Starting here in 2020, I am going to do a series of blog posts with accompanying 1-hour long Spotify playlists that take the reader/listener through a particular artist’s discography. I figure that in one-hour chunk, you can get a sense of the scope and shape of a band’s history without having to listen to every song on all their albums they have produced. First up, I thought I would start with a two-part series on one of my favorite groups, The Beach Boys.
Where to start with The Beach Boys? That one’s easy: Pet Sounds. The entirety of the rest of their catalog combined may have a hard time comparing to just that one album. It’s not an album that is easy to get at first listen either. When I first listened to the CD (from the Columbia Record House) I didn’t get it. I thought it was boring and slow and bland. I set it aside and tried it again several weeks later. It took a few times, but it eventually it did reveal itself to me like a beautiful flower. So go ahead and do that. I will wait.
Once you have accepted and integrated Pet Sounds into your life, you have also neatly bifurcated The Beach Boys career into two very distinct parts. There’s the pre-Pet Sounds years, with all the hits you know and have heard over and over again. And there’s the post-Pet Sounds years when things got weird and members started staying in bed for years or dying. Everyone grew a beard and sued each other, and then sang Kokomo on Full House. In both good and bad ways, the post-Pet Sounds years are far more interesting. For one thing, the songs are far less ubiquitous and overplayed.
That is the one of the biggest challenges of compiling this first playlist, as these are songs you know so well, you don’t even know that you know them. It is hard to really concentrate on them and hear them again with fresh ears. These are years for the band where their songs have been compiled into hundreds of different “Greatest Hits” sets. Some even have themes like “love songs” or “summer songs” or “songs picked by Brian Wilson”. There’s even one with the London Philharmonic overdubbed onto everything for no good reason. Avoid that album. But it’s hard not to continually re-package these tracks, because there are a lot of big hits that stand the test of time in there.
The other problem is there are not a lot of hidden gems during this era either. The Beach Boys before Pet Sounds are primarily a singles band. Their albums contain some of the most offensively obvious filler in the world there. There are uninspired covers and lazy instrumentals. There’s a track, Cassius Love vs. Sonny Wilson that is just a skit of the Beach Boys making fun of each other. There’s Our Favorite Recording Sessions that is essentially just a blooper real. There’s even Bull Session with Big Daddy which is just a recording of the band receiving their sandwich order. Capitol was really pushing the Beach Boys to pump out as much product as possible. Between March 25, 1963 and March 2, 1964 the band released four studio albums. As a result, there are even whole “filler” albums released. Not only the usual live albums and compilations to fill the stopgaps, but also a Christmas album, and an album theoretically recorded during an informal party, and even an album of previously released tunes with the vocals erased so you can sing along. It was karaoke before there was karaoke.
So once you weed all this dross out, what you’re left with is a series of songs that you still hear on the oldies radio to this day. I tried to pick the more obscure or complex ones. And as the playlist progresses chronologically you can hear the Beach Boys (and especially Brian Wilson) growing and experimenting and evolving. Because, as big of a leap forward as Pet Sounds is, it didn’t come out of nowhere. There were some tantalizing and intriguing moments beforehand, they just got never coalesced into a single album statement the way that one record did.