How do you like this ?

They look great in this picture. Brian looks genuinely happy. The performance initially left me disappointed, but seeing it a second time, I thought is was about as good as one could expect. What I really look forward to is the new recordings. The "Do It Again" remake had the old magic, and I feel like they can still create that in the studio, and I hope whatever "new" songs of Brian's they do will have that magic as well. If that happens, it will be a successful 50th celebration for me.

I have a very special life-long bond with this particular song.  When I was only 7 years old, my brother brought home the single "California Girls/Let Him Run Wild", and I always played both sides of 45s because from infancy I was a huge lover of all things musical.

I was absolutely stunned by "Let Him Run Wild", and played it over and over again. I thought it was one of the most amazing pieces of music I'd ever heard. And now, almost 50 years later, I still feel that it is one of the most amazing pop records of its time, and perhaps of all time.

I think that a lot of Brian's work with lyricists is also very personal, but I can't imagine a more deeply personal lyric than "Til I Die".  I would say that's the most personal song he ever wrote.

Testing.

What the hell did you say?

For me it's one great song ("Wonderful"), one good song ("Bill"), and one bad pairing.  They're just too different in style and lyrical content to mesh well.  Must've been the drugs that made them think it'd work...

[I]

And I want to thank all the folks who replied kindly to Jimmy. 

I didn't know exactly how to approach the question, but I'm glad there were others who did.

The idea here should be to help newcomers enjoy this music as many of us have enjoyed it for many years.  Just my opinion.

In no particular order:

"The Like In I Love You"
"Palm Tree And Moon"
"Midnight's Another Day"
"Your Imagination"
"Adios" (Linda Rondstadt's recording of the Jimmy Webb song, on which Brian arranged and sang bgvs)

I don't think the Beatles or Brian needed to "borrow" from one another in those days.  I Brian's admiration for the Beatles, and the Beatles' admiration for the Beach Boys and Brian's artistic vision, were a case of gifted artists spurring each other on to greater creativity and originality.

Yeah, but outside The Beach Boys, The Beatles were quite open to pilfering from other sources. John did it more than any of them, I think. He stole lyrics on more than one occasion. The beginning of the electric version of Revolution was taken wholesale from the beginning of Pee Wee Crayton's Do Unto Others, etc. To me, his pilfering made him an even more sophisticated artist, as far as I'm concerned. Artist like Lennon, Van Gogh, etc. understand that art is really as much about borrowing as it is about creating - or, that creating and borrowing are not necessarily different things.

Really can't disagree with you.  Brian was a borrower from earlier sources as well, and did so with a sophistication perhaps more profound than that of his Liverpudian peers.

I can't believe some of the junk I'm reading here.  I would expect people with an interest in SMiLE era Beach Boys to at least be able to generally identify the different types of psychedelic music that were happening in the U.S. and England around the mid-to-late 60s, to understand the blues underpinnings of the San Francisco scene, the more jazz/pop/folk influenced L.A. sounds, and the music-hall-meets-mad-hatter-meets-medieval-meets-sci-fi mix happening in London with established bands like the Beatles and new (at the time) bands such as Pink Floyd. 

Instead, I'm reading groundless conjectures about "drones" and stuff.  Come on folks, get some decent info and do some decent listening.

I don't think the Beatles or Brian needed to "borrow" from one another in those days.  I Brian's admiration for the Beatles, and the Beatles' admiration for the Beach Boys and Brian's artistic vision, were a case of gifted artists spurring each other on to greater creativity and originality.

If anything was ever "borrowed", I would say that Brian and his bandmates in 2003 did some borrowing from side two of Abbey Road to come up with the seamless segues that create the "movements" of BWPS.  But that's not a bad thing at all.  It's a very cool thing.

All the reports I've ever heard indicate that Brian wasn't interested enough to bother being involved until they started working on the "Child" coda and he burst into the studio with the (apparently) forgotten melody that we know as "A children's song, have you listened as they play?"

This thread is definitely reminding me of why I didn't bother with this board for a long time after initially enjoying it.  And it makes me wonder if I want to continue bothering.

SMiLE in its final form (as in BWPS) is pretty much a psychedelic experience throughout, especially in the way it is seamlessly structured in three long pieces that move through many different moods and musical textures. 

As far as one song, I would say that "Mrs. O'Leary's Cow" is the most, could we say, "classsic psychedelia" piece in the song cycle.  It's like an aural hallucination.

None of this matters anymore.  And it hasn't mattered since 2004.  The story has a happy ending.  And that's all that matters now.

happy? no vocals 4 "child is the father of the man","look","love to say da da" & "holiday" :/ far from happy.

That's certainly not the way I look at it.  I consider BWPS to be the finished, definitive SMiLE with completed songs and vocals (I know they're not 1967 BB vocals, but that doesn't matter near as much to me as it does to some of you).  I look at this from the perspective of a songwriter.  Brian and VDP were the songwriters, and they were creating a song cycle, basically.  They were able, in 2004, to finish the work they started and see it presented in a triumphant world tour, then be released to rave reviews and respectable sales as an album.  I really don't see the problem here, unless one thinks that it's not enough to create a great work of music and see it performed and recorded.  For me, that is wonderful, and the release of the SMiLE Sessions is the cherry on top of the icing of the cake.

I guess you could say that "All I Want To Do" is the BB's "Why Don't We Do It In The Road?"

I think probably the stuff we point to as showing some sort of mental/emotional problems were just the way Brian was with his type of genius.

I don't know about needing to cool out after SMiLE, in actuality he didn't cool out at all, he was working full tilt for the next year.

I think we have overlooked the elephant in the room which was between Brian and VDP, the actual collaborators. I think the "conflicts" with VDP were the problems. Not really conflict but just a plain disagreement of the creative and behavioral. Brian wanted to be snooty, he did it because he could, as he did it he began to feel more and more like it just was not him, and VDP felt it was not brainy enough and Brian's sort of juvenile behavior didn't endear him either and they drifted apart and Brian dropped SMiLE because he just did not feel it.

I've never read or heard of anything that would support that as a reason VDP left the project.  What I've read and heard seems to indicate that VDP was frustrated with the general atmosphere that permeated the project once the Beach Boys returned from touring.  What are you basing this on, Cam?

[It has a sick, high school locker-room tone to it that is not at all appropriate for the song into which it intrudes.]

The middle section of "Wonderful" on Smiley is disturbing because of the chatter.  It has a sick, high school locker-room tone to it that is not at all appropriate for the song into which it intrudes.  That's one of the hardest things for me to take about Smiley Smile.  And yet, even that did not keep me from recognizing the greatness of the song when I first heard it.

I believe that is the entire point of the interlude. It presents the "locker-room tone" that symbolizes the band itself. The high voice takes the part of the voices inside Brain's head. Both intruding right into the middle of a song that perhaps best exemplifies Brian's fragile SMiLE art-world. That Smiley trashing of Wonderful is Brian's own commentary on the end of the SMiLE project, whether subconscious or not.

You may well be right on that.  Brian was doing a lot of truly brutal self-parody at that point, such as the scathing critique of "Heroes and Villains" that he put into the mouth of Mike Love during the Leid In Hawaii sessions.  But that makes the whole matter even more disturbing for me, to be honest.

None of this matters anymore.  And it hasn't mattered since 2004.  The story has a happy ending.  And that's all that matters now.

Really tragic that he passed so young.  He had the potential of being every bit as impressive a creative musician as his celebrated older brother.  His restless spirit is what propelled his talent, but is also what destroyed his life.

I kinda like it with "Workshop", actually...

It's interesting to note that with all the crap 20/20 gets, it peaked at #3 in UK, on of the few top 5 albums for the group in UK (PS #2, party #3). So they must have done something right with 20/20.

 

Oh yes, they did several things right.  Let me list them for ya:

Do It Again
I Can Hear Music
Be With Me
The Nearest Faraway Place
I Went To Sleep
Time To Get Alone
Never Learn Not To Love

and especially...

Our Prayer
Cabinessence

With all those things done right, I can easily forgive a few mistakes...

My question would be:  By this time, did even Brian know what piece the music belonged to?

I think "celebration" is a good term.  As has been stated, the Beach Boys have never actually broken up; they've only changed personnel.  Whether or not you consider the Mike and Bruce Show legit or not really doesn't matter. It is, for all intents and purposes, an unbroken continuation of the Beach Boys as a functioning musical unit.  In addition, even as Brian has done his solo career he has remained a partner in the Beach Boys business empire.

So yeah, it's a celebration. 

Intro: California Girls
Outro: God Only Knows

I'll second that.