The Beach Boys: 10 songs to understand their post-Pet Sounds era
Falling in love with the Beach Boys is like falling into a musical black hole, emerging in a warped world of classic hits, novelty albums, endless compilations, abandoned projects, recycled themes and a dizzying variety of box sets. To date, the band have been responsible for 29 studio albums, seven live albums, 50 compilations and 82 singles, an intimidatingly large array for even the most encyclopaedic of music fan.
Broadly speaking, though, the band’s output can be classified into three phases: the early hits (1962 to 1965, a period that saw the band produce 10 studio albums, including some of their most iconic songs); Pet Sounds (released in May 1966, the one undeniably classic Beach Boys album to see the light of day during their popular peak); and post-Pet Sounds (a period that started with the release of Good Vibrations in October 1966 and continues to the present day, taking in death, addiction and Charles Manson, not to mention critical and commercial failure, along the way).
Each period more than merits its own elegy. But it is the last that is the most easily overlooked, thanks to its bewildering length, musical diversity and epic peaks and troughs. The band’s post-Pet Sounds catalogue is home to everything from 1996’s Stars and Stripes Vol. 1, a woeful collaborative album with assorted country musicians, to gigantic pop hit Kokomo (from Cocktail, lest we forget) to the raw soul music of 1967’s Wild Honey.
The accepted narrative is that this period saw the band — and especially leader Brian Wilson — spectacularly fall from grace following the high watermark of Pet Sounds, abandoning planned follow up album Smile (eventually pieced together and released in 2011) in favour of pale copies of what Smile would have been, as drugs, paranoia, stress and underlying mental health issues made Wilson into a virtual recluse. Even the band themselves have supported this theory: Beach Boy Carl Wilson famously compared Smiley Smile, the simplified version of Smile that was released in 1967, to “a bunt instead of a grand slam”.
But the truth is that the post-Pet Sounds era saw The Beach Boys produce some of the oddest, tenderest, most delicate and even funkiest music of their reign and it is a period that rewards re-examination.
The obvious place to start is with one of the band’s greatest hits: Good Vibrations, a towering pop symphony that manages to be both wildly inventive — a mixture of sawing cellos, Hammond organ, jaw harp, theremin, tack piano and otherworldly harmonies — utterly ecstatic and consummately addictive.
It is one of two “completed” Smile tracks that appeared on Smiley Smile, alongside the grandiloquent Heroes and Villains (although it is worth noting that the Smile Sessions, the compilation released in 2011 which gets about as close to the finished Smile as we’re ever likely to see, features longer versions of both tracks). These two songs, you might think, would be enough in themselves to make Smiley Smile a welcome addition to the Beach Boys catalogue. And yet it remains one of the least popular albums in the band’s repertoire, criticised largely for what it isn’t — Smile — than appreciated for what it is, a decent, if somewhat limited, example of late 60s pop that leans on the avant garde without falling headlong into the experimental tuba.
Alongside these two tracks Smiley Smile, which was recorded in six weeks at Brian Wilson’s makeshift home studio after work on Smile was halted, includes basic, re-recorded versions of Smile songs Fire (which appears on Smiley Smile as Fall Breaks and Back to Winter (W. Woodpecker Symphony)), Vegetables, Wind Chimes and Wonderful, as well as a handful of new tracks, some of which — such as She’s Goin’ Bald — had their roots in the Smile sessions, while others (including Gettin’ Hungry and Little Pad) were totally new. Of these, With Me Tonight — notable described as “psychedelic doo wop” by Peter Ames Carlin in his book Catch a Wave: The Rise, Fall, and Redemption of the Beach Boys’ Brian Wilson — is the pick of the bunch.
2) Wild Honey
Wild Honey, the Beach Boys’ thirteenth studio album, was released in December 1967, just three months after Smiley Smile, a remarkably quick turnaround for a band who had spent months recording Good Vibrations alone. Carl Wilson apparently called Wild Honey “music for Brian to cool out by”, while others have claimed the album was an attempt to regroup as a living, breathing rock and roll band, after the studio perfectionism of Pet Sounds and Smile.
Whatever the case, Wild Honey is a very different album to Pet Sounds or even Smiley Smile: it features little of the musical experimentation of their previous releases, while even the band’s trademark group singing is largely absent, replaced by simple soulful, R&B-influenced rock (Wild Honey is often called the Beach Boys’ soul album, for good reason). Wild Honey also saw Brian Wilson’s influence on the band recede, as he battled with his drugs and mental health issues, with production shared by the whole band.
Wild Honey, like Smiley Smile before it, was mauled by contemporary critics, who saw it as a rather paltry work from the band, compared to the symphonic innovation of Pet Sounds. And in a way they have a point — Wild Honey is rather slight compared to what has gone before. But it is an immensely pleasurable listen nonetheless, full of uncomplicated musical charm that breezes through the album, blowing the troubles gestation of Smile away.
Typical of this charm is the title track, a barnstorming soul number with an impassioned, beautifully flawed vocal from Carl Wilson, which could hardly be further away from his angelic perfection on God Only Knows. The song, two minutes 40 of rolling R&B, also features the theremin work of Paul Tanner, becoming the third song in the band’s catalogue to feature the instrument after I Just Wasn’t Made For These Times and Good Vibrations.
Other notable songs on the album include Darlin’, a Motown-ish number which later gave its name to Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo’s pre-Daft Punk band; Here Comes The Night, reinterpreted as a disco number on 1979’s L.A. (Light Album); and Mama Says, a one-minute long acapella vocal originally intended as a bridge section on Smile’s Vega-Tables.
When Wild Honey was re-released in 1990, it came on a double CD with Smiley Smile and a raft of brilliant bonus tracks, including an alternate take on Heroes and Villains; incomplete, yet fascinating versions of Good Vibrations; Heroes and Villains’ angelic B side You’re Welcome; a thoroughly gorgeous take on Bobby Troup’s Their Hearts Were Full of Spring; and Can’t Wait Too Long, a Smile-ish song collage that Brian Wilson would re-record for his 2008 album That Lucky Old Sun.
Friends, the band’s fourteenth studio album in six years, followed hot on Wild Honey’s heels. Released in June 1968, it did little to turn around the band’s declining commercial fortunes, however, limping to 126 in the US charts. But if Friends came at a difficult time for the band and Brian Wilson in particular (who had added cocaine to his regular drug line up of amphetamines, marijuana and LSD), it really doesn’t show in the music, with glows with a resigned, almost unnatural, calm, predating the horizontal lushness of Air by a good 25 years.
As with Wild Honey, Friends saw the other Beach Boys join Brian Wilson on songwriting and production duties. Arguably, though, the album’s two best songs were written by Brian alone: Passing By, which floats by on a cloud of wordless harmonies, and Busy Doin’ Nothin’, a bossa nova shuffle with elegant flashes of acoustic guitar, in which Wilson relates his day-to-day business (“The afternoon was filled up with phone calls / what a hot sticky day”) and gives detailed step-by-step directions to his Bel-Air mansion. It sounds effortless, a song Wilson tossed off in an afternoon to avoid cleaning his sandpit, but impressively so, a lazy summer’s sigh transposed to vinyl. At the same time, though, there is an immense sadness at the song’s core, the sound of Wilson fiddling around, alone, in his California mansion while his musical career turns to pot and his motivation slides.
4) Do It Again
Between Friends and the band’s next studio album, 20/20, Brian Wilson entered a psychiatric hospital for a brief period of time, while the group’s label, Capitol, released both The Best of the Beach Boys Volume 3 and Stack-O-Tracks, an album of 15 backing tracks, as it looked to make up for low sales of Wild Honey and Friends.
By July 1968, when Do It Again was released as a single, the Beach Boys’ reputation was dirt, the band considered — when considered at all by younger audiences — as over the hill and long in the tooth, a group of ageing fuddy duddies compared to hip young things like The Doors. Do It Again, a conscious throwback to the band’s surfing style complete with lyrical nods to beaches and girls, did little to change this reputation, although it did give the Boys a top 20 hit in the US and their second number one in the UK.
Nevertheless, it is a gem of a song, two and a half minutes of nostalgic joy and doo-wop harmonies that must raise a wistful tear in anyone who’s ever looked back on their childhood with a note of regret. For those fond of slightly more complicated musical pleasures, meanwhile, Do It Again starts with a curious — yet thrilling — double tape delay effect on the drums which, according to engineer Stephen Desper, repeats each drum strike four times, 10 milliseconds apart.
Do It Again would later open 20/20, released in February 1969. As might be expected, Brian Wilson had little involvement in recording the album, with brothers Carl and Dennis taking the lead. Carl, notably, would produce a version of Phil Spector’s I Can Hear Music for 20/20, which gave the band a number 26 hit in the US, while Dennis penned the gloriously cinematic Be With Me. Somewhat less gloriously, Dennis would also be credited with writing 20/20’s Never Learn Not To Love, much to the annoyance of the song’s original author, psychopathic cult leader Charles Manson, who had been hanging out at Dennis’s mansion.
Brian’s absence also obliged Carl and Dennis to dig into their older brother’s archives for 20/20, emerging with two Smile tracks — the ethereal Our Prayer and Cabinessence, once described by Mojo as “Smile in microcosm”, thanks to its theatrical scope — as well as Time To Get Alone, an exceptionally tender love song in waltz time, originally intended for Three Dog Night and later recorded for Wild Honey. 20/20 is, as a result, something of a dog’s dinner of an album, home to several exceptional songs (not least Bruce Johnston’s Pet Sounds-inspired The Nearest Faraway Place) but little in the way of a coherent thread to hold it all together.
Breakaway — a Do It Again-ish throwback released as a single in June 1969 that almost scales the heights of its predecessor — is among the bonus tracks on the Friends / 20/20 CD. It would be the band’s last single of the 60s, closing the decade in a joyous fashion that didn’t exactly chime with their mental and physical state as the 70s loomed into view.
Sunflower, the Beach Boys’ sixteenth studio album, was released in August 1970 to a surprisingly enthusiastic critical reaction, earning comparisons to Abbey Road but poor sales. Over the years its reputation has endured: in 1997 The Guardian placed Sunflower at 66 in its list of 100 best albums, while Pitchfork called Sunflower “perhaps the strongest album they released post-Pet Sounds” in 2000.
Songwriting on Sunflower is largely split between Brian and Dennis Wilson, with the former contributing the idyllic Our Sweet Love, shapeshifting rock number This Whole World and the ecstatic ode to musical harmony Add Some Music to Your Day, while Dennis penned the darkly funky Slip On Through and John Lennon-esque ode Forever, perhaps his best known song.
It seems perverse, then, to include no songs from Sunflower in this list. And yet, for me, the song that best represents this era is Dennis Wilson’s Fallin’ in Love, a song cut from Sunflower but released as a single in the UK in December 1970 as Lady, credited to Dennis Wilson & Rumbo. 39 years later a new mix of the song — now known as Falllin’ In Love once again — was included on the compilation album Summer Love Songs, although it remains a fairly obscure entry in the band’s catalogue.
It’s hard to see why: over swirling strings and a primitive drum machine, Falllin’ In Love sees Dennis unload his heavy heart, making the first flushes of romance sound like the most melancholy experience in the world, in a song that rivals anything in the Beach Boys’ catalogue.
6) ’Til I Die
It feels equally perverse not to include Surf’s Up, a baroque jewel of a pop song that drives a dagger into the heart of surf culture, in this list. Surf’s Up, originally recorded for Smile, had already reached mythical status by 1970, after Brian Wilson recorded a solo version of the song for a CBS News special, Inside Pop: The Rock Revolution.
Journalist and radio presenter Jack Rieley, who had met Brian in 1969 at Wilson’s health food store The Radiant Radish, became the Beach Boys’ manager in 1970, after presenting Brian with a lengthy memo on how the band could improve their record sales. In his new position, Rieley pushed the band to include Surf’s Up on their next album, provisionally entitled Landlocked, which was intended to include unreleased songs from the Sunflower sessions.
Landlocked became Surf’s Up, the band’s seventeenth album, released in August 1971. The title track, which had been completed by a reluctant Brian Wilson, closed the album in stately fashion. And while it’s hard to argue with the quality of a song voted the band’s best by Mojo magazine, for my money the track that precedes it, ’Til I Die, a spine-tingling reflection on mortality, pips Surf’s Up for sheer emotional impact.
’Til I Die is one of the most overtly bleak songs in the Beach Boys cannon, as Wilson variously compares himself to “a cork on the ocean / Floating over the raging sea”, “a rock in a landslide / Rolling over the mountainside” and “a leaf on a windy day / Pretty soon I’ll be blown away” over a funereal — yet utterly beautiful — backing of drum machine, vibraphone and organ, creating one of the most moving moments in pop history.
Also of note on Surf’s Up are A Day in the Life of a Tree, Brian’s only entirely new contribution to the album and almost as emotionally devastating as ’Til I Die (in fact, so mournful was A Day in the Life… that Jack Rieley ended up singing lead vocal on it, as the rest of the band apparently considered it too depressing); Carl Wilson’s Feel Flows, an unnerving masterpiece of reverse echo; and the fragile beauty of Mike Love’s album opener Don’t Go Near The Water.
7) You Need a Mess of Help to Stand Alone
If Dennis Wilson would prove an inspiration for Sunflower, Carl Wilson would come increasingly to the band’s fore in the early 70s after being appointed musical director by manager Jack Rieley. The band’s eighteenth studio album, Carl and the Passions — “So Tough”, was named after Carl’s teenage band and he hired South African musician Blondie Chaplin as a third guitarist in 1971.
The resulting album, released in May 1972, is widely seen as a transitional affair, with drummer Ricky Fataar also joining the band after Dennis Wilson suffered a hand accident, while long-time Beach Boy Bruce Johnston departed during the recording process. Brian Wilson, meanwhile, was only sporadically involved, as he concentrated on the production and release of the debut album from his wife Marilyn’s band, American Spring.
Brian did, however contribute the album’s best song in You Need a Mess of Help to Stand Alone, a rough, rootsy rock number, with gritty vocals from Carl — similar to his turn on Wild Honey — and Chaplin. It is not, perhaps, the most sophisticated of Beach Boys numbers, more Surfin’ USA than Surf’s Up, but it is catchy as hell, satisfyingly funky and a track I find myself increasingly turning to when I dive into the Beach Boys’ later work.
8) The Trader
Holland, the band’s nineteenth studio album, saw the release of what is probably Carl Wilson’s greatest song: The Trader (penned with the band’s manager Jack Rieley).
Holland is, in many ways, a strange album for the Beach Boys: in 1972 Rieley decided that the band — and in particular Brian Wilson — would benefit from a change of scenery, resulting in the most Californian of musical outfits going to record in Utrecht. Brian, however, contributed little to the album, while a homesick Mike Love and Al Jardine created a three-part song cycle that paid homage to California. The album also came with a bonus EP, Mount Vernon and Fairway (A Fairy Tale), a whimsical story about a magical radio that appears to a young prince.
On the band’s return to the US, Holland was rejected by their label, Reprise, for not having a hit single, leading the Beach Boys to dig out an unfinished Brian Wilson / Van Dyke Parks number, Sail On Sailor, which, when polished up, would become one of their biggest hits of the 1970s.
But it is The Trader, an anti-imperialist tale about Europeans coming to the Americas, which really stands out on Holland, a strident opening musical phase giving way to an exquisite second part, which mixes brushed drums, subtly shifting time signatures and an exquisite Carl Wilson vocal to create a kind of aural valium.
9) Wonderful (The Smile Sessions)
For a release that spent 40 years as the archetypal “lost” album, Smile has been surprisingly ubiquitous in the Beach Boys’ catalogue. Several Smile songs — or rather songs pieced together from Smile fragments — adorned the band’s albums in the late 60s / early 70s, box sets added further fragments in the 90s and Smile bootlegs were once a familiar site in record fairs and festivals throughout the world.
In 2004, however, Brian Wilson properly blew the lid on Smile, by performing the album in full at a series of live dates. Excitement was fevered: finally, after all these years, Smile enthusiasts could discover how the album’s fragments fit together, putting end to a guessing game that had run ever since the album was abandoned in 1967. Wilson would then record Smile with his new band, for release in September 2004.
The resulting album, Brian Wilson Presents Smile, was as frustrating as it was brilliant, the undeniable excellence of the songs offset by the nagging feeling that the 2004 studio recordings lacked a certain grit found on much-loved bootleg releases, while Wilson’s vocals were, sadly, a shadow of his teenage self. What …Presents Smile did do, however, was give Beach Boys fanatics a definitive track listing for Smile which they could study, then try to recreate using Smile-era material released on box sets, bootlegs and more, getting ever closer to the “finished” Smile.
Fun though this was, new of the release of The Smile Sessions in 2011 was greeted with euphoria by Beach Boys fans. Smile could never be “properly” released — it wasn’t even finished, after all — but The Smile Sessions was about as close as we would get, using the track listing for Brian Wilson presents Smile and the Beach Boys’ studio archive to create a 19-song approximation of what Smile would have been.
The highlights of The Smile Sessions are endless — really, go and listen to it now — but for this list we’ll take Wonderful, a song horribly botched on Smiley Smile, where it is bogged down in murk and gloom, but present in all its love and innocence on the Smile Sessions, complete with one of Brian’s most heart-rending vocals. (This version had, admittedly, already seen the light of day on 1993 box set Good Vibrations: Thirty Years of The Beach Boys but was hardly well known, given that album’s bulky track listing and price.)
10) That’s Why God Made the Radio
Between Holland and The Smile Sessions, the Beach Boys released nine studio albums, of a quality we’ll describe as “varying” and you can pick your own personal lowlight, from the electronic mess of Summer in Paradise to Fat Boys collaboration Wipe Out. It was not, in short, a good time to be a Beach Boys fan.
The 2010s, however, have been far better for the band: not only was there the release of The Smile Sessions in 2011 but the band — now, essentially, a touring outfit run by Mike Love — reunited with Brian Wilson for a 50th anniversary tour in 2012, the first time that Wilson had joined the Beach Boys for a full tour since 1965. The reunited band also put out an album, That’s Why God Made the Radio, their 29th studio effort, as part of their 50th anniversary celebrations.
The tour was met with universally ecstatic reviews. The album less so, although it still gave the band their highest charting studio album of new material in the US since 1965, when it debuted at number three. The presence of Jon Bon Jovi, co-writer on closing track Summer’s Gone, probably didn’t help. But the album did contain at least two brilliant songs, in Smile-esque acapella opener Think About The Days, and the title track, a song penned by Brian Wilson back in the late 1990s, whose chorus is so perfectly Beach Boys melancholy it more than justifies the album’s existence on its own.
