The Beach Boys: We Gotta Groove review – A collection of lost ’70s music that has all the turmoil and talent of Brian Wilson | Beach Boys

We Gotta Groove – The Brother Studios Years, a new 73-track collection, picks up the story of the Beach Boys at a very strange juncture in their career. On the face of it, they are back on top. Their commercial fortunes were revived by the massive success of some timely compilations: in the US, 1974’s Endless Summer sold three million copies, while 20 Golden Greats became the second biggest-selling album in Britain in 1976. Their leader Brian Wilson was clearly, miraculously, fit after years of addiction and mental health struggles. “Brian is back!” He ran the banner for 15 Big Ones, the first Beach Boys album to bear his name as sole producer since Pet Sounds, and the first to be produced at the newly founded Brother Studios. Buoyed by a media campaign that included an hour-long television special, it became the most successful album of new material in 11 years.

But, as is always the case with the Beach Boys, it was more complicated than it first seemed. As a series of features noted, Wilson doesn’t appear to be in good shape at all. A Rolling Stone writer sent to interview him was astonished when Wilson asked him for drugs mid-interview and expressed serious doubts about Eugene Landy, the controversial psychologist supposedly responsible for Wilson’s recovery. A Melody Maker journalist who saw the Beach Boys live that summer declared that Wilson “should not be supported on stage,” and noted that he looked visibly distressed and made no musical contribution. Instead of a triumphant return, 15 Big Ones was a hastily assembled mess of cover versions and weak new material, and its sessions were marked by disagreements, not least over whether Wilson was capable of producing an album. The band members publicly disparaged it upon its release: Dennis Wilson bluntly described one song as a “piece of crap”. The public who bought it seemed to quickly lose interest: The Beach Boys didn’t record another Top 10 album of new material for 36 years.

There are people who have retroactively made some wild claims about the artistic merit of 15 major films, including Brian Wilson himself, but collectors of this box set are tactfully wrapping their heads around its existence despite its Brother Studios roots. The original album is not included, its presence here being limited to scattered snippets, none of which seem adequate to make anyone reevaluate their views, unless your opinion is likely to be influenced by the sound of Mike Love singing his way through Johnny Preston’s 1959 indigenous-themed song “Running Bear.” Indeed, the inclusion of a few songs preceding the big 15 (from sessions that were abandoned due to Wilson’s reluctance to participate) suggests that the Beach Boys may have been making music Better Before He Healed: Even in their unfinished state, Dennis Wilson’s Holy Man and 10,000 Years Ago are pretty much superior to anything the returning Beach Boys had to offer.

Instead, we should focus our attention on the 15 big companies that are less commercially successful. The Beach Boys’ 1977 song Love You, composed entirely and mostly played by Wilson, was both a radical departure—dominated by the sound of synthesizers—and a radical improvement: the first seconds of Let Us Go on This Way contain more life than every song on 15 Big Ones combined. That’s not the same as suggesting it’s a masterpiece. Your enjoyment of it will likely depend on whether you view Wilson’s words as charmingly naive, a fascinating look at the damaged psyche or just downright painful. “He’s sitting behind his microphone, talking in a manly tone,” he assesses talk show host Johnny Carson. The Solar System notes that “Saturn has rings everywhere.” “I looked in the sky and found it.”

Still, you don’t want the melodies to be pretty enough to suggest that Wilson’s basic songwriting skill has remained intact, despite all that’s been visited upon in the previous decade: “Tonight’s so young, I want to pick you up, plane.” Whatever you think of Roller Skating Child’s lyrics — “I go put on my skates and catch up / We do it holding hands, it’s so cold I say ‘brrr'” — the melody and stacked vocal harmonies are great.

Despite the muted commercial response, Beach Boys Love You seemed to encourage Wilson even more. His next project was a collection of songs inspired by pre-rock ‘n’ roll pop, an idea out of left field, but not entirely unprecedented. Wilson was a big fan of George Gershwin and the Fresh Four, a 1950s singing group whose work drew heavily on pre-war pop and jazz: a quick listen to their 1955 album Four Freshmen and 5 Trombones reveals how much influence they had on the Beach Boys’ harmonies. Moreover, his work at times seemed to predate the birth of rock ‘n’ roll. It’s not a stretch to imagine “Pet Sounds That Still Believe in Me or Don’t Speak (Put Your Head on My Shoulder)” has its origins in the 1930s or 1940s rather than 1966, though it was less clear in its intentions than his new material: Wilson had intended Frank Sinatra to sing I Still Dream of Him. Sinatra turned him down, but no matter: it’s hard to imagine a more effective version than Wilson’s, his cigarette-riddled voice amplifying the impact of the song’s somber lyrics. Another lavishly orchestrated song, “It’s Over Now,” is similarly gorgeous, as is a cover of Wilson’s 1930s hit Deep Purple.

The concept wasn’t entirely out of touch with contemporary trends—shortly after Wilson recorded these songs, Willie Nelson released Stardust, a breakthrough album of Great American Songbook standards that sold in the millions—but somehow things got off the rails. First, Wilson recorded a selection of songs that seemed to have nothing to do with his original idea, including the frankly terrifying “Hey Little Tomboy,” a song even creepier than its title suggests. Then, the tracklist of the anticipated album, Adult/Child, was filled with outtakes from the early 1970s, apparently in the belief that the world was desperate to hear HELP Is on It Way, the 1971 paean to organic food, and its ability to protect against “lumps of dough, and stomach pumps, and enemas too” (no outtakes and no Hey Little Tomboy here, the latter presumably omitted on the grounds of taste). Then the whole thing was cancelled: in a strange echo of Smile, Mike Love’s response to ’40s-style songs was: “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

It’s a question that seems more relevant to the remainder of the Beach Boys’ recording career. Their next release turned out to be the abysmal MIU album, home to the tennis-themed “Match Point of Our Love,” which manages to make the Beach Boys’ “Love You” lyrics sound as cultured and layered as “Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands.” It says something about the Beach Boys’ increasingly disastrous judgment that the only path to surviving the adult/kids sessions and getting into MIU was Hey Little Tomboy. You may have thought that MIU represented the band’s artistic nadir, until you heard its follow-up, LA (Light Album). And if you think Which It was rock bottom for them, and you hadn’t heard ‘Keepin’ the Summer Alive’ in the ’80s, etc.

It’s an unfortunate story that puts the music on We Gotta Groove into context: wildly variable in quality, even at its best not in the same league as the stuff that made the Beach Boys famous; For fans only. But because it’s full of strange diversions and dead ends, it’s rarely boring: in fact, the Beach Boys will never be that interesting again.