I certainly hope Brian doesn’t outlive Paul Dano. Oh fuck it, we all know Mike Love will be the last man standing.

“Summer’s Gone” would have been such a perfect, terrific note for both the Beach Boys and Brian Wilson to end on and then pffft. We don’t get what we want, but we get what we deserve.

I only really, really liked the first Brian Wilson solo album (and you might recall I actually didn’t like Love You much at all) but aside from “Smart Girls” - probably one of the twenty worst songs I’ve ever heard, and easily the worst thing a Beach Boy ever wrote - Sweet Insanity is actually not bad. At the very least I sure do love “Hotter.”

These box sets you speak of are, like, VINYL, right? I’m stunned people are still shelling out for such things.

You can skip No Pier Pressure for sure, you probably don’t need to hear re-recordings like the piano album or I Just Wasn’t Made For These Times, Imagination is listenable but not terribly essential, and then there’s that miserable Van Dyke Parks collaboration that three years and loads of money were spent making, and then NOBODY bought the damn thing (no “cult status” either–very few reviews of Orange Crate Art exist), meaning it bombed even worse than Song Cycle did in 1968!!