How Sly Stone and Brian Wilson Changed Music
01:14:09 Share

After zoomies at the dog park, it's time for Drive Up at Target. In goes a big bag of kibble and one squeaky chicken toy for the good boy. Drive Up that's ready when you are. Only in the Target app. Just tap Target.

You know that feeling when someone shows up for you just when you need it most? That's what Uber is all about. Not just a ride or dinner at your door. It's how Uber helps you show up for the moments that matter. Because showing up can turn a tough day around or make a good one even better. Whatever it is, big or small, Uber is on the way so you can be on yours. Uber, on our way. I'm Brian Hyatt.

This is Rolling Stone Music Now. I'm here today with Rob Sheffield. Rob, I was saying you had a wild and sad duty last week of, on deadline, writing tributes to not one, but two.

two of the most important musical artists of the 20th century and beyond, Brian Wilson and Sly Stone. There is a weird, tragic poetry in both of them passing in the same week. Yeah, both of them poets of summer, both of them...

chroniclers of the American dream in California, both of them from pretty much the same era. They started out in the sixties. Both of them also started out very young as musical prodigies who figured out early that they needed to be in charge of their music and were very aggressive in taking steps to, to make their music, their own music and set out to create an original sound that in both cases completely transformed the world.

We're not going to spend the whole episode talking about parallels, but also two artists who you can know their music on a very superficial level. There's some really fun hits and then you can go much deeper and there's a lot of very rewarding weirdness and darkness and

They work on both levels, really. Absolutely. And something that makes them both specifically pop artists is that even if you know the most famous, most obvious songs, those are great. There's nothing wrong with knowing them at the most superficial level. If you know three Sly songs, you know three great Sly songs, three of his best. Same thing with the Beach Boys, Brian Wilson, that they designed their most famous work to be among their greatest. Yeah.

Yes, I would say unless one of the three Beach Boys songs you know is Kokomo, in which case, forget you know that one and please don't. We should do a Kokomo episode because I will defend Kokomo. I think it's a fan letter to Brian Wilson that is a genuinely beautiful Brian Wilson tribute.

Yes, sure. But nevertheless, wouldn't be... If you know three songs, I wouldn't put that as one of them. I agree. Yes. I think we should start with Sly Stone. What a catalog, what a career up until Fresh, which was the end of his classic era. But if you just take that initial catalog...

from before he kind of slipped into trouble it matches anyone's vernon reed makes a case that sly and the family stone were the single greatest american band and i think that that is far from an unreasonable position to take it is pretty funny the leader of one of the only other candidates for greatest american band also died in the same week but really incredible yes and that i

They both had these bands where their presence as the central genius of the music was always key to the identity of the band. Sly was such a fascinating character because he was such a prodigy who, even in his high school years and his teens, when he was at Vallejo Community College in California, he was already a hugely successful DJ,

on KOSL Radio, Super Soul Radio. And he was also a super successful producer. He met Tom Donahue, who had the local label Autumn Records in San Francisco. So it's mind-blowing how many just classic songs he produced before he...

formed his own band with the Family Stone. He was gigging with his R&B bands, but he produced the Bo Brummels, which, A, sound nothing like Sly and the Family Stone, except when you look for analogies, there's all these weird sort of minor chords. There's all this genuine sort of Southern California melancholy that's spread all over their Northern California music. It's fascinating. That could have been his legend as a producer. ♪

Yeah, what always strikes me about his time as a DJ and as a producer is it seemed to have prepared him for a career of blurring genre lines. Like he just did not see, he did not build walls between what was seen as black and white music, between genres. It seemed like it was all one thing to him. And I think that came out through his music.

Absolutely. He loved to talk about how when he was on KSOL radio, he was playing the R&B hits. It was an R&B station, but he was always making a point of playing the Dylan, playing the Beatles. He was always trying to mix up boundaries. And as you said, that's where he realized his eclectic taste was something that he needed to really establish aggressively in his band, or he'd always be pigeonholed. Yeah.

And I think people maybe have an idea of music as more walled off than it actually was in the 60s. There was an incredible amount of cross-pollination both ways between what was seen as R&B and what was seen as rock. And Sly was the absolute poster child for that. Totally. Well, and he was so inspired by the acid rock scene.

San Francisco and in 65, 66, 67. And it's interesting that that was his roots. I mean, that was his original audience. That was before he crossed over to the pop audience or the R and B audience. He was playing in biker bars in Northern California and he was playing like very, you know, he was influenced by Quicksilver and the dead and, and,

these jam bands as we would call them now in modern parlance but these acid rock bands who would just do a lot of free-form jamming that he was able to do that with a band that had absolute chops that had polish and finesse and could do this in a james brown muscle shoals stacks kind of way just meant that he could do almost anything that was musically associated with rock and roll he could do it all with one band

The biker bars thing is funny because he shares that with the Doobie brothers, who also bizarrely were entirely a product of biker bars. That's a weird crossover there. It's a really weird crossover. Imagine if you're a biker and you're like, oh, who am I going to go see tonight? You know, the Doobies or Sly and the Family Stone.

He famously had this wood shedding thing where he played every weekend, very late night sets until five in the morning, just at this bar that was...

just an hour outside of San Francisco. And while he was doing all his other projects, he would just be woodshedding with his band, figuring out what he could do with this group of musicians who he picked very meticulously and how much of his wide ranging musical vision he could bring to that band. And after six months of woodshedding, that was pretty much anything they could do, anything he wanted them to do. Sly and the Family Stone strike me as one of the most sort of designed musicals

minus things that were put together by Malcolm McLaren or Simon Cowell. Beyond those things accepted, it's a very carefully and consciously constructed band by Sly. Definitely. Very, very much conceptually fitted to the individual people in the band, all of whom he knew, all of whom he trusted musically. And Sly,

It was a thing where the concept, like you said, it really was, it was almost packaged like a boy band in terms of, you know, the specific concepts that the music was designed to be part of and that he just had this really wide ranging vision of what he wanted the music to be.

When you hear Lululemon, you probably think of Align yoga pants. Weightlessly soft, like you're wearing next to nothing. That's why you see them in class, at the grocery store, and in the park. But did you know about skirts with built-in liner shorts so you can still jump for the frisbee? And tanks and bodysuits? With Align's iconic stretch, you won't want to take it off. And with endless style options, you don't have to. Shop in-store or online at lululemon.com.

Savor every last drop of summer with Starbucks. From bold refreshers to rich cold brews, the sunniest season only gets better with a handcrafted iced beverage in your hand. Available for a limited time. Your summer favorites are ready at Starbucks.

It was interesting for me to learn over the years that their debut, A Whole New Thing, didn't really connect at the time. No, it's funny. The first couple records didn't have what we think of as the Sly and the Family Stone concepts, that he had the sound down, but writing songs took him longer. And it was really the 1969 Stand album where the power of the band and the power of the songwriting really...

Really matched as one. I mean, what a phenomenal album that is. Stand, the song is one of my very favorite Sly and the Family Stone songs. Just what a, what a song. Stand, you'll still be you. It had great singles like Dance to the Music, I Want to Take You Higher, Sing a Simple Song, Sing a Simple Song. Everyday People, I am everyday people.

You can make it if you try. You can make it if you try. Push her. The title track, all-in-one albums. Yeah, and Sex Machine is divisive. The really, like, long hippie jam. I love Sex Machine. It's not as good as James Brown's Sex Machine, which came out a couple years later, but still just a phenomenal song on a phenomenal album. I think I'm beautiful.

It is pretty funny that James Brown was like, I think I can make a better sex machine. You know, this I can top this. Yeah.

Everyday people, would it be fair to say that's his most famous song? I feel like, yeah. It's such a pop song. It's, you know, it's three minutes. It's a song you hear, you can sing along right away. It's almost got a Sesame Street kind of vibe. It's funny how Sly's music and Sesame Street were concurrent. And there's a lot of Sly in the Sesame Street aesthetic.

I wonder if he was a fan of Sesame Street as so many rock stars at the time were. But it's interesting that there's that kiddie thing that he had in his music that was always there. That's a good point. The trade-off of vocals, which many, many people took from Prince, of course, in the Revolution era is a great example, but hardly the only example. The way, again, it's like he was casting the different parts of the song like a musical.

What a brilliant way to put it. Yeah, it's very much very much casting is is how we saw it. And that songs like Everyday People or Everybody is a Star, which is my favorite, where each member of the band has a line. And it's funny because you could tell some of them are singers. That's a thing they do. And some of them are just members of the band who slides like, OK, you take this one. And it was very important to his vision of the band that everybody sing a line.

whether they're real singers or not. And that's part of the beauty of the song is you listen to Everybody is a Star or Everyday People. Those would be very different songs if one person were singing them. And when people cover those songs, just singing them as one solo voice singing the whole song, they're kind of missing the ambience of the song because it's designed for multiple voices to be telling the story together. And a star.

And the Woodstock performance, it's hard to even put that in words. It certainly encapsulates a lot of what was great about that band.

It sure does. It encapsulates so much of what Woodstock was designed to be. I mean, no band in terms of having the chops to do this, like at a festival setting, some of the greatest bands ever played Woodstock and just were overmatched by the chaotic circumstances. And Sly, who was such a pro and, you know, his band who were such pros, your theater analogy is really, really right on. You know, they adapted to the chaotic circumstances and they had the chops to make Woodstock a

a show that they dominated rather than letting the moment dominate them. What a phenomenal performance that is. That I want to take you higher at Woodstock is just really like a hippie apotheosis. I want to take you higher.

And, you know, of course, there's a riot going on. It's really interesting. That is an example of an album that is so far ahead of its time and so far out there that when I first, you know, when I was a teenager, I would listen to the things that were commonly brooded as the greatest albums of all time. And many of them I instantly got into.

As a kid in the 90s, even, it was still too far out for me. Now it's one of my favorite albums of all time. But it was actually too fucking weird for me, even in 1991 or whatever. It is the sheer genius and futuristic sonic sculpting of that album.

I think cannot be overstated. It's absolutely wild. A great album. Like a lot of people, I knew that album and its mystique and legend so much tied in with Greal Marcus's classic book, Mystery Train, which came out 50 years ago as a chapter on There's a Riot Going On, which is one of the greatest things ever written about pop music. It's phenomenal the way he writes about

Sly Stone and I've been thinking about that book a lot because Garth Hudson just passed away the last of the band and that Randy Newman is basically the last man standing from the portraits in Mystery Train but for Sly and the Family Stone that Sly Stone was such a

a figure who got everything he wanted, designed the career he wanted to have, had that career. And that was, there's a riot going on. He just, he faced up to it and says, you know, this is what it means to me. We began to wrestle. I was on the top. And that's, it was really strange that for Sly to drop an album that was so negativist and so, you know,

arcane and so just, you know, very difficult for a lot of people to understand. And yet it was an immediate number one hit and a blockbuster and a case where the audience got it right away. Very much like today. We forget, we think of today as, you know, such a quintessential, you know, like forget the audience. We're going to go our own way. Today was a gigantic commercial hit. It was a blockbuster just as okay. Computer was people were,

responded to the fact that these artists were making something that was challenging them and they wanted to go along with them. The analogy that Creel Marcus makes in Mystery Train that really hits home for me is Exile on Main Street, which came out

Around the same time, just a few months later, but had the same kind of vibe of an immensely popular band making an album that's deliberately tough to listen to and designed to challenge anybody who likes the band, not giving the obvious goods. And yet those are both gigantic commercial hits. There's a riot going on. It's a lot easier to understand if you're frankly a bit high. Yeah.

It definitely is in the ranks of stoner albums, although I'm sure what Sly was making it on was a little bit stronger perhaps than Legal Weed, but I would say it ranks extremely high in stoner albums and it's very visual that way, if I may make that recommendation. And then what's different, I would say, than Exile on Main Street is Exile on Main Street was very much a band slipping into a hermetic phase, whereas...

There's a Riot going on is a fascinating example of a great band leader slipping into a much... It was the beginning of a much more solo hermetic phase. It was much less of a band product, even though the band was involved. A lot of that was he was doing himself. It's also the beginning of people like Prince, great band leaders who then realized they can also be great by themselves, especially with the help of technology. And he was using a lot of that technology early. Totally. Totally.

and the family affair for a song that's so grim and bleak to be

It's just so full of beauty. I mean, people underrate Sly as a singer because he was largely a moaner and a drawler, but like his singing on Family Affair is just mind-blowingly beautiful and emotional. And it's funny that there's two singers in one, you know, just like very like on point female virtuosic soul vocals. And then Sly is just raw emotion in his voice.

It's just nothing sounds like family affair for such a famous song by such a famous artist to have so few imitators. I mean, there's some like overt homages like Madonna's Keep It Together is a great example. Wow.

But for Family Affair, a song that everybody knows and everybody loves, but it's not a song people imitate because it's just too hard. I mean, how do you do a song like that? And Bobby Womack's guitar is so beautiful. There's so much guitar in that song and it's so weird and bluesy and virtuosic and it's

emotional. There's just nothing like that song. Yeah. Everything's sort of muted and trumpety. It's like the whole song went through a wah pedal, you know, totally, totally, which is possible. It did totally well. And your connection to, uh,

to the drugginess. I mean, it's funny that riot was an album that in many ways it came into its own in the nineties when stuff like trip hop and daisy age hip hop and warp records type stuff, you know, was happening that that really created a context for people to hear there's right going on. Cause it really took that long for people to figure out how to use the technology to

Whereas, you know, Sly without that technology was still getting those effects with just, you know, a beatbox and that lo-fi production style that he had. But with indie rock and trip-hop and all these things that were going on in the 90s, it's like the world finally learned how to hear there's a riot going on.

Yeah. In some weird poetic way, it's kind of a nineties album. It really is. Yeah. Um, and the way it was sampled on early hip hop records is the great song three minute rule, like early on, uh, Paul's boutique where, and it just, because of the like that really weird, spooky alienated horn fanfare. That's very like very cheerless sound.

For producers like the Dust Brothers and Prince Paul to find ways in which there's a right going on with the template for what they wanted to do with hip-hop.

And then in 1973, after he'd already been through some dark years, he came back with Fresh, which is, that is an album that eluded me. If I may drop a truly obnoxious name, what really got me listening to that album and kind of obsessively, I think it's maybe the Sly album I've listened to most, was Prince himself. I happened to recommend that album to me. It was something I'd only listened to once or twice. How do you not take a recommendation like that seriously? Wait, Brian, you got to tell this story. Prince told you? His absolute favorite Sly album was Fresh.

And then where you can really hear it is the way the, uh, on the opening track in time, the way the drum machine bleeds into a live drum part is very similar to what Prince does, presumably as an homage on sign of the times on the title track of sign of the times. It's in fact, definitely a tip of the hat to, to that song and to slide. Yeah.

When I first heard Fresh, and it was the late 80s, the album that blew my mind, I was like, oh wow, this is Prince's Parade. Parade is basically Prince trying to do this specific Sly album. Parade is a real favorite of mine in the Prince canon, and it's definitely got that fresh kind of sound. Kiss is very much a fresh kind of song. Don't have to be my girl.

but I love, I guess when Prince looks you in the eye and tells you to listen to an album, you're, you're, you're damn well going to do it. Um, but fresh, it's so different. It's wild to think that it was the followup from riot. Whereas, you know, fresh is so lovable on the surface. Even if you're not going very deep with this album, you can just listen to it on a casual level, which you can't really do with riot in the same level. And fresh will just, it'll dazzle you all the way through.

he did sort of come out of the darkness of riot long enough to make this aptly titled album fresh. Yeah. And then unfortunately kind of plunged back into the darkness for quite some time. It seems like, well, and it's funny that fresh is full of, you know, boasts basically about his chaotic and, uh, and,

and out of control drug life and performance life. He has quite a few jokes on the album about his failure to show up for shows, which was something that he was the first person ever

to make this part of his artistic brand. You know, he cultivated this. For George Jones to be No Show Jones, that was something that, you know, that was a nickname that George Jones got tagged with, that he wasn't eager to promote that image. George Jones didn't want people thinking of him as No Show Jones. Whereas Sly comes out with, you know, a top 20 hit, If You Want Me To Stay, which is basically, look...

If I don't show up for the show, it's because I had something better to do, okay? Don't expect me to show up. You're lucky I even sold you the ticket.

It's a really, really funny song that he is like, look, number one has got to be number one. I just can't go to every single show that people show up to. And it's this really funny sort of attitude that he, I mean, the first line on the album is there's a Mickey in the taste of disaster. And that's something that he goes for all the way through. It's this really fun, high spirited, often very euphoric album that's

That is, nonetheless, it's got this undercurrent of, you know, it's never trying to hide that it's made by a troubled and unstable personality. You are, as am I, a huge fan of Parliament Funkadelic, and it's certainly an interesting case of an artist truly picking up the torch from another artist. George Clinton obviously followed in the footsteps of Sly, I would say.

Absolutely. Especially when you think of a song like One Nation Under a Groove, which really doesn't sound like other Parliament Funkadelic songs. It sounds much more like the Sly Stone song that George Clinton wished that Sly had written. To me, that doesn't even really seem like a Funkadelic George Clinton Parliament song. It's really George Clinton saying, if Sly were here, it's 1979, we're going to be here.

If Sly were here with his powers, what sort of anthem would he make for this time? And One Nation Under Groove is absolutely that anthem. One nation under one

And then where else, you know, we've spoken a bit about this already, but where else do you hear Sly's influence? Outkast is a great example, of course. Outkast is such an ultimate example. The first time I heard Rosa Parks, which is the first Outkast song I ever heard, completely blew my mind. I was watching MTV, I heard the song, I immediately jumped in the car and drove to the mall because I needed this song, I needed this album. I...

I just, whatever the hell this is, I need to hear more of this. And I was desperate to get to the same goodies at the Fashion Square Mall before it closed at nine. So I was just driving on Route 29 like a madman with this song going through my head. I was like, what the hell is that song? It's, you know, Rosa Parks is such a sly kind of song. Outkast had a lot of those, but also more than that, they went for his experimental spirit. You know, B.O.B. doesn't sound like...

Sly and the Family Stone, but it sounds like it could only have been made by people who absolutely admired, worshipped, and had studied that man. You know, Power Music Electric Revival sounds like it would have been the name of a Sly song. But, like, for that to be the chant of Bombs Over Baghdad. Sly and the Family Stone

The Native Tongues, I always thought of as the hip-hop movement that was closest to the spirit of Sly and most deliberately going for the spirit of Sly. But also for Outkast, I mean, and their whole, the Dungeon family sort of vibe that they came from with Goody Mob and everybody. I thought that that whole sort of Atlanta vibe, or I should say Georgia vibe, because Decatur was very involved. But for Sly to be sort of a presiding spirit over that.

Um, in general, like the most like communitarian and egalitarian hip hop movements tend to be the ones that take Sly as a tribute. I mean, you mentioned Prince and honestly, everything Prince did with his millions of side projects, the way he turned his, his side people into stars. I mean, it's crazy how everybody on earth knows who Wendy and Lisa are. Um,

For Prince to do that with the whole community and whole tribe that he built around his music, that was in many ways the truest, I think, embodiment of this Sly vision. Dungeon Family Offshoot, it was produced in that world. TLC's Waterfalls is a great example of a very Sly-esque song. Yes, for a song that just like musically is just drinking very deeply from the well of Sly. Like that's, Waterfalls is a great example. I mean, it sounds more like a Sly song. ♪

Another classic example of just how musically it took the vibe was the Jackson 5. It's a great and seldom made point, yeah. And it's funny because at the time, Sly hadn't made a record in over a year, and so he gave Motown a head start. And you could tell that Barry Gordy was thinking, okay, we're going to do a Sly, but we're going to do Sly for kids. And that the Jackson 5...

were basically just drafted in and they did this family stone thing where like different brothers are pitching in different lines and so you listen to a song like i want you back is a total sly song but especially abc and love you save are total sly songs i mean just mind-blowingly obvious uh and and not in a bad way they took that sound in a brilliant original direction

Very much the Jackson 5 as we know them happened because Sly took so long between albums and that if he were a little more on deadline, then we never would have had the Jackson 5 because like Motown, they got the greatest musicians in the bunch. They got, you know, the corporation, they got all these serious jazz people. They got the Crusaders. They said, we're going to just, we're going to make these perfect Sly records. And they did. Yeah.

That is such a great point that I'm not sure I've heard made before. And it's, as you said, that sort of the kiddie Sesame Street side of Sly was something

so open to being exploited by a band that included an actual kid who could have been on Sesame Street. And then you think about actually, you think about that we've just established that Sly Stone was a key influence on the Jackson 5 and thus on Michael Jackson, one of the most important artists, and on Parliament Funkadelic, and on the Dungeon Family, and on Prince.

I think we've just encapsulated what an extraordinarily important artist this was. The entire history of 20th and then 21st century music would have been different without this guy. So yeah.

You can Venmo this, or you can Venmo that. You can Venmo this, or you can Venmo that.

The Venmo MasterCard is issued by the Bancorp Bank, and a pursuant to license by MasterCard International Incorporated. Card may be used everywhere MasterCard is accepted. Venmo purchase restrictions apply. My day kicks off with a refreshing Celsius energy drink, then straight to the gym. Pre-K pickup, back home to meal prep. Time for my fire station shift. One more Celsius, gotta keep the lights on. When the three alarm hits, I'm ready. Celsius. Live. Fit. Go. Grab a cold, refreshing Celsius at your local retailer or locate now at Celsius.com.

Completely. And apologies for bringing up this particular rock band, but let's just mention the Red Hot Chili Peppers, who are by any measure one of the most phenomenally popular, even if often disliked.

perhaps inexplicably so, most phenomenally popular rock bands of the past 40 years. And they have aspired to nothing more than being sly-like, as Anthony Kiedis once put it in their most famous song. He aspires to confide with sly and be the wiser. Yeah.

It's an open question whether he achieved either of those goals, whether he either truly confided with Sly or whether he became any wiser, but it's possible that the most airplay that Sly Stone got in the 90s was being name-checked in that Red Hot Chili Peppers song. And if anyone understood what he was saying in that line is the other question. You know, the thing is,

They also are a place, this may be our transition point here, they may be the exact point at which Brian Wilson and Sly most converge. Because as they went on Californication and everything after, they started to bring in more of a Beach Boys, Brian Wilson thing. So I think the N-Day also, I have to admit, I have listened...

In the past week, I've listened 10 times to their cover of I Get Around from the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, which is so incredible that

Do you remember this? No, I don't. I got to check this out. It is so great. They nail every bit of the harmonies and then in the verses, the verses become funk. It then becomes like the Sly version of I Get Around. Maybe the reason I was listening to it so much is because that is actually a simultaneous tribute really to both Sly and Brian Wilson, even though they did it many years ago. Wow. I love that. So that is our pivot point. Thank you, Flea et al. Yes. Fuck.

One could argue that Stadium Arcadium is both the pet sounds and that there's a riot going on of our time.

Brian, you're welcome to make this argument should you choose to accept it. Those albums walked so Stadium Archie could run. If I'm not mistaken, the Chili Peppers covered If You Want Me To Stay on one of their first records, didn't they? Yes, they covered it on Freaky Styly, 1985. If you want me to stay, to be a failure.

Well, we have a lot of ground to cover. We're also going to talk about the late Brian Wilson. One of the things I really loved about your piece on him is you focused a lot on his earlier work because there is this paradoxical thing among young music fans who are so impressed with Pet Sounds. Mike Love was saying lead on a lot of those early songs. He's done his own corny version of the Beach Boys under the Beach Boys name and has perhaps done

It's kind of an undamageable brand, but has done a bit of damage to the conception, I think, of the Beach Boys' early songs because his sort of sub-Jimmy Buffett presentation of it is, does the music no favors? But all that, I think that's maybe confused some people because the early stuff, yes, Pet Sounds and Smile are transcendent and incredible, but so is the early stuff. Yeah, there's this... As with the Beatles, there's this...

shallow tendency to say, oh, they started out making hits for kids and then they became great artists. And the whole point is that like the Beatles, the Beach Boys, they were great artists from the beginning that Brian Wilson was always in his own zone in terms of harmony, in terms of songwriting, in terms of mythic ambition, that the early Beach Boys songs were just completely phenomenal on a musical level with it.

that they threw harmonies together, the way they threw different types of rock and roll rhythm and rock and roll harmony together, the way that they had, you know, Chuck Berry and Buddy Holly's so prominent in the sound. There's a lot of Bo Diddley in their sound, but a lot of, you know, choir music, a lot of gospel, a lot of theater, the Disney tunes that Brian was so fond of, that's

There's a lot of different types of music that are thrown together in a way that almost dares you to hear it as just simple, fun, good times, rock and roll. But, you know, a song we were just talking about, I Get Around, where there's just so much going on in that song. There's so many different parts of it and so many different moving parts that fit together in ways that they shouldn't. I mean, that's like three or four songs whipped up into one undeniable pop single. Yeah.

He may not have written it himself, but whatever. The line, I'm getting bugged driving up and down the same old strip is one of the most American bits of poetry ever written. I think it says everything about America. Absolutely. Absolutely. The ennui of the endless road. Or the not so endless road, just the strip. It's

It's like, yeah, I need to find a new strip with, you know, with like new mall chops and new, you know, like, but where the kids are hip. When I was a little kid, that was the Beach Boys song for me. Like when I was eight, I heard that song and I thought, well, this is the best song I've ever heard in my entire life. And.

It's funny that just I Get Around was a song that sounded like, it very much sounded like another song I loved at the time, The Boys Are Back in Town by Thin Lizzy. But it was like, wow, just like hanging out with other cool kids. And like, it just made it sound so fun. I guess when the Beach Boys say the bad guys know us and they leave us alone, they're talking about Thin Lizzy. You know, like, if the boys want to fight, you better let them. I said, oh.

Didn't Lindsay sound like they actually know those boys and they're really down with them? Whereas, like you said, I Get Around is the kind of song about hanging out that could only have been written by a kid never invited to hang out. Just as American Graffiti is clearly a movie about being on the strip that was made by a kid who was on the strip but wasn't one of the cool kids. It's very much the same thing. Definitely. And great, great argument about the Beach Boys in American Graffiti.

which is a great scene where there's where Mackenzie Phillips to talk about irony of ironies that, you know, it's like the daughter of the mom is on the Papa's guy. She's in the car with Paul Lamont. He's I, I believe we,

where he's, you know, the greaser character and the Beach Boys come on and she's like, oh yeah, I love this. And he's like, oh, the Beach Boys suck. Rock and roll died when Buddy Holly died. And like, she gets really mad. She starts hitting him and she's like, you gotta admit, the Beach Boys are awesome. And maybe like the first time awesome is used that way in 70s pop culture, but that's, that's neither here nor there. George Lucas, was there anything he couldn't do? His put down was grungy. Like Paul Amat, like accuses

Mackenzie Phillips has been grungy and she's like, Carol's not grungy. She's awesome. Like, and I'm like, wow, George Lucas ahead of his time in so many ways. But, but I love the argument about the beach boys in American graffiti, which is so typical of the journey that people tend to have with the beach boys, right? You're a little kid. You hear those songs, you love them when you're a little kid and then you get a little older and you're maybe feel a little embarrassed by, you know, like the corn aspect, but

And then you're blown away by Pet Sounds and Sunflower and Wild Honey and all those amazing works of art that they did on a more ambitious level. And then you realize that they were always that group, that Pet Sounds is just amplifying something that was always there in their music and that yearning that was always there. A really early song like Surfer Girl. Little surfer, little world.

What really turned me on to the depths of that song was there's a really old Springsteen interview where he says, if you want to understand Sandy, just listen to Surfer Girl. Wow. You know, and of course, it's the same thing, really. Just like rich, aching poetry by the beach, you know? Yeah. Just the yearning in it and the pain in the voice and the fact that...

As in, like, I get around where there's this really keening falsetto on top of it that is it's yearning. It's not the kind of sound you make when you're hanging out with the boys, like on the strip and, you know, you're racing your cars. Like that's that's a song of yearning for this community. And that's something that's so absolutely there in Surfer Girl that you listen to Surfer Girl. You could tell the Surfer Girl has no idea who this guy is.

Like, the surfer girl does not know Brian's name in that song. It's kind of the essence is that it's this really, like, detached, long-distance yearning. Sandy is a great Springsteen analogy that's really kind of amazing. Things like when I grew up to be a man and in my room... There's a war I can go away.

The plaintive honesty of those songs, I mean, you can draw a direct line to certainly someone like Rivers Cuomo. He definitely was certainly invented emo among many other things, I would argue. Rivers Cuomo is a great analogy. Lindsey Buckingham, who one of the absolute top, I don't know if anybody's has, has ever listened to Brian Wilson as clearly and accurately and perceptively as Lindsey Buckingham did, but he,

so much of what Lindsay Buckingham achieved came out of those early Beach Boys records. He has a great line that he wrote something, a tribute to Brian for Rolling Stone once, where he said that people always think they became artists with Pet Sounds, but everything that was going on in Pet Sounds was going on earlier, just in a different form. And he pointed out as something that I had never noticed, even as a hugely obsessive Brian Wilson fan myself, but

He said his favorite Beach Boys was side two of the album today, which came out in 1965. All those ballads, right? Yeah. All those ballads in a row. And Lindsey Buckingham says that's his favorite album side in rock and roll. And that you listen to that and you listen to that album and that side and you think, well, it's not a huge surprise that somebody who studied this music in this detail was the guy who made Rumors. Yeah.

It's so interesting to me that how heavily influenced Brian Wilson was by things like the four freshmen with things that I've barely listened to and things that I don't think any, hardly anyone listens to today, but those formed this sort of architecture of his harmony came from groups like that, apparently. Yeah. Well, a real glee club, a real, you know, what we would think of as an acapella college singing group sort of thing. Um, I think, uh,

My opinion on that is that it got him mostly doo-wop was like really what he got him. That the four freshmen is a, and the four preps are a much publicized aspect of his sound because there's so much of that in the Beach Boys, but it's really doo-wop that was what gave their vocal sound. It's, it's soul, it's presence, it's, it's personality. And that doo-wop was very much in repose when the Beach Boys started like Chuck Berry himself, that it's,

they took on these aspects of American rock and roll. Chuck Berry hadn't had a hit in a while and was actually headed for really horrible persecution. He was about to go to jail when the Beach Boys started. Doo-Wop was a music that had kind of run out of gas in terms of having hits. And for the Beach Boys to revive those two, those were the two biggest influences on their sound. And that...

you know, what the Beach Boys did with Doo-Wop was to, you know, and to transpose it into a, you know,

Southern California setting, you know, whereas doo-wop was thought of as mostly urban music. It was very much associated with the Northeast and street corners. It was associated with, you know, groups sang on street corners and they didn't have string sections and studios the way they did in California. So it was, you know, city street corner music and the Beach Boys were able to take that to a different sort of geographical mindset. And, but, you know, you can hear doo-wop and everything they did, um,

You know, the early stuff, Pet Sounds and, you know, all through Brian's solo career. I mean, Doo-Wop was always the biggest influence, I think. It's an often made point, but as you suggested about I Get Around, Brian was making music about a life he didn't live very often. It's a big part of what he was doing. Really is. There's so much pathos in the music scene.

But when you know about the really dark childhood that Brian had and the dark adulthood he had, quite frankly, like with the damage that was done to him as a kid early on, and that so much of the emotions in the songs of just feeling cherished by other people or even noticed or accepted or welcomed by other people is something that was so alien to his life at this time that it was something he could only access through music. And that for...

him to sing about, you know, this world where the kids are hip and where, you know, like there's, there's this group of friends and like, they all like love and accept each other and they all trust each other. And, you know, there's always hanging out to be done. And, you know, the whole take it to awesomely self-parodic extremes with something like be true to your school, which I just think is a genius song, but like, Oh,

When I was a kid, that was a Beach Boys song that really, that was a hard one to take for me. That one made me roll my eyes a bit, but I love that song. But that's a song that's a fantasy, you know, a kid who was, you hear that song now and you're like, this kid was well aware that he was a total outcast in school. Nobody had any idea who he was. Nobody else could have written that song or would have written that song. You mentioned The Warmth of the Sun, which is such an underrated song and it's unbelievable that that is from 64. Still I am

of the sun yeah it's really incredible incredibly beautiful melody and that's one not to not to keep mentioning brian's cousin i really want to like avoid just like just comparing brian to his is somewhat less uh elevated cousin perhaps in some ways but that that

when the Beach Boys now do the warmth of the sun and it's the first time in the show, it's, it's after the first intermission. So the first half of the show, uh, Brian has not been mentioned at all during the show, which is like a little weird. And then after intermission to do the warmth of the sun and Mike love mentions Brian, but says that he wrote this song about the JFK assassination, which I don't recall Brian ever saying. And honestly, it sounds like a real way to dismiss and contain a song that is just, uh,

It's not the song you write about the president being assassinated. That is just like very deeply felt personal pain in that song. One of the things that's so cool is you can... There's been a release of...

many of these in-between moments in studio sessions. So you can hear Brian kind of laying out songs, bossing everyone around, telling these highest level studio musicians on earth exactly what to play and just really taking charge. You've talked to Brian. I talked to him once. I had the world's worst phoner with him once. It's so hard to reconcile that with the reticent, shut down guy that he became after his sort of troubles increased. It's just hard for me to

wrap my head around that. Well, really, in a studio is the only place where he had that ability to relate to people. He was bossing people around, but he knew what he wanted in a studio. And once he got outside of that environment, he had no idea how to relate to people. That's why for much of his life, he was

dominated by people who saw him as a weak person who could easily be cowed. A lot of the sad parts in his life going back to the 60s were people who took advantage of how naive he was about interacting with people, just that he didn't have a lot of sense of how to interact with people. And that really, in his studio, is the only part where he was

able to articulate really directly what he wanted and how he wanted to work with people. We've spent the rest of this almost downplaying Pet Sounds. We nevertheless agree that Pet Sounds is incredible. And there's so much to be said about the Beatles, Beach Boys back and forth and the way that they inspired each other and the way that undoubtedly that without that interplay, we would have been robbed of some of the greatest music ever made.

Absolutely. Like one of the absolute greatest rivalries in terms of the great music that we got from it. And people, people neglect how much the Beatles got from Pet Sounds. If you listen to a song like Penny Lane, you are listening to Paul McCartney listen to Pet Sounds and say like, wow, like this is totally like what I want to do. Penny Lane, there is a barber showing photographs of every head he's had the pleasure to know.

Let's do a song like, you know, with a little help from my friends. And you're listening to, you know, John and Paul, like trying to do a Pet Sounds kind of song. Oh, I get by with a little help from my friends. I get by with a little help.

Sgt. Pepper is very much a response to Pet Sounds and Paul McCartney has never said any different. He said that in the 60s. He says that now. He's often said that when Pet Sounds came out, that the Beatles felt like this was the best album that had ever been made and that they wanted to make a better one. And that, you know, of course, Brian's goal for Pet Sounds was to make an album that would be as good as Rubber Soul and that

you know, he heard Rubber Soul. And then as Brian always said, he woke up the next morning, went to his piano, wrote God Only Knows. And he said, I prayed for an album that would be as good as Rubber Soul. God only knows what I'd be without you.

That this back and forth gave us so much great music from both of them. It's just kind of scary. And of course the Beatles with Sergeant Pepper, when Brian heard that, and that's when he was unable to finish Smile because that's when he realized it was not going to be as good as Sergeant Pepper. There's the great story that I love where Brian is in the studio making Smile and Paul McCartney comes to visit and he listens to the songs. He's really into it. And, uh,

He somewhat mischievously sits down at the piano in the studio and plays a new song for Brian and it's she's leaving home. Then Paul says, well, you better hurry up. She

Imagine you're Brian Wilson, you're in the studio making a smile, and Paul McCarty comes by and he's like, oh, by the way, here's a little song we've been working on for our next record. And she's leaving home. And just, what are you going to do? In the history of catty, intra-band moves of the 60s, that's rivaled only by Mick Jagger foisting Alan Klein on The Beatles, I think. Yes, yes.

Yes, that's really the equivalent. That's really the equivalent. But, and, you know, Paul is very famous. He liked to bring acetates to, you know, like the famous meeting in, Paul shows up, the Beatles are working on Revolver, and he's like, oh, wait till you hear this. And he plays Tomorrow Never Knows for Bob Dylan. And Bob Dylan's like, oh, okay, I'm working on a new album too. And he plays like some of the new songs from Blonde on Blonde. And you think like, wow, those guys, they could have ruined those albums. Like,

like any people less confident than Paul and Bob Dylan, they would have heard those songs and say, well, okay, I'm getting out of the music business entirely. Like for Bob Dylan to keep his poker face after he hears tomorrow, never knows. It's like, it's a real compliment to their egos. But for Brian to be aspiring to be the Beatles, people forget that it had as beneficial an impact on the Beatles as it did on the beach boys. That was not a one-sided rivalry. The, the,

famous story about when, uh, they were first playing pet sounds at the, at the London office of, of the record company. And Marianne faithful was there. The stones were there. And of course, uh,

John and Paul were there and they sat like right close to the speakers and they just sat silently listening to it all the way through. They didn't make chitchat. They were just taking it all in. And you could definitely hear that on Sergeant Pepper. That is really an answer record to Pet Sounds. It's worth noting that Brian did not have

George Martin. He had to be his own George Martin. If we're going to compare him to Paul McCartney, he didn't have a John Lennon either. He had collaborators on lyrics over the years that range from Mike Love to other people brought in from the outside. But he had to do this mostly on his own, which is...

helps explain part of why since the pressure became overwhelming. Absolutely. A lot of people who were close to that scene at the time, Tony Asher, prime among them said that Pet Sounds would have been better if Brian made it without the Beach Boys and that he had to find things for the Beach Boys to do on the records.

and that they were dragging it down. That's an extreme statement, and I don't know if I buy it 100%, but certainly all the singing Brian could do himself, all the arranging he did himself, it's a thing where, as you said, he had to be his own George Martin in a way that was just really remarkable. He didn't have the support system that Paul always had. The Beatles always had the three others, and

There was a lot of acrimony later, but up to Sgt. Pepper, the Beatles are best friends. And that is so key to how the Beatles made everything happen, that the Beatles got closer every year that they were the Beatles together up to 68. And that Sgt. Pepper is something they very much made because they had each other as a support system. And they were lucky to have Jeff Emmerich and George Martin, whereas, as you say, Brian was carrying the weight all by himself.

First of all, I guess just to give credit where credit is due, he always had the voices. Carl would come in and play. He wasn't on his own in the making of the music, but he was on his own often in the sort of composition and arranging, which is kind of an important part of the music. And then it is true that when his, as his mental health troubles increased, that the other guys in the band did step up. Yeah. Sunflower is a real turning point. That's the one where...

they all had to write and bring in their own songs and they all rose to the occasion. And as Brian very generously said, both at the time and later, that for him to hear the really great songs that the others were writing was the main inspiration writing the great songs that he wrote for that album. But that was a real...

a team effort. I don't mean to, I'm talking about Pet Sounds, but certainly Wild Honey, which is a very Carl record. I mean, I think of that as like Carl Wilson's greatest hits. That's one of my top three favorite Beach Boys records. Brian is very much dominant songwriter in that record, but it's Carl. He's making music that Carl wants to sing and that it's a very Carl focused record.

Obviously, Smile is the archetypal album that got away from the creator probably the first time in popular music. As the reach became higher and higher, it was the first time an artist reached so high that they just couldn't reach it at the time and gave up on it that I know of. It's the first album like that. But right before that, he had made good vibrations in the most chaotic way.

wildly, crazily ambitious way. Talk about things being ahead of, as we were discussing with Sly, I mean, you listen to that and it's so discontinuous and non-linear, cut and paste, really kind of hip hop in the way that it jumps from sonic landscape to sonic landscape. It's like a DJ made it. It's not in any way a rendition of a live performance. It's even now a little disconcerting.

the way it jumps, and the fact that he not only did that successfully, but made a huge hit out of it. Not an underrated song, but probably an underrated stroke of genius that anyone could pull that off in 1966. I'm picking up...

Absolutely. And your point about it being a hip hop song is so dead on that in the, you know, the, the years after, you know, the 15 years after good vibrations, there's no rock song that sounds like good vibrations, but the closest thing is that when you get something like grandmaster flash on the wheels of steel in 81, like that's really the closest anyone came to a good vibrations type record. And, and,

By the end of the 80s, when you have Prince Paul making records, Three Feet High and Rising is very much like Good Vibrations aesthetic in a hip-hop sense. That foresaw a lot of things about music making and Smile in general, which really hops around a lot. He was also taking the sort of classical symphonic approach

approach further than it had ever been taken before. And then again, further than he could even take it at the time. To me, like one of the great triumphs of Brian's life is that he finally did smile in 2004. And I think it's easy to underrate what an achievement that was because partly because of a certain pop singer with the initials TS, people have gotten more used to the idea of somebody going back and doing an album that they did before. Um,

it seemed like it should have been a disaster, right? Like, you know, it's 2004. Brian Wilson is going back to the album that he tried to finish and failed to finish in 1967. And yet he's finally got the voice for it. He's finally got the support team to do it. He's finally got the collaborators who like know how to execute what his ideas are. He's finally able to do it, but also he's just singing better in 2004 than he wasn't in 1967. And yeah,

the 2004 smile is, I hate to say the word miracle. It's such a flaky sounding word, but there's no other analogy like this where he goes back to the album that was his famous defeat and he actually does it and he doesn't just do it in a way that preserves the songs or makes them respectable, but

This is how the songs always should have sounded. And it's not a copy of how they would have sounded in 1967. You could hear all the years in between. This album really needed to be made by the 2004 Brian. And you listen to a song like Wonderful, which is, you know, one of my very favorite Brian Wilson songs ever.

And he listens to any previous version of it before the 2004 Smile, and they're all totally inadequate. She laughs and stays in the 1-1-1-1

It's funny that my history with Smile, because of when I became a Beach Boys fan, was that I had all the Smile songs on bootlegs for years and years, and was used to hearing those Smile songs in those forms. And Wonderful was always really half-assed. You could tell there was a beautiful melody there that nobody was doing justice to. They did a studio version on Smiley Smile, which is just really flat-out bad.

It took until the 2004 Smile for this song to be brought to life the way it always deserved to be brought to life. And I think there's just no analogy for what Brian did on Smile, where he didn't just make the album he should have made in 1967, but he made...

He found that these songs always really belonged to his self, to the older self that he was, his 60-something self in 2004. It's such a beautiful triumph. I can't think of any other analogy to it in pop music. It's a profound artistic triumph. It's a profound personal triumph. It's a profound psychological triumph. It's inspiring to anyone who didn't finish anything that you can still finish it later.

And not only that, but he managed to finish Smile before Axel finished Chinese Democracy.

I love that. But, you know, like they did a really good job of in 2011, they did the Smile Sessions box set where they took the best versions of the scraps and fragments and outtakes that, you know, we'd all had on crummy sounding bootlegs for all those years. And they really did a complete and pretty much.

definitive version of the 1967 Smile Sessions, but it wasn't Smile the album. It wasn't anywhere near as good as the version Brian did in 2004. It's really kind of amazing that that's

how the album always should have been. And that's, that's the smile I listened to. In connection with that, the fact that Brian was able to go on the road with this fantastic band of Brian Wilson, super fans who knew his music so well and feel the love from a whole new generation of fans for him and

as an entity apart from the Beach Boys and was able to successfully tour, even if towards the end he wasn't perhaps fully present on the stage. But still, that's another thing that changes the narrative of the way you look at his life and career. Completely. It seemed...

So, I mean, if you look at really just the change between, say, something like 98, when he makes the album Imagination, where he's just really vocal talent, you know, the producer is making the album and Brian's just showing up. And as with everything he did in those days, it was like, well, just glad he's still around and can do something.

Very different from in the early 2000s when he's got, as you said, this phenomenal band that he always deserved to have that like a band that was capable of doing justice to his music. You know, God bless the Wondermints. What a beautiful addition to the Brian story they were because they made it possible for him to have this whole other astounding creative rebirth as a creative artist.

I remember the 2001 Pet Sounds concert, which became a really strange TV special. The TV special is very strange. It leaves out most of the concert. It honestly leaves out most of the best moments of the concert. I kind of really don't know why, but...

The fact that we were hearing the Pet Sound songs live for the first time, nothing like that had been attempted before. It was so shocking for those of us who were in the room to hear these songs in a live setting at all and to hear them brought to life and

Everybody in the room assumed it was a one-time thing. This was a one-time event in honor of Brian. And the fact that Brian was able to then take Pet Sounds on the road for years and do it live the way that honestly none of us Pet Sounds obsessives ever dreamed would have been possible. And to do this night after night, year after year, and just do justice to these songs on a live level, that clearly meant so much to him to be able to share these songs with a live audience.

It was just such a beautiful triumph and so different from what anybody would have expected from Brian in the 70s, 80s or 90s.

In 2012, the Beach Boys briefly got back together, made the album, That's Why God Made the Radio. And Brian wrote a song that you mentioned in your piece and that also Springsteen told people to go listen to when Brian died. And the song is Summer's Gone. And what a gorgeous, melancholy, shatter your soul song that is. Summer's gone

I loved seeing that Springsteen just said, like, go listen to this song and weep. Such a beautiful tribute for... And it's funny because that's a song that Springsteen has written his own versions of many, many, many times. You know, you could say even on his second album, he's writing a lot of Summer's Gone songs. But for Brian, he's singing specifically about his brothers, Carl and Dennis, and

He'd sung many songs about many times before, you know, like they were both gone by the nineties and for summer's gone. He's sitting on the beach. He's watching the waves. He's thinking about the end of it all. He's thinking about the fact that his voice is gone, but his voice will be passed on to other people who have other ideas and other feelings like his such a beautiful, explicit song about mortality. And he'd addressed that before in so many great songs like till I die, which is just a song.

such a jaw-droppingly beautiful song from 71. Summer's Gone, you could tell he wrote this for a Beach Boys album. He's writing it for this emotional project where these people have this very uneasy truce that they're going to make another Beach Boys album and they're going to do another Beach Boys tour. And it ended pretty much the way you would have predicted it ended. But for...

Brian to bring this song to this moment was just unbelievably beautiful. It's, it's in a very unknown song. So, uh, I was really glad Springsteen mentioned it, but I, for me, it's the last of the great classic Brian songs and it's very much his farewell. I mean, he like kept like,

like performing after that. And he kept even like recording after that. But to me, summer's gone is really his, his farewell. It's like Prospero at the end of the tempest where he breaks his wand. And to me, summer's gone is Brian's great, beautiful magician breaking his wand moments.

And if you think about the fact that he could muster a song of that quality in 2012 after everything he'd been through, really enough to shatter most people, that he could, at that point in his life, make something that stood with the absolute best of one of the best catalogs ever is really pretty astonishing.

Really astonishing. That's why God Made the Radio is such a funny album because all the Beach Boys are on it and they're all really trying. They're all bringing whatever their A-game is. They're bringing their A-game. But it's somebody that Brian, responding to this occasion and, you know, in a really specific, you know, this isn't a song he would have written probably for one of his own records and that this is his...

you know, on some level, Brian is aware that this is the first Beach Boys record in a long time and probably the last. It's a farewell of sorts. And he's able to bring all these other different eras that he's inhabited as a songwriter. You know, it goes back to Surfer Girl. It goes back to the Girls on the Beach. It goes back to the warmth of the sun. It goes back to good vibrations. All these songs are present in this one. And

In so many ways, he's saying goodbye to his youth and his past and his creative vitality. It's just an astoundingly beautiful farewell and that he was able to do that. Like you said, at that stage in the game, we'd already been making songs like that for 60 years.

there's so many 60s bands where when you watch footage of them it only enhances the experience it's so funny that the extent to which it's the opposite with the beat boys it's like you can have a transcendent song like don't worry baby and then you see them in striped shirts performing and you're just like i don't want to see this they were missing that aspect of the mystique

They sure were. The early 70s live performances, they're pretty funny. There's a bunch of those on the excellent box set Feel Flows, which if you're into the Sunflower Surf's Up period, that box is full of phenomenal stuff that had never been released, including the best song Mike Love ever did, Big Sur, Credit Where Due. Cashmere Hill in this fieldwood.

That said, I'm about to say something bitchy about Mike Love, which is there's this great 1973 live introduction of Surf's Up where they're about to do Surf's Up, a song that does not involve Mike Love or his music or his

or him in any way whatsoever. And he's introducing, he's like, Brian did this song on a Leonard Bernstein TV special. Leonard Bernstein said it was one of the best songs ever written. Well, you're just going to have to make up your own mind about that. But now Carl is going to sing it. And it's so wonderfully passive aggressive, so incredibly bitchy. And it's like, yeah, this is the live Beach Boys. This is the part of themselves that they were showing off to an audience. The diamond necklace played the part.

I think I said something like this in one of my write-ups of their songs. The Beach Boys truly give you the sublime and the ridiculous. The sublime all provided by Brian and the ridiculous all provided by my club. Very true. Very true. But also a beautiful part of the story is that these people being in a band with Brian Wilson, they're not just

to their credit, they all learned how to write songs. Uh, most of them didn't know how to write songs before they were hanging out with Brian Wilson, but he can't say they didn't learn on the job. And Dennis Wilson, who by all accounts was very much a hedonistic guy who, uh, was very, very poor impulse control. Let's put it that way. But he became a phenomenal songwriter, really just picking up his, his bigger brother's influence. And, uh,

Just really amazing to see his effect on the Beach Boys that way. That said, you're 100% right. The sublime was Brian. And the part of the pathos of Brian, I mean, we think of him so differently if he'd been in a more sympathetic group or he'd been just a solo artist from the beginning. But the fact that he was always trapped for life with this group of, you know,

Many of them family members. I mean, Mike Love and Brian, they never should have been in the same room, right? Let alone trapped for life in the same band, which was torture for both of them. There's something so profoundly wrong about that and something so profoundly American about that. And I think that's part of why we respond to the music. Part of why we respond to Pet Sounds is we know this is a guy who is...

trapped in this very, very, very unhappy family situation. It's also true that we were able to see the Beach Boys much more clearly now than clearly they were seen in 67 when Rolling Stone started. There was that thing of the Beach Boys were on hip. And the same thing, why they were afraid to play Monterey, that story gets complicated, but basically they would have fit in very strangely at Monterey Pop.

probably, or, or would have shown people how great they were at that moment. Hard to say, but I think it probably would have been the visual thing might've been an issue. All the quality professional pop groups who played Monterey pop, like they looked out of place, even if they were great, the mamas and the papas were great at Monterey pop, but they just seemed out of place. Simon and Garfunkel, whose performance at Monterey was great, but they just, you know, it wasn't a flattering showcase for them. It wasn't their fault, but I think maybe it was a good idea for the beach boys to pull up. But yeah,

They had that weird, you know, their great jam with the Grateful Dead. Right. It's such a strange moment in both careers. I would love to see a movie. If someone would make a movie just about that one night, I would be so fed. Like for arguably the two great American rock band stories in terms of bands that start in California, not that far from each other at the same time and continue forever.

through many of the same absurdities, many of the same situations, the same sense of really different personalities trapped together and that they keep going through large periods of time where people are like, why are they still going? And to me, there's so much parallel between the Grateful Dead and the Beach Boys and that they had this one show where they played together is just so fascinating to me. And so out of whack with both of their stories, I,

I would love if, if any aspiring ambitious filmmaker wants to do a movie just about that one night, I would just love that. Yeah.

I mean, what a crazy story that is. You can hear how funny it is and how like nobody's really sure why this is happening. And that Mike Love is so cocky in the whole situation. And everybody else in both bands is like, yeah, we're not so sure anybody's digging this. You know, where it's like Mike Love is like, I'm going to show these hippies how it's done. Like, and he's doing student demonstration time. It's just really strange.

Well, on that note, Rob, thank you so much. Hopefully we will not have to talk about two legends at once anytime soon, or if we do only for happy reasons. Thank you so much for your insight and for joining me. Thank you so much, Brian. What a joy. And that's our show. We'll be back next week. In the meantime, subscribe to Rolling Stone Music Now wherever you get your podcasts. And please leave us five stars and a nice review on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

because that's always appreciated. But as always, thanks so much for listening and we will see you next week. Panoply.