The Beach Boys were in town and I got to see them Monday night... I showed up and got a $60 ticket for $40 from a scalper, I think because the protests had scared a lot of purchasers off...
Overall, I wasn't so sorry I went, but I the concert was like a box of jawbreakers - nice at 1st, but towards the end, your whole mouth is sugary, and you're like, "Get this shit away from me."
They sounded great overall with their harmonies, esp. on slow numbers and on "Heroes and Villains" (what a song - no-one else can do it like them), but the low point of the concert had to be Mike Love announcing he was going to sing a song for someone who had taught him how to meditate, the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, and that the song was based on "ancient scriptures"... I laughed, and so did the (older) (white) woman behind me, when he said that.
Interestingly, one of the later Beach Boys wrote the song "I Write the Songs", which they announced mid-concert when introducing him a bit more, and I was like one of a couple people to start clapping and whooping, and I was a bit ticked when they then segued into saying how you could hear his work at minimalls and in elevators everywhere.
They also had tributes to Dennis and then Carl (sp.?) Wilson, where they had a vocal track play where they sang lead play on screen, and then the singers and band backed them up. Carl sang "God Only Knows" live up there, and during the song, just like with Dennis, pictures of him alone and part of the group flashed on screen, but for some reason there were a couple pictures of just him and Dennis and Brian up there as kids, and after the second picture, I suddenly thought about Brian Wilson, and I was like, "He's all alone now," and it really hit me that he was up there on stage in front of all these people watching memorial tributes for his brothers.
Fortunately, that was toward the end of "God Only Knows", and you could see him get absorbed in the overlapping voices and play-conduct to himself over the grand piano.
(He was a little out of it; he played the piano a bit and even got up with a bass guitar at the end; but they were more for him to occasionally form a chord on, they weren't hooked up to the sound system or anything.)
Also toward the end of the concert, I thought about all the songs glorifying cars, and about how we're facing global warming. I flashed back to the commuter rail this fall that took me back to the San Francisco airport after my conference there, and looking out at just wave upon wave of cars on the highway.
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