Is Carl Lying?

[Julia]

In recent years, there seems to be a trend among some fans to think/say "Carl wasn't as good as people said he was" - meaning, "he didn't always support Brian 100%." Because that's what certain fans want from the "other" Beach Boys. Brian (and to a lesser extent, Dennis) was the real talent in the group, and the other guys should have just done what Brian told them to do without question. I mean, those guys would all be stuck in Hawthorne pumping gas if not for the genius (except for Dennis, who would have become an alt/indie star).
I guess it was inevitable that this would happen. For many, many years, we heard nothing but good things about Carl - how kind and thoughtful he was, how supportive he was, how he kept the warring factions from killing each other; "Carl was the rock that kept the Beach Boys together".
Well, maybe Todd Gold's portrayal of Carl as an uncaring drunk in "Wouldn't it Be Nice" was true. That's not how I see him, but maybe I'm guilty of putting him up on pedestal.

It's inevitably how things go, yes. Movements start, they push too far, the pendulum swings. I'm just a stickler for nuance myself. I hate this black and white thinking that seems to permeate so much of our society, where if you criticize anyone for anything at anytime you're a hater. This whole idea that my bringing up some of Carl's shortcomings means I'm a believer in WIBN "Carl's a drunk asshole" is ridiculous. I'm not a one-dimensional Brianista who thinks he or people in his camp did no wrong either. Brian was a bad leader during the SMiLE years and alienated EVERYONE with his actions. He, more than Mike, Anderle or VDP is responsible for that project's death because he refused to communicate effectively or delegate. I have criticized Melinda's tactics managing him and his career. (Just for saying that again, I'm probably inviting a tongue lashing.) Not all of Brian's ideas were golden and sometimes the other guys did great things without him. Yadda yadda yadda.

It's not that I think the other guys should've been his slaves and submit to his will on everything forever, at least not in a vacuum. It's that they wanted to have their cake and eat it too (at least as far as I can tell). They wouldn't let him branch out and be a solo artist or independent producer as he clearly wanted--nearly all the non-band primary sources from the Pet Sounds / SMiLE era I've seen say as much--without a massive guilt trip. They literally interrupted studio sessions to berate him into submission in front of others, making him cry and feel publicly humiliated. How is that ok? Why does that get brushed under the rug because "they're family/why you hate the other BBs, you Brianista!?" It's messed up, they stifled his creative and professional ambitions to remain their meal ticket because they knew they couldn't have done it without him--at least not until CATP:ST or Holland. (I go that far into the future because even Sunflower and SU were dependent on SMiLE leftovers--the latter used it as its main marketing push!) I didn't even realize until this summer that they took the recording equipment from his home studio when they toured so he couldn't surprise them with another PS/SMiLE ever again! That's straight up dystopian if you ask me--it's his house!!

And even if we let that go because "hey its just family drama / you'd do the same thing in their shoes" ok, but then you better use his material without complaint. You're claiming monopoly on his output, use it or lose it. But did they do that? No! Even without the previous examples, Mike belittled Til I Die (by far the highlight of SU) as a "downer" and they accused Brian of writing a drug song. The guy was pouring his heart out, arguably delivering a not so veiled cry for help and they just sh*t all over it. Do you have any idea how stifling that is for a creative person to be put in an ideological box indefinitely: no sad songs (our fans want fun!) no complex arrangements (we gotta play it live!) no new genres (Endless Summer sold like hotcakes!) no outside collaborators (Mike might get jealous!). That may not be "getting beat up" level abuse (oh whoops, they subjected him to that too!) but it's certainly emotional abuse, which I'd argue is more insidious. That's the kinda thing that can consume a man's soul and make him give up on life--like, get 300lbs and waste away on drugs level giving up. (Yeah, Murry and other factors contributed but I'll die on the hill if Brian could've honestly expressed his muse from '67 to '74 he would've been better off psychologically.) Marilyn outright states the other guys wore him down into submission--is she a BB hater too?

This attitude that all I want from the other BBs is to be Brian's puppets isn't true. By all means, contribute your own material if you've got it--it's just that they so rarely did. I really like Holland so they eventually found their footing without him but that's one album. CATP:ST has its moments. I like Dennis' stuff and even enjoy some of Bruce's like Tears in the Morning (goes on too long tho) and Nearest Faraway Place (the outro is diabetes tho). But yeah, I'm not gonna pretend I love Carl's lackluster songs or Al's ode to foot care just to put up a front of being unbiased. People don't talk up Dennis out of peer pressure or whatever you're implying, it's that he showed with POB that he could bring the goods on his own. Carl, Mike and Al never had that, and I don't see it in their contributions to the late '60s thru mid '70s output either. This isn't being mean, this isn't "you're not Brian," it's brutal honesty. I know we all love this band and want to pretend they were a big happy family, that they belonged together always and forever, but real life is complicated and people outgrow each other. David Leaf definitely overstated his case but he didn't stumble on the premise of "Brian and the 5 assholes" from nowhere. The group clearly took Brian for granted and he was too passive to stand up for himself. I don't think it does any good to sweep that very real issue under the rug just because it makes the other guys look less than perfect.

I'm sure the others would've been successful at something else without Brian--hardly pumping gas 50 years on--but they wouldn't have made a record deal in '61-'62 without him. They wouldn't have become the top American band without his production and songwriting talents. Absolutely not and to argue otherwise is wishful thinking. This shouldn't be a controversial take against the fantastical "everyone deserves equal credit because that makes me feel good" line of thinking. It's the cold hard fact of a brutal industry--you need a unique secret sauce to stand out in a crowded field of hungry artists and Brian was theirs. And yes, obviously Mike's talent for writing hooks, Carl's voice, Dennis' sex appeal and Al were big parts of their success too...but let's not act like it wasn't Brian who got their foot in the door and put them above the other flash in the pan pop stars. Lots of guys off the street could write catchy lyrics or look good on stage, but nobody--even 60 years later--could write the melodies and arrangements to something like GV.

If Brian was so incidental that they would've made it without him, they would've...made it without him. They tried and it didn't work. His old melodies rereleased outshone anything they'd done in 7 years with minimal (or diminished) contribution from him. If Carl and the others were such perfect angels that their actions were beyond reproach, why would so many outside parties who've looked at this band (from authors to Marilyn to Anderle) take issue with how they've treated Brian through the years? Could it be possible that there's a grain of truth to their misgivings? Naw, everyone's just out to slander them for no reason. That makes more sense.

[BJL]

In other words, Don Was told poor Brian not to "mess" with the formula.

Funnily enough, this is what he told the Rolling Stones around the same time... At least according to Jagger, talking about Voodoo Lounge in 1995, "... there were a lot of things that we wrote for Voodoo Lounge that Don steered us away from: groove songs, African influences and things like that. And he steered us very clear of all that. And I think it was a mistake"

[BJL]

In recent years, there seems to be a trend among some fans to think/say "Carl wasn't as good as people said he was" - meaning, "he didn't always support Brian 100%." Because that's what certain fans want from the "other" Beach Boys. Brian (and to a lesser extent, Dennis) was the real talent in the group, and the other guys should have just done what Brian told them to do without question. I mean, those guys would all be stuck in Hawthorne pumping gas if not for the genius (except for Dennis, who would have become an alt/indie star).
I guess it was inevitable that this would happen. For many, many years, we heard nothing but good things about Carl - how kind and thoughtful he was, how supportive he was, how he kept the warring factions from killing each other; "Carl was the rock that kept the Beach Boys together".
Well, maybe Todd Gold's portrayal of Carl as an uncaring drunk in "Wouldn't it Be Nice" was true. That's not how I see him, but maybe I'm guilty of putting him up on pedestal.

If Brian was so incidental that they would've made it without him, they would've...made it without him. They tried and it didn't work. His old melodies rereleased outshone anything they'd done in 7 years with minimal (or diminished) contribution from him. If Carl and the others were such perfect angels that their actions were beyond reproach, why would so many outside parties who've looked at this band (from authors to Marilyn to Anderle) take issue with how they've treated Brian through the years? Could it be possible that there's a grain of truth to their misgivings? Naw, everyone's just out to slander them for no reason. That makes more sense.

I don't disagree with you, here, but I don't think the question at issue is whether the other Beach Boys needed Brian to be successful in the music industry (they obviously did!), or whether the band and band dynamic as a whole was bad for Brian post-1967 (I think that's also pretty obvious, personally). It's whether Carl supported Brian musically. I certainly don't think Carl was a saint, and I think the band dynamic in the 70s was obviously toxic in some respects, and by the late 70s probably all respects. And frankly no one is innocent in that; they were all adults, and family is complicated. I think where you're getting the most push back is the idea that Carl didn't like or support Brian's new direction during Smile, which is something on which, so far as I can tell, we have basically no documentation. And secondarily, whether Carl supported Brian musically in the 70s and 90s. Like many fans, I've always considered Carl's work on the fairy tale in the early 70s and Love You in the late 70s to be signs of genuine support and an effort to support Brian musically, and you haven't presented any evidence to the contrary, beyond your sense that it was a shitty situation and Brian would have been better off without the rest of the band or with a very different attitude from the rest of the band as a whole. And again, I agree, but I also think it's not reasonable to think Carl Wilson could have solved those problems from his position. He couldn't control Mike's actions, and I guess he could have broken up the band, but not without blowing up his own life and everyone around him's.

[guitarfool2002]

In other words, Don Was told poor Brian not to "mess" with the formula.

Funnily enough, this is what he told the Rolling Stones around the same time... At least according to Jagger, talking about Voodoo Lounge in 1995, "... there were a lot of things that we wrote for Voodoo Lounge that Don steered us away from: groove songs, African influences and things like that. And he steered us very clear of all that. And I think it was a mistake"

Consider that Don Was had been hired to produce on almost all the Rolling Stones albums released since Voodoo Lounge, including the original albums, live albums, and compilations. And they were pretty successful. So Mick may have had some nitpicking to air on Voodoo Lounge, but that album was a success and they brought Don back to produce over the past 30 years again and again and he gave them respectable sales and even some critical acclaim in return.

That's generally what he's known for - making albums that sell and are well-received especially with "legacy artists". He knows the biz. 

[guitarfool2002]

As ever, it's a deeply nuanced situation where the personal relationships and working dynamics do and don't clash. Nobody would deny that Brian and Carl had a difficult time with each other in the post-Landy years. It's the idea that Carl was being disingenuous in the Was interview and in his general attitude about Brian's music that I think just isn't a fair or accurate characterisation of the guy.

The oft repeated accusation that Carl hated Brian's new tunes and shut down the Beach Boys reunion sessions is such a puzzling thing when you actually get down to what's been said about it. Because, well... he just didn't.

The Baywatch Nights session was a one-off in March '95. According to Andy, he thought the session with Carl and Mike had gone well, until afterwards Brian announced without explanation that he'd hated the experienced and never wanted to do it again. The "Beach Boys are trying to destroy me" interview appeared a few months down the line. I'm not refreshed on whether the snubbed listening invite happened in '94 or '95, but again according to Andy, there was a listening session with Carl at Don Was' house in 1995 where Carl reacted very favourably to the material. Only two days at Ocean Way were booked in November as a test to see if the group would get on with each other, which they apparently did, aside from a slightly strange atmosphere around Mike, who arrived on his lonesome on the second afternoon. Eyewitnesses (Mike Harris, Cindy Lee Berryhill, Andy Paley, Matt Jardine) all describe an enthusiastic atmosphere with Carl upbeat, professional, and down to sing whatever Brian wanted however he wanted it.

Nothing further was planned, but the thought was that the sessions might move to Don Was' Chomsky Ranch studio on the proviso that he coordinate their schedules. He didn't, and in Don's own memory of what happened next (via Mark Dillon's book), a month passed before he told Brian that the material wasn't up to snuff, and that he should write better songs before they work on an album. Brian's enthusiasm obviously evaporated at that, and the situation never came up again. The group had already committed to Stars & Stripes at that point (started beforehand, in October '95) and by early 1996 were in Nashville working with Joe Thomas. Brian and Melinda put the blame on Carl for changing his tune and deciding Soul Searchin' wasn't commercial enough some amount of time after the fact, but clearly whenever this conversation took place it was already a non-starter. Bruce was gunning for the group to work with Sean O'Hagan and Melinda was gunning for Brian to focus on a solo album with Joe Thomas. Carl certainly didn't shut a project in progress down, and it isn't a situation where you can assign blame to any one person. Don Was, if someone has to take the fall.

Thank you for adding those details. I do think though that some of the scenes in question are being conflated into other issues, and some points mentioned that were more isolated cases, like the whole Baywatch Nights debacle.

I think trying to "blame" Don Was in these cases is similar to those who try to blame or assign more weight to one factor over others for the collapse of Smile in '67. It's not possible to do so because of so many external influences and other moving parts.

There are several very strong undercurrents running at this time in the band's and Brian's timeline. Some of them are personal and interpersonal, some are business, and some are just they way things happened in the process. You cannot point a finger at Don Was without pointing another at Carl, and then the rest of the band. Remember The Beach Boys at this point were a corporation. And they were also a group lost in the wilderness desperately trying to get a label deal. They had no original music to offer of any consequence, yet were still basking in the afterglow of the renewed interest in their back catalog Capitol classics, from the box set to the reissues to TV appearances. And yet they couldn't score a new deal and had no songs to speak of in the can to get such a deal. Most deals, I'm fairly certain, hinged on Brian's involvement in the music and his name being attached to any project. Even Joe Thomas had to make deals to get Willie Nelson involved to bring Brian on board, since he was not interested in it otherwise. And in fairness, he did have dozens of songs in reserve if they needed them - which they did.

Now how much power did Don Was have, and what did he think his role was? He originally wanted to work with Brian, and began doing so, cutting original tracks with Paley and Don's regular crew of session cats like Waddy. When Brian became "free", he told Don he wanted to make music with The Boys again. So did that shift Don's role from working with Brian as he wanted to do to working with "The Beach Boys", which is an entirely different set of circumstances. Did Don eventually balk at the group politics and dynamics associated with that, could that have been a factor too? Did Don simply feel that after hearing "The Beach Boys" on songs he had been working up with Brian and Paley that they were not what The Beach Boys needed to make a hit? Maybe good for a Brian solo project, maybe not for what The Beach Boys were looking for?

Then factor in the interpersonal stuff, including the lawsuits (plural), the tensions already in the band without Brian's involvement, and the tension with Brian's return and the past several years of nonsense that went on.

It was not a good time. The details could fill pages. But I think again the family issues and at times turmoil mixed with jealousy and resentment contributed as much to various happenings as anything a producer-for-hire like Don Was could have had an effect. And again I'm curious to hear and speculate whether Don was fully on-board producing the Beach Boys rather than just working with Brian, and whether at any points he may have asked "did I sign up for this?" when it shifted from working with Brian to trying to get The Beach Boys a record deal and back on the charts with new material.

I/we could add much more to this but that's a start.

[Lonely Summer]

If Carl and the other Beach Boys were against the SMiLe music as being uncommercial, how the f*** did they find Smiley Smile acceptable? "Hey, we're gonna have a hit single singing about Vegetables with just a bass guitar for backing, and someone chewing on carrots"? It makes no sense to me. How on earth is the "Little Pad" a potential hit? Where are the fun in the sung songs, the cars, the bikinis? The only angle that works on is, "well at least we don't need an orchestra to reproduce this stuff on stage".
I don't know where I have ever dismissed Brian's talent; his record was almost 100%  before Smile (I knock off half a point for whoever thought Ten Little Indians was a good followup to Surfin' Safari). Even in later years, the best songs on Beach Boys albums were often Brian's - whatever they could coax out of him.
Dennis is loved, worshipped, adored for his songwriting, but I don't belong to the cult. I like/love about half of the songs he contributed to Beach Boys albums - Little Bird, Be Still, All I Want to Do, Slip On Through, Got to Know the Woman, It's About Time, Forever, Cuddle Up, Only With You, Baby Blue. That's a pretty good list right there, but I like Carl's songs ever more - Long Promised Road, Feel Flows, Trader, Good Timin' (yeah, he wrote it with Brian), Angel Come Home (sung by Dennis), Full Sail, Keepin the Summer Alive, Livin' with a Heartache, It's Gettin' Late, Where I Belong, Maybe I Don't Know - those are some of my favorite Beach Boys EVER. I know I am supposed to be unbiased, objective; but all I know about music is what I like and what I dislike.

[Julia]

If Carl and the other Beach Boys were against the SMiLe music as being uncommercial, how the f*** did they find Smiley Smile acceptable? "Hey, we're gonna have a hit single singing about Vegetables with just a bass guitar for backing, and someone chewing on carrots"? It makes no sense to me. How on earth is the "Little Pad" a potential hit? Where are the fun in the sung songs, the cars, the bikinis? The only angle that works on is, "well at least we don't need an orchestra to reproduce this stuff on stage".

Forget SMiLE, that's the least of my complaints--I even made a point to blame BRIAN for its death if you'll recall. SMiLE was an unfortunate perfect storm, where Mike's conservatism (as a songwriter AND political I'd argue) paired with Anderle's intelligent but unwise BRI legal maneuvering (he should've waited a month or two before pushing Brian--it's not like there was a deadline for this corporate posturing) and VDP's independent career needs (I "blame" him for leaving the first time, in Dec, rather than defend his work but by April I'd take the Warner deal and bail too, absolutely) combined in the increasingly frazzled, paranoid, avoidant, irresponsible, incomprehensible, drug-addled mind of an overgrown child who could barely handle the mounting pressure and responsibilities even with everything else going perfectly let alone all these snags at once.

My main criticisms, which you're conveniently avoiding to address this strawman argument, are the fact that they forced a home studio into his house he couldn't even use without THEIR permission. (So, all the extra expectations of productivity and other people coming and going in YOUR HOUSE at their pleasure, but none of the benefits for you). Also trashing his later efforts, from Til I Die to Mount Vernon, to 15BO to the original Love You to Adult/Child to the Paley Sessions and even suing him during BWPS to piss on that moment of happiness. It's also having him beat up, stalked and physically intimidated by the likes of the Love cousins and Rocky. It's that every primary source (Hutton, Marilyn, Anderle, Vosse, etc) and secondary source (Leaf, Gaines, other authors) say the guys berated him publicly and beat him down. It's that Carl, as I perceive it, is lying decades later in the Don Was documentary rather than own his mistakes. You can't sidestep my whole argument for a cheap "gotcha!"

As for why they recorded Smiley despite it being less commercial (I agree) how should I know? I've been combing over every source there is systematically and can't find an answer. Best I can determine is they were so overdue for a new album (6 months when the work even started on it) there wasn't time to start writing new songs--it was just "what songs do we have and how can we bang them out in the home studio?" I think the decision to record in that weird funky style was absolutely Brian's--he was trying to salvage what he could from SMiLE without the modular style or Wrecking Crew (which was getting annoying: having to book studio time, getting flak for touching the console, for Brother Records they'd have to pay the fees themselves, they were getting criticized for not playing their own instruments, plus Brian legitimately thought other people had listened to the tapes without permission...). When one looks at the change from this context it makes sense, plus I'd argue the radical departure to a minimalist sound was Brian wanting the lack of progress in his sound to appear deliberate not desperate. What's important is, the extenuating circumstances of this one artistic compromise does not mean those other slights from the guys never happened.
 

I don't know where I have ever dismissed Brian's talent; his record was almost 100%  before Smile (I knock off half a point for whoever thought Ten Little Indians was a good followup to Surfin' Safari). Even in later years, the best songs on Beach Boys albums were often Brian's - whatever they could coax out of him.

You sarcastically accused me (or people who share my misgivings) of saying the other guys would've been pumping gas. I said that wasn't true but emphasized that, yeah, they wouldn't have had a career in the record business long enough to even get to make the Carl-led Ricky/Blondie albums without Brian. Hence, they owed it to him to give his material a shot (or, out of gratitude and with respect for his wishes, tell him it's ok to go on and produce Three Dog Night & Spring exclusively or whatever else he might want to do).

Dennis is loved, worshipped, adored for his songwriting, but I don't belong to the cult. I like/love about half of the songs he contributed to Beach Boys albums - Little Bird, Be Still, All I Want to Do, Slip On Through, Got to Know the Woman, It's About Time, Forever, Cuddle Up, Only With You, Baby Blue. That's a pretty good list right there, but I like Carl's songs ever more - Long Promised Road, Feel Flows, Trader, Good Timin' (yeah, he wrote it with Brian), Angel Come Home (sung by Dennis), Full Sail, Keepin the Summer Alive, Livin' with a Heartache, It's Gettin' Late, Where I Belong, Maybe I Don't Know - those are some of my favorite Beach Boys EVER. I know I am supposed to be unbiased, objective; but all I know about music is what I like and what I dislike.

Fair enough, I'm the opposite. Different strokes.  One thing I like about Dennis is he was always in Brian's camp, from the famous SMiLE quotes to as late as his drunken ABC appearance "he's the reason we're all here!"

[BJL]

In other words, Don Was told poor Brian not to "mess" with the formula.

Funnily enough, this is what he told the Rolling Stones around the same time... At least according to Jagger, talking about Voodoo Lounge in 1995, "... there were a lot of things that we wrote for Voodoo Lounge that Don steered us away from: groove songs, African influences and things like that. And he steered us very clear of all that. And I think it was a mistake"

Consider that Don Was had been hired to produce on almost all the Rolling Stones albums released since Voodoo Lounge, including the original albums, live albums, and compilations. And they were pretty successful. So Mick may have had some nitpicking to air on Voodoo Lounge, but that album was a success and they brought Don back to produce over the past 30 years again and again and he gave them respectable sales and even some critical acclaim in return.

That's generally what he's known for - making albums that sell and are well-received especially with "legacy artists". He knows the biz. 

I know! That was my original point, that the whole point of hiring Don Was in the mid-90s is that he'd help you honor your legacy and be successful at the same time, and the way you do that, in large part, is by not deferring to the artist, having a strong perspective, and not being afraid to call out weak material. Daniel Lanois played a similar role with Dylan, their relationship was creatively contentious but artistically and commercially very successful. I wasn't trying to criticize Was, I was trying to point to the fact that he was doing his job, with Brian Wilson as with the Stones, but with Brian it may not have been the ideal strategy, although we agree that there were a lot of factors in play. I do think hindsight shows that the ideal collaborator for Brian is a Paley or a Scott Bennett, someone whose approach is almost always "yes, and," rather than "no, but," which isn't really how being a star producer works. But I don't think anyone in this thread was trying to blame Was, really, I think we're all just trying to paint a more complex picture, one that places whatever hesitancy Carl may have had in its broader context.

[Lonely Summer]

If Carl and the other Beach Boys were against the SMiLe music as being uncommercial, how the f*** did they find Smiley Smile acceptable? "Hey, we're gonna have a hit single singing about Vegetables with just a bass guitar for backing, and someone chewing on carrots"? It makes no sense to me. How on earth is the "Little Pad" a potential hit? Where are the fun in the sung songs, the cars, the bikinis? The only angle that works on is, "well at least we don't need an orchestra to reproduce this stuff on stage".

Forget SMiLE, that's the least of my complaints--I even made a point to blame BRIAN for its death if you'll recall. SMiLE was an unfortunate perfect storm, where Mike's conservatism (as a songwriter AND political I'd argue) paired with Anderle's intelligent but unwise BRI legal maneuvering (he should've waited a month or two before pushing Brian--it's not like there was a deadline for this corporate posturing) and VDP's independent career needs (I "blame" him for leaving the first time, in Dec, rather than defend his work but by April I'd take the Warner deal and bail too, absolutely) combined in the increasingly frazzled, paranoid, avoidant, irresponsible, incomprehensible, drug-addled mind of an overgrown child who could barely handle the mounting pressure and responsibilities even with everything else going perfectly let alone all these snags at once.

My main criticisms, which you're conveniently avoiding to address this strawman argument, are the fact that they forced a home studio into his house he couldn't even use without THEIR permission. (So, all the extra expectations of productivity and other people coming and going in YOUR HOUSE at their pleasure, but none of the benefits for you). Also trashing his later efforts, from Til I Die to Mount Vernon, to 15BO to the original Love You to Adult/Child to the Paley Sessions and even suing him during BWPS to piss on that moment of happiness. It's also having him beat up, stalked and physically intimidated by the likes of the Love cousins and Rocky. It's that every primary source (Hutton, Marilyn, Anderle, Vosse, etc) and secondary source (Leaf, Gaines, other authors) say the guys berated him publicly and beat him down. It's that Carl, as I perceive it, is lying decades later in the Don Was documentary rather than own his mistakes. You can't sidestep my whole argument for a cheap "gotcha!"

As for why they recorded Smiley despite it being less commercial (I agree) how should I know? I've been combing over every source there is systematically and can't find an answer. Best I can determine is they were so overdue for a new album (6 months when the work even started on it) there wasn't time to start writing new songs--it was just "what songs do we have and how can we bang them out in the home studio?" I think the decision to record in that weird funky style was absolutely Brian's--he was trying to salvage what he could from SMiLE without the modular style or Wrecking Crew (which was getting annoying: having to book studio time, getting flak for touching the console, for Brother Records they'd have to pay the fees themselves, they were getting criticized for not playing their own instruments, plus Brian legitimately thought other people had listened to the tapes without permission...). When one looks at the change from this context it makes sense, plus I'd argue the radical departure to a minimalist sound was Brian wanting the lack of progress in his sound to appear deliberate not desperate. What's important is, the extenuating circumstances of this one artistic compromise does not mean those other slights from the guys never happened.
 

I don't know where I have ever dismissed Brian's talent; his record was almost 100%  before Smile (I knock off half a point for whoever thought Ten Little Indians was a good followup to Surfin' Safari). Even in later years, the best songs on Beach Boys albums were often Brian's - whatever they could coax out of him.

You sarcastically accused me (or people who share my misgivings) of saying the other guys would've been pumping gas. I said that wasn't true but emphasized that, yeah, they wouldn't have had a career in the record business long enough to even get to make the Carl-led Ricky/Blondie albums without Brian. Hence, they owed it to him to give his material a shot (or, out of gratitude and with respect for his wishes, tell him it's ok to go on and produce Three Dog Night & Spring exclusively or whatever else he might want to do).

Dennis is loved, worshipped, adored for his songwriting, but I don't belong to the cult. I like/love about half of the songs he contributed to Beach Boys albums - Little Bird, Be Still, All I Want to Do, Slip On Through, Got to Know the Woman, It's About Time, Forever, Cuddle Up, Only With You, Baby Blue. That's a pretty good list right there, but I like Carl's songs ever more - Long Promised Road, Feel Flows, Trader, Good Timin' (yeah, he wrote it with Brian), Angel Come Home (sung by Dennis), Full Sail, Keepin the Summer Alive, Livin' with a Heartache, It's Gettin' Late, Where I Belong, Maybe I Don't Know - those are some of my favorite Beach Boys EVER. I know I am supposed to be unbiased, objective; but all I know about music is what I like and what I dislike.

Fair enough, I'm the opposite. Different strokes.  One thing I like about Dennis is he was always in Brian's camp, from the famous SMiLE quotes to as late as his drunken ABC appearance "he's the reason we're all here!"

Yeah, Dennis was always in Brian's camp; Carl was not.

[Zenobi]

It's baffling, and a bit frustrating, how the "evidence" about Carl's relationship to Brian is all over the place, to the point that perfectly reasonable reconstructions have been made with diametrically opposite results.

[Zenobi]

But... if I think about the Beach Boys' (as a group) relationship to Brian, the view is more clear imho. I agree with Julia. Basically, the BBs leeched on Brian up to a point that they actually damaged him. And I don't think Mike is the only one responsible for that, though he's the main one. Much as it saddens me to say all this.

[WillJC]

As ever, it's a deeply nuanced situation where the personal relationships and working dynamics do and don't clash. Nobody would deny that Brian and Carl had a difficult time with each other in the post-Landy years. It's the idea that Carl was being disingenuous in the Was interview and in his general attitude about Brian's music that I think just isn't a fair or accurate characterisation of the guy.

The oft repeated accusation that Carl hated Brian's new tunes and shut down the Beach Boys reunion sessions is such a puzzling thing when you actually get down to what's been said about it. Because, well... he just didn't.

The Baywatch Nights session was a one-off in March '95. According to Andy, he thought the session with Carl and Mike had gone well, until afterwards Brian announced without explanation that he'd hated the experienced and never wanted to do it again. The "Beach Boys are trying to destroy me" interview appeared a few months down the line. I'm not refreshed on whether the snubbed listening invite happened in '94 or '95, but again according to Andy, there was a listening session with Carl at Don Was' house in 1995 where Carl reacted very favourably to the material. Only two days at Ocean Way were booked in November as a test to see if the group would get on with each other, which they apparently did, aside from a slightly strange atmosphere around Mike, who arrived on his lonesome on the second afternoon. Eyewitnesses (Mike Harris, Cindy Lee Berryhill, Andy Paley, Matt Jardine) all describe an enthusiastic atmosphere with Carl upbeat, professional, and down to sing whatever Brian wanted however he wanted it.

Nothing further was planned, but the thought was that the sessions might move to Don Was' Chomsky Ranch studio on the proviso that he coordinate their schedules. He didn't, and in Don's own memory of what happened next (via Mark Dillon's book), a month passed before he told Brian that the material wasn't up to snuff, and that he should write better songs before they work on an album. Brian's enthusiasm obviously evaporated at that, and the situation never came up again. The group had already committed to Stars & Stripes at that point (started beforehand, in October '95) and by early 1996 were in Nashville working with Joe Thomas. Brian and Melinda put the blame on Carl for changing his tune and deciding Soul Searchin' wasn't commercial enough some amount of time after the fact, but clearly whenever this conversation took place it was already a non-starter. Bruce was gunning for the group to work with Sean O'Hagan and Melinda was gunning for Brian to focus on a solo album with Joe Thomas. Carl certainly didn't shut a project in progress down, and it isn't a situation where you can assign blame to any one person. Don Was, if someone has to take the fall.

Thank you for adding those details. I do think though that some of the scenes in question are being conflated into other issues, and some points mentioned that were more isolated cases, like the whole Baywatch Nights debacle.

I think trying to "blame" Don Was in these cases is similar to those who try to blame or assign more weight to one factor over others for the collapse of Smile in '67. It's not possible to do so because of so many external influences and other moving parts.

There are several very strong undercurrents running at this time in the band's and Brian's timeline. Some of them are personal and interpersonal, some are business, and some are just they way things happened in the process. You cannot point a finger at Don Was without pointing another at Carl, and then the rest of the band. Remember The Beach Boys at this point were a corporation. And they were also a group lost in the wilderness desperately trying to get a label deal. They had no original music to offer of any consequence, yet were still basking in the afterglow of the renewed interest in their back catalog Capitol classics, from the box set to the reissues to TV appearances. And yet they couldn't score a new deal and had no songs to speak of in the can to get such a deal. Most deals, I'm fairly certain, hinged on Brian's involvement in the music and his name being attached to any project. Even Joe Thomas had to make deals to get Willie Nelson involved to bring Brian on board, since he was not interested in it otherwise. And in fairness, he did have dozens of songs in reserve if they needed them - which they did.

Now how much power did Don Was have, and what did he think his role was? He originally wanted to work with Brian, and began doing so, cutting original tracks with Paley and Don's regular crew of session cats like Waddy. When Brian became "free", he told Don he wanted to make music with The Boys again. So did that shift Don's role from working with Brian as he wanted to do to working with "The Beach Boys", which is an entirely different set of circumstances. Did Don eventually balk at the group politics and dynamics associated with that, could that have been a factor too? Did Don simply feel that after hearing "The Beach Boys" on songs he had been working up with Brian and Paley that they were not what The Beach Boys needed to make a hit? Maybe good for a Brian solo project, maybe not for what The Beach Boys were looking for?

Then factor in the interpersonal stuff, including the lawsuits (plural), the tensions already in the band without Brian's involvement, and the tension with Brian's return and the past several years of nonsense that went on.

It was not a good time. The details could fill pages. But I think again the family issues and at times turmoil mixed with jealousy and resentment contributed as much to various happenings as anything a producer-for-hire like Don Was could have had an effect. And again I'm curious to hear and speculate whether Don was fully on-board producing the Beach Boys rather than just working with Brian, and whether at any points he may have asked "did I sign up for this?" when it shifted from working with Brian to trying to get The Beach Boys a record deal and back on the charts with new material.

I/we could add much more to this but that's a start.

To be clear, I'm not actually blaming Was as the reason it fell apart, I used that comparison to highlight that he probably shouldered more direct responsibility for the project not going forward than Carl, who can't have been more than another cog in the general vague sputtering out of this thing rather than the arch villain. A lot of conflict and dramatic objections tend to be to put into the telling of what happened here but in my view, after doing a lot of digging, the album basically just crumbled into the rear view under indifference and mismanagement the way a lot of Beach Boys ideas tend to. They all hold responsibility for fumbling the potential. It was plainly a huge failing of them all for not rallying behind an enthusiastic Brian who had material that sounded as good as You're Still a Mystery. While Carl likely didn't help, nobody else lifted a finger to keep it going, and Bruce was actively going out of his way to start them on something else. Don Was probably just undervalued that it took a miracle to get them together in the first place, and they'd need to keep being glued in close proximity under cohesive leadership or it wouldn't happen at all. Joe Thomas, for all the questionable things he did with music, was a "get stuff done" guy who spoke corporate and knew how to maintain the balance. He wasn't taking his time between calls and turning up to places barefoot.

I do think that Don Was wanted to work with the Beach Boys. What he was after was a Pet Sounds 2 for current times, and he said as much in interviews. He envisioned Brian and Mike writing deep stuff about working through their family troubles, probably not songs titled Baywatch Nights. During the IJWMFTT doc shoot in 1994, he was filmed on the phone pitching to Elliott Lott the idea of getting the guys down to a studio and singing parts on one of Brian's new tracks on camera (Proud Mary floated as an option), just to test them working together again and get a positive public image rolling. I think working with Brian was one thing, working on a competent Beach Boys album of Brian Wilson songs was the real ambition. Proud Mary, Wasserman's Trios, and the documentary remakes aside, he had been fairly distant to what Brian and Andy were stacking up in the studio until this came together in November 1995.

[WillJC]

My main criticisms, which you're conveniently avoiding to address this strawman argument, are the fact that they forced a home studio into his house he couldn't even use without THEIR permission. (So, all the extra expectations of productivity and other people coming and going in YOUR HOUSE at their pleasure, but none of the benefits for you).

Forest for tree here, but I think this is another example casting the Beach Boys as monsters for something that didn't really happen the way you're framing it. Brian begged for a home studio! He went on and on about wanting one of his own for ages. Marilyn and Danny Hutton have both said as much. The original makeshift setup involved a Gates Radio Company console and equipment mostly rented from Wally Heider's that could be used any time of year. Later, for practical reasons, new sound system equipment was developed for the road that could also be multipurpose installed as a more durable setup in the house. Kind of a weird way to do it, sure, but it isn't as if this was designed to constrain and control Brian. He was personally wealthy enough that he could've had a permanent studio built outside of the Beach Boys corporation if he'd wanted. When the equipment was moved out of the house at Marilyn's behest, Brian spent years talking about wishing he had it back.

[guitarfool2002]

My main criticisms, which you're conveniently avoiding to address this strawman argument, are the fact that they forced a home studio into his house he couldn't even use without THEIR permission. (So, all the extra expectations of productivity and other people coming and going in YOUR HOUSE at their pleasure, but none of the benefits for you).

Forest for tree here, but I think this is another example casting the Beach Boys as monsters for something that didn't really happen the way you're framing it. Brian begged for a home studio! He went on and on about wanting one of his own for ages. Marilyn and Danny Hutton have both said as much. The original makeshift setup involved a Gates Radio Company console and equipment mostly rented from Wally Heider's that could be used any time of year. Later, for practical reasons, new sound system equipment was developed for the road that could also be multipurpose installed as a more durable setup in the house. Kind of a weird way to do it, sure, but it isn't as if this was designed to constrain and control Brian. He was personally wealthy enough that he could've had a permanent studio built outside of the Beach Boys corporation if he'd wanted. When the equipment was moved out of the house at Marilyn's behest, Brian spent years talking about wishing he had it back.

Now this gets into some of the deeper layers that were a factor during this specific time, and also gets into how the personal issues would have an effect on the music and the band's business. Brian may have wanted a home studio, no doubt he did because he had an ad hoc studio at his previous house with expensive tape machines (including his own 8-track machine) and primitive mixers as early as 1966, we have photo evidence. But when it got into say 1969-70-71 was Brian actually actively using the studio in his house? It did become like a business venture for the band more than a place for Brian to work on his music. He rarely ventured down to the studio when the guys were there working except to occasionally offer a suggestion. Yet he and his wife and kids (key point to come there...) heard what the band was doing.

Picture having two daughters under 5 years old, a wife/mother taking care of them, and all the other issues of being a homeowner. And then you have a studio running at who knows what hours where you'd hear the tracks being recorded and mixed in your own home. What if you needed a break so to speak? Nope, this was the business agreement made with the band/corporation and these guys needed to record.

I'm just thinking that arrangement wore thin after some point, from a personal perspective, and again Brian who had the studio in his house was probably the least involved in actually using it at various points in time during that era.

There was also the situation where I believe it was Mike had invested in some of the road gear, which was also rented out to other acts, so he was collecting rental fees when the band toured with that live sound equipment as well as if it were rented to other acts. Check with Desper on that one...but was Brian getting anything for the use of his house apart from the gear itself, which he didn't personally own outright?

And the personal layer is as simple as imagine raising a family with a baby and toddler and dealing with that, and having musicians coming and going and recording music that you could hear in the house, and that's just on Marilyn's side. With Brian, if he were 22 again and super competitive and brimming with ideas to put his band on the top of the charts, he'd be in that studio cutting tracks whenever he wanted. By 1969 that simply wasn't the case, and yes he DID agree to the business arrangement for the studio, but man that probably got old pretty quick if there was little or no break from music being made in that studio and people coming and going when Brian wasn't even directly involved.

Just raising that as one issue out of many where the personal and the business/music intersected, perhaps negatively, and how what seemed like a good idea could turn sour.

Point being, maybe Brian loved the idea of having a studio setup like that in his house, but the reality and everyday issues surrounding that reality weren't as great as the concept and they were a few years too late in the execution.

[guitarfool2002]

As ever, it's a deeply nuanced situation where the personal relationships and working dynamics do and don't clash. Nobody would deny that Brian and Carl had a difficult time with each other in the post-Landy years. It's the idea that Carl was being disingenuous in the Was interview and in his general attitude about Brian's music that I think just isn't a fair or accurate characterisation of the guy.

The oft repeated accusation that Carl hated Brian's new tunes and shut down the Beach Boys reunion sessions is such a puzzling thing when you actually get down to what's been said about it. Because, well... he just didn't.

The Baywatch Nights session was a one-off in March '95. According to Andy, he thought the session with Carl and Mike had gone well, until afterwards Brian announced without explanation that he'd hated the experienced and never wanted to do it again. The "Beach Boys are trying to destroy me" interview appeared a few months down the line. I'm not refreshed on whether the snubbed listening invite happened in '94 or '95, but again according to Andy, there was a listening session with Carl at Don Was' house in 1995 where Carl reacted very favourably to the material. Only two days at Ocean Way were booked in November as a test to see if the group would get on with each other, which they apparently did, aside from a slightly strange atmosphere around Mike, who arrived on his lonesome on the second afternoon. Eyewitnesses (Mike Harris, Cindy Lee Berryhill, Andy Paley, Matt Jardine) all describe an enthusiastic atmosphere with Carl upbeat, professional, and down to sing whatever Brian wanted however he wanted it.

Nothing further was planned, but the thought was that the sessions might move to Don Was' Chomsky Ranch studio on the proviso that he coordinate their schedules. He didn't, and in Don's own memory of what happened next (via Mark Dillon's book), a month passed before he told Brian that the material wasn't up to snuff, and that he should write better songs before they work on an album. Brian's enthusiasm obviously evaporated at that, and the situation never came up again. The group had already committed to Stars & Stripes at that point (started beforehand, in October '95) and by early 1996 were in Nashville working with Joe Thomas. Brian and Melinda put the blame on Carl for changing his tune and deciding Soul Searchin' wasn't commercial enough some amount of time after the fact, but clearly whenever this conversation took place it was already a non-starter. Bruce was gunning for the group to work with Sean O'Hagan and Melinda was gunning for Brian to focus on a solo album with Joe Thomas. Carl certainly didn't shut a project in progress down, and it isn't a situation where you can assign blame to any one person. Don Was, if someone has to take the fall.

Thank you for adding those details. I do think though that some of the scenes in question are being conflated into other issues, and some points mentioned that were more isolated cases, like the whole Baywatch Nights debacle.

I think trying to "blame" Don Was in these cases is similar to those who try to blame or assign more weight to one factor over others for the collapse of Smile in '67. It's not possible to do so because of so many external influences and other moving parts.

There are several very strong undercurrents running at this time in the band's and Brian's timeline. Some of them are personal and interpersonal, some are business, and some are just they way things happened in the process. You cannot point a finger at Don Was without pointing another at Carl, and then the rest of the band. Remember The Beach Boys at this point were a corporation. And they were also a group lost in the wilderness desperately trying to get a label deal. They had no original music to offer of any consequence, yet were still basking in the afterglow of the renewed interest in their back catalog Capitol classics, from the box set to the reissues to TV appearances. And yet they couldn't score a new deal and had no songs to speak of in the can to get such a deal. Most deals, I'm fairly certain, hinged on Brian's involvement in the music and his name being attached to any project. Even Joe Thomas had to make deals to get Willie Nelson involved to bring Brian on board, since he was not interested in it otherwise. And in fairness, he did have dozens of songs in reserve if they needed them - which they did.

Now how much power did Don Was have, and what did he think his role was? He originally wanted to work with Brian, and began doing so, cutting original tracks with Paley and Don's regular crew of session cats like Waddy. When Brian became "free", he told Don he wanted to make music with The Boys again. So did that shift Don's role from working with Brian as he wanted to do to working with "The Beach Boys", which is an entirely different set of circumstances. Did Don eventually balk at the group politics and dynamics associated with that, could that have been a factor too? Did Don simply feel that after hearing "The Beach Boys" on songs he had been working up with Brian and Paley that they were not what The Beach Boys needed to make a hit? Maybe good for a Brian solo project, maybe not for what The Beach Boys were looking for?

Then factor in the interpersonal stuff, including the lawsuits (plural), the tensions already in the band without Brian's involvement, and the tension with Brian's return and the past several years of nonsense that went on.

It was not a good time. The details could fill pages. But I think again the family issues and at times turmoil mixed with jealousy and resentment contributed as much to various happenings as anything a producer-for-hire like Don Was could have had an effect. And again I'm curious to hear and speculate whether Don was fully on-board producing the Beach Boys rather than just working with Brian, and whether at any points he may have asked "did I sign up for this?" when it shifted from working with Brian to trying to get The Beach Boys a record deal and back on the charts with new material.

I/we could add much more to this but that's a start.

To be clear, I'm not actually blaming Was as the reason it fell apart, I used that comparison to highlight that he probably shouldered more direct responsibility for the project not going forward than Carl, who can't have been more than another cog in the general vague sputtering out of this thing rather than the arch villain. A lot of conflict and dramatic objections tend to be to put into the telling of what happened here but in my view, after doing a lot of digging, the album basically just crumbled into the rear view under indifference and mismanagement the way a lot of Beach Boys ideas tend to. They all hold responsibility for fumbling the potential. It was plainly a huge failing of them all for not rallying behind an enthusiastic Brian who had material that sounded as good as You're Still a Mystery. While Carl likely didn't help, nobody else lifted a finger to keep it going, and Bruce was actively going out of his way to start them on something else. Don Was probably just undervalued that it took a miracle to get them together in the first place, and they'd need to keep being glued in close proximity under cohesive leadership or it wouldn't happen at all. Joe Thomas, for all the questionable things he did with music, was a "get stuff done" guy who spoke corporate and knew how to maintain the balance. He wasn't taking his time between calls and turning up to places barefoot.

I do think that Don Was wanted to work with the Beach Boys. What he was after was a Pet Sounds 2 for current times, and he said as much in interviews. He envisioned Brian and Mike writing deep stuff about working through their family troubles, probably not songs titled Baywatch Nights. During the IJWMFTT doc shoot in 1994, he was filmed on the phone pitching to Elliott Lott the idea of getting the guys down to a studio and singing parts on one of Brian's new tracks on camera (Proud Mary floated as an option), just to test them working together again and get a positive public image rolling. I think working with Brian was one thing, working on a competent Beach Boys album of Brian Wilson songs was the real ambition. Proud Mary, Wasserman's Trios, and the documentary remakes aside, he had been fairly distant to what Brian and Andy were stacking up in the studio until this came together in November 1995.

Yes, and just for the record I remember all of this stuff trickling out into the music press in 95 and 96, and I still have "Pulse!" magazine, Tower Records' in-house magazine from November 1995, Brian and Van Dyke on the cover promoting Orange Crate Art. That's where there was a sidebar article about Don Was working with Brian and describing how he told them how uplifting it would be to write a song about about the truths of their lives and family, etc...and they came back with Baywatch Nights.

I've posted that article or at least clips/scans of sections on this board in past years, not sure if they're still accessible, but I'd highly recommend looking for that Pulse! issue Nov. 1995 for the interview. That is also where Brian tells about the Boys not returning his calls and not showing up for the listening party he had invited them to, and it says Brian was hurt by this (obviously!).

Similarly, I have Mix magazine March 1996 where Brian is interviewed by "Bonzai", invited by Don Was to the studio where Don's crew was recording with Brian and Andy, to photograph and interview Brian. That article has some neat descriptions of the recording process Don was helming at the time, and how Don and the guys were cutting the tracks live and sometimes on the fly to capture that electric live feel of the past. Brian also mentions how Carl was excited about the track "Soul Searchin" ('Carl liked it a lot') after saying Andy wrote most of that himself, and in Brian's mind, quote, "Andy was a hero to Carl".

There's also a quote at the end of the Pulse! article where Don Was says of Brian and Andy's new songs "of the 40 new songs we've got, a handful are as good as anything he's written."

That last quote would seem to contradict the notion that Don didn't feel the material was strong enough. So was Don's opinion that the material was as good as anything Brian had written, but not what The Beach Boys were looking for? Maybe that's the crux of it. But it would seem like a direct contradiction for him to say that, then say the material wasn't up to par.

[WillJC]

As ever, it's a deeply nuanced situation where the personal relationships and working dynamics do and don't clash. Nobody would deny that Brian and Carl had a difficult time with each other in the post-Landy years. It's the idea that Carl was being disingenuous in the Was interview and in his general attitude about Brian's music that I think just isn't a fair or accurate characterisation of the guy.

The oft repeated accusation that Carl hated Brian's new tunes and shut down the Beach Boys reunion sessions is such a puzzling thing when you actually get down to what's been said about it. Because, well... he just didn't.

The Baywatch Nights session was a one-off in March '95. According to Andy, he thought the session with Carl and Mike had gone well, until afterwards Brian announced without explanation that he'd hated the experienced and never wanted to do it again. The "Beach Boys are trying to destroy me" interview appeared a few months down the line. I'm not refreshed on whether the snubbed listening invite happened in '94 or '95, but again according to Andy, there was a listening session with Carl at Don Was' house in 1995 where Carl reacted very favourably to the material. Only two days at Ocean Way were booked in November as a test to see if the group would get on with each other, which they apparently did, aside from a slightly strange atmosphere around Mike, who arrived on his lonesome on the second afternoon. Eyewitnesses (Mike Harris, Cindy Lee Berryhill, Andy Paley, Matt Jardine) all describe an enthusiastic atmosphere with Carl upbeat, professional, and down to sing whatever Brian wanted however he wanted it.

Nothing further was planned, but the thought was that the sessions might move to Don Was' Chomsky Ranch studio on the proviso that he coordinate their schedules. He didn't, and in Don's own memory of what happened next (via Mark Dillon's book), a month passed before he told Brian that the material wasn't up to snuff, and that he should write better songs before they work on an album. Brian's enthusiasm obviously evaporated at that, and the situation never came up again. The group had already committed to Stars & Stripes at that point (started beforehand, in October '95) and by early 1996 were in Nashville working with Joe Thomas. Brian and Melinda put the blame on Carl for changing his tune and deciding Soul Searchin' wasn't commercial enough some amount of time after the fact, but clearly whenever this conversation took place it was already a non-starter. Bruce was gunning for the group to work with Sean O'Hagan and Melinda was gunning for Brian to focus on a solo album with Joe Thomas. Carl certainly didn't shut a project in progress down, and it isn't a situation where you can assign blame to any one person. Don Was, if someone has to take the fall.

Thank you for adding those details. I do think though that some of the scenes in question are being conflated into other issues, and some points mentioned that were more isolated cases, like the whole Baywatch Nights debacle.

I think trying to "blame" Don Was in these cases is similar to those who try to blame or assign more weight to one factor over others for the collapse of Smile in '67. It's not possible to do so because of so many external influences and other moving parts.

There are several very strong undercurrents running at this time in the band's and Brian's timeline. Some of them are personal and interpersonal, some are business, and some are just they way things happened in the process. You cannot point a finger at Don Was without pointing another at Carl, and then the rest of the band. Remember The Beach Boys at this point were a corporation. And they were also a group lost in the wilderness desperately trying to get a label deal. They had no original music to offer of any consequence, yet were still basking in the afterglow of the renewed interest in their back catalog Capitol classics, from the box set to the reissues to TV appearances. And yet they couldn't score a new deal and had no songs to speak of in the can to get such a deal. Most deals, I'm fairly certain, hinged on Brian's involvement in the music and his name being attached to any project. Even Joe Thomas had to make deals to get Willie Nelson involved to bring Brian on board, since he was not interested in it otherwise. And in fairness, he did have dozens of songs in reserve if they needed them - which they did.

Now how much power did Don Was have, and what did he think his role was? He originally wanted to work with Brian, and began doing so, cutting original tracks with Paley and Don's regular crew of session cats like Waddy. When Brian became "free", he told Don he wanted to make music with The Boys again. So did that shift Don's role from working with Brian as he wanted to do to working with "The Beach Boys", which is an entirely different set of circumstances. Did Don eventually balk at the group politics and dynamics associated with that, could that have been a factor too? Did Don simply feel that after hearing "The Beach Boys" on songs he had been working up with Brian and Paley that they were not what The Beach Boys needed to make a hit? Maybe good for a Brian solo project, maybe not for what The Beach Boys were looking for?

Then factor in the interpersonal stuff, including the lawsuits (plural), the tensions already in the band without Brian's involvement, and the tension with Brian's return and the past several years of nonsense that went on.

It was not a good time. The details could fill pages. But I think again the family issues and at times turmoil mixed with jealousy and resentment contributed as much to various happenings as anything a producer-for-hire like Don Was could have had an effect. And again I'm curious to hear and speculate whether Don was fully on-board producing the Beach Boys rather than just working with Brian, and whether at any points he may have asked "did I sign up for this?" when it shifted from working with Brian to trying to get The Beach Boys a record deal and back on the charts with new material.

I/we could add much more to this but that's a start.

To be clear, I'm not actually blaming Was as the reason it fell apart, I used that comparison to highlight that he probably shouldered more direct responsibility for the project not going forward than Carl, who can't have been more than another cog in the general vague sputtering out of this thing rather than the arch villain. A lot of conflict and dramatic objections tend to be to put into the telling of what happened here but in my view, after doing a lot of digging, the album basically just crumbled into the rear view under indifference and mismanagement the way a lot of Beach Boys ideas tend to. They all hold responsibility for fumbling the potential. It was plainly a huge failing of them all for not rallying behind an enthusiastic Brian who had material that sounded as good as You're Still a Mystery. While Carl likely didn't help, nobody else lifted a finger to keep it going, and Bruce was actively going out of his way to start them on something else. Don Was probably just undervalued that it took a miracle to get them together in the first place, and they'd need to keep being glued in close proximity under cohesive leadership or it wouldn't happen at all. Joe Thomas, for all the questionable things he did with music, was a "get stuff done" guy who spoke corporate and knew how to maintain the balance. He wasn't taking his time between calls and turning up to places barefoot.

I do think that Don Was wanted to work with the Beach Boys. What he was after was a Pet Sounds 2 for current times, and he said as much in interviews. He envisioned Brian and Mike writing deep stuff about working through their family troubles, probably not songs titled Baywatch Nights. During the IJWMFTT doc shoot in 1994, he was filmed on the phone pitching to Elliott Lott the idea of getting the guys down to a studio and singing parts on one of Brian's new tracks on camera (Proud Mary floated as an option), just to test them working together again and get a positive public image rolling. I think working with Brian was one thing, working on a competent Beach Boys album of Brian Wilson songs was the real ambition. Proud Mary, Wasserman's Trios, and the documentary remakes aside, he had been fairly distant to what Brian and Andy were stacking up in the studio until this came together in November 1995.

Yes, and just for the record I remember all of this stuff trickling out into the music press in 95 and 96, and I still have "Pulse!" magazine, Tower Records' in-house magazine from November 1995, Brian and Van Dyke on the cover promoting Orange Crate Art. That's where there was a sidebar article about Don Was working with Brian and describing how he told them how uplifting it would be to write a song about about the truths of their lives and family, etc...and they came back with Baywatch Nights.

I've posted that article or at least clips/scans of sections on this board in past years, not sure if they're still accessible, but I'd highly recommend looking for that Pulse! issue Nov. 1995 for the interview. That is also where Brian tells about the Boys not returning his calls and not showing up for the listening party he had invited them to, and it says Brian was hurt by this (obviously!).

Similarly, I have Mix magazine March 1996 where Brian is interviewed by "Bonzai", invited by Don Was to the studio where Don's crew was recording with Brian and Andy, to photograph and interview Brian. That article has some neat descriptions of the recording process Don was helming at the time, and how Don and the guys were cutting the tracks live and sometimes on the fly to capture that electric live feel of the past. Brian also mentions how Carl was excited about the track "Soul Searchin" ('Carl liked it a lot') after saying Andy wrote most of that himself, and in Brian's mind, quote, "Andy was a hero to Carl".

There's also a quote at the end of the Pulse! article where Don Was says of Brian and Andy's new songs "of the 40 new songs we've got, a handful are as good as anything he's written."

That last quote would seem to contradict the notion that Don didn't feel the material was strong enough. So was Don's opinion that the material was as good as anything Brian had written, but not what The Beach Boys were looking for? Maybe that's the crux of it. But it would seem like a direct contradiction for him to say that, then say the material wasn't up to par.

Oh yeah, thanks, the Pulse issue, that's the one I was thinking of. I've read that one and I've heard of the Bonzai interview in Mix magazine but have never been able to find a copy. Would you be able to post that anywhere if it's in reach? Really interested to read about any studio behind the scenes. I'm guessing that was reporting on the Nov 7 and 8 sessions at Ocean Way, where they cut basic tracks for Soul Searchin', You're Still a Mystery, It's Not Easy Being Me and Turn On Your Love Light, a week and a half before the Beach Boys came in and sang. Pulse being the interview where Brian mentions them cancelling on his listening invite makes sense of the timeline - it's a few months down the line from the aborted March attempt, then it must've been shortly after this that Carl did go along to Don Was' house with Brian and Andy to hear what they'd been working on.

Noticed this as well in the Pulse report from Don: "Halfway through the movie, what Brian said to me was, 'I want more than anything to make a Beach Boys album, but you go talk to them.' So I did, and they were all anxious to work with him. Since the film is partly about him repairing his damaged relationships, I thought, fine - let's get it on film, even if it's uncomfortable. They were all receptive to that, but ultimately the lawsuits prevented it from happening." I'd forgotten about the context behind it, but that's exactly what he did during the shoot. That was early August '94 and he was trying to arrange for the others to drop in alongside Carl. Didn't know what postponed it so long, but, um... the lawsuit would make sense.

It would kind of make sense that Don had different expectations about a Brian Wilson album and a Beach Boys album. A new Brian solo record didn't have to change the world, but with the Beach Boys, he said himself that he was fretting about making a worthy successor to Pet Sounds, which was obviously in everyone's ears around the time of the 30th anniversary.

[WillJC]

My main criticisms, which you're conveniently avoiding to address this strawman argument, are the fact that they forced a home studio into his house he couldn't even use without THEIR permission. (So, all the extra expectations of productivity and other people coming and going in YOUR HOUSE at their pleasure, but none of the benefits for you).

Forest for tree here, but I think this is another example casting the Beach Boys as monsters for something that didn't really happen the way you're framing it. Brian begged for a home studio! He went on and on about wanting one of his own for ages. Marilyn and Danny Hutton have both said as much. The original makeshift setup involved a Gates Radio Company console and equipment mostly rented from Wally Heider's that could be used any time of year. Later, for practical reasons, new sound system equipment was developed for the road that could also be multipurpose installed as a more durable setup in the house. Kind of a weird way to do it, sure, but it isn't as if this was designed to constrain and control Brian. He was personally wealthy enough that he could've had a permanent studio built outside of the Beach Boys corporation if he'd wanted. When the equipment was moved out of the house at Marilyn's behest, Brian spent years talking about wishing he had it back.

Now this gets into some of the deeper layers that were a factor during this specific time, and also gets into how the personal issues would have an effect on the music and the band's business. Brian may have wanted a home studio, no doubt he did because he had an ad hoc studio at his previous house with expensive tape machines (including his own 8-track machine) and primitive mixers as early as 1966, we have photo evidence. But when it got into say 1969-70-71 was Brian actually actively using the studio in his house? It did become like a business venture for the band more than a place for Brian to work on his music. He rarely ventured down to the studio when the guys were there working except to occasionally offer a suggestion. Yet he and his wife and kids (key point to come there...) heard what the band was doing.

Picture having two daughters under 5 years old, a wife/mother taking care of them, and all the other issues of being a homeowner. And then you have a studio running at who knows what hours where you'd hear the tracks being recorded and mixed in your own home. What if you needed a break so to speak? Nope, this was the business agreement made with the band/corporation and these guys needed to record.

I'm just thinking that arrangement wore thin after some point, from a personal perspective, and again Brian who had the studio in his house was probably the least involved in actually using it at various points in time during that era.

There was also the situation where I believe it was Mike had invested in some of the road gear, which was also rented out to other acts, so he was collecting rental fees when the band toured with that live sound equipment as well as if it were rented to other acts. Check with Desper on that one...but was Brian getting anything for the use of his house apart from the gear itself, which he didn't personally own outright?

And the personal layer is as simple as imagine raising a family with a baby and toddler and dealing with that, and having musicians coming and going and recording music that you could hear in the house, and that's just on Marilyn's side. With Brian, if he were 22 again and super competitive and brimming with ideas to put his band on the top of the charts, he'd be in that studio cutting tracks whenever he wanted. By 1969 that simply wasn't the case, and yes he DID agree to the business arrangement for the studio, but man that probably got old pretty quick if there was little or no break from music being made in that studio and people coming and going when Brian wasn't even directly involved.

Just raising that as one issue out of many where the personal and the business/music intersected, perhaps negatively, and how what seemed like a good idea could turn sour.

Point being, maybe Brian loved the idea of having a studio setup like that in his house, but the reality and everyday issues surrounding that reality weren't as great as the concept and they were a few years too late in the execution.

No disagreement with any of this, all great observations. I just object to the original framing of it (not in your post) as if the Beach Boys forced a studio into Brian's home that he could then only use when they allowed, evilly, as if it was a sinister machination to hold his leash. It was basically an amenity that Brian wanted at first, then life and convenience changed around it. Danny Hutton likened it to having a private pool; once you've got it, it's so easily in reach that the thing sort of loses appeal. And then imagine that, but Al Jardine is also in your pool.

[Julia]

Its what Brian wanted to some extent to avoid having to book time, not get flak for touching the console, not have his tapes hanging around where other people could sneak a peak (he really believed the SMiLE tapes were leaked and felt "like he was raped" according to one source I've seen.)

But the fact that he couldn't record without the guys there or without their permission I think is pretty skeevy any way you slice it. Admittedly sources can be biased and most are pro-Brian but a lot of them that I've read frame it as the group trying to control him that way. It feels like being shackled to work too, like "you better record every idea you get as it comes so we can profit off of it!" Then you factor in the guys coming and going through his house as they please, like GF was saying, or badgering him to participate (and forcing him to listen as noise leaked through the floor/walls) it sounds almost like a prison to me. Some of the sources like Anderle and Hal have said as much "when they built the studio, it [Brian's golden age] was all over" words to that effect. It's a nice gift in theory but definitely one with strings attached, or an unspoken understanding of "make this worth it."

But Im not here to quibble that everything I've read is an accurate depiction or that the guys were bad people. The point is, it was a complicated situation and they could've been more appreciative and/or more willing to take a haircut if it meant their bro/cousin/friend who made them millionaire stars got to do what made him happy. And I die on the hill anyway that in late 60s-early 70s what Brian wanted was to expand beyond the BBs--still producing them here and there but doing other groups too. They put the kibosh on that. That's the big "sin" I can't let go of, they denied him the human right to pursue his own happiness. Someone might say "hey man they didn't hold a gun to his head" and that's true but they bullied an extremely passive, childlike, mentally unwell guy in public till he broke and that's hardly honorable either.

I don't know. They all had their pros and cons. All I was saying when this whole thing started is I think Carl made some mistakes he should be held to task for and isn't the whited saint he's often made out to be. If I got some things wrong I'll admit my sources could be biased but I think the general principle still stands.

[HeyJude]

Watching that Mike Harris recap of his visit to that ’95 BB session, it’s obviously fascinating and I’m glad he did it.

I also feel based on my gut that if any of us were in the room just like he was, we probably would have interpreted things at least slightly differently. Some people are better or worse about picking up vibes and reading people, and reading a room. And some folks know the various BBs better than others and can interpret things better or worse.

I often think back to the quote Bruce Johnston gave to Howie Edelson regarding the BBs working on those Paley tracks:

"That was a courtesy to Brian for us to be there. Brian certainly wasn't at any kind of peak in those days, but we respected his history and achievements for us to go and record with him and see what it might sound like. We were just trying to support someone who had been successful and good for us. I think if you use your ears, you'll hear that those tapes don't really lift off. It's fine -- but not fine enough."

That doesn’t exactly sound like someone that is particularly enthusiastic about working on the material.

I think a lot of the people involved in working on that material didn’t fully “get it”; they were not in the mode of the BB indie nerds in the mid 90s, who would have dug on something like “You’re Still A Mystery.” I think some of the people involved were in the mode of “Kokomo”, and by that I don’t mean trying to make a song that sounds just like “Kokomo.” Rather, they were still in the mindset of trying to get “a hit”, as in a hit single. What they should have been doing (in my opinion obviously) was cutting a good album that critics would like and would maybe get them some award noms.

If Don Was said the material wasn’t good enough, was he right? Depends! I think the best 10-12 cuts with BB vocals would have done well with critics. But none of those songs were going to be a hit single. So I’m not sure where Don Was would be coming from. I think a project like that was always going to be VERY fragile, and Was just kind of blurting to Brian that the material wasn’t good enough would certainly NOT be a good idea if you’re trying to keep the fragile momentum going.

I often comment on how people like Gary Usher, Andy Paley, and Don Was couldn’t actually get their projects done and out the door, whereas Joe Thomas was able to do it.

You really have to go to Joe Thomas in 2011/2012 to see how something like that would need to be done. You need an industry guy, and also a guy both with a lot of money and access to people with a lot of money, and you spearhead the thing. It also helps when there’s a timecrunch/hard deadline, which there was with TWGMTR, which minimized the carping and back-and-forth about whose songs go where. Joe came in with a record deal based on songs he had written with Brian, he already had some backing tracks cut, and, as one person once put it, “clapped his hands and said ‘now here’s what we’re gonna do’.”

Mike Harris’s description of that ’95 BB session does not sound like anybody is clapping their hands and *telling* everybody what’s going to go down. You’ve got randos coming in and out of the studio, you’ve got three co-producers. Andy Paley certainly doesn’t sound like he felt he could take charge of that session.

And meanwhile it sounds like everybody but kinda Mike came in and did a professional job, but I suspect someone like Bruce just viewed the whole thing as a lark. Al seems to have liked the material, but nobody really cared much what Al thought based on his position in the organization.

Setting aside the observers at that ’95 session, I don’t think anybody in the control room *loved* the material they were working on other than Andy Paley, kinda Brian (because he could waffle), and maybe Al and Matt Jardine. I think Carl was a pro and did the work, and I doubt he *hated* the songs. But we know his musical sensibilities were askew in that time period (e.g. the wonky AC sounds of “Beckley/Lamm/Wilson”). I think Bruce just showed up and did whatever, and you can see based on his own later comments that he didn’t think the material was that strong. And Mike obviously had a whole potential bag full of issues, rooted not only in musical taste, but ego, and corporate politics, and so on.

That’s not a recipe for getting an album finished and released. You kind of either need to be in “Pet Sounds” mode where someone’s running the thing and everybody else comes in and does as they’re told, or you need most if not all of the participants to “get it” and truly be on board. Not there “as a courtesy”, not there with a circumspect frame of mind. But enthusiastic about the material. Or at the very least being utterly neutral and willing to do whatever they’re told.

[HeyJude]

Personally, as someone who watched IJWMFTT recently, I thought Carl was lying too. Just the way he said it, it didn't sound very enthusiastic, just him being able to read the room. (You dont go on a documentary about someone and trash their work, you don't admit to disappointed fans you're part of the reason something didn't come out.) Carl, I think, was kind of more Mike-like than a lot of fans give him credit for. I think he was shrewd, commercial-oriented, not a particularly gifted songwriter and "political" (IE fake, strategic). Something about him kinda rubs me the wrong way I can't totally put my finger on, like he was just as entitled as Mike but had better PR.

The “I Just Wasn’t Made for These Times” film is a good film for getting vibe/sense of Brian at that time period, and for getting some sense for things that had happened in the past. But it’s something like 70 minutes long, and Carl Wilson is in it for all of a minute or two. I don’t think we know enough about Carl Wilson to reach any of these conclusions, and his scant interview comments in IJWMFTT are certainly not enough to even *vibe* anything much, let alone make any broader judgements.

A dude wrote a biography of Carl several years back and had very little to work with; Carl didn’t give a lot of interviews, and to his credit, he cultivated relationships with people around him such that they are not willing to talk in much detail about him beyond simple fond remembrances.

I don’t think Carl was *anything* like Mike personality wise. I do think Carl, especially in later years, kind of just acquiesced and let Mike kind of run the band. Carl apparently didn’t side with Al in the late 90s when Al complained that Mike wanted his (Mike’s) company to run the Beach Boys tours. I don’t think Carl had any particular moral failings; I think he got either lazy or, or put more sympathetically, lost the energy to keep things about the band a bit more progressive. The setlist got very stale *with* Carl in the band in 1996/97. He was willing to let Mike run the tours. He didn’t think Brian would be able to do a “Pet Sounds” tour with the band. Most of these things are simply a case of things being different in the mid-late 90s. We don’t know if Carl would have gotten on board for more progressive setlists in the 2000s had he lived. Brian’s solo tours obviously would have been proof that Brian could handle touring, and touring full albums. We don’t know how Carl would have reacted to that.

I don’t think Carl was some sort of shrewd player like Mike. I think he was just sometimes diplomatic and sometimes passive, and those traits are often useful and then sometimes problematic.

[Lonely Summer]

Personally, as someone who watched IJWMFTT recently, I thought Carl was lying too. Just the way he said it, it didn't sound very enthusiastic, just him being able to read the room. (You dont go on a documentary about someone and trash their work, you don't admit to disappointed fans you're part of the reason something didn't come out.) Carl, I think, was kind of more Mike-like than a lot of fans give him credit for. I think he was shrewd, commercial-oriented, not a particularly gifted songwriter and "political" (IE fake, strategic). Something about him kinda rubs me the wrong way I can't totally put my finger on, like he was just as entitled as Mike but had better PR.

The “I Just Wasn’t Made for These Times” film is a good film for getting vibe/sense of Brian at that time period, and for getting some sense for things that had happened in the past. But it’s something like 70 minutes long, and Carl Wilson is in it for all of a minute or two. I don’t think we know enough about Carl Wilson to reach any of these conclusions, and his scant interview comments in IJWMFTT are certainly not enough to even *vibe* anything much, let alone make any broader judgements.

A dude wrote a biography of Carl several years back and had very little to work with; Carl didn’t give a lot of interviews, and to his credit, he cultivated relationships with people around him such that they are not willing to talk in much detail about him beyond simple fond remembrances.

I don’t think Carl was *anything* like Mike personality wise. I do think Carl, especially in later years, kind of just acquiesced and let Mike kind of run the band. Carl apparently didn’t side with Al in the late 90s when Al complained that Mike wanted his (Mike’s) company to run the Beach Boys tours. I don’t think Carl had any particular moral failings; I think he got either lazy or, or put more sympathetically, lost the energy to keep things about the band a bit more progressive. The setlist got very stale *with* Carl in the band in 1996/97. He was willing to let Mike run the tours. He didn’t think Brian would be able to do a “Pet Sounds” tour with the band. Most of these things are simply a case of things being different in the mid-late 90s. We don’t know if Carl would have gotten on board for more progressive setlists in the 2000s had he lived. Brian’s solo tours obviously would have been proof that Brian could handle touring, and touring full albums. We don’t know how Carl would have reacted to that.

I don’t think Carl was some sort of shrewd player like Mike. I think he was just sometimes diplomatic and sometimes passive, and those traits are often useful and then sometimes problematic.

Agreed.

[guitarfool2002]

As ever, it's a deeply nuanced situation where the personal relationships and working dynamics do and don't clash. Nobody would deny that Brian and Carl had a difficult time with each other in the post-Landy years. It's the idea that Carl was being disingenuous in the Was interview and in his general attitude about Brian's music that I think just isn't a fair or accurate characterisation of the guy.

The oft repeated accusation that Carl hated Brian's new tunes and shut down the Beach Boys reunion sessions is such a puzzling thing when you actually get down to what's been said about it. Because, well... he just didn't.

The Baywatch Nights session was a one-off in March '95. According to Andy, he thought the session with Carl and Mike had gone well, until afterwards Brian announced without explanation that he'd hated the experienced and never wanted to do it again. The "Beach Boys are trying to destroy me" interview appeared a few months down the line. I'm not refreshed on whether the snubbed listening invite happened in '94 or '95, but again according to Andy, there was a listening session with Carl at Don Was' house in 1995 where Carl reacted very favourably to the material. Only two days at Ocean Way were booked in November as a test to see if the group would get on with each other, which they apparently did, aside from a slightly strange atmosphere around Mike, who arrived on his lonesome on the second afternoon. Eyewitnesses (Mike Harris, Cindy Lee Berryhill, Andy Paley, Matt Jardine) all describe an enthusiastic atmosphere with Carl upbeat, professional, and down to sing whatever Brian wanted however he wanted it.

Nothing further was planned, but the thought was that the sessions might move to Don Was' Chomsky Ranch studio on the proviso that he coordinate their schedules. He didn't, and in Don's own memory of what happened next (via Mark Dillon's book), a month passed before he told Brian that the material wasn't up to snuff, and that he should write better songs before they work on an album. Brian's enthusiasm obviously evaporated at that, and the situation never came up again. The group had already committed to Stars & Stripes at that point (started beforehand, in October '95) and by early 1996 were in Nashville working with Joe Thomas. Brian and Melinda put the blame on Carl for changing his tune and deciding Soul Searchin' wasn't commercial enough some amount of time after the fact, but clearly whenever this conversation took place it was already a non-starter. Bruce was gunning for the group to work with Sean O'Hagan and Melinda was gunning for Brian to focus on a solo album with Joe Thomas. Carl certainly didn't shut a project in progress down, and it isn't a situation where you can assign blame to any one person. Don Was, if someone has to take the fall.

Thank you for adding those details. I do think though that some of the scenes in question are being conflated into other issues, and some points mentioned that were more isolated cases, like the whole Baywatch Nights debacle.

I think trying to "blame" Don Was in these cases is similar to those who try to blame or assign more weight to one factor over others for the collapse of Smile in '67. It's not possible to do so because of so many external influences and other moving parts.

There are several very strong undercurrents running at this time in the band's and Brian's timeline. Some of them are personal and interpersonal, some are business, and some are just they way things happened in the process. You cannot point a finger at Don Was without pointing another at Carl, and then the rest of the band. Remember The Beach Boys at this point were a corporation. And they were also a group lost in the wilderness desperately trying to get a label deal. They had no original music to offer of any consequence, yet were still basking in the afterglow of the renewed interest in their back catalog Capitol classics, from the box set to the reissues to TV appearances. And yet they couldn't score a new deal and had no songs to speak of in the can to get such a deal. Most deals, I'm fairly certain, hinged on Brian's involvement in the music and his name being attached to any project. Even Joe Thomas had to make deals to get Willie Nelson involved to bring Brian on board, since he was not interested in it otherwise. And in fairness, he did have dozens of songs in reserve if they needed them - which they did.

Now how much power did Don Was have, and what did he think his role was? He originally wanted to work with Brian, and began doing so, cutting original tracks with Paley and Don's regular crew of session cats like Waddy. When Brian became "free", he told Don he wanted to make music with The Boys again. So did that shift Don's role from working with Brian as he wanted to do to working with "The Beach Boys", which is an entirely different set of circumstances. Did Don eventually balk at the group politics and dynamics associated with that, could that have been a factor too? Did Don simply feel that after hearing "The Beach Boys" on songs he had been working up with Brian and Paley that they were not what The Beach Boys needed to make a hit? Maybe good for a Brian solo project, maybe not for what The Beach Boys were looking for?

Then factor in the interpersonal stuff, including the lawsuits (plural), the tensions already in the band without Brian's involvement, and the tension with Brian's return and the past several years of nonsense that went on.

It was not a good time. The details could fill pages. But I think again the family issues and at times turmoil mixed with jealousy and resentment contributed as much to various happenings as anything a producer-for-hire like Don Was could have had an effect. And again I'm curious to hear and speculate whether Don was fully on-board producing the Beach Boys rather than just working with Brian, and whether at any points he may have asked "did I sign up for this?" when it shifted from working with Brian to trying to get The Beach Boys a record deal and back on the charts with new material.

I/we could add much more to this but that's a start.

To be clear, I'm not actually blaming Was as the reason it fell apart, I used that comparison to highlight that he probably shouldered more direct responsibility for the project not going forward than Carl, who can't have been more than another cog in the general vague sputtering out of this thing rather than the arch villain. A lot of conflict and dramatic objections tend to be to put into the telling of what happened here but in my view, after doing a lot of digging, the album basically just crumbled into the rear view under indifference and mismanagement the way a lot of Beach Boys ideas tend to. They all hold responsibility for fumbling the potential. It was plainly a huge failing of them all for not rallying behind an enthusiastic Brian who had material that sounded as good as You're Still a Mystery. While Carl likely didn't help, nobody else lifted a finger to keep it going, and Bruce was actively going out of his way to start them on something else. Don Was probably just undervalued that it took a miracle to get them together in the first place, and they'd need to keep being glued in close proximity under cohesive leadership or it wouldn't happen at all. Joe Thomas, for all the questionable things he did with music, was a "get stuff done" guy who spoke corporate and knew how to maintain the balance. He wasn't taking his time between calls and turning up to places barefoot.

I do think that Don Was wanted to work with the Beach Boys. What he was after was a Pet Sounds 2 for current times, and he said as much in interviews. He envisioned Brian and Mike writing deep stuff about working through their family troubles, probably not songs titled Baywatch Nights. During the IJWMFTT doc shoot in 1994, he was filmed on the phone pitching to Elliott Lott the idea of getting the guys down to a studio and singing parts on one of Brian's new tracks on camera (Proud Mary floated as an option), just to test them working together again and get a positive public image rolling. I think working with Brian was one thing, working on a competent Beach Boys album of Brian Wilson songs was the real ambition. Proud Mary, Wasserman's Trios, and the documentary remakes aside, he had been fairly distant to what Brian and Andy were stacking up in the studio until this came together in November 1995.

Yes, and just for the record I remember all of this stuff trickling out into the music press in 95 and 96, and I still have "Pulse!" magazine, Tower Records' in-house magazine from November 1995, Brian and Van Dyke on the cover promoting Orange Crate Art. That's where there was a sidebar article about Don Was working with Brian and describing how he told them how uplifting it would be to write a song about about the truths of their lives and family, etc...and they came back with Baywatch Nights.

I've posted that article or at least clips/scans of sections on this board in past years, not sure if they're still accessible, but I'd highly recommend looking for that Pulse! issue Nov. 1995 for the interview. That is also where Brian tells about the Boys not returning his calls and not showing up for the listening party he had invited them to, and it says Brian was hurt by this (obviously!).

Similarly, I have Mix magazine March 1996 where Brian is interviewed by "Bonzai", invited by Don Was to the studio where Don's crew was recording with Brian and Andy, to photograph and interview Brian. That article has some neat descriptions of the recording process Don was helming at the time, and how Don and the guys were cutting the tracks live and sometimes on the fly to capture that electric live feel of the past. Brian also mentions how Carl was excited about the track "Soul Searchin" ('Carl liked it a lot') after saying Andy wrote most of that himself, and in Brian's mind, quote, "Andy was a hero to Carl".

There's also a quote at the end of the Pulse! article where Don Was says of Brian and Andy's new songs "of the 40 new songs we've got, a handful are as good as anything he's written."

That last quote would seem to contradict the notion that Don didn't feel the material was strong enough. So was Don's opinion that the material was as good as anything Brian had written, but not what The Beach Boys were looking for? Maybe that's the crux of it. But it would seem like a direct contradiction for him to say that, then say the material wasn't up to par.

Oh yeah, thanks, the Pulse issue, that's the one I was thinking of. I've read that one and I've heard of the Bonzai interview in Mix magazine but have never been able to find a copy. Would you be able to post that anywhere if it's in reach? Really interested to read about any studio behind the scenes. I'm guessing that was reporting on the Nov 7 and 8 sessions at Ocean Way, where they cut basic tracks for Soul Searchin', You're Still a Mystery, It's Not Easy Being Me and Turn On Your Love Light, a week and a half before the Beach Boys came in and sang. Pulse being the interview where Brian mentions them cancelling on his listening invite makes sense of the timeline - it's a few months down the line from the aborted March attempt, then it must've been shortly after this that Carl did go along to Don Was' house with Brian and Andy to hear what they'd been working on.

Noticed this as well in the Pulse report from Don: "Halfway through the movie, what Brian said to me was, 'I want more than anything to make a Beach Boys album, but you go talk to them.' So I did, and they were all anxious to work with him. Since the film is partly about him repairing his damaged relationships, I thought, fine - let's get it on film, even if it's uncomfortable. They were all receptive to that, but ultimately the lawsuits prevented it from happening." I'd forgotten about the context behind it, but that's exactly what he did during the shoot. That was early August '94 and he was trying to arrange for the others to drop in alongside Carl. Didn't know what postponed it so long, but, um... the lawsuit would make sense.

It would kind of make sense that Don had different expectations about a Brian Wilson album and a Beach Boys album. A new Brian solo record didn't have to change the world, but with the Beach Boys, he said himself that he was fretting about making a worthy successor to Pet Sounds, which was obviously in everyone's ears around the time of the 30th anniversary.

Will, I do have the March 1996 issue of Mix, the full magazine. I may not be able to get it scanned in the next week, but I will try. I've only posted bits and pieces in scans here in the past. Unfortunately a lot of the interview/article is Bonzai asking Brian to comment on Pet Sounds tracks, so it's heavier on that and lighter on the Don Was sessions, but there is still some good conversation and descriptions about the then-present time and Brian's takes on things rather than only revisiting 1966. But at that time even hearing Brian talk about PS track by track in a new article was pretty cool, although you can tell Brian was more interested in what he was working on in the studio with Don and Andy than he was rehashing Pet Sounds.

When I do get it scanned I will try to post it in this thread, just check back for updates.