It seems to me that if Brian had been diagnosed with dementia, the court filing would have said so -- not that he suffers a "major neurocognitive disorder (such as dementia)". Clearly the filing needs to establish a basis for a conservatorship to achieve its purpose, and the legal hurdle to be cleared is that his cognitive challenges be in the ballpark of dementia. Presumably it's for the courts to decide if that's the case, but the filing tells us only that Brian indeed has such challenges, a fact that's been obvious for decades.

I was actually surprised that at least on occasion he might actually be really singing, even if it's into a dead mic

Perhaps nobody's told him.

I check in every couple of days, because scanning through Recent Posts here is still the most efficient way of seeing if any real consequence has happened recently in BBs-world, which these days means deaths and news of archival releases.

To answer my own question: Rolling Stone's 1969 review of 20/20 can be found here, if you're deft enough to evade the paywall.

https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-album-reviews/20-20-187920/

You can read RS's reviews of Friends and Sunflower in volume 12 of Contemporary Literary Criticism (along with a whole bunch of contemporary reviews/critiques of the BBs, Beatles, Dylan, Led Zep, Stevie Wonder and Joni Mitchell -- unfortunately, CLC's interest in popular culture was not maintained in later volumes), which is available at archive.org (search under "Books"). But I don't believe I've ever seen its review of 20/20. Guitarfool2002 -- is it available online anywhere you're aware of?

Ian, as someone who knows where you're coming from, I suggest you give his most recent album (The Boy Named If) a whirl. It's the first thing of his in three decades that I've really gotten into.

Great comments, JakeH. I'd never made the connection from Up on the Roof to In My Room and There's a Place, but it seems obvious now you point it out.

I see the reference to Today! being called The Beach Boys was corrected from the book edition I read.
https://www.amazon.ca/Heroes-Villains-Steven-Gaines-ebook/dp/B0C29ZCY5N/ref=sr_1_1?crid=QCXIM1LEWHQR&keywords=steven+gaines+heroes+and+villains&qid=1686256804&sprefix=steven+gaines+heroes+and+villains%2Caps%2C89&sr=8-1

Is it still "an uninspired melange of car tunes"? I actually thought it was the Concert album that he was befuddlingly calling self-titled, since he says it was released in late 1964 and went straight to number one. Like pretty much any book from more than 20 years ago, you can read a scanned copy for free at Internet Archive:

https://archive.org/

In spite of its obvious deficiencies, it's the only account of the band's history that's written by a hard-nosed journalist with an interest in the business side of the band's affairs.

I'm never going to be a scholar of this album, but when I eventually got around to listening to Uncovered and Unplugged I was struck by how good a lot of the outtakes were and what a missed opportunity the album was as a result. If they'd dropped guff like Papa Oom Mow Mow in favour of slightly more polished versions of things like Satisfaction and She Belongs To Me, the album could have fit in with the 1965 folk rock boom and helped them pivot to a more hip image going forward. Instead they got a big hit out of the retrograde Barbara Ann right when they needed it least.

What's the song at the beginning of this collage that someone posted on YouTube?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=igrjIw7hSTI

Compare and contrast the play counts for the CATP songs from Sail On Sailor:

I'm not sure if this is news to anyone here or not, but Spark In The Dark turns out to have nothing to do with Funky Pretty -- it's completely instrumental and has part of the melody of Chain Reaction Of Love.

Yep, it's on Spotify in Australia.

An a capella mix of All This Is That just hit Spotify here in Australia (I expect you'll have to wait until after midnight wherever you happen to be).

It's also worth noting, especially for newer fans, that for most of the 90s, you couldn't even get these albums AT ALL, as far as buying a new copy. The Caribou CDs went out of print very quickly, and it wasn't until 2000 that one could even buy CD versions again.

Nothing in my life will ever top the thrill of finding copies of Sunflower and CATP circa 1989-90. Kids these days have no idea.

I suspect there's a reason "Summer in Paradise" has been more or less quietly "retired", not even making it into album artwork collages on the 50th anniversary tour.

I can think of twelve.

Honestly it kinda broke my heart when that small snippet of the original melody for DYLW was unsurfaced when the Smile Sessions came out. It is so different from the BWPS version (and so much better)...it really is a tragedy that the lead vocal was never recorded. I'm so glad that the melody was brought to light, but it also shows us a glimpse of what could have been.

Pardon my ignorance, but what does this refer to? Where specifically can I find it on The Smile Sessions?

Great to hear about 'Baby Blue' - can't wait to hear that too!

It's probably not a coincidence that my favourite of the new 1970s mixes is a song with no drums.

ETA: Listening to the original version on LA now after a couple of plays of the new mix, and I hardly describe how inferior it is.

If you were offended by the Marcella mix, you'll no doubt feel the same way about Let Us Go On This Way -- it's got a big reverb-y drum sound that's clearly meant to play to the contemporary listener in a way that the entire Love You album distinctly does not.

But Baby Blue -- oh my. Gorgeous. Fully lives up to Howie Edelstein's hype. I'll never want to hear the original mix again.

I like the new mix of Mess of Help -- drums maybe a bit too conspicuous, but dispels the muddiness of the original without committing sacrilege.

You're right - it's all there. No doubt it will become available wherever you are when the clock strikes midnight, as it has just done here in Australia.

New stereo mix of Surfin' USA now on Spotify.

A "2021 Mix" of Marcella is up on Spotify (at least in my time zone). It's ... different. Very different.

The remix of Celebrate the News is one thing I don't like about FF. Why bother trying to improve on perfection? The vocals sit oddly in the mix, whether because of being mixed too loud or the reverb they seem to have added to them (correct me if I'm wrong here). It's great to hear the vocals in isolation at the end, of course, but that just confirms me in my view that they should have made this a vocals-and-instrumentals deconstruction track rather than a straight-up remix.

Also, at the risk of losing friends here: is it wrong of me to wonder how Dennis produced tracks of the precision and complexity of Celebrate the News and San Miguel in 1969 that he never matched later? Do his production credits on these songs belie a fair bit of involvement from Brian? By the same token, surely Sunflower is rich in Brian Wilson vocal arrangements, even where they aren't his songs or production credits. This seems to be to be an under-appreciated (see what I did there?) fact about the album.

Definitely a Spector-esque vibe, but also it's got somewhat of a sinister and extremely rocking vibe.

Perfectly described.

Mark Lewisohn on the tale about Brian Epstein hyping Love Me Do into the British charts:

North-west sales this first Friday and Saturday – with the epicentre in Liverpool – sent Love Me Do straight into the Top Fifty, the one compiled for the following Thursday’s Record Retailer: it snuck in at 49 ... So freakish was all of this, rumours quickly took grip that Brian was hyping the chart, buying in boxes of Love Me Do to fake its position ... No one considered Brian’s membership of a committee that challenged suspicions of chart malpractice, or his resistance to faking My Bonnie into even his own shop’s published Top Twenty, or – most striking of all – the fact that, in 1962, it made no difference how many copies a shop sold of any record because the charts weren’t computed that way. Nems had been a ‘chart return’ operation for years – it still provided data to Melody Maker and also now to Record Retailer – but those papers’ weekly phone calls or printed questionnaires didn’t ask for sales figures, only for a shop’s bestselling records ranked from 1 to 30; the papers awarded thirty points to the number 1 record down to one point for the number 30, and calculated an overall national total. All the charts were produced this way, as they still were in America. Brian Epstein had no need to buy ten thousand Love Me Dos to fake it into the charts; he didn’t even need to buy one. He did buy a couple of thousand copies, because the majority of Beatles fans wanted to buy it from Nems’ three stores, and because he was the manager and agent of this band and EMI had sent him one free copy.

A mere #83 on the Billboard Top 200. Still, 68 places higher than Sunflower ...

https://www.billboard.com/charts/billboard-200