The Other Lost Beach Boys Album, And Lesser Music From Great Bands
Welcome to the latest edition of All the Music of All the World, our weekly series where we aim to share music worth being passionate about. Consider us a guide who can help you get the most out of your Victrola by giving you new music to listen to, or new ways to think about music you already know.
I’ve often been drawn to the “lesser” albums in artists’ discographies. I’m not talking the Miles Davis rap album: I’m talking the albums either on an artist’s way up the ladder or down, when things don’t really work in ways they expected them to. The albums where—may it be hubris, or drugs, or creative burnout, or an artistic turn that doesn’t quite work—things are not connecting into a 5-star classic, a universally beloved LP, Grammys, accolades, a 33 1/3 book in indie retailers.
I’m talking about Harry Nilsson’s Son of Schmilsson and A Little Touch of Schmilsson in the Night, the two albums he made after his masterpiece, Nilsson Schmilsson. He’d achieved everything he wanted—Grammys, recognition, he was friends with the Beatles—but he was still sad, still unfulfilled, and still ended up divorced. He made Son of Schmilsson, a worthy divorce canon album, and put the original f-word in the album’s best song’s chorus, dooming the album to never have a hit. When given another chance to follow up Nilsson Schmilsson, he delivered A Little Touch, the album that invented the “rock star doing standards” genre that Rod Stewart would dominate 30 years later, but which is maybe the most punk thing Nilsson could have done at the time. He made a stunning, beautiful album of old Hoagy Carmichael songs instead of making a rock album. It rules. It’s here:
I love listening to In Through the Out Door, the Zeppelin album made largely by John Paul Jones and Robert Plant, as John Bonham and Jimmie Page dealt with alcoholism and heroin, respectively. The Willie Nelson albums from the early ‘70s when RCA gave up on him, the Booker T. solo albums when he quit the M.G.’s, Bob Dylan’s Christian rock albums, Bob Dylan’s Frank Sinatra covers albums…you get the point.
Of all of the classic rock legends with albums like I’m describing, the Beach Boys probably have the most legendary. Owing to the volatile genius and volatile mental health of leader Brian Wilson—and the relative unreliability of basically everyone else in the group minus Al Jardine and Carl Wilson—the group was constantly starting and abandoning full albums, constantly feuding with record labels about said albums, and constantly feuding with each other about the relative merits of those albums.
The most famous of those was SMILE, the original follow-up to the Boys’ 1966 masterpiece Pet Sounds. The lead single from the album came to fruition—“Good Vibrations”—but the album itself was shelved, and instead replaced by Smiley Smile, an album that was stripped down and less audacious than the planned original, as the band members and their father manager worried Brian was taking too long to make the version of the album he heard in his head. The original was sprawling, stitched together, and complex, something the rest of the band thought Brian could never finish even if they gave him more years. The album was eventually “finished” in 2004, when Brian released a version of the album that he “completed” in the early ‘00s.
But there’s another “lost” album in the Beach Boys oeuvre: Adult/ Child. Originally intended for a 1977 release, the album came at the end of a period of renewed creative energy from Brian that is captured in a new box set called We Gotta Groove: The Brother Studio Years. Collecting three albums the group made at their own studio before selling it off, it offers a snapshot of a band flailing in the wind, trying to work out their inspiration more than 15 years after they first broke through. It’s not their best album, but it’s got the allure that albums that don’t quite work have: you can hear where it might have gone wrong.
After struggling with his mental health and an acid habit in the late ‘60s, and after the Beach Boys became primarily a nostalgia act on the charts—their iconic Endless Summer compilation was a massive seller when it first came out in 1974—the Wilsons formed Brother Records, their own label. Alongside the label, they launched Brother Studios in Santa Monica, meant as Brian’s home base for him to work on the band’s studio material while the rest of the band toured regularly. First, Elton John recorded both Caribou and Blue Moves there, while the Boys worked on their 20th album, 15 Big Ones. It was billed as Brian’s first album back with the band in years, and it was the first album since Pet Sounds—and first since the death of his tormentor, his dad Murry—that Brian produced entirely himself. 15 Big Ones was originally going to be an oldies cover record, but when the band couldn’t agree on which songs to cover, they started writing their own. The album tanked, and the band regrouped and recorded The Beach Boys Love You, an album that centered the synthesizer and also flopped, even if Brian Wilson considered it his favorite Beach Boys album.
This is where Adult/Child enters. The 22nd Beach Boys album was envisioned by Brian as an exploration of the two parts of the mind: the adult side, and the child side he felt lived in everyone. What this meant thematically is harder to pin down, but musically it meant that the synth explorations of Love You were replaced by a sometimes schmaltzy big band feel. But when that sound works—on “It’s Over Now,” a devastating, “I’ve seen everything and I’m about done” ballad that hinges on Wilson’s then-weathered voice—it stands with some of the best music in the Beach Boys’ catalog.
Recorded mostly by Brian, a huge grip of hired guns on strings, and his brothers Carl and Dennis, the album—as presented on the box set—doesn’t quite work, but it crackles with a nervous, self-reflective energy I couldn’t stop listening to. You hear why Mike Love and Al Jardine—at this point, functionally just the lead singers in the touring, nostalgia-heavy version of the Beach Boys—bristled at the idea that they’d have to bring this song cycle out on the road. It’s hard to imagine Mike Love crooning “I’ve made some mistakes today” on “Still I Dream of It” in between “Surfin USA” and “Barbara Ann.” It’s hard to imagine any Beach Boys concert going postal to the Randy Newman-esque “It’s Trying to Say.” Jardine and Love rioted, the label blanched, and the album was shelved.
At the same time Brian was toiling away on Adult/Child, his brother Dennis was working on his own solo album, Pacific Ocean Blue, a bruised, depressive classic. That album—Dennis’ only solo album released when he was alive—carried with it the lived experiences Dennis had that his brothers never experienced: he was, after all, the only Wilson who actually surfed, and was the one who was hanging out with Charles Manson when the Beach Boys were California’s premiere LSD consumers. Adult/Child sounds like an album of a guy figuring out if what’s inside his head makes life worth living, and if there’s still something left. Pacific Ocean Blue sounds like a guy hitting the end of the road and realizing he made a ton of mistakes, but it’s too late to do anything about them. Might as well just drift off into the ocean. They’re weirdly the two sides of a self-exploration coin.
All of this to say: I think the thing that appeals to me most about the three albums in We Gotta Groove is that it shows that genius is not a constant state and that even our greats are just normal people, figuring out how to make it to their next big moment. That moment might never come, but if you don’t try, it definitely won’t.
-- Andrew Winistorfer
