Capitol Records DKAO-2893
Released August 19, 1968
Side A
1. Darlin’
2. Salt Lake City
3. Sloop John B.
4. In My Room
5. Catch a Wave
6. Wild Honey
7. Little Saint Nick
Side B
1. Do It Again
2. Wouldn’t It Be Nice
3. God Only Knows
4. Surfer Girl
5. Little Honda
6. Here Today
7. You’re So Good to Me
8. Let Him Run Wild
Outtakes
1. You Still Believe in Me [lost]
2. In the Back of My Mind
3. I’m Waiting for the Day
4. My Only Sunshine
5. Wonderful
6. Good to My Baby
7. Time to Get Alone [lost]
8. When I Grow Up (to Be a Man)
9. Kiss Me, Baby [lost]
Mixed:
January 9, 1968 at Wally Heider Recording / Producer: Brian Wilson / Engineer: Jim Lockert
July 18-22, 1968 at Capitol Records / Producer: Carl Wilson / Engineers: Don Henderson, Steve Desper
Recorded:
June 1963 to June 1968 at Western Recorders, Gold Star Recording Studios, Sunset Sound Recorders, Wally Heider Recording, Brian Wilson’s house / Recording Engineers: Chuck Britz, Bowen David, Larry Levine, Bruce Botnick, Jim Lockert, Steve Desper, Winston Wong, Bill Halverson
Produced by Brian Wilson and Murry Wilson:
“Catch a Wave,” “Surfer Girl,” “In My Room,” “Little Saint Nick”
Produced by Brian Wilson:
“Little Honda,” “When I Grow Up (to Be a Man),” “Kiss Me, Baby,” “In the Back of My Mind,” “Good to My Baby,” “Let Him Run Wild,” “Salt Lake City,” “You’re So Good to Me,” “Sloop John B.,” “Wouldn’t It Be Nice,” “You Still Believe in Me,” “I’m Waiting for the Day,” “God Only Knows,” “Here Today,” “Wonderful,” “My Only Sunshine,” “Wild Honey,” “Darlin’,” “Time to Get Alone”
Produced by Brian Wilson and Carl Wilson:
“Do It Again”
Bouncing Around the Bags
1968 felt like a new beginning for the Beach Boys. The year prior had been one of endless tribulation, of a band nearly broken apart for good and then knit back together. In short: shelving the Smile album, suing Capitol Records, all the difficulties in establishing Brother Records, many key characters introduced and exiled, Brian’s deepening struggle with mental illness, Carl’s draft problems and arrest by the FBI, Bruce taking a trial separation from the group, Dennis getting a real separation from his wife, Audree’s brother dying, concerts taking heavy criticism, dropping out of Monterey, the underperformance of “Heroes and Villains” and Smiley Smile, shelving a live album, the Redwood signing falling apart, retreating from plans for Brother Records, clouds of hashish, Brian not being allowed to paint his house magenta… But beautiful things had come from it too. Beautiful music. And a promising, spiritually reinvigorated eye to the future, thanks to Wild Honey and meditation with the Maharishi.
By the time January rolled around, those problems seemed to be receding into the distance. In an interview Brian gave to journalist Jamake Highwater on Thursday, January 11 (whilst sitting in the back of a car driven by Carl), there’s a gentle optimism in the air as discussion touches upon feeling a complete circle of creative progression for the Beach Boys and a new source of energy in transcendental meditation. And hints of melancholy, too – quiet pangs of disappointment over his surrender from the forefront of the rat race – but rarely did Brian Wilson sound so at peace with himself and his music.
“Everything just started to happen for me personally about two or three years ago,” he offered. “I just started to feel something happening – I didn’t know exactly what it was, you know? All of a sudden, I began to realise that I had a lot of music to make. That’s personally what happened to me; I just started making music, and music, and I couldn’t stop. But I didn’t try to stop, because I was having a lot of fun doing it, and it was just a ball.”
Not even experiences with LSD were thought upon negatively at the time. Or as Brian colourfully put it, “Ever since I blew my mind, everything has just been so groovy. That’s what happened to me.”
The conversation caught Brian at a crossroads; he wasn’t gone from the game, but this was an artist evidently reflecting upon his work of the past seven years with a sense of closure, of a whirlwind that he’d finally stepped outside of and could observe in totality. It was a moment of calm before the next chapter, a time to look back. “We’ve touched upon quite a few different bags,” he said, in Brian lingo. “And with us it’s just been a real experience bouncing around all the bags, you know? We just found a little way to bounce around the bags, and it’s just been so much fun. Like, we just did an R&B album, and we really haven’t planned our next production album.”
Back around November or December 1967, Brian underwent a potentially life-altering operation to restore the hearing in his deaf right ear. Details about this surgery are scarce, but it was apparently thought to be a success at the time. While stopping in London in December, Dennis told Keith Altham of NME, “Brian had an operation on his bad ear and is now hearing so acutely that you are going to have to stand back for our next few records – he’s really into some amazing things… I’m still flying paper airplanes out the window!”
This optimistic story was repeated by group members for a while, and then quietly forgotten. The reality appears to be that Brian’s operation did nothing, or very little, or perhaps just saddled his ear with the effects of painful tinnitus. He would have to remain a mono man.
Nonetheless, music release plans continued to unfold, and the shape of the thing to follow Wild Honey was up in the air at the turn of the year. It wouldn’t be another Beach Boys take on R&B; continuing to bounce around the bags was paramount. Several ideas were apparently in contention. “We have another half an album in the can which is better than Pet Sounds, although it’s already a year old,” Bruce told Mike Hennessey of Melody Maker during that London trip, alluding to the abandoned Smile album, which still appeared to be a viable project that could be revived. Bruce simply noted, “We haven’t worked on it since last April.”
The other supposed forthcoming LP was a mutation of the Lei’d in Hawaii live project. According to Bruce, “We also have another album coming out which was recorded live at concerts in Hawaii, Michigan and Boston.” This would in actuality mean a Frankensteining of Michigan shows cut on four-track in October 1966, fake ‘live’ studio productions cut on eight-track in September 1967 (which were recreations of the messy Honolulu concerts in August), and Boston shows captured via two-track soundboard recordings in November 1967. This strange live compilation idea was never formally assembled.
Distribution deals and new artists for Brother Records were also on the cards, despite Wild Honey coming out on Capitol. Dennis was scooping up soul singers, Carl was working with songwriter-poet Stephen Kalinich, and Bruce wanted to record a solo album for Polydor.
Another dilemma facing the Beach Boys was that they owed Capitol product, big-time. The wait between Pet Sounds in May ’66 and Smiley Smile in September ’67 left an enormous gap, an unprecedented gap, a gap that could swallow up whole universes in the 1960s. Best of the Beach Boys and Best of the Beach Boys Vol. 2 helped somewhat, but the group hadn’t delivered on their demented three-albums-per-year quota back in 1966 and were under pressure to play catch-up. With commercial fortunes drooping, there could be no more dancing around deadlines.
Somewhere between Brian and Capitol, an idea arose to put together a special compilation LP featuring only instrumental backing tracks from the group’s previous recordings – a Beach Boys album with no Beach Boys voices. Whoever the suggestion came from, the concept was right up Brian’s street. The label might’ve been thinking more along the lines of giving kids something to sing along to… however, there was artistic appeal there too; a unique opportunity to show off those finely wrought instrumental arrangements that were so often obscured behind finely wrought vocal arrangements.
There probably wasn’t another contemporary vocal group with a producer/arranger so well-positioned to highlight the instrumental component of their music. It would primarily be a showcase for Brian’s production work, on Brian’s songs, by nature – as much as the group were reorganizing themselves by his wishes into a more democratic unit, and all releases from “Heroes and Villains” onward carried a homogenous “Produced by: The Beach Boys” credit, Brian was for the moment still calling most of the actual shots about their output. In the studio, Carl became more closely integrated as his co-pilot to ease the responsibility.
During that January car ride, Brian discussed his philosophy about the track and vocal aspects of production as one art joined together in his mind, somewhat contradictory to the creative intent of an instrumental record. “I guess you could say it’s all alive, really – voice, instrument, they’re all really the same thing, and I think that’s where I’ve had my biggest thrill, being able to get the voices to groove with everything else.”
But underneath, he and the Beach Boys understood the value of the backing track as a compartmentalized thing that could be enjoyed for its own merits. “You’d probably be surprised at what was under the vocals,” Carl observed. “It was what was really behind them, too. Just the music tracks – I like that.”
The proposed title for the album: Stack-o-Tracks.
What remains so interesting about this project is that it signifies the first time the Beach Boys ever consciously dipped back into their own archive. They and their peers were caught up in such a hurricane of forward-momentum in the ’60s that it was quite an anomaly for any act to pull out the old tapes, have a listen, and revisit their creations in progress. The first hurdle: What archive? There wasn’t one. Beach Boys tapes were usually left behind at whichever studio they were last worked on: Capitol had some, and others littered the tape libraries of Western Recorders, Gold Star, CBS, RCA, Radio Recorders, Sunset Sound, and anywhere else in town they might’ve visited. Brian took home many of the reels after sessions, and more recently, the group had started to use Wally Heider Recording as a base of operations when they weren’t at Bellagio Road. Gathering up a decent amount of their stuff into one place would’ve been an arduous undertaking.
In late December or early January, Brian, Dennis, Carl, Mike, Al and Bruce got together with the Capitol Records art department twice and took photos for an album cover. Memorable shots were produced at those sessions: a couple where the group stand around numerous piles of tapes, and some (one chosen for the LP) where they pose with a gigantic tape tower reaching up to the ceiling. Those are legitimate Beach Boys tapes in the shots – a few of the Party! reels are visible.
“It’s gonna be called Stack-o-Tracks,” Brian explained to Highwater. “We took a picture of a big stack of tapes – it went all the way to the ceiling, at the very top, y’know? The thing would’ve fallen if we’d not stuck in a four-track at the very top, just to keep the thing from falling – took a picture of it with us standing around the stack. So I think it’s gonna be out of sight! I don’t know if it’ll sell very much, but it’ll be a real nice, solid catalogue member.”
Stacking at Wally’s
On Tuesday, January 9, 1968, Brian and the group’s engineer Jim Lockert (probably with at least Carl, and maybe others) drove to Wally Heider Recording on the corner of Selma and Cahuenga to compile and mix seventeen possible cuts for the instrumental LP. The selection had likely been discussed to some extent before heading into the studio with a collection of tapes.
The kaleidoscope of chosen Beach Boys reels necessitated use of 1/2” three-track, 1/2” four-track, and 1” eight-track tape machines; handily, Wally’s business was a prolific remote recording and rental service, so the studio had access to any type of equipment format imaginable. There were two recording studios at the Heider complex: the older, ad-hoc Studio 1, where Smiley Smile was completed and mixed, and the brand new Studio 3, a near enough replica of Western’s famous Studio 3, where Lei’d in Hawaii and much of Wild Honey were recorded (there was no Studio 2). Lockert didn’t write down which control room they used that day. If any trends from the Wild Honey sessions were carried forward, Bill Halverson may have been on hand as a second engineer.
The productions selected were largely pulled from the first year of Brian’s retirement from touring, a period which he professed to be his most contented time as a music-maker. “A revitalization of total life energy was what happened to me,” he explained, on leaving the road. “I was able to express myself in such complete terms. I could take all the time I wanted, I had no chains, I didn’t feel like I was being pressed to make something in an unnatural way, and all of a sudden, I couldn’t believe how much greater making music was when I did have the time, and the naturalness to do it. It was so beautiful.”
Taking into account those feelings, the initial song selection seems to have been Brian’s doing. Nearly all of the songs hail from 1965 to 1967, a collection of some of his fondest arranging accomplishments that by and large were created after giving up personal appearances. Most of the material was therefore found across a variety of 1/2” reels. About half of the selected masters were three-track recordings, and others were four-track, owing to changes in Hollywood studio technology during the 1965-66 era. For convenience, Jim Lockert went about harvesting the master takes from various reels and splicing them onto one 1/2” compilation reel before mixing.
The earliest tape generation sources with un-combined tracks were used if available. Below is the transcribed inventory of the comp reel Lockert and the Boys assembled. (Our notes about the generation of each track are in square brackets.)
| Date: 1-9-68 |
| Client: Brother Records |
| Program: Instrumental Album – Pulled Masters |
| 1. | 4trk | My Childhood (You Still Believe in Me) | [1st gen] |
| 2. | 3trk | Salt Lake City | [1st gen] |
| 3. | 3trk | In the Back of My Mind | [3rd gen] |
| 4. | 3trk | Let Him Run Wild | [1st gen] |
| 5. | 4trk | Sloop John B. | [2nd gen] |
| 6. | 4trk | I’m Waiting for the Day | [1st gen] |
| 7. | 3trk | Wouldn’t It Be Nice | [1st gen] |
| 8. | 3trk | You’re So Good to Me | [1st gen] |
| 9. | 4trk | My Only Sunshine | [1st gen] |
| 10. | 4trk | Wonderful | [version 1, 1st gen] |
| 11. | 3trk | Good to My Baby | [1st gen] |
[A depressing note: Later down the line, the last stretch of tape containing “My Only Sunshine,” “Wonderful” and “Good to My Baby” was spliced off to another reel, which is missing as of writing. In 1972, Carl relayed a concerning story to Melody Maker about someone mistakenly throwing the “Sunshine” tape out with the garbage before he rescued and repaired it. Whatever happened there, it’s gone now.]
Swapping the reel back and forth between the three-track and four-track machines, the following were then mixed to mono on another 1/4” reel. (Numbers, runtimes, and titles are exactly as written or not written on the box – our notes about sources and which mixes no longer reside on the reel are again in square brackets.)
| 1. | 2:20 | My Childhood (You Still Believe in Me) | [1st gen 4trk to mono – removed] |
| 2. | 1:55 | Salt Lake City | [1st gen 3trk to mono – removed to LP] |
| 3. | 2:07 | In the Back of My Mind | [3rd gen 3trk to mono] |
| 4. | 2:12 | Let Him Run Wild | [1st gen 3trk to mono – removed to LP] |
| 5. | 2:47 | Sloop John B. | [2nd gen 4trk to mono – removed to LP] |
| 6. | 3:06 | I’m Waiting for the Day | [1st gen 4trk to mono] |
| 7. | 2:10 | Wouldn’t It Be Nice | [1st gen 3trk to mono – removed to LP] |
| 8. | 1:53 | You’re So Good to Me | [1st gen 3trk to mono – removed to LP] |
| 9. | 1:57 | My Only Sunshine | [1st gen 4trk to mono – with vocals] |
| 10. | 1:45 | Wonderful | [1st gen 4trk to mono] |
| 11. | 1:50 | Good to My Baby | [1st gen 3trk to mono] |
| 12. | 2:40 | Time to Get Alone | [2nd gen 8trk to mono – removed] |
| Little Honda | [2nd gen 3trk to mono – removed to LP] |
Of those thirteen mixes, five remain on the tape as of writing. Onto a second 1/4” reel, four more songs not sourced from the compilation were mixed and (partially) numbered in continuation.
| 13. | Wild Honey | 2:34 | [1st gen 4trk to mono – removed to LP] |
| 14. | Darlin’ | 2:12 | [1st gen 3trk to mono – removed to LP] |
| 15. | When I Grow Up to Be a Man | [1st gen 3trk to mono] | |
| Kiss Me Baby | [1st gen 3trk to mono – removed] |
Now, there’s a lot to unpack here. One song from All Summer Long, four from Today!, three from Summer Days (And Summer Nights!!), four from Pet Sounds, two from the unreleased Smile sessions, two from Wild Honey, and the unreleased “Time to Get Alone.” There are curious, towering omissions: “I Get Around,” “Help Me, Rhonda,” “California Girls,” “God Only Knows,” and above all, “Good Vibrations.” There’s nothing earlier than 1964, and nothing from Smiley Smile.
Hold on – two tracks from the unreleased Smile sessions, and one of them has vocals, AND “Time to Get Alone” is here?! Yes! But let’s back up and talk about the less surprising decisions first.
No additional reverb or limiting effects were added to most of these tracks as they were mixed, nearly all being a straightforward balancing of channels to mono. Many of them fade out surprisingly quickly, as was Brian’s wont. Late ’60s mixing impulses of his are evident in places, such in “In the Back of My Mind,” where the strings are buried down under the track until riding up for the end of the song.
“In the Back of My Mind” and “Good to My Baby” were both recorded on the same day – January 13, 1965. Brian had mixed both of those backing tracks to mono on their initial recording date, keeping a two-sided dub copy in his personal possession, so the unadorned arrangements were already familiar listens to him and they seem to have reflected a particularly satisfying sojourn in the studio. The first generation tape for “In the Back of My Mind” apparently couldn’t be located, therefore they spliced the final third gen master with Dennis’ doubled vocals onto the comp reel and muted the voices in the mixdown.
“Let Him Run Wild” was considered by Carl and Dennis to be the major turning point in Brian’s musical development, the moment it all began to explode outward. Its inclusion feels like the band’s acknowledgement of that milestone.
“Sloop John B.” was mixed from the second generation tape, as Billy Strange had overdubbed additional guitar parts onto that reduction mix alongside the vocals.
“My Childhood (You Still Believe in Me)” with its subtitle is written on the boxes containing both of the relevant reels. It may just be Lockert pulling the original title from the four-track tape box, but perhaps it suggests something psychological about Brian divorcing the track’s original identity from the song it eventually became, approaching the instrumental as a self-contained piece of music that can communicate different ideas. Or something.
The inclusion of three unreleased productions is, clearly, fascinating, and a bit weird, and evidence that the label didn’t have any input into these choices. Let’s go into what they might be doing here.
“My Only Sunshine” is the most intriguing selection of all. Created deep within the sessions for the Smile album, it was an esoteric pocket-sized suite integrating pre-rock standards “The Old Master Painter” and “You Are My Sunshine” (or “You Were My Sunshine”) with original music. Brian recorded a track in two sections at Gold Star on November 14, 1966, and the Beach Boys overdubbed vocals at Western on November 30, 1966.
The modest production was finished and edited, though if it was mixed to mono in 1966, such a mix is lost. On February 10, 1967, Brian copied the fadeout section to eight-track, replaced the group’s vocals with his own multitracked harmonies, and mixed and spliced it as a tag to that night’s version of “Heroes and Villains.” On February 28, 1967, he recorded a revised arrangement of the fadeout music explicitly intended for “Heroes.” The original “My Only Sunshine” was discarded along the way and didn’t make it to Smiley Smile.
Maybe this tape was stumbled upon by chance when the Beach Boys were sifting through material for Stack-o-Tracks. Maybe Brian or Carl or whoever just liked it, and it wasn’t associated with a negative aura in the way that some of the Smile tracks were. The tape they dug out was the original four-track reel; the two sections were already edited together, and it contained Dennis’ doubled lead vocals in the first half and the group’s doubled harmony vocals in the second half (with Mike singing an almost-lead underneath). Unique amongst the Stack-o-Tracks mono mixes done that day in January 1968, “My Only Sunshine” wasn’t given a track mix at all, but rather a full mix that actually included the vocals.
Heavy reverb had already been printed on those vocals, so this was another simple combination of tracks to mono. A little slapdash – the voices in the fade are dipped very low, the way Brian mixed a lot of Wild Honey – but nonetheless a proper mixdown with a fadeout. We can only speculate about why this mono mix exists. Perhaps, hatching a zany scheme, Brian wished to include it on Stack-o-Tracks as a bonus surprise. Or, potentially more likely, he thought to mix the rediscovered song for posterity whilst already busy in the studio, with an eye to including it on their next studio album. Regardless of the reason, we as listeners are fortunate that they did this preservation work.
[Note: This January 1968 mono mix of “My Only Sunshine” was featured on CD 1 of 2011’s The Smile Sessions, albeit with modifications. The “Old Master Painter” introduction segment comes from an alternate session outtake, with a quick crossfade from “Barnyard,” and another crossfade into the master mono mix following the drum fill. An unwanted noise is removed before the splice.]
The track that follows it on the reel is “Wonderful.” Not the Smiley Smile version that had been released, but the original, first attempt at a backing track, recorded August 25, 1966. The first generation tape running at the original non-slowed-down speed was used here, containing harpsichord, piano, bass and trumpet on track 1, and a ukulele on track 3. So this was a true instrumental mix, but for a version of a song that the public hadn’t heard. Another perplexing choice. But maybe, like “My Only Sunshine,” it was simply the result of spontaneity in the studio after rummaging through the old tapes, and maybe, like a reversion to the “My Childhood” title, it reflected an attitude that this Stack-o-Tracks album didn’t necessarily have to be karaoke for familiar songs, but rather it could be a standalone listening experience with instrumental music enjoyed for its own sake. That was how “Let’s Go Away for Awhile” evolved, after all. This “Wonderful” mix fades out early, in the middle of the last verse.
The twelfth backing track mixed to the first mono reel was “Time to Get Alone,” formerly a production for Redwood, then for the Beach Boys, then shelved. It was the latest chronological track here – production had begun on October 12, 1967 – and it was therefore mixed from 1” eight-track, by then the standard format for Beach Boys recordings. Brian was especially proud of this production at the time of its creation and still held it close, in spite of friction surrounding the Redwood situation. If we’re assuming that Stack-o-Tracks was conceived as an instrumental album that could be enjoyed without knowledge of the Beach Boys’ released catalogue, “Time to Get Alone” is a great arrangement that makes sense for inclusion. Another possibility is that the group assumed “My Only Sunshine,” “Wonderful” version one, and “Time to Get Alone” would all feature on the next mainline album.
The other dryly recorded eight-track productions from the Wild Honey sessions did employ additional reverb during mixing for accuracy to the records, such as on the title track’s theremin. “Wild Honey” comes from the now-missing first generation eight-track master and thus doesn’t include the organ solo parts. The “Darlin’” instrumental recreates a quirk of the original assembly by using copies of the second chorus in place of the first and fourth choruses, spliced onto the beginning and end.
“When I Grow Up (to Be a Man)” was mixed from the first generation three-track master, so it lacks the chopping guitar ‘solo’ overdub. Eight bars into the fade, the group’s (single-tracked) vocals are suddenly faded up in the mix. If we take the 1-15 numberings written on the boxes as gospel, it could be that this was thought of as a closing flourish to the album, reintroducing the Beach Boys’ voices after the listener’s journey through track country. “Kiss Me, Baby” was scribbled out, and not numbered like the others, although a splice indicates that a mix of the song once resided on the tape. It appears as though “Little Honda” was mixed onto the end of the first reel after everything else, hence its exclusion from the numberings – possibly intended to replace “Kiss Me, Baby.”
Dub pressings of some of these 17 Stack-o-Tracks mixes may have been taken home for review. A couple of days later, Brian sounded pleased about this first draft of the album: “It’s a real nice… Just pure music, you know? No words, nothing. It’s just the first time we’ve ever put out pure music. Non-vocal, pure music.” And, apparently, the trip down memory lane prompted him to go home from the mixing session and listen to another of his LPs for the first time in a while. “I guess I went through the peak of my orchestrating years at about Pet Sounds,” he reflected. “That’s I think where it really hit its peak. That was really quite an album to make, you know, it really dumped it all out there. I listened to it a couple nights ago with my wife in bed, and I felt like I had just heard it for the first time. It’s one of the albums I’ve made where it’s really stayed right with me, new all the time. It’s beautiful. I really enjoy listening to it.”
Line-up Revisions
During an undated visit to Capitol Records (which could’ve taken place at any time between January and July, before or after a slew of events to come), eight mono instrumental mixes were spliced from the first Stack reel to an official master compilation: “You Still Believe in Me,” “Let Him Run Wild,” “Sloop John B.,” “Wouldn’t It Be Nice,” “You’re So Good to Me,” “Good to My Baby,” “Time to Get Alone,” and “Little Honda” – the titles were crossed out or circled with arrows directing to an “OUT TO A REEL” note by Steve Desper (in keeping with Capitol’s practice of an ‘A’ master and ‘B’ duplicate reel for each project). Following this, Brian wrote “DO NOT USE – B.W.” in pink marker over the “Wouldn’t It Be Nice” title, and somebody else wrote “OMIT” with an arrow pointing to “Time to Get Alone.” The Smile tunes were left behind, as were “In the Back of My Mind” and “I’m Waiting for the Day.” From the second tape, “Wild Honey” and “Darlin’” were spliced off with a matching “OUT TO A REEL” note, and “Kiss Me, Baby” was removed as well.
Further down the line, the mono track mixes of “You Still Believe in Me,” “Time to Get Alone,” and “Kiss Me, Baby” were struck off to another, now-missing reel (or just thrown in the trash), and Brian’s request to not use “Wouldn’t It Be Nice” was disregarded. The label likely wanted a wider selection of popular songs on the album, even if they held a surprisingly relaxed position over not using the top selling hit singles, and probably weren’t too keen on a few of Brian’s proposed deep cuts and previously unreleased productions. Again, there are no known dates associated with these amendments, but notes on the mix reels’ boxes provide useful insight into how the album’s conception changed.
Below the original titles, Carl Wilson’s hand faintly pencilled an alternative proposed sequence of thirteen songs, divided into two columns to probably indicate each side of an LP:
S.J.B.
WOULDN’T IT BE NICE
GOOD TO MY BABY
DARLIN
WILD HONEY
IN MY ROOM
SURFER GIRL
LITTLE ST NICK
CATCH A WAVE
HONDA
HERE TODAY
GOD ONLY KNOWS
YOUR GOOD
Number one singles “I Get Around,” “Help Me, Rhonda,” and “Good Vibrations” remain intriguingly absent. A mixture of older cuts from the Surfer Girl days balance out the breadth of the catalogue representation, and delving further into the past would also allow the group to showcase instrumentals they’d actually played on together as a band. According to Steve Desper, the band’s road mixer and occasional newbie studio engineer (who got more deeply involved with the project later), “Popularity of the song, available separated tracks, complexity of the arrangement, and vocal to instrument ratio were some of the criteria used to assemble the playlist.” The choices were a compromise between Brian and Carl and Capitol’s A&R department, probably meaning they had input from Karl Engemann.
A week following Brian’s interview, more archival work was undertaken on the greater Beach Boys tape library that appears to be connected to vault combing for Stack-o-Tracks, and to this revised list of songs. On Wednesday, January 17, the group and their old favoured engineer Chuck Britz were at Western Recorders splicing and re-labelling three-track masters onto a new 1/2” compilation reel; mostly material from the July 1963 Surfer Girl sessions, with a few tracks dating to shortly before or after. The master takes of each production were snipped off of their original session reels with Chuck transcribing the take numbers onto a new legend. (Once again, our notes about tape generations are in brackets.)
| WESTERN RECORDERS INC. |
| Date: 1/17/68 |
| Client: BEACH BOYS SEA OF TUNES – FINAL MAST’S |
| Engr: CB |
| TAKE NO. | TITLE | |
| 6 | CAR CLUB | [1st gen] |
| 2D | SURFER MOON | [5th gen] |
| 2A | CATCH A WAVE | [2nd gen] |
| 13 | IN MY ROOM | [1st gen] |
| 11 | HAWAII | [1st gen] |
| 3 | YOUR SUMMER DREAM | [1st gen] |
| 4 | GOOD HUMOR MAN | [1st gen] |
| 33 | LORDS PRAYER | [1st gen] |
| 7B | LITTLE SAINT NICK | [3rd gen] |
| 4B | HUSH A BYE | [2nd gen] |
| 3 | SURFER GIRL | [1st gen] |
These were all the final tape generations that produced the released versions of each song – except for “Good Humor Man,” which was a completely different, earlier version of “The Rocking Surfer,” and “Hushabye,” which used the second-to-final tape generation before Brian and Mike doubled their lead vocals.
The studio legend doesn’t clarify whether or not this tape was assembled explicitly for Stack-o-Tracks, but considering some of these songs’ eventual inclusion in the final LP line-up, it would be a huge coincidence if it wasn’t. Still, that doesn’t quite explain the inclusion of a cappella number “The Lord’s Prayer,” unless it was simply being preserved because they’d found it on a reel alongside “Little Saint Nick.”
The client listing also avoids clear explanation, curiously a joint specification between “Beach Boys” and “Sea of Tunes.” And whenever the latter was written down on a tape box, it usually indicated the attendance of Dad.
Murry’s Memories
January 1968 found Murry Wilson in a nostalgic mood. Little is known about the thinking behind the Sea of Tunes boss’ movements at that time, save for what we can interpret from the trail he left behind, but on the heels of the group’s early work on Stack-o-Tracks, their former manager was evidently in the business of rounding up Beach Boys tapes.
Perhaps his sons’ archaeological dig through their old masters inspired Murry to undertake a similar job, rolling back the clock to the era in which he’d been right there alongside them in the studio. Maybe there was a need to organize assets related to the Sea of Tunes publishing company he still ran. Alternatively, and potentially most likely, the Beach Boys and Capitol had decided to feature some of their earliest production work on Stack-o-Tracks, veering into material that was sitting in boxes in Father Wilson’s home in Whittier, necessitating that Murry sift through his tapes and assist the group in pulling the master takes to a new compilation reel.
He’d also been reconnecting to some extent with Brian, Dennis and Carl, an armistice that seems to have been brokered under the calming influence of transcendental meditation and a detox from pharmaceuticals. Wilson family relationships were tentatively on a healing incline, and with them, tensions that had once banished Murry from the recording studio slipped into forgive and forget. That “Sea of Tunes” listing and other activity to follow give us good cause to believe that Murry was with the Beach Boys at Western Recorders on January 17.
Then ten days later, on Saturday, January 27, Murry booked himself into Western to once again make preservative efforts with Chuck, but not the group. Appearing to be a continuation of the same work, Murry asked his trusted engineer to run off 7.5ips mono and stereo copies of a whole stack of early Beach Boys tapes dug out from home and/or the library at Western. These were mono, two-track, and three-track masters and session outtakes in all shapes and sizes, and Murry wanted to duplicate or mix listenable representations of the entire reels in most cases. Having already dubbed whole Sunrays session tapes to lacquer for personal playback, he was clearly a man who liked to keep mementos from his time in the studio.
If this sounds like a valiant, thoughtful archival project, like the sort of thing that’d be a lifeline to the work of future historians, it might have come at a cost. In the enormous living room of his house, Murry did possess an amateur recording and playback rig where he intended to listen to these tapes in his own time. It was a little machine for 7” reels, such as those used for the copy tapes produced that month at Western, and not a setup that could handle the standard studio-size 10.5” NAB reels. Mixing at 7.5ips rather than 15ips would allow more music to fit onto Murry’s smaller reels. Nearly all of the source tapes he copied are missing as of writing in the 21st century, so it’s a frightening possibility that the originals were considered unnecessary baggage and consigned to a dumpster after Chuck made the backups. So the copy tapes exist, and that’s fortunate – but are the originals gone because Murry chose to run those copies? Was this all a mission to minimize shelf space?
Chuck transcribed titles and occasional dates from the original boxes, as well as numbering the 1/27/68 tape copy reels, noting “MURRY WILSON – SEA OF TUNES – BEACH BOYS” on each. Two-track tapes were folded to mono during the transfers, and the three-track tapes were mixed to either stereo or mono.
The Wilson-Britz team filled up nine known 7” reels in all, comprising material from the Beach Boys’ earliest sessions at Western Recorders in April ’62 through to the “Little Saint Nick” / “The Lord’s Prayer” single in November ’63 – basically, the period of their history in which Murry served as a co-producer. A few fragments from a Shut Down Volume 2 session in January ’64 were included, which Murry did not attend, but the masters and outtakes duplicated were otherwise all recorded under his oversight. Of notable inclusion were uncut candid session reels for the Surfer Girl LP recorded in June-July ’63; the companion Little Deuce Coupe LP was largely overlooked, save for new mono mixes from a few of the master takes. The songs from the 1/17/1968 three-track compilation reel were all given rough stereo and mono mixes on this date.
Ejection From the Bags
Although a good portion of the work for the album was completed rather efficiently, getting Stack-o-Tracks across the finish line drifted back onto the Beach Boys’ nebulous to-do list as other projects took precedence. We know that it did stay hanging about on their minds, because in March, Bruce told Keith Altham of NME that they would also be releasing “an instrumental album of our biggest hits so that people can sing and play along with them.”
From February to April, the Beach Boys recorded a new original studio album instead – Friends, a wonderful song cycle of lightness, joy, family, and friendship, the last of its kind in the ’60s to be arranged and produced from head to toe by Brian Wilson (who didn’t take the official credit). All of that contemplative excavation work on Stack-o-Tracks may have helped to reinvigorate his creativity and loosen the knot on a new “bag” to bounce into. It was a happy time for Brian, and a healthy balance between his dominating auteurship of the group’s music and plenty of creative contribution from the others – particularly Dennis, who emerged from under his brother’s shadow as a unique, brilliant songwriter. Even Murry found his way in there, in effect co-producing a handful of the sessions, doing his best to not stomp on anybody’s toes again and keep the atmosphere harmonious. When another tour cut recording plans short, Brian tackled the last few songs alone in L.A. and assembled the album with Jim Lockert.
And then, all of that year’s replenishment began to travel down the tubes.
The unravelling has been written about at greater length by others. The assassination of Martin Luther King shook the nation and threw a gruelling U.S. tour schedule into disarray. A subsequent tour with the Maharishi in May was a disaster, resulting in a lengthy string of cancellations that left the group in a financial hole, and when everyone took time off to recuperate, Dennis hooked up with a stranger, more sinister guru called Charlie. For all but Mike and Al, meditation’s allure wore thin. The “Friends” (b/w “Little Bird”) single bombed. Following the birth of little Carnie Wilson on April 29, lingering scars from Brian’s own upbringing left him unequipped to deal with becoming a father, and as time wore on, and chemical vices reappeared, undiagnosed depression and schizoaffective disorder sunk their claws deep to undo his recent contentment.
Sessions for another Beach Boys album (eventually given the title 20/20) began on May 22, before the Friends LP was even on the shelves, but this time there wasn’t much of an artistic prompt other than to let happen musically whatever might happen. Brian again led the charge, and it’s clear to see with the benefit of hindsight that he was finding it difficult to stay above water. There’s a sense that running on the same treadmill had begun to wear him down, especially amid all of the personal changes happening in their lives, and more heavily than ever, he leant on Carl as his right-hand man in the studio. An eerie, downcast quality crept into the music – which was still outstanding, if understated in its ambition – and Brian no longer seemed inclined to finish much of what he was starting. Aside from getting “Do It Again” (a Brian/Carl co-production) mixed and in the can for their next single, most other new tracks languished incomplete, and a briefly productive run of sessions had dissipated by late June… right in time for Brian’s beloved Friends album to hit the world, and for it to sink like a stone. The LP peaked a month later at #126 in Billboard.
Though impossible to know exactly what the brothers discussed behind closed doors, or to put dates to the conversations, clearly, the period of June to September 1968 following the release of Friends was a time that marked significant lasting changes in the working dynamics of the Beach Boys. “Just before 20/20,” Carl remembered, “Brian told me, ‘Please, you got to take over and help me out; this is obviously not the thing I want to do now.’”
Stacking at the Tower
Following the dissolution of those early summer sessions, and with another tour coming up fast, it became clear to both the group and Capitol that the next mainline album wasn’t going to be a lightning fast delivery. The label quickly prepared a Best of the Beach Boys Vol. 3 compilation to fill the void (to be issued August 5), but the other obvious pivot was to finish off Stack-o-Tracks.
Brian’s apparent disenchantment over the whole Beach Boys enterprise left him in no willing mood to supervise a compilation album. But that responsibility no longer needed to be his alone, because he had a capable younger brother ready to take up the slack (or stack). “At Capitol’s and Brian’s suggestion,” Steve Desper recalled, “Stack-o-Tracks became a project headed by Carl. I don’t know who originated the idea, the group or the company.” The label likely had some communication with the Boys about all of this in late June, because from July 2 to 17, the group were busy racking up the miles on another American tour. Upon returning to L.A., Carl got straight into the studio to work.
The A&R department at Capitol were already working with a predetermined list of songs cultivated from the January mixes and subsequent discussions with Carl, essentially a reshuffled and expanded version of his handwritten tape box tracklist (which might have been drawn up around June, but there are arguments for and against that spot on the timeline). Songs from Friends were completely omitted. During a dismissive funk, Brian later commented, “Stack-o-Tracks was Capitol’s idea… They picked the cuts.”
On Wednesday, July 17, while the Beach Boys played a concert in San Diego (with Brian in the audience), a Capitol memo noted that “Good to My Baby” was to be replaced by “Do It Again” (a single released July 8); the instrumental mix of “Good to My Baby” was spliced back onto its original reel for preservation. Though the mixing sessions to follow were barely documented, they are known to have taken place in the window of Thursday, July 18 to Monday, July 22 – mixing was certainly being done on the Friday, and the final album was compiled on the Monday.
Carl didn’t want to go into this on his lonesome. He wanted a team-mate, and it was a perfect opportunity to train up an important member of the band’s unit. Young engineer Stephen W. Desper started mixing sound for the Beach Boys on the road around late December 1966, and by the summer of 1968, he’d climbed the studio ladder from sometime-assistant, sometime-substitute for Jim Lockert to inheritor of the Chief Engineer mantle at Brother Records. Desper’s recent resume included developing a state-of-the-art live sound system, remodelling the home studio, and handling most of the post-Friends sessions, during which his fashioning of the distinctive drum intro effect for “Do It Again” solidified his place as a respected creative contributor to the group’s music. Jim was phasing himself out of the scene for calmer pastures, and Steve was proving himself to be more than capable of leading the Beach Boys’ sound into the future. What he didn’t yet have was experience in mixing and assembling albums, and that was an angle to the full-time studio engineer gig he’d need to acclimate to before shepherding whatever came next. With Carl synchronously learning the ropes of being a producer in Brian’s stead, heading to the Capitol Tower together for the Stack-o-Tracks mixing sessions represented a step up for both of them.
Seasoned staff engineer Don Henderson was assigned to the project to oversee the remaining mixdowns. Carl produced in a hands-on capacity, and Steve Desper was there to assist, observe, and learn what he could from the masters. “I was invited to join Carl in all the Stack-o-Tracks mixdowns lasting a week,” said Desper, “some a few hours and some all day. I had been mixing on the road, but now Carl wanted me to move into the studio with the group. During the mixdowns I sat next to Carl behind the mixing console … Capitol engineer Don Henderson was the engineer in charge. A very kind and helpful man, he handled all the recording levels and tapes, and oversaw the technical aspects of the studio.”
Of the song selection that had already been decided upon, seven cuts still required mixing. These were “Catch a Wave,” “Surfer Girl,” “In My Room,” and “Little Saint Nick,” all from the January 17 three-track comp reel, and “God Only Knows,” “Here Today,” and “Do It Again,” from various other four-track and eight-track reels.
“This was my first trip into the renowned Capitol Tower,” Desper recounted. “It was full of wonderful recording equipment and beautiful sounding studios. Depending on booking schedules, the Stack-o-Tracks sessions moved between Control Room D, which had no studio, and Studio C – that had an overdub studio, but we only used the control room. They were still using big Altec monitors back then. Some multitracks were four, some eight. The consoles used vacuum tubes. There was a lot of editing and cleaning up of the tracks, sonically. Having worked in other studios before, Carl let me help with that – as second engineer (so to speak). Carl always let me mix the tracks, and hear for myself how each part could influence the whole. Stack-o-Tracks was a learning experience for me.”
Some of these productions were less work-intensive than others. Mixing instrumental versions of “Catch a Wave,” “Surfer Girl,” and “In My Room” simply involved making mono transfers from one channel of the tape and fading them down at the end, applying light EQ and limiting along the way. “Little Saint Nick” was a little bit different: due to the final instrumental overdub of celeste, glockenspiel and bells having been recorded after the vocals, with Mike simultaneously tripling his lead part live at a nearby microphone, some unavoidable vocal bleed from the room and an adjacent channel made it onto this track mix. Just like in the unused Stack-o-Tracks version of “When I Grow Up,” the “Little Saint Nick” vocals are properly faded up as the song fades out.
Carl was one of the earliest champions of Pet Sounds, regarding it as the peak of his brother’s craft before time cemented its legacy as such, which may be why he selected two additional cuts to be represented here. On July 19, Don Henderson mixed “God Only Knows” in Studio C by copying the mono instrumental from one channel of the eight-track tape (a second generation source used for vocal overdubs) to a 1/4” reel and giving it a fade. Desiring greater fidelity and control over the mix than the existing bounce afforded, Carl and Steve junked it, making this ‘8 to 1’ instrumental the only ‘outtake’ to come from the July sessions.
With Henderson, they instead dug out the first generation four-track tape and created another “God Only Knows” mix, balancing the recording anew from three channels: accordions/brass/winds/strings on track 1, upright bass on track 2, guitars/keyboards/percussion on track 3. “Here Today” was likewise mixed to mono from its first generation four-track tape, which had been laid out on four channels: keyboards/guitars/basses on track 1, percussion on track 2, horns on track 3, tack piano overdub on track 4.
The relevant songs co-existed on tapes alongside a number of others – namely, most of the Surfer Girl album and all of the eight-track Pet Sounds recordings – and with those on hand, the studio time at Capitol provided ample opportunity to attend Beach Boys University. Carl and Steve weren’t only dubbing down the shopping list of backing tracks for Stack, they were also exploring the reels, mixing the voices and instruments of various productions for the educational experience. “I was hearing the many parts separately, before being assembled,” Desper explained. “This enabled Carl to instruct me in how the music is structured as it relates to the mix, his perspective of balance as it relates to the music structure. In short, how to build a Beach Boy mix.”
While there, enamored with the facilities and eager to survey it all, Wilson and Desper put in a request to see the famous Capitol reverb chambers with their own eyes. Engineering bosses granted Don Henderson permission to take the visitors on a subterranean journey to where few were ever allowed to tread, 30 feet underground beneath the parking lot. The trio travelled down a stairwell to the basement filled with cooling pipes, through a foreboding hatch, and again down a ladder within a claustrophobic tube leading to the centre of an anteroom with four doorways. The third, Chamber 3, had been booked for their exploration – a rectangular, grey, plastered room, containing only a couple of Altec speakers to pipe the sound into its reflective box and two condenser microphones to capture the magic. Steve wrote about the chamber experience in his “God Only Knows” online study video:
I asked Don if we could experience the room as it operates – in the dark. He departed, closing the heavy door behind him. As he left to turn off the light, I moved to the wider end of the room while Carl stayed at the narrow end, facing like the speakers.
The light went out leaving us in absolute blackness. It was scary. I heard Carl take a deep breath…
…and then came, “I may not always love you.” The sound was nowhere, and everywhere.
“But long as there are stars above you, you never need to doubt it, I’ll make you so sure about it.” This was unqualified pleasure; heaven in a box.
“God only knows what I’d be without you.” It was as pure as possible, no speakers or microphones, just Carl and my ears. With the last decay of reverb, the light came back on. As I moved closer I could see Carl with a big smile. We just looked at each other; we both knew. No one spoke, trying to hold on to the last memory of the sonic joy we had just experienced.
Soon the door opened and it was time to leave.
Back up on terra firma, “Do It Again” was the most contemporary track to be placed upon the stack, added to the roster following the single’s launch in the hope of it driving sales (and validating the Beach Boys’ latest music through inclusion on the LP, having hopped right past Friends). The signature sonic component of the production, a chain of millisecond-apart delays applied to the drum and tambourine track, was considered essential to the song’s arrangement, even then – on tour earlier that month, the band recreated the effect live each night thanks to Steve Desper lugging along the Philips device and rigging it up to the sound system.
Because that effect had originally been added during the mixdown stage and did not exist on the eight-track tape, doing it again for Stack-o-Tracks wasn’t automatic. Desper therefore brought the delay unit to Capitol and replicated exactly what he’d done on the single, careful to cue it up in the same spots: the intro, the first verse, and the second section of the bridge through the guitar solo. On Stack, the percussion delay lingers into the third verse a little longer than on the 45. This was a studious mixdown job for Carl, more so than the others, seeing as a couple of instrumental parts shared tracks with vocals and had to be ducked at the right moments. “Carl spent a lot of time himself finding the right blend,” Desper said. “Don would suggest this EQ or that limiting, but it was Carl’s final choice.” Brian reportedly stopped by a few times to check in on how the sessions were going.
With the seven new track mixes completed, production on the album wrapped up in short order. Carl’s handwritten 13-song track selection was mostly kept, albeit completely reshuffled, and with “Do It Again” replacing “Good to My Baby” per Capitol’s request. “Salt Lake City” and “Let Him Run Wild” were re-added to the LP from Brian’s original set of mixes, bringing the total up to a whopping 15 large ones – the most generous number of cuts to grace a Beach Boys record yet.
On July 22, the sequence was finalized and a mono master reel was assembled at Capitol. The legend has a note reading “LITTLE SAINT NICK changed per Carl Wilson,” meaning unknown. An ‘electronically reprocessed’ stereo master was then created using the label’s house method of splitting the frequencies of a mono signal between left and right channels; unaccountably, the album was issued in this pseudo stereo format only. The final sequence is as follows, with the month and producer/engineers behind each mix initialled:
| Side A | ||
| 1. | Darlin’ | [01/68 – B.W./J.L.] |
| 2. | Salt Lake City | [01/68 – B.W./J.L.] |
| 3. | Sloop John B. | [01/68 – B.W./J.L.] |
| 4. | In My Room | [07/68 – C.W./D.H./S.W.D.] |
| 5. | Catch a Wave | [07/68 – C.W./D.H./S.W.D.] |
| 6. | Wild Honey | [01/68 – B.W./J.L.] |
| 7. | Little Saint Nick | [07/68 – C.W./D.H./S.W.D.] |
| Side B | ||
| 1. | Do It Again | [07/68 – C.W./D.H./S.W.D.] |
| 2. | Wouldn’t It Be Nice | [01/68 – B.W./J.L.] |
| 3. | God Only Knows | [07/68 – C.W./D.H./S.W.D.] |
| 4. | Surfer Girl | [07/68 – C.W./D.H./S.W.D.] |
| 5. | Little Honda | [01/68 – B.W./J.L.] |
| 6. | Here Today | [07/68 – C.W./D.H./S.W.D.] |
| 7. | You’re So Good to Me | [01/68 – B.W./J.L.] |
| 8. | Let Him Run Wild | [01/68 – B.W./J.L.] |
[Note: In 1990, much of the album was remixed in stereo by Mark Linett for its first CD release. “Salt Lake City,” “Sloop John B.,” “Wouldn’t It Be Nice,” “God Only Knows,” “Little Honda,” “Here Today,” “You’re So Good to Me,” and “Let Him Run Wild” were all given true stereo remixes, while the other seven songs were issued for the first time in their original 1968 mono mixes. New instrumental mixes of “Help Me, Rhonda” (mono), “California Girls” (stereo), and “Our Car Club”(mono) were added to this version of the album as bonus tracks.]
The LP released August 19, 1968 was handsomely packaged with a songbook containing the lyrics, chords, lead lines and bass lines for each of the 15 songs, a toolkit for musically inclined fans at home to play along and immerse themselves in the compositions. It celebrated Brian’s productions with new artistic legitimacy and heralded the arrival of Carl Wilson as the Beach Boys’ studio project coordinator, setting the stage for himself and Desper to bring the 20/20 mixing sessions to the Capitol Tower.
Stack-o-Tracks didn’t sell, failing to even scrape the charts – of course. But far from a contractual novelty, time granted the album a unique cult reputation, a curious treasure that grew in stature among the younger generation of musicians whose creative imaginations had been ignited by that peek behind the curtain into the Beach Boys’ music. “Making a track calls for good concentration,” Brian later wrote, “and a heart full of musical feelings to stay up on your toes and always have the overall sound and feeling in mind. Even though these tracks are presented without my vocal arrangements and harmonies, they are my music. I am proud to share with you my music, because I believe music is God’s voice.”
…
It’s July 23, 1979. Eleven years have passed, and they might as well be eleven decades. Brian, Bruce, Al and their entourage are at Western Recorders Studio 3 with a small band of familiar session musicians alongside Chuck Britz and Steve Desper, cutting cover versions of “Little Girl” and “Jamaica Farewell” on a four-track machine using the old console in the old studio, attempting to zap Brian out of creative hibernation by transporting him into the past. The experiment doesn’t work, but it’s a chance for old friends to catch up and reminisce about their storied history together. Every word of conversation in the control room is recorded onto 1/4” log reels for posterity. Shortly into the session, Steve surprises Brian by bringing up an album he’d all but forgotten.
Steve: “Brian, I played Stack-o-Tracks.”
Brian: “What?”
Steve: “I played Stack-o-Tracks a couple of days ago.”
Brian: “You didn’t like it?”
Steve: “No, I enjoyed it! It was so much fun – I had a few of us over at the house, over at my house, and we were singing with it, it was just a lot of fun.”
Brian: “Oh, yeah? That’s great.”
Steve: “It really was, and … anyway, it may not sell a monstrous number… but I think … I think it’s time for another Stack-o-Tracks.”
He’s right. It’s always time to stack those tracks.
Sources
Based on original research by John Brode, Will Crerar, Joshilyn Hoisington and Craig Slowinski.
Stephen W. Desper, The Desper Thread, smileysmile.net.
Stephen W. Desper, “God Only Knows: Study in Mastering Technique” Study-Video, 2012.
Byron Preiss, “The Beach Boys: The Authorized Illustrated Biography,” 1979.
Bruce Johnston interviewed by Mike Hennessey, Melody Maker, December 23, 1967.
Dennis Wilson interviewed by Keith Altham, New Musical Express, December 30, 1967.
Brian Wilson interviewed by Jamake Highwater for “Rock and Other Four Letter Words,” January 11, 1968.
Bruce Johnston interviewed by Keith Altham, New Musical Express, March 23, 1968.
Carl Wilson interviewed by Geoffrey Himes, 1983.
Brian Wilson, Stack-O-Tracks CD liner notes, Capitol Records, 1990.
Tapes and associated documentation from Brother Records and Capitol Records.
Thank you to Frederick French-Pounce and JK for proofing. Extra special thank you to Stephen Desper and Mike Conner for giving this piece their blessing.