By the late 1970s, the business of so-called bootlegs, illegally released sound recordings, began to boom worldwide: the bulk of the market was dominated by private live recordings in painfully difficult sound quality, yet the real hits were unpublished studio recordings by accomplished artists such as Bob Dylan, the Beatles, or the Rolling Stones.
The Beach Boys were enjoying, at this time, economically speaking, a second spring thanks to overwhelmingly successful hit compilations such as Endless Summer (1974) and 20 Golden Greats (1976). No wonder the bootleggers began to investigate them as well. And they struck gold.
“We may have the largest catalog of unreleased recordings in the world,” Al Jardine, a member of the band, is quoted in Brad Johnson’s book “Surf’s Up – The Beach Boys On Record 1961–1981.” Especially toward the end of the 1960s, Beach Boys mastermind Brian Wilson was out of control.
Hundreds of hours of audio material had already accumulated for the 1967-abandoned project of the never-completed album “Smile.” Some of it served the Beach Boys in the 1970s as a quarry to upsize rather weak albums. At the same time, further material was produced that, for various reasons, immediately wandered into the archives.
The Beach Boys: „We Gotta Groove – The Brother Studio Years“ (Capitol/Universal)
Pretty Noisy
For the bootleggers’ business, the legend of the never-finished “Smile” album proved to be an excellent turbo. There were enough former engineers and other staff of the band and their record labels to obtain mostly terribly noisy copies of copies of unreleased recordings, and so, step by step, new, allegedly definitive “Smile” versions appeared as bootlegs for a short time.
The success of these releases encouraged bootleggers to broaden the repertoire, and next came albums from the 1970s with material that flooded the market. Especially the album “Adult/Child” ignited the imagination of the Brian Wilson fandom, because the bootleg versions revealed that he had, sometime in the mid-1970s, yet another artistic vision for his band: Californian sunshine-pop matures through a fusion with opulent big-band jazz-pop in the style of the 1950s. As part of the box set “We Gotta Groove: The Brother Studio Years,” “Adult/Child” is now appearing legally for the first time.
The 1970s were a sobering time for the Beach Boys. After the successes and creative heights of the sixties, public interest in their new albums remained limited. By now, singer-songwriters, metal, funk, disco and reggae shaped the pop scene, and their carefree sun-drenched sound with lyrics about surfing, the beach and pimped-out cars seemed like from another world.
In addition, the personal problems of the five members came into play, with the three Wilson brothers Brian, Carl and Dennis especially drifting into various drugs, while Mike Love and Al Jardine turned to transcendental meditation. The growing alienation and the increasing psychological and health problems of the Wilsons led to increasingly intense internal band confrontations.
Away from the Public Eye
What also became clear: Without the input of the creative mastermind Brian Wilson, who had largely withdrawn from public life after the disputes surrounding the “Smile” project in the late 1960s, a future for the band was unimaginable. This was also the view of Warner Brothers at the time, the label.
The Wilson family eventually hired psychiatrist Eugene Landy, who, with rigorous nonstop supervision, actually pulled Brian away from drugs and junk food and back to work as a composer, arranger and producer of new Beach Boys material. Management and the record company then launched an elaborate campaign under the banner “Brian is back,” hoping to entice all the old and new fans of the classic Sixties Beach Boys to check out the new material.
The first album produced in this period, however, did not meet expectations: “15 Big Ones,” released in the summer of 1976, is a somewhat incoherent mix of cover versions of oldies like Chuck Berry’s “Rock and Roll Music,” Fats Domino’s “Blueberry Hill,” or “Just Once in My Life” by the Righteous Brothers, and a few new Wilson compositions, only the charming “Had to Phone Ya” roughly meeting Brian’s standards.
The recording sessions were marked by long arguments and confrontations; the Love/Jardine faction was skeptical, Dennis Wilson thought the oldies idea was stupid, Brian soon tired of it and wanted to lie down again. It was Carl Wilson who somehow kept the band project together, even though he constantly tried to suppress his chronic back pain with tranquilizers, alcohol and later heroin.
Commercially Successful
Surprisingly, the album turned out commercially successful and became the first Beach Boys work since “Pet Sounds” (1966) to reach the Billboard Top 10. The single release “Rock and Roll Music” was the first single since “Good Vibrations” to crack the Top 5. In the “We Gotta Groove” box, “15 Big Ones” is nonetheless only indirectly present with alternative versions and remixes.
Instead, “The Beach Boys Love You” is the actual centerpiece of the box, the album that fans can agree marks the last flicker of Brian’s unique talent—even though it turned out somewhat bizarre. It starts with the lyrics, which, according to British critic Alexis Petridis (The Guardian), can be read as either “charmingly naive or as a fascinating glimpse into a damaged psyche or, again, simply painful.”
Text examples: “He sits behind his microphone / He speaks in such a manly tone” (from “Johnny Carson,” an anthem to the talk show host of the same name). Or “Saturn has rings all around it / I searched the sky and I found it” (from “Solar System,” an anthem to our Solar System). Musically, it is more appealing because Brian repeatedly augmented his childishly simple self-compositions with interesting harmonic twists; and because he also revived the five Beach Boys’ choir singing in its former glory.
Moreover, because he created a completely new, contemporary sound environment for the Beach Boys: Brian Wilson replaced the usual throngs of studio musicians with largely self-played analog synthesizer parts. In fact, “Love You” was intended to be celebrated as an early milestone of synth-pop.
Crooners like Sinatra
For “Adult/Child” he then charted in the opposite direction. It began with the sudden inspiration to compose a song for Frank Sinatra. When the maestro did not respond to the demo of “Still I Dream of It,” Brian decided to record the song himself—in Sinatra style. He recalled Dick Reynolds, an arranger who had previously worked with Sinatra and who helped Brian in 1964 on the Beach Boys’ Christmas Album. Reynolds arranged a total of five titles for Brian, among them besides “Still I Dream of It,” the wistful breakup song “It’s Over Now” — interpreted brilliantly by Carl Wilson and Brian’s wife Marilyn — which stands as the absolute highlight.
Even more moving is the demo version published here for the first time, in which Brian sings at the piano with a cracked voice. Also nice: “Life Is for the Living,” a “Love You”-style children’s song celebrating physical fitness, shows how something like that can be realized with an orchestra instead of synth-minimalism. Also published for the first time: “New England Waltz,” an unpretentious but charming, gentle trumpet instrumental. Hardly any track on this box is as far removed from both the musical zeitgeist of the mid-1970s and the classic Beach Boys sound.
Filling out “Adult/Child” were several unfinished-sounding recordings, of which only “Lines,” a diary-like description of a trip to the cinema, is noteworthy. All of this sounded so far from the Beach Boys’ trademark that both Mike Love and Al Jardine, as well as the record company, kept their thumbs down. “The other guys were not convinced,” Brian is quoted as saying in the box booklet. “Warner Brothers did not like the album either. They mostly agreed. The record didn’t come out.”
For bootleggers, the Beach Boys project is likely concluded. They can now turn to Brian Wilson’s solo work, as there are further unreleased gems — for instance, an entire album with the lovely title “Sweet Insanity.”
