower album.
Some titles are available in multiple configurations: both stereo and mono, and in 33-1/3 RPM (single LP) and 45 RPM (two LP's) versions. IMO the recorded sound quality of most of the albums doesn't justify 45 RPM (including Pet Sounds, which wasn't that well recorded), but that's up to you.
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@tylermunns: A cheap way to get one of the best pressings of Pet Sounds is in the Reprise Records original issue of The Beach Boys (jokingly called Carl & The Passions) So Tough album from 1972, which was a double: the new album and a reissue of Pet Sounds, the two discs housed in a gatefold sleeve. It wouldn’t surprise me to learn that Reprise did that to help sell the very mediocre So Tough (which imo contains only one great song: "Marcella", written by Brian and Jack Rieley). Carl had produced an album by a South African band named Flame, and when Dennis Wilson broke his hand The Beach Boys brought in Flame members Ricky Fataar (who plays George Harrison in the great mockumentary film The Rutles) and Blondie Chaplin. The two guys really helped The Beach Boys on stage: they became a good live band, doing shows with The Grateful Dead and Chicago. I saw at them at The Fillmore (or was it Winterland?) in ’72, Dennis at the front of the stage playing one-handed electric piano, Fataar playing drums. They were REAL good, much better than when I had seen them in the Summer of ’64 (my first live concert, at The San Jose Civic Auditorium). So Tough, though, is one of their worst albums: only four songs on each side, a likely indication of bad songwriting. Sunflower is a great album, and Surf’s Up is imo a must-own. Holland is spotty (Fataar and Chapin weren’t the best songwriters), but is worth having I guess. Smiley Smile---the album that was originally to be the infamous aborted Smile, a collaborative effort by Brian and Van Dyke Parks---is about as odd an album as I have ever heard, and I love it. But the recorded sound quality is atrocious, not even close to being hi-fi. Very dark, spooky. I discovered in in 1968, and found it mesmerizing. Still do. I have my original Capitol mono pressing, a UK E.M.I. pressing, the Simply Vinyl reissue, and both the mono and stereo reissue by Analogue Productions. |
@bdp24 I think Smiley Smile is great, even if it was a watered-down, hastily-released version of what Brian was really after. I prefer Smiley Smile to Brian’s Smile LP that came out about 20 years ago. I had the two-fer Pet Sounds in my Discogs cart a couple years ago, for some reason didn’t pull the trigger, and then got an email saying, “someone else bought this LP.” Then I just kind of let the analogue-copy-of-Pet Sounds thing fall off my radar for some reason. Sounds like you were happy with the Analogue Productions copy of Smiley Smile, which is good to know. |
@tylermunns: For an in depth accounting of the recording of Smile (done in Brian's Spanish mansion on Belagio Road in Bel-Air---which I made a pilgrimage to in the Summer of 1975---on a pro machine Capitol Records installed), look for a copy of the book Outlaw Blues written by Crawdaddy Magazine writer Paul Williams (not the singer-songwriter). Fascinating! |
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