When I was seventeen years old, I was ready to become totally absorbed in something legendary. I didn’t know this on a conscious level, but because I read magazines in the library during lunch every day, I chanced upon an article about a lost album by a lost genius, and found the legend I didn’t know I was waiting for. When I heard the songs themselves, there was no chance of going back.
There is a simple, distorted narrative about the creative arc of the Beach Boys. It goes like this: The Beach Boys spend the early 1960s making vapid music about beaches and girls; Brian Wilson, their leader, is suddenly inspired to make music that is Actually Interesting; Wilson is incapacitated by mental illness; the Beach Boys fade away into perpetual mediocrity. Sometimes the narrative is even simpler, consisting only of the first and final stages. Other times it dwells upon the lunacy and eccentricity, excluding the music itself from consideration.
I’d like to talk about how to listen to the Beach Boys, and how to situate them within a more nuanced narrative, using historical context to explain why and how they made the music that they did. This is similar to what I undertook regarding the Beatles, another 1960s rock group with which I am abidingly obsessed, but it must be noted that despite some superficial similarities the Beatles and the Beach Boys are very different groups with very different stories. The Beatles achieved both an unprecedented level of commercial and critical success, and split up before either achievement could be compromised by the passage of time. The commercial success of the Beach Boys was considerable yet more modest, and they flirted briefly with serious critical recognition, but they endured as a musical entity for decades, sorely diminished on both counts yet possessing a legacy as great as any musicians of the rock era.
Crests and Troughs
Some of the most beautiful, fun, and awesome recordings that I have ever heard come from the Beach Boys’ discography. That very same discography contains some of the most misguided, un-listenable music ever offered for sale. All bands have highs and lows, but the Beach Boys are burdened with a built-in metaphor for alternating periods of success and failure: catching the perfect wave, or wiping out in the attempt.
They didn’t name themselves “Beach Boys.” That name was given to them by the independent record label that released their first single, which was incidentally named “Surfin’.” Surf music was popular at the time and the Beach Boys played along for about two years, but surf music as such was not their natural home. Early Beach Boys music sounds more like the terrestrial rock and roll of Chuck Berry than the reverb-washed guitarists, like Dick Dale or the Ventures, who defined surf rock. Furthermore, the Beach Boys were a singing group, while surf music was customarily instrumental—and their singing was influenced not only by Berry-type rockers and rhythm and blues singers, but by the intricate harmony arrangements of the Four Freshmen, a group that is rarely invoked these days except as a formative influence on the Beach Boys.
“Surfin’ USA,” one of their best-known early songs, is a perfect illustration of the initial Beach Boys sound. It is essentially a Chuck Berry song (virtually identical to “Sweet Little Sixteen,” according to the copyright lawyers) with surfing lyrics and a guitar solo drenched in reverb, and a chorus of multi-part harmony, including a high part that transforms a relatively undistinguished portion of Berry’s melody into a unique falsetto hook.
With songs built from such an idiosyncratic formula, and a name like “the Beach Boys,” they were probably destined to be identified as a band about a subject, whether the subject was surfing or cars or, more broadly conceived, the teenage lifestyle on the West Coast. They never broke out of this paradigm for good, but despite the irresistible force of gravity it should be noted that most of their “surf” music was recorded before 1965, and their lyrics after that year cover a much wider array of topics (with a distinct California twist).
So what did they sing about? Often romantic love, as with most groups in popular music. But they also sang songs extolling the virtues of eating vegetables, transcendental meditation, and legendary late night talk-show host Johnny Carson (those songs are called “Vegetables,” “Transcendental Meditation,” and “Johnny Carson,” respectively). Extolling virtues is perhaps their default mode of lyricism, as the lead singer identifies something he thinks is “cool” or “outta sight” and enumerates the various reasons why; songs of this type appear on nearly every Beach Boys album. Surfing is awesome, they tell us, but so are drive-in theaters, cool drinks of water, the landscapes of Big Sur, and all the kids who buy their records in Salt Lake City, Utah.
The obverse of this sunny disposition is a capacity to sing introspective, melancholy songs about insecurities, disillusionment, and loneliness. Much of this stems from the experience of leader and songwriter Brian Wilson, who struggled with depression and other serious mental illnesses throughout his life. Songs like “‘Til I Die” and “Caroline No” are worlds away from “Surfin’ USA” in terms of lyrical content, and they occupy a lot of space in most people’s assessments of the group’s greatest artistic achievements. The sunnier tunes can come across as corny by comparison, but it would be a mistake to disregard their more cheerful music, which includes such astonishing, musically adventurous songs as “Wouldn’t It Be Nice” and “Good Vibrations.” The Beach Boys sang about pain and joy, and they sang about both with equal honesty and purity of intention.
Essentially, the Beach Boys were a group that combined outsize talent and ambition with a desperate need for commercial validation, a formula that was equally as capable of producing hackwork as classics. In addition, they had the ill luck of finding massive commercial success, and defining themselves to the public for generations, a few short years before the culture of rock and roll was transformed to their disadvantage. They could grow their hair long like all the other groups, but from 1967 onward they struggled to be taken seriously by an audience that had written them off as un-hip, passed that judgment down to posterity, and rarely heard the best, strangest, and most interesting music they were capable of making—which was some of the best, strangest, and most interesting music being made by anybody.
A Musical Family
The Beach Boys’ line up changed substantially in the fifty years between “Surfin’” and their final studio album, That’s Why God Made the Radio. Sometime official members David Marks, Bruce Johnston, Blondie Chaplin, and Ricky Fataar made significant contributions on stage and in the studio. A collection of the best session musicians in Los Angeles, such as Hal Blaine and Carol Kaye, built their sound up in the mid-1960s, until the band returned to recording most of their instrumentation themselves. As their arrangements became more complex, a cadre of supplementary musicians began to join them on tour. But at the time of their greatest success and through all their most vital years there were five individuals who defined the group’s core: Brian Wilson, his younger brothers Dennis and Carl, their cousin Mike Love, and a close friend and neighbor, Al Jardine.
All five of them were singers, and all five sang lead vocals on various of the group’s hits. Apart from Mike (barring the occasional saxophone or electro-theremin part) they all played instruments, their early stage appearances featuring Dennis on drums, Brian on bass, and Carl and Al on guitars. Breaking out with a mix of covers and originals, their songwriting was powered by Brian Wilson, who usually collaborated with lyricists (Mike Love was a frequent, but by no means constant partner) but otherwise composed, arranged, and produced all of their recordings, a nearly unprecedented level of control for a young artist in the 1960s. The group’s fortunes took a fateful turn in 1964, when Brian retired from touring and devoted himself to studio work in his band’s absence. Brian was a frequent lead vocalist on record both before and after this decision, most notably on ballads in the upper register, or in contrasting co-leads with Mike.
Brian’s dominance over the band’s recordings grew tenuous after 1967, with the abandonment of the Smile album. New albums were crediting “the Beach Boys” as producers, with Carl Wilson in particular increasingly assuming control as Brian receded from the front lines (having already acted as the leader of the Beach Boys on tour for some time). The band sharply decreased its reliance on studio musicians, and its various members became more active as songwriters and more frequent lead singers. Dennis Wilson in particular is often regarded as a major force in this time, although his massive drug abuse and ill-fated associations (most notably Charles Manson, shortly before the famous murders) undermined his health and his development as an artist. The period from 1967 through 1973 is one of the most interesting of their entire history, but it also corresponds with the band’s exile from the good graces of the record-buying public.
The enduring popularity of their early-to-mid 1960s catalogue, as reintroduced through a popular compilation album in 1974, resuscitated the band and led to a brief resurgence of Brian Wilson’s standing as producer and creative voice. Carl and Dennis Wilson both released solo albums in this period, as did Mike Love. However, drug abuse, interpersonal difficulties, and the contradictory expectations of the marketplace trapped the Beach Boys in a zone of mediocrity and dysfunction. Audiences liked the group best as purveyors of youthful summer music, and punished them for being too old to credibly replicate the sound of their youth. Nostalgia and trend-chasing led to commercial success in fits and starts (most notably “Kokomo” in 1988), but by the 1990s Brian Wilson had escaped the unethical guardianship of an abusive therapist and established a solo career, while the Beach Boys’ two studio albums of that decade were widely regarded as commercial and creative disasters (which they were). A final reunion album in 2012, That’s Why God Made the Radio, allowed them to cap their discography with a measure of dignity.
Dennis Wilson died in a drowning accident in 1983. Carl Wilson died of lung cancer in 1998. Brian Wilson died of respiratory arrest in 2025. Al Jardine has not toured with the group since their 50th anniversary tour in 2012 (having gone solo, and performed alongside Brian’s own touring group). Mike Love is currently the only founding member of the band performing under the name “The Beach Boys,” backed by an assembly of mostly younger musicians (and Bruce Johnston, who has been an official member of the Beach Boys for longer than anybody outside of the founding five). Because of his more conservative and commercial sensibilities, as well as a famously difficult personality (his speech at the band’s induction to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame was legendarily hostile and bizarre), Mike has often been considered the heel of the Beach Boys, the embodiment of the band’s “Kokomo” era, or the “anti-Brian.” Certainly he has succeeded in maintaining the Beach Boys as a profitable nostalgia act; I leave it to the reader to make any further judgments. There is a more complicated personality at play in this story than the caricature who is often cited by his loudest detractors. But believe me when I say: if you’re looking for outrageous Mike Love-isms, that Hall of Fame speech is just the tip of the iceberg.
These are the broad strokes of the Beach Boys’ story, which on the whole is muddled, frustrating, and tragic, even as it provided the context for music that is as important as it is breathtakingly beautiful. The Beach Boys endured for half a century largely because they had to endure: they were bound together by a powerful (though frequently corrosive) mix of family ties and commercial concerns. On the other hand, their music has endured because of its emotional power, inimitable sound, and embodiment of a cherished mythology of youth, freedom, and all the best qualities of California. Listening to this music may well inspire you to love it, but loving this music is just like loving any wonderfully flawed thing.
Where to Start
You could make an interesting study of the Beach Boys by listening to their twenty nine(!) studio albums in chronological order, charting their ups and downs in the changing times. That would be the obvious thing to do, right? It’s just that I can’t guarantee you’ll be having a very good time by the end of it. After 1977’s The Beach Boys Love You, there aren’t very many albums that stand up to scrutiny (and that album is itself highly likely to polarize new listeners). I’ve listened to all of them at least once (or I’m pretty sure I have), and I could not tell you anything specific about many of them. Things get dire on that basis.
You could restrict your attentions to some of the most popular compilation albums. Sounds of Summer was the second Beach Boys CD that I ever bought; paired with its follow-up, The Warmth of the Sun, you have close to sixty songs that were commercially successful or otherwise beloved. A similar dynamic in more condensed form is found on The Beach Boys Classics Selected by Brian Wilson, which is only twenty songs (including one by Brian as a solo artist), hand picked by the man himself.
Many people swear by 1974’s Endless Summer and its follow-up, Spirit of America. Those two collections had a decisive impact on how the Beach Boys came to be remembered by subsequent generations, so if you are looking to know the band as posterity knows them, they might make a good starting point. Their discography has been repackaged so many times, however, that you could get a substantially similar experience from any of the major compilations and box sets. No, I haven’t listened to most of them individually; after a point, it honestly gets kind of redundant.
One set with appeal for advanced listeners is Good Vibrations: Thirty Years of the Beach Boys, which includes demos, session tapes, and also tracks from Smile and Adult/Child, two famously unreleased albums. However, the Smile tracks were released as their own “sessions” box set in 2011; word on the street is that Adult/Child will also see wider release in the near future.
The studio albums themselves have also been subject to repackaging more than once. Since Beach Boys albums tend to run on the short side (thirty minutes or less is not uncommon), they have tended to be re-released in two-packs, sometimes with generous helpings of bonus tracks. Even Pet Sounds, widely regarded as their greatest artistic achievement, was once included as a bonus disc with the original release of Carl and the Passions—”So Tough,” though it has generally been treated with more reverence since then. Pet Sounds is also available as a “sessions” box set, which is absolutely amazing and ideally suited to listeners who like hearing alternate versions of the same songs over and over.
Fortunately, the existence of streaming has made it possible to engage with any of the group’s albums without having to hunt down records and CDs like we did in the old days. You can take them one at a time and consider an album like Today! without necessarily viewing it as a companion to Summer Days (And Summer Nights!!). But you can do that too if it suits your fancy: the Beach Boys released their first nineteen(!) albums over a span of just over ten years, and certain groupings and associations are just natural.
Finally, let’s talk about the live albums. The best of these is The Beach Boys in Concert, a double album from 1973 that shows the band at their most comfortable in a “classic rock” context, blending their older and more recent material seamlessly (and again, none of the songs were much more than a decade old at that point). Another fine pair that got the two-for-one reissue treatment on CD are the similarly named Beach Boys Concert from 1964 and Live in London (aka Beach Boys 69, although it actually came out in 1970), which show both the band’s playing and singing chops and the growth of their repertoire over a short run of years.
Good Timin’: Live at Knebworth England 1980 is also worth a listen, both for its solid performances and for its historical value, being the last and only live record featuring the whole “classic” lineup: all the founding five members playing with longtime member Bruce Johnston. You could say that the band was never really the same after this show, although they were already well into their years of decline in the studio. It’s also a movie which I just watched again for the first time in a while, and I have to say, they rock and they roll. I’m not sure why the song “Good Timin’” isn’t on it, though.
There’s an album from the 50th anniversary tour which I think of as mostly skip-able; the autotune leaves a bad taste in my mouth. There are also a ton of other live sets that have seen official release in recent years, to say nothing of a vast sea of bootlegs that you could spend a lifetime on. You don’t need to, but they are out there.
Next Week
I will talk more about the studio albums, and the best order to listen to them in order to appreciate the fullness of the Beach Boys’ legacy and to not go absolutely insane. I will also digest the vast catalogue of their songs into the ultimate song playlist, demonstrating their range and power, as well as their unparalleled good-natured goofiness.
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