The Beach Boys started the eighties much like they ended the seventies. With Bruce Johnston back in the fold, they recorded Keepin’ The Summer Alive, and album that sounds pretty much like L.A. (Light Album) only without the lows (10-minute disco songs) or the highs (tracks imported from Dennis’s unfinished second album Bambu). So a pretty uninteresting record overall. They’re still trying to recapture their old sound while maintaining enough of a modern gloss to try and get back on the radio.

Sadly, Dennis would never finish Bambu, as he ended up drowning in 1983 making Keepin’ The Summer Alive the last Beach Boys album with Dennis on it – even though he didn’t contribute much. Given that tragedy, it would be five years before the Beach Boys would record another album. During this time it was looking more and more like Brian was going to follow his brother Dennis into an early grave, so The Beach Boys re-hired Dr. Landy. Dr. Landy turned out to be as much of a psychopath as a psychiatrist. He began cutting Brian off from all of his friends and family, insinuating himself in all of Brian’s financial affairs, over-medicating the man to keep him docile and in control. But Brian needed some really aggressive and unconventional treatment. It’s hard to know how to feel about Dr. Landy. On one hand, he probably saved Brian’s life. On the other he also ruined Brian’s life.

Thanks to Dr. Landy’s intervention, Brian was able to participate in the 1985 eponymous album The Beach Boys. The record was produced by Steve Levine, probably best known for producing Culture Club. So the album sounds pretty much like you would expect it to. Dr. Landy also pushed Brian to start a solo career (possibly so he could have further control over Brian’s finances). His first solo album was also eponymous, 1988’s Brian Wilson. Brian had written a song called Love & Mercy that he was extremely proud of and still performs as his encore to this day. However, while trying to push Love & Mercy as a single, the rest of the Beach Boys managed to have a fluke of a hit without him.

Originally from the Cocktail soundtrack, Kokomo stunned everyone by becoming a huge smash. Despite an extensive history of unfinished and/or unreleased albums in their wake, the success of Kokomo spurred the Beach Boys to complete Still Cruisin’ despite the fact they didn’t have enough songs to fill up an album and the last three tracks are just old songs tacked on to the end. The concept was supposed to be all songs from recent movie soundtracks, which is how they justified the inclusion of I Get Around, Wouldn’t It Be Nice, and California Girls. But no one gave Al or Brian the memo, so they just contributed some new tunes to the album. Still Cruisin’ is a cold-hearted cash grab of an album that hasn’t been released on Spotify so I wasn’t really able to include any tracks from it.

Having proven to himself that he didn’t need Brian to have a hit, Mike continued without him on the 1992 album Summer In Paradise. That album is truly ghastly, although the rap rendition of Surfin’ and the version of Forever sung by John Stamos do have a bit of rubbernecking-curiosity to them. It does have the distinction of being one of the first albums recorded in ProTools. But this album isn’t on Spotify either.

Luckily by this point Dr. Landy was out of the picture. In the mid-nineties, Don Was tried to get the group together to record a new album. Though a couple of tracks like Some Sweet Day, Soul Searchin’, and You’re Still A Mystery have come out much later, Carl wasn’t feeling it and so the band abandoned this album.

In 1996, trying to ride the coattails of Garth Brooks and Billy Ray Cyrus, the band got Brian Wilson to produce an album of re-recorded Beach Boys classic with various country stars singing lead title Stars & Stripes, vol. 1. The only one of these tracks that is even remotely listenable is Willie Nelson’s version of The Warmth Of Sun. However, I couldn’t include it because (are you noticing a pattern here?) it is also unavailable on Spotify. There would not be a Stars & Stripes, vol. 2.

Carl ended up succumbing to cancer shortly after the album was scuttled. Being the last anchor who could try and get everyone to work together, the Beach Boys split into three separate camps starting in the new millennium. Mike and Bruce had the rights to the Beach Boys name, touring and selling merch willy-nilly while not even bother to record new material since they knew that wasn’t where there bread-and-butter lay. Brian surprisingly, became something of a touring regular, while continuing to put out new solo material. Some of which are good and some of which are pretty bad. There’s a Disney album and a Gershwin album and a Christmas album. He also finished SMiLE in 2004. He had gained enough stature as the “genius” behind the Beach Boys that he could easily tour under his own name with a 20-piece band made of members of the Wondermints and various other groups. This just left poor Al Jardine to try and tour as “The Beach Boys Friends & Family” sometimes with Brian’s kids Carnie and Wendy from Wilson Phillips. Eventually Al has sued and forced to rename his touring ensemble. This was hardly the last lawsuit between bandmembers.

Given the in-fighting and bad blood between everyone, it was somewhat surprising to hear that in 2012 all of the remaining Beach Boys would be reuniting for a tour. Even the erstwhile David Marks! Even more shocking, Brian was going to produce an album for them. While the resultant record, That’s Why God Made The Radio, was merely okay, people were just happy that it existed at all, much less that it wasn’t terrible. It pretty much sounded like a Brian Wilson solo recording of the time (check out No Pier Pressure) but with Mike Love’s auto-tuned voice in the mix. Needless to say this truce didn’t last long, and after the one tour the band disassembled again. Several members from both Brian’s and Mike’s backing bands swapped side. Al started touring as a member of Brian’s band, as did Blondie Chaplin, which meant that he may have had more actual Beach Boys on-stage than the band that bore the Beach Boys’ name. They still put aside their squabbles every now and then to do something stupid like release an album of Beach Boys songs with the London Philharmonic overdubbed on top, but it is unlikely that there will be a new Beach album again.

Then again, we’ve said that before…

By the mid-seventies, The Beach Boys were trying really hard to seem trendy and cool and hip. At the same time George Lucas was making American Graffiti, whose soundtrack was going to cement the Beach Boys reputation as retro and nostalgic… but in a good way. They could hardly give away copies of 1972’s Carl & The Passions or 1973’s Holland, even with bonus discs attached to both, but the 2-LP compilation Endless Summer sold like gangbusters in 1974 prompting a pair of “greatest hits” follow-ups: 1975’s Spirit Of America and 1982’s Sunshine Dream.

This was fine by Mike Love. He had no problem peddling in the nostalgia circuit. So Ricky Fataar and Blondie Chaplin were let go because they didn’t fit the new old image of The Beach Boys. Now there was need to try and plug their latest album in a show where everyone just wanted to head Barbara Ann. No need to even record new music. But at this time, it was still record sales and not touring that brought in the big bucks for musicians. And if The Beach Boys were going to capitalize on their new, family-friendly, squeaky-clean image as purveyors of fun, fun fun from before everything got weird and dark and scary they were going to have to put out an album with Brian Wilson’s name, and Brian’s alone, as producer.

Brian wasn’t in any condition to produce a whole new album at this point though. So the rest of the band hired a really intense psychiatrist to give Brian what essentially amounted to 24-hour-a-day. Surprisingly it was starting to work. Until the band received Dr. Landy’s bill. At this point they declared Brian “fixed enough” and set about promoting the new as-yet-unrecorded album with a whole “Brian Is Back!” ad blitz and campaign.

But Brian wasn’t quite back all the way. He agreed to produce a new album, but he didn’t really have any songs written. So he produced a record mostly full of malt-shop doo-wop oldies with a handful of originals thrown in. To celebrate their 15th year together the album was titled 15 Big Ones. Thanks to be the big marketing push, this became one of the Beach Boys biggest sellers in nearly a decade. Thanks to Brian’s diminished mentally capacity, this also was one of the worst albums the Beach Boys made. It’s just a bloated mess with no clear vision or even any enthusiasm from the participants

People were so burned by the mediocrity of 15 Big Ones that they just skipped the next album The Beach Boys Love You which is a shame because that album is actually very good. Certainly off-putting at first listen, but as raw and vulnerable as any outsider artist like Daniel Johnston or Wesley Willis.

It was originally planned as a solo album (called Brian Loves You) it was far more of a solo venture than even most of Brian’s solo albums. Eschewing a lyricist, Brian wrote all the words himself – even if they were just about how great he thinks Johnny Carson is or what he knows about astronomy. It is very simple and naive. In addition, Brian also played all the instruments himself, meaning all the bass lines are handled by a fart-y sounding Moog synthesizer. He even plays the rudimentary drums, sounding like Meg White with one arm tied behind her back. The rest of the band just swooped in and added the vocal harmonies on top of all this. It is very strange to say the least.

While Brian was unable to complete his solo album in 1977, Dennis was. And even more of a surprise, it was really good. While technically not a Beach Boys record, I did include a couple of tracks from Pacific Ocean Blue on this playlist.

Next up, Brian decided to do an album called Adult/Child that was going to be all crooning Sinatra-styled songs with a big band sound. While Brian was working on this Mike was recording a second Christmas album to be called Merry Christmas From The Beach Boys. Reprise Records rejected both. So The Beach Boys decamped in Iowa and rewrote the lyrics for a bunch of the Christmas songs to make them less seasonal and added a few of Adult/Child‘s less brass-heavy songs and called it M.I.U. Album. It was named after the Maharishi International University in Fairfield, Iowa. It was a lot easier to swallow than The Beach Boys Love You, much slicker and more polished. But also boring as all hell. The Beach Boys commercial slide continued, so Reprise insisted that the next record be produced by Brian himself.

Only Brian had been brought back on the road to replace the fired members of Flame and had slid back into a lot of the bad habits that Dr. Landy had discouraged. He was in no shape to produce a record again. All he felt like doing was playing the old tune Shortenin’ Bread over and over again. So once again Bruce Johnston was brought in to replace Brian, only this time not as a touring member but as the album’s producer. Reprise was not happy, but what could they do? Bruce’s first idea was to take an obscure Wild Honey track called Here Comes The Night and turn it into a 10-minute disco remix. And that was one of Bruce’s better ideas as producer! Even with that monstrosity eating up a good portion of side two, the Beach Boys had to convince Dennis to give up a couple of tracks from his planned second solo album, Bambu, in order to fill out the rest of L.A. (Light Album). The subtitle was overly accurate as the album was extremely featherweight. And thanks to that album, Dennis never finished Bambu which may be an even more egregious mark against this album.

As the seventies ended, The Beach Boys seemed destined to be only remembered as a oldies band whose only hits came before Brian self-destructed in the 1960s. But the Eighties were going to throw a few curveballs at this narrative.

By 1970, all of the members of the Beach Boys were writing and producing and contributing equally. This made the Beach Boys very happy. You know who wasn’t happy? Their new record label, Reprise. They rejected the first pass at the album and insisted the band go back and repurpose the SMiLE-era fragment, I Love To Say Da-Da into Cool, Cool Water so they would have something to sell this album with. The resultant record, Sunflower, frequently shows up in people’s list of best post-Pet Sounds albums by the Beach Boys. Frankly I don’t get it. Sure you get to really see what each other the band members is interested in and made of, but at least a couple of the members of the band (Mike and Bruce and maybe Al) just aren’t that talented or interesting. That leaves a rather uneven and uninspiring listen.

But despite the modicum of critical praise that Sunflower received, no one in 1970 was interested in buying it. In an attempt to turn their commercial fortunes around, the band hired manager Jack Riley. Jack had some ideas about the band. He though they needed to present themselves as far more mature. Start writing songs about social issues of the day — especially environmentalism. He wanted the band to be taken seriously. He even considered changing the name from The Beach Boys to just Beach. Jack had a real voice in the band, and not only that he also sang lead on the song A Day In The Life Of A Tree. Yeah, that’s how eager Jack was to have the band be seen as sincere.

Their first album with Jack Riley was Surf’s Up, the title track of which was another SMiLE remnant that the band finished off as best as they could. Part of being taken seriously was having Brian go around being a genius again. But Brian wasn’t really interested. He contributed very little to the album, and was disinterested completely in reviving any of that failed album that haunted him. Still, what little Brian did do was majestic, witness the glorious ‘Til I Die. The rest of the album was an odd mish-mash of complaints about student demonstrations and podiatry advice.

Another important step in getting people to re-engage with The Beach Boys was getting rid of that schmaltz-merchant, Bruce Johnston. His songs like Disney Girls and Diedre were so saccharine they could rot your teeth. So Jack fired him. Bruce did alright for himself in this time however. He wrote the song that Barry Mannilow sang in which he claimed “he wrote the songs that made the whole world cry”. Jack was probably right to fire him.

Unfortunately this left a gap in the band that was compounded by the fact that Denny had just broken his arm. The Beach Boys need a new drummer and bassist – so they cannibalized 2/3 of the South African R&B trio, Flame. But unlike many other touring or backing musicians who would float through the Beach Boys’ wider orbit over the years (including The Captain from Captain & Tenille and Uncle Jesse from Full House) Ricky Fataar and Blondie Chaplin were given full-fledged membership status and credentials in The Beach Boys. Of course, Jack probably figured it would help reverse their clean-cut, lily-white image if the Beach Boys were now racially diverse.

Ricky and Blondie’s contributions to the Beach Boys didn’t really sound like anything the band had done in the past – or even what they were working on currently, but it was a nice change of pace on the next few albums.

The first album they recorded with this new line-up was the clunkily titled Carl & The Passions – “So Tough”. On of the stipulations of the Beach Boys’ contract with Reprise was that they were supposed to finish the SMiLE album for them. And the plan was for it to come packaged with this Carl & The Passions. Unfortunately Brian was even more uninterested in reviving the project than ever, and Carl, despite his best efforts, was unable to finish it himself. Just completing the one song Surf’s Up seems to have broken him. So the new album actually came bundled with Pet Sounds instead. As if anyone deep enough into the Beach Boys in 1972 to buy their new album didn’t already have a copy of that. Needless to say, lawsuits revolving around breach-of-contract soon followed.

For the next record, Jack though the best idea was to ship the Beach Boys’ entire studio to a small town in Holland (and great expense) and hope that everybody – especially Brian – would get inspired by it. Brian, who rarely even left his bed around this period was less than thrilled. When he finally did make it to the Netherlands, instead of helping with the album, he spent his time writing and recording a weird, poorly written fairy tale called Mt. Vernon & Fairway, narrated by Jack Riley himself. The extended piece was so completely at odds with the album the rest of the band was making it was banished to a separate EP that was included with the Holland album.

The rest of the album is another collection of disparate tracks from the remaining Beach Boys who not only didn’t have much in common, but also seemed less and less to like each other. Decamping in Europe didn’t do much except make the band homesick, inspiring a three-song California Suite. Needless to say this latest attempt to seem current and fashionable failed, much like all of Jack Riley’s other plans. But there was someone out there at this time 1974 who would unwittingly began a whole new phase in the Beach Boys career. And it was the same man who also gave the world Jar-Jar Binks.

The Beach Boys had come to an impasse. The failure-to-launch of the SMiLE project had left Brian shaken and unable to leave his home. However, no one else in the band was really capable or willing to try and fill his shoes at such short notice. So an inventive if insidious compromise was put in place: they would build a recording studio in Brian’s home. This meant Brian had to produce the next record. Unless he hid in his bedroom. Which he often did.

The delays in getting SMiLE completed meant that The Beach Boys needed some new product and needed it fast. Which was okay – the band itself was competent enough after years of touring to throw together something simple pretty quickly. The problem was there was no simple material to be found. The only new stuff they had were Brian’s complex, weird-o SMiLE songs. So that’s what they used. Plus some other new songs that were simple ditties with gibberish lyrics that almost felt deep, or at least pretentious, if you squinted. Good Vibrations was still going to be on the record. It had to be. But nothing else was going to sound like it. They took one of the umpteen versions of Heroes & Villains and overdubbed some really cheap organ onto it. In fact, that cheap organ was going to become the signature sound of Smiley Smile, the new replacement album. Many tracks feature almost nothing but that stupid organ.

Overall the album that replaced SMiLE was seen as more of a “bunt than a grand slam” as Carl put it. After nearly a year of intense press coverage and hype, this tiny little album couldn’t help but be underwhelming. Over the years however, it has grown to something of a cult-like status, being one of the first DIY, lo-fi, bedroom recordings and it has belatedly garnered lots of fans in the shoegaze and no-wave set.

Next the Beach Boys wanted to try a R&B/blue-eyed soul album, called Wild Honey. This seemed like something they could do well enough, even with Brian at half-capacity. The only real downside was that this album would not feature many of the vocal harmonies that had become the Beach Boys’ trademark. While the songs are certainly far more straight-forward and energetic, the production remains fairly stripped-down and basic. At least on most of the songs. One song however, Darlin’, had a far more full-bodied arrangement and featured far more of the usual studio musicians that one would find on a Beach Boys record. That’s because this was a song that Brian had produced for the band Redwood. When the rest of the Beach Boys found out that Brian was working hard on someone else’s music while half-assing it with their own, they took the track to Darlin’, replaced the vocals, and released it on Wild Honey.

Redwood was the band that Brian wanted to sign to their newly founded Brother Records. He got vetoed and Redwood changed their name to Three Dog Night before achieving success on their own. Carl’s pick to join the label’s roster was a South African R&B trio called Flame. They didn’t get signed either, but Flame will came back later in the Beach Boys’ story. Dennis idea, was to sign a singer-songwriter by the name of Charles Manson. Luckily that never came to fruition.

Continuing in the lo-fi, homegrown production style was the next record, Friends. Not only was the production minimal, but so was the angst and the drama. In fact the album is so light and wispy and airy that it threatens to float away completely. It’s the kind of album where Brian can just give you directions to his front door over a soft samba beat and no one bats an eye. Luckily as Brian was receding further into the background, some of his bandmates were stepping up. Dennis, to the surprise of everyone, turned out to be a very sensitive and mature songwriter. Bruce finally got pictured on the album cover and celebrated by writing a drippy instrumental for the album. Friends is not a very great album, but it is often cited as Brian’s favorite. Probably because it is so chill and mellow. The whole album is very laid-back, except the last track, which is jarringly obnoxious and abrasive. Especially after following the rest of the album. Which is ironic, because the song is about (and titled) Transcendental Meditation.

To close out the sixties, and their record contract with Capitol, The Beach Boys dug out some old tunes and finished them off and called the whole thing 20/20. Before the decade had even ended, the Beach Boys were playing with nostalgia about the good old days (when they sold more records) with the single Do It Again. Al dusted off another old folk classic, Cottonfields to try and re-capture the magic of Sloop John B. A couple of SMiLE tunes, Our Prayer and Cabinessence were used to help sell the album.

By this point Al, and especially Carl, were starting to really get the hang of producing themselves. Soon the whole band would be able to carry equal weight and the Beach Boys would once again become an equanimous democracy. Whether anyone in the seventies would realize or care that The Beach Boys had metamorphosed into something completely new and different is a whole other matter.

Apparently listening to The Beatles’ Rubber Soul convinced Brian Wilson that you could do a whole album of good songs. What a revolutionary concept! I wonder if it was the American version of Rubber Soul with harder rocking songs removed and I’ve Just Seen A Face and It’s Only Love added by Capitol in an attempt to make this seem like a “folk rock” album. That would be ironic.

Unfortunately Brian was going to need some extra time to try putting together something that was good from top to bottom, so he bought himself some time by throwing together a quickie Party! album of quick acoustic covers of random songs with some chatting and other noises overdubbed on top to give the feeling of “audio verité” from an actual party. What nobody expected was that DJs would turn the last track, Barbara Ann, into a hit forcing the band to release it as a single and play it as an encore at pretty much every concert. It’s particularly bittersweet since none of the Beach Boys actually sang lead on the track. It’s actually an uncredited Dean Torrence of Jan & Dean.

Still it did the trick and Capitol satiated long enough for Brian to hunker down and record his masterpiece. First he was going need a new lyricist. Since he needed someone who was good at translating his client’s needs and desires and making them succinct yet effective, Brian actually ended up hiring ad man Tony Asher for the job. While the rest of the band was on tour in Japan, he and the Wrecking Crew worked over the slavish and complex arrangements for the songs. Once the band was back in town, Brian put them through their paces getting their vocals down on tape just exactly right.

The hard work paid off… at least in some respects. The resultant album was widely heralded at the time and is still considered one of the best albums ever. This won Brian a lot more acolytes and accolades from the drug-taking, groovy hippy community. Unfortunately, it also did not perform as well as the last few Beach Boys albums, earning him some skepticism, not only from the record company, but also the rest of the band.

I put 11 of the 13 tracks on this playlist, because really it is a whole unique sound different from everything that came before and everything that came after. I just left off the instrumentals, as they are not nearly as interesting or as important. Hey, I had to cut something.

While some were worried that Brian was getting too esoteric and out-of-touch with the common man, his next single was going to prove that he still had what it took to make hits. At least for now. Started during the Pet Sounds but not finished until sometime later, Good Vibrations became one of the band’s biggest singles. It was also one of the most expensive singles ever recorded at the time, and featured a truly experimental recording technique, where Brian would only record parts of the song at one time, moving to different studios to get different types of sounds for the various sections. While these days it easy to overlook what a truly weird and complex song it is, because it has become so ubiquitous, it is really a strange record.

But it is a strange record that sold a lot of copies, so Brian was allowed to take this modular recording technique and apply it to a whole album that was going to be called SMiLE. There are reams and reams of legends and stories and facts and misinformation surrounding the album, but ultimately it wasn’t finished at the time. But over time, whether on bootlegs or subsequent album, the songs were leaked out to the public showing just how beautiful, if overly ambitious, SMiLE would have been.

There’s tons of speculation and conjecture about what would and would not have been on the album. Since the recording process took nearly a year from inception to it’s final disintegration, answering that question depends a lot on when you are talking about. The late 1966 SMiLE would’ve been much different from the mid-1967 SMiLE. And it’s not just which songs, but which versions of which songs would end up where. Lots of little bit and pieces were recorded and no one was taking very thorough or comprehensive notes. Brian changed his mind a lot too. Bits initially written and recorded for one song would later be repurposed for a different song. It is a mess. A fascinating, intriguing mess. And I will say that when Brian finally did finish the work in 2004, it was somewhat disappointing that we didn’t have the mystery still so we could play infinitely with the puzzle pieces.

What I have included on here are some of the songs that are the most complete and certain that would’ve been on the album. Good Vibrations definitely would be on there, even though Brian didn’t really think of it as part of the project. Capitol needed a big hit to sell this weird album and even included it on the cover for the album. The a capella Our Prayer was mentioned as being the prelude or introduction to the album, so most SMiLE mixes start there. Wonderful, Vegatables, and Wind Chimes were re-recorded for the next album, Smiley Smile, so they seem like a safe bet.

Also included in both SMiLE and Smiley Smiley is Heroes & Villains. Which should be simple enough to add, but the question because which version of the song. Not that there are really that many different takes, per se. It just that a lot of the little snippets and bits floating around have, at one time or another, been considered part of Heroes & Villains. There’s the more streamlined version that was eventually released as a single. There’s the “Cantina” mix that swaps out a few parts. There are versions ranging from 3 to 7 minutes long. There’s even a 2-part version that may have been considered for both the A and B side of a single at one point. I went with a pretty standard, middle-of-the-road edit of the song for this playlist, although if I were compiling my own personal SMiLE set list I may be attempted to include something a bit longer and more adventurous.

The myth of SMiLE was so great that the Beach Boys would often have to pay homage to it in an attempt to boost sales of other wise forgettable albums. In 1969, they took the rough tracks for Cabinessence and put it on the album 20/20. There was even less completed for the song Surf’s Up, but the Beach Boys cobbled something together in 1972 and named their latest album after it.

Other than these well known songs there’s lots of flotsam and jetsam floating around in the SMiLE stream. Some are thirty second little tidbits like I’m In Great Shape or Barnyard. Others are instrumentals like Do You Dig Worms? or I Love To Say Da-Da. There were instrumentals on Pet Sounds, so it is possible that they would’ve been put on the album as is, although the 2004 Brian Wilson Presents Smile has lyrics and vocals added to almost all of them. The only one that doesn’t have new words is Mrs. O’Leary’s Cow, although there are some backing vocals. This song was supposed to represent “Fire” in the Elements Suite. What other songs were in the Elements Suite? No one’s really sure.

I had to include this one instrumental track as it has some stories attached to it. At the time of recording, Brian made the musicians wear fire helmets and there was even a small fire set in a trash can so the smell could inform the playing. Later that even Brian discovered there was a coincidental rash of fires around Los Angeles that broke out while they were recording. Brian feared that his song may have been in some way responsible for these fires and determined to have the tapes destroyed (possibly even burned). But clearly he didn’t actually go through with it. Maybe someone told him they were, but were lying. Who knows? The track eventually resurfaced – and it is pretty spooky.

Still with no support from his band mates and frustrations from the record company, eventually the SMiLE project was trashed. Nobody was really sure that such a weird, experimental, psychedelic album would sell. And then a week after it was announced that the album would not happen, Sgt. Pepper was released. Now everyone was scrambling to make their version of Their Satanic Majesties Request, while Brian was burned out and in no mood to try and create (or finish) anything so massive and complicated. So things got simpler, but somehow even weirder, next week…

In his heart, Brian Wilson knew he was not a bass player. He was willing to do it because he knew Carl was already good at the guitar and Denny was only going to be able to handle the drums, and for a rock’n’roll group someone had to, but Brian wasn’t a bassist. But in 1961 it was really feasible for a garage band to bring an organ on-stage. And while they were a number of other more pressing factors that led to Brian quitting the road and choosing to stay at home in L.A. and just produce from the hits, I think people tend overlook the fact that he was saddled with an instrument that didn’t really fit him.

The Beach Boys’s formula was in its own way as incongruous as Dread Zeppelin’s. Four Freshman harmonies on top of Chuck Berry rock’n’roll with lyrics about surfing (or hot rods). But it proved to be very lucrative. And far more open to variation than one would initially surmise. Still it was a formula, and after a couple years – before the public started getting sick of it – Brian was chafing against these restrictions.

With their dad out as manager and Capitol Records seeing continued financial growth from the band, Brian was allowed the latitude to concentrate in the studio. On the road he was replaced briefly by Glen Campbell, and then more permanently by Brian Johnston. Brian was never the purest of rockers. He was far more interested in xylophones, theremins, and bass harmonicas than he was in a ripping lead guitar solo.

While he was never going to find a group of vocalists that would compete with the tight familial blend of the Beach Boys, he was no longer restricted to their limited instrumental prowess. Hal Blaine could do a lot more than his little brother Denny. And Brian was going to explore it.

This middle, pre-Pet Sounds period is interesting. There is certainly a tension between the Beach Boys not wanting to rock the boat and Brian wanting to stretch his creative wings. There’s a lot of compromise between the two. The instrumentals and covers are becoming fewer and less frequent. But they still happen. In fact the biggest drawback during this period’s album is that Brian clearly was thinking in terms of singles and not full albums. There’s all sort of very obvious filler that keep these records from being truly comparable to Pet Sounds.

Even without the time constraints of being out on the road, Brian still had to churn out so much product that he had to rely on stuff like “Cassius” Love vs. “Sonny” Wilson, Our Favorite Recording Sessions, and Bull Session With ‘Big Daddy’ to reach even the short running time of a Beach Boys album. But the singles that he did care about he poured his heart and soul into. When Help Me, Ronda didn’t quite come out the way he wanted it on The Beach Boys Today, he simply re-did it as Help Me, Rhonda on All Summer Long. And it worked! The sales not only continued to improve, but the recordings themselves were growing in sophistication and complexity.

It’s just that Brian figured no one really listened to a whole album anyway. It was all about airplay on the radio and singles in the marketplace. That’s why he could get away with with the whole Ronda/Rhonda thing. But that was about to change when Brian heard his rival’s latest album, Rubber Soul…

Continuing this year-long experiment into hour-long introductions, I realize I may have given the Beach Boys a short shrift earlier. They are far more than just pre- and post-Pet Sounds. So now I present to you: A More Thorough Introduction to The Beach Boys.

The first hour will concentrate on the earliest incarnation of the Beach Boys, when they were still a band. Not just a band but a garage band. David Marks, who was only 13, had replace Al Jardine who had only played on their first song Surfin’. They played their own instruments still, so doing stuff like instrumentals and covers not only made sense – but was fairly common. Mike Love sang almost all the lead vocals (primarily because he couldn’t really do much with the instrument we occasionally carried on stage, the saxophone). The Wilson brothers’ dad was still the manager. Nick Venet, a Capitol Record employee, was still the producer. Brian played bass, and even though he co-wrote the originals, he was just another member of the band.

Over the years, all of this changed. Not just one big sudden explosion, but a slow evolution over time. It wasn’t even a lot of time, but because the record company saw the Beach Boys as a novelty act, they wanted to squeeze as much from the golden goose as they could before it became passe. Between October 1st, 1962 and October 7th, 1963, The Beach Boys released four whole albums: Surfin’ Safari, Surfin’ U.S.A., Surfer Girl, and Little Deuce Coupe. 

By the second album Brian was producing, and by the third he was getting credited for it. While David Marks was not around long, he did end up on several albums, although Al Jardine was slowly brought back to replace him as he frequently butted heads with dad/manager Murray. Brian started singing more leads himself – and having other members of the band step up and do the same. As Brian also found other lyricists to collaborate with, this meant the non-sax playing, nominal leader of the band, Mike Love, had less to do.

Brian’s vision for the sound began to expand too. First he would bring in Mike’s cousin Maureen to play harp on one track. Then he would do a ballad like The Lonely Sea, and have string players on the track. Soon though he was recruiting members of L.A.’s premier studio musicians, The Wrecking Crew, to add to the bass, drums, and guitars that his own band was already playing.

While we are not quite to Pet Sounds, Brian was flexing the independence and control necessary to create the sound he heard in his head. The only problem was that with the constant touring and the record company demands for new product constantly, he just didn’t have the time. But that was about to change…