Deep Album Cuts Vol. 389: The Beach Boys
Brian Wilson died on Wednesday at the age of 82, two days after Sly Stone, who was also 82. People have compared it to when David Bowie and Prince died in the same year, but I don't know if we've ever lost two titans of popular music in the same week in unrelated deaths like this before. As this series stretches into nearly 400 volumes, I've covered most of the big names I could possibly cover, but there are always certain indispensable artists I haven't gotten to yet, and the Beach Boys are one of those that stayed at the top of my to-do list, I just kept putting off the exciting but daunting task of trying to boil down this catalog to 80 minutes. Kinda wish I'd gotten it done before Brian passed away, but it gave me a reason to dig in and work on it finally.
2. Chug-A-Lug
3. Farmer's Daughter
4. Catch A Wave
5. No-Go Showboat
6. The Warmth of the Sun
7. All Summer Long
8. Merry Christmas, Baby
9. She Knows Me Too Well
10. In The Back Of My Mind
11. Girl Don't Tell Me
12. Let Him Run Wild
13. You've Got To Hide Your Love Away
14. I'm Waiting For The Day
15. Don't Talk (Put Your Head On My Shoulder)
16. Wind Chimes
17. Vegetables
18. Aren't You Glad
19. Let The Wind Blow
20. Busy Doin' Nothin'
21. Be Still
22. Our Prayer
23. Cabinessence
24. All I Wanna Do
25. Forever
26. 'Til I Die
27. Feel Flows
28. All This Is That
29. California Saga (Big Sur)
30. Back Home
31. The Night Was So Young
Tracks 1 and 2 from Surfin' Safari (1962)
Track 3 from Surfin' U.S.A. (1963)
Track 4 from Surfer Girl (1963)
Track 5 from Little Deuce Coupe (1963)
Track 6 from Shut Down Volume 2 (1964)
Track 7 from All Summer Long (1964)
Track 8 from The Beach Boys' Christmas Album (1964)
Tracks 9 and 10 from The Beach Boys Today! (1965)
Tracks 11 and 12 from Summer Days (And Summer Nights!!) (1965)
Track 13 from Beach Boys' Party! (1965)
Tracks 14 and 15 from Pet Sounds (1966)
Tracks 16 and 17 from Smiley Smile (1967)
Tracks 18 and 19 from Wild Honey (1967)
Tracks 20 and 21 from Friends (1968)
Tracks 22 and 23 from 20/20 (1969)
Tracks 24 and 25 from Sunflower (1970)
Tracks 26 and 27 from Surf's Up (1971)
Track 28 from Carl and the Passions - "So Tough" (1972)
Track 29 from Holland (1973)
Track 30 from 15 Big Ones (1976)
Track 31 from The Beach Boys Love You (1977)
Growing up, the Who and Hendrix were a bit more important to me than the Beach Boys and the Beatles, in terms of me just having an immediate connection to the '60s music that was more about the raw energy of a band. So for me, part of my musical maturation has been caring just as much about studio craftmanship, in a weird way Steely Dan and Burt Bacharach were my gateways to appreciating what Brian Wilson and the Beach Boys did.
Pet Sounds was the only Beach Boys album I heard as a teenager. I'd only just gotten into their great '70s albums Surf's Up and Sunflower and Holland for the first time in the past year and I was amazed, as many people have been, at how modern "All I Wanna Do" and "Feel Flows" sound. And this past week it was really fun to listen to the '60s albums in chronological order and really experience that incredible creative journey the band went on. Hearing how they got to Pet Sounds made me appreciate that album even more. I really almost opened the playlist with "Chug-A-Lug" because I love the idea of starting that journey with a song about drinking root beer.
Of course, the big dividing point in the Beach Boys story is before and after Smile, the legendary 'lost' album that remained uncompleted after Brian Wilson reached a breaking point in 1967, despite the success of the lead single "Good Vibrations." Several tracks written for Smile appeared on other Beach Boys albums over the next few years, sometimes in very different arrangements, including "Vegetables," "Wind Chimes," "Our Prayer," and "Cabinessence" on this playlist (I will say, I like the Smile version of "Wind Chimes" a lot more than the Smiley Smile version here, but both are good).
Smile was eventually completed in a couple forms -- with new recordings as 2004's Brian Wilson Presents Smile, and with the original tapes as 2011's The Smile Sessions. Listening to those, I don't think Smile ever would've surpassed Pet Sounds -- I think it would've been a great follow-up to their pinnacle, the Wish You Were Here to their Dark Side of the Moon. It still feels like one of popular music's great what-if albums, though. I think the band would've been commercially and creatively a lot better off if they'd finished Smile in '67 and released that instead of the comparatively lo-fi Smiley Smile.
Stephen Thomas Erlewine's excellent Stereogum piece about some of Wilson's best deep cuts included some of these tracks ("Farmer's Daughter," "The Warmth of the Sun," "Let Him Run Wild," "Busy Doin' Nothin'," and "The Night Was So Young"). Given that the Beach Boys made 29 albums over the course of 50 years, I thought about whether to try to cover that entire run or cut it off somewhere. And seeing that 1989's Still Cruisin', the album that contained the band's divisive last #1 single "Kokomo," isn't on streaming services kinda made me feel free to end the playlist somewhere earlier, and '77's The Beach Boys Love You seemed like a good place to stop as one of their last well regarded albums.
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