The Smiley Smile Message Board

Not sure where this should go. But seems to be new.  I like the amateurish aspect of the recording.
The OLD Yankee Stadium.  Really sensing history.  [pause for deep breath...]

Alan is superb in his lead singing.  Carl is an angel.  Mike sounds good on Little Deuce Coupe.
Who is singing the high falsetto throughout?  Love the little girl in the seats dancing.

Some American boys making a paycheck...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PiKvYVWaD_8

Looks like Matt Jardine is at the back doing percussion, but Adrian Baker is way off to the side behind Bruce. So Baker is still doing the falsetto parts.

The kokomoization of the group in all its glory.... :-\

That YouTube video is of course truncated, but here is a link to the full set list for that day:

http://www.setlist.fm/setlist/the-beach-boys/1991/yankee-stadium-new-york-ny-63d9de6f.html

The baseball gigs were usually even more likely to be "meat and potatoes" shows. So it's a pretty standard setlist of that era and for that type of show.

They actually go a bit Euro-centric with "You're So Good to Me" and "Then I Kissed Her", perhaps because they were going to Europe soon after.

What would have happened if at that show, while wearing that terrible jumpsuit and all, Mike sang lead on I Just Wasn't Made For These Times?  ;D

How can this be the same band?!

How did OSD survive this era? ;D

WTF???? God Only Knows sandwiched between Barbara Ann and Surfin' Safari???

myKe luHv at his bleating worst at Yankee Stadium dressed like Bozo The Clown. Took my daughter to see them a couple of years later. If it wasn't for Carl and Al, that would have been the end . When they were gone, it was, and had already moved on to Brian.

I got to see a lot of BB's shows in the 80's, and this setlist is pretty similar to what they were doing then. I really don't get the complaints. A band that's had over 2 dozen hits on the charts comes to town and plays as many of those hits as they can. What are they supposed to do, dump the hits and just play rarities? You gotta play what the people want to hear. Could the Beach Boys go onstage in 1990 and NOT play California Girls? Help Me Rhonda? Fun Fun Fun? God Only Knows? Good Vibrations? I Get Around? Brian and his band do these songs in their shows; Mike and his band do those songs, too. Looking back, actually, I feel I was very lucky to have seen Mike, Carl, Al and Bruce together onstage. And Brian, the 2 times he was there. And Dennis, before he died. Just to be there, and see those guys TOGETHER...and it all ended too soon.

No. My issue is 1. the way the hits were presented and 2. the band pretending that they did nothing between 1966 and 1988.

Lonely Summer -  They played alot of the " after baseball shows"  in that time period.
Carl told me that "they stink" and if he had his way he would not do the 'baseball shows", the stage was always set up to far away from the audience and he didn't like that presentation !   At least you got to see the band when it was The Beach Boys .... no more thou

This would be Yankee Stadium 2. Yankee Stadium 1 was from 1923-70's.

No, it was still Yankee Stadium 1. The original stadium was renovated in 1974-75 but wasn't demolished until 2008.
Yankee Stadium 2 opened in 2009.

That's not really true; Getcha Back was in the setlist for several years. Come Go With Me - okay, it's a remake, but it was in all the shows for a few years. Rock 'N' Roll To the Rescue, California Dreamin', Wipe Out (ouch!), California Calling, She Believes in Love Again all got played. They even did a couple Carl solo songs in the shows circa 1983-84. I mean, you could make the same complaint about Brian's solo shows - he does almost none of his solo material, concentrating, again, on the Beach Boys hits with maybe a few lesser known BB tunes thrown in (and I guess we have to consider the Pet Sounds shows a sort of GH show since it's apparently the only BB's album the general public wants to hear). As for the way the music was presented 20 years ago, I certainly didn't mind the cheerleaders, :).

Did you keep your 1970s albums in a bunker? ;D

 :lol :lol  I did! With a few exceptions, they've pretty much been kept in a cool, dry area. a few are in ratty condition from always taking a few in the car when I did college radio but for their age, they've stood the test of time, at least for me. I never play them-too much snap, crackle, and pop. And, SB, I still have my copy of Surf's Up (white promo) with "thanks Marilyn".

I think it's very fair to say that by the early-mid 80s, the band largely ignored it's post-60s material. Even in the late 70s and early 80s, the stuff they *did* do from the 70s and 80s was mostly "new album" material that was quickly jettisoned.

Stuff like "Rock and Roll to the Rescue", "California Calling, "She Believes in Love Again", "It's Gettin' Late", all that *original* material, was "blink and you'll miss it" status, not even surviving a full single year in the setlist. "Getcha Back" survived for a few years, not returning until decades later when Mike added it back to his shows.

Brian's solo setlists, especially the 1999 to early-mid 2000s shows, were *nothing* like 80s or 90s BB shows. Obviously, some core hits were the same. But Brian touched on much deeper cuts, dug heavily into "Pet Sounds", "Smile", and "Today", as well as stuff like "'Til I Die", "This Whole World", "Add Some Music", tracks from "Friends", and the list goes on. Brian also *didn't* do a number of by that time "Beach Boys" setlist standards like "Kokomo", "The Little Old Lady from Pasadena", "Surf City", "Summer in Paradise", "Come Go With Me", "California Dreamin'", etc. It wasn't until later in the 2000s that Brian started to introduce a few more car songs he hadn't been doing much or at all like "Shut Down."

The touring BB's on *rare* occasion dug deeper into the back catalog, occasionally doing something like "Lookin' at Tomorrow" at a small number of shows in 1983, adding "This Whole World" and "Forever" to the setlist for about five seconds in 1988, etc. But other than the short late 1993 "Boxed Set" tour, they never went to any great length to cast a wider net to cover their careers in live shows.

Using a "Baseball Game" show from the late 80s or early 90s would only make this effect more pronounced, since those shows were almost always even shorter than their "regular" shows, and you can even see in that 1991 Yankee Stadium show that they dropped the few interesting bits they had in the setlist around that time like "Please Let Me Wonder."

What I disliked most about the early 90s set lists is the fading into the background of Carl and Al. Their leads continued to decrease in favor of Mike leads.  By the late 90s, Carl's leads consisted of GOK, GV, and WIBN in most shows. Sometimes  Darlin and ICHM would show up, and he did do SOS for a little bit because Al pushed it.

Any new material from Brian is in the setlists briefly, then dumped. How many NPP songs did he do last year? I don't think the 80's 90's BB's were as interested in digging deep into the catalog as they were in promoting their new records. Still, they did occasionally play things like I Can Hear Music, Forever, This Whole World, and Please Let Me Wonder.

The original contention seemed to be that Brian setlists historically have been analogous to 80s/90s BB setlists, and that is demonstrably false. One of the big selling points and notorious things about Brian's solo touring when he came out in 1999 was that his setlist was in large part the *antithesis* of what the touring BBs had been doing in recent years and what they were then presently doing with Mike's band. There are several ways a setlist can be "different", the main two ways being "new album" material, and other being back catalog deeper cuts that *haven't* been in the setlist often.

Almost all "legacy" bands of the era of Brian/BBs/McCartney, etc. tend to do "new album" stuff and then quickly drop it.

Brian's solo career on the whole has featured a much higher concentration of "non hits" or "deep cuts" or "non-standards" or whatever one wants to call them, than the 80s/90s touring BBs setlists. Yes, there have been strings of time where Brian too has gone rather "meat and potatoes", but again if the comparison is to 80s/90s BB shows, there is still much difference between the two.

As I mentioned, "Forever" and "This Whole World" were in the 1988 setlist for *mere months*; they didn't even survive one full tour. "Please Let Me Wonder" was done on and off across maybe two years at most. This is all far different from Brian coming out in 1999 with "Til I Die", "Kiss Me Baby", "The Little Girl I Once Knew", "This Whole World", "Add Some Music To Your Day", "Back Home", the two PS instrumentals, then in 2000 with the *FULL PET SOUNDS ALBUM*, in 2001 with "Our Prayer", "Marcella", "Sail on Sailor", "Forever", and so on. I'm not even getting into weird short-term selections he did during that time like "Let It Shine", "Desert Drive" (three years prior to being officially released), "This Could be the Night", "The First Time", etc.

I'd argue "I Can Hear Music" was pretty much a concert staple for the touring BBs from the late 80s through most of the 90s, so that's a "meat and potatoes" number to me.  

I think this happened in large part simply because they wouldn't do longer shows. When they did that extended set in late 1993 for a short time, a lot of the added songs were non-Mike leads.

But I would agree that Carl and Al were ironically and tragically underutilized going back to the 80s and 90s.

I was real curious when I first heard that Brian was going to do a solo tour in the late 90's, wondered what the setlists would be. It's true that from the start of his solo touring, Brian has featured many, many "deep tracks" from the Beach Boys catalog, but I was disappointed that so little attention was paid to his solo career. This was, after all, a Brian Wilson solo tour. There always seems to be a buzz among fans when a new album is on the way; then the album comes out, we dissect it, and forget about it. So, like it or not, the BW solo concerts have become oldies shows.  And yes, that is true for Macca and other acts of similar vintage. So I guess I misunderstood the complaints about the BB's 80's 90's concerts. I thought people were complaining that they didn't do enough new or recent material; but in fact, the complaint was that they didn't do enough "deep tracks". I can tell you from my experiences attending these shows with friends that were casual fans, that a show full of deep tracks would have had them yawning and complaining about "when are they gonna play the hits?" Yes, the group could have done the kind of shows the hardcore fans dreamed of, but they would have been playing much smaller venues.

The thing with Brian's live show is that I've never thought of it as a "Brian Wilson Solo Album Artist" show, as if he ever would have or should have featured a high volume of solo material. Unlike, say, Mike's show in which Mike performs a large hunk of material that he (Mike) had no hand in writing, Brian's shows have always been a showcase largely of "Brian Wilson Music"; songs that he wrote. Essentially, Brian's not doing a "Brian" or "Beach Boys" show in terms of collating material released by one artist or the other. Rather, he's collating all of his life's work including BB and solo material.

As I've often mentioned in the past, Brian *rarely* features songs he didn't write or co-write. Even with Al and Blondie in his band, most of the songs the other guys sing are songs Brian co-wrote. They sneak a song in here and there, like "California Saga", and on occasion Brian has done cover versions. But Brian has very rarely done any Beach Boys material he didn't write. I think that's because he's showcasing his music rather than his "solo career." I think his solo career is obviously part of his music catalog, and especially in more recent years he has ignored it outside of new album material. But in some cases that makes sense, such as the PS shows from the last year where there isn't much room left in the setlist once you account for the "classics" and the full PS album.

Mike will do "Surfer Girl" or "Surf's Up" or "'Til I Die", but you'll likely never see Brian do "Tears in the Morning" or "Big Sur" or "Kokomo." Mike's show *is* an attempt at being a "Beach Boys" show, meaning largely songs released by the band. Brian's show is mostly the "Brian Wilson Songbook" for lack of a better term.

I guess it would be interesting to see Mike do a show of only songs he had a hand in writing. There's no lack of material to draw from.

Mike has never presented himself first and foremost as a songwriter; even his short run of 1981 solo shows (perhaps the only time he did shows billed as simply "Mike Love" rather than "Endless Summer Beach Band" or something) featured a bunch of songs he didn't have a hand in writing:

http://www.setlist.fm/setlist/mike-love/1981/brandywine-club-chadds-ford-pa-43dbcf03.html

Concurrent with that: Mike's solo album Lookin Back With Love has only *one* (count 'em) song which Mike had a hand in writing. Unless the credits are wrong.

More commentary from Mike about why he released his solo album would be interesting.

It certainly wasn't, by the time LBWL came out, a case of finding an outlet for songs he had written that didn't have an outlet on any BB albums due to whatever reason.

Does anyone have any contemporary comments either from 1981 regarding LBWL, or circa 1978 regarding his previous two attempts at solo albums, about what his motivations were? Was it just kind of a generic "well, we're in a band, but sometimes bands split off and do solo albums, so I guess I'll try one of those?" Was it motivated by jealousy over Dennis and POB?

Whereas, with Carl's solo albums, you can see he wanted an outlet for songs he had written, wanted to do a (relatively) different style of music, saw no movement towards a BB group album, and was overtly rejecting the BBs due to lack of studio activity and live tour antipathy.

Dennis's album seemed to not be a rejection of the BBs (he didn't quit the touring band, and the BBs *were* recording albums at that time), and was more just an outlet/expression of his own songs.

When Mike took to doing "First Love" and "Country Love", I'm curious what he was aiming at. Perhaps it started as an outlet for more of "his" songs. But by the time of LBWL, as evidenced by the album being almost exclusively covers and work from outside writers, was he just taking one last stab at solo stardom?

TV interviews of the like of "Solid Gold" and "Merv Griffin" often weren't very substantive, but I can't remember what sort of comments Mike made about LBWL on those shows.

Coincidentally or not, it also sounds better than anything on KTSA (and most of La Light for that matter)