It’s hard to imagine a Beach Boys fan — a real Beach Boys fan, that is — who doesn’t have a warm place in his or her heart for 15 Big Ones and The Beach Boys Love You, the two widely ignored and often derided albums they recorded and released in 1976 and ’77 respectively in their new Brother Records studio in Santa Monica. The superficial view took them as acts of desperation following years in which only greatest-hits albums like Spirit of America and Endless Summer kept their name alive. The first was an album of mostly covers, the second an attempt to haul Brian Wilson back into a role front and centre of the group’s activities in the studio. Both were recorded in an atmosphere of uncertainty over what they needed to do in order to reassert themselves as a creative and commercial force. Neither album had a lot of polish, certainly not at the level of Surf’s Up or Holland, their studio predecessors. And there were certainly few vestiges of the rapt introspection of Pet Sounds or the fascinating brainstorms of Smiley Smile. Instead, 15 Big Ones and Love You came from a place between Little Deuce Coupe and Beach Boys’ Party! — only made by guys a decade older, with all the tensions the intervening years had introduced. I liked both albums a lot, for all their rough edges, and play them often. The doo-wop/R&B covers on 15 Big Ones — the Five Satins’ “In the Still of the Night”, the Six Teens’ “A Casual Look” and Little Willie John’s “Talk to Me” — are in the class of their earlier versions of the Students’ “I’m So Young” and Bobby Freeman’s “Do You Want to Dance”. The originals on Love You — “Let Us Go On This Way”, “The Night Was So Young”, the lovelorn “I’ll Bet He’s Nice”, the witty “Johnny Carson”, the duet between Brian and his first wife on “Let’s Put Our Hearts Together” — match the quality of those on, say, Sunflower. A new three-CD package called We Gotta Groove: The Brother Studio Years collects outtakes from 15 Big Ones, the original masters and outtakes from Love You, various cassette demos made by Brian, plus tracks recorded later in for Adult/Child, an aborted album planned by Brian as a sort of tribute to the Four Freshmen, one… [TheTopNews] Read More.
2 weeks ago
