Good Vibrations (2021 Stereo Mix) + New SoundsOfSummer Info

At some point it is a matter of whether it was a daily diet music menu (as it was from the 60s fans forward, and that includes The Beatles) or an occasional listen by current and future generations. Everyone wants a piece-of-the-action in a legal context, to assure continuity of royalty flow to the heirs, and guarding of copyrights not expiring to go to the public domain. On some level, it is something shiny, new, and repacked, with diminishing returns. They want a slice and they should. And, there is Estate Planning to consider which is no different from these other major catalogs that have been sold. You can go back and reclaim after several decades and how they reclaimed their catalog, after several decades, so that will be up to the successor heirs.    

Listened to this and noted some of the more revealing details about Howie and where his mind is at. Bolding for emphasis.
To summarize, Howie is implying that "FM" and "AM" designations still matter in 2022. He also thinks that the Beach Boys deserve the kind of validation and appreciation that a rock magazine from 1967 would afford to, say for example, Jefferson Airplane and the Doors.

Rolling Stone, wow, what a gold standard to follow. Does Howie understand that the pages of rock magazines, historically, have had very little to do with appreciating timeless art, and everything to do with advertising a disposable product? Who knows. But let's move on to his next point.

Howie wants to "unscrew" the Beach Boys, even though, as he already notes, the band are already regarded as one of the sacred cows of the 20th century. So what is there really left to "unscrew"? Well, apparently, we need to frame the Beach Boys the same way pop culture frames every other rock group.

Are you with me so far? Howie's basically saying, "The Beach Boys are the greatest band of all time. But you know what would make them even better? If they were just like everybody below them!"
These comments are surely controversial enough to merit their own thread. But one of the more interesting implications is that Howie doesn't consider Weezer to be "cool." Yet he would have you believe that he's totally in touch with today's youth. Yes, Howie, the kids are just dying to rock out to Student Demonstration Time.
I don't think there's anything inherently wrong here. But it does leave me with an image of Howie urging Mark to compress, much the same way Murry would demand Brian to surge.
This counterargument falls apart as soon as you consider the fact that many of these tracks have never been released before.

"C'mon, Mark, treble up!"

Nail these new mixes to the fucking cross; they're dead on arrival.

These new singles just drive home even further just how good the 2017-18 period was as far as sound quality, to say nothing about revelations and other nerdy minutiae that we love to hear. Feel Flows was bad enough sonically; if these new singles are any indication, it appears to be a "hold my beer" moment as far as dicey mixing goes.

If this is what "the young people want to listen to," well, then I don't blame them for wanting to stay away. 

Howie: "So what I was saying to Linett was, 'You need to be the producer that they never had then'."

Hang on, weren't the Wilson brothers largely producing themselves during this period? So... Howie thinks that he can retrospectively oversee record production better than the Wilson brothers?

The results over the last two years would suggest otherwise.

"In order to protect the legacy we must release stuff that sounds like dogshit because all the cool kids." - someone, somewhere in a high place

Go to a Beach Boys concert, and you’ll see the young crowd standing and dancing and cheering songs about mom and dad and high school, and not so much about taking a load off your feet.

There is truly nothing more tragic and misguided than an old person trying and failing to be down with the kids. These new remixes are the audio equivalent of dad dancing.

I think comparing Howie to Murry is wildly bizarre and odd.
Howie’s just a journalist dude trying to get the Beach boys to be cool.
Well guess what?
Being nerdy *is* todays cool.
The Beach Boys *are* nerdy, and awkward, and are not The Beatles.
And that’s perfectly ok.
Nerdy shit sells.
Comic books, weird Al, all the stuff that used to be “nerdy” decades ago is today’s pop culture.
The Beach Boys making their little nerdy songs about vegetables and sleeping and goddamn magical transistor radios doesn’t have to be thrown away just so that some Beatles/Who music snob Will be impressed by it.
It’s just the modern example of The people in charge of the Beach boys trying to turn them into something they’re not.
The Beach Boys were a collective of weird, weird little men, who rarely could keep up with their contemporaries, but were still able to create some of the best, goofiest, most beautiful music of all time.
Trying to force them into a box is just stupid.
But even still, that has very little to do with the problem here, which as pointed out several times is simply THE GODDAMN TREBLE AND COMPRESSION!!!
To me, it doesn’t sound like they’re trying to make The Beach Boys sound like the Beatles, it sounds like they’re trying to make The Beach Boys sound like Californication, the first example everyone goes to when talking about hot-bad modern mastering.
During the guitar solo on the new Marcella mix, you can literally hear digital pops, cracks and distortion where they just have everything going too loud and bright all at the same time.
No one likes unintentional distortion.
In 2016, when they were working on the SACDs for the catalog, Linett had this to say:
“In reply to an earlier question, I supervised the mastering of all the new reissues.  I recall that Sunflower required a couple of tries to get it to sound like the original vinyl LP which was what I compared the tests of the new version to before it was approved.”
Those SACDs, and the analog production pressings from the same time, all pretty much got universal acclaim for their sound quality.
That Version of sunflower is basically my go to, it sounds wonderful.
Why are things so much different a short half decade or so later?

They're both controversial figures. They are/were both deeply involved at the production stage. That is where the similarities end.

Yep! Wonder how Howie feels about one of the nerdiest and most influential pop/rock bands ever, Sparks, who just produced a feature-length documentary that made $1 million.


Pops, cracks, and distortion usually happen when there are issues with the "hardware" (i.e. the tapes), not the software. I would consider those issues separate from the bad compression and EQ. Inevitably, when you make a mix louder and "clearer," especially for 40-year-old tapes like these, it will reveal some technical flaws that were previously inaudible.

I stand corrected then. If only there was someone at BRI who could explain these technical discrepancies to the fans.

Preservation project is the exact term. You don’t want the sound judgment (pun intended) of a sound expert substituted by another non-sound or non-archival expert. Or, directing the sound archivists. I don’t want to pile on Howie and compare him to Murry. That’s just wrong. But people do have concerns that they have articulated.

Over the course of their career, various people have done exactly this, with their own vision, rather than the best interest of the band’s music. We don’t need to name names, but starting with those who wanted Brian apart from the band who had their own visions and concepts that are a digression. Preservation and sound presentation for the truest (not newest) and artfully managed for a effect, consistent to showcase this enormous musical gift and not reinventing the wheel.  

Constructive, preventative feedback is better than the kind of blowback that happened with the C50 CD.  It is the only release that I won’t play but do play C50 YouTube’s every day which sound magnificent and a better representation of those performances. The releases should showcase the absolute best representation of their work, not the “vision” of another. A lot of posters seem to want to see the work packaged in its very truest form, uncompromisingly faithful to the original tracks, and seem to feel, that at this juncture, that is not what is going on.