From: JYOB@aol.com   
      
   Brian Wilson's Secret Bedroom Tapes    
   A newly unearthed musical treasure trove reveals the reclusive Beach Boys   
   leader at his artistic peak   
   by Brian Chidester Thursday, Jan 30 2014   
   Comments (1)   
       
   The Beach Boys' 1966 Pet Sounds album overnight changed rock & roll into art.   
   Its follow-up, the stand-alone single "Good Vibrations," continued leader   
   Brian Wilson's experimental direction; Capitol Records promo men pronounced it   
   the "kind of gutsy    
   production that makes a No. 1 single," a prediction swiftly fulfilled.   
   L.A. Weekly recently was granted access to many of these never-before-heard   
   tapes from 1968-74 — almost 60 titles in all.   
   While the rest of the Beach Boys were touring the United Kingdom in late 1966   
   — having just bested The Beatles in a year-end New Music Express poll —   
   Wilson labored back in Los Angeles on what he described as his "teenage   
   symphony to God." Titled    
   Smile, the now-legendary project finally saw release in a definitive five-disc   
   box set in 2011.   
   Yet as Smile received its due fanfare, winning a Grammy Award and landing on   
   the Billboard album charts more than 40 years after its conception, there   
   remains a post-Smile body of Wilson recordings that is almost unknown to   
   critics, historians and fans    
   alike. L.A. Weekly recently was granted access to many of these    
   ever-before-heard tapes from 1968 to 1974 — almost 60 titles in all —   
   currently stored at the Beach Boys' archive on Vanowen Street, near Bob Hope   
   Airport in Burbank.   
       
   The tapes represent a treasure trove of material from the last period in which   
   Wilson was at the peak of his songwriting abilities, a time when the chief   
   Beach Boy ultimately took leave of his duties as the band's writ   
   r-arranger-producer. That sudden    
   departure would drive a wedge between him and his bandmates for decades to   
   come.   
   The rift began in the fall of 1966, when the Beach Boys returned from their   
   tour of England. Lead singer Mike Love took issue with the Smile lyrics.   
   Wilson's newest collaborator, Van Dyke Parks, had penned lyrics on such   
   weighty issues as the decimation    
   of the Native American, Western expansionism and the fragile ecology.   
   According to Parks, Love's earlier paeans to souped-up hot rods and suntanned   
   beauties were illusions that Wilson could no longer abide.   
   The internal discord caused Smile to degenerate, then collapse, sending Wilson   
   into a self-imposed exile in his bedroom, which led to his reputation as the   
   Howard Hughes of rock & roll.   
   "When the withdrawal began to attract notice," says Jack Rieley, who managed   
   the Beach Boys from 1971 to 1973, "Brian's keen sense picked up on the fact   
   [and fed] off the crumbs of legend available to 'Brian Wilson, eccentric   
   recluse,' a hideous second-   
   best to the public acclaim he was denied [with Smile]."   
   We know now, however, that Wilson wasn't simply growing his toenails. With a   
   studio installed in the living room of his Bel-Air mansion, Wilson was able to   
   craft intensely personal songs of gentle humanism and strange experimentation,   
   which reflected on    
   his then-fragile emotional state.   
   During the early '70s, a small group of Wilson's trusted friends and   
   collaborators — including Byrds leader Roger McGuinn, songwriter Tandyn   
   Almer ("Along Comes Mary"), Danny Hutton of Three Dog Night, and Smile   
   lyricist Van Dyke Parks — visited him    
   often at the mansion. Byrds producer Terry Melcher, himself a part of this   
   inside group, likened the disheveled Beach Boy, lumbering down from his   
   bedroom midday in bathrobe and slippers, to Aesop emerging to deliver his   
   latest fable.   
   "Brian went through a period," recalls sometime Beach Boy Bruce Johnston, who   
   also was removed from the band during the early to mid '70s, "where he would   
   write songs and play them for a few people in his living room, and that's the   
   last you'd hear of    
   them. He would disappear back up to his bedroom and the song with him." Thus   
   these late '60s–early '70s recordings have come to be known as Wilson's   
   "Bedroom Tapes," akin to the "Basement Tapes" that Bob Dylan made with The   
   Band at Woodstock, following    
   a near-fatal motorcycle accident in 1966.   
   "He was so innocent and bizarre and so truthful," Hutton said of Wilson in the   
   1995 documentary, I Just Wasn't Made for These Times. "He would frighten   
   people. I took him to a party at Alice Cooper's and, afterwards, Alice, Iggy   
   Pop and me went to his    
   house to write something. There was a certain point of the night where Iggy   
   said, 'I'm leaving! This guy's nuts!' He had us singing 'Short'nin' Bread' in   
   parts."   
   In fact, during this period Wilson wrote a number of tunes riffing on   
   "Short'nin' Bread," an old American plantation song. These include titles in   
   the archive such as "Clangin'," "Rollin' Up to Heaven," "Ding Dang" and   
   "Brian's Jam."   
   Meanwhile, an unreleased 1970 cut titled "My Solution" remains a strange   
   Halloween novelty, with Wilson doing his best Vincent Price imitation over a   
   set of descending chords and bubbling test-tube sound effects. An eccentric   
   Moog synthesizer piece    
   titled "Honeycomb" was tracked in 1974, replete with the kind of jagged bass   
   lines that felt a million miles from Wilson's heyday with the Beach Boys.   
   "This period is important," confirms Andrew G. Doe, author of The Complete   
   Guide to the Music of the Beach Boys, "because it allowed Brian to write in   
   his home, without pressure from the band to be commercial. More importantly,   
   we know now that Brian    
   didn't just spend three years in bed."   
   Wilson wasn’t simply growing his toenails but crafting intensely personal   
   songs that reflected on his then-fragile emotional state.   
   Doe confirms the comparison of the archive's breadth to that of Dylan's   
   "Basement Tapes," the major difference being that the folk legend's home   
   recordings saw eventual release nearly a decade after they were laid to tape.   
   Wilson's remain sequestered.   
   Back in 1968, Wilson had completed his last full album production with the   
   Beach Boys on the brilliantly understated Friends, whose summer release was   
   followed by a disastrous recording session of Jerome Kern's Broadway classic   
   "Ol' Man River." Session    
   tapes reveal Wilson conducting the Beach Boys to such extreme perfectionism   
   that both he and the band seem at the end of their rope with one another.   
   Wilson soon thereafter checked himself into a mental institution, where he was   
   prescribed Thorazine for    
   severe anxiety disorder.   
      
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