"The BAD Tour 2013" - Brian, Al, and David

Someone on the Smiley Smile Message Board dubbed the Brian/Al/David tour dates as the "BAD Tour", and I certainly believe it will be anything but bad (unless we're talking about the good kind of "bad", but that's a discussion for an old fuddy-duddy parent to have circa 1990).

What remains to be seen at this point is how much of a "tour" this will be. Here's what the schedule looks like so far:

• July 20 — Atlantic City, NJ (The Grand @ The Golden Nuggett)
• July 21 — Pittsburgh, PA (Stage AE)
• July 23 — Interlochen, MI (Kresge Auditorium)
• July 25 — Kettering, OH (Fraze Pavilion)
• July 26 — Highland Park, IL (Ravinia Festival Pavilion)
• July 27 — Apple Valley, MN (Minnesota Zoo, Weesner Family Amphitheater)
• October 20 — Los Angeles, CA (Greek Theatre)

So we have six dates bunched together in late July, and a random October date in L.A. It might be tempting to believe they will literally fill in the entire time between 7/27 and 10/20 with tour dates, but that seems unlikely. But I certainly hope we get some additional dates, at least something akin to a standard Brian solo tour from the old days, a good 20-30 shows or so that hopefully gets around most of North America.
What can we expect from these shows? I think they could be awesome, especially if they allow David and especially Al to have more than just cameo roles in the show. When Al played a few gigs with Brian in 2006/2007, he was really relegated to a few leads. Beyond that, it was more just the novelty of seeing the two guys together. Let's hope Brian hands over a substantial number of leads to Al, and some to David as well. Let's also hope we see Al and David introducing their own stuff into the setlist. I'd love to see Al sing "Cottonfields" and "California Saga" again, but I wouldn't mind seeing him add "Don't Fight the Sea", or "Lady Lynda", or "Santa Ana Winds", and so on.

We'll be getting essentially/presumably the 50th Anniversary tour lineup minus Love, Johnston, Cowsill, and Totten and probably one additional person to fill in on drums and/or bass (Brett Simons?). So it should be an awesome show, and maybe Brian will be more at east not having to do all the vocal heavy lifting on the tour.