Hello, from a not quite new member!

Hi Beach Boys fans!
I’ve been babbling away on this board for a few months now without properly introducing myself. I have two lame excuses for that: first, this is the first board I’ve ever joined and I didn’t know the proper etiquette; second, until today I’ve been doing all my reading and posting from my mobile communication device which is not convenient for writing longer or more thoughtful posts.
My Beach Boys background:
My dad was a fan. He was a great man (though flawed, of course) whom I loved very deeply and who influenced me in many ways. He was in the Navy before going to graduate school and was stationed from 1960-1964 in Long Beach, Ca. He saw Dick Dale, Jan and Dean and the Beach Boys and other local bands live in the region before he left. He was mainly a jazz fan and liked the SoCal surfey/beach club scene for the society more than he liked the music and didn’t buy any albums. But he followed the Beach Boys and really got into their late 60’s stuff. He had a massive record collection, all jazz except a smattering of classical, some Beach Boys, The Band, Aretha Franklin and Linda Ronstadt (the latter mostly because his girlfriend in the ‘70s was a big Ronstadt fan). Of the latter three, he had one album each. Of the Beach Boys he had: The Greatest Hits vol. 2, Pet Sounds, Smiley Smile, Wild Honey, Friends, Surf’s Up, Holland and In Concert. When I was young, I found the jazz he listened to (mostly bebop or hard bop, but some avant-garde and later some fusion and eventually Marsalises) hard to grasp so I mostly listened to the Beach Boys.
My dad thought Pet Sounds was a great tool for teaching me about instrumentation. The first time I went to the symphony I already understood, from Pet Sounds, the sounds that many of the instruments could make and what role they could each play and how an artist could use existing instruments to find new unexpected sounds.
As I’ve aged I’ve recognized what remarkable achievements Pet Sounds and the eventual SMiLE were. To bring such sophisticated instrumentation into popular music at that time was completely innovative and it was brilliantly done. The fact that the artist doing it had pretty much no formal training is still shocking.
I still love the post-SMiLE albums as my childhood music, and as awesome, sometimes interesting, sometimes fun, always in-the-groove stuff. Carl Wilson’s voice and Dennis Wilson’s songs were my particular favorites. (Though Carl Wilson’s voice was and is my MOST particular favorite thing to listen to.) I’ve never really pursued bootlegs, memorabilia, etc. But in the last year or two I’ve gotten a lot more active in learning more detail around the Beach Boys’ story.
I was out of the country, in real “third world” territory, for a bunch of the last decade and missed the whole Pet Sounds Live, BWPS era. For the latter few years of the last decade and the first few years of this one, my time was really absorbed with my job and raising a small child. My child is now old enough that she doesn’t really want to hang out with me anymore, so I’ve got time on my hands and am finally really absorbing the SMiLE Sessions and my fascination has increased, so here I am!

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