The Beach Boys released three albums chock full of material from 1967!
1967 – Sunshine Tomorrow, 1967 – Sunshine Tomorrow 2: The Studio Sessions, and Live Sunshine – 1967 dive deep into a fascinating and frenetic chapter in The Beach Boys’ long, groundbreaking creative arc, exploring the band’s dynamic year through their recordings. The Beach Boys have personally overseen the creative process for the three collections, which are produced by Mark Linnet and Alan Boyd. Reviewer Jesse Jarnow praised 1967 – Sunshine Tomorrow as “remarkable,” saying, “These recordings make it possible to hear The Beach Boys simultaneously as the moody pop geniuses of Pet Sounds and the fresh-faced surf-rockin’ teens from Hawthorne, California.”
1967 – Sunshine Tomorrow features Linett and Boyd’s new, first-ever stereo mix of The Beach Boys’ 1967 Wild Honey album and all three collections throw open the legendary band’s vault to debut sought-after rarities, 50 years after they were put to tape. Previously unreleased highlights across the titles include The Beach Boys’ shelved “live” album, Lei’d in Hawaii, studio recordings from the Wild Honey and Smiley Smile album sessions, and standout concert recordings spanning 1967 to 1970. Wild Honey’s 2017 stereo mix is also available in a 180-gram vinyl 50th Anniversary Edition.
The Beach Boys’ final studio session for the shelved SMiLE album took place on May 18th, 1967, with Smiley Smile album sessions booked at Brian Wilson’s new home studio from June 3rd through the end of July. The band’s 12th and 13thstudio albums were released exactly three months apart to cap the year’s studio efforts: Smiley Smile on September 18th followed by Wild Honey on December 18th.
For the Smiley Smile sessions, “I wanted to have a home environment trip where we could record at my house,” recalls Brian Wilson in the liner notes for 1967 – Sunshine Tomorrow. “I wanted to try something different, something new. I produced Smiley Smile, but Mike inspired me. He said ‘Brian, let’s make a really good, easygoing album’. We had an engineer convert my den into a studio. We had my piano detuned to make it ring more.”
“Just prior to that, Brian had built up this production peak and then just completely reversed field, and (for Smiley Smile) did something so light and airy, and y’ know, easy,” explains Mike Love. “That was an underground album, I figure, for us. It was completely out of the mainstream of what was going on at that time, which was all hard rock, psychedelic music, and here we come with a song called ‘Wind Chimes.’ It just didn’t have anything to do with what was going on – and that was the idea.”
“Times were changing,” adds Al Jardine. “We were happy to put our musical skills to work. We didn’t have to look at the clock; there was virtually 24-hour availability to experiment.”
It was, at the time, an album of what might have been, but Smiley Smile is nonetheless a fascinating chapter in the story of the Beach Boys.
The early weeks of that year saw Brian Wilson experimenting with ever more sophisticated studio techniques in his quest to follow the groundbreaking Pet Sounds opus of 1966. The first working title for the new project was Dumb Angel, which later changed to the name that would become legendary among legions of fans as the great lost Beach Boys record, Smile.
The ambitious ideas and often eccentric methodology that Wilson explored with lyricist Van Dyke Parks, for what was envisaged as an even greater sonic tour de force than Pet Sounds, were often met with bemusement by Brian’s band members. Huge sections of what was recorded were subsequently abandoned, and became the subject of great conjecture among devotees for the next four decades.
In more recent years, Wilson let audiences into his creative process of the period, firstly with the 2004 live performances that became the Brian Wilson Presents Smile album, and then via Capitol’s The Smile Sessions box set, which set out to reassemble much of it in 2011.
But at the time, what remained of the work was gathered together on Smiley Smile. It was something of a curate’s egg of a disc, onto which Capitol placed the previous year’s masterwork ‘Good Vibrations’ and a tantalising glimpse of what might have been, in the epic ‘Heroes and Villains.’ The song charted in the summer and performed well, reaching No. 8 in the UK and No. 12 in the US.
British audiences, indeed, remained loyal to the Beach Boys through the year, also giving them an unlikely hit with the incongruously belated release of ‘Surfer Girl.’ Even as the Smile sessions were unravelling in May, the group (minus Brian) were delighting British audiences on an eight-date, two-shows-a-night tour.
Smiley Smile included several whimsical and sometimes downright peculiar material, such as ‘Vegetables’ and ‘She’s Goin’ Bald,’ but it was also home to Carl Wilson’s lovely vocal interpretation of a Parks lyric and his brother’s melody on ‘Wonderful.’ American audiences never fully embraced the album, which peaked there at No. 41; in the UK, it didn’t enter the chart until November, but spent four weeks in the top ten and peaked at No. 9. It was a positive end to a difficult year.
All three of the releases document the group’s pivotal post-Pet Sounds period – including sessions for Smiley Smile and Wild Honey, the two 1967 albums they recorded after shelving the famously ambitious SMiLE LP. 1967 – Sunshine Tomorrow 2: The Studio Sessions includes 29 studio session recordings, and Live Sunshine – 1967 features 109 live recordings, most of which are previously unreleased.
Highlights from the Studio Sessions set include an a cappella version of “Heroes and Villains,” the previously unreleased “Tune L” and outtake “Good News.” The live set includes recordings from Hawaii, Detroit, Washington D.C.; White Plains, New York; Pittsburgh and Boston.
The Beach Boys oversaw the creative process for all three collections, which Mark Linett and Alan Boyd co-produced. 1967 – Sunshine Tomorrow included Linett and Boyd’s first-ever stereo mix of Wild Honey; the previously unreleased “live” album Lei’d in Hawaii, studio recordings from the Wild Honey and Smiley Smile sessions and concert recordings spanning 1967 to 1970.
On August 25th and 26th, 1967, The Beach Boys (absent Bruce Johnston, but with Brian Wilson on organ for his first concert appearances with the band in more than two years) recorded two concerts and rehearsals in Honolulu for a prospective live album to be titled Lei’d In Hawaii, applying a new Smiley Smile-inspired aesthetic to the performances. Just over two weeks later, the band (with both Brian and Bruce participating) began re-recording the live set in-studio at Brian’s house and at Wally Heider Recording in Hollywood, after the Honolulu concert tapes were deemed unusable. Although completed and mixed, the final planned audio element of a canned concert audience was not added and the Lei’d In Hawaii project was cancelled. Those live, in-studio performances morphed into sessions for the Wild Honey album, primarily comprised of original Brian Wilson/Mike Love compositions.
Two days after wrapping the Wild Honey sessions on November 15th, 1967, Mike Love, Carl and Dennis Wilson, Al Jardine, and Bruce Johnston returned to the road for The Beach Boys’ Thanksgiving Tour, premiering several songs from the forthcoming album at their concerts.
