Relationships and Law and the Press

[Shady]

I work on the principle that everything I post here gets back to the 'interested parties'.

And it does. 

It's a wonder Melinda will still speak to you

She doesn't.

Sorry, I thought you two were OK. Is this recent, if you don't mind me asking?

Well... I'm assuming that since she requested (via the Bloo admin) that I don't post on Brian's board any more, I'm off the Christmas card list. Seems to have a problem with historical facts.

She kicked you from the blueboard, what a joke.

Yoko indeed 

[Alex]

Welcome to the board, Ms./Mrs. Keil (or can I just call you Debbie?)!! Nice to have yet another BB insider around these parts...gotta love the internet!

[The Heartical Don]

Welcome to the board, Ms./Mrs. Keil (or can I just call you Debbie?)!! Nice to have yet another BB insider around these parts...gotta love the internet!

OT, but I love your subscript: I like Winds Of Change too! It has been slagged off so many times, yet I think the melody is great, with large intervals between the notes. Had it been produced, arranged and sung in 1971 for Surf's Up, many folks would have an entirely different perspective on that song.

[dk]

Welcome to the board, Ms./Mrs. Keil (or can I just call you Debbie?)!! Nice to have yet another BB insider around these parts...gotta love the internet!

Thanks.  I'm not really an insider...more of an historian, I think...not a revisionist, though - just like to focus on what counts. 

Now I'm off to work on my book and lectures - astrology, not BBs - sorry...Just too many additions to our solar system to ignore!

Debbie

[♩♬🐸 Billy C ♯♫♩🐇]

Quick question: Out of the songs  you remember Brian working on during the time you spent with him, which was your favorite?

[Alex]

Welcome to the board, Ms./Mrs. Keil (or can I just call you Debbie?)!! Nice to have yet another BB insider around these parts...gotta love the internet!

Thanks.  I'm not really an insider...more of an historian, I think...not a revisionist, though - just like to focus on what counts. 

Now I'm off to work on my book and lectures - astrology, not BBs - sorry...Just too many additions to our solar system to ignore!

Debbie

Or "former insider/friend of BW", I guess!

[dk]

Quick question: Out of the songs  you remember Brian working on during the time you spent with him, which was your favorite?

He called it "The Angel Song."  Much of it appeared in "Don't Let Her Know She's and Angel."...Wish it had a different mix when it finally came out...Didn't sound much like Brian to me when it was released many years later - very "dumbed down" from what I heard originally...

Debbie

[GLarson432]

Jeez Debbie, your insights, knowledge, history is a really, really good addition to this board. 

Please don't go away anytime soon!

[The Heartical Don]

Could there be a recording of 'The Angel Song' (demo?) lying around on a dusty shelf somewhere?

[Rocker]

Quick question: Out of the songs  you remember Brian working on during the time you spent with him, which was your favorite?

He called it "The Angel Song."  Much of it appeared in "Don't Let Her Know She's and Angel."...Wish it had a different mix when it finally came out...Didn't sound much like Brian to me when it was released many years later - very "dumbed down" from what I heard originally...

Debbie

Hey, thank you. That was new to me. So "Don't let her..." was also "begun" in the 70s...
Did you hear the "Sweet Insanity"-version? Is that more like what you remembere?

[dk]

Quick question: Out of the songs  you remember Brian working on during the time you spent with him, which was your favorite?

He called it "The Angel Song."  Much of it appeared in "Don't Let Her Know She's and Angel."...Wish it had a different mix when it finally came out...Didn't sound much like Brian to me when it was released many years later - very "dumbed down" from what I heard originally...

Debbie

Hey, thank you. That was new to me. So "Don't let her..." was also "begun" in the 70s...
Did you hear the "Sweet Insanity"-version? Is that more like what you remembere?

[dk]

"The Angel Song" was written in either 1979-80 or 1980-81 - Christmas time.  The "Sweet Insanity" version was closer to the original, although there were a few other elements to it that made it a bit more dramatic as a song, but I liked the "Sweet Insanity" version, in any case.  Part of the original felt a little like the "flourish" part of "Goin' On."  It may have transmuted into that...It's a little hard to break it down, as I just heard the original melody on the piano when it was first pouring out of Brian.  I would say that it was the most enchanting music I ever heard.

Debbie

[hypehat]

Just wanted to say thank you, Debbie. It's really great to have you on board!   

[Mr. Wilson]

Hi Debbie..Please stay + hang out with us..I would LOVE to hear your recolections of BW creating songs..recordings..etc..Stay + talk about the music please..The other stuff we dont need to know..We know far to much allready..Talk about the music.. I love your story about  angel song....Didnt know it was that old..GOD bless..

[Julia]

It's not surprising really that Brian was interested in girls much younger than him (even 11 or 12, sick as it sounds)...he seemed to be attracted to (and hold in high regard) innocence, and obviously that tends to be a trait of younger girls as opposed to girls in their early 20s.  If I had to guess, I would think that these attractions he had weren't sexual in nature...Brian was just drawn to their innocence.

Thats mostly how Ive always seen it. Brian I think had some kind of developmental disorder (ya think) that caused him to not see himself as fully adult. I dont think it was in his nature to even actively pursue sex with adult women (most of his relationships seemed to fall in his lap thanks to fame and circumstance) much less anything unspeakable with minors. He just never really grew up and maintained a certain aesthetic and philosophical appreciation for the innocence of young women. Caroline losing her innocent glow, Wonderful about a girl's loss of innocence, all his other songs about not wanting to grow up, without even getting into Rollerskating Child, I Wanna Pick You Up and Hey Little Tomboy. If Brian were a creep with the presence of mind to do terrible things, he wouldn't advertise it so openly and naively. He just never really got it through his head that after a certain age, it's not dignified to express these feelings out loud. Like Lewis Carol, who took consenting pictures of nude or semi-nude minors which yeah is fucking weird and would never be tolerated today with good reason, but whatever we may say about that, I don't believe he ever harmed a child.

I think our society needed to outgrow the way things used to be, where women were married off young to older men with the idea that they had maximal baby-making years ahead of them. But I also think we may've over-corrected to where just acknowledging a young woman is pretty (as in "she has nice features" not "I wanna sleep with her right now") or artistically celebrating the beauty/charm of younger women in a general sense, has become demonized to the extreme. Nobody wants to be accused of pedophilia as that's like the worst thing a person can be, so nobody's willing to say words to the effect of what I just did. In the late 50s they wrote songs like "Thank Heaven for Little Girls" and no one batted an eye. Nowadays dads get dirty looks taking their own children to the park, or taking their teen out for a father-daughter activity. Maybe the former was too far in one direction but the latter is certainly too far in the other.

When Brian was living with the Rovells he was obsessing over Barbara while he was dating and sleeping with Marilyn - apparently most of the gooey confessions Brian burdened Tony Asher with during the Pet Sounds writing sessions involved his attraction to Barbara . . . no evidence he ever acted on it, however.  If the parents consent, it is legal to marry someone underage in most states, sometimes as young as 14 . . . I don't think carnal knowledge of an underage girl is legal whether the parents allow it or not, but it wouldn't be prosecuted if no one objected or would testify to the police.

I'd like to see a source for this, if anyone's reading this thread. I've just spent the last 2 months pouring over almost all the major sources of the SMiLE Era (which usually begins with Pet Sounds and GV in their tellings) and I've NEVER heard anyone say this. Never. Doesn't mean it didn't happen but any version of their collab I've heard it was always Diane Brian was pining over openly, with Marilyn in the very next room and almost certainly listening.

[BJL]

When Brian was living with the Rovells he was obsessing over Barbara while he was dating and sleeping with Marilyn - apparently most of the gooey confessions Brian burdened Tony Asher with during the Pet Sounds writing sessions involved his attraction to Barbara . . . no evidence he ever acted on it, however.  If the parents consent, it is legal to marry someone underage in most states, sometimes as young as 14 . . . I don't think carnal knowledge of an underage girl is legal whether the parents allow it or not, but it wouldn't be prosecuted if no one objected or would testify to the police.

I'd like to see a source for this, if anyone's reading this thread. I've just spent the last 2 months pouring over almost all the major sources of the SMiLE Era (which usually begins with Pet Sounds and GV in their tellings) and I've NEVER heard anyone say this. Never. Doesn't mean it didn't happen but any version of their collab I've heard it was always Diane Brian was pining over openly, with Marilyn in the very next room and almost certainly listening.

I'm also always on the lookout for *any* source that goes into any kind of real depth about Brian's emotional attachments and inner life in the early 60s. It's all there in the music, on one level, but the people who might know on a more personal level have been understandably circumspect, for the most part. Which is probably for the best, but some of us are obsessed with how the Beach Boys music intersects with gender roles and expectations and want all the insight we can get...

For what it's worth, speaking without any real evidence, I've always had a strong intuitive sense that Brian was a little obsessed with the Rovell sisters *as sisters*, the three of them, and that a big part of what attracted him so strongly to Marilyn (without discounting that they were in love, I'm sure), was just the idea of being part of that family. And I think that honestly that obsession doesn't seem, to me, to require any kind of developmental issue or mental health problem, just that three pretty teenage girls living in a house are a compelling thing to a young man in his early 20s, and there was nothing in the culture at that time that told him it shouldn't be so. I'm reading Willa Cather's The Song of the Lark right now, and it's pretty disorienting and fascinating to see just how differently the attraction between adult men and girl children was understood in the early 20th century. Our culture has changed a *lot* in the last few generations, for the better for sure, but we have to be carefully not to read cultural expectations back that no one could reasonably have had, especially if its going to lead us to speculate about someone having a disorder or disordered way of thinking (Not that that didn't become true later, for sure, but I really think sometimes people read back Brian's mental situation between 1965 or 1968 and, well, 2025, into the early 60s, and I think there's a lot of evidence that Brian was pretty well adjusted and, for lack of a better word, "normal" up through when the schizoaffective symptoms started to appear when he was in his mid-20s (well within the normal range for when that kind of thing starts, so far as I understand).