Wild Honey (album)

"Wild Honey" was co-written by Mike Love from the perspective of Stevie Wonder singing it. He felt that the album title was suggestive of both edible honey and "honey" as a term of endearment,[33] Session musician Paul Tanner was recruited to play his Electro-Theremin on the track.[11] "Aren't You Glad" is described by Rolling Stone magazine as a "Lovin' Spoonful type song with the Beach Boys touch",[34] while magazine editor Gene Sculatti said it "achieves a Miracles style smoothness via a Bobby Goldsboro-type song".[4] "I Was Made to Love Her" was originally recorded by Wonder, who had a number 2 hit with the song in July 1967.[35] "Country Air" was stated by Brian to be his "favorite cut on the record."[36] "A Thing or Two" is identified by Christian Matijas-Mecca as a "sibling" to Smiley Smile's "Gettin' Hungry", and that the vocal riff would be reprised in the group's 1968 single "Do It Again".[37]

Three Dog Night's Chuck Negron, Cory Wells and Danny Hutton, whom Brian hoped to produce as Redwood

"Darlin'" was one of the album's more developed productions, and was reworked from the earlier Brian Wilson/Mike Love composition "Thinkin' 'Bout You Baby".[9] Initially, Brian had planned to give this song (along with "Time to Get Alone") to Three Dog Night, then called "Redwood", before Carl and Love insisted that Brian focus his attention on producing work for the Beach Boys.[37] Redwood's version of the song was left unreleased until the 1993 compilation Celebrate: The Three Dog Night Story.[11] "I'd Love Just Once to See You" prefigured the writing style that Brian would later explore in the next studio album Friends.[9]

"Let the Wind Blow" was the first composition recorded by the group that is in ³
₄ time from beginning to end. "How She Boogaloed It" was the first original Beach Boys song (excluding instrumentals and cover versions) not to feature contributions from Brian.[9] "Mama Says" is a chant that originated from an unreleased incarnation of the composition "Vegetables". It was the first time a track with thematic links to Smile was used to close a later Beach Boys album, the others being 20/20 (1969) and Surf's Up (1971).[9] Inexplicably, when the alternate "Mama Says" version of "Vegetables" was released, Van Dyke Parks’ songwriting credit was not honored, and instead Love was listed as the song's only co-writer.[39]

Brian is credited as composer or co-composer for 9 of 11 tracks, compared to Smiley Smile in which he held a songwriting credit for every track.[30] This would be the last Beach Boys album to feature Brian as a primary composer until The Beach Boys Love You (1977).[40]

Outtakes from the Wild Honey sessions include the originals "Can't Wait Too Long", "Time to Get Alone", "Cool, Cool Water", "Honey Get Home", and "Lonely Days".[41] A solo recording of Brian performing the Smile song "Surf's Up" was lost and rediscovered several decades later at the end of the multi-track reel for "Country Air". Archivist Mark Linett stated: "No explanation for why he did that and it was never taken any farther. Although I don’t think the intention was to take it any farther because it's just him singing live and playing piano."[42] The band also recorded cover versions of the Box Tops hit "The Letter" (1967), Clint Ballard Jr.'s "The Game of Love" (1965), and the Beatles' "With a Little Help from My Friends" (1967), as well as Johnston's demo for "Bluebirds over the Mountain".[43] The New York Observer's Ron Hart said that the significance of the Beach Boys covering "The Letter" as sung by Alex Chilton is "simply beyond comprehension [...] for that special kind of music nerd."[20]

On October 13, 1967, Capitol announced that the Beach Boys' next release would be Wild Honey and offered its track listing, even though some of the songs had yet to be recorded at that point.[44][nb 4] Among its differences, "How She Boogalooed It", "Country Air", and "Mama Says" were not included, while "Cool, Cool Water", "Game of Love", "The Letter" (live version from Hawaii), and "Lonely Days" were. "Honey Get Home" was also listed, but crossed out. "The Letter" was to serve as a teaser for the forthcoming live album before the plans for the record were dropped.[44]

Wild Honey was reportedly one of Jim Morrison's favorite albums.[49]

Like Smiley Smile, Wild Honey was viewed by contemporary critics as an inconsequential work,[1] and it alienated audiences whose expectations had been raised by Smile.[9] The group remained effectively blacklisted by the music press, to the extent that reviews of the group's records were either withheld from publication or published long after the release dates.[13] Writing in his 1969 book Outlaw Blues, Paul Williams summarized that Wild Honey was "a work of joy [...] new and fresh and raw and beautiful", and said that while the album's boogie woogie piano riffs were, "in their own way, as inventive as Brian’s more textured records [...] we expected more (from Brian) than we would expect from any other composer alive, because the tracks we'd heard from Smile were just that good. Smiley Smile was [...] a confusion [...] and Wild Honey is just another Beach Boys record."[9]

Rolling Stone reviewed that the Beach Boys regained their better judgement after the "disaster" of Smiley Smile, although their use of "pre-existing ideas and idioms" on Wild Honey is less satisfactory and original than their earlier work: "It's kind of amusing that the Beach Boys are suddenly re-discovering rhythm and blues five years after the Beatles and Stones had brought it all back home".[34] Jazz & Pop's Gene Sculatti wrote: "[the Beach Boys] have the audacity to fool around with r&b, a territory indeed alien to them. Surprisingly, Wild Honey works well. It isn't the least bit pretentious, it's honest, and convincing."[4] In a column for Esquire, Robert Christgau wrote that the album "epitomizes Brian Wilson", including the song "I'd Love Just Once to See You", which "expresses perfectly his quiet, thoughtful, sentimental artistic personality."[50] Billboard welcomed the band's return to form after the "avant-garde" Smiley Smile, but was critical of "How She Boogalooed It" as "far below the group's quality" and predicted that "I'd Love Just Once to See You" would not receive airplay.[51]

Disc & Music Echo awarded the album "LP of the Month" and wrote that it was the band's best since Pet Sounds. The magazine concluded that "Others who, like us, felt Brian Wilson was becoming bogged down in his complex arrangements can relax and listen to the most refreshing sounds for many months."[52] In a 1968 Crawdaddy! article, David Anderle reported that the Doors' Jim Morrison considered Brian Wilson "his favorite musician" and Wild Honey "one of his favorite albums. [...] he really got into it."[49]

Retrospective professional reviews

Review scores
Source	Rating
AllMusic	[53]
Blender	[54]
Encyclopedia of Popular Music	[55]
MusicHound Rock	4.5/5[56]
Pitchfork	3.5/10[57]
The Rolling Stone Album Guide	[58]
Sputnikmusic	3.5/5[59]
The Village Voice	A+[60]

Like Smiley Smile, Wild Honey was later reevaluated by fans and critics who highlighted the record for its simplicity and charm, particularly after the LP was reissued by Warner Bros. in 1974.[61] In his 1971 review of Surf's Up, Rolling Stone's Arthur Schmidt referred to Wild Honey as "a masterpiece", "the most underrated" of the band's "post-surfer LPs", and "the last time they truly rocked their asses off, one cut after another."[62] In a 1976 retrospective guide to 1967 for The Village Voice, Christgau felt Wild Honey is "so slight" but "perfect and full of pleasure". He argued that, "almost without a bad second", the album conveys "the troubled innocence of the Beach Boys through a time of attractive but perilous psychedelic sturm und drang. Its method is whimsy, candor, and carefully modulated amateurishness, all of which comes through as humor."[60][nb 5]

Critic Geoffrey Himes called the record "10 wonderful celebrations of everyday life and a terrific Stevie Wonder cover. Wonder, though, never sang odes to clean air and refreshing wind or made boyish jokes about seeing a naked woman or brushing one's teeth."[65] Record producer Tony Visconti listed Wild Honey as one of his 13 favorite albums and said that "I still refer to this record as a benchmark in the same way that I do Revolver."[66] In 2020, Rolling Stone ranked the record at number 410 on its list of "The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time".[67] It was also ranked second on Rolling Stone's 2012 list of the "Coolest Summer Albums of All Time" list, with the editors praising the record's "hedonistic rock & roll spirit", "humor" and "pensive depth".[68][69]

Less favorably, Richie Unterberger wrote in his review for AllMusic that, apart from "Darlin'", "Here Comes the Night" and the title track, most of Wild Honey was "inessential". He found the music "often quite pleasant, for the great harmonies if nothing else, but the material and arrangements were quite simply thinner than they had been for a long time."[53] Sommer wrote that the album's original mono mix suffers from being "flat and peculiar".[29] In the lyrics to the Beta Band's 1999 song "Round the Bend", Wild Honey is hailed for its "funny little love songs" although considered "probably not as good as something like Pet Sounds.[70]

In a negative review, Pitchfork critic Spencer Owen said only "one or two" songs succeed and the majority of Wild Honey is "not pretty" because of its R&B vein as "interpreted by white surfer boys", including "a Stevie Wonder cover sung with as much faux-soul as Carl Wilson could have possibly mustered".[57] Writing in his Encyclopedia of Popular Music, Colin Larkin pairs the album with the "scrappy" Smiley Smile as two "hastily released" works that show how the Beach Boys' music had "lost its cohesiveness", with Brian Wilson's reduced involvement.[71] Noel Gallagher, who considers the Beach Boys to be "the most vastly overrated band in the history of popular culture", named "How She Boogalooed It" among the group's only "six good tunes".[72]

In the wake of Wild Honey, numerous contemporaries of the Beach Boys adopted a similar back-to-basics approach, including Bob Dylan (John Wesley Harding), the Band (Music from Big Pink), the Beatles (The Beatles), and the Rolling Stones (Beggars Banquet).[73] Uncut's David Cavanaugh remarked that despite the poor critical response afforded to the album at the time of its release, Wild Honey heralded rock trends of the late 1960s and effectively pioneered "a post-psychedelic music while the Summer of Love was still in full swing. And wouldn’t you know it, The Beatles' 'Lady Madonna' would get the credit."[74] Author Mike Segretto echoed, "Ten days before Dylan got all the credit for popping the psychedelic balloon with John Wesley Harding, the Beach Boys had done it first with Wild Honey."[75]

Similarly, music journalist Tim Sommer characterized the album as boldly subverting "rock's expansion into pompous avenues of volume, psychedelia and lyrical pretension" and called it a precursor to albums such as the Kinks' Village Green Preservation Society and the Byrds' The Notorious Byrd Brothers (both 1968).[29] Editors at Rolling Stone credited the LP with starting "the idea of DIY pop".[67]

In 2017, a complete stereo mix of Wild Honey was released for the first time on the rarities compilation 1967 – Sunshine Tomorrow. The set also includes numerous session highlights, alternate takes, and live renditions of Wild Honey tracks in addition to other unreleased material recorded during the Smiley Smile and Lei'd in Hawaii era.[76] Several months later, the compilation was followed with two more digital-exclusive releases: 1967 – Sunshine Tomorrow 2: The Studio Sessions and 1967 – Live Sunshine. They include more than 100 tracks that were left off the first compilation.[77]