The Lawn Boys' Malaise Years Dept.

In this heirloom double-header FoamFeature™, Steve Shark and FT3 pick through the Beach Boys' Malaise Years, finding some treasure in the flotsam and jetsam.

Steve Shark opines:

 "I'm practically a member of the band...Brian's got the talent to make the music...he's the creator. The other band members are just performers. So I'm the one who's making the album."

Yet one more egomaniacal quote from Murry Wilson?

Nope.

That was Brian Wilson's psychologist Eugene Landy in 1985, when interviewed about the new album "The Beach Boys". He got songwriting co-credits for all the Brian songs on it, although he lost them (hooray!) later. The whole Wilson/Landy saga is so convoluted that I'm not even going to try to begin to describe it. The above quote will have to suffice for now.

Out of all the band's recorded output, it's probably one of the Beach Boys' albums I'd have least wanted to claim any credit for because it's an absolute turkey. With some tracks using synths for everything instrumental, as well as uninspired and uninspiring material, its sales showed what Joe Public thought of it - #52 in the Billboard 200 and #60 in the UK Top 100 album chart. The vocals are great, with Carl, Brian, Mike, Al and Bruce all singing really well, but there's not a snowball's chance in hell of them saving "California Calling" - a "Surfin' USA" clone that sucks more than a sucking sucker which sucks. If it wasn't the Beach Boys, it'd be a cruel parody. Even the cover art is shite.

1985 was also the year of Live Aid and the Beach Boys duly took part, delivering a performance that was lacklustre, quite frankly. Mike Love's lead vocals, in particular, were poor and even his harmonies were way off at times. It was a chance to make a global comeback just two years after Dennis' death, and a golden opportunity to promote their new album, but it proved to be just one more mediocre chapter in the band's career at that time.

Although the band carried on gigging, just 4 more studio albums were released after that. "Still Cruisin'" (1989) was moderately successful but mostly a repackaging of music that had been used in films. 1992's "Summer in Paradise" sold less than 1000 copies on its first day of release and the poor sales contributed to its distribution company going bankrupt. Almost inevitably the downward spiral continued with "Stars and Stripes Vol. 1", which featured guest vocals on a mixture of the guests' songs and old Beach Boys hits. It was the last studio album to feature Carl, and it's a blessing that Volume 2 never appeared. To quote one critic, it was an "unmitigated disaster". 2012 saw the release of the last Beach Boys studio album "That's Why God Made the Radio", with the return of David Marks for one track, but it was better received this time. It was their highest charting studio album since 1965's "Summer Days (And Summer Nights!!) - not that its content was anywhere remotely near as good.

So, a mere 4 studio albums since 1985's "The Beach Boys", although a staggering 50+ assorted live, archive and repackaged hits albums over the same time frame.

Tryin' to keep the summer alive.

Even the following year was an arid period for Beach Boys fans - but there was one glittering gem amongst all those turds in the mid 1980s, and what a gem it was!

"California Dreamin'" (yes, *that* California Dreamin') was a one-off single produced by Terry Melcher in 1986 and, to my ears, surpasses the original by considerably more than a few country miles.

It's a fairly simple arrangement, with prominent bass and drums, but the real icing on the cake is several tracks of gorgeous electric 12-string from ex-Byrd Roger McGuinn. I'm assuming it's all Rog [he gets the credit - Ed.], it sounds like it, although some could be BB session regular Jeff Foskett. There's also an acoustic 12 string guitar, possibly a synth pad adding ambient body to the overall sound, tambourines, and two brief sax solos - player unknown. It concludes with McGuinn's Rick 12 chiming during the fade. The vocals, as ever, are sublime and it's quite simply a stunning track - right up there with the very, very best that the band ever recorded.

It has a real goosebump moment for me. The first beat of the fourth bar of McGuinn's solo has him playing a note (a sharpened 9th over the root minor chord for music buffs) that sounds so discordant but works so beautifully. One of his very finest moments ever.

The video for the track is well worth seeing, too:

Shot in black and white, it's a sombre take on the whole California vibe, as befits the lyrics. There's Brian, Carl, Mike, Al and Bruce dressed for the winter weather going into a large church, with Papa John Phillips playing the rather saturnine looking priest, and also miming to the sax solo. McGuinn makes an appearance on the balcony playing his Rick and the camera zooms right in to his trademark tinted granny glasses during the solo. There's also Mama Michelle Phillips in the video who fades in and out - as do John P, McGuinn and the five Beach Boys themselves. So, they're all apparitions, It's interesting to ponder why the Beach Boys go into the church seemingly solid but when leaving it, they fade away to nothing.

It's all very bleak and almost like a funeral service without someone dead to mourn, or even some sort of black mass. At one point, a close up of Brian [above - Ed.] shows a quite chilling expression that's a million miles away from sunny California.  All in all, quite, quite remarkable.

"California Dreamin'" stiffed (no pun intended), only reaching #52 in the US charts and failing to enter the UK charts altogether. It got an album release later that year on a hits collection which went platinum, although I doubt it was down to the inclusion of the single.

FT3 avers:

I *cough* curated Low Tide [alternate cover, left - Ed.] a while back because there's a few late Beach Boys albums that even I, a broken man too tough to cry, avoid like beached jellyfish during my bathrobe stumbles along the ocean's edge. Albums I don't even own in digital form, whose titles I cannot bring myself to utter, so gravid are they with Lovecraftian horror. But I wanted to keep the few good-to-great songs from this period, and this gathering thereof came out surprisingly swell, given the disparate (and shit) sources, and the collection gets mucho kudos down at fabled Imaginary Friends Tiki Hut®.

If you were prescient enough to download it antecedently, do it again, on account which it's now got California Dreamin', which Steve reckons is not only better than the original (*splutter*) but as good as Good Vibrations (*choke*). Of particular note are the superior Kokomo and Somewhere Near Japan, both benefitting from John Phillips' participation, but the whole album's a simple pleasure, if you're in the market for that kind of thing - and nobody is, in these doomscrolling times in which we're living in. Forgiving the 'eighties production values is easier, and more rewarding, than you might think. It's the songs. And the singing. It's The Beach Boys. Even the borderline insulting Brian's Back (thanks, Mike) is saved by an ear-worm verse and a swooning chorus with Carl at his most angelic. The synthetics and generics and the corny lryics are everywhere redeemed by tunes and singing only these guys could come up with.

It means you can skip gaily from LA Light Album, assuming you've already gathered your skirts and vaulted over MIU, to That's Why God Made The Radio, scooping up Low Tide with a beachcomber's beady-eyed glee. 

Incidentally, some of Steve's opinions in the above screed make my sunken cheeks color with unreasoning anger, and if he were here I'd beat him about the head and shoulders with a bag of glass noodles. But I'm a professional, so I rise above it.

This post made fungible thru' catering services from Arnie's Kup O' Kake©, Pismo Beach CA, - "when a cupcake just ain't enough!™"