Favorite Beach Boys Records

20 Big Ones

My All-Time Favorite Beach Boys Records

by Gary Pig Gold

With our beloved Biggest Brother Brian having just celebrated his 82nd (!) Birthday, smack dab there on the first day of endless summer 2024, I thought it high time and tide indeed to take a brief overview of some of the man’s indisputable classics; the ones which have been spinning most frequently of late on the ol’ Pig Player, that is…

A wet, wild and totally wonderful Call To Arms for the barefooted legions of West Coast beach trash, both real and imagined: This is one of the band’s first, and best signposts towards the fabled, mythical Land of California (“Four Seasons, you BETTER believe it!”)

A rich, evocative B. Wilson melody swirling beneath lyrics of loss, pain and remorse (composed in the wake of the JFK assassination): One of an absolute wealth of Beach Boy recordings which continue to grow and mature ever so gracefully with age.

This was the very first Beach Boys record I ever owned: Not a bad way to start off one’s collection, no?

Their initial album of ’65, Beach Boys Today is rightfully recognized as the beginning of the band’s most creative period (no doubt due to the fact that Brian had just retired himself from roadwork). This all-but-lost rocker from vinyl Side One finds the band scaling Phil Spector’s Wall of Sound brick-for-sonic-brick, with more than compelling results. Turn that clock Back To Mono, I say!

Revengefully tacked, as if by mere afterthought, onto the end of the Summer Days album, this exercise in barbershop-quintet-from-hell vocalizing takes on all sorts of new, ominously macabre undercurrents in light of Father Murry’s horrific child-rearing practices.

Capitol Records, and no doubt at least three actual Beach Boys, flew into a downright panic when this eccentric “Little Girl” failed to hit the Top 10 in the autumn of ’65. Solution? Throw out the ragtag Beach Boys’ Party! version of “Barbara Ann” as a quickie-as-possible substitute. Result? One of the band’s biggest international hits EVER (Sheesh… go figure!) proving, I do suppose, that the dreaded Dumbing Way Down of the B. Boys’ (mass) audience began long, long before “Kokomo” first put them on Cruise control.

You mean you DON’T have your copy yet?!!

What is really left to be said about this, one of the greatest recordings of all time? Proof of its durability: The “Good Vibes” have duly survived countless subliminal appearances on radio and TV hawking soda pop, cupcakes and low-fat butter substitutes (not to mention several decades of abuse on-stage at the hands of Mike Love & Co.) But somehow still, this song continues to ring out strong, bold and true in its original, and forever best, incarnation. They simply do NOT make records like this anymore.

As the intended cornerstone of The Great Lost SMiLE (not to mention follow-up single to the aforementioned “Vibrations” monster), this poor disc could never even attempt to live up to its utterly undue expectations. But listened to today, it reveals itself to be one of the most subtly clever inventions the Boys ever concocted. (Also extremely recommended is the 1973 live recording off The Beach Boys In Concert).

Had that SMiLE album actually managed to come out a half year before a certain Pepper, this is but one of a dozen examples therein proving The Beach Boys were easily, musically and vocally, light-years ahead of all other players then on the field …yes, and that includes Messrs. Lennon and McCartney. The melody of this song in particular is unquestionably without precedent in the annals of (pop) music history.

More often than not, Beach Boys lyrics mean, and say much, much more beneath the surface than mere sun, fun and surf: Listen closely to this gem, for example, and you’ll hear actual directions to Brian Wilson’s late-Sixties Bel Air pad!

Those beached boys needed a hit – BAD – during this low-point in their career (can you believe a concert in New York City drew only 200 paying customers that summer?!!) So Mike Love took a trip back to the beach, Brian discovered a great new drum-loop effect (several decades before those Brothers Dust), and Voila! A Top 20 Triumph circa “Tip Toe Through The Tulips”!

Metaphorically sending a message to their ex-employers, the Boys ended their initial contract with Capitol Records with this stunning if seldom-heard single (with lyrics purportedly by father figure Murry!) Check out the great footage floatin’ all round the www wherein Mike Love (not war) dedicates an early performance of this ditty in Prague, Czechoslovakia to none other than anti-Communist rabble-rouser Alexander Dubcek.

When Carl became the second Beach Boy to forever drift away, the band was dealt a crippling blow from which it never fully recovered. “I Can Hear Music” was, unbelievably, the youngest Wilson’s very first attempt at record production, and somehow, someway, he deftly made this original Ronettes number practically his own. Ahh, my… Rest in peace, sweet young Carl.

Casting about for a fresh lyrical collaborator in the wake of Pet Sounds, Brian turned to Hollywood boy wonder Van Dyke Parks, and this landmark composition was supposedly the result of their very first night’s work together. An auspicious beginning to say the least, and one of the truly great Beach Boy creations.

True, Brian may have gone into hiding for a few years ’way back when, but he’d never fail to regularly send out little phonographic “messages” to his fans and followers the world over. This message however, snuck onto Side Two of the Surf’s Up album, sounded like nothing short of a musical suicide note. Powerful, disturbing… and uniquely magical, as only Brian Wilson can be.

In one of the band’s greatest (of several dozen) marketing disasters, their Carl and the Passions – So Tough album was first released as a double-LP set, packaged alongside the first-ever Pet Sounds re-issue. Of course, So Tough was made to sound all the more wobbly when placed next to their 1966 masterpiece. Nevertheless, its one redeeming factor was “Marcella,” a stirring, zither-driven stomper originally composed by Brian in honor of one of his favorite Sunset Strip masseuses. …no, Really!

When The Beach Boys decided to relocate to the Netherlands for a spell in order to write and record their Holland album, Brian was of course hijacked from his room and (speaking of disasters) forced to come along. Naturally out of sorts, wiped on apple sap and wallowing in Randy Newman’s Sail Away platter, Brian composed a marvelous suite of tunes which, slyly disguised as a children’s fairy tale, told the sad, autobiographical story of a man abandoned by his muse. Cut from the final album’s line-up by forces untold (all you need is Love), it was eventually pressed up onto seven-inch EPs and included with the album’s first pressings. Needless to say, it shuts every other sound on the Dutch debacle down …WAY down.

This snap-happy little-single-that-couldn’t was supposed to provide the band with their first (self-composed) hit in a decade, and was even the theme song of their legendary Summer of ’76, SNL-produced television special (wherein Officers Aykroyd and Belushi hauled a bathrobe-clad Brian out of bed and into the cold, cruel waters of the nearby Pacific). Of course, this first of several ill-fated “Brian is Back!” campaigns backfired severely, but this song remains one of the Boys’ coolest ever records: Grab some headphones and start picking it apart vocally sometime for some real fun!

The late, very very great Dennis Wilson has gotten criminally short shrift insofar as musical appreciation is concerned: This beauty (originally from the band’s unreleased Merry Christmas album), along with such other wonders as “Fourth of July,” “Slip On Through” and “Be Still,” so obviously reveal a tunesmith as inventive as Brian himself, yet with a heart perhaps even more fragile. Dennis, truth be told, embodied the very persona of “Beach Boy,” both physically and emotionally, and as such it was perhaps fitting he finally succumbed to the sea mere miles from the Wilsons’ Hawthorne, California homestead – a childhood house where, it seemed a million years earlier, this entire magnificent story-in-song had begun.

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