In that article Vosse talks about the Capitol lawsuit being settled out of court by Christmas 1966. But I thought the lawsuit was settled over the summer of 1967?

And speaking of zonked out on drugs - listen to them all giggling senselessly, high as kites on Little Pad - a track from Smiley Smile which they released...pot/kettle/black.  It was just gaslighting blaming him for the none release in that way.

You know, giggling on a song after smoking a joint is quite different from forcing everybody to hold business meetings inside a swimming pool and ranting about how the Jews have wiretapped your home after ingesting copious amounts of amphetamines and barbiturates. Have you never read the Gaines book?

This thread is wild. I can't believe that fans still split hairs over ILTSD and CCW.

Sire Records, where Andy is well-connected, offered to fund the completion of the Wilson/Paley album. Joe, who had somehow weaseled himself into being Brian's intermediary, refused their offer. How the hell does this guy have a reputation for "getting projects out the door"?

Better question: why would anybody even want completed Brian Wilson projects if it's just going to be tainted by a corporate dinosaur from Hollywood with the worst taste in music that you can possibly imagine? I'd rather Brian stayed at home and be comfortable banging out Phil Spector riffs on the piano. Why should he be coaxed into writing anodyne soft-rock? Hasn't this man suffered enough?

I wouldn't be surprised if Brian's estate/handlers are hoarding a huge trove of unreleased Wilson/Paley recordings spanning the 1990s-2000s. Like, several albums of non-bootlegged material, none of which will ever see official release, even after Brian passes. Well, we might get 1 or 2 songs thrown on the next greatest hits package, due for 2032. But don't expect the tracks to sound like how they were intended to be heard.

I Am Brian Wilson p. 76: "I had laryngitis. I wasn't using my normal voice. It was an assumed voice. I had to make it up to get through all the singing. For me, it's basically a laryngitis album."

"That the Smile recordings were abandoned the next day does not appear to be reflected in the work the day before. And Smile ‘legend’ would have one believe that these sessions became increasingly weird, and increasingly ‘out of control’. But the recordings show the same Brian Wilson that all the Smile sessions reveal: a composer and a producer in control."

So the accepted history is utter rubbish and probably simply to protect the brand.  And it's funny how the message changed over time from 'it's a nuclear bomb' to 'let's release it' in 2011.

Yeah it's rubbish. The sessions were going just fine circa February 1967. Nothing to see here, folks!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_oz3FWFn5sk
^ Brian at the top of his game, obviously. You can tell it's the same guy who wrote God Only Knows and Our Prayer.

[can't]

I think this is the most frightening part: some of you can't even see how deranged your grievances are regarding Howie's interview...even when you're looking right at the posts/threads themselves. I mean you literally linked to a quote where Howie says the akin to "I'm gonna step away and get some fresh air" and allude to the idea that such a statement escalated the conflict and was "out of bounds". Do you realize how utterly insane that is?

I concede that, for whatever reason, older fans cannot hear what the younger fans hear in these new remasters. The same weirdness happened 10 years ago with the laughable autotune on TWGMTR and MiC. And then again 5 years ago when Steve Desper mistakenly shared what he thought was a vintage recording of Carl singing Sail On Sailor.*

If you can't hear the issue, then you won't understand why Howie got dogpiled after he admitted to pushing Mark "to go further out" and told fans to "stop bugging about records."
If you can hear the issue, then you will understand why Howie got dogpiled after he admitted to pushing Mark "to go further out" and told fans to "stop bugging about records."

I'm sure it has something to do with the fact that younger fans are more likely to have expertise in these matters. I've been working with DAWs alone and with friends for as long as I can remember. I know what it sounds like when someone tinkers too much, or not enough, and creates a mess of digital artifacts. Those artifacts aren't a big deal in modern pop music anymore. But they are a big deal if your goal is to preserve the magic of a legendary '60s rock band.

I also know, based on reading Smiley for over a decade, that there's a lot of inanities involved within BRI and the record business in general. And that some of the most active Smiley posters can recite dozens of Mike Love interviews verbatim, and yet understand very little about the craft of music composition and production. *shrug*

* (Did we ever settle on a consensus, or are there still some hold-outs who believe that it truly was Carl singing? Haha.)

You do realize that the actual real comments made by others that you're incorrectly paraphrasing and/or quoting are all available for everybody to read, right?

Yes, I'm aware. I linked to some of them directly. (One of the moderators here, Billy C, seemed to take issue with me for doing so.) I don't really have anything more to add, except that I respect Howie for the good work he's done in getting these preservation projects off the ground. There's just a lot about how he's conducted himself online and in interviews that's embarrassing for younger Beach Boys fans.

Howie basically said he’d rather be spending time with his family than dealing with that sh*t. If you can find something wrong with that, you my friend are an asshole

I guess that's the difference between me and Howie. Howie likes to randomly announce irrelevant details about his personal life to strangers on the internet. I don't. I think it'd be rather pathetic if I entered an online debate concerning bad record production just to say "please stop caring so much about music, I need to go play with my children." Call me old-fashioned.

The fact that you're equating the Beatles and Beach Boys and their current situations in order to make this comparison kind of indicates you don't know enough about either.

You are aware that Giles Martin in this awkward analogy is the guy doing a sh*t TON of remixing, right?

Not only did you miss the point, but you're making the same argument I was making against Howie's views on music and how he compares other bands to the Beach Boys. You agree with me and you don't even realize it. It's utterly tragic.

130 posts to your name over six years, and almost ALL of them are you arguing with people, or being argumentative or complaining.

Oh hey there, Guy Who Has Written 9643 Posts on a Beach Boys Forum in Which He Is Also Almost Always Arguing with People or Being Argumentative or Complaining for Over 20 Years. How's life?

You're a Beatles guy, right, Howie? Then allow me to summarize the situation in terms that you can understand.

Imagine being hired by Apple to do PR.
Imagine telling Giles Martin that he needs to "go further out with his mixes" and "be the producer the Beatles never had."
Imagine saying that Help! had "shitty mixing and mastering" after you just oversaw a Beatles release that had the shittiest mixing and mastering ever heard from a major band.
Imagine saying that you're going to rewrite the history of the Beatles so that the group can finally be ranked side-by-side with Led Zeppelin and Jefferson Airplane.
Imagine saying all these things in an interview, then going on a Beatles forum to pour fuel on the fire, telling them that they care way too much about music, and then painting yourself as the victim.

Maybe this will give you a better idea of how you're now perceived by most Beach Boys fans. Enjoy that reputation. You've earned it!

That's out of bounds, seemingly, everywhere but there.
I was also uncool with how some "friends" there allowed that to pass and let things escalate -- all while still pumping me for information re: the band.

"Let things escalate"? "Out of bounds"? Weren't you the one who brought your wife and kids into this out of nowhere -- just to belittle the fans who were, with good reason, complaining about the quality of the product that you're trying to sell us?

Why did you decide to respond to a hot button subject in this manner? Because some other kids on the internet were making fun of you for having weird opinions? Welcome to 2022.

I think the big thing that has put Howie in the crosshairs was that quote about "be the producer they never had," which is just about the worst optics one could ever create in such a context. That statement has never been clarified or walked back, and it seems to be fueling some of the rage about the Sounds of Summer set.

Don, it's not the worst optics at all.

"Am I so out of touch?... No, it's the fans who are wrong."

And for some to take away ONLY that from my SEVERAL HOURS-worth of interviews and to use it as an excuse for character assassinations against the people that conceive and provide all this content (TSS; MIC; Sunshine 1 & 2; Live Sunshine; Wake; Hear Music; Live '68; Feel Flows, et al. . . ) proves what a TREMENDOUS portion of the business thinks about "die-hard" fans. It underscores that it's really only a few levels above some rabid JFK assassination "chat group."

Now you're making your own character assassinations. Deranged conspiracy theorists are now comparable to record-buying geeks on the web discussing:
A) your inflammatory remarks about their favorite band and
B) poor quality control being afforded to their favorite band's only active preservation projects

Seriously, Howie, you're an amusing guy, but one of these days you need to learn to look in the mirror and check your ego at the door.

Read it. Well-researched. No new info. Probably not worth $15.

I’ve seen more than one post here and the other place  stating The Beach Boys would never been ranked along the classic rock greats like the Beatles and the Stones . Crazy part is, these are the only two places that say that !

Care to point where this was ever said by anyone?

If no one here's gonna say it, then I will. These remasters and remixes are dreadfully brittle. Most of them sound like they're on the verge of crumbling into a thousand pieces. Like they're being held together by Elmer's glue and rubber bands.

Baby Blue is possibly the worst offender. That compression. That hiss. "The definitive mix"? Holy tomatoes.

Why do the horns on Let Us Go On This Way sound like they were recorded on a flip phone from 2005?

God help you, Mark. And God help listeners with misophonia. I'd never recommend this set as an entry point to the Beach Boys.

["What I did was say, "I'm going to cover the Beach Boys like it's the Who, the Beatles, the Stones, Led Zeppelin, because I want to right a great wrong. I want to cover them like they should have been covered in 1967."""I think I bring the cool. I know what's cool. And I know what's cool about them, and I know what hasn't been tapped about them.""There were songs that I wasn't cool with being on the new comp, and I got outvoted. The stuff that I wanted to back away from was the - my fear is that they will get perceived, worst case scenario, as Pat Boone. As shitty doo-wop. As a public TV special. That's what I don't want. So where am I always pushing is: get the beards, get them playing Central Park. That kind of stuff where they're more modern. The Beach Boys sang about mom and dad, and high school. Unless you're like, somebody who's in the kitsch of like Weezer, and that nerdy kind of thing... Grease ain't cool anymore. You know what I mean? But you know what is cool? Sunflower. Surf's Up. Take A Load Off Your Feet. Student Demonstration Time. Feel Flows. That kind of stuff.""When Mark was doing the remixes last summer, I was pushing him to go even further. I was saying specifically to him, there are some Beach Boys albums where the album is there, the songs are there, but the production left the band down. Either it was rushed, or it didn't... The production didn't match the quality of the performance and the material. The weak link in a lot of stuff was a shitty mix and bad mastering. So what I was saying to Linett was, "You need to be the producer that they never had then. You need to be the guy that's hearing all that stuff and realizing it. Be the guy in the corner that they needed.""So as far as it goes at making it understandable to a younger generation, absolutely. Because 62-year-old people, 65-year-old people aren't buying new music. We have to be aiming for the 23-year-old, or this thing dies."]

Once again, HeyJude, you've drowning yourself in rhetoric and obfuscating what Howie actually said:

"What I did was say, "I'm going to cover the Beach Boys like it's the Who, the Beatles, the Stones, Led Zeppelin, because I want to right a great wrong. I want to cover them like they should have been covered in 1967.""

"I think I bring the cool. I know what's cool. And I know what's cool about them, and I know what hasn't been tapped about them."

"There were songs that I wasn't cool with being on the new comp, and I got outvoted. The stuff that I wanted to back away from was the - my fear is that they will get perceived, worst case scenario, as Pat Boone. As shitty doo-wop. As a public TV special. That's what I don't want. So where am I always pushing is: get the beards, get them playing Central Park. That kind of stuff where they're more modern. The Beach Boys sang about mom and dad, and high school. Unless you're like, somebody who's in the kitsch of like Weezer, and that nerdy kind of thing... Grease ain't cool anymore. You know what I mean? But you know what is cool? Sunflower. Surf's Up. Take A Load Off Your Feet. Student Demonstration Time. Feel Flows. That kind of stuff."

"When Mark was doing the remixes last summer, I was pushing him to go even further. I was saying specifically to him, there are some Beach Boys albums where the album is there, the songs are there, but the production left the band down. Either it was rushed, or it didn't... The production didn't match the quality of the performance and the material. The weak link in a lot of stuff was a shitty mix and bad mastering. So what I was saying to Linett was, "You need to be the producer that they never had then. You need to be the guy that's hearing all that stuff and realizing it. Be the guy in the corner that they needed."

"So as far as it goes at making it understandable to a younger generation, absolutely. Because 62-year-old people, 65-year-old people aren't buying new music. We have to be aiming for the 23-year-old, or this thing dies."


Here's (hopefully) my last words on the subject:

There will never be a time when critics rank So Tough and Holland side-by-side with Pet Sounds, Sgt Pepper, Dark Side of the Moon, Aja, Hotel California, and Rumours. We need to accept this.

Isn't it funny how we've gone full circle from "America's Top Surfing Band!" to "America's Top Classic Rock Band!"?

Anyone in charge of marketing and promotion for the Beach Boys needs to stop framing them as "classic rock à la the Beatles and Rolling Stones." If you can't appreciate the fact that the Beach Boys are inimitably kitsch at heart, then you're probably not qualified to be the arbiter of what's "cool" about them.

HeyJude, it seems like we listened to a different podcast. Howie explicitly said that he makes decisions about the comps based on what he thinks is "cool" from the perspective of a hypothetical 23-year-old. That is what disturbed the REAL 20-year-olds who lurk around the BBs fan community, none of whom are particularly active on this forum. Almost everything else in your post is, again, irrelevant to that single point. You're approaching this from precisely the same broken and misguided framework as Howie.

Also, I think it’s far too broad of a statement to say that 20-year-olds in 2022 who are into “FM rock” are already into the Beach Boys. Like, they’re all familiar with “Here She Comes” and “Steamboat?”

Do you think a 20-year-old who gets into the Beach Boys in 2022 is just going to stay with Pet Sounds and Smile for the rest of their life? No, eventually they're going to check out the band's other albums. As we all did. We didn't do it because some dude from the company was constantly comparing them to the Beatles, Led Zeppelin and the Who. Or because of a remix that amped up the compression.

The poster over there said Howie’s interview indicates he things AM and FM matter for the Beach Boys in 2022. That’s ENTIRELY missing the point. It’s the opposite! They’re not a presence on radio much, and haven’t been for quite some time. The point isn’t that remixing “Baby Blue” is going to get them on the radio in 2022. The point is that the BBs not existing in the “classic rock” realm alongside other peers is a *symptom* of a long string of unfortunate things that injured their cred/image/legacy over the years. The point is now to right those wrongs the best they can be. Not by trying to get radio to play “Marcella” or “Baby Blue” now, but rather to talk the band up in media and venues that will give them some of that cred, and will make both their music and the ability to discover and enjoy their music something that is relatable and tangible and plausible for a 20-year-old in 2022.

The point that you and Howie are missing is that 20-year-olds who are into FM classic rock are already into the Beach Boys. And they don't care what some boomer critics wrote in Rolling Stone fifty years ago. That old school of thought is painfully irrelevant.

One of the major reasons EH blew up was because of Howie saying that 20-year-olds don't appreciate the nerdy/kitsch songs. It's an insane statement. Bands like Weezer, They Might Be Giants, and BMX Bandits made entire careers out of exploiting Beach Boys-style kitsch. Are they seen as "shitty doo-wop" today? No!

I have skimmed this book. It's not really for fans, and it barely qualifies as "non-fiction." I'm not sure who it was written for. Maybe someone seeking a master's degree in American history?

It is an extremely well-researched collection of essays by the author. The first chapter contains some interesting tidbits of information, particularly about Loren Schwartz and the mysticism "mumbo jumbo" that had fed Brian's acid-induced Christ complex circa '65-'67. The rest of the book is like... I don't know how to describe it. The words "overwrought", "grasping for straws", and "minimum word count" come to mind.

You'd be better off watching this video: https://youtu.be/NAh9oLs67Cw?t=64

Brian's on record stating that he's always abhorred the question of what his next project will be.

Tasteful. I'm glad they didn't rehire the guy who did the unfortunate Feel Flows cover.

Hi Ian! Thank you so much, don't know how I missed that. I could have really used this info (not that Wiki would have accepted it anyway)

Bellagio 10452 is managed by a published author who has worked closely with the BBs, which meets enough checkmarks for it to be accepted on Wikipedia

Is the next set really going to be titled "Sail On Sailor"? Kind of uninspired, much like the song itself. Wouldn't "Leaving This Town" be a thousand times more fitting? The song is one of their proggiest, a Blondie/Ricky offering, and an underrated highlight, not to mention the group had "left town" in '72, both literally and musically.

That's the quote! I don't see where it says they used the ELTRO in 2004.

If you cannot extrapolate that from "when we were doing Smile again in 2004, people who heard it thought about HAL" then... I dunno. I'm not the only person who interpreted the text this way. We'll have to agree to disagree.

If you're going to tell people who haven't read it that it was 15% of this, and 1% of that, and 80% of this...it suggests you actually did tally all that up, or that you know more than the average fan about how the book came together in order to give that much detail. Did you, or do you?

All I did was read the Wikipedia articles in the mid-2010s and cross reference them with the thousands of interviews, books, and articles written about the Beach Boys. From this, I found that various topics in the book were summarized with verbage that was particular only to the Wiki articles. I also noticed that a lot of claims and observations that had only been printed in the form of unsourced Wiki statements were reprinted in the book. So I guess, yeah, I do know more than the "average" fan?

It's not too different from the astute fans who read My Own Story and realized that some sentences were copied almost verbatim from, say, Goodbye Surfing, Hello God. Thus, I take issue when anyone claims that I Am Brian Wilson should be elevated over My Own Story.

[When we were doing SMiLE again in 2004, people who heard it thought abut HAL, not the original record.]

The book never said the ELTRO was used in 2004. The page in question clearly says it was used in 1967.

"Brian Wilson"/Ben Greenman: To do that in 1967, we used something called an Eltro Information Rate Changer, which changed pitch without speeding up or slowing down the tape. The Eltro was one of those toys we used as a tool. About a year after we tried the Eltro, it was the voice of HAL in 2001: A Space Odyssey. When we were doing SMiLE again in 2004, people who heard it thought abut HAL, not the original record.

So the entire book is bad because it put Heider's studio in SF rather than LA?

No, the book is bad because those examples demonstrate that the book does not necessarily contain Brian's account of his own life. And those are just the two examples I remember the most. It's been five years. I'd have to go through the whole book again to find more. Even if the book was riddled with errors, it still would have been "good" if it was presenting Brian's actual memories, feelings, and perspective, complete with the factual distortions.

And given your quoting of percentages, do you know those percentages as a fact or are they just numbers you made up to criticize the book without knowledge of how it was written?

Brian himself stated that he wrote the book with Ray. I recognize about 80% of the book's content as reworded tidbits from Wikipedia, stuffed with points of trivia that Brian has never brought up in interviews. That leaves about 20% of the book certainly to Brian, Ray, Ben Greenman, and God only knows who else. Brian himself stated that he wrote the book through phone interviews with Ben.

Based on the hundreds of interviews with Brian that I've read, watched, and listened, I am absolutely certain that less than 5% of the book was spoken by Brian over the phone to some random dude from the New Yorker. Instead, much of the "unique" portions of the book reminded me of Ray's posts about Brian and the posts from Brian Wilson/Beach Boys social media pages written by the guy/woman whose name escapes me.

These numbers are just my rough estimates. Do you expect me to get out a highlighter and do some wordcount math to figure out the exact percentages?

[NOT]

Do be aware that, if you happen to come across a book titled Wouldn't It Be Nice, purportedly written by Brian Wilson and Todd Gold, the book is NOT an autobiography. Brian didn't co-write it, Eugene Landy did.

Brian's for-real autobiography is I Am Brian Wilson, co-written with Ben Greenman.

  I Am Brian Wilson is almost entirely composed of slightly rewritten passages taken from Wikipedia. You can tell because it has all the same misconceptions that used to be printed on Wikipedia, like the band recording at Wally Heider's studio in San Francisco. It's a cheap, poorly researched biography written by a ghostwriter who was obviously not familiar with the Beach Boys, as evidenced by absurd errors like the claim that Brian used an Eltro Information Rate Changer in 2004 for the recording of She's Goin' Bald.

This is in addition to the 15% of the book in which Ray Lawlor and Brian's publicists recite anecdotes and quotes involving other famous musicians. And of course, maybe 1% of content that probably did come from Brian's mouth, like a previously unpublished anecdote about being in a mental hospital in the late '70s, or everything that he calls "quite an experience."