Bicentennial Beach Boys

Like several of its predecessors, the latest 50th-anniversary Beach Boys box is part album reissue, part vault excavation. The three-disc We Gotta Groove: The Brother Studio Years (Capitol) begins with all 35 minutes of The Beach Boys Love You (recorded mostly in 1976) then burrows into previously unreleased outtakes, the majority of the unreleased Adult/Child album, alternate mixes, alternate takes, backing tracks, and demos—73 tracks in all. It’s both fascinating and frustrating for the same reason: In ’76 and ’77, the Beach Boys were a hot mess.

Outwardly, they were more popular than they’d been in a decade, riding the wave of the nation’s bicentennial as a venue-filling live act and as the band responsible for the bestselling compilations Endless Summer and Spirit of America. Inwardly, they were riven by drugs, booze, infighting, and, in Brian Wilson’s case, mental struggles. As a result, they were finding it hard to record new music worthy of their legacy.

In some ways, the challenge was the same as it had been since Pet Sounds. Mike Love wanted the group to record hits while Wilson, whose ability to fathom or to care about the expectations of contemporary radio was practically nil, just wanted to express himself. That he was doing so under pressure from Warner Bros., his bandmates, and eventually his domineering therapist Eugene Landy guaranteed that the results would be unconventional to say the least.

The first fruits of this duress were the mixture of oldie covers and originals constituting 1976’s ramshackle but occasionally inspired 15 Big Ones (the subject of the first dozen tracks on We Gotta Groove’s third disc). The second fruits were 1977’s The Beach Boys Love You (the subject of Disc 1), which set lyrics reflecting Wilson’s emotionally stunted takes on life and love to inexplicably catchy melodies leavened by synthesizers. Cute, charming, pathetic, funny, and sad—sometimes all at once—the album rapidly earned the euphemism “cult classic,” i.e., a work so out of step with its time almost no one bought it.

The follow-up, Adult/Child (nine tracks of which open Disc 2), was even more unfashionable, and Warner Bros. or various Beach Boys or both kept it under wraps. But here’s where the story gets interesting: Heard nearly 50 years after its creation, a lot of Adult/Child, especially the four selections orchestrated by the Four Freshmen arranger Dick Reynolds, sounds really good.

The addled silliness to which Wilson often defaulted hadn’t disappeared entirely. (We Gotta Groove spares us the notorious “Hey Little Tomboy.”) But in pieces such as “Still I Dream of It” and “It’s Over Now”—the former composed with Frank Sinatra in mind—Wilson achieved a haunting beauty unlike anything that he’d ever done before or would ever do again. The karaoke potential of the backing-tracks mixes is a bonus.