Rarities - 1983

How did Bob Norberg come to be involved with this?

Bringing It All Back Home
Rarities 1983 - Capitol USA

Randall Davis was 27 years old and director of merchandising and advertising for Capitol USA. He had told Trouser Press magazine in June of 1980 that due to his naïveté and strong beliefs as far as what historic compilations should be, The Beatles' Rarities LP was given over to him with a "if you think the proposed package is inferior, then you do it…fast!" order from his superiors. He didn't disappoint.

Randall then turned his attention to a compilation for The Beach Boys entitled Sunshine Dream. Capitol USA had just reacquired the post Party LPs and it was time for a gathering together of all of the tracks from those various projects. Remember, within the terms of the agreement Capitol has with the group after their departure, Capitol could not release cuts from LPs which included such hits as Wouldn't It Be Nice, Heroes And Villains, Do It Again and of course, Good Vibrations.

Sunshine Dream corrected that situation. In hopes of pleasing fans and collectors alike, the collection included hits as well as lesser know cuts such as Vegetables, Be Here In The Morning and Aren't You Glad. To collectors great relief, mono tracks were left mono and not "processed for stereo phonographs". Even the Warner re-issues of this material in the '70s were duophonic.

It was during the pre-production phase that Randall got in touch with Brad Elliott. Brad had just released his comprehensive discography on The Beach Boys and Randall was looking for an expert. Brad assisted Randall not only on Sunshine Dream, but, Be True To Your School, which complied the tracks left off of the re-released Capitol LPs in the '70s, as well as 45 mixes of songs (like the title track). Brad also was the catalyst for the re-release of The Beach Boys Party! LP which had been missing in action since the late '60s.

Randall then proposed to Capitol an LP of true rarities which the execs green lighted for 1983. Randall however had departed from Capitol before the assembly stage. Capitol then turned to Randall's partner in crime on the other re-issues, Brad Elliott. Which brings us to this interview.

I conducted the following interview with Brad Elliott in May of 1999. I want to thank Brad for his time and energy in answering all of these questions in such detail. I couldn't ask for a more willing subject.

PS: Tell us, how did you come to be involved with the Rarities project? I know you worked on the Be True To Your School and Sunshine Dream projects before this.

BE: As you said, the year before I'd consulted on the Sunshine Dream and Be True To Your School compilations. That had come about as a result of my book. A Capitol staffer named Randall Davis had seen it and, when putting together Sunshine Dream, had called and solicited my recommendations for the album (conceived as a companion set to Endless Summer and Spirit Of America, oriented largely around the late 1960s albums, the rights to which had just reverted to Capitol). During the course of our discussions, I suggested the idea for what became the Be True To Your School compilation, as well as prompted the re-release of Beach Boys Party (they hadn't even realized they had an entire Beach Boys album that hadn't yet been put back in print).

When the following summer rolled around, Capitol wanted to release another Beach Boys package of some sort. However, Randall had left Capitol by then, so they turned to me. I have to admit that the idea of the Rarities package wasn't mine; it's something that Randall had been pushing for since he'd done the Beatles Rarities package a couple of years before. Unfortunately for him, the package didn't get the go-ahead until after he was gone. But it was fortunate for me.

PS: When you first started out, what were the parameters given to you by Capitol? Also, how much time did you have?

BE: The parameters given to me were pretty open -- simply find enough material to assemble a package of rare Beach Boys' tracks. They could be unreleased songs or alternate versions or non-LP B-sides, basically whatever turned up.

As for time, Capitol flew me out to Hollywood on a Sunday, so I could start work on Monday, and I had to have the album assembled by the end of the week. It was pretty much a non-stop rush job from beginning to end.

PS: I know that you had, or thought you had, knowledge about where to find some SMiLE outtakes. Care to elaborate?

BE: I had been told, second hand, that Michael Ross (who assembled Endless Summer back in 1974) had found tapes of some SMiLE tracks while working on that album. I had been told enough about where they were supposed to be stored (in amongst tapes of a certain format) that I thought I could find them.

Unfortunately, they weren't there -- or anywhere, for that matter. I don't know whether that means I was the recipient of bad information and they never were there, or possibly that they had been removed from storage during the intervening decade.

PS: It seemed to me given the restrictions you had to work with, source wise, that you were able to compile as good of a set as you did. I know that the only multitracks you had to work with were Surfin' Safari (recorded at Capitol) and Live In London. That puts up a roadblock from the beginning. Tell us a little bit about the search itself, the locations and vaults that you were given access to.

BE: For the most part, the only places I could search for tapes were within Capitol. There was the tape library itself on the first floor of the Capitol Tower, a room on an upper floor at the Tower where certain "special projects" tapes were stored, the basement of the Pantages Theater down the street (where Capitol had leased space to store the overflow of tapes from the library), and Capitol's Los Angeles warehouse, where older rarely-accessed multi-track tapes were stored. Because I wasn't satisfied that Capitol's tape inventory listings were accurate, I basically spent the better part of a day in each location looking through shelves and shelves of tapes literally tape-by-tape to make sure that something didn't get missed.

That effort did pay off, as I found things that were not cataloged in just about every location. I found the Live in London multi-tracks in the upstairs "special projects" room. I found the Surfin' Safari multi-tracks at the Los Angeles warehouse. I don't think I found anything worthwhile in the Pantages Theater. Everything else came out of the tape library at the tower.

PS: How did you get the go ahead to include the alternate version of Good Vibrations, especially since Capitol didn't have a copy in their possession and one had to obtained from the Best Summers Of Our Lives radio special?

BE: In preliminary talks with Bobby Colomby (the ex-Blood Sweat & Tears drummer, then working as Capitol's Vice President of A&R Special Projects), I had mentioned the alternate Good Vibrations as an example of the kind of Capitol-era material that we might be able to find. He asked where it had aired and, in the course of answering him, I had mentioned that I had a set of the half-track reels on which the show had been distributed to radio stations. He told me to bring the tape with the alternate Good Vibrations out to L.A. with me, that there was a possibility we could actually use the tape as a source if we couldn't find a master tape for that version. My understanding is that Bobby checked with Capitol's legal staff and was told that Capitol had the right to release that version of the song -- regardless of the source -- because they had paid for the sessions back in 1966.

PS: Can you give us a quick rundown on how Pamela Jean was on then off the LP. Wasn't it on the initial LP master?

BE: Yes, Pamela Jean was planned for inclusion on the album. It would have been the second song on the second side, between the alternate Good Vibrations and Land Ahoy. The plan was to tell the full story about the song in the liner notes -- how it wasn't really the Beach Boys, even though it had been rumored for years that it was. I was going to explain that The Survivors were a different group, although they shared Brian Wilson with The Beach Boys. But Capitol's legal people nixed the idea, because Rarities was a Beach Boys album and Pamela Jean wasn't a Beach Boys track. Apparently, its inclusion would have required billing the album as a Various Artists package and they didn't want to do that.

PS: It really seemed odd to me at the time because Capitol had released the 45 originally. It had also been re-released three times since 1979 (once on 45 and two compilation LPs). I know when I first heard it might be on the Rarities LP here, I thought "It's about time!"

BE: Most of those previous releases had been predicated upon the idea that The Survivors were The Beach Boys under an assumed name. Since those earlier appearances, the full story had been learned -- actually by me in an interview I did with Dave Nowlen and Rich Alarian (two of The Survivors) for the old Add Some Music fanzine.

PS: On the subject of Pamela Jean, does the master that Capitol has in their possession start a beat late. The first part of the "Whop" is cut off on the versions released of late (World Records, '81 Rarities, etc.)

BE: That's the way the master tape is at Capitol, and there's no evidence that a piece of tape has broken off. Apparently, that's the way Brian delivered it to Capitol. It's interesting, though, that he actually delivered the tape to Capitol twice. Once in September 1963, then when the single was scheduled for January release, Brian came and got the tape (on Dec. 9) and returned a "revised" tape the next day. What changes he might have made, I really don't know. But maybe that's when the intro got clipped.

PS: Mark Linnet commented in a 1995 interview for GOLDMINE that Capitol's tape vault was like a jungle the size of two supermarkets. Did you find it this way in 1983?

BE: Even more so! I know that by the time Mark was in there in the early 1990s, some work had been done to try to better organize the chaos. Today, it's better than it ever has been, but it's still not an orderly place. And there's really no way it can be. When you stop and think about the sheer number of tapes that Capitol has, with the company's history going back more than 50 years, there's just too much stuff to keep it all perfectly organized -- at least not without a government-sized budget!

PS: Let's run though a couple of other tracks and where and how you found them: With A Little Help From My Friends.

BE: That was one of the tracks we found that was uncataloged. I had a list of master numbers for about 60
unreleased Beach Boys tracks. I had gotten the list from Capitol's librarian several years earlier while I was working on my book. When I first got out to Capitol, that list was my starting point. Bruce McKinney, Capitol's tape librarian at the time, looked up all 60 tracks in his tape inventory listing, but was only able to match one title -- The Letter. So we went to the tape where The Letter was supposed to be, opened up the box and found not only The Letter, but also With A Little Help From My Friends and a long version of I Was Made To Love Her.

By the way, we mastered With A Little Help From My Friends at normal tape speed, because there were no instructions with the tape to indicate that anything different should be done. Several years later, Bruce Johnston advised that the tape should have been sped up, but unfortunately we had no way of knowing that.

There's also something I want to mention in regard to I Was Made to Love Her. I know there has been some speculation that we edited the ending tag onto the track to create a long version, but the truth is that's the way it was found. The identification sheet with the master tape actually listed it as a "long version," and we simply dubbed it from that tape to our digital master.

PS: You're Welcome.

BE: There's not much to say about You're Welcome. We simply used the mono master tape that The Beach Boys had turned over to Capitol in 1967 for use as the B-side of Heroes and Villains. Capitol has kept all of the mono masters for all of the singles they've released over so many years. They're all neatly filed and cataloged, so it was easy to find You're Welcome.

PS: The Lord's Prayer.

BE: Again, there's not much to say. We used the mono master tape that had been submitted for the B-side of Little Saint Nick.

(Brad indicated that several other tracks (Celebrate The News and Pamela Jean) that had been previously released were found as master tapes in the vaults. I have edited out those responses. - Ed)

PS: Bluebirds Over The Mountain.

BE: This was interesting, because there was no mono master tape for the single. Instead, we found it filed with the masters for the stereo singles. I remember when we looked it up in the inventory list, we were directed to the stereo tapes, which I though was rather odd, since it hadn't been a stereo single. The reason I was looking for in the first place was that I wanted to find the master tape for the unique Dutch mix of the single and possibly include it on the album. Of course, what I found was a two-track master -- not really stereo -- that had the "ping pong" percussion overdub on a separate track from the rest of the recording. That overdub track was to be mixed at a lower level with the other track, producing a mono mix in which the "ping pong" percussion added an understated accent. In Holland, however, they combined the two tracks at an equal level, with the result that the percussion overdub dominated. For Rarities, we had a little fun and presented the two tracks in separated form.

PS: Land Ahoy.

BE: That was found among the three-track master tapes for the Surfin' Safari album, in storage at Capitol's L.A. warehouse. The three-track tapes for all of the album tracks were there -- except Surfin', Surfin' Safari and 409, which only exist in mono form. And that was the only Beach Boys album for which Capitol had the multi-track masters, as it was the only album that was recorded and assembled at the Tower. We mixed Land Ahoy down to stereo (a pretty simple mix, actually) for inclusion on Rarities. On the master tape, there were five takes of the group trying to put vocals on the completed track for the song. Three were blown, either at the start or part way through; the fourth went all the way through but wasn't a great performance; and the fifth was the best. We left on the countdown at the start of the take just for fun.

PS: In My Room - German Version.

BE: That was in among the mono single masters, but curiously was not in the inventory list. We had reached a point where we realized that the inventory list obviously was missing stuff that actually was there, so one afternoon during the week that I was out there, I sat down and went through all of Capitol's mono single masters from 1962 through 1970. Most of the tracks the Beach Boys had turned in to Capitol had been mono, so that seemed the most likely place to perhaps find a stray track. That's when I found the German version of In My Room. The tape box had a big red "X" marked across it, and the notation "Do Not Use" had been scrawled across it. Needless to say, we ignored the warning. This really was quite a find. Like a lot of other fans, I'd heard that The Beach Boys (like The Beatles) had recorded some tracks in a foreign language, but there'd never been any actual evidence of it. This was not only evidence, but proof!

PS: Cotton Fields - 45 mix.

BE: The tape inventory sent us to an odd reel stored separately from the mono single masters. When I pulled it out, it was a tape that had three or four different mixes of Cotton Fields -- all the single version, but all slightly different. The first mix on the tape was the one used as the single, while the other mixes included the sound of a child speaking (somewhat like the "Hi" at the beginning of The Trader). I remember there was one mix where the child's voice preceded the beginning of the actual song, and I think
there were two mixes where the child's voice was mixed into the song at different points. Since the original single version had never been released on a U.S. album at that time, I chose to go with the mix used on the single. In retrospect, I wish I'd used one of the other mixes, simply because it would have been different.

PS: Auld Lang Syne - Promo Mix.

BE: That was one of the things I really wanted to include from the outset, because I'd always thought the beauty of the Beach Boys' acappella vocals was ruined by Dennis' voice-over on the Christmas album. The track had appeared clean on a couple of Capitol promotional records back in the Sixties, but we couldn't find either a master tape for a clean version or copies of the actual promotional records at Capitol. I finally called Peter Reum, a collector whom I knew had copies of the promotional records, and arranged for us to borrow one of them. He overnighted his cleanest record out to us, and we mastered that from vinyl. I was really pleased last year when Andrew Sandoval found the three-track master tape for Auld Lang Syne and was able to mix a stereo acappella version of the song for inclusion on Ultimate Christmas. As much as I loved Dennis, that's the way that song should have been heard from the very beginning. It's absolutely breathtaking!

PS: The Letter sounds different than it does on the Wally Heider sessions. Is that just because the track has been mixed to mono with some reverb added?

BE: I think that's all there is to it, but that's a weird one in regard to trying to establish its origins. The tape that we found carried master number 58582, which (according to Capitol's sessions sheets) should have been a studio recording of the song cut Oct. 25, 1967 at Brian's house, right in the middle of the Wild Honey sessions. The fake live version of the song cut at Wally Heider's on Sept. 11 (during the session to record replacement tracks for that summer's Hawaii concert recordings) should have master number 58388. So, with no other information, we concluded what we had was the studio version of the song. Years later, when the Lei'd In Hawaii tape (actually from the Sept. 11 Heider session) leaked out, it included the same version of the song. Plus, the original liner notes for Wild Honey had turned up by then, and they indicated that a live version of the song from Hawaii (actually the Heider re-creation) was included in the album's original lineup -- which explains why Capitol had a copy of the song. All of this points to the fact that the version of The Letter included on Rarities is the Sept. 11 Heider recording. Still, I have to wonder about the fact that the tape we found carried the studio master number. Perhaps the two versions really are one and the same, except that the "studio version" had additional work done on it at Brian's home. Maybe that accounts for the difference in sound that you noted.

PS: The Rarities LP was digitally mastered. I know a lot of younger fans I converse with say "hey, DAT cassettes and U-1630 tapes weren't around then!" Please explain how it was done.

BE: Rarities was done in the infancy of digital audio. We used VHS tapes to store the digital signal. We sequenced and assembled the album directly onto VHS tape, using an outboard digital converter. Then that VHS tape went down the hall to Wally Traugott, who mastered it to vinyl and cassette master.

PS: If you knew then what you know now, do you think you would have put Three Blind Mice on the LP?

BE: Probably. When we found the tapes of that October 1965 orchestral session, I wanted to do something cool, like put the three tracks -- Stella by Starlight, How Deep Is the Ocean and Three Blind Mice -- on a bonus 45 that would come with the album. Of course, that idea got nixed, and there didn't seem any way to sequence "Stella" and "How Deep" into the album -- they just didn't fit soundwise. And in the midst of all that, Three Blind Mice was sort of forgotten. If I had known that Pamela Jean was going to get dropped from the album before release, I probably would have included Three Blind Mice instead.

By the way, the tapes of that October 1965 session were not found at Capitol. One of the "last ditch" efforts we made to find more tapes was to call United Western Studios to see what Beach Boys tapes they might have stored there. The only things they had that Capitol could lay claim to were the "Stella"/"How Deep" tape and a Brian Wilson production of Endless Sleep (which didn't even carry an artist identification; it was years before we learned the artist was Larry Denton). They had a number of tapes from the late 1970s and early 1980s, but those post-dated Capitol's contract with the Beach Boys, so we couldn't touch those (even though I really wanted to -- there were some very interesting titles from 1980 and 1982).

PS: I will be delicate with this next question. How did the Rarities LP come to be discontinued?

BE: Obviously, Rarities was done without the permission or cooperation of The Beach Boys, so they weren't real happy when the album came out and included previously unreleased material. They used the album's unauthorized nature as a bit of a bargaining point in some discussions with Capitol that commenced soon thereafter. And those discussions eventually led to the situation we have now. The Beach Boys and Capitol reached some accords a year or so later -- one of which was that Rarities went out of print, but another was the group's cooperation in a 25th anniversary package, Made In USA, for which the Beach Boys recorded several new tracks. And the groundwork was laid at that time for packaging the group's Sixties albums in the two-fer format with previously unreleased bonus tracks. So the direct impetus for the eventual release of the bonus tracks was the unreleased material on Rarities. The album sold about 80,000 copies, which showed the Beach Boys there was a market for some of the material they had stashed on a shelf somewhere.

I ought to mention that a couple of years after Rarities came out, one of The Beach Boys (who shall remain nameless) told me that I shouldn't take the album going out-of-print the wrong way. He assured me that its removal from the market was "strictly business" and that he actually thought the album was "pretty cool."

PS: Thank you again for you time, Brad. We are all looking forward to the new packages coming soon from Capitol.

BE: Thanks, Bob, for being interested in this aspect of the group's history. And, of course, I hope the new packages coming from Capitol are well received by the fans. I think they're going to be great!

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I have the Japanese version of the Rarities CD, and I always felt that the long medleys presented there sound like really amaeturistic edits compared to the single hit medley that Capitol originally released.

Yeah, I can imagine him saying that - he's always been a fan as well as a band member. 
I remember buying this album shortly after it came out. Had no clue it would have rarity value someday. 

Thank you for that, petsite and the notes. I don’t have Rarities, but now I will will check ebay to get a copy.  Thanks, again. ⭐️   

Has the extended tag been officially released for I Was Made To Love Her?