If ever there was an album that epitomized the words "first step", this would be it. Surfin' Safari was set up to capitalize on the success of the title track, which had gotten enough regional airplay to make the band something of a local sensation. Capitol decided to cash in on this "surfing" craze that the kids seemed to dig, and cobbled this album together out of four singles (Surfin', Surfin' Safari, 409, and Ten Little Indians), some B-sides, and some filler. Right from track 1, their sound for the first couple of albums was set: fairly bare harmonies over competent but rudimentary rock and roll with more smiles than chops. Many of these songs sound exactly the same, and really not very good, like something a high school band would put out. This band - which actually was in high school when this was recorded - wants very badly to create good music, but they were crippled by two things: one, the fact that they were so young they just couldn't play much other than simple up-and-down bass lines with proto-Ramones rhythm work; two, the fact that even if they had been superstars, rock vocabulary (which they would later play a major part in helping to expand) was just so limited that the genre ITSELF wouldn't let them play what they wanted. The music is all the same because who in 1962 would ever think to use things like theremins and weird guitar pedals and so on? Music evolves slowly, especially if your record company makes you release 3 albums a year even if you haven't had time to write because you are touring constantly to earn enough to live and get your name out there. Brian Wilson took on a really heavy load as the band's only songwriter for the longest time and it's frankly astonishing that he was able to carry the band to such huge success while also touring and going to school. It's due to his genius that this stuff just can't help but sound charming from 40 years in the future. In a world where ironic 80s references were invented before Bill Clinton even took office, this stuff sounds charming. Songs about root beer are a far cry from the "revolutionary" music that would be popular in just half a decade, but even "The Mozart of Surf", as Brian was quickly dubbed, couldn't write a symphony right off the bat.

So what's actually to love here? There's just a bunch of surfing songs, right? Actually, there are only two surfing songs on here: Surfin' Safari and Surfin'. The subject matter of the other band originals ranges from root beer (Chug-A-Lug) to county fairs (County Fair, shockingly enough) to cars (409) to fairness (Heads You Win, Tails I Lose) to love (Ten Little Indians, Little Girl (You're My Miss America), Cuckoo Clock, The Shift). There's some covers: Eddie Cochran's Summertime Blues, which isn't that great, and a decent rendition of the world's first surfing instrumental Moon Dawg, but those are brief and clearly not the album's focus. I'm not trying to claim that this breadth of subject matter constitutes "diversity" because the actual music strains mightily to accomodate about two different moods, but the band wasn't a one-trick pony by any stretch of the imagination. I guess what makes this album listenable as opposed to a complete waste of time is the ever-present layer of wide-eyed fun on the album. Mike Love is a terrible lead vocalist, sure, but gosh darn it, he and the others are so adorable you can't hate them. Even a completely generic song like Little Girl (You're My Miss America) manages to sound heartfelt and genuine, and I'm sure that the surfer songs captured the mood of the times perfectly. I can't judge Surfin' Safari by the same standards I can judge Pet Sounds, not only because this is clearly not an album with a higher artistic purpose, but because the standard of Pet Sounds did not exist. Rock and roll was not art, by which I mean you weren't supposed to find anything in the music deeper than as the soundtrack to your life: surfing and root beer, in this case. By that standard this is a great album, even if it's hardly that much better than most of the other music out at the time. If you want to get really deep and sociological, you could point to the embryonic rock and roll defiance

1. Surfin' Safari
2. County Fair
3. Ten Little Indians
4. Chug-a-Lug
5. Little Girl (You're My Miss America)
6. 409
7. Surfin'
8. Heads You Win Tails I Lose
9. Summertime Blues
10. Cuckoo Clock
11. Moon Dawg
12. The Shift

This album might as well be a copy of the last one, except that it contains a pretty good selection of instrumental tracks, if you like instrumental tracks. Why shouldn't you, even though it may seem weird to listen to a Beach Boys album for songs they don't even sing on? Behind all those fancy lyrics and complicated vocals that people fall so much in love with, there's got to be music, and the music had better be good. An instrumental can tell a story just as well as a song with lyrics if the composer is skilled enough. Sure enough, the instrumentals are the songs with the most interesting music, even if all they're about is providing the soundtrack to the latest wave you caught. They could have fought it out with The Ventures had they been so inclined. You could do worse than to go driving around Long Beach in your vintage Ford Fairlane to these songs, and I'm sure that's what a lot of people did, because the surf rock craze was in full swing now. Misirlou is a cover of the song used in Pulp Fiction, and it sounds pretty good, though it loses some of the "rebellious" edge it's supposed to have since this band is about as revolutionary as Jackie Kennedy. Sit back and listen to the others: For Stoked I picture some poor schmuck stalking a girl across a 50s junior high dance floor, trying to work up the nerve to talk to her while the other kids dance awkwardly to the neon lights up above. He might succeed, but the other kids will laugh at him and he will go outside under the stars. Eventually he will share a tender moment with the girl of his dreams, having something to cherish for years to come. Honky Tonk conjures another night scene where our protagonists are driving around downtown, maybe out to the beach in a bit, talking to their friends they happened to stop next to at a stoplight, one of the few on this stretch of road. Someone's got some liquor in the backseat, and they're all having a good time. Surf Jam is someone catching that wave, dude. I can't think of anything for Let's Go Trippin' either, but it's as good as the others.

Their vocal songs are nothing you haven't heard before, but they're done a bit more competently since now there was money in the surfing craze and Capitol tossed them a few bucks. One of the key songs propelling the hot new trend of surfing was Surfin' USA, which certainly sounds a bit more advanced than the lead single off the last album. It's a competent rocker with a Chuck Berry-derived intro and a driving start-stop rhythm. They learned to play with tempos! Brian also creates the very first truly "introspective" song of his which would eventually lead down all the way to 'Til I Die. Lonely Sea is a lovely quiet ballad, with a stirring lone falsetto over a warm bed of harmony which floats you out to the middle of the ocean and leaves you there all alone. I don't know what it is about those quiet wordless vocals... don't you get the same image of floating on the water under a full moon or something? Sadly the rest of album is not so evocative. I realize that Farmer's Daughter is SUPPOSED to be a touching story about a migrant farmworker or something, but I just picture a hobo or something who stops off at a farm, "plows her fields", and takes off again. I am not sure exactly what ingredients go into making a truly gripping Johnny Cash-esque epic story that involves the listener in the life of the protagonist and make you care, but all I hear is someone writing about what they read in a Steinbeck novel. If you try you can work Lana into the narrative: he gets her to come along with him using only the seductive magic of his voice. That song isn't great shakes either, but it is at least better than surfing stuff, which is all that's left on the album. The Noble Surfer gets his choice of honeys from up and down the coast! Finders Keepers proves that even if you are the kind of subhuman scum that steals a surfboard you won't get away with it! What's that? Shut Down introduces the hot new trend of drag racing! What WON'T this band try? I am being far too harsh: this is more than just another reason to say "Fuck you, Capitol", it is actually a really interesting peek into the sociology of the 1960s. Isn't this stuff more interesting than hip hop lyrics? At least Brian Wilson READ a Steinbeck novel.

1. Surfin' USA
2. Farmer's Daughter
3. Misirlou
4. Stoked
5. Lonely Sea
6. Shut Down
7. Noble Surfer
8. Honky Tonk
9. Lana
10. Surf Jam
11. Let's Go Trippin'
12. Finders Keepers

Finally, Brian hits his stride and composes a decent album, at least technically. There are many pretty ballads here and some holdout songs from earlier eras don't really ditract too much. This is an album you can listen to without having to ignore the extremely basic musicianship they'd previously displayed. Sadly, the band continues to frustrate people who want something truly unique from them. Catch a Wave, The Surfer Moon, Hawaii, South Bay Surfers, and Surfers Rule are all pretty much the same song to me, and probably to you, so there's no point in talking about them because THEY ARE THE SAME. I realize that there are plenty of little details you can talk about, like the fact that Catch a Wave has a neat arrangement that has the sound of crashing waves and so forth, but the impatient fan in me wants to just say come on: are these the songs on which the glories of The Beach Boys are built? No! The band's value lies in using their voices (and musical skills too, but mostly voices) to go into that private world of the self that no one else can see. That's why In My Room is a classic and Boogie Woodie is merely a useless departure into car bullshit which shouldn't excite you at all. At least a song like Surfer Girl those really first-rate harmony vocals, which are all the more surprising since this was one of the first songs Brian ever wrote. It reminds me a lot of When You Wish Upon a Star from Pinocchio since Brian made a homage/shamelessly stole the melody, but I'll give him a break. If one of the first songs I managed to compose was as good as this I'd be ecstatic. It's slightly more sophisticated than Little Deuce Coupe, which is a Little Saint Nick sound-alike hopping upbeat dance about cars that only appears to the retro part of my brain. You hear this type of song and wow! so catchy! but at the same time extremely limited in terms of what's going on inside their HEADS, not the direct conduit to God that let Brian write such a neat melody. I can't believe I just wrote that.

I hate to rag so much on these albums, it's just that I don't feel they speak much to me, on the whole. The Rocking Surfer is another good surf instrumental that might as well be on the last album, or on another album by The Ventures or something. "All right guys, there's only one way to settle this fight. Both of you fellas have a point, but there's no way we can agree, so let's have a surf-off!" You can tell that Brian is really good at writing these things because there are little stories to go along with them. Frequently the band's vocal harmonies overshadow their songwriting talents, which is wrong. Capitol didn't release Stack-O-Tracks for no reason! All of these songs have GREAT backing tracks that are interesting enough on their own, but you need lyrics to really make people connect with pop songs. Luckily there's the standout track In My Room, which is musically fiarly nondescript but gives you a safe, comforting blanket of warm sound that makes me want to close my eyes and be at peace. Who can't identify with this song? Not everyone can be tough and angry all the time; you need to have some moments of doubt and worry. I can personally relate this song to the lowest point in my life, after I dropped out of college and all I wanted to do most days was sit in my room and just hide. THAT'S songwriting: to create a song that captures a little part of life and makes it IMPORTANT. It can be as epic as The Wall or as simple as this song, but it has to resonate over more than just a few years. All those surfing songs were fantastic at capturing the surfing life back then, but these days I can't relate to them. Their day is just over. Of course, here's where subjectivity creeps in: I dig Your Summer Dream, which honestly isn't about anything deeper than the surfing songs, but I connect to it personally. I had plenty of time to think similar things when I was stuck on a beach up in Ontario every summer for years. Brian's version is a lot more lyrical and pleasant than mine usually were though. That's one thing even The Beach Boys learned very quickly - the beach gets boring after a while! Enjoy those surfing songs while you can.

1. Surfer Girl
2. Catch a Wave
3. The Surfer Moon
4. South Bay Surfer
5. The Rocking Surfer
6. Little Deuce Coupe
7. In My Room
8. Hawaii
9. Surfers Rule
10. Our Car Club
11. Your Summer Dream
12. Boogie Woodie

I used to have mixed feelings about Little Deuce Coupe. Actually, I only had BAD feelings. What could I have loved? All but one song is about cars, which aren't my favorite subject in the world. Not only that, but Little Deuce Coupe, 409, Our Car Club, and Shut Down were all on previous albums, leaving this one with a scant 17 minutes of original music. Additionally, this music is still vintage early period basic Beach Boys, so expect more of the same, instrumentally. However, time has made it grow on me to some extent. Not a lot, because there's only so many times I can hear the same bass pattern over and over again, but enough to get into its groove somewhat. Certainly it has some good songs, most notably the moving a capella James Dean tribute A Young Man Is Gone, which is an exact clone of Their Hearts Were Full of Spring (or maybe the other way around - the studio version doesn't appear until the Smiley Smile / Wild Honey twofer CD release). My other favorites that are new are Spirit of America and No-Go Showboat, the former for Brian's falsetto, the latter for just being a really driving rocker with the "tense" moment before the next verse starts. Ballad of Ole Betsy is a hilariously solemn dedication to a dead car, and Car Crazy Cutie has those catchy "whoa-whoa-whoa"s and "do run run"s, so those aren't bad either. Custom Machine is generic but okay, and I think the lame school spirit anthem Be True to Your School ("Just like you would to your giiiiirl... or guy!") is my least favorite song, possibly because of that jingoistic school spirit bullshit. I sat through a lot of that in high school and it was exactly this retarded, only with worse singing. The melody isn't terrible and the song is well-produced, however. Overall this album is all right, but it's a little too limited in songwriting and subject, plus it's a bad value, though these days you get it when you buy it on a twofer with All Summer Long. Little Deuce Coupe is one of the first, but certainly not the last indicators of just how far the band's record company would go to make the band appear "hip" to teens.

1. Little Deuce Coupe
2. Ballad of Ole' Betsy
3. Be True to Your School
4. Car Crazy Cutie
5. Cherry, Cherry Coupe
6. 409
7. Shut Down
8. Spirit of America
9. Our Car Club
10. No-Go Showboat
11. A Young Man Is Gone
12. Custom Machine

Now it's time for some absolute classics. The Beach Boys have now revealed that their true strength lies in performing Brian's gorgeous ballads. There is no Volume I, the title is a sarcastic reference to a compilation album their record label put out without their consent which contained some bad tracks. Everyone knows Fun, Fun, Fun, which sounds exactly like Chuck Berry's Johnny B. Goode out of the gate, leading directly into one of the catchiest choruses known to man and even an organ solo, wow! The rip-off may or may not bother you, but I can tolerate it here because regardless of the story, which is some archetypal teenage rebellion drama, the band has produced one of those tracks that just sounds legendary. It's one of those songs that manages to embody fun, to the point where I don't think it will ever be forgotten. A shitty fade-out leads straight into Don't Worry Baby, which tries to out-Spector legendary 60s producer Phil Spector, whose famous "Wall of Sound" production style would influence and haunt Brian for the rest of his life. Brian has a fantastic lead vocal as he sings about what seems to be just another car song, but is really about the love of his girlfriend and how that moronic car lifestyle just isn't doing it for him anymore. This triumph of maturity through love is tempered somewhat by The Warmth of the Sun, which is my favorite track on here. Written one day after JFK was assassinated and Brian had just broken up with his first serious girlfriend, it has staggeringly great harmonies over that same doo-wop backing track they've been using for the last few albums, but don't begrudge it that, because it's intensely moving. Despite the sadness of this ballad, the narrator holds out hope for the future, because of his love (the warmth of the sun). I think that's a really interesting metaphor, but I also think the near-tearful delivery of the lead vocal combined with the reassuring backing vocals is brilliant, like even the production manages to reinforce the message.

Apparently it's not a Beach Boys album without a "summer" song, so here comes Keep an Eye On Summer to pick up the slack. This could be a younger clone of the later Graduating Day, even disregarding the similar subject, which is about moving on after high school. I had a brief nostalgia period after high school, and this is a sort of tribute to it. It's really interesting to watch the band's progression during this period, because remember that these kids WERE in high school when they were making these albums. When they sing about cars and surfing and girls, the songs are as authentic as they are amateurish and therefore just as embarassing as they are true. I don't feel so bad about kind of liking them, because even if I have pretty much zero Be True to Your School-type school pride, I can see where they're coming from. They wrote what they knew, and it's as fascinating as it is corny, and genuine corniness I can respect more than pointless jaded cycnicism. In the Parkin' Lot ("Making out with your girl before class and showing her off is swell"), This Car of Mine ("I'm proud of my car which I bought with my own money"), and Pom Pom Playgirl ("Look at that cheerleader slut strut her way through school") also fit into that mold, and while they are of varying quality as songs, it's kind of neat to look back on. I wonder if I would say the same thing about equivalent songs written today. Shut Down, Part II has a really bad opening, but it gives way to a passable instrumental, and this one's mental image is a cross between driving on the highway and surfing inside one of those big waves that has collapsed into a tube, or "pipe", if you will. Maybe a truck wandered out into the waves and the kids are hanging on for dear life as the driver aims for the coast and punches it. Why Do Fools Fall In Love is an annoying cover of that stupid song which I wish would fall off the planet because it requires the lead singer to affect that incredibly irritating high whiny falsetto, or at least all the versions I've heard do. The last song is Denny's Drums, which is probably the most unnecessary drum solo in all of classic rock, because Dennis Wilson makes Ringo Starr look like Keith Moon. Still, who else devoted a song entirely to a drum solo in 1964? That's right, no one! Honestly I don't think drum solos are very entertaining in general and at least this one's short, unlike your unbearable John Bonham/Neil Peart/Ginger Baker bore-fests, so unless someone can go ahead and prove that drum solos are artistically valid and not a waste of my time, I am going to declare this my favorite drum solo ever just out of spite. Go Dennis go!

1. Fun, Fun, Fun
2. Don't Worry Baby
3. In the Parking Lot
4. "Cassius" Love vs. "Sonny" Wilson
5. The Warmth of the Sun
6. This Car of Mine
7. Why Do Fools Fall In Love
8. Pom Pom Play Girl
9. Keep an Eye On Summer
10. Shut Down Part 2
11. Louie Louie
12. Denny's Drums

All Summer Long is the very last early Beach Boys album. Not only is the very last surfing song they'd ever do on it, but it was released mid-year, months after The Beatles' marketing juggernaut had hit the United States and permanently altered the band's perch at the top of the charts. It still took after the "single, B-side, and filler" archetype that dominated their catalog, but the songs seem newer, fresher, and more inspired. "Inspired" is a relative term, of course: there's still a gag song on here, and unfortunately it's not the last. All Summer Long also wraps up all of their early facets in a neat little package: there's surfing (Don't Back Down), cars/scooters (I Get Around, Little Honda), girls (Hushabye, We'll Run Away, Wendy, Girls On the Beach), the fun of summer (All Summer Long, Drive-In), and even a surf instrumental (Carl's Big Chance). It's not technically a concept album, but the songs do seem to revolve around a "summer" theme, or at least "things that happen in summer". You can HEAR summer on the title track, which I love. The "We've been havin' fun all summer long" descending chorus is truly fantastic, and the happy xylophone rhythm is irresistably catchy. I Get Around is justly famous for its great a capella intro, with a stop-and-start rhythm that doesn't detract from the beat as much as you might think; this song has a groove that's easy to get sucked into. The only part of this song I don't like are the hand clap sound effects, but I'll let those slide. Girls On the Beach is Surfer Girl run through some kind of weird chord modulation bizarreness, but it features beautiful harmony vocals (I'm going to stop mentioning those, since every song has those from now on), as does Hushabye, a doo-wop cover that has dumb lyrics but a great intro and outro.

Little Honda feels like it should have replaced Be True to Your School on Little Deuce Coupe. It's an okay song about a Honda motor scooter, which were all the rage at this time. More proof that the band would chase every fad, no matter how lame. We'll Run Away is surprisingly adult, with a church organ underscoring the narrator's quest to elope with his teenage girlfriend. Hopefully she wasn't Wendy, who ended up cheating on him after a neat jerky guitar intro, but before cheap organ solo. There are only 3 other major songs on here, the most annoying of which is Drive-In, which wastes a decent backing track with the dumbest disguised ad for drive-ins, delivered with a right cross right to the nose by Mike. He is in top form tonight, blasting right out of both nostrils and right into my heart. They actually did reuse this backing track for a weird version of Little Saint Nick on the Christmas album. Carl's Big Chance is a passable instrumental that showcases – surprise - Carl on guitar. I picture a Fonzie-type guy swaggering around the diner being a cool cat, hitting on the waitresses, starting jukeboxes with his fist, etc. Somehow the hoppin' beat just doesn't work for surfing. Speaking of which, the last surfing song they ever wrote makes its appearance here in the form of Don't Back Down, which is okay.

1. I Get Around
2. All Summer Long
3. Hushabye
4. Little Honda
5. We'll Run Away
6. Carl's Big Chance
7. Wendy
8. Do You Remember
9. Girls On the Beach
10. Drive-In
11. Our Favorite Recording Sessions
12. Don't Back Down

This is a great concert. As a listener separated by more than 40 years from the culture that spawned this album, it is a bit weird to hear the first track introduced by an unbelievably stereotypically square middle-aged dude and then to have what must be thousands of teenage girls screaming their heads off as that famous Chuck Berry ripoff riff of Fun, Fun, Fun starts up and an unbearably young Mike Love takes off with the lead vocals and then brings it back home like 90 seconds later. Just try to imagine a crowd of rock fans these days react to a song as simple and wholesome as The Little Old Lady From Pasadena; it doesn't work, not even when they "rock out" for about 10 seconds in the middle. As those chords bounce up and down, I can picture in my head with almost painful clarity what it must have been like back then to live a life before rock music was history. Normally, I don't take historical period into account when I listen to music because I listen almost exclusively to music made before I was born and it's difficult to truly put yourself in the mindset of someone your age 40 years ago, but I have to here, simply because this is what context is all about. Just listen to their furious (and to my mind, definitive) rendition of Johnny B. Goode; it's like nothing we have today. That was as fast and loud as music got back then, and there are those who would argue that rock music has in real terms progressed very little past its simple but effective power. Of course, that assumes not only that rock music has stayed unchanged, but that people have stayed unchanged. I don't believe that's true. As they do the instrument-by-instrument introduction to Little Deuce Coupe that reveals both that Al is totally silent in the mix and that he gets way less applause than Dennis, you can hear what this music meant to the people at the time. This raises the question of whether or not it is reasonable to compare an album like Concert to an album like In Concert because hey, they're both live Beach Boys albums, right? I can simply say that the performances were better or worse on certain songs and therefore one is better than the other. Wrong. A live album isn't just a band having to play their tunes without the benefit of overdubs and second takes (except in the case of I Get Around, which is the studio version for some stupid reason), it's also a record of how the people at the time felt about the music.

In 1964, The Beach Boys were burning up the charts as the only serious competition to the staggering power of The Beatles, and so they played to teenagers who were even as young as the sixth grade. In 1973, The Beach Boys were playing to an audience of people with a totally different relationship to them, people who were no longer kids, but were now college graduates and rapidly aging hippies who had completely lost the sense of wide-eyed excitement that permits the existence of absurdly goofy material like Long Tall Texan, with its grotesque Texas accents and abysmal sax solo, or Papa-Oom-Mow-Mow's so-silly-and-catchy-it-should-be-illegal mindless happiness, or Monster Mash's absolute ignorance of how dated it sounds and refusal to care. This concert explains how TV shows like The Monkees came to be, but it also shows what kind of environment has to be present: innocence and freshness. Today's world has no place for this. I think that a song as personal and intimate as In My Room could and should last forever, because it perfectly expresses a certain kind of inner vulnerability that everyone has in such an apt and expressive way that I don't see how the same feeling could be captured any better. Its version here is note-for-note, as it should be, because this song is immortal. Other songs, like Let's Go Trippin', don't have the same sort of resonance for me that they do for the crowd, who is pleased as punch to yell the title along with Mike before the surf instrumental kicks into gear. Don't get me wrong, it's a fine song (despite Mike's ill-advised sax solo), but this song so much a product of the past it's like listening to Gregorian chants, as it is when everyone wants to go along to the magical paradise of Hawaii, or when they have that mildly repulsive school spirit for Graduation Day, which is actually a lovely rendition. I realize that artists are still idolized just like Dennis is when he gets his spotlight as lead vocalist for the cover of the basic rocker The Wanderer, but surely not just like this. I just can't believe that the passing march of time, cynicism, and irony would allow something as youthful as Johnny B. Goode to exist and be enjoyed today. I think this album is great, but it's like listening to a radio broadcast of a culture 40 years gone in time and a thousand light years behind in terms of sophistication, values, and that word "innocence" again. Still, these guys were great, and they shame a lot of other bands in delivering excitement and passion to the music, which I guess is one thing that stays true throughout time.

1. Fun, Fun, Fun
2. The Little Old Lady From Pasadena
3. Little Deuce Coupe
4. Long, Tall Texan
5. In My Room
6. Monster Mash
7. Let's Go Trippin'
8. Papa-Oom-Mow-Mow
9. The Wanderer
10. Hawaii
11. Graduation Day
12. I Get Around
13. Johnny B. Goode

This is the best pre-Pet Sounds album, though in my mind the rockers aren't quite as good as they used to be. The split between the upbeat Beach Boys of the past on side 1 of the original LP and the new orchestrated downtempo ballads on side 2 is a new direction for the band. Brian had quit touring due to a nervous breakdown, so he had lots of time in the studio to hang out with the best session musicians L.A. had to offer and think of new things to try. The improvement in studio technique is immediately obvious, as Do You Wanna Dance kicks off the album with Dennis on lead over a very Spector-like production. Just listen to the almost physical blast of fully orchestrated sound on the "Do you do you do you do you wanna dance?" chorus. I always get that song confused with the last song on the first side, Dance, Dance, Dance, which has all sorts of unusual percussion choices like castanets, sleigh bells, and tambourine, over a bouncy bass line. Though they're both great songs, I don't think either are as good as I Get Around, and I wonder why. Maybe Brian was just tired of their image? I would be too. It really seems like this side was written just to placate fans, though Brian made sure not to skimp on the music. Good to My Baby is a good example: it's a standard doo-wop love song, but written much more skillfully than those on the last album. Even the really weirdly-tuned notes that open Don't Hurt My Little Sister can't hide the production. When I Grow Up to Be a Man finally manages to embed a serious message behind its seeming happiness. It's actually got a lot of worry lurking there amongst the multiple parts and moods set to that relentless count-up of the years. I think there's some neat tension created by the contrast: instead of just a fun-fun-fun song you have an outwardly confident and upbeat guy trying to convince us he's all smiles still but inside he's still worried. Finally, Help Me, Ronda (note the spelling) is not the #1 single we've all grown to love, it's a differently arranged, longer version which misses the enthusiastic "bow bow bow" backing, as well as the quicker pace and shorter running time. Normally I don't mind long songs, but this version drags, and stays around too long at the end, where it sounds like it's ending several times before it actually does.

All of the songs on the second side except for the very last gag track we'll be subjected to (no gagging jokes about Kokomo, please) are immaculately orchestrated, and really need to be heard in stereo to get the full effect. Kiss Me, Baby is the perfect example of this, as the brilliant call-and-response between Mike's smooth tenor and Brian's high falsetto just doesn't sound as good as it could when squashed into mono, and the majestic backing orchestration loses some of its impact. There's something about Brian's part, in particular, that gets me every time. It sounds so lonely and heartbrokenly sad, absolutely the PERFECT representation of the emotions he's trying to convey when he sings about love and heartbreak. It's the best track on the album, followed closely by In the Back of My Mind, which uses Dennis' lower, more ragged voice to expose Brian's worries that are always "in the back of [his] mind", even when he's happy, because even the happiness of love can be eroded by worry and doubt. Please Let Me Wonder is in much the same vein, saying so much about the narrator's fragile mind and insecurities with Brian's yearning lead confessing his weaknesses to his love, wanting her but preferring to live in his dream world where his love is returned instead of the cold harsh world of rejection and tears. I'm So Young is about getting married – a triumph of love? No! Because they're too young! They don't know what's happening or where they're going, because he's about to set off to sea, so he can't get married. It's all for the best, anyway, because in She Knows Me Too Well you find out that Brian worries he's an asshole, always mistreating his girlfriend, looking at other girls, and all that stuff which makes me cringe when listening to domestic violence songs. It's beautifully done though. Brian has just about reached his arrangement peak, meaning I think these songs sort of "finish off" the genre of doo-wop, transitioning the ballad into the rock era quite skillfully and making all those old songs finally obsolete, in the sense that anything they tried to say has now been said nearly perfectly. This is one of those albums which might have sounded better if you had mixed up the fast and slow songs, but it's pretty impressive nonetheless. I just wish the highs were higher, because as fine as the ballads are, the rockers just aren't that impressive. Still, it's a great album which is one of the best introduction to both the fun and the thoughtful sides of the band.

1. Do You Wanna Dance
2. Good to My Baby
3. Don't Hurt My Little Sister
4. When I Grow Up (To Be a Man)
5. Help Me, Ronda
6. Dance, Dance, Dance
7. Please Let Me Wonder
8. I'm So Young
9. Kiss Me, Baby
10. She Knows Me Too Well
11. In the Back of My Mind
12. Bull Session With "Big Daddy"

This is a pretty fine album, almost as good as Today!, but not quite. There is a hint of retrogression and the filler is back due to record company pressure. Today! felt like Brian had some room to himself so he could experiment a little, but here all of the experimentation feels like it's being crammed back into the fun 'n sun formula again. Which isn't to say that the retreads are too blatantly recycled (Help Me, Rhonda benefits immensely from its re-recording), because all the old surf tricks get repurposed and sound nearly new, thanks to the continuous production improvements. A good example is the neat surf-style background vocal inThe Girl From New York City, which is what they've been doing for about a thousand years by now, it seems, and yet it's the best thing about the song, which feels a little mismatched. The vocals are suited for a slow but intense building song, yet there's that horrible sax bleating away to itself periodically. County Fair off of Surfin' Safari gets an insane rewrite in Amusement Parks USA, which is really one of the creepiest songs in their catalogue. It was a big hit single in Japan, which makes sense, because it's a really messed-up track. The unnaturally happy tune, the out of control nutcase laughter, the monotone carny spoken parts by session drummer Hal Blaine, and the interspersed clips of group members trying to sound like girls at an amusement park all frighten the hell out of me. Then I Kissed Her is a fuck you / homage to Phil Spector, as it's a nicely done gender-reversed cover of a song by The Crystals which chronicles the success of the narrator's makeout session with some girl at a dance. I think it's easily as good as the original. Salt Lake City is a pointless love letter to the city of the same name, with stupid "hip" lingo and obligatory fun in the sun lyrics. The stalker anthem Girl Don't Tell Me doesn't do anything for me either. I don't like the vocal melody and the lyrics are frankly bizarre. You're So Good to Me is livened up by nice "la la la la" backing vocals and a hauntingly familiar guitar line but isn't so hot otherwise. The last lame track is I'm Bugged at My Old Man, which is a demo-quality "joke" track which is tepidly amusing until you read about the abuse that Brian suffered at the hands of his father (who is responsible for him being deaf in one ear) and wonder whose idea it was to release this. It's uncomfortable to listen to.

Thank God for the good songs. The single version of Help Me, Rhonda arrives to save the record, sounding very different, without the extended intro and more emphasis on the backing vocals and free to live up to it's potential as one of the catchiest songs in human history. "You gotta help me Rhonda, help me get out of my heart!" Aww yeah. Brian Wilson claims the instrumental intro to California Girls is the greatest piece of music he's ever written, and I have to give him something there. It's beautiful, almost glistening thanks to the unusual instrumentation. Most rock songs don't start out with strings and a sax section at that casual, almost effortless tempo, but it sounds so fluid and smooth. I used to think that singing about California girls was really juvenile and I thought that he was wasting his time when he could have been writing songs about things that mattered, but that was a stupid attitude, because girls do matter. Girls are great! They're not a less valid topic than war or The Meaning of Life or some other ponderous concept album's weighty subject. The song is about enjoying life, and could you ask for a better tribute? The singing is truly wonderful, with beautiful soaring harmonies in one of their finest outros to boot. But Let Him Run Wild is great too, particularly the backing track which uses a lot of the same tricks as California Girls. I love the vibraphone, the plucking bass and guitar, the saxophones, the blissful vocals at 0:53 and 1:38, the plaintive melody... thank God it's in stereo on Stack-O-Tracks. The lyrics, though, are slightly cringe-inducing, talking about how the narrator wishes you, the object of his affections, would dump your worthless scum boyfriend who doesn't care about you and come to him who will treat you like a prince. Hello ladies! Summer Means New Love is a lushly orchestrated instrumental that is supposed to evoke the impression of "the first blush of new love". It sounds like the background to a 50s romantic comedy, but this is actually a compliment because it sounds great. The french horn and crisp guitar work well together, it just sounds a little melodramatic, like it's either a slow dance at a prom or the background music in a restaurant. What's kind of funny is that And Your Dreams Come True is a short lullaby to the exact same thing, but in reverse since it's a capella. Summer Days doesn't have the "classic" feel to it that Today! did, but it apparently inspired The Beatles' Revolver and you can see why. It's lively and fun, and has two of the best radio singles Brian ever wrote. Enjoy it.

1. The Girl From New York City
2. Amusement Parks U.S.A
3. Then I Kissed Her
4. Salt Lake City
5. Girl Don't Tell Me
6. Help Me, Rhonda
7. California Girls
8. Let Him Run Wild
9. You're So Good to Me
10. Summer Means New Love
11. I'm Bugged at My Ol' Man
12. And Your Dreams Come True

You know, I honestly feel that Pet Sounds might as well be the last word on the ecstacies and torments of being a teenager, perhaps even more so than the more well-known "teen epics" like The Wall or Quadrophenia. Why? Well, even though a lot of Pet Sounds seems like it doesn't measure up to the grandiose pretensions (I mean that in a good way) of those two double-disc heavyweights, its smaller stature only emphasizes its embodiment of the eager anticipations, crippling self-doubts, and half-crushing, half-revelatory romantic discoveries of that age. All of these songs are about some kind of disappointment or unfulfilled wish, cleverly camouflaged by the encyclopedia of instruments buried in the mixes. Of course, a list of instruments by itself means nothing; anyone with enough money for studio time can throw together an album that runs through sounds with every letter in the dictionary. This is Brian at his most complex and perfectionist and it shows; even a comparison of the instrumentals to previous ones like Summer means New Love reveals a move away from the unambiguous and straightforward hit-machine mentality towards a more complex, even orchestral approach to songwriting. Though Let's Go Away For Awhile and Pet Sounds seem like half-efforts to me (sorry, I can appreciate the effort it took to write them but they could really have used some vocals, which are, if not perfect, then as close as is humanly possible), they are vastly more complex than anything going on at the time. Pet Sounds isn't a concept album, it's a collection of tracks that Brian wrote while the rest of the band was touring, and he used them as just more instruments. It's his show, start to finish, and the album shows what he was thinking about: that confusing and hurtful world that comes after adolescence, when everyone has to worry about fitting in, falling in and out of love, and trying to live up to the pressures of real adulthood. When listened to right after the previous album, it's easy to be wowed at the huge leap in consistent quality, but even more striking is the change in lyrical tone. Brian didn't write the words, but he told lyricist Tony Asher what the words should mean. There's no bombast or theater here, just the surprisingly low-key work of a pop songwriter who is finally tired of fun in the sun.

However, if you're listening to the album fresh, without any preconceptions, it's easy to mistake Pet Sounds for another typical upbeat Beach Boys summer album. After all, the opening Wouldn't It Be Nice easily rivals California Girls in terms of unadulterated pop hooks carefully calibrated to make the listener feel not just good but GREAT. That vocal melody is so sing-alongable it's not funny, and the way the verses and the choruses blend nearly invisibly into each each other is truly inspired. But then the lyrics hit

has a strange, almost out-of-tune mandolin intro, but it moves straight into the perfect pop song about hoping to get married someday. The complicated multiple sections come completely naturally, as blissful harmonies and instruments layer over everything. You Still Believe In Me's backing track is from an older song which has nothing to do with its message about love and disappointment. Nearly everyone has been lucky enough to somehow manage to find someone who loves them for some unfathomable reason, and Brian knows the sadness you feel when you let them and yourself down. But love endures, and people still believe in you. I can relate to That's Not Me very personally. For me it was my first try at college. A lot of the time I didn't know what I was doing, and leaving everyone back home and wasting my time for no results that I could see led to a sad state of affairs. Though this song is sung to the narrator's girlfriend, the ideas are applicable to anyone who's ever "had a dream / [and] packed up and split for the city" to an uncertain future. Don't Talk (Put Your Head On My Shoulder) is a sublimely gorgeous mellow orchestrated ballad about the things you never say. The bass line mimics a heartbeat right after he says "Listen to my heart beat", which is a nice touch. Brian's strong double-tracked solo vocal is incredibly meditative and thoughtful. I'm not nearly as fond of I'm Waiting For the Day, which is a sophisticated simple love song. The galloping tympani and the nearly shrill flute just rub me the wrong way for some reason. I like the message, but the song just doesn't click for me.

Let's Go Away For Awhile is fantastic instrumental, but even though I like it I am somewhat disappointed. For all the evocation that the complicated instrumentation does of a vacation, there's a sense of frustration I have that this could have been turned into something more. It seems like a waste of tape when he could have written another song to hold onto. Sloop John B. sounds completely out of place after that song. I didn't like this song at first because it's an arrangement of a Caribbean folk tune which has nothing to do with the album, but it's grown on me. The vocals are great, and it's such a happy tune that you can't not like it. It was included at the request of their record company for it hit single, and Al had the idea to cover this song. God Only Knows is Carl's finest hour. I don't like the accordion in the intro, I think it drowns out the horn somewhat, but the rest of the song is wonderful. Paul McCartney has said that this is favorite song of all time, and it's easy to sympathize. I'm not so supportive of the singer's threats to kill himself if his girl left him, but it's very romantic aside from that. After a fantastic outro, the somewhat irritating sax and piano of I Know There's an Answer start up. This is an intelligent analysis of drug use which covers the ultimate futility of trying to gain enlightenment through abusing chemicals. The message is that there's solutions to life's problems, but you have to find them by yourself, without looking for a sugar cube to give them to you. I wish I'd known that during my freshman year of college!

Here Today strikes me as a darker response to Let Him Run Wild. Instead of encouraging the girl to leave the guy and come to you, you're warning the guy not to let the girl come to him. I am also not enthusiastic about this track, although I guess I empathize a little. There's also a break towards the end where it seems like the band wants to just freak out and jam, but it never happens. Luckily, I Just Wasn't Made For These Times follows, and it's the best song on the album. The meandering plucked bass line subconsciously suggests the wandering quest to find someplace to fit in with your friends, who often let you down for reasons you can't even articulate, because you don't know yourself. The low "ooh" chorus behind "Each time things start to happen again" and the outro are also superb, but I love every second, even the theremin break. This song depresses, but it tells the truth, at least for me. Pet Sounds is another great instrumental, but it suffers from the same sense of waste as the first, and this song has a much less clear feel to me. Supposedly it was intended to be used in a Bond film, but the mood is much too positive to work for me. Caroline No finishes the album strongly with a plaintive plea to a girl to explain what happened, why the magic is gone. I've seen many people from my past who on the outside have changed only a little, but it's a sign of a deep change within of both myself and them. The recognition of change makes the nostalgia bittersweet and ultimately futile. The abrupt shift to the train sound effect at the end is slightly out of place and not so significant to me, but it's an ending as good as any.

1. Wouldn't It Be Nice
2. You Still Believe In Me
3. That's Not Me
4. Don't Talk (Put Your Head On My Shoulder)
5. I'm Waiting For the Day
6. Let's Go Away For Awhile
7. Sloop John B.
8. God Only Knows
9. I Know There's an Answer
10. Here Today
11. I Just Wasn't Made For These Times
12. Pet Sounds
13. Caroline No

Smiley Smile is way too easy to call "schizophrenic", but personally, I think "suffering from multiple personality disorder" would be a better analogy, given that you have two of the band's very strongest songs mixed with filler that sounds like it was written in between bong hits. "Smiley Smile was a bunt instead of a grand slam", as Carl said after it was finished, and sometimes I think even a bunt would be charitable. What happened to the intricately layered instrumentation of Pet Sounds or the lush vocal harmonies of Today!? There are only brief, frightening snatches of pure craziness with sing-song chants over creepy pianos and unsettling background noises battling angry growls. As I'll explain in the Smile review, what was supposed to be a soaring religious anthem to happiness ended up sounding like a DARE commercial. This is drug music in the sense that if you listened to this while on drugs you would probably stop taking them shortly thereafter, because this album shows you what can happen to a fragile mind loaded with psychedelics and hung out to dry: two sides of the same coin in radically different currencies. Good Vibrations and Heroes and Villains were completed or mostly completed before Brian flipped out, and as such are far and away the best songs here. Good Vibrations is of course more famous, for good reason. A perennial contender for their finest single work, it really does seem to sum up all that made them great: catchy melodies, intricate construction, far-out arrangement, and some of their most feverishly intoxicating vocal harmonies. It has been said to death but it's true: this song says more in three and a half minutes than most albums do in forty. How is that the slow contemplative part at the end lasts for less than a minute but still manages to convey Brian's near-religious attitude to happiness so well? Who else would think of putting in a Theremin, previously known only for its unearthly wails in cheap science fiction and horror movies, in to a pop single, or cellos to simulate a fuzz bass? I really can't say enough good things about it in strong enough terms: it's perfect. The edited version of Heroes and Villains presented here is also a winner. The goofy lyrics about nothing in particular (made up by lyricist Van Dyke Parks on the spot when he heard the instrumental demo Brian played for him), the back-and-forth bass line, and especially the off-the-wall vocal sounds are just as impressive as Good Vibrations. These songs sound very simple and straightforward, but they aren't! Writing one catchy vocal melody is tough for a lot of artists; imagine being able to write five or six of them, layer them on top of each other, and have it still turn out as good as Heroes and Villains.

What's truly unfortunate is that the rest of the tracks here pretty much suck. Aside from those two, there's barely anything that could be called a complete song. Sound clips of pot smoking, no rhythm, childish manipulations of tape speed, and barely any instruments. Vegetables, while unquestionably groundbreaking due to its unprecedented use of a real honest-to-fucking-God VEGETABLE rhythm section (featuring Paul McCartney on lead celery!), is simply too weird for me to accept it, despite its undeniably catchy melody. It's just too goofy, and maybe that's my failing as a listener since it IS such a fun song, but I don't like it. When I hear it in this incarnarnation, I'm not picturing a peaceful basket of vegetables begging to be eaten, I'm picturing a dormant army of militant radishes gone mad with power and ready to spread their insane fury to salad bars worldwide. Maybe it's the arrangement too, but it sounds WAY too unsettling. Wonderful has some spare, beautiful singing from Carl over hushed harmonies and organ which offers hints at its power, but the mood of prayer it's going for is ruined by ridiculous "funny" chatting in the middle. Fall Breaks and Back to Winter (Woody Woodpecker Symphony) has a low, spooky atmosphere with surreal growling and ambient sound effects that are very nicely done, but I'd prefer another band to be scoring some horror movie soundtrack, thanks. I think it's a neat reinterpretation of Mrs. O'Leary's Cow, but I can't imagine the twisted thought processes that turned a song about fire into... this. Wind Chimes also makes me afraid to sleep at night, especially the scary noises that hint at the true dark sinister powers contained within their menacing shadows in the dead of night under a cold moon. Unfortunately there's a serious drop-off in quality after those tracks. The rest of the songs are either ruined through childishness (like the tape-speed hijinks on She's Goin' Bald) or aren't really songs. There's nice humming in Little Pad and nice whistling in Whistle In, but I'd like to hear what they could have done with them after more than 30 seconds. Gettin' Hungry is just too short, and was much better when The Faces covered it. As one of the most spectacular self-destructions in music at the time, this album single-handedly destroyed their reputation and it's not too hard to see why. Aside from the fact that they abandoned the Pet Sounds dynamic for THIS sound, the absence of fully-written Smilesongs like Cabinessence or Surf's Up is unconscionable. And at less than a half-hour, it's way too short to have competed with the other great albums of 1967. From here on out, the band would be on a near-permanent commercial decline.

1. Heroes and Villains
2. Vegetables
3. Fall Breaks and Back to Winter (W. Woodpecker Symphony)
4. She's Goin' Bald
5. Little Pad
6. Good Vibrations
7. With Me Tonight
8. Wind Chimes
9. Gettin' Hungry
10. Wonderful
11. Whistle In

It's an R&B album from your favorite surfing band! Wild Honey sounds like it was recorded by a completely different group of people than those guys who sang about blossom girls and vegetables so recently. After Smiley Smile tanked on the charts, they decided to keep the minimalistic production while recording some actual songs. The album sounds slightly fuller than Smiley Smile, though it's certainly no Good Vibrations, or even I Get Around, to be honest. It's just simple melodies, spare harmonizing, and the band playing their own instruments for the first time in I don't even know how many albums. Brian still writes the lion's share of the material, but the rest of the group is getting the first hint that they might have to do more work in the future: How She Boogalooed It is the first full-fledged song they put out that he wasn't involved with, and it isn't awful. I'm just amazed that Wild Honey manages to sound as good as it does, with each song having a its own mood and character. Every song is fully-written, at least, and the band bothers to sing on all of the tracks. Unfortunately, the entire record is less than 25 minutes! Bands have SONGS which are this long!

Wild Honey is a great rocking start to the album. Carl has found a new lead vocal style: wild soul yelling. The theremin isn't as gimmicky as you might think, fitting in great over the congas, shaky percussion, and tack piano. The rest of the rockers on the album are somewhat mixed. The Stevie Wonder cover I Was Made to Love Her has more Carl, but unexcites otherwise. Darlin's melody, however, is super-catchy and I like the heartfelt and energetic Carl lead. Here Comes the Night is only mediocre, partly due to its "Hold me / Squeeze me / Don't ever leave me" chorus, but How She Boogalooed It is fast and has a nice chord progression, though it also has dumb lyrics. Aren't You Glad is the first of the generally quality ballads on this album, and its insistent groove outruns Brian's attempts to ruin it with an irritating falsetto. Country Air is great outside of those strained Mike humming sections, with really nice verses. A Thing or Two is somewhere between a rocker and a ballad, and its feeling of disappointment owes mainly to the lack of ideas inside. A few are tossed in but they don't come together. Still, there are some nice pounding sections which could have used some more development, much like Brian's I'd Love Just Once to See You, which has a nice melody and acoustic guitar, but cries out for more backing harmonies. Watch out for "I'd love just once to see you / in the nude" at the end. Tee hee. Let the Wind Blow has a superb atmosphere and plaintive lyrics, moving between the hushed verses and louder choruses with natural ease over the dominating tack piano and bass. I don't have anything to say about Mama Says because it isn't much of a song. A short review for a short album!

1. Wild Honey
2. Aren't You Glad
3. I Was Made to Love Her
4. Country Air
5. Thing or Two
6. Darlin'
7. I'd Love Just Once to See You
8. Here Comes the Night
9. Let the Wind Blow
10. How She Boogalooed It
11. Mama Says

Friends is placed on a pedestal by a section of Beach Boys fans for some unfathomable reason, even though it's awful. The "good songs" here would look pathetic placed on a better album, but here they stand out because this has to be their least-inspired toss-off ever. Does it seem wrong to anyone else that the absolute calamity of a song known as Transcendental Meditation is the only upbeat rocker on here? Or that this 25 minute collection of nearly comatose songs was released in 1968, one of the most turbulent years in the modern era? The songs themselves are not exactly ruinously bad (except for Transcendental Meditation, whose corrosive harmonies and out-of-tune woodwinds grate deeply on my soul), but the whole album is one long exercise in skipping to the next track to find a good song only to realize it's already over. For the first time since Little Deuce Coupe, there are no first-rank songs to be found. Dennis' Little Bird (his first song! Go Dennis!) is one of the halfway decent songs on the whole album, but it's about birds. His Be Still is a nice snippet of organ prettiness, but it's barely a song. Though, to be fair, it sounds a whole lot like Pink Floyd's Cirrus Minor on More, which I love. The rest is an uninspiring bunch. Brian's Busy Doin' Nothing has a neat Latin beat, and even includes directions to his house! In real life! That makes it worth looking into, I guess. His Diamond Head is a well-executed (that's a pretty bottom-of-the-barrel adjective) Hawaiian-themed instrumental that, uh, sounds nice. Passing By could have had some good vocals to go with the samba, which would have made it much better. Anna Lee is okay. And that's it! Friends has nice harmonies on the "Let's be friennnnnds!" chorus, but the rest of the song sucks, with unbearably corny lyrics. Oh God. Is this worse than Little Deuce Coupe? Yes, to be honest. Even if you took away the songs from other albums, you were still left with almost 20 minutes of passable rock music there. Friends - a full album, mind you - is barely over five minutes longer and sucks from end to end, with no interesting lyrics, and and only a few "Mmm, that's kind of nice" moments. I almost consider this the band's lowest moment, but their post-1973 output managed to be even worse, somehow.

1. Meant For You
2. Friends
3. Wake the World
4. Be Here in the Morning
5. When a Man Needs a Woman
6. Passing By
7. Anna Lee, the Healer
8. Little Bird
9. Be Still
10. Busy Doin' Nothin'
11. Diamond Head
12. Transcendental Meditation

Much better than Friends, in spite of being a tossed-together contract obligation of singles and leftovers (this was their 20th album of a 20-album deal, thus the title). Shockingly, it is the best Beach Boys album since Pet Sounds because the songs the band had lying around were somehow stronger than the ones they put on Friends. Does this make sense? Peering into the future, we can see that the band's experiments with letting everyone have a say would be consistent-but-not-wonderful (Sunflower), uneven-with-genius-parts (Surf's Up), or superb (Holland). 20/20 ranks right below Holland because it's not that long and because the weak tracks are a little weaker, but I'd still rank it as more listenable than Surf's Up, album flow-wise. 20/20 is one of the few post-Pet Sounds albums which remain listenable all the way through by having few out-and-out bad tracks and by being pretty diverse, sound-wise. Brian writes or contributes to 6 songs, Dennis has 3, Bruce gets 2, and Carl, Mike, and Al all put in a song, so there's no unity or cohesiveness of message or anything, but all of the band members are at least trying hard to write good songs. It's probably a near-fatal weakness of "song-oriented" bands that have many different personalities that they rarely sound like they thought about what they wanted to say with an album as a whole, but sometimes you get something that sounds great all the way through. 20/20 sounds oddly like a career retrospective of sorts, going from nostalgia to old covers to modern rock, and even tossing in some instrumentals. Do It Again kicks off with a nostalgia rocker that says up front what the band later devoted entire albums to: their not-so-hidden desire to be young and famous and on top of the world again. But hey, go surf again! Enjoy yourself! There's nothing wrong with a fond appreciation for the past while still moving forward. The band couldn't have written this song in 1963, but they certainly would have known better than to write crap like 15 Big Ones. Carl gets into the spirit by trying his hand at imitating Brian's production when he covers the Phil Spector classic I Can Hear Music, and he comes out with a great pop song that certainly isn't far from his brothers own Spector covers.

I despise Bruce's insistence of a squealing guitar on Bluebirds Over the Mountain, but underneath it's a decenttune. I can't call his other contribution of The Nearest Faraway Place anything but a lounge-jazz cover of previous Brian instrumentals like Diamond Head or Let's Go Away For Awhile, but you could do worse, I guess. Dennis has the superb orchestrated dynamic ballad Be With Me, the lusty sex rocker All I Want to Do (with bonus audio at the end of him actually fucking someone!), and the incredibly disturbing Never Learn Not to Love, which was actually written by Charles Manson when he was hanging out with the band and giving Dennis groupies and drugs. Al gets to cover the old folk classic Cotton Fields, which he later ended up remixing several times to get away from Brian's minimal production decisions that in his eyes detracted from it, and I can agree with that. I like this version better than Creedence Clearwater Revival's version because those backing vocals are so good, but there are better versions out there. Brian's stuff makes up the rest of the record, and it's the most interesting to me. He already touched on nostalgia with Do It Again, but you can't figure out where he's going to go next with any of the other songs. Our Prayer and Cabinessence are two absolutely wonderful Smile tracks that only a fool would have left off of Smiley Smile, both featuring mind-boggling "modern" Gregorian-style chanting and almost unbelievably subtle rhythmic ebb and flow. They might not be "rock songs" but boy are they the equal of any other "psychedelic pop" stuff out at the time. The standard theory is that after Smile failed Brian simply went crazy then and there, which I guess is supported by something like the childish I Went to Sleep, but then where does Time to Get Alone come from? It has a vocal melody and production values that I can't believe a paranoid schizophrenic could do by himself. It's a normal classic love song as good as Dennis' Be With Me – how could he make this if he was crazy? Brian's stuff has always been marked by his sincere desire to combine his strong emotions with his innate musical genius, and is only Dennis comes close to him. The rest of the band just can't write stuff like Our Prayer on a consistent basis, which is why for the most part they have occasional good songs, but you can easily tell the Mike-dominated Do It Again from Cabinessence. This slowly widening gap between the visions and talents of the various members of band would become troublesome in the future.

1. Do It Again
2. I Can Hear Music
3. Bluebirds over the Mountain
4. Be With Me
5. All I Want to Do
6. Nearest Faraway Place
7. Cotton Fields (The Cotton Song)
8. I Went to Sleep
9. Time to Get Alone
10. Never Learn Not to Love
11. Our Prayer
12. Cabinessence

Mike Love is retarded. He was tolerable on Concert, but here his stage banter is difficult to call anything other than tedious, and thanks to record company idiocy you can't skip his ludicrously stupid jokes at the beginnings of tracks, or even in the middle of songs like Good Vibrations. Why did he want to delight audiences worldwide with his astoundingly unfunny Spanish monologues or idiot jokes about performing in the nude? What could he possibly have been thinking? That said, this is still a pretty good concert, even if it's the least interesting of the three classic live albums. The London crowd is rapturous, because whatever popularity the band may have lost in the US was still going strong in the UK. They've got a horn section along on the tour, which is interesting, but it turns songs like Sloop John B. into mariachi-fests. All around their show is perfectly competent, but it's neither as youthful and energizing as Concert or as diverse and interesting as In Concert, which makes me curious as to what it's supposed to document. The band had suffered huge, catastrophic changes in the few short years since they'd last done a live album, and it's barely acknowledged at all here, since all you hear is a grinningly happy band. Of course, maybe I complain too much. After all, there aren't official live versions of stuff like California Girls, Wouldn't It Be Nice, God Only Knows, or Good Vibrations any earlier than this because those songs were written only a few years prior. All are perfectly respectable, and I like hearing contemporary songs like Darlin', Do It Again, Wake the World, Aren't You Glad, and Bluebirds Over The Mountains, but I wish there were more current songs like I Can Hear Music, Cottonfields, or Country Air, because it's hard to feel that the band is as excited about their new stuff as they could be when shackled by the need to play stuff like Barbara Ann. Wake the World and Bluebirds Over the Mountains do benefit, as the latter is freed of that atrocious screeching guitar solo and the former loses the stupid tuba backing and gains a tasteful sax and horn arrangement, but at what cost?.

The band's setlist is trapped between contemporary stuff, which by and large sounds great and fresh, and retrospective songs that sound fake-happy, to my ears. I wish they'd left the greatest hits back when they were fresh and new, or at least played them without the corny humor, because corny humor never last long, enduring only as a monument to Mike's astounding stupidity. At least there's the pretty a capella ("Which means nude") Their Hearts Were Full of Spring that has all of the gentle, intimate harmony you could ask for. Some of the other songs, like Darlin', Do It Again, Good Vibrations, and the Pet Sounds material minus Sloop John B. are first-rate, gaining a whole lot of energy from their live renditions and making you feel like the band cares deeply about their music. At certain times they truly do make you feel the love the songs were written with, particularly Carl's fantastic delivery on God Only Knows. Brian's a little out-of-tune on Don't Worry Baby, and the rest of the band isn't as confident as I'd like them to be, but I can overlook that because hey, he's crazy and he at least improves as the song goes on. The crowd digs that guitar riff too! There's just something about this album I don't like as much as they want me to. Maybe it's that Wake the World, Aren't You Glad, and Bluebirds Over The Mountains weren't wonderful songs even when cleaned up, or my own dislike of stuff like Barbara Ann, which should have gone away a long time ago. I can't justify giving this a higher grade because it simply sounds inessential to my ears. Concert is a perfect document of their early years, and its goofy childishness is somehow adorable and endearing in spite of logic telling me I should hate it. In Concert has a staggeringly good (and longer) setlist and actually sounds proud of its new material in spite of the occasional bone thrown to older fans. Live In London is the sound of a band who can't embrace its current sound and isn't allowed to ignore its past sound. Did they really feel they had to go retro this early in their career? Couldn't they at least have tried to do something novel with those old chestnuts? Yeah, I do complain too much. I should go relisten to a happy song like Wake the World again.

1. Darlin'
2. Wouldn't It Be Nice
3. Sloop John B.
4. California Girls
5. Do It Again
6. Wake the World
7. Aren't You Glad
8. Bluebirds Over The Mountains
9. Their Hearts Were Full of Spring
10. Good Vibrations
11. God Only Knows
12. Barbara Ann

This is a pretty solid album with no really bad tracks, but it also contains a lot of songs which don't strike very strong feelings in me, possibly as a result of its acrimonious production. It was originally supposed to be called Add Some Music, with an almost totally different tracklist, but after repeated record company rejections it morphed into its current form. There's some fluff, but on the whole it's probably the most reassuring-sounding album they ever made. It's commonly cited as the most band-like album of their entire catalog, since all of them contribute and help each other out, but I personally find Holland to be a better group effort. The production is now warm and smooth, just like the harmonies, which are back in full force. Dennis emerges as a great songwriter, contributing or helping out on four songs, and they're all at least interesting. He mostly concentrates on energy: Slip On Through is an almost gospel-ish Wild Honey-style upbeat song done in the old style. Got to Know the Woman is the same way with a little more roots influence to it, though its honky-tonk piano and female choir are kind of wasted on its repetitive structure. It's About Time is a great conga and guitar-dominated rocker with moving and inspirational lyrics about finding your place in the world and trying to help other people find love with a surging guitar solo and great vocal harmony crescendos at the end in a powerful climax. He also writes the incredibly moving Forever, which has been played at approximately 1 million weddings per month ever since he wrote it. It's a soft ballad with his powerful voice singing tenderly about his love for whatever woman he's talking about, totally sincere and heartfelt. Unfortunately, Bruce steps in with two of his own sap-fests. Deirdre (co-written with Brian) is filled with an obvious, platitudinous melody and simplistic chords which repel me. I'm honestly not sure why I dislike this song so strongly, but it strikes me as very insincere. Slightly better is Tears In the Morning. That song, though really just as schmaltzy and contrived, has better harmonies, better instrumentation, and feels more genuine. Even the French accordion and the Lawrence Welk strings in the middle can't take away from it, and the ending piano noodling feels really sad.

Brian still dominates the record, writing or cowriting the majority of the record. This Whole World has his trademark odd vocal bursts ("Aummm-dop-diddit") and simplistic view of love ("When girls get mad at boys and go / Many times they're just putting on a show / But when they leave / You wait alone"), but its pretty twinkling glockenspiel and harmonies make it soud harmless and innocent. Add Some Music offers every band member a turn at the lead vocal, and the universalist message helps to shake off any air of contrivance it might have. I don't mean to denigrate the works of a paranoid schizophrenic or suggest that his work is fake somehow; it really is touching how he made music to make people happy as he slipped into madness. It's just hard sometimes to take this kind of corniness seriously. Pet Sounds was easy to fall in love with because it had all of those strong feelings mixed with great songwriting, whereas the same sort of wide-eyed emotionality is starting to sound a little strange and... over-happy, if that's a word. The sentiment is fine, it's just... weird. All I Wanna Do is a beautiful ethereal love ballad that works even though Mike sings it. Mike actually sounds happy when he sings "Ooh when I sit and close my eyes", unlike on Friends, which was burgeoning with suppressed rage. The God Only Knows / Forever hybrid Our Sweet Love features Carl being similarly touching, smoothly moving the listener over the harmony and string-drenched backing with real love. If it weren't so short and it sounded a little more confident, it would be the equal of its two influences. Brian throws Al a bone by touching up the somewhat embarrassing At My Window, which has an incredibly poorly pronounced French interlude gracelessly interrupting the pretty but harmless song about a bird. What kind of demented songwriting process resulted in this? Closing up the album is Cool, Cool Water, which was based on the Smile outtake I Love to Say Da Da. It doesn't make any sense at all, except as a commercial for water, but it's a bouncy yet hypnotizing example of the band's total mastery of vocal harmonies. Does there need to be a point to the song? It's beautiful and strange, especially the spooky middle section that goes from a haunting stillness back to the happy rhythm of the first part. It's a fine closer.

1. Slip On Through
2. This Whole World
3. Add Some Music to Your Day
4. Got to Know the Woman
5. Deirdre
6. It's About Time
7. Tears in the Morning
8. All I Wanna Do
9. Forever
10. Our Sweet Love
11. At My Window
12. Cool, Cool Water

Even though 3 or 4 of these songs suck some kind of ass pretty hard, there are some amazing standouts. Completely unsurprisingly, the bad songs are courtesy of Mike and Al because they got it into their heads that their voices were as important as the band members with actual talent. In the interests of "band democracy", Dennis has no songs whatsoever on this album, despite his contributions to Sunflower, and despite the fact that he had songs written that would have gone just fine on here. So you get crap like Don't Go Near the Water, which is a lame song by the two non-Wilsons about water pollution with an incredibly annoying "water" filter on the guitarthat isn't saved by the brief harmonies right before the loud Al ranting and the unexpectedly gorgeous fade-out; it's a waste. Take a Load Off Your Feet is unbelievably stupid, with that irritating Brian voice. Who would have thought a song about taking care of your feet could suck so badly, Al? Everyone? You're right! Student Demonstration Time tries valiantly to rock, but Mike's megaphone voice and awful protest lyrics only hurt what is already painfully generic blues. Add in those mariachi horns and remember what band this is and you get a song that I always skip right over. Al's distant-sounding acoustic Lookin' at Tomorrow (A Welfare Song) at least has nice atmosphere, even if it's a little hypocritical from a rich rock star. Carl has two hits: Long Promised Road is the first good song on the album, and the first song he ever wrote, which surprises me. It's in the spirit of Break Away, but with more confusing lyrics, thanks to new manager Jack Rieley, who will offer similarly baffling lyrics to several other songs. That little bit with the shimmering doodly noises and "ooh" backing vocals is sublime, and somehow for me it sums up mid-period Beach Boys: beautiful and serene but slightly melancholy. Feel Flows, the other one, is burdened with more Rieley spiritual bullshit but has a wild, futuristic soundscape with plenty of filters and distortions, and some neat feedback guitar and wild psychedelic flute. Bruce chips in the genius nostalgia piece Disney Girls (1957), the best song he ever wrote for the band. It's a song that makes you see the quiet shaded street with the front porch and rocking chair in a small town with a newspaper to read and an American flag and apple pie and traditional values and all of that stuff. His perfect yearning vocals sound alternately old and wistful and young and enthusiastic, and the tune has the right backing harmonies, clever false stops, temporary climaxes, unexpected changes, and that whistling fade-out which make it classic.

Brian's pieces are all segregated to the end of the record, because they're all somewhat weird. A Day In the Life of a Tree seems ridiculous on first listen, because on the surface it's a ridiculous children's song about a dying tree, complete with a singer who sounds like he's been smoking two packs a day for a while (it's co-writer Rieley, who was asked to sing this song because he "sounded like a tree"). Eventually, though, this demented church hymn starts to make sense: not only is this song a metaphor for the environment as a whole, it's also a metaphor for Brian himself, realizing that the world just isn't a place where he can live anymore. Seen in that light, it's incredibly sad and moving. This ideally would hit the listener just as 'Til I Die starts up, which makes it even clearer. He KNOWS he's gone insane, and he shares that with us through this unbearably gorgeous ballad, which he allegedly wrote by playing random piano chords until he found the ones that "looked the best". The lyrics are filled with metaphors for his disintegrating mental state, and the ornate, shining harmonies are some of the best he's ever written. The quiet sadness at end of this song, repeating "These things I'll be / Until I die", is so haunting and beautiful that it almost steals best on the album away from the title track. It's a close race. Surf's Up is the very last Smile outtake and my personal choice for best Beach Boys song ever. The theme of this song is death and rebirth, though Van Dyke Parks' somewhat elliptical lyrics take some puzzling over to arrive at that conclusion. You can read the lyrics for yourself, but my take is that the surface story of a society gripped by by decadence and rigidity and then rescued by the force of youth is really a veiled metaphor for the power of modern music, which Brian, making a little joke, sets to lovely orchestration with stellar piano playing in a great example of how rock music doesn't need guitars or drums or anything - it's the spirit that matters. At the end is the Child Is Father of the Man vocal chorus which is by far the most climactic catharsis he'd been able to write yet, and it's there that I find the most power of the song. There are other versions floating around with different lead singers, maybe only a solo piano, maybe with a long orchestral intro, but this is the best, just because it most clearly embodies Brian's faith in the power of music, even though he was ruined by its creation.

1. Don't Go Near the Water
2. Long Promised Road
3. Take a Load off Your Feet
4. Disney Girls (1957)
5. Student Demonstration Time
6. Feel Flows
7. Lookin' at Tomorrow (A Welfare Song)
8. A Day in the Life of a Tree
9. ‘Til I Die
10. Surf's Up

From the very first piano notes and strange country / R&B beat of You Need a Mess of Help to Stand Alone, it's immediately clear that this is a clear departure from the previous album. This album reminds me a lot of a more mature Wild Honey. Bruce left the band, but picking up the slack are Blondie Chaplin and Ricky Fataar from the South African group The Flame. At Carl's request, Ricky takes over on drums and Blondie sings lead on plenty of songs, to Mike's displeasure. While this album definitely does not sound like The Beach Boys for the majority of the tracks, it's hard to say that any of these songs are bad. The trouble is that while a song like Here She Comes is a perfectly decent roots rocker with great soul singing, interesting Eagles-style organ, and nice slide guitar, it really belongs to some other band. In this catalog it sounds out of place. Similarly, He Come Down is a totally inappropriate gospel hymn to that transcendental meditation that some members of the band (Mike) were still involved with. Hold On Dear Brother is a COUNTRY song. Yeah, it's got a good steel guitar solo in the middle and fine country harmonies, but I want it off this record no matter how good it is. In other circumstances, I would be congratulating the band for embracing new styles and adding some diversity to their repertoire, but this just doesn't seem right.

Brian's Marcella is about a favorite masseuse of his, and it's not bad. It's got Mike on lead, and I like the aggressive soul middle eight with feedback-laden steel guitar before the sleigh bells pick up. An unjustly forgotten rocker, and we're lucky that it's good, because that's Brian's only number here. Dennis contributes two great songs. Make It Good is a swooping and dramatic love ballad, and his lone croaking voice yells out defiant love to the highly produced orchestrated background quite nicely. Cuddle Up is affecting in the same way. Dennis alone over a solo piano sings seemingly to no one, as the strings and backing vocals slowly, almost imperceptibly pick up. Normally I hate manipulative string swells with "passionate" yelps in the background, but it works here. The middle section reminds me a lot of the movie The Land Before Time when the mother dinosaur dies, maybe it's just me. In between those two, Carl is responsible for the music and Mike for the lyrics behind All This Is That, yet another TM song. The backing track will remind you very much of a less spooky Feel Flows, which works well. Some great production helps Carl's voice soar over the tag, evoking something presumably related to following Indian gurus around and giving up all your worldly possessions except for your massive royalty check every month.

1. You Need a Mess of Help to Stand Alone
2. Here She Comes
3. He Come Down
4. Marcella
5. Hold on Dear Brother
6. Make It Good
7. All This Is That
8. Cuddle Up

The rest of the band managed to rein in Blondie and Ricky for Holland, which was recorded in the country of the same name as a sort of "working vacation". It must have done the trick, because Holland is a great album that blends prog rock, pop singles, R&B, and other influences into 9 tracks that range from stunning to all right. The band's weakness had always been the lack of consistency when they all wrote their separate songs and then tossed them into a complete product, but this is where every single member (all 7!) produce songs that, while no Good Vibrations or California Girls, are still lovely and classic. Almost every song aims for a line in between art and pop – that is, between the ode to nature of The Beaks of Eagles and the simple love song of Only With You. This line is tricky because the kind of emotions you want to hit when you sing about pure psychedelia in Steamboat are not at all the same ones as when you sing about the oppression of Native Americans in The Trader. You can have songs about loneliness and perseverance such as Leaving This Town and Sail On, Sailor on the same record as cryptic love songs like Funky Pretty as long as you manage to somehow convey that you are sincere about every word of it. Holland has no embarrassing corniness, and it is entirely free of self-conscious pandering to an audience because they finally stopped worrying about the past. No one expected The Beach Boys to do Bob Dylan waltzes like Big Sur, they wanted upbeat pop rockers like California, but even California has a twist to it: it is to more normal be-proud-of-your-state songs what I Get Around is to car songs. It's a tough mix, to be sure, and that the twin handicaps of Brian's nearly comatose involvement (Sail On, Sailor has a million different co-authors and Funky Pretty has a chunky synth-heavy clockwork feel to it that isn't helped by the baffling astrology lyrics) and an empty reservoir of Smile songs didn't ensure something even more uneven than Surf's Up is amazing. Sail On, Sailor is Brian's last truly wonderful song: I can't even count how many times I've been invigorated by its simple, gentle rhythm and uplifting chorus. I know it's "only" a pop song, but where else can you find another pop song that matches its quiet soulfulness?

Steamboat is pure 1967: those mechanical sound effects with the distantly screaming slide guitar solo IS the psychedelic mindset. I can't imagine why Dennis wrote an ode to Robert Fulton, but I don't care if psychedelia was out of fashion by 1973. Mike and Al don't care either, and their contributions are the most surprising because if you had to take bets on which band members would contribute the most progressive songs to the Beach Boys canon, you sure as hell wouldn't bet on the guys who wrote At My Window and Transcendental Meditation. But the mini-concept album has some of the most powerful moments on the record, once you get used to the novelty, and it is definitely one of the most cohesive mini-suites I've ever heard. Big Sur's campfire harmonicas and slide guitars have a spine-tinglingly slow transition into The Beaks of Eagles's lonely mountain flute and piano, and the Robinson Jeffers poem about the conflict between humanity's restless progressive spirit and the slow, quiet march of nature is brilliant. The catchy single California shoves California Girls' bassline and Cool, Cool Water's "Get yourself in that cool, cool water" chorus into a country stomp, which adds a litle variety at the suite's climax and still continues the nature theme, plus it rocks! After that, Carl's angry and insistent denunciation of the mistreatment of the Indians by European settlers in The Trader reminds me of why I liked Feel Flows so much, and it even has more weird mystical Jack Rieley lyrics. Blondie and Ricky toss up a weird R&B / progressive hybrid that is just about their only creative input , but Leaving This Town has both a great R&B beat and a Moog solo that approaches Pink Floyd's Any Colour You Like for abstract prettiness. Even the "worst" 2 songs on Holland (Dennis' Only With You and Brian's Funky Pretty) are not too bad. The former is a sincere-sounding love song that is just a little slow and syrupy for me, and I thought its ending was a little ambiguous. Funky Pretty is merely too weird for its own sake and a harbinger of the synth nightmare of Love You, but it has a decent near-dance beat and a nice outro. They're slightly diappointing after all those great songs, but the rest is a great mix of the kind of joyful pop fun of their early days with actual serious lyrics in a more satisfying package. This is easily the best album since Pet Sounds in terms of giving off that kind of shining and beautiful songwriting that used to be their trademark, and one can only wish that they'd stopped making albums here.

1. Sail On, Sailor
2. Steamboat
3. Big Sur
4. The Beaks of Eagles
5. California
6. Trader
7. Leaving This Town
8. Only With You
9. Funky Pretty

This is their best out of 3 official live releases for a few reasons: it has a good setlist, with a fair mix of hits and more obscure songs; it features renditions of the songs that are fresh and energetic enough so that it doesn't feel like they should have just gone onstage and pressed play on a CD; and last but not least, Mike Love mostly shuts up! Yes, there are the old crowd-pleaser numbers (California Girls, Help Me, Rhonda, Surfer Girl, Don't Worry, Baby, Surfin' USA, Fun, Fun, Fun), which I'm not too happy about - those all receive treatments not far shy of the studio originals that nullify my complaints. Or that the Boys' voices are not the immaculate harmonies you have come to expect (Sloop John B., You Still Believe In Me, Caroline No) - true, but songs like Surfer Girl and Don't Worry Baby make up for them. An additional protest could be lodged that the band's vocals are mixed a little low and on occasion the instruments threaten to overwhelm their voices - it's true, but the musicianship here is so good (for them, anyway) that you hardly notice. Plus, if you wanted studio-quality vocals, why not listen to the studio versions? There's also some overlap with the last live album, which is a drag, though it is interesting to compare the changes in stuff like Wouldn't It Be Nice and hear what a difference the years made. You could even add in the feeling that the backing band, while super-professional, sounds a little bit TOO professional sometimes, as if this was another day, another dollar on the road with The Beach Boys. I disagree with that assessment: I think the arrangements are really groovy and ALIVE. Take Sail On, Sailor, for instance. It is as rocking a version as you could ever hope for, mixing the original patient soulfulness of the song perfectly with a wailing Hammond and a driving rhythm section. I'm not sure what else you could expect from the song in a live context. It beats Brian Wilson's solo live versions by a long shot for energy and shows the band as relaxed, confident, and proud of their new material which might not exactly be racing up the charts but is in no way bad. You are listening to a band that has gone from top of the world to being unfairly ignored, but they don't hold a grudge.

There's a lot of fun and energy here which shines through in almost every song. I can't see how the band for this album is any less dedicated to the music than they were for Live In London, which had that blaring and sometimes inappropriate horn section. In Concert is loose, free, and - dare I say it? - funky at times. At worst, songs like The Trader or Darlin' are merely very similar to the studio versions. But songs like Leaving This Town, Heroes and Villains, Funky Pretty, Let the Wind Blow, and even Good Vibrations get substantial changes when let loose onstage, and always in an interesting way. Hell, old songs like Help Me, Rhonda get mutated radically to the point where you would swear you were listening to a samba band! Are these changes any good? I miss the prominent harmonies of Live In London where the band was at least at the forefront of the sound, but it's kind of like with their studio stuff: the backing tracks usually get overshadowed by their voices, and here you get to hear how the band can actually play their instruments - with a little help from their touring band, of course. The band has been playing songs like Surfer Girl (which they nail flawlessly) for a decade now, I would like to hear some changes, some growth. You get to hear the band's growth and maturity on this album in a way that isn't on Live In London. The youthful hyperspeed of Concert was great and I loved it, but I also like the little funk intro to Funky Pretty; it shows that the band knows this material and can stretch it around. Honestly, the only way this concert could be better in my eyes would be if they had played Holland straight through as if they were touring to support the album. At least they included Blondie and Ricky's great anti-apartheid single We Got Love, which was dumped for Sail On, Sailor on Holland. I could ask for more contemporary songs (Feel Flows? Surf's Up? Forever?) but I have few problems with the songs that are here. Plus, even those moldy oldies like Fun, Fun, Fun are kind of, well, fun. Their best live album!

1. Sail On Sailor
2. Sloop John B.
3. The Trader
4. You Still Believe In Me
5. California Girls
6. Darlin'
7. Marcella
8. Caroline No
9. Leaving This Town
10. Heroes and Villains
11. Funky Pretty
12. Let the Wind Blow
13. Help Me, Rhonda
14. Surfer Girl
15. Wouldn't It Be Nice
16. We Got Love
17. Don't Worry, Baby
18. Surfin' USA
19. Good Vibrations
20. Fun, Fun, Fun

Smile is a tough album to wrap your head around. Part of that is due to its being released nearly 40 years after it was first written, and part of that is due to the source material. This music was written in little bits and snatches and then shuffled around until something in Brian Wilson's mind went "click!" and a song came out, or didn't come out. His inability to finish the project in the 60s was due to a loss of faith in himself, his band, and his music – ironic for an album that was supposed to be a "teenage symphony to God". To be fair, his ambition was staggering: Smile was to blend a history of America, philosophy of life, elemental mysticism, music as spiritual enlightenment, and the traditional Beach Boys commercial appeal in a single record. Pet Sounds had failed to sell as well as Brian hoped, so this record was to re-focus on the sunny, happy feelings that had propelled Good Vibrations to the top of the singles charts, neatly bring the band back into widespread popularity at the same time as its far-out arrangements and grooviness would appeal to the burgeoning Summer of Love crowd. 40 years later, we can see the result of this vision, and it is something of a cosmic tragedy that such a potentially epochal album had to wait until the age of ironic hipsterism to see the light of day. Smile (and all of Brian's work from Pet Sounds on) has absolutely nothing to do with irony or any other type of humor derived from cynicism. The very first song is a legitimate prayer, which was as unhip in the days of LSD and free love as it is now. The fact that Smile's underlying religiosity is no less fervent than Tommy or All You Need Is Love or any other "hipper" record of the time is erased now, when the sanitizing effects of four decades enable a fresh view of The Meaning of It All. While I sometimes cringe at the sense of humor that spawns stuff like Barnyard, the idea of making an album that conceptually unifies the sunny feel-good spirit of their earlier music with the intricate carftsmanship that went into Pet Sounds must have been a powerfully attractive vision. The 2004 version does not completely align with Brian's half-forgotten, half-unwritten original intention, but thanks to his backing band's love of the music and his newly cleaned-up mental state (though his voice has seen better days), enough shines through to make this a wholly remarkable album that presents a completely different picture of the world than what was going on in other centers of musical innovation at the time.

It's broken into 3 sections: Americana, Cycle of Life, and The Elements, though those are not coherent, exclusive thematic sections by any means, as songs meander through cross-references and the whims of Brian's drug-addled mind. The album's single most noticeable feature, aside from his aged vocals, is its staggering diversity, which begs to be compared to the contemporary work of The Beatles. While not digressing from the subject too far, in my opinion the incredible array of musical styles, arrangements, lyrical topics, and emotional tone on Smile far outstrips that of its illustrious "competitor", Sgt. Pepper's. The loose carnival feel of the Lennon/McCartney is actually very similar in many ways, but their opus pales next to a canvas that spans the American continent in its idiosyncratic half-poetic, half-childish fervor. You have the c