Kevin Wachs is the publisher of Rock Cellar Magazine and is an old friend of The Tooners and Rock & Roll Rehab founder, Greg Piper. A kid from the old neighborhood in the West Valley, Kevin performed in the Beach Boys tribute band, Pacific, while Greg and brother Tim founded the Beatles tribute band Revolution.
It must, therefore, have been very special for Kevin to have Al Jardine of the Beach Boys (the actual Beach Boys, not an incredible simulation), give Rock Cellar Magazine an interview (Read It HERE).
A lot of the interview centers around the resurrection of the mythical Beach Boy album SMiLE. A few years ago Brian Wilson re-recorded SMiLE as a solo album and I bought it. From what I can tell from the audio samples included in the online interview the newer (although remixed from the much older original sessions) Beach Boys edition of the SMiLE CD is pretty much the same as the Brian Wilson solo version. To be honest, I am not a fan.
I am a fan of the old Beach Boys' album, Surf's Up, which includes one of my all time favorite songs, Beach Boys or otherwise, Bruce Johnson's great Disney Girls (1957) and the title track, Surf's Up which is one of the few tracks from SMiLE that deserves to be called Classic. The other great songs that are on SMiLE but not exactly lost gems are Heroes And Villains and of course, Good Vibrations.
I suppose in the Sixties if you had three bonafide classic songs on one album it was quite an accomplishment but most of SMiLE sounds like the sort of stuff that makes you understand why the album was eventually abandoned, the great tracks Shanghaied onto other albums and people started to worry about Brian Wilson's state of mind.
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