Interesting note about Rio Grande and TLOS: Both were created in a similar way. Brian had a number of songs or song fragments laying around. Then someone wanted a suite. In the case of Rio Grande, Lenny W. wanted a single long track. For TLOS, the Royal Festival Hall wanted a follow-up to Smile.

In each case, Brian couldn't write the suite from scratch. He doesn't work that way. For Rio Grande, he and Andy wrote a couple of extra pieces, then bolted everything together. For TLOS, Brian and Scott wrote nearly two albums' worth of music over a summer. They had no specific project in mind, and great material from that project remains unreleased (I've heard multiple people talk about a track called "Angles in Love"). Then the commission came in, and Brian for a brief time considered doing a musical version of the Little Prince (it's true! He said it in an interview). But that didn't happen, so they ended up roping in Darian and Van Dyke. Darian sequenced and Van Dyke wrote the segues. Then Brian and Scott wrote (I believe) Midnight's Another Day and Southern California to pull the whole thing together.

More alike than you might think!

Actually, one thing has always been true: no collaborators, no Brian output.

This is so important. The need to work with someone, to prove himself to them (and also have a buddy) is so important to Brian. I remember once being told by a non-musician friend of Brian that BW asked him to sing backing vocals on a track (or produce it or something). The friend was aghast and turned him down. But that social drive really motivates the man's creativity.

But... no Brian, none of all these works.

And that's the other point. You take someone like Joe Thomas or Andy Paley or Scott Bennett. Talented guys, sure. Able to write songs on their own, sure. But where else in their careers did they manage anything like their work with Brian? The fact is, whatever his contributes in a collaboration (and sometimes it might be a few lyrics and a bit of vocal melody), it creates something totally different and special. It creates a Brian Wilson song. They're not all great, but almost all of them, in some way or another, represent him.

I have a lot of thoughts about this, but they're kind of disjointed.

On one hand, yes the Smiley Smile through 20/20 period features consistently great material, released and not. On the other hand, because that material is consistently great we've seen it parceled out as bonus tracks and in special releases for the last 30 years. The Brother material is so much fresher, at least to my ears.

Are physical releases even that big of a deal anymore? Do they earn new fans? Or do they simply resell largely familiar material to the same audience that has bought BB/BW product for ages?

My local record retailer sounded a little burned by the last couple of big boxes. He couldn't move Feel Flows sets and ended up not ordering as many of the Sail on Sailor. I had to special order the vinyl box from him (this is a college town with an active music shop).

At a certain point, the train does run out. There's a Brian's Back set out there for sure, and something mopping up the odds and ends from the late 70s through the soundtrack work of the 80s. Obviously live sets, including the '93 unplugged shows, could follow. But that's not a lot of material, and it appeals to a narrower and narrower slice of the fanbase.

Perhaps at some point the archivists will double back and start doing ultra-deluxe reissues of the '60s albums with session material and stack of vocal mixes and 78s tossed in.

I remember getting my hands on the Good Vibrations box back in 1995 or 1996. I also remember thinking at the time that you could easily tell Carl was all over those early records -- the guitar solos just sounded like the same guy. Likewise, the backing tracks up until Pet Sounds or so sounded very much like a basic rock band with occasional odd accents (what BW did with a simple harp part in "Catch a Wave," for example).

But then I spent years hearing from folks online that the band played practically nothing after the first couple of albums. I even believed it for a time. All the better to build the myth of Brian the auteur. And to be fair, no one in the band every made a big deal of their instrumental prowess one way or another. Once the session information began to come out, however, thanks to Craig and others, we all could finally know the truth. And it was that the music sounded like was what it was. A solid, professional group doing their part to bring great songs to life.

This is most excellent. Thank you, Adam.

I think “Mowg” isn’t quite right. What I recall hearing is more “Moag.” Or, the name of the stooge with a hard stop. Super picky, I know. 

I bet people are searching for Hall and Oates' "Maneater" with the phase "Here she comes."

I realize that I contributed to this thread months earlier, but I hadn't taken the time to actually watch footage from that last show. In large part, good-quality video and audio wasn't being regularly posted at the time. But yesterday my curiosity got the better of me.

More than anything else posted of Brian since the Landy years and immediately before, this is difficult stuff.*

As someone who cares about Brian and all the guys, I want them to be well and happy. Brian has from time to time let band members pick up missed lines, and he has pointed at Al to take lead vocals. But what I see in these videos is BW randomly shutting down in the middle of lines. He's not just quiet and reserved onstage, but withdrawn and morose. His range and pitch seem pretty much the same as the last 10-15 years, but that doesn't make up for the rest.

I agree that it's remarkable everyone gave Brian a sympathetic reaction. The headlines could have been vicious. For that matter, I wrote about the 80th birthday show I saw, but I don't know that I could have managed a piece about those later performances. I'm sure someone somewhere has heard rumors, but I've been reluctant to bug people because it seems tacky.

However, this does get me to a point I've never been to before.

Unless BW and his folks level with folks about what's going on -- and something clearly is -- he should not tour again. I don't think it's fair to sell tickets without more clarity about the role and capacity of the lead performer. This isn't part of the debate we've had for 23 years now about Brian touring. This is different. I think we all understands this, and I just wish everyone the very best.


* To be crystal clear, I do not believe BW is being manipulated or abused. This footage is difficult in other ways.

Just watched videos from the last BW show — Pine Knob — not sure what to say. I appreciate everyone’s discretion, but now that a new months have passed, I wish we had a better understanding of what was going on. The show I saw a month and change before had rough moments, but it was recognizably part of the same continuum of shows I had seen dating back to 1999.

This was something else entirely. Love to all.

Also, regarding a previous comment about wanting alternate takes of songs, I'm not sure how much of that stuff there is once you get into the later era, particularly the 70s. I don't think there's the same kind of full hours of take-after-take of backing tracks like with a lot of the 60s stuff, with an engineer calling out "Take 37!" So unless there's something notable and different about it, I'm not sure if there's much value in putting like a half-finished, aborted backing track take of "Hold on Dear Brother" that sounds just like the finished backing track, only with some stray note and then the whole take stopping. At that point, it makes much more sense, if one is inclined to present a backing track (or backing track with backing vocals) to use a finished take.  

I suspect, given that by this point they were recording and paying for the sessions themselves, they might not even keep aborted takes. They may well have taped over them.

That being said, it's surprising to me that we haven't had full-length instrumental / vocal mixes of albums other than Pet Sounds. Would love to hear Sunflower that way, for example.

Man, “Rooftop Harry.” Where the heck did that come from? And it’s a precursor, at least in a few melodic phrases, to “From There and Back Again,” on TWGMTR.

More members of Brian's band are tagged on the post. Darian is at the keyboard, percussionist Jim Laspesa is there. I'd bet there's some sort of BW project going on. Kind of doubt it would be an album, but who knows?

My original post should be corrected now. Apologies for getting some of the details wrong -- I was running around yesterday and wanted to get it to everyone. Nice to see whatever is happening happening.

Facebook photos of the big man shared by TomorrowLabs studios. Darian and Brian chatting by the keyboard. Band members on hand. Mertens conducting a small string section. All posted last night.

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(Edited and corrected original message.)

Those events were four years apart. And almost every one was controlled heavily by Landy. They were entirely different than the situation that arrived with Imagination and beyond, when Brian did exponentially more (and shorter) interviews. What's more, the pieces Jason Fine wrote, along with the astonishing Harvey Kubernik one, show that he could still be talkative when the mood struck.

Here’s the thing — Brian did almost no press from the late 60s to the late 90s. That’s almost 30 years. When he did give interviews, he was usually on uppers of some kind (legal or illegal). Once he was properly diagnosed, he actually began taking less medicine — but it was definitely of a more sedating, calming variety. That coincided with doing more press and, for Brian, no doubt getting much more bored and annoyed with the whole thing. So he became far more terse — and interestingly, also began to sing in a far more relaxed manner.

And some of you (not you Billy), always guessing that Andy Paley, Scott Bennett, even Joe Thomas (!!!) actually composed many of his songs.
Ableism to 10000000000000000000000000000000%.
Brian is the greatest songwriter in the world, but he has mental problems and answers yes and no in interviews. So he can't be the real composer, right? It must have been that famous songwriter, Joe Thomas. Or whoever.

Brian's always wanted a collaborator, and he's always brought out the absolute best that his collaborators had to offer. It seems like one of the most important things for Brian was to work with someone who didn't have a strong ego about it, and that this is partially, perhaps, what led him to collaborate with so many unknowns in the 60s, and someone like Joe Thomas in the 90s (and what made working with Mike so hard). But as a creative mind Brian is just such a dominant force that it is blindingly obvious that his collaborations are all Brian Wilson songs, and that when they fail it's up to what Brian brought to the table, not the collaborator. Imagination is a deeply flawed record but so many of those songs are catchy as hell. If Joe Thomas could write hooks like that without Brian Wilson sitting next to him, he'd have done it. And if Brian had cared about how the backing tracks sounded, he'd probably have shown up to the sessions. Basically, I agree with you completely. Brian has had a lot of problems over the years and a lot of struggles, but in the big picture, it's pretty clear that, with the exception of Landy, who really exercised extreme psychological control methods, the buck has stopped with Brian. He's responsible for the sound of his music, both when you like it and when you don't, and Love You or Paley are not *more* Brian or *more* authentic, they're just a direction Brian pursued at one moment, and at other moments he pursued other directions, and sometimes he was hands on and sometimes he was hands off, by choice.

BJL, I think you nailed this. And yes, I don't think that Smiley Smile, Love You or the WP sessions are the only "authentic" Brian. It's simply the Brian I prefer, the one I consider almost consistently great. The "mellower" Brian, after Pet Sounds, has been more hit and miss, imho.
That's the reason the Long Promised Road soundtrack has been such a nice surprise for me.

I think this is absolutely spot on. We may disagree on what we like, but I think nearly everything released under Brian's name as a solo artist has _something_ distinctive from him in it. It's really just how he approached the collaboration and what folks' individual tastes are. I find a lot to enjoy in most projects, but I acknowledge that the easy-listening BW isn't to everyone's taste (although also something he's done for a long time, going back to his Four Freshmen fandom).

I think the plan was to record the "rock and roll" album as something to accompany the film. Brian and the band did a handful of sessions and recorded about 18 minutes' worth of material, but that wasn't enough for a record. I also think that the sessions, regardless of what you see in the film, didn't go particularly well.

BW then had the bad spinal surgery (and an attempt to repair it) after the bulk of the sessions and has been in rough shape since.

I do suspect that "I'm Broke" would have been part of the new sessions, as they played it live a handful of times in recent years, along with the "Honeycomb" cover. The rest of the Paley stuff is filler, although well-chosen given the subject of the film. (Must be a Miracle sounds like a re-recording from the late 90s or early 00s.)

Don't know about balls, but this thread showed, for the umpteenth time, that I am just not made for these times.

Enjoy fandom!

Just a year or two after the Beach Boys sessions, Brian also arranges and produces -- on his own -- a backing track for Carnie and Wendy. It's "Everything I Need," which has nothing to do with Andy Paley or Joe Thomas.

Thomas eventually overdubs the bejesus out of it, but the original circulates. It makes me wonder, frankly, if a solo album without Thomas would have included Asher material as well. It's clear that Brian didn't see Andy as an entirely essential piece of what he was putting together.

And let’s not forget the partial album with his daughters from 1997. He also got together with Asher and co-wrote a bunch of songs after Paley but before Joe Thomas.

This all suggests to me that Brian was interested in going back to Spector-like songwriter and producer role, for both the BBS and his daughters. Melinda and Joe together, I think, persuaded him to take the solo artist route. Carl’s death sealed the deal.

These events happened in only three or so years. It was crazy!

So, so interesting. All of this. Points to consider —

Circa 1995, Brian was arguably a bigger name than the band. That may have complicated things. It was cool to like BW, less so the other guys. He was cooler than the other guys.

I’d never considered BW viewing that work as BB material, but it makes sense. We know he earmarked co-writes with Thomas just a few years later for the band and not himself. Could it be the reason we haven’t seen a full release is that BW only saw a handful of songs as “solo” tracks?

Some in the band wanted BW to be _more_ avant-garde than the Paley sessions. Bruce brought in Sean O’Hagen of the High Llamas as a possible producer and co-writer after listening to “Hawaii.” That didn’t go well, but O’Hagen was in the mix for a time.

Brian marries Melinda in the middle of this. Now, her role was debated back then, but it’s pretty clear that Brian’s life was in transition as he moved from an independent conservator to having Melinda fill that role and guide his business affairs. The move to Chicago and some other big decisions around this time (a country album?!) suggest an artist recalibrating his career and personal life.

I mean, this person who supposedly doesn’t do a lot still released two records last year.

All you need to know about Mike is that for the entire C50 tour he watched crowds erupt in love and appreciation for Brian while he — the man who kept the touring ship afloat — stood by. And the instant those contractually obligated dates were done, Mike was gone.

He is bitterly jealous of Brian’s talent and the adoration of Brian’s audiences. He will sabotage himself willingly to keep poking at his cousin.

Which is all so pointless and ridiculous. Mike is talented too. His contributions are unarguable. Just … stop it already.

At one point, the loss of the Paley sessions seemed like a tragedy.

But then we got BWPS, TLOS, BWRG and TWGMTR. Brian working with his band, writing and arranging new and familiar tunes, and eventually singing far better than he ever had in his solo career. He gave us a late career miracle, of a kind I will never forget or underestimate.

The myth of the Paley sessions persists, and don’t get me wrong — I think everyone here would love a collection at some point. But so much else happened in the subsequent 27 years that I no longer see it as much of a tragedy. Would it have been nice? Sure. But did we still get a bunch of top quality new material from BW? Yes. Did we get great tours and shows? Yep. Did the vast majority of highlights from the sessions find their way out anyway? They sure did.

The person looking after Brian on the road has varied. Jerry did it, but Jeff Foskett had the role for much of the time he was with the band, I believe. Lawlor might have pitched in for a tour too, although I don’t recall.