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Unless Taylor Swift is recording/touring with them or dating one of their grandkids, I doubt new fans will care about The Beach Boys.


Jon Stebbins said it best regarding the delayed release of the feel flows set. Look at the history of the band, the answer is obvious. Finding a way to f*** up a beautiful thing. It's in the DNA of the Beach Boys. Sadly this documentary was no exception.

Al Jardine spills the beans again:

“There is some really wonderful footage of our performing,” Jardine said. “But unfortunately, Carl and Dennis are gone, so you don’t have their point of view. You have the narrative, according to Mike Love, and you have me in there somewhere in between, going, uh-hmm, sure. The truth is, we didn’t have enough content the way I would have liked to have done it. The producer did what he could, with what he had.”

https://www.mauinews.com/news/local-news/2024/05/beach-boys-cofounder-reflects-on-career-future/

Just go back to this quote from Al and the direction of this film makes perfect sense. It's the narrative according to Mike Love. If the Smile chapter plays out the way it does, again that makes perfect sense because efforts have been underway for several decades to minimalize the Smile saga and its influence, discredit firsthand eyewitnesses to what was happening, repeat ad nauseum either a whitewashed or false narrative about the how's and why's of what happened, and ultimately dismiss what has been reported and published about it since 1967 by trying to replace it with a narrative which was cartoonishly portrayed on ABC in 2000 via the John Stamos produced biopic...again, the narrative according to Mike. Broadcast twice now by networks owned by Disney.

It's really not hard to suss out why the documentary reads this way and why the narrative is what it is. It's just a shame to see over the past few decades such blatant efforts by some factions to diminish and discredit the individuals who had firsthand, even eyewitness information that would counter the narratives which included Brian being so geeked up on drugs and held back by various leeches and hangers-on that he couldn't do the work and decided to one day wave his hand in the air and scrap everything in his fits of drug-fueled paranoia. It's so laughable, yet if that crap continues to be repeated there are people who will believe it.

And if these narratives go beyond message boards and people with agendas sending false information around the fanbase, and gets broadcast widely to "new" fans on projects like the ABC miniseries and the Disney doc, those new fans will hear it and believe it. Sad.

I have to ask this.

An American Family was 2 parts. How is it that John Stamos can get a 2 part miniseries about the BB made yet Frank Marshall and Irving Azoff can only get a less than 2 hour doc made?

Exactly!! I haven't seen the documentary, 50/50 chance that I pony up the money to subscribe to Disney+ for a month to watch it (I realize the fee is equal to a few cups of coffee, but that's pretty much how little I care about seeing this). What is sad is that with 'Get Back' I was subscribing to Disney+ within minutes of that documentary being available. The Beach Boys are without a doubt my favorite band ever and yet I can't seem to be the least-bit enthused about watching this thing. I'm sure I'll get around to it at some point.

The trailer just seemed meh - no magic, the same "insert current one-hit-wonder band personality here" interviews to tell us how inspirational and incredible Brian Wilson is (and, as I've said before, a music personality who released the song 'Water Slide' has absolutely no business being in a Beach Boys documentary...I mean come on guys). The reviews are so lukewarm about this thing. Even people who seem to like this thing sound so tepid about it.

And I keep seeing people say "this documentary was not made for us" - but this is exactly the problem. Maybe if they made a movie for the fans, non-fans would be drawn into the storytelling/magic/music itself. I think of Ken Burn's baseball series, that was clearly made for baseball fans, but yet you can read stories/reviews of non-fans being drawn into the subject because of the amazing filmmaking/story. That's like a 24 hour long documentary from 1994 that is STILL talked about and watched to this day. Imagine if Ken Burns had watered down the story of baseball into an hour and half movie - it would have been forgotten about in a year. Which is likely what will happen with this Beach Boys documentary.

This should have been at least two parts, and not stopping at 1980. On the bright side, it'll introduce people to The Beach Boys. The downside is that so much opportunity was wasted yet again in The Beach Boys realm. At least we have an amazing book and some incredible boxsets from the last few years - which is honestly a heck of a lot more than I would expect from this band. So while the documentary may be disappointing, we're still one of the luckiest/blessed fanbases in music!

I think that even if we could see and hear absolutely everything, to the last bit, about what happened in 1966-1967, we would end knowing exactly what we know now. The matter is so complex, and everybody chooses their favourite narrative.
"Brianistas" will tend to blame Mike.
"Mike Lovers" will say he did no wrong (like, ever).
And so on.
My own narrative is that SMiLE "demise" in 1967 was the end result of everything that happened before, and separating the 100 specific reasons is impossible. What is sure, is that Brian got a mess of "help", by literally everybody, in not completing SMiLE in 1967. He was surrounded by too many people, but he was alone.

About SMiLE 1967's demise, the truth has been known since 1993 (liner notes in GV box): Brian had to can the project to save his own life. He was literally imploding.

But what were the reasons causing him to almost literally implode?  Was it The Boys resistance to the lyrics and the ideas behind the album -- and all the emotional baggage that brought?  His mental health problems?  I think it was a mixture of the two.


Love and merci,
Dan Lega 

Thanks to disagreements within the band, Brian's collaborator had left the project. Van Dyke Parks is not an easy person to replace. And Brian was having huge problems with the sequencing. The pressure was enormous. And then the Beatles released Sgt Pepper.

The one sound bite from Paul McCartney talking about Pet Sounds (the quote was from David Leaf’s interview with McCartney for the first Pet Sounds CD) sounded particularly egregious in the AI department.

That McCartney clip sounds so bizarre.  It might be AI, but if it is, then whoever coded that AI algorithm should be fired.  It sounds almost nothing like Macca.  Dana Carvey does a better impression of Paul than that.   Does anyone remember the circumstances of Leaf's interview with Paul? Could it be a situation like Leaf recording an audio interview on some cheapo tape recorder not for broadcast but just for his own notes?  And then said lo-fi recording is later run through some digital filters to enhance it with said "enhancement" utterly massacring it?

And of course, the Beach Boys recorded (live?) his title song "Monkey's Uncle": backing Annette F.!

http://www.reddit.com/r/thebeachboys/comments/1d0no2y/in_honor_of_richard_shermans_passing_the_monkeys/?rdt=52008

ON AiR: BRiAN{ö}LoveVol. 380. By BW/PapaLaPap (1980/2024)
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   "BE MY REDEEMER" AS A REMEEDer !          Y  ME, B*? «  
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    "RE~MEMEr":  O*K*A  PapaLaPap ?        A  K*O~REMEMEr !«  

I have to ask this.

An American Family was 2 parts. How is it that John Stamos can get a 2 part miniseries about the BB made yet Frank Marshall and Irving Azoff can only get a less than 2 hour doc made?

I read some comments on the other Beach Boys forums about the documentary and noticed something really off, in my opinion. Namely, quite some "fans" seem to think that the docu was right in practically ignoring the 1967-1977 stretch because there were no "hits".
What I think, instead, about this subject.

1) Yes, no hits. I get that, thanks. I was there. In my Italy, my Beach Boys literally DISAPPEARED (no kidding!) starting from 1967. Forever. And there was no helping it in the world of guitar noodling, shirtless frontmen, 20-minute suites, and all that came afterwards. Brian or no Brian.
2) But... the Beach Boys 1967-1977 stretch, artistically, is FANTASTIC. Not perfect, of course, but fantastic. That stuff is timeless, and priceless.
3) This has never been really acknowledged, in any case not enough, by a mile.
4) This 2024 docu was maybe the last chance. There will never be a Peter Jackson for the Boys.
5) Chance TOTALLY missed. Most people will keep on thinking that Good Vibrations was the last good/important thing the Boys, and Brian, did.
6) F..k the damn charts. It seems many people aren't inspired by music, but by charts. And mind you, it's understandable when Brian, Carl, Mike, Al, the artists themselves, worry about the charts. But we, after the facts, in hindsight, should

Yeah, I don't get the obsession with hits, charts, sales, etc. It's not like they never hit the charts after Good Vibrations. Heroes and Villains, Darlin', Do it Again and I Can Hear Music all hit the top 40 in the late 60's. Surf's Up and Holland did okay on the album charts - but that's not how we should define what is good and what is not. Sunflower was a commercial bomb, but many people love that album. Many people love the equally poor selling Friends. I can honestly say I never, ever heard any Pacific Ocean Blue songs on my radio in the late 70's, yet many people regard it as a masterpiece.
I think the way history will regard the Beach Boys and other groups of their era is pretty much set in stone now. The Beatles continue to attract a level of interest not attained by any act of that - or possibly ANY - era. History will record that the Beach Boys, Kinks, ex-Beatles didn't do any great work after 1973; just as the official history of 60's pop and rock now tells us that after 1966, it was all hard rock and guitar heroes on the charts, even though a look through old issues of Billboard and Cashbox shows that there were plenty of soft rock, pop and MOR acts selling lots of records in that era. Anyone ever heard of Glen Campbell? Carpenters?