The beginning part seems to have been crafted to get revenge on Michael McDonald and to haunt his dreams forever.

Here’s something I thought of when GOK came out last month, thinking about why this album might be happening right now.

Brian was pretty good at supporting himself on the piano in one-off performances through the late 80s and early to mid 90s. Here’s when the problem started: I remember a performance of your imagination on David Letterman in 1998 in which Brian started playing during the first verse, got kind of locked up on the first chord, and either his mike was faded down quickly or he stopped playing for the rest of the song. (In 94 or 95 on the same show, he did a great job with Do It Again.)

Next: 1999. He pounded the same chord on the piano in his very first solo concerts for the entire show without moving his hands (I mean this literally: footage shows his hands locked on A major for 2 hours) and was of course not plugged in or was turned completely down. After that he stopped playing altogether during shows. A couple of years later, I think, he started playing Surfer Girl audibly. By 2010 he was noodling on the keyboard through at least half of the show. I think he has may have tapered off again in the last couple of years, but still plays much more than he used to.

Related: we know that his voice went through several stages since the late 60s, getting to its weirdest sound in the early 90s. By 1998 he was suddenly singing pretty but sounded kind of tired. He sounded slurry for a few years (sometimes attributed to changes in his meds), but made a huge improvement which started after SMiLE got out of his system. Lucky Old Sun was much better than prior albums vocally. I think the Disney album was his very strongest album vocally. He was 100% free of anything that had ever made his voice sound weird by then. Since then he’s done some weird speak-singing during the Pet Sounds shows, but other than Run, James, Run (which was pretty good, although it sounded like he was singing gently), we don’t really know how he sounds in the studio now.

So why this recording, and why now? I think Brian is probably keenly aware that people see his limitations at the keyboard, and he has seldom if ever played very exposed and intricate parts on his albums in quite a long time. I feel like he’s trying to prove himself as a keyboardist by putting himself out there as a soloist, however much editing/overdubbing is involved. I think this is therapeutic for him, and perhaps when he wraps up his career he wants to leave no unresolved issues.

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I also think that they should give Brian some slight vocal tuning on these live shows, it's not a bad thing

Problem with that is, if Brian is more than a quarter step off (which he often is), the autotune will flip him to the wrong note altogether, and it sounds like butt. (Remember the first few months of C50?)

Somebody would need to be at the board constantly reprogramming the autotune to the scale of the song currently being sung— diatonic plus any intended accidentals.

It was a good mix if you want to study Christian Love’s occasional guitar plinkings.

I saw them several years ago after they had just absorbed Jeff Foskett, and their vocal blend was on point. This was pretty much just a hootenanny tonight.

Brian’s lost a LOT of weight, and is not in his wheelchair. 

Never noticed this before, but he uses a lot of finger substitution in the left hand for Love and Mercy. In other words, he’ll put one finger on a note and switch to another finger before he releases the note, in order to make the downward scales easier and more comfortable to play. That’s a fairly advanced piano-playing technique.

 Verse 2 of “I’m Waiting for the Day.” He goes from 23-year-old Brian to 60-year-old Brian and back again.

GIOMH is truly the ultimate Brian solo album— the elusive Phil Spector-sounding rock and roll album. Brian and the band cut loose, mostly free of autotune and Joe Thomas. The much-maligned City Blues rocks harder than most any other Brian track, and Clapton’s pyrotechnical masturbation fits perfectly and sounds great.

Out-of-tune vocals? Sure, for 2004, but compare them to any random Ronettes song. Speaking of which, Brian does a killer Ronnie at the end of Fairy Tale— sounds almost like a placeholder for her to do her own vocal there, which would have been killer.

Even the Paley songs work, if you set aside the more vocally-alert originals. The fact that the original instrumental tracks were reused (while it was claimed that they were all new recordings) is really peculiar, particularly to those who have ears and/or software.

Overall, this is THE BW party record. Free of artifice and eminently crankable.

My personal favourite on this collection is 'You're Making Me Harder'

Great little sing along.

That’s not what he’s saying at all. Grow up.

It’s “You’re MAKIN’ Me Harder.”

I miss ghost.

Hi

I'm really interested to know if this RSD 17 release sounds any better than the same tracks on the POB 3 LP blue vinyl release ?

 

I haven't heard the blue, but the new version sounds freaking amazing-- the pressing is about as good as any album I own.

And in my opinion, colored vinyl usually sucks. Not this one.

Isn't he also doing the "What's in her head" part?

Willie Nelson pitch-shifted up a fourth really is something, ain't it?

I would wait until Brian did some acid, pull him aside, and show him an episode of Full House on my magical phone.

Maybe I'd follow that with The New Leave It to Beaver. Or the premiere of SMiLE; I dunno.

This one is hard to spot, but if you look real close in this video clip, you can spot the band's dignity floating away into the ether:

I don't know when I'll be playing Looking Back With Love again; maybe Mike can get Trump to do a duet on a Rockin' The Man in the Boat remake.  

Grabbin' the Little Man in the Boat?

Isn't "Wipeout" a pure stack of Brians?

when I first glanced at the title of this thread, I thought it said:

Dick Van Dyke Parks ......

He'd probably prefer if you asked him first.

I can't hear Bruce on the lead anyway, he's moving his lips but is being overshadowed by the other guy.

Bruce sang verse one entirely by himself, I think; other guy sang verse two by himself.

This is what all BB gigs are going to look like from now on, if they do the inauguration.

Give me one Donald Trump tweet that makes him a racist.

Thank you. You just made my argument. You don't know Donald Trump personally. Neither do I. But to call someone a racist simply because of what you might have heard on NPR, CNN, MSNBC, Washington Post or New York Times or whatever does your cause (whatever it is) no justice and diminishes you. Maybe not to all those who might agree with you, but most certainly not for those who come here wanting to talk about the Beach Boys. Everything you stated is YOUR OPINION - you have no proof whatsoever. If you want to hurl serious charges like this you better have more proof or at least have the decency of posting at Daily Kos or Huffington Post. Again - and it's just my view - this board deserves better.

Remember when Trump retweeted an image claiming 85% of whites are killed by blacks (when it's really 15%)? You know how that was debunked in the media, but Trump never disowned the tweet or apologized for it?

http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2015/nov/23/donald-trump/trump-tweet-blacks-white-homicide-victims/

That's something racists do. Trump is a racist. Even if he personally doesn't give a crap, appealing to and encouraging supporters' racism is BEING RACIST.

We can talk about Steve Bannon, sherriff's stars, Pepe memes and the alt-right, too. I'd be curious as to your feelings regarding Trump's campaign ceo and chief policy advisor being a nationally-known alt-right (white supremacist) figurehead.

I'm getting the feeling that many people in this thread are liberals which is just a shorthand of saying hysterical people with no political understanding very little formal education and who read a couple of selected websites like moveon.org or read the guardian rag magazine and have hatred for Trump who is already doing an outstanding job in leading this country and will do more for women and more for minorities and more for the gay community than all the brain-dead Liberals combined that have tried to lead this country of late .  I don't like to get angry or unkind here but I'm so frustrated with the moral self-righteousness of snarky liberals who pay no attention to the real actions and accomplishments of the president-elect and just go with the crowd from things they have heard from other uninformed and barely educated people who live only for hate and snark. I would be thrilled if the Patriotic Beach Boys would put country first and would perform which is not a political act but an act of patriotism and unity. I thought the motto on the left was stronger together wasn't it? There is nothing more intolerant and hate-filled than a leftist American liberal.

American Liberals are an elite academic cast who are capable only in performing in a snarky way what they call social justice and I am very disappointed that the level of intellectual depth in this thread, which is equivalent to that of someone like Samantha Bee on television. I am one of the intellectuals for Trump and like him I have liberal social policies and I believe in protection and prosperity and have seen nothing but failure in the Obama years.

Let's talk about Trump University, Pepe memes, sherriff's stars, a retweet with false statistics that 85% of whites are murdered by blacks (it's really 15%), Steve Bannon, the alt-right conference in Washington, "blood coming out of her wherever" and "you have to treat (women) like sh*t", an utterly inexperienced and homophobic cabinet, and Hair Furor's promise to overturn marriage equality on day one, "Professor."

I assume you mean the tambourine at 0:08 (https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=K6Ok9bKdAeU). That doesn't really bug me-- I hear one slightly sluggish entrance but don't hear the speeding up.

Yeah, I meant the "look out, babe"/"split, man" parts. I should have said follow the bass, not the horns.

That's definitely not a drum flub in LGIOK. It's an obvious bad edit (sounds almost like a needle skipping a groove), and about 2 beats are missing.

Listen to the same bit at the end of the second verse, and try counting both. Try singing/following the horn part.

It's possible Brian was trying to trick the listener into thinking the record skipped, which would be an interesting bit of humor. If it was just a bad edit, one has to wonder how every single person listening to the tape before the records were pressed could have missed that.