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Dan Weiss's avatar

Dear Dean: You give the Beach Boys' Wild Honey an A+. However, it's only 24 minutes long. Should it be subject to your practice of docking LPs notch if they're under 30 minutes? Or do you now consider it an EP? Dan Weiss

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Robert Christgau's avatar

It's sweet and perhaps part of my exotic allure that fans out there remember rules I may have once established but no longer even remember. FYI, the Wild Honey CD I made sure to play for an ecstatic Carola as well as an ecstatic Bob is dated 2001 on Capitol (plus something called "Hollywood and Vine" whose further details I lack the magnifying glass to make out, just as I can't make out whether there are further annotations in Chinese or some other alien script). Also the bonus track "Their Hearts Were Full of Spring." Yum.

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Omar Qutteineh's avatar

Their Hearts Were Full of Spring sounds like something from early renaissance music. I'm surprised you like it.

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wwolfe's avatar

The last time Mike Love saw Brian Wilson, two or three weeks before Brian died, the two of them sang a few songs together, with the last being "Their Hearts Were Full of Spring." Whatever one's thoughts might be of Mike Love, I found that to be a sweet and poignant way for these two lifelong friends, partners, and antagonists to say farewell.

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Ed's avatar

“Wild Honey” is great.

The 2017 stereo reissue is confusingly on an album called “1967 - Sunshine Tomorrow”

No mention of “Wild Honey” on the cover

It sounds great to me, but maybe purists will disagree.

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Tim M.'s avatar

I discovered Lead Belly’s (separate not compound there) Last Sessions from Stanley Booth’s writing. I see in Goldmine it was called pungent with history and personality. Amen.

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Jesse F's avatar

Mr. Bad Example is a pretty solid album with nice clean production, and I’d bet even money that if you were to go back and bear down, it’d be a low-medium HM with the title track and one or two others mentioned. But why would you?

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