THE BACKSTORY: Carl Wilson was only 15 when he sang on The Beach Boys’ “Surfer Girl” in 1962, and his brother Dennis, the only surfer in the family, was 17. The curators further argue that these releases mark the emergence of Brian’s brothers Carl and Dennis as important songwriters and producers who compensated for Brian’s decreasing participation. This new box set focuses on the latter two albums, arguing that these are crucial, underrated aspects of the band’s core achievement. The counter-narrative points out that the group followed that last album with five inconsistent but often terrific records: Wild Honey, Friends, 20/20, Sunflower and Surf’s Up.
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THE ARGUMENT: One popular narrative about The Beach Boys is that their creative period ended when Brian Wilson had a nervous breakdown, gave up on his ambitious Smile album and released a truncated version of it as Smiley Smile in 1967. THE TITLE: The Beach Boys: Feel Flows: The Sunflower & Surf’s Up Sessions: 1969-1971 (Universal/Capitol/Brother) Here are some of the more compelling recent cases. It’s up to us in the jury of music fanatics to hear the argument, examine the evidence and render the verdict. These curator-lawyers make their claims in the often-long liner notes and present as proof the tracks on the enclosed CDs or LPs. The curators of these projects are like lawyers in the court of public opinion, arguing that a certain artist, a certain movement or a certain phase of an artist’s career has been undervalued and overlooked. Instead of emphasizing the most obvious tracks, these new packages rely on revelations from the vaults-unreleased, out-of-print or overlooked old releases.Īt their best, these assemblages of old recordings became arguments about musical history. If you can make a playlist of your favorite songs, why do you need the record company to do it for you? And yet the reissues keep coming, but now they serve a different purpose.
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Streaming services such as Spotify have made that concept obsolete. They were sometimes baited with one or two unreleased tracks to lure longtime fans, but their basic purpose was to collect an artist’s biggest hits and most popular live songs in one place so casual fans could hear what they most wanted in the most efficient way possible. In the last century, most reissues were greatest-hits collections.