DEEP DISCOG DIVE UPDATE 6.9.26 (Patreon)

Hey folks!! It's lovely here on the east coast, which is great because we're about to get rain for the next four days straight. Hope it's nice wherever you are.

Anyone catch the Nintendo Direct earlier? I'm writing this the day before, so I don't know what's in it. Hoping we'll get games like Metroid Prime 7 and Tingle Starts An S-Corp.

I'm back for another DDD update, and boy what a gaggle of albums we've got this time. Without further ado…

WHERE WE'RE AT NOW

When we left off, the Boys of the Beach had just scored their biggest commercial success in years with 15 Big Ones, even if the album itself wasn't particularly inspired. Brian's "return" had been marketed to death, even though it was more marketing than reality. The more Brian-flavored The Beach Boys Love You followed shortly after.

What comes next is a period where the band is, depending on the album, either quietly treading water or actively making things worse. Brian's involvement was becoming increasingly sporadic. Dennis was struggling with substance abuse and his health is deteriorating. Carl was holding everything together through sheer force of will. And Mike Love was gradually, inexorably consolidating creative control.

If the 70s were the Carl & Dennis eras of the BBs, the 80s started out as a group effort and ended as the Mike Love era. 

The 80s and early 90s were not, to put it gently, a good time. And while some of these albums have bright spots, when they get bad, they get BAD.

ALBUMS I'VE LISTENED TO

M.I.U. Album: Some quick context; after their previous album Love You, Brian got to work on another essentially-solo album called Adult/Child. (The idea for the album apparently came from Brian’s 24-hour therapist and noted very-bad-not-good person, Eugene Landy.) This album didn’t come out because it got vetoed by the other members, specifically Mike Love and Al Jardine. They thought Brian’s new songs were too weird, Love You was too much of a flop, and after the success of 15 Big Ones, Mike and Al wanted to give the people what they wanted. 

This leads us to MIU Album, which is… I guess what the people wanted? The album title stands for Maharishi International University, which is the university in Fairfield, Iowa where a chunk of this was recorded. Mike Love was of course a student of the Maharishi and a outspoken fan on Transcendental Meditation. Carl and Dennis largely wanted no part of it, and only showed up minimally. So what you get is basically a Mike, Al, and Brian album that goes in hard on inoffensive easy-listening. It's fine? It’s background music for a beachside restaurant. Critics and the public both didn’t care for it, and the band nearly broke up completely around this time after a confrontation at Newark Airport.

L.A. (Light Album): This one isn’t too bad though! It’s the band’s first album with CBS, a slight step away from easy listening and towards adult contemporary/soft-rock. I have been chomping at the bit to mention this finally - you remember Here Comes The Night all the way back on Wild Honey? On LA, there is an ELEVEN MINUTE DISCO REMAKE of it. Whaaaaaaaaaaaat the actual hell. At least they were right on time to capitalize on disco, less than a year before Disco Demolition Night! For real though, Dennis brought his A-game again with Love Surrounds Me and Baby Blue. Al’s Lady Lynda is also nice, and it even samples Bach! And the album closes with a folk song called Shortenin’ Bread - more on that later. Reviews were better than MIU, but it once again underperformed.

Keepin' the Summer Alive: This one is just okay. By this point the band had been cycling through different attempts to find their footing commercially, and this one just feels like it’s treading water. Dennis Wilson appears on exactly one song (an archival recording from years prior) and his absence from the actual sessions is palpable. In hindsight, this is a genuinely sad album to listen to knowing what happened next, but I’ll get to that in a sec. Carl's contributions are okay, my favorite of his was the opening title track. My two favorites on the whole album are the last pairs of songs, Santa Ana Winds and Endless Harmony. 

The Beach Boys (1985): First, a note - KTSA was the last album to feature Dennis Wilson. In December 1983, Dennis died in a drowning accident. To lose not only a younger man (he was only 39 when he passed) but also a gifted songwriter who stood tall next to his savant brother is a tragedy. So how do the BBs move forward?

Produced by Culture Club's Steve Levine, this self-titled album sounds very much like 1985. I admit, I was low-key endeared by this one, if only because the cheesiness of the BBs can match well with the cheesiness of 80s pop production. Also, sax solos - I’m a sucker for a sax solo. Some highlights for me were It’s Gettin’ Late, Maybe I Don’t Know, and I Do Love You. That last one, I was shocked by how much of a Stevie Wonder rip-off it was. Then I looked it up and it turns out Stevie himself wrote it lol.

Still Cruisin': KOKOMO TIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIME. Still Cruisin’ has the BBs’ first genuine no-holds-barred hit song in many years, originally released with the Tom Cruise movie Cocktail. Still Cruisin' went platinum on the strength of Kokomo. The rest of the album is mostly a grab bag - I like the guitars on the title track and Somewhere in Japan, Wipe Out has a rap verse by the Fat Boys and it proves that the BBs should never do rap in any way ever again. I also don’t hate Kokomo? Maybe the band’s locked onto a new sound that’ll pay off well!

Summer in Paradise: Never mind this shit is so ass. This is the first and only Beach Boys studio album made entirely without Brian Wilson's involvement, and that absence, combined with Mike Love having total creative control and producer Terry Melcher trying to recreate the Kokomo formula. The result is trash. The production is lathered in synthetic drums and 90s adult contemporary sheen in a way that grosses me out. It failed to chart in the US or the UK. Critics hated it. It has never been reissued. It is not on most streaming platforms. And the band didn't release another album of original material for twenty years. Great work everyone!

INTERESTING FACTS FROM THIS TIME

Eugene Landy, Brian's psychologist, inserted himself so deeply into Brian's affairs during the 80s that he was getting co-writing credits on songs. He was eventually barred from practicing psychology in California. Truly a bad guy!

When the disco version of Here Comes the Night tanked as a single, the band scrambled to release Good Timin’ as a fast follow-up. Good Timin' was actually pulled from sessions dating all the way back to 1974. So by the time it came out on the L.A. (Light Album) in 1979, it was a five-year-old song being rushed out as a salvage operation. Bruce Johnston recalled that while the rest of the band was largely absent, Carl showed up and the two of them knocked out all four vocal parts themselves. That song then became a modest hit, which makes the whole thing feel like a very Carl Wilson story.

LA ends with a rendition of Shortenin' Bread, a folk song from 1900. Brian was a big fan of this song. A very big fan. A VERRRRRRRRRY big fan. Here's a Reddit thread of various stories about how much Brian loved Shortenin' Bread, but this is my favorite: "The Monkees' Micky Dolenz said that when he tripped on LSD with Wilson, John Lennon, and Nilsson, Wilson played "Shortenin' Bread" on piano 'over and over again'."

When Brian heard Kokomo on the radio in 1988, he reportedly didn't know who it was and genuinely liked it before being told it was his own band. He described the harmonies as having "a cool sound." Brian did not play on the track, with his absence attributed by Mike Love to Eugene Landy blocking his involvement.

Kokomo was written specifically around a scene in Cocktail where Tom Cruise's character travels to Jamaica. The Beach Boys read the script, identified the scene, built a song around it. In case you’re curious about the movie, it was a massive box-office hit AND a Razzie winner for Worst Picture.

Summer in Paradise was recorded using a beta version of Pro Tools on a Macintosh Quadra computer, making it one of the first albums ever recorded that way. Another reason to hate Pro Tools!

Al Jardine was reportedly suspended from the band during early Summer in Paradise sessions over a "severe attitude problem," but was quietly reinstated before the album was finished. His lead vocals ended up on two tracks anyway.

Summer in Paradise includes a cover of "Forever" (the Dennis Wilson song from Sunflower) produced by AND with vocals by… John Stamos! He and Mike Love had become buddies, and John would go on to play regularly with the Boys going forward. 

Mike Love filed his major songwriting credits lawsuit against Brian Wilson in 1992. He ultimately won co-writing credit on 35 Beach Boys songs and reportedly saw his annual songwriter royalties jump from around $75,000 a year to over $1 million. The lawsuit is one of the most contested chapters in Beach Boys history and a major reason why Mike Love is considered A Bit Of An Asshole.

SONGS TO CHECK OUT

Match Point of Our Love: the only song from MIU that I had any real notes about.

Baby Blue: Gorgeous ballad from Dennis.

Endless Harmony: Bruce sounds great on lead vocals!

I Do Love You: the Stevie Wonder song

Somewhere Near Japan: Nice guitar tone like I said earlier. It also vaguely reminds me of The Cure's Friday I'm In Love, I think bc they're in the same key?

Strange Things Happen: One of the only moderately tolerable songs on SIP. Nice chorus, nice guitar solo.

And that's the lot for now! I’ve only got two albums left to talk about. I think I’ll check out Adult/Child as well, since some folks were telling me about it last week. If there are any other side albums you’d recommend, let me know. I’ll see you all later this week for a new main-channel video.