Tony Visconti Likes The Beach Boys and the 'Wild Honey' Album

"... The title track has got such incredible abandon and they were really riffing like they were jazz musicians and yet it was a pop record. Every track on this album is slightly out of control and it was also a lack of reverb – because their earlier records were swamped in reverb and that was typical of the day – but The Beach Boys just knocked that one off the ledge. They came up with this very dry album and if you listen to the tracks they’re very in-your-face recordings...."

http://thequietus.com/articles/10534-tony-visconti-favourite-albums?page=3

Not certain who actually played each instrument for this album (Did Mike Love play the woo-woo machine?), but the recording style was fairly unique compared to the manner in which the band had usually recorded most of their biggest hit albums. Though, the success of Beach Boys Party! may have shown that the band didn't need elaborate recordings for good hit albums.

 

bump

 

Fantastic album. I had largely ignored it for a while, but decided to come back to it after reading an A+ review by Robert Christgau since I respect his opinion usually. Loved every track, only wish it was longer. It think it's really cool that Tony likes the album. Great performances all around

 

Wild Honey's profile has risen considerably over the years. It was a great, funky album that kind of came sideways given the relative unfunkiness of the group.

The Boys all play on the album and there's a lot of heart and soul in the performances.
The real sleepers for me are Aren't You Glad and Here Comes The Night.

 

Loveitloveitloveit!!!!

 

Jim Morrison liked Wild Honey too. Everybody should.

 

I just got a very nice copy, original pressing at a thrift for peanuts. I'll have to dig into this record a bit. It was one I kind of passed over, over the years.

 

Wild Honey is a fun album. A lot of good songs from Brian and Mike and it is only a shame that there aren't more group harmonies.

In his autobiography Tony Visconti also talked about listening to Smiley Smile with his musician friends when it was released at the time.

 

Daft Punk also loved Wild Honey, so much that they named their first band after one of it's singles, "Darlin'".

 

It's the duck's nuts!

Along with Surfin' USA, PS, Smiley, LDC, Sunflower, Friends, Love You I could go on & on...

I first heard a couple of tracks offa really cheap Capitol/EMI era comp around '83, then chanced upon, what I know now is, a poorly pressed World Record Club Australia variant. I'd Love Just Once to see you is an enduring fave, Mike's soft touch on Aren't You Glad a dazzling precursor to Meant For You, All I Wanna Do & All This Is That.

 

So were the 80's pressings cut in original mono?

 

It took me years to warm to this LP...I considered it a badly executed slapdash hardly professional album by a group spiralling commercially and artistically down the drain...

But then one day with nothing to listen to I gave it another chance and started to get it.

It's still appallingly recorded and pathetically short... But it's also charming.

 

Country Air, aren't you glad, darlin, let the wind blow, title track

 

I'll have to seek that out. Do you happen to remember if it was a green label?

 

Wild Honey rules and so does Tony Visconti. Obviously.

 

Love my green Capitol label mono pressing.

 

I love "Let The Wind Blow", despite some bad lyrics (let the bees make honey/let the poor find money).

 

So do I.

 

Great to read this!

 

Why the band didn't include "Can't Wait Too Long", "Time To Get Alone", finish Lonely Days" and have a killer album with "Wild Honey" is beyond me!

 

A true testament to the sublime, true artistic inspiration that sparked the Beach Boys. Even at their least produced - Smiley Smile and Wild Honey - something intangible through on such tracks as "Aren't You Glad," "Wild Honey," "Here Comes the Night," "Let the Wind Blow," "Darlin'," "With Me Tonight," "Wonderful," "Wind Chimes," "She's Goin' Bald," and "Little Pad." From the first time I heard these records, there was something so arresting and awesome about them - whether they were hip or not. I had read all about the image downfall and knew before my first listens that these were the the works that supposedly spelled the first nadir of the band (prior to the second late 70s one). Taste is personal, of course, yet, when I eventually listened to them, I couldn't understand why people could not hear what I was hearing. I absolutely love them. They didn't need production to capture the magic; they just had it.

 

That whole Visconti article was a great read