1. Caroline, No (love the haunting background music and lyrics)
2 I Just Wasn't Made For These Times (i love the harmony in the "each day i start to" part)
3 That's Not Me (kind of sums up the type of things every young person goes through)
4. I Know There's An Answer (something i relate to with OCD)
5. You Still Believe In Me (good reminder to appreciate your girlfriend/relatives or significant other when they stand by you)
6. Here Today (love the advice of the lyrics, also the middle solo kicks ass)
7. Wouldn't It Be Nice - one of the best bipolar songs I can think of (and by that I mean the mood of the song is very contradictory)
8 I'm Waiting For The Day (Love the track and the lyrics most) - another good song that epitomizes what any young person in love feels
9. God Only Knows (one of the greatest love songs of all time*) - heard it too many times for it to be higher but takes the prize for second most realistic love song (second to this http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vc8tPTVBRSc)
10. Let's Go Away For Awhile - being an instrumental probably pegs it down a few but it is still a very chill song to listen to
11. Sloop John B - doesn't fit on Pet Sounds at all
12. Pet Sounds - don't really know the song
13. Don't Talk (Put Your Head On My Shoulder - ditto

Well, they had Murry after he found out about the sex and (I think) booze that their old road manager simply ignored, right?

well the reason for the question in question is why Dennis and Mike were at each other's throat (or so the books say).  Mike was quite a bit older than Dennis and I wouldn't think that they'd hang out with each other that much. From what I remember it was Mike, Brian and Al in one half (or 3/5) of the group who were the older guys who were the founders of the group and did most of the heavy lifting while Dennis and Carl were the other half (or 2/5) that were the tagalongs.

[All]

that's just a silly way of singing, those people after stepping out of the recording booth didn't say, "that was some sick gnar, brah".

also, "HEY BEACH BOYS FANS LISTEN TO THIS SONG I FOUND IT'S CALLED ALLEY OOP", I take it you've never listened to Beach Boys Party?

no. It's all covers. I would compare it to Beatles For Sale - an attempt to cash in for the holiday market. But at least half the songs on BFS were written by them.

All covers ?  I'll bet you the entire US national debt that it's not.

You owe me $16,365,370,575,377.43.  

This conversation and that debt figure depress me immensely
_______

@dwtherealbb: Do yourself a huge favor and listen to Party. Their voices are amazing and they make a lot of those covers sound better than their originals.

you're actually sort of right. The Argyles version is painfully slow. The guitar and faster pace make the Party version easier to listen to.

another thing i've wondered is if rambunctious onstage antics early in their career would have helped them later on. Would they have attracted a larger following if Dennis had made his "quaaludes and cocaine" comment fifteen years earlier.

If one can go along with forcing a story/concept into Pet Sounds, one should be able to see a thematic link between Good To My Baby and Don't Hurt My Little Sister. It is obvious from checking out the lyrics of the ballads on the second side of Today! that Brian's fracturing psyche was focused at that time on paranoia about his relationship with Marilyn. This is plain on songs such as Kiss Me Baby, She Knows Me Too Well, In The Back Of My Mind and Please Let Me Wonder. But it is also plain in the two uptempo songs previously mentioned. Here, Brian's paranoia is focused on other people's vision of the relationship, and the view of himself as the unthinking, insensitive male aggressor. In Good To My Baby, he takes the understandable first-person defensive angle ("They think that I'm bad and I treat her so mean/but all they know is from what they've seen"). With Little Sister, he takes a surprisingly empathetic turn, expressing the reservations of Marilyn's big sister Diane, a woman who was able to converse with Brian in a much more direct fashion than her sister. This view is confirmed by the fact that the tune was originally written to be sung by a woman, Ronnie Spector. He only changed the lyric to a "big brother" perspective when Spector rejected it and he was forced to cut it with the Boys.
I am astounded that people so underrate Little Sister. I honestly never met any fan of Today! who didn't rate the song high before reading comments on this board. It is a major piece of Brian's confessional approach to songwriting, an attack on himself.

was Marilyn the oldest out of the three Rovell sisters? That's something I've always wondered.

that's just a silly way of singing, those people after stepping out of the recording booth didn't say, "that was some sick gnar, brah".

also, "HEY BEACH BOYS FANS LISTEN TO THIS SONG I FOUND IT'S CALLED ALLEY OOP", I take it you've never listened to Beach Boys Party?

no. It's all covers. I would compare it to Beatles For Sale - an attempt to cash in for the holiday market. But at least half the songs on BFS were written by them.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MQOFq_wox6o
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iYLO1R-uCPk

i had thought that the pothead/surfer slang didn't become evident until the 1970s around the time where skateboarding/punk became evident but apparently it existed even in the very early 60s.

[Risque lyrics]

1. In The Back Of My Mind - Oh man, the feelings this song conjures. The melody is so haunting and gorgeous and the fragility of Dennis' voice nails it.
2. Kiss Me Baby - The lyrics, the chorus and the trading of lines is amazing.
3. Please Let Me Wonder - So loving and sweet but the solo kind of kills it. The solo is like the album version of Wendy, awful (See the Ed Sullivan Show version)
4. When I Grow Up To Be A Man - A theme well done and with a great tag and ending coda.
5. She Knows Me Too Well - Amazing melody and great vocal performances by both Brian and Mike.
6. Good To My Baby - One of the best choruses in any song.
7. Dance Dance Dance - A fun little track with a good, catchy riff and great use of key changes.
8. Do You Wanna Dance - A great rocker, although Dennis is drowned out.
9. I'm So Young - I prefer the alternate version on the Twofer, to be honest.
10. Help Me Ronda - The Summer Days (And Summer Nights !!) version is much better. Drags on much too long and those false endings annoy the heck out of me.
11. Don't Hurt My Little Sister - Risque lyrics which don't go well with kinda poor backing.
12. Bull Sessions - Actually pretty funny, I enjoy each second but gets placed here because it isn't a song. "Everything's gonna be alright, Marilyn".

what?

in their early days (62 and 63) were Mike and Brian sort of the parents/chaperones in the group? I can just imagine them having the responsibility of making sure Dave, Carl and Denny weren't getting into any shenanigans like bringing a hooker into their hotel room (something I could have seen Dennis doing).

and by that i mean anthropologists and sociologists who criticized them as painting a smiley face over "Amerika". For those that don't know what "Amerika" means its a euphemism to describe cold war America as a fundamentally racist oppressive society.

as sort of a "ballad" as opposed to their faster songs like "Fun Fun Fun"

what if "Till I Die" had been released as a single during their heydey (64-65)? Would it have been treated sort of like surfer girl or in my room or would people have been like WTF?

Question: which Beach Boys song would work best as a dubstep number?!

anything from Wild Honey.

Being a parent terrified him iirc - reckoned he would be a bad parent to the extent where he became.... A bad parent!

well i don't like to judge people by calling them bad parents but wouldn't he have tried hard not to have any children until he got his act together? In an alternative history, he married a 20 something year old in the 90s (instead of Melinda) and has children then instead.

Al had a $100 a day cotton habit in the early 70's(and maybe Bruce also). Not hard drugs (HEROIN, Speed, Crack, Blow, Ice) but it was enough to make me wonder what is it with the Wilson brothers that made them??? did it have to do something to do with their genes or their environment or their wealth and their fame(money to afford hard drugs (Heroin, Speed, Cocaine)) or their feelings(pleasant ones, pleasureable ones, unpleasant ones, angry ones etc) the fact that they liked to party,  was it their beliefs or their relationships, was it their musical talent , the fact that they were musicians, or the trivialities of what happened to them from day to day and the fact that they existed, the laws of physics, did these factor in any way as far as contributing to why they did drugs?  What (if any) of the above contributed  to why they infact did do Hard Drugs(and by this I do not mean Mike's brief pot use 66-67) ? (paging Todd )

great imitation.

back around the time of Wild Honey, did Brian think that becoming a father was the best way to get him out of his mental slump? It sort of made sense at the time as it would entail him focusing less on music and drugs and more on being a parent.

Lastly, what was it about the Wilson brothers compared to the rest of the group? Al and Mike never really got into that type of stuff, or even soft drugs for that matter (minus Mike's brief pot use in 66-67).

Anyone? Is it possible it was genetic or that it was used to cover up the emotional scars of their father?

Brian (and maybe Dennis also) were known for abusing hard drugs, especially during the 70s. Did Carl do any of that stuff (and by hard I mean cocaine, heroin, speed)? There was a period, if I recall, around Love You/MIU that Carl was thought to be addicted to something (more likely booze).

Lastly, what was it about the Wilson brothers compared to the rest of the group? Al and Mike never really got into that type of stuff, or even soft drugs for that matter (minus Mike's brief pot use in 66-67).

i wrote this on another thread, but I think the post 1966 beach boys would have been most successful as a kind of soft rock group. They probably didn't have the players to be a hardrock group like Led Zep or Black Sabbath but they did have the talent to be sort of a Rundgren/Bread/JT type of group. Something along these lines:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fXq81-cGJr4

ok i'm probably pissing a lot of when i keep talking about the beatles, but one of the things I've wondered is why the beatles kept producing hits while the beach boys mostly didn't. Even after 1966, the beatles had quite a few hits:
Strawberry Fields Forever/Penny Lane
All You Need Is Love/Baby You're A Rich Man
Hello Goodbye/I Am the Walrus
Lady Madonna/The Inner Light
Hey Jude/Revolution
Get Back/Don't Let Me Down
Let It Be/You Know My Name
The Ballad of John and Yoko/Old Brown Shoe
Come Together/Something

For the love of Andrew G. Doe, please no more Beach Boys movies!

it wouldn't be a beach boys movie though. Remember that in Nowhere Boy the word "Beatles" is never mentioned.

Does anyone here think that there best hope in the 1970s (in terms of commercial success) was as sort of a soft-rock group in the mold of someone like Marvin Gaye, Chicago, Todd Rundgren etc? Songs like "All This Is That", "Till I Die" "Sail On Sailor" etc. ?

If the movie concentrated on Murry's exotic punishments it would make horror cult classic. Pink Flamingos meets Bad Taste.

That's the only "interesting" point I could see in their pre-band days. They all were so very young when the Beach Boys started that there really was not much time for anything else

age comparisons at the time of first album

Please Please Me
John (half Brian half Dennis IMO) 22
Paul (Mike) 20
George (Carl) 20
Ringo (Al) 22

Surfin Safari
Brian 20
Dennis 17
Mike 21
Carl 15
Al (although not on album) 20

type movie? Not much has been said about their early life, but is there enough information to make it an interesting movie?

the lyrics are incredibly abstract and I don't recall Brian ever talking about it in interviews. Considering they were done with surf music by that point yet the song uses the words "surf", I would assume that that's what BW had in mind. I've also heard that there are some references to Murry in it and how the song was basically a message to  him saying "don't worry about us".