From early 1966 to early ’67, the Beach Boys matured from a platform for Brian Wilson’s songwriting and production into a fully democratic band. As Wilson and Los Angeles session musicians were laboring over Pet Sounds and the infamously scrapped Smile, a live quartet—led by Brian’s brother Carl—toured the world, with Bruce Johnston replacing the stage-shy Brian. But during the Summer of Love, as Wilson’s Smile lost focus, these two visions of the Beach Boys merged and created something new—as documented on the remarkable 2xCD set 1967 - Sunshine Tomorrow. 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, Calif.—and, for that matter, the unabashed nostalgia-mongers of their later years.
Sunshine Tomorrow assembles the bulk of the Beach Boys’ post-Smile 1967 work. There are outtakes and demos from two albums, titled Smiley Smiley and Wild Honey, as well as pieces of a scrapped live record, a live studio session, and concert versions. The compilation is anchored up top by the first stereo mix of Wild Honey—a homemade, detuned, piano-based affair, where the band found a new voice for their ebullient early ’60s bounce. Clocking in at just over 20 minutes, Wild Honey is pure fun from the theremin burst opening of the title track to off-kilter folk-pop miniatures like “I’d Love Just Once to See You.”
Though most of the tracks are credited to the songwriting team of Brian Wilson and Mike Love, Wild Honey’s key is “How She Boogalooed It,” an original R&B tune credited to every Beach Boy except Brian. The other four members, along with Brian’s tour replacement Johnston, were beginning to contribute to the Beach Boys in unprecedented ways. That was especially true of Carl, who was beginning to take over the producer’s role. For those already familiar with the sweet charms of Wild Honey, this new mix reveals details throughout, like the DIY Pet Sounds-style busyness of “Aren’t You Glad” and the bass-led “Let the Wind Blow.” But the set’s value comes in the outtakes, rehearsals, live recordings, and even fake live recordings, revealing a band that retained far more ambition than their two modest 1967 LPs suggested. Though often framed as the band’s discovery of R&B, Sunshine Tomorrow reveals Wild Honey to contain almost as many connections to brother Brian’s sad-boy masterpieces and psych-pop as it does to the surf-rockers of yore.
Smiley Smile was recorded in June and July that year, when Beach Boys sessions moved predominantly from proper studios into Brian Wilson’s Bel Air home. Accordingly, Smiley Smile is the quirkier of the band’s two 1967 LPs, carrying forward the cosmic playfulness of Smile with the Boys’ earnestness swapped for Van Dyke Parks’ puzzle-box lyrics. In the studio, the band had been mostly subservient to Brian-the-Genius, and Smiley Smile reveals a finally-shifting dynamic. Working together on the exotica-tinged “Little Pad,” the Boys take up parts that would’ve once been played by the sessions musicians known as the Wrecking Crew, and it marks a beginning of their own individual creative developments.
But Smiley Smile’s lead single, “Gettin’ Hungry”—included as a live take on Sunshine Tomorrow—was the first Beach Boys release not to chart since a 1962 7” issued under the name Kenny & the Cadets. And Smiley Smile itself didn’t do much better. “It just didn’t have anything to do with what was going on [in 1967]—and that was the idea,” Mike Love is quoted saying in Howie Edelson’s perceptive liner notes. Wild Honey, released in December, was only a slight improvement in sales. Heard now, it’s clearly a breakthrough.
After the mega-success of “Good Vibrations,” the rock press had breathlessly covered the ongoing developments of Smile, elevating Wilson to intelligensia status—so much so that he’d been included on the planning committee for the June 1967 Monterey Pop Festival, with the Beach Boys scheduled for a headlining slot. But when the band pulled out of their performance, the ascendant underground effectively wrote the Beach Boys—one of the biggest American hitmakers of the decade—out of the ’60s rock narrative that followed. For that matter, the years following Smile are often written out of the Beach Boys’ own history. (In the 2014 Brian Wilson biopic Love & Mercy, Wilson follows up Smile by waking up in the 1980s as John Cusack.) But while Wilson drew inward and gradually stop participating in the late ’60s, he remained a vital member of the Beach Boys for several more years and albums. Sunshine Tomorrow documents one of the all-time paradoxes of rock history: the sound of a band taking a major creative turn at the exact moment pop culture dooms them to obsolescence.
Sunshine Tomorrow also captures the final live performances of the original Beach Boys quintet with Brian (and without additional musicians) in Hawaii in August 1967. Intended as a live album and ultimately tossed aside, only 12 minutes make the cut here, including two rehearsal takes. Wilson’s vision of a smaller Beach Boys sound most definitely would not have passed the Monterey acid test against the likes of the Who and Jimi Hendrix, especially the muted surf toodles of the “Hawthorne Boulevard” set opener. But it’s a joy to hear the original Beach Boys do “Heroes and Villains” in all its barbershop weirdness, drummer Dennis Wilson translating Hal Blaine's cinematic thwack to an old-fashioned surfer's stomp. With the Hawaii concert tapes deemed unusable within days of the recording, the band reconvened a few weeks later at a Hollywood studio with auxiliary member Johnston to rerecord the songs, planning to add in crowd noise and release it as a “live” album. It, too, would disappear into the Beach Boys’ accumulating vault of unreleased music.
While Sunshine Tomorrow omits Mike Love’s oft-cited anti-“Heroes and Villains” tirade from the Hollywood session, in which he refers to the single as a “nuclear disaster,” the band is powerful but subdued throughout. Brian sings “The Letter,” a brand new hit for Alex Chilton and the Box Tops just then climbing the charts. Johnston serves as a passable Ringo on "With a Little Help From My Friends" (itself only four months old) while the dreamy Wilson harmonies make it glow. The real joy of the session is hearing some of the band’s studio-aided hits performed by the band itself. If “Sloop John B,” “California Girls,” “God Only Knows,” and “Good Vibrations” sound less immortal than their original incarnations, it is also the sound of the genuine Beach Boys, human and wonderful. One can easily imagine them playing (if perhaps not writing) the same arrangements in the family garage a half-decade earlier.
Behind the scenes, the Beach Boys were in chaos, having discarded three albums in one year. So it’s something of a surprise that Wild Honey is as relaxed-sounding an album as the band ever made. Given its short length and sometimes fragmentary tracks, it’s a shock that several of the outtakes included on Sunshine Tomorrow didn't make the official LP; it’s as good or better than much of the material that did. On the mysterious “Lonely Days”—“unknown” listed as author on the official release—Carl, Al, and Bruce pick up Pet Sounds’ melancholy while channeling it through a more innocent surf-ballad brightness. Brian’s “Time to Get Alone” achieves lost-masterpiece status with its denser string and horn mix, more like the baroque machinery of Pet Sounds and Smile than the syrupy vibes of the official 1969 version.
But the magic of Sunshine Tomorrow is that the Beach Boys are all of these at once: chaotic and relaxed, naive and sophisticated, pop-oriented and intimate. Brian is both present and slipping away. The tendrils of Smile wend below the surface, a specter that continued to haunt their works, like the dreamy harmony explorations like “Cool, Cool Water” (eventually on 1970’s Sunflower), the stacked backing vocals on their cover of Stevie Wonder’s “I Was Made to Love Her,” and—most significantly—in another lost masterpiece Wild Honey outtake, “Can’t Wait Too Long.” There, Brian keeps working with an alluring section of “Wind Chimes” developed during Smile but jettisoned from its simpler Wild Honey version.
Wondrously, there’s also a previously unheard solo piano version of Wilson and Van Dyke Parks’ Smile masterpiece “Surf’s Up.” “You know something, I better do the whole song,” Brian says after running through a few fragments, and thankfully he does, soaring into the perfect angelic high vocals. While brother Carl would finish the arrangement, sing lead, and make it the title (and closing) track of 1971’s Surf's Up, the November 1967 take is most likely the last time Brian played the song for decades, undocumented even in Keith Badman’s definitive day-by-day history. It’s a breathtaking performance. Like so much Beach Boys music, it is filled with dark undercurrents, a never-ceasing family turmoil that still acts as a counterpoint to the Endless Harmony brand the group so actively promoted.
The Beach Boys never fully resolved the tension between pop maturity and summer fun, either musically or personally. They came closest with Wild Honey and the albums that followed over the next half-decade, perhaps mostly clearly on Brian’s “‘Til I Die,” before the best-selling 1974 greatest hits compilation Endless Summer sucked them onto the oldies circuit for good. But 1967 - Sunshine Tomorrow finds them firing in all creative directions at once for a brief, beautiful moment just as their wave started to recede. The box’s closing is reserved for an a capella mix of “Surfer Girl” from the band’s fake Hollywood live album, and there they are one last time, the fabulous Beach Boys, singing the sun into the surf.
