The post-Pet Sound years are far less well-known.  Other than the excruciating “Kokomo”, there are no really big hits during this period.  While this period is less popular, it has certain risen in critical acclaim over the years.  When once the Beach Boys were written off as irrelevant after 1966, these days most of your favorite indie bands see these records as an early progenitor to the bedroom-recording lo-fi sound.

While the last playlist chronicled a steady slope upward, this period is full of all sorts of ups and downs.  It is a weird time.  Brian is trying to give up the reins long before anyone else in the band are ready to pick up the slack.  Drummer Dennis, of all people, turns out to be the best songwriter besides his brother Brian.  The most materialistic, conservative, commercial minded member (Mike Love – boo, hiss) is also a devout follower of the Maharishi.  George Lucas, long before ruining Star Wars with the prequels, ruins the Beach Boys by paving a path for them to become nothing but a touring nostalgia act. 

Since the band has evolved from a single genius (and his messengers) to a democracy, things get really scattershot.  There’s some good stuff buried in those seventies and eighties albums, but there are some undeniable stinkers too.  The Wilson brothers continue to try and push the band into new territory of experimentation and innovation, but are stymied by their drug use, mental illness, and own deaths.  Meanwhile the other three are busy chasing whatever trends are hot at the time.  In the late seventies, they release a ten-minute disco remix of one of their songs.  At the height of Garth Brooks-mania, they corral a bunch of country singers to do countrified versions of their songs while they sing back-up.  They team up with the Fat Boys for a rap version of Wipe Out.  They appear on Full House.  Everything is thrown at the wall; not much sticks. 

The band breaks up.  A couple of times.  Each reunion features fewer and fewer original members.  Brian hides in bed for a couple of years, so the rest of the band moves the studio into his house.  Brian is taken to a quack therapist, just enough that they can trot him on-stage like a dancing bear (No one cares how well he’s dancing; it’s just the fact that he’s dancing at all that is impressive).  Everyone is fired by everyone else at one point.  They start their own record label – Brian tries to sign Three Dog Night, but is turned down.  Dennis tries to sign Charlie Manson, but that doesn’t pan out (luckily).  Carl tries to sign Flame, a South African soul trio, but instead The Beach Boys just add two of their members to the band.  So for a period of time The Beach Boys – America’s whitest band – were integrated.  There are also a few notable people joining the touring group as The Beach Boys start augmenting their troops.  Daryl Dragon (the Captain from the Captain and Tennille) plays keyboards.  One of the Cowsills plays drums on a few tours.  As does future heartthrob John Stamos. 

Their dedication to writing and recording new music ebbs and flows as touring becomes more of the focus (and only source of profit).  Usually a new record is just something to hock at the merch table.  There are more unfinished albums: Adult/Child which was to be made of original Big Band/Swing tunes, and a second Xmas album that gets rejected, so they just change the lyrics to remove references to Santa and release that.  However, when Kokomo becomes a big hit, they are able to put together an album of “movie tunes”, Still Cruisin’ despite having to pad it out to full-length by including three previously released tracks.  They even tried to get Bart Simpson to duet with them, but were rejected. It is an interesting, tumultuous time for the band.  While the downfalls and pitfalls are certainly worthy of note, there are still some moments of grace and beauty that shine through every now and then.  I’ve even included a track from Dennis’s solo album and a pair from Brian’s solo career, as these were easily some of the high points during the Beach Boys’ darkest days.  It’s a ride, but definitely one worth investigating.

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.