Bellagio Road says the Perth incident was March 14.

http://www.esquarterly.com/bellagio/1978.html

It also reminds us that Carl "keeled over" at one point in the show. Someone pointed out earlier on that on the recording Carl appears to forget the entirety of the second verse of Darlin' - my instinct on hearing it was that he was on the ground at that time.

has all this anti-smoking stuff that even took over France reached Down Under yet?)

Just slightly. This is what cigarette packets are required to look like by law in Australia. Whenever I go to Europe, I'm always amazed at how relaxed attitudes are to smoking there.

If you'll pardon me for going off topic ...

I've lived most of my life in Perth and while I was only six-and-a-half in April 1978, I clearly remember scandalised talk that the Beach Boys had performed while drunk. My brothers and I owned a best-of and liked the BBs, but not to the extent that them coming to Perth was any kind of event for us. I was a bit disappointed at the onset of my full-blown fandom a decade later to read in Stephen Gaines' Heroes and Villains that all this happened in Melbourne. This turned out to be wrong of course - although Carl's performance in Melbourne was quite bad enough. My brother tells me Molly Meldrum blasted the group on Countdown (apologies to baffled non-antipodean readers here), which would have been one of a tiny number of cases of him offering an opinion on anything that wasn't completely fawning. I'm sure this would have been on the basis of the Melbourne show, which was shown on television besides (hence the footage on YouTube, if it's still there).

Question for the historians: what date would this press conference have been, and when did he cop his black eye from Rocky Pamplin?

I note that the comments on The Smoking Gun site for the tour rider include the following from "Steve Love, University of Southern California". The accompanying Facebook page looks kosher (superficially at least).

Looks like the Boys have become cranky old fusspots since my time with them in the roaring Seventies!

http://www.thesmokinggun.com/backstage/hall-fame/beach-boys

http://www.facebook.com/steve.love.90

And on a semi-related note, there's this zinger from, of all things, the United States Court of Appeals (Ninth Circuit) ruling in LOVE v. SANCTUARY RECORDS GROUP LTD TV LLC, concerning the Smile/Mail on Sunday matter.

The central issue before us is whether American claims for relief can be asserted on the basis of conduct that only occurred in Great Britain. The defendants think not. Love wishes they all could be California torts.

http://caselaw.findlaw.com/us-9th-circuit/1530601.html

I've just come across this 2007 piece by Rafi Mohammed, who appears to be some manner of big-cheese business consultant, entitled "What’s the Value of the 'The Beach Boys' Brand", which as far as I can tell has never been mentioned on this site before. The upshot:

Luckily, the Beach Boys are litigious – there are several publicly available court documents containing a treasure trove of interesting information ...

In 1998, after the death of Carl Wilson and amidst dissension in the band, BRI met to decide how “The Beach Boys” trademark should be used. As a result of this meeting, Mike Love agreed to pay a royalty on all of his gross concert revenues for the right to tour as “The Beach Boys.” C’mon, take a guess at how much the royalty rate is…Mr. Love agreed to pay a 20% royalty on the first $1 million in gross receipts and a 17.5% royalty thereafter. WOW…20% right off the top (before expenses)! I was surprised - that’s a lot of money especially since concert touring expenses are so high: managers and agents take percentages, it’s expensive to travel with a large band, and sound/light systems are costly. Of course, since Mike Love owns 25% of BRI, the net royalty he pays is 15%...but still, quite pricey ...

We all know that brands are valuable. But from a Value Decoder perspective, I’m always interested in understanding exactly how much a brand is worth. In this case, a heck of a lot! This value is illustrated by a comment from a friend of mine who is mildly interested in music. Amidst my shock over the 20% royalty, he commented “Rafi, I know who ‘The Beach Boys’ are but I have no idea who Mike Love is.”

http://www.pricingforprofit.com/pricing-strategy-blog/what-s-value-beach-boys-brand.htm

I've aggregated the various lists here and come up with the following:

1. Wild Honey (79 points)
2. Surf's Up (75)
3. Smile (69)
4. Smiley Smile (64)
5. All Summer Long (52)
6. Holland (49)
7. Friends (41)
8. Love You (28)
9. Summer in Paradise (27)
10. Summer Days (26)

Persons of good taste who would like to see Summer in Paradise blasted out of the top ten might wish to vote tactically for Surfin' USA, Surfer Girl, Party! and Surfin' Safari, all of which are bubbling under.

Surfin' USA, All Summer Long and Summer Days are the best of the early covers, but I wouldn't go so far as to say that I liked them.

I've had two takers in my bid to get a best album covers discussion going on the "Good/Poor/potentially confusing Beach Boys album titles" thread, and it occurs to me that it warrants a thread of its own. I also suggest we nominate least favourites as well as favourites.

From the other thread we've had this from Roger the Shrubber:

01) The Smile Sessions (3D Box)
02) Surf's Up
03) Summer In Paradise (UK Version)
04) Smiley Smile
05) Friends
06) LA
07) Holland
08) Pet Sounds
09) In Concert
10) Wild Honey

And this from Sockittome:

1). Friends
2). Wild Honey
3). TSS
4). Surfs Up
5). All Summer Long
6). Summer Days and......
7). Surfin' USA
Cool. Smiley Smile
9). Surfin' Safari
10). Holland

And here's what I wrote on the previous thread, to which I would like to add that my nomination for least favourite goes to KTSA.

I've only been able to come up with seven covers I actually like. I dare say I'm the only person who'll be including C&TP, which is fatally flawed in its failure to accurately represent the music, but I nonetheless think it's a striking design that would have stood a more "nostalgic" album in very good stead.

1. Smile
2. Holland
3. Wild Honey
4. Surf's Up
5. Smiley Smile
6. Friends
7. Carl & The Passions - So Tough

As far as I'm concerned, anything pre-Smile is just hack work by an art department that clearly had nothing invested in the band emotionally. I've got nothing against the covers of 20/20 or Sunflower, but neither is terribly imaginative. There would be a case to be made for including Endless Summer, but I don't find the image all that attractive personally. MIU and BB85 are inoffensive, but a really good cover has to make a statement about the music, and in neither case does the music allow for a statement worth making. The other later covers are bad to disastrous, the worst offender being KTSA.

As for solo albums, an honourable mention goes to the very elegant design for BW88. TLOS is the best of the later BW solo albums. I find the cover of POB cover a bit boring, I'm afraid - I wish they'd gone for the shot of the title scrawled in beach sand which you see on the foldout for the reissue.

I've only been able to come up with seven covers I actually like. I dare say I'm the only person who'll be including C&TP, which is fatally flawed in its failure to accurately represent the music, but I nonetheless think it's a striking design that would have stood a more "nostalgic" album in very good stead.

1. Smile
2. Holland
3. Wild Honey
4. Surf's Up
5. Smiley Smile
6. Friends
7. Carl & The Passions - So Tough

As far as I'm concerned, anything pre-Smile is just hack work by an art department that clearly had nothing invested in the band emotionally. I've got nothing against the covers of 20/20 or Sunflower, but neither is terribly imaginative. There would be a case to be made for including Endless Summer, but I don't find the image all that attractive personally. MIU and BB85 are inoffensive, but a really good cover has to make a statement about the music, and in neither case does the music allow for a statement worth making. The other later covers are bad to disastrous, the worst offender being KTSA.

As for solo albums, an honourable mention goes to the very elegant design for BW88. TLOS is the best of the later BW solo albums. I find the cover of POB a bit boring, I'm afraid - I wish they'd gone for the shot of the title scrawled in beach sand which you see on the foldout for the reissue.

I seem to remember Al saying he didn't like the end of Break Away because they were singing at too low a pitch, which "made us sound like old men". So my guess is that his concern was commercial. Remember that the context here was that they were experiencing financial difficulties, fishing for a new contract and desperate for a hit, and here was a full-blooded Brian Wilson production specifically tailored to that end - but in the view of Al, they blew it by failing to sound sufficiently "youthful", which he continued (rightly or wrongly) to perceive as synonymous with "commercial". From my perspective though, the end section of Break Away is awesome. The descending "ahh-ahh-ahh" bit is breathtaking - like a ray of sunlight flooding into a dark room.

Back on topic - I've never liked the fadeout on the otherwise lovely You Still Believe In Me.

Depends on where you are.

There's cross-purposes here as to whether we mean a classic in the sense of a great song, or a song everybody knows. In the first case, most certainly. In the second, it may as you say depend where you are. I imagine it would be best known in the US by virtue of having been on Endless Summer.

There's obviously a great deal of crude guesswork here. Surely the Capitol two-fer CDs weren't really outsold by things that came out at about the same time called "California and Other Girls" and "Concert Days". It also isn't my understanding that KTSA outsold LA (Light Album), chart positions notwithstanding.

Summertime is awesome - one of the few extra-BBs Brian productions of the 60s that I like, I'm sorry to say.

Has a "best BBs album cover" poll ever been done here?

I'd hardly call catch a wave a classic

A minority opinion, I'd suggest.

Or if I might put it differently - it seems to me that the common thread behind the decisions queried by Eric is concern for contemporary sensibilities. Few of the sentiments captured in the BBs' early work could be expressed unironically today, but BTTYS is more naivete than I and a lot of others can stomach. As an old doo-wop song, Come Go With Me might be heard as pre-historical if the foundation of your musical tastes is the 60s rather than the 50s. You might say something similar of a girl group song like Then I Kissed Her. Sure the original was contemporaneous with early BBs, but to many it might not seem that way - Phil Spector's work never had the mass popular revival that the Beach Boys enjoyed in the 1970s, which is the time their music was directly experienced by a huge part of their mass audience. Disney Girls, in common with almost everything else by Bruce, has dated badly - the line of 1970s MOR it represents is culturally extinct today.

On the other side of the coin, All Summer Long perfectly exemplifies everything that makes the BBs durably significant, and it's simply too good to exclude. TLGIOK gets props today which weren't due to it at the time because we can now see it as a signpost to Pet Sounds. And as well as being a lovely song, Friends expresses Beatles-ish 1960s sentiments that would generally be seen as having aged well.

As for 409, there are better car songs than that one, and unfortunately you have to cut somewhere.

Personally, I'm happy to credit the inclusion of the three songs listed at the expense of the five excluded songs listed to good taste on the part of the compiler. Those of us too young to have experienced the era directly can appreciate the surf and car oeuvre as expressing the spirit of its time, but there are few of us who don't draw the line at BTTYS.

1. The Warmth of the Sun
2. Don't Worry Baby
3. Fun Fun Fun

Any album with Denny's Drums and Sonny vs Cassius is cruisin' for a bruisin', but the top tier is the equal of any other BB album's.

4. In The Parkin' Lot
5. Why Do Fools Fall in Love
6. Keep an Eye on Summer
7. Shut Down Part 2
8. Pom Pom Playgirl
9. This Car of Mine

I have a sneaking regard for Shut Down Part 2, and think they would have done better to have padded out their early albums by setting Carl to work on instrumentals more often. Pom Pom Playgirl is a recently acquired taste.

10. Louie Louie
11/12. Denny's Drums/Sonny vs Cassius

Thud. Fancy putting Louie Louie on Best of the Beach Boys (the one that squeezed Pet Sounds out of the marketplace).

1. In My Room
2. Little Deuce Coupe
3. Surfer Girl
4. Catch a Wave

These four are very hard to separate, and are the reason this is their best album pre-All Summer Long.

5. Our Car Club
6. The Rockin' Surfer
7. Your Summer Dream
8. Hawaii
9. Boogie Woodie
10. Surfers Rule
11. The Surfer Moon
12. South Bay Surfer

The rest is a mix of non-filler tracks I happen not to like (like Hawaii, which to my annoyance has been played every I've seen Brian or the BBs), filler tracks I do like (The Rockin' Surfer, which is the early BBs instrumental that best evokes its subject matter), filler tracks I don't like (South Bay Surfer - Brian was never able to make anything out of his love for Swanee River), and The Surfer Moon. The latter stands alone because it is fatally unblemished by rock'n'roll, placing it in the same category as the unlistenable second side of the Christmas Album.

Pretty ballsy of Al to decide Brian's version wasn't up to scratch and he had to re-do it all by himself. Glad he did though.

I have a very clear memory of Carol Kaye saying on a documentary that Brian would come in to the studio with musical parts written out, but as a school child would do it, with crotchets and quavers and such written the wrong way around.

Obviously these record company types were listening for different things from the rest of us, but I really don't understand why Being With The One You Love didn't make the cut. The biggest tragedy though is that nothing became of Black Widow, the demo of which is quite stunning despite its sketchiness. My instinct is to blame Landy for this - that Brian heard from him the kinds of things Mike Love would have said. Too negative, Brian. A downer. Think positive! Hence its transformation into the ghastly and deservedly unreleased Let's Do It Again. If Brian had been able to pursue the song's haunted and melancholy quality, it could have been a new 'Til I Die to match the neo-Smile of Rio Grande.

Poor Old Body To Move and Too Much Sugar on the other hand are clearly b-sides, much as I love the latter.

The label also asked for an ambitious suite-type work, and Paley took two unfinished Brian songs, wrote extra sections and all the linking material, and Rio Grande was done.

Obviously one of these two was Night Bloomin' Jasmine. Which was the other?

This English language instruction website features yeasayer Jason and naysayer Amy discussing their views on the BBs. Additions to your vocabulary this week  are "backbone", "upbeat", "depth", "experimental", "go downhill", "tour", "timeless", "old fashioned", "put off" and "corny". And "Pet Sounds".

http://www.englishbaby.com/lessons/6012/music/beach_boys