Suzy and BB Y los Quattro with the great BW in London last week...
Of all the Brian Wilson reviews that I've read over the past week, the following is the absolute best... Courtesy of Lane Steinberg
"I'm now on the phone listening to "Smile" live from London. At 3:30 my friend Lenny called and said, "Lane, you there? Listen. I'm at the Brian Wilson concert in London. He's about to start the Smile section. I'll put the cell phone on the floor."
It's un-fucking-believable. I can't believe what I'm listening to. "Cabinessence" better than the record. Wait, now Lenny's singing along with "Wonderful" and he's off key. STOP SINGING, LENNY! He just popped onto the phone to say Macca & Martin are in the audience. Now I'm hearing stuff I've never heard before. GREAT. Like Good Vibrations mixed into Wonderful. OH, THIS IS AMAZING!!!!! Now it's the coda of "Surf's Up" with other stuff I can't recognize into the beginning of "Surf's Up". Harmonies are dead on. This is like an acid trip. For me, this is phone sex...
(Smile Coda - 45 minutes later)
Listened to the entire hour 2nd set + encores on the cell phone. The capillaries in my brain are probably like fried onions. Amazing to think that in 2004, Brian is performing a letter perfect version of Smile. If Vegas was putting odds on such a possibility back in '77, when Brian looked like the side of a barn, the ratio would be off the charts. Even through the static of the phone, the power of this music struck me in a very unique way. It was much deeper and more serious than the Pet Sounds set I saw two years ago. There was not even a vaguely pathetic moment here. This was pure intellectual vision and POWER. There were no breaks throughout the whole set. It was done as an entire piece, like a symphony. How these guys were able to nail a piece as tough as "Our Prayer" live is beyond me. Brian sounds absolutely astounding. The encores of "Barbara Ann", "Do It Again", and "I Get Around" were admittedly anti-climatic & sounded much like the Pet Sounds tour versions. Lenny got on the phone during "I Get Around" to say that Macca was dancing in the aisles with everyone else and no one was paying him any mind. I enjoyed trying to envision that! Now, almost forty years past the Sgt. Pepper/Smile rivalry, Brian's played the unreleased Smile exactly the way it should have sounded to the guy he lost the battle to. Pretty dramatic stuff. And then, after what seemed like three minutes of solid trans-atlantic applause, Brian came out for a simple solo piano rendition of "Love & Mercy", a song which gains more majesty & resonance with each passing year. It was quite a moving finale. I'm sure Dennis & Carl were having quite an amusing "I told you so" moment out there in the Ozone...
I wonder how much Lenny's cell phone bill is gonna be... "
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