another thing I'll add is that the beach culture itself changed dramatically. I was watching the movie Secondhand lions and the beach culture was dramatically different than what it had been ten years earlier.

with me that the classic Beach Boys ( which I'll define as the period from Surfin Safari to Holland) strike you as an allegory of southern California at the time? Like SoCal in the early 60s they were a happy go-lucky car and surf band. By the early 70s they had turned to drugs (or at least Brian and Dennis had) and had a much more cynical or at least deeper stuff to their music just as the culture of early 1960s California was unrecognizable by the early 70s. Some of the stuff like "The Welfare Song" "Don't Go Near The Water" or "Here She Comes" would have been dismissed by the record companies in 1962. In their early days they were all clean cut kids but by the early 70s, almost all of them had beards.

Lastly, I think that by the early 70s, the life they had lived as kids (working class suburban family in ranch house, dad works in industrial job, mom stays home etc) was mostly gone or unsustainable and many of the people who lived in the blue collar suburbs of the South Bay, Gateway Cities and San Gabriel Valleys mostly left LA County. From 1970 to 1980, the white population of Los Angeles county declined by a million people. I'm not trying to sound racist or anything but  the original culture of early to mid 1960s SoCal was mostly displaced.

Anyone here kind of agree?

anyone here think this would have been a good cover song for the "So Tough" album?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GtNQvt99P2w

remind anyone of the group America?

I think that Brian would have been in a band no matter what. The Beach Boys were one of the earlier American bands to form, but the guys who would later make it in The Byrds, Love, Buffalo Springfield were all around the LA scene too. I imagine Brian would have just been in another group before the British invasion, maybe a group without a hit single, but he would have been one of the seeds germinating during the 1964-1965 period.
Hell maybe he would have joined The Lovin' Spoonful, or formed a group with Danny Hutton/Van Dyke Parks/Gary Usher or some other guys like that.

The point is, I think that Brian would have had some part of the LA scene with or without The Beach Boys. Mind you I'm not saying that this would have been some how preferable, or that his career would have been "better" or anything like that. I'm only saying that Brian was a very dedicated guy, and had a ton of musician pals pre-Beach Boys who were all trying to break out of the LA scene as well.

(I also think that Brian's commitment to his family prevented him from fulfilling his mid-70s destiny of a Wilson-Newman-Nilsson-Van Dyke Parks supergroup!  )

I sometimes wonder if he would have been a member of the Doors

Professionally, I don't think any of them would have been in the music business (maybe Dave...). Brian seems like the kind of guy who would've written songs in his room and not played them to anyone. Mike would have had a regular day job, Al would have been a dentist of course, Dennis probably would have stayed working at Murry's factory. Carl would have been president.

Carl, yes, but I always thought that Dennis marched to the beat of his own drum (no pun intended). Out of the three of them, he had the most issues with Murray.

I listened to the Beach Boys as a kid, eventually grew out of it, and didn't start liking them again until I heard some of their good late stuff (like from the Blondie/Ricky era). It was then that I learned more about who the beach boys were (as I didn't know any of their names except for Brian)

So with the main five members (Mike, Al, Brian, Dennis, Carl), how do you think they would have turned out had they not become famous?

- I think Mike would have been sort of an Uncle Rico type given how his life was early on at the time (pumping gas, shotgun wedding, alleged wife beating). Out of all of them, his ass was saved the most by tagging along with his cousins

- Al, knowing that he was always the quieter and inoffensive out of all of them, would probably be a Dentist living in Orange County with a wife and kids

- I could see Brian becoming a professor or something like that. He was definitely the brains of the group.

- OK, I might have been too rough on Mike but to be fair, Dennis probably wasn't going anywhere in their early days. From what I read, he was considered a juvenile delinquent who got kicked out of Hawthorne High for fighting. A lot of the stuff that happened to him in the late 70s and early 80s was probably only delayed by the success and fortune of the beach boys.  My guess is he would have ended up like Jeff Bridges character in "The Big Lebowski."

- I'm not sure about Carl as he was only a kid when they first got started but my guess is he would have been successful whatever he had gotten into as he had the least baggage out of the three Wilson brothers.

What are your thoughts?