Beach Boys ‘We Gotta Groove’ Boxed Set Revives Cult Love for Classic ‘Love You’ Album: Producers and Engineers Tell What Went Down in the ‘Brian’s Back’ Era
Any new boxed set in the series of Beach Boys compendiums that have been released sequentially over the years has been highly anticipated by hardcore fans. Now, with the newly released “We Gotta Groove: The Brother Studio Years,” the band’s mid-1970s archives are being explored in a 3-CD, 3-LP set, which delves into a period that encompasses two officially released albums, “15 Big Ones” and “The Beach Boys Love You,” plus an additional project that never saw the light of day, “Adult/Child.” These are artifacts for cultists, to be sure, but how big is the clique that has been waiting to hear all this unvaulted material?
“Universal really put some muscle into this one,” Howie Edelson, one of the producers of the collection, said in introducing a Grammy Museum program that took place on the eve of its release last week. “This is not an easy sell, this boxed set.”
…or is it?
Well, of course it couldn’t have been a simple pitch in a board room — no boxed set is, in 2026, least of all one devoted to half-century-old material that mostly didn’t sell well in the first place. But “We Gotta Groove” was a very easy sell to the group’s most devoted cadre of fans, who sold out the initial allotment of the set online almost immediately after it was announced and went on sale in January. That sellout created a minor panic among the empty-handed faithful, until it was announced that there would be a second edition, which will ship on March 20, a little more than a month after the initial Feb. 13 release date. (Don’t worry, it’s also on streaming, with no delayed gratification.)
If anyone was shocked by how demand outstripped supply with this set, the irony was inescapable. “The Beach Boys Love You,” released in 1977, was loved by a certain cadre of fans when it first came out, but it was also a significant commercial bomb, peaking at a paltry No. 53 on the Billboard 200, coming off of “15 Big Ones,” a top 10 success. They could barely give the LPs away in bargain bins in the years that followed, but now, a $130 set that appeals primarily to people who really, really, really care about “Love You” is so popular it can’t be kept in stock even for a day. Good news: The Beach Boys still love you! — and Beach Boys devotees still love vindication, in whatever belated form it comes.
The Grammy Museum’s program brought together six producers and engineers who worked on this material — then, or now — followed by a climactic cameo appearance by Mike Love. Participating from the original sessions were Earle Mankey, the first engineer at Brother Studio in the 1970s; John Hanlon, the second engineer for those same recordings; and mastering engineer Jeff Peters, who first put the mixes to vinyl. Joining them from the current Beach Boys team were historian, producer and writer Edelson; producer and mixing engineer James Sáez and band archivist Alan Boyd, who’s credited with “artistic direction” on the new set.
This will hardly be the last chance anyone has to celebrate “The Beach Boys Love You” publicly. Upcoming at L.A.’s United Theater on Feb. 27 will be the first full-length performance of that album by anyone directly associated with the Beach Boys, as Al Jardine and the Pet Sounds Band (formerly Brian Wilson’s touring band) will play the album in its entirety after a series of recent tour dates in which they did most but not quite all of “Love You.” (In the audience for the Grammy Museum event were members of the Wilson/Jardine band, including Darian Sahanaja and Jim Laspesa.)
A quick warning that there will be some biased reporting here: I am among that strange sliver of fans who considers “Love You” to be my third favorite Beach Boys album — after “Pet Sounds,” and after any given version of “Smile” that was cobbled together after the fact… and there are some days, and maybe even some years, where “Love You” moves to the top of the list. Which, inevitably, translates into it being one of my favorite albums of all time. It’s a hard obsession to explain, when the ’77 effort can be characterized as the group’s rawest-sounding project, and “raw” is not necessarily what most people come to the Beach Boys for. But the combination of the usual musical sophistication with some unusual rough edges is part of what makes it a singularly fascinating entry in the canon. It’s no wonder to me that there is a younger generation that might prefer this to more polished Beach Boys works generally. While all five members’ voices are featured, the writing and instrumentals are largely Brian Wilson as a synth-crazed, one-man Wrecking Crew, indulging in delightfully DIY auteurism that we never got from him quite like this, prior or since.
While “Love You” is my primary interest/obsession, as it is for many fans, I found myself also loving the set for the chance to explore more deeply the projects that bookended “Love You” on either side — the overtly commercial “15 Big Ones,” and overtly uncommercial “Adult/Child” — and what they, too, represent about Brian’s and the band’s always roller-coaster journey. Taken in whole, this period was an oasis of creativity for Wilson in-between long stretches of inactivity that preceded and followed it, so even the minor misfires are fascinating; the absolute gems contained within the entry and exit points of Brian’s 1970s flourishing feel all the more precious. There is a narrative there…
Here’s how the panelists told the story at the Grammy Museum, obviously with more of a focus on what was happening in Brother Studio, and secondary guessing at what was happening in Brian’s not always permeable head.
As Edelson set up the backstory: “In 1973, the Beach Boys had purchased a porn theater in Santa Monica [at 1454 5th St.]. This was Dennis’ idea, and it was gut-renovated and redesigned and repurposed by Steven Moffitt… and they made this place their professional home till February ‘78. This was the only time the Beach Boys ever had a professional studio that was open to the public. … In the interim, they made some incredible music that’s finally gotten its due… all recorded at this space. What I’ve always loved about this music is that Brian Wilson came back, and although people were expecting him to come back as the 1965 hitmaker Brian Wilson, Brian came back as Brian Wilson 1976, and it was not the same guy. It was not the striped-shirt Brian. But this music was just as real, just as authentic as ‘Smile’ was, as ‘Pet Sounds’ was. It was Brian being real and giving you what he had at the moment.
“And for someone who was supposedly housebound and bedridden and doing nothing — which wasn’t true — Brian came back and in 15 months or so recorded about 40 songs… He had help finishing it through Carl, but he came back and made a ton of music, producing original songs, covers, other band members… Mike and Al and Carl and Dennis had been working on a followup to (1973’s) ‘Holland’ — they were all writing and recording songs — and once Brian came back, they all stepped back and let Brian lead, and it was the first time he had been back as the producer officially in eight years. It marks the last time that records ever bore the credit ‘produced by Brian Wilson.’ So this is a really special period. And a whole new generation has taken to it like nothing else.”
But the beginnings of Wilson’s creative renaissance weren’t exactly entirely organic. An infamous “Brian’s back!” campaign was set in motion by the record company … deeply complicated by the fact that Brian didn’t want to be back.
“The Beach Boys were behind on their contract,” explained Edelson. “There was no followup to ‘Holland.’ Capitol [the group’s former label] wisely put out ‘Endless Summer,’ which Mike helped program and, unlike every other greatest hits, brought a new career to them. The Beach Boys had already gotten back to the point where they were selling out Madison Square Garden on their AOR cred and this dynamite live show. And then all of a sudden a whole new generation gets this compilation and it starts getting played on AM radio, where kids like me are hearing the Beach Boys for the first time. It changed the game. And Warner Bros. is looking at their own diminishing returns and essentially says to this band, ‘Where’s our Brian Wilson classic album?’ Brian rises to the occasion … He had he said to me, ‘I said I would, and I did.’ There’s just something to that work ethic, and this wasn’t just his band, this was his family. And it was like, ‘OK, now’s the time. Now I have to go back to work.’”
Begrudgingly, apparently, for a while. “At one point he said, ‘I just don’t have the fire anymore,’” remembered Earle Mankey, who served as first engineer during this period. “Whatever lit him on fire to do all of that stuff in the past, he didn’t have that… When I started working with him, Stephen (Moffitt) told me, ‘Well, Brian would much rather be out in his woody with his buddies, smoking dope and driving down the boulevard.’
Said John Hanlon, who worked as second engineer, “When he came back in, Brian wasn’t really user-friendly in terms of wanting to be around a bunch of people at all — anybody, even his brothers. Brian didn’t really seem like he wanted to be there. … Carl, Dennis, Al and Mike, all of ’em were just completely solidly behind ‘Let’s support Brian.’ I didn’t see any ego whatsoever. I saw the other four guys in the band in complete support for their elder brother, their writer, their genius. It was selfless, like, ‘What do we gotta do to make our brother shine and to bring him out of his shell one more time?”
Added Mankey, “’15 Big Ones’ was like the whole crowd — everybody from the olden days. The Wrecking Crew, they were there, and the room was packed from side to side. Brian came in and looked around; luckily he didn’t turn around and run the other direction. That was Brian working really fast, doing those songs in a very short time. But that’s a lot different than the things later on where he was in the studio writing songs.”
The idea, as explained in the boxed set’s liner notes, was to record covers of some oldies, to ease Brian back into the process, with at least some thoughts of eventually releasing a separate covers album and a full record of Brian originals, if they got ‘em. His writing muse returned, as hoped, and the camp around him thought they had the beginnings of a full-fledged return to greatness after all. But then Brian announced that the album was done, and they were left with a record that was neither fish nor fowl.
Yet it was a hit, thanks in part to one of those covers that not everyone was excited about. At the Grammy Museum, Mike Love was happy to defend the hit single that came out of “15 Big Ones” — the last really major one the Beach Boys would have before “Kokomo” in 1988. “That was actually a pretty fun album to work on for me,” he told the audience. “Because I told my cousin, ‘Brian, we did pretty good with “Surfing USA,” which was paraphrasing “Sweet Little 16.” Why don’t we do “Rock and Roll Music”?’ The Beatles did ‘Rock and Roll Music.’ Chuck Berry certainly wrote it, but we did our own version that was kind of quirky and it went top 5. That’s not bad.”
As the new archival project shows, there were more solid covers left on the cutting room floor, like a very solid Al Jardine-sung “Shake, Rattle and Roll.” But part of the mission of the part of the boxed set that commemorates “15 Big Ones” was to show that some of the cut that did make the album had more fascinating arrangements than were apparent in the mix that made it onto LP at the time.
“There was a rush to get that album out, and I wish you hadn’t had to rush it out,” said Edelson to Mankey and Hanlon, “because there was a definite deadline, and if there had been more time, I think more stuff would’ve sounded like what it sounds like now. Because you recorded it incredibly well, and there’s so much there that’s just brought to life. What you did, (Alan) Boyd, with ‘Chapel of Love’ — it’s like little pieces of Eden are popping up, and you couldn’t hear it on vinyl. And now to hear ‘Just Once in My Life’ sounding like this… when you hear that track now, it’s the definitive moment of those sessions.”
Said Boyd, “One of the things that one of the participants told me 25 years ago, and I can’t remember exactly who it was now, was that at the time of the mixdown of ‘15 Big Ones,’ there was a bit of an effort to dial down the eccentricities of Brian’s arrangements, so it would sound a little bit more normal for 1976. And in a way, that’s why one of my greatest thrills on this project was working with James (Sáez) on remixing a couple of those tracks.” But Boyd — the band archivist who is credited with “artistic direction” on the new collection — is not going to make the case that this album is an unsung masterpiece. “I mean, ‘15 Big Ones,’ when that came out, was very much a mixed bag for me. Some of it I thought really worked; I particularly liked ‘Just Once in My Life,’ and (the original song) ‘Had to Phone Ya’ might be one of the the greatest backing tracks that Brian ever recorded— it is so delicate and there’s so many layers…
“But,” said Boyd, “I mean, I hate to say it, but there were times on ‘15 Big Ones’ when it sounded like the Beach Boys were trying to imitate the Beach Boys.”
No one in recorded history would ever make that accusation about the offbeat classic that very shortly followed, “The Beach Boys Love You.”
Boyd explained to the Grammy Museum how hearing the album hit him as a Beach Boys-obsessed kid. “People who know me well know that I’ve been obsessed with the Beach Boys’ music from a very young age, literally 5 years old,” Boyd said. “By the time I was 6 or 7, I was getting things like ‘20/20’ when they came out. … And I still vividly remember what it was like being a fan of 1977 when ‘The Beach Boys Love You’ came out. Because I rode down to the record store on my bike, got that album, took it home, listened to it, and I had never heard a record that sounded like that — before or since. It completely blew my mind. The musical textures, the synth basses going from the left and the right, the Hammond B3 organs, the tack pianos, the very rough vocals, which had a lot of texture… And the songs, well, they were some of the silliest lyrics I’d ever heard in my life! You know, ‘Roller Skating Child,’ ‘Mona,’ a song about Johnny Carson, a song about the solar system. But the music behind it was incredible and very deep and very complex, and that record just blew my mind.
“As it turned out,” Boyd continued, “there were three albums that came out that year, all from Brother Studios. The first was ‘Love You.’ And then there was this album by Ricci Martin, Dean Martin’s son, called ‘Beached,’ that was produced by Carl and Billy Hinsche and had some very eccentric musical textures going on with it that I really wanted to pick apart and see how did they do that. And then ‘Pacific Ocean Blue,’ Dennis Wilson’s solo album, which is I just think another sonic masterpiece, and another record that didn’t sound like anything I’d ever heard before or since. And I was convinced that Brother Studio was this just absolutely magical place.”
“It was!” Hanlon quickly piped in.
Whatever muse had shown up only intermittently for Brian during the “15 Big Ones” sessions had now moved in for a serious residency, with the most explosive writing burst he’d had since “Smile” was abandoned. The peculiarity of some of the lyrics — representing the only times Wilson basically wrote an album’s worth of words on his own — is part of the charm of “Love You,” along with the one-and-done Moog-iness of the project. But what was clear was that the key to getting a whole record’s worth of material out of Wilsonwas to take the pressure off and leave him to his own devices, for hours on end. Some of that burst can be heard in the solo demos included on the boxed set.
Said Hanlon, “There was a point where Steven Moffitt told me to blend into the woodwork, which was easy for me. There was a Nakaamichi wall cassette recorder, and he said, ‘Just set up one mic on the piano and one on Brian’s vocal and get out of there. Don’t interrupt him, no matter what. If he daydreams, if he walks away from it, just leave him alone.’ And anybody who knows working with Brian knows that’s exactly what you do. We used 120-minute cassettes and I left never walked in that studio, once he started playing on these writing sessions.
“He would be doing three-part harmony and get hung up on the fourth (part), so he’d go sit down at the piano and play another song, like ‘Help Me, Rhonda’ or something. Most engineers would make a stupid mistake of opening their ego-ed mouth and go, ‘Brian, we’re working on this.’ But that’s how he came up with the fourth or fifth part in his head, while he was working on something else. He’d clear his head, go back over to the mic and all of a sudden there’s the third, fourth and fifth. He was a genius, even though he couldn’t elucidate speech-wise to you what he was trying to do.”
Wilson is alone on those solo demos, apart from one moment that stands out to Edelson. “He’s playing ‘I’ll Bet He’s Nice’ to Mike for the first time, and you hear Mike give like a whoop — a holler — and you hear Brian just get filled with this little bit of joy. Like ‘I’m being heard and there’s kindness being shown to me.’ And he starts playing a little stronger and he starts singing a little better. It’s such a great moment,” said Edelson. “You know, there’s a lot of issues with family bands, but nobody loves you like your family. And in those demos, when you hear Mike giving him that love, when Brian’s a tentative guy as it is, and he’s playing new songs, just getting that is one of the highlights on the whole box for me.”
The result of this creative overflow: something you can edge your way toward calling a pop masterpiece, if a masterpiece can feel modest and minimalistic, have a high degree of mirth, and be very, very Moog-y.
Although “Love You” is sometimes thought of as nearly a Wilson solo album — the supposed original title was going to be “Brian Wilson Loves You” — that’s not nearly fair, and not just because of how evenly Brian dispersed the lead vocals among band members once he brought them into his vision. Boyd noted how crucial Carl was to the final product. “When the ‘Love You’ album came out, on the record label, there was a credit I’d never seen before,” he noted. “It says ‘produced by Brian Wilson; mixdown producer Carl Wilson.’ When I was 15 years old, I didn’t quite understand what that meant. But many years later, after thoroughly examining and dissecting the multitracks, I have come to understand what it was that Carl brought to the mixdown process.
“On a lot of those songs, Brian just sort of recorded them full-stop, all-out, all the way through. Carl was making choices in terms of what not to include in the mix, to give it some dynamics. And that’s one of the things about ‘Love You’ that I’ve always loved, that I now realize that Carl brought to the finished project.” That process continues even now on the boxed set, with a new mix of “Mona” — arguably the most monotonous song on the original album — that now has peaks and valleys built in.
And then, inevitably, after the adorkable weirdness of “Love You,” things got weird in a somewhat less satisfying way with the aborted “Adult/Child” project. It’s a mongrel of a lost album — or shards of it, anyhow — that few cultists, even, would say should have come out in the late ‘70s. Yet it does include some of the best songs Wilson wrote in that decade (which previously came out on other boxed sets), and some intriguing curios (some of which are previously unreleased).
“Well, it was like three albums in one,” Edelson told the audience, not necessarily meaning that as a compliment. “There were big band songs…” Not a typo there. “…and these ‘Love You’-like songs where it’s the Wilson brothers. And they brought in a Mike outtake and they brought an Al outtake in, and all of a sudden it was an album. And I think everybody kind of realized that, that although this is a collection of songs — and, albeit, some brilliant — it’s not an album. And that’s, I think, where its destiny lie.”
Mastering engineer Jeff Peters recalled getting the recordings and being puzzled. “So, coming off of ‘Love You,’ which is just this incredible thing, the ‘Adult/Child’ tapes come in. I put it up and the first thing is ‘Life is for the Living’” — one of the aforementioned “big band”-style songs — “and it’s like, oh my God. It was super weird… But, getting through the rest of the record, I mean, ‘Still I Dream of It’ — what an amazing cut. ‘It’s Over Now’ — I mean, wow. It was just a shock hearing it for the first time.”
Said Boyd, “Brian brought in the old Four Freshmen arranger, Dick Reynolds, to do full orchestral charts on these, and we pulled the multis, and James has done these new instrumental mixes of the orchestral tracks behind ‘Still I Dream of It,’ ‘It’s Over Now’ and (the old standard) ‘Deep Purple.’ And James, I had tears in my eyes listening to this the first time, because you’ve uncovered all this musicality that was kind of lost in the old mix, buried underneath the vocals” on the bootlegs that have circulated. “It’s beautiful. It’s incredibly delicate.”
With “Adult/Child” being consigned to the scrap heap — with another 50 years to pass before fans got an authorized listen to some of the scraps — Brian dropped the creative leadership mantle he’d taken on. It wouldn’t be until a little more than a decade later that there would another groundswell of “Brian’s back” enthusiasm, this time surrounding his celebrated 1988 solo album debut.
But the Beach Boys as a unit were anything but inactive in the immediate wake of the “Adult/Child” fizzle. Even though Brother Studio would not be sold until ’78, most of the group decamped to Maharishi International University in late ’77 to make the Jardine-co-produced “M.I.U. Album,” which had Brian still on board for vocals and co-writes, but as a team player, not leader.
Most of the Grammy Museum event proceeded as a producers-and-engineers panel, with Love’s appearance saved for the very end. When he was brought out, Love launched into a 12-minute stream-of-consciousness monologue that touched on the Brother Studio years represented in the boxed set, but also events stretching back to him and Brian bonding over music while attending youth group at Angeles Mesa Presbyterian Church.
“He’d come over to my house in his Nash Rambler, and we’d get kicked outta my house because my dad had to get up so early to go to work at Love Sheet Metal, where I was an apprentice at one time,” recalled Love. “The Nash Rambler had the feature of the seats going down, so we laid back and listened to all the R&B stations in L.A. and we’d listen to our Everly Brothers. … We loved doo-wop. We loved Chuck Berry. We loved Little Richard. You name it, we loved it.
“And so when I wrote this song, ‘Brian’s Back’…” He recited the lyrics. “They say that Brian’s back / Well, I’ve known him for oh so long / Well, they say that Brian’s back / Well, I never knew he that he was gone / But still they say Brian’s back / Well, I know he’s had his ups and downs / Well, they say Brian’s back / But in in my heart, he’s always been around.’
“’Brian’s Back’ was a campaign for a record company, but it was far more than that for all the rest of us. I mean, we witnessed him get to 312 pounds. We were all worried about his mortality… and anxious about Brian’s well-being to the point where he spent a fortune with someone who overstepped his bounds as a therapist. But nonetheless… he kept him alive. Dr. Eugene Landy came in and got him down into the 180s, 190s, swimming a mile a day at Pepperdine University. Brian went so through so much to literally get back.”
Love turns 85 next month, and his soft-spoken manner in his museum soliloquy was touching to many of those in the audience, even some of those not normally inclined to favor his point of view on disputes that have been part of Beach Boys lore over the decades.
“I mean, there’ve been differences and terrible things that have happened and lifestyle choices that were terrible, ultimately, to many,” Love said. “But it’s always been about love, and with me, about trying to accentuate the positive. This evening, tonight, is ridiculously positive. It’s kind of miraculous, in a way, that there would be an interest in a period of time and a group of songs that never saw the light of day until now… We did all get together and support Brian in whatever ways we could. And I just had nothing but love for Brian, for the other guys, and for the music, and all the people that have worked on our music.”
He referred to the “M.I.U.” album that came after the music in the boxed set, saying, “That was an attempt to get out of town, going to Maharishi International University, because there were too many temptations in town. We felt, being in Iowa, maybe that would be a better thing health-wise…”
“That’s gonna be the next box set,” said Edelson.
“Oh gosh, really?” said Love, sounding surprised. “Oh my goodness.”
A boxed set that moves from “Brian’s back” back into the “Brian’s a little bit checked out” era may not have the same natural appeal to devotees as a “Love You”-centric collection… and if there are any songwriting demos of “Kokomo” to be had, we’ll be having them. Any time there’s material to be unearthed from the archives, the hardcore will be there to tell the rights-holders: Do it again.
“Universal really put some muscle into this one,” Howie Edelson, one of the producers of the collection, said in introducing a Grammy Museum program that took place on the eve of its release last week. “This is not an easy sell, this boxed set.”
…or is it?
Well, of course it couldn’t have been a simple pitch in a board room — no boxed set is, in 2026, least of all one devoted to half-century-old material that mostly didn’t sell well in the first place. But “We Gotta Groove” was a very easy sell to the group’s most devoted cadre of fans, who sold out the initial allotment of the set online almost immediately after it was announced and went on sale in January. That sellout created a minor panic among the empty-handed faithful, until it was announced that there would be a second edition, which will ship on March 20, a little more than a month after the initial Feb. 13 release date. (Don’t worry, it’s also on streaming, with no delayed gratification.)
If anyone was shocked by how demand outstripped supply with this set, the irony was inescapable. “The Beach Boys Love You,” released in 1977, was loved by a certain cadre of fans when it first came out, but it was also a significant commercial bomb, peaking at a paltry No. 53 on the Billboard 200, coming off of “15 Big Ones,” a top 10 success. They could barely give the LPs away in bargain bins in the years that followed, but now, a $130 set that appeals primarily to people who really, really, really care about “Love You” is so popular it can’t be kept in stock even for a day. Good news: The Beach Boys still love you! — and Beach Boys devotees still love vindication, in whatever belated form it comes.
The Grammy Museum’s program brought together six producers and engineers who worked on this material — then, or now — followed by a climactic cameo appearance by Mike Love. Participating from the original sessions were Earle Mankey, the first engineer at Brother Studio in the 1970s; John Hanlon, the second engineer for those same recordings; and mastering engineer Jeff Peters, who first put the mixes to vinyl. Joining them from the current Beach Boys team were historian, producer and writer Edelson; producer and mixing engineer James Sáez and band archivist Alan Boyd, who’s credited with “artistic direction” on the new set.
This will hardly be the last chance anyone has to celebrate “The Beach Boys Love You” publicly. Upcoming at L.A.’s United Theater on Feb. 27 will be the first full-length performance of that album by anyone directly associated with the Beach Boys, as Al Jardine and the Pet Sounds Band (formerly Brian Wilson’s touring band) will play the album in its entirety after a series of recent tour dates in which they did most but not quite all of “Love You.” (In the audience for the Grammy Museum event were members of the Wilson/Jardine band, including Darian Sahanaja and Jim Laspesa.)
A quick warning that there will be some biased reporting here: I am among that strange sliver of fans who considers “Love You” to be my third favorite Beach Boys album — after “Pet Sounds,” and after any given version of “Smile” that was cobbled together after the fact… and there are some days, and maybe even some years, where “Love You” moves to the top of the list. Which, inevitably, translates into it being one of my favorite albums of all time. It’s a hard obsession to explain, when the ’77 effort can be characterized as the group’s rawest-sounding project, and “raw” is not necessarily what most people come to the Beach Boys for. But the combination of the usual musical sophistication with some unusual rough edges is part of what makes it a singularly fascinating entry in the canon. It’s no wonder to me that there is a younger generation that might prefer this to more polished Beach Boys works generally. While all five members’ voices are featured, the writing and instrumentals are largely Brian Wilson as a synth-crazed, one-man Wrecking Crew, indulging in delightfully DIY auteurism that we never got from him quite like this, prior or since.
While “Love You” is my primary interest/obsession, as it is for many fans, I found myself also loving the set for the chance to explore more deeply the projects that bookended “Love You” on either side — the overtly commercial “15 Big Ones,” and overtly uncommercial “Adult/Child” — and what they, too, represent about Brian’s and the band’s always roller-coaster journey. Taken in whole, this period was an oasis of creativity for Wilson in-between long stretches of inactivity that preceded and followed it, so even the minor misfires are fascinating; the absolute gems contained within the entry and exit points of Brian’s 1970s flourishing feel all the more precious. There is a narrative there…
Here’s how the panelists told the story at the Grammy Museum, obviously with more of a focus on what was happening in Brother Studio, and secondary guessing at what was happening in Brian’s not always permeable head.
As Edelson set up the backstory: “In 1973, the Beach Boys had purchased a porn theater in Santa Monica [at 1454 5th St.]. This was Dennis’ idea, and it was gut-renovated and redesigned and repurposed by Steven Moffitt… and they made this place their professional home till February ‘78. This was the only time the Beach Boys ever had a professional studio that was open to the public. … In the interim, they made some incredible music that’s finally gotten its due… all recorded at this space. What I’ve always loved about this music is that Brian Wilson came back, and although people were expecting him to come back as the 1965 hitmaker Brian Wilson, Brian came back as Brian Wilson 1976, and it was not the same guy. It was not the striped-shirt Brian. But this music was just as real, just as authentic as ‘Smile’ was, as ‘Pet Sounds’ was. It was Brian being real and giving you what he had at the moment.
“And for someone who was supposedly housebound and bedridden and doing nothing — which wasn’t true — Brian came back and in 15 months or so recorded about 40 songs… He had help finishing it through Carl, but he came back and made a ton of music, producing original songs, covers, other band members… Mike and Al and Carl and Dennis had been working on a followup to (1973’s) ‘Holland’ — they were all writing and recording songs — and once Brian came back, they all stepped back and let Brian lead, and it was the first time he had been back as the producer officially in eight years. It marks the last time that records ever bore the credit ‘produced by Brian Wilson.’ So this is a really special period. And a whole new generation has taken to it like nothing else.”
But the beginnings of Wilson’s creative renaissance weren’t exactly entirely organic. An infamous “Brian’s back!” campaign was set in motion by the record company … deeply complicated by the fact that Brian didn’t want to be back.
“The Beach Boys were behind on their contract,” explained Edelson. “There was no followup to ‘Holland.’ Capitol [the group’s former label] wisely put out ‘Endless Summer,’ which Mike helped program and, unlike every other greatest hits, brought a new career to them. The Beach Boys had already gotten back to the point where they were selling out Madison Square Garden on their AOR cred and this dynamite live show. And then all of a sudden a whole new generation gets this compilation and it starts getting played on AM radio, where kids like me are hearing the Beach Boys for the first time. It changed the game. And Warner Bros. is looking at their own diminishing returns and essentially says to this band, ‘Where’s our Brian Wilson classic album?’ Brian rises to the occasion … He had he said to me, ‘I said I would, and I did.’ There’s just something to that work ethic, and this wasn’t just his band, this was his family. And it was like, ‘OK, now’s the time. Now I have to go back to work.’”
Begrudgingly, apparently, for a while. “At one point he said, ‘I just don’t have the fire anymore,’” remembered Earle Mankey, who served as first engineer during this period. “Whatever lit him on fire to do all of that stuff in the past, he didn’t have that… When I started working with him, Stephen (Moffitt) told me, ‘Well, Brian would much rather be out in his woody with his buddies, smoking dope and driving down the boulevard.’
Said John Hanlon, who worked as second engineer, “When he came back in, Brian wasn’t really user-friendly in terms of wanting to be around a bunch of people at all — anybody, even his brothers. Brian didn’t really seem like he wanted to be there. … Carl, Dennis, Al and Mike, all of ’em were just completely solidly behind ‘Let’s support Brian.’ I didn’t see any ego whatsoever. I saw the other four guys in the band in complete support for their elder brother, their writer, their genius. It was selfless, like, ‘What do we gotta do to make our brother shine and to bring him out of his shell one more time?”
Added Mankey, “’15 Big Ones’ was like the whole crowd — everybody from the olden days. The Wrecking Crew, they were there, and the room was packed from side to side. Brian came in and looked around; luckily he didn’t turn around and run the other direction. That was Brian working really fast, doing those songs in a very short time. But that’s a lot different than the things later on where he was in the studio writing songs.”
The idea, as explained in the boxed set’s liner notes, was to record covers of some oldies, to ease Brian back into the process, with at least some thoughts of eventually releasing a separate covers album and a full record of Brian originals, if they got ‘em. His writing muse returned, as hoped, and the camp around him thought they had the beginnings of a full-fledged return to greatness after all. But then Brian announced that the album was done, and they were left with a record that was neither fish nor fowl.
Yet it was a hit, thanks in part to one of those covers that not everyone was excited about. At the Grammy Museum, Mike Love was happy to defend the hit single that came out of “15 Big Ones” — the last really major one the Beach Boys would have before “Kokomo” in 1988. “That was actually a pretty fun album to work on for me,” he told the audience. “Because I told my cousin, ‘Brian, we did pretty good with “Surfing USA,” which was paraphrasing “Sweet Little 16.” Why don’t we do “Rock and Roll Music”?’ The Beatles did ‘Rock and Roll Music.’ Chuck Berry certainly wrote it, but we did our own version that was kind of quirky and it went top 5. That’s not bad.”
As the new archival project shows, there were more solid covers left on the cutting room floor, like a very solid Al Jardine-sung “Shake, Rattle and Roll.” But part of the mission of the part of the boxed set that commemorates “15 Big Ones” was to show that some of the cut that did make the album had more fascinating arrangements than were apparent in the mix that made it onto LP at the time.
“There was a rush to get that album out, and I wish you hadn’t had to rush it out,” said Edelson to Mankey and Hanlon, “because there was a definite deadline, and if there had been more time, I think more stuff would’ve sounded like what it sounds like now. Because you recorded it incredibly well, and there’s so much there that’s just brought to life. What you did, (Alan) Boyd, with ‘Chapel of Love’ — it’s like little pieces of Eden are popping up, and you couldn’t hear it on vinyl. And now to hear ‘Just Once in My Life’ sounding like this… when you hear that track now, it’s the definitive moment of those sessions.”
Said Boyd, “One of the things that one of the participants told me 25 years ago, and I can’t remember exactly who it was now, was that at the time of the mixdown of ‘15 Big Ones,’ there was a bit of an effort to dial down the eccentricities of Brian’s arrangements, so it would sound a little bit more normal for 1976. And in a way, that’s why one of my greatest thrills on this project was working with James (Sáez) on remixing a couple of those tracks.” But Boyd — the band archivist who is credited with “artistic direction” on the new collection — is not going to make the case that this album is an unsung masterpiece. “I mean, ‘15 Big Ones,’ when that came out, was very much a mixed bag for me. Some of it I thought really worked; I particularly liked ‘Just Once in My Life,’ and (the original song) ‘Had to Phone Ya’ might be one of the the greatest backing tracks that Brian ever recorded— it is so delicate and there’s so many layers…
“But,” said Boyd, “I mean, I hate to say it, but there were times on ‘15 Big Ones’ when it sounded like the Beach Boys were trying to imitate the Beach Boys.”
No one in recorded history would ever make that accusation about the offbeat classic that very shortly followed, “The Beach Boys Love You.”
Boyd explained to the Grammy Museum how hearing the album hit him as a Beach Boys-obsessed kid. “People who know me well know that I’ve been obsessed with the Beach Boys’ music from a very young age, literally 5 years old,” Boyd said. “By the time I was 6 or 7, I was getting things like ‘20/20’ when they came out. … And I still vividly remember what it was like being a fan of 1977 when ‘The Beach Boys Love You’ came out. Because I rode down to the record store on my bike, got that album, took it home, listened to it, and I had never heard a record that sounded like that — before or since. It completely blew my mind. The musical textures, the synth basses going from the left and the right, the Hammond B3 organs, the tack pianos, the very rough vocals, which had a lot of texture… And the songs, well, they were some of the silliest lyrics I’d ever heard in my life! You know, ‘Roller Skating Child,’ ‘Mona,’ a song about Johnny Carson, a song about the solar system. But the music behind it was incredible and very deep and very complex, and that record just blew my mind.
“As it turned out,” Boyd continued, “there were three albums that came out that year, all from Brother Studios. The first was ‘Love You.’ And then there was this album by Ricci Martin, Dean Martin’s son, called ‘Beached,’ that was produced by Carl and Billy Hinsche and had some very eccentric musical textures going on with it that I really wanted to pick apart and see how did they do that. And then ‘Pacific Ocean Blue,’ Dennis Wilson’s solo album, which is I just think another sonic masterpiece, and another record that didn’t sound like anything I’d ever heard before or since. And I was convinced that Brother Studio was this just absolutely magical place.”
“It was!” Hanlon quickly piped in.
Whatever muse had shown up only intermittently for Brian during the “15 Big Ones” sessions had now moved in for a serious residency, with the most explosive writing burst he’d had since “Smile” was abandoned. The peculiarity of some of the lyrics — representing the only times Wilson basically wrote an album’s worth of words on his own — is part of the charm of “Love You,” along with the one-and-done Moog-iness of the project. But what was clear was that the key to getting a whole record’s worth of material out of Wilsonwas to take the pressure off and leave him to his own devices, for hours on end. Some of that burst can be heard in the solo demos included on the boxed set.
Said Hanlon, “There was a point where Steven Moffitt told me to blend into the woodwork, which was easy for me. There was a Nakaamichi wall cassette recorder, and he said, ‘Just set up one mic on the piano and one on Brian’s vocal and get out of there. Don’t interrupt him, no matter what. If he daydreams, if he walks away from it, just leave him alone.’ And anybody who knows working with Brian knows that’s exactly what you do. We used 120-minute cassettes and I left never walked in that studio, once he started playing on these writing sessions.
“He would be doing three-part harmony and get hung up on the fourth (part), so he’d go sit down at the piano and play another song, like ‘Help Me, Rhonda’ or something. Most engineers would make a stupid mistake of opening their ego-ed mouth and go, ‘Brian, we’re working on this.’ But that’s how he came up with the fourth or fifth part in his head, while he was working on something else. He’d clear his head, go back over to the mic and all of a sudden there’s the third, fourth and fifth. He was a genius, even though he couldn’t elucidate speech-wise to you what he was trying to do.”
Wilson is alone on those solo demos, apart from one moment that stands out to Edelson. “He’s playing ‘I’ll Bet He’s Nice’ to Mike for the first time, and you hear Mike give like a whoop — a holler — and you hear Brian just get filled with this little bit of joy. Like ‘I’m being heard and there’s kindness being shown to me.’ And he starts playing a little stronger and he starts singing a little better. It’s such a great moment,” said Edelson. “You know, there’s a lot of issues with family bands, but nobody loves you like your family. And in those demos, when you hear Mike giving him that love, when Brian’s a tentative guy as it is, and he’s playing new songs, just getting that is one of the highlights on the whole box for me.”
The result of this creative overflow: something you can edge your way toward calling a pop masterpiece, if a masterpiece can feel modest and minimalistic, have a high degree of mirth, and be very, very Moog-y.
Although “Love You” is sometimes thought of as nearly a Wilson solo album — the supposed original title was going to be “Brian Wilson Loves You” — that’s not nearly fair, and not just because of how evenly Brian dispersed the lead vocals among band members once he brought them into his vision. Boyd noted how crucial Carl was to the final product. “When the ‘Love You’ album came out, on the record label, there was a credit I’d never seen before,” he noted. “It says ‘produced by Brian Wilson; mixdown producer Carl Wilson.’ When I was 15 years old, I didn’t quite understand what that meant. But many years later, after thoroughly examining and dissecting the multitracks, I have come to understand what it was that Carl brought to the mixdown process.
“On a lot of those songs, Brian just sort of recorded them full-stop, all-out, all the way through. Carl was making choices in terms of what not to include in the mix, to give it some dynamics. And that’s one of the things about ‘Love You’ that I’ve always loved, that I now realize that Carl brought to the finished project.” That process continues even now on the boxed set, with a new mix of “Mona” — arguably the most monotonous song on the original album — that now has peaks and valleys built in.
And then, inevitably, after the adorkable weirdness of “Love You,” things got weird in a somewhat less satisfying way with the aborted “Adult/Child” project. It’s a mongrel of a lost album — or shards of it, anyhow — that few cultists, even, would say should have come out in the late ‘70s. Yet it does include some of the best songs Wilson wrote in that decade (which previously came out on other boxed sets), and some intriguing curios (some of which are previously unreleased).
“Well, it was like three albums in one,” Edelson told the audience, not necessarily meaning that as a compliment. “There were big band songs…” Not a typo there. “…and these ‘Love You’-like songs where it’s the Wilson brothers. And they brought in a Mike outtake and they brought an Al outtake in, and all of a sudden it was an album. And I think everybody kind of realized that, that although this is a collection of songs — and, albeit, some brilliant — it’s not an album. And that’s, I think, where its destiny lie.”
Mastering engineer Jeff Peters recalled getting the recordings and being puzzled. “So, coming off of ‘Love You,’ which is just this incredible thing, the ‘Adult/Child’ tapes come in. I put it up and the first thing is ‘Life is for the Living’” — one of the aforementioned “big band”-style songs — “and it’s like, oh my God. It was super weird… But, getting through the rest of the record, I mean, ‘Still I Dream of It’ — what an amazing cut. ‘It’s Over Now’ — I mean, wow. It was just a shock hearing it for the first time.”
Said Boyd, “Brian brought in the old Four Freshmen arranger, Dick Reynolds, to do full orchestral charts on these, and we pulled the multis, and James has done these new instrumental mixes of the orchestral tracks behind ‘Still I Dream of It,’ ‘It’s Over Now’ and (the old standard) ‘Deep Purple.’ And James, I had tears in my eyes listening to this the first time, because you’ve uncovered all this musicality that was kind of lost in the old mix, buried underneath the vocals” on the bootlegs that have circulated. “It’s beautiful. It’s incredibly delicate.”
With “Adult/Child” being consigned to the scrap heap — with another 50 years to pass before fans got an authorized listen to some of the scraps — Brian dropped the creative leadership mantle he’d taken on. It wouldn’t be until a little more than a decade later that there would another groundswell of “Brian’s back” enthusiasm, this time surrounding his celebrated 1988 solo album debut.
But the Beach Boys as a unit were anything but inactive in the immediate wake of the “Adult/Child” fizzle. Even though Brother Studio would not be sold until ’78, most of the group decamped to Maharishi International University in late ’77 to make the Jardine-co-produced “M.I.U. Album,” which had Brian still on board for vocals and co-writes, but as a team player, not leader.
Most of the Grammy Museum event proceeded as a producers-and-engineers panel, with Love’s appearance saved for the very end. When he was brought out, Love launched into a 12-minute stream-of-consciousness monologue that touched on the Brother Studio years represented in the boxed set, but also events stretching back to him and Brian bonding over music while attending youth group at Angeles Mesa Presbyterian Church.
“He’d come over to my house in his Nash Rambler, and we’d get kicked outta my house because my dad had to get up so early to go to work at Love Sheet Metal, where I was an apprentice at one time,” recalled Love. “The Nash Rambler had the feature of the seats going down, so we laid back and listened to all the R&B stations in L.A. and we’d listen to our Everly Brothers. … We loved doo-wop. We loved Chuck Berry. We loved Little Richard. You name it, we loved it.
“And so when I wrote this song, ‘Brian’s Back’…” He recited the lyrics. “They say that Brian’s back / Well, I’ve known him for oh so long / Well, they say that Brian’s back / Well, I never knew he that he was gone / But still they say Brian’s back / Well, I know he’s had his ups and downs / Well, they say Brian’s back / But in in my heart, he’s always been around.’
“’Brian’s Back’ was a campaign for a record company, but it was far more than that for all the rest of us. I mean, we witnessed him get to 312 pounds. We were all worried about his mortality… and anxious about Brian’s well-being to the point where he spent a fortune with someone who overstepped his bounds as a therapist. But nonetheless… he kept him alive. Dr. Eugene Landy came in and got him down into the 180s, 190s, swimming a mile a day at Pepperdine University. Brian went so through so much to literally get back.”
Love turns 85 next month, and his soft-spoken manner in his museum soliloquy was touching to many of those in the audience, even some of those not normally inclined to favor his point of view on disputes that have been part of Beach Boys lore over the decades.
“I mean, there’ve been differences and terrible things that have happened and lifestyle choices that were terrible, ultimately, to many,” Love said. “But it’s always been about love, and with me, about trying to accentuate the positive. This evening, tonight, is ridiculously positive. It’s kind of miraculous, in a way, that there would be an interest in a period of time and a group of songs that never saw the light of day until now… We did all get together and support Brian in whatever ways we could. And I just had nothing but love for Brian, for the other guys, and for the music, and all the people that have worked on our music.”
He referred to the “M.I.U.” album that came after the music in the boxed set, saying, “That was an attempt to get out of town, going to Maharishi International University, because there were too many temptations in town. We felt, being in Iowa, maybe that would be a better thing health-wise…”
“That’s gonna be the next box set,” said Edelson.
“Oh gosh, really?” said Love, sounding surprised. “Oh my goodness.”
A boxed set that moves from “Brian’s back” back into the “Brian’s a little bit checked out” era may not have the same natural appeal to devotees as a “Love You”-centric collection… and if there are any songwriting demos of “Kokomo” to be had, we’ll be having them. Any time there’s material to be unearthed from the archives, the hardcore will be there to tell the rights-holders: Do it again.