The 25th Anniversary show is pretty much "Mystery Science Theater 3000" fodder at this stage. At the time, I think it was cool/interesting to see and hear the new song at the end. And Carl offers a truly earnest and heartfelt "Heaven" dedicated to Dennis. The cheesy show frankly didn't deserve the class Carl brought to it.
But everything looks and sounds awful at that show, save a few numbers. They pre-recorded most of the audio (see the Gary Usher diaries book for the story on that), and while that negated them actually biffing the songs, they very much sound like they were recorded in a TV dub studio.
Even most the guest spots were kinda awful. Two Dog Night was okay I guess. Everybody always cites Ray Charles, and I can't fault his performance, but frankly I would have been fine with Carl (or god forbid they called up Blondie) singing it. Glen Campbell seemed to be on something at the show and they actually left in the part where he sings the lyrics to the wrong song.
But it's highly entertaining as cheese. Brian squinting to read the lines without glasses. I've always loved Mike's randomly blurting out "Don Ho, what are YOU doing here?" during the end of the show. The truly awful editing, including not even showing the guys in the order they got off the stupid boat for their leis at the beginning of the concert.
There are actually some network like interstitials that the guys taped that I don't think even made it on the Japanese laserdisc, including Brian lifting weights.
As we learned from the Gary Usher book, the 25th show seems to have helmed by an old fashioned, cranky, demanding network variety show producer who yelled and demanded everything yesterday. You can imagine how *that* guy enjoyed dealing with Landy.
There's just no pleasing some people. It's the Beach Boys, it's prime time tv in 1987. I was just happy ABC gave 90 minutes to our guys on a Friday night.
I don't remember Glen singing the wrong song; he did mess up the words on I Get Around, though. "Now none of the guys go steady, no, no, because it wouldn't be right to leave her alone on a Saturday night"...or something like that.
Well yes, my assessment was from the point of view of literally 35 years later. It wasn't that great when I watched it back then, and it certainly hasn't aged well; that was my main point. It's not exactly "Concert for George."
The only way to get the band in primetime, even in 1987, was to stuff the show with flavors of the moment and mostly b-listers from the past (or A-listers past their prime, hence Two Dog Night). And even then, they weren't even getting A-listers *of that era.* Mike actually said later on in an interview that he was disappointed with the number of artists who turned down appearing on the show. I recall him specifically citing Billy Joel. Mike lamented that Billy Joel had opened for the BBs in his pre-superstar days, and Mike seemed to feel it was disappointing that Joel now seemed "too big" to do the BB anniversary show.
Who knows. If the band's 25th had fallen right after "Kokomo" became a hit, maybe a better show could have been finagled with better guests and better production values. But probably not.
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