The Beach Boys' unreleased and bootleg recordings
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Many recordings and performances by the Beach Boys have attained some level of public circulation without being available as a legal release, and several albums by the band or its individual members were fully assembled or near completion before being shelved, rejected, or revised as an entirely new project. Since the early 1980s, numerous rarities compilations and album reissues have been released with studio outtakes included as bonus tracks.
Bootleg recordings arise from a multitude of sources, including broadcast performances, recordings of live shows, test discs, privately distributed copies of demos, and covertly copied studio session tapes. Some recordings have never seen wide public circulation. Others are only rumored to exist, were misapprehended to tangentially related projects, or have yet to surface in the hands of archivists or record collectors. This article includes commonly bootlegged material and unreleased (or formerly unreleased) recordings which are reported to exist.
Some of the largest sources of Beach Boys bootleg material has derived from the Pet Sounds and Smile sessions; their underground circulation eventually resulted in the officially issued compilations The Pet Sounds Sessions (1997) and The Smile Sessions (2011). In 2013, the latter won the Grammy Award for Best Historical Album. In 2011, Uncut voted Smile the number one "greatest bootleg recording of all time".[1] In 2003, Stylus Magazine named the Beach Boys' Smile, Landlocked, Adult Child, and Dennis Wilson's Bambu "A Lost Album Category Unto Themselves".[2]