Summer Love Songs

This sort of follows on from the Mitchum/Beach Boys post below...
The latest Capitol Beach Boys' archive release is titled with their usual lack of imagination, Summer Love Songs, following the discovery of a number of master tapes from the Shut Down Volume II sessions.

Here's the press release:
"To Be Released May 19 By Capitol/EMI. Hollywood, California

April 6, 2009 – The Beach Boys have long been the world’s leading, harmonious voice of summer fun, with an ocean’s swell of universally-loved songs about the beach, surfing, hot rods, and in no small measure, girls and sun-kissed romance. 20 of The Beach Boys’ best love songs, from tender ballads to boisterous romps, have been gathered for Summer Love Songs, a new 20-track CD and digital collection to be released May 19 (May 18 internationally) by Capitol/EMI. Three classic tracks have been mixed in stereo for the first time, exclusively for this release, and three others have received new stereo mixes. Two of the new stereo mixes have been created from long lost, newly-recovered analog multi-track masters. A rare track, previously unreleased in the U.S. and long out-of-print in the U.K., is also included. The Beach Boys’ romantic ballads, including “God Only Knows,” “Please Let Me Wonder,” and “Don’t Worry, Baby,” and their playful, high-energy love songs, including “California Girls” and “Good To My Baby,” come together as the perfect soundtrack to romantic fun in the sun on Summer Love Songs. Evocative of time and place for all who hear them, these classics continue to warm hearts around the world. Two of Summer Love Songs’ new stereo mixes, for “Don’t Worry, Baby” and “Why Do Fools Fall In Love,” have been created from newly-recovered analog multi-track masters that went missing from the Western Recorders studio in Los Angeles after they were first recorded in the mid-1960s. These original 3-track analog masters were recently recovered by The Beach Boys and Capitol/EMI for the first time since they were used for the band’s Shut Down, Vol. 2 album in 1964. The collection’s four other tracks with new stereo mixes are “Hushabye,” “I’m So Young,” “Good To My Baby,” and “Time To Get Alone.” Summer Love Songs also includes “Fallin’ In Love,” a song written and recorded by Dennis Wilson during the Beach Boys’ Sunflower album sessions in 1970. The track has never before been released in the U.S. and has long been out-of-print in the U.K. (where it was released as “Lady”). This track has also been mixed in stereo for the first time."

THE BEACH BOYS: Summer Love Songs (CD, digital)
1. Why Do Fools Fall In Love [new stereo mix from newly recovered analog multi-track master]
2. Don’t Worry, Baby [new stereo mix from newly recovered analog multi-track master]
3. Wouldn't It Be Nice
4. God Only Knows
5. Surfer Girl
6. California Girls
7. Please Let Me Wonder
8. In The Parkin' Lot
9. Your Summer Dream
10. Kiss Me, Baby
11. Hushabye [new stereo mix]
12. I'm So Young [new stereo mix]
13. Good To My Baby [new stereo mix]
14. Fallin' In Love [previously unreleased track, written and recorded by Dennis Wilson]
15. Time To Get Alone [new stereo mix]
16. Our Sweet Love
17. Help Me, Rhonda
18. Keep An Eye On Summer
19. Don't Talk (Put Your Head On My Shoulder)
20. Girls On The Beach

From http://dutchbeachboys.blogspot.com/

Notice the solid and by now time-worn marketing tactic of including a handful of well-known classics as well as some more obscure stuff. After all the postive reaction to the re-release of Dennis Wilson's Pacific Ocean Blue, notice also the presence of his Fallin' in Love/Lady, until now only officially available on CD on a Super Furry Animals' selection of songs they like, Under The Influence(2005), and not available on vinyl since its original release as DW/Rumbo (Rumbo = Daryl Dragon = Captain Keyboards = the Captain in the Captain and Tenille) single in 1970, with the exception of its appearance on the hastily withdrawn Australian Brian Wilson Rarities LP in 1981.

This is the story behind the rediscovered master tapes:

4/9/2009

"BEACH BOYS MASTER TAPES RETURNED AFTER 45 YEARS

by Howie Edelson

The new Beach Boys collection due out on May 19th, called Summer Love Songs, was made possible by a longtime fan coming forth with previously unknown session tapes for such classics as "Don't Worry Baby," "Why Do Fools Fall In Love" and others. The reels -- which contained the discarded multi-tracks from the Beach Boys' 1964 Shut Down Vol. II album -- enabled the group's production team to create the first true stereo mixes for some of the Beach Boys' most beloved tracks.

After the success of the reissue of Dennis Wilson's Pacific Ocean Blue album, Wilson's biographer Jon Stebbins told us that an article in a Northern California newspaper about his work on the project led to the long lost Beach Boys tapes: ["The article was published in the local entertainment weekly and I got an email subsequently from a singer-songwriter named Lance Robison who lives here on the central coast, and he said that he had some Beach Boys tapes that I might be interested in. I hear that thing a lot in my line of business. But, anyway, I emailed him back and asked him a few pertinent questions about it. And his response to my initial email was pretty astounding."]

Stebbins admits that he was speechless at his first sight of the 45-year-old master tapes: ["He pulled out three tape boxes, and they were original multi-track masters from the Beach Boys' Shut Down Vol. II album. I also knew that the Beach Boys had been missing the master tape -- the multi-track masters. So whereas before, all you had was a 'left' and a 'right' two tracks for a stereo mix; now you could turn it into, y'know, 6, 8, 10 tracks (and) spread it across the spectrum. So, true stereo mixes of these things."]

From there Stebbins brought the tapes directly to the Beach Boys' official archivist, Alan Boyd. Boyd, who has spent years cataloging the band's session masters and live tapes, had never thought these multi-tracks had survived. Prior to 1965, it was not Capitol Records' standard policy to have artists deliver session tapes along with the finished masters to the label. It's not that the tapes were thought to be "missing" or "lost" -- they were never expected to still exist.

Alan Boyd recalls hearing the session tapes as being an incredible personal and professional moment: ["I have been somewhat fanatical about this music since I was about five years old. Y'know, I may have found my way into this job as some deep-seated desire to figure out what made this music tick. It never gets old. When you find something like this for the first time and you really get to hear the creative process, and the boys are getting comfortable with the song and working their way through it. Uh, no, it was a definite 'Whoa, hands are shaking' kind of thing."]

The missing master tapes enabled Boyd and engineer Mark Linnett to make the first true stereo mixes for "Don't Worry Baby" and "Why Do Fools Fall In Love," both of which lead off the upcoming release.

Jon Stebbins wrote the groundbreaking books Dennis Wilson: The Real Beach Boy and the David Marks biography The Lost Beach Boy.
Alan Boyd directed the Beach Boys' 1998 official documentary, Endless Harmony."
From http://www.shutdown-vol2.com/forum/index.php?topic=3324.15

Cliched, not to say shitty cover art that seems derivative of the poster for Bruce Brown's classic surfing documentary, Endless Summer (1966) or possibly his belated sequel, Endless Summer II (1994).