'The Beach Boys Love You'

While during the summer of 1976, The Beach Boys publicity machine was insisting that "Brian Is Back", Rolling Stone Magazine assigned journalist David Felton to interview Brian Wilson and document his return to the limelight in a cover story ultimately titled "The Healing Of Brother Brian". The article revealed the complexities involved with Brians return the official marketing campaign was largely overlooking with extensive interviews with Brian and his publicity seeking therapist Dr. Eugene Landy. Much of the descriptions of Landy and his oversight of Brians life and therapy tactics were quite disturbing to say the least. While the article did close on a semi-optimistic note emphasizing that Brian was once again writing songs for future Beach Boys albums. Fortunately, by the end of 1976 Dr. Landy was fired by The Beach Boys management due to his fees eating into the group's profits and with Brian in relatively good enough shape to no longer require Landy's services.

While many recording artists are equally proficient at both composing songs as well as writing lyrics such as Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, James Taylor, Jackson Browne, Joni Mitchell and more recently Taylor Swift, there are also musicians who can compose songs but whose lyrical ability leaves much to be desired. The most obvious example of this is Sir Elton John who has famously created melodies to lyrics provided by his longtime collaborator, Bernie Taupin as well as occasionally other lyricists such as Gary Osborne, Judy Tsuke, Tom Robinson and Tim Rice.

No one would question Brian Wilson's ability to create beautiful melodies as well as his gift for harmony and instrumental arrangements and in fairness he did write the lyrics to early hits such as "Surfin, U.S.A" with the aid of a list of surfing spots provided by his Girlfriend's brother as well as "borrowing" the tune of Chuck Berry's "Sweet Little Sixteen", and "Surfer Girl" on in 1963, It is clear that he felt that by collaborating with lyricists such as bandmate and cousin, Mike Love, Gary Usher, Roger Christian, Tony Asher and Van Dyke Parks' their abilities in turning his ideas into words surpassed his own and obviously it yielded great results. So, as we will see with the songs on 1977's The Beach Boys Love You Brian's own lyrics and choice of subject matter could also leave much to be desired. To be completely fair this can also be said around the same time of Brian's closest equivalent in composing timeless melodies and born a few days later and across the Atlantic Ocean, Sir Paul McCartney who clearly benefitted from his collaborating with his songwriting partner in the Beatles, John Lennon who obviously had a great sense of editorial control and mostly shooting down some of McCartneys more questionable ideas. The Beatles of course had been broken up for seven years by 1976 and McCartney was leading his second band Wings. The 1976 album, Wings At The Speed Of Sound would showcase how fascinatingly lackluster McCartney lyrics could get without Lennon's guidance. The fact that the man who wrote such emotionally powerful songs as "Yesterday" "Eleanor Rigby" "Hey Jude" and "Let It Be" could within a decade go on to write songs as fascinatingly bad as "Silly Love Songs" and "Let Em In" just boggles my mind.

Then of course you have the artists who seem to value the lyrics more than the actual melodies and compositions such as Pink Floyd's Roger Waters who thinks that his lyrics and conceptual ideas somehow make him more valuable to the group than the musical abilities of fellow band members guitarist and vocalist David Gilmour and keyboardist Richard Wright, especially as over time his lyrics went from universal messages of madness and alienation on 1973's The Dark Side Of The Moon and 1975's Wish You Were Here to quickly dated political diatribes on his latter albums with Floyd and his virtually unlistenable solo work.

As classic-era Elton John producer, the late Gus Dudgeon said in an interview a year before his tragic death "There are no hit lyrics, there are hit melodies which if you are lucky, you will get a great lyric to go with it."

For better or worse, for Love You the decision was made that Brian would not only compose, produce and play virtually all the instruments which largely consisted of synthesizers but write all the lyrics as well with often odd and occasionally quite creepy results. As he had abused his once angelic voice with cigarettes and various other drugs during his mid-70s bed-ridden years his vocals on the album can be quite rough and difficult to listen to. The albums cover is a needlepoint design by Kathy Torrence, sister of Dean Torrence formerly of Jan and Dean. Kathy had done a similar needlepoint-based design on Harry Nilsson's album/fable, The Point! back in 1971.

The album opens with the track "Let Us Go On This Way" which was co-written with Mike Love and was a last-minute addition to the album much like "Sail on Sailor" was for Holland two albums earlier. The second track on the album is "Roller Skating Child" sung by Mike which is an unfortunate lyrical amalgamation of two different lyric ideas that Brian conceived at different times.

"Mona" is a brass and bell loaded track sung by Dennis which name checks Brian's idol, record producer Phil Spector and his hit songs "Da Do Ron Ron" and "Be My Baby" which is of course infamously Brian's favorite song followed closely by "Shortening Bread".

"Johnny Carson" is next written by Brian and sung by Mike about the host of NBC's Tonight Show from 1962 until 1992. Many observers including Biographer Peter Ames Carlin and YouTube reviewer Elliot Roberts have suggested that the lyrics could be read as Carson as a metaphor for Brian himself.

"Good Time" written by Brian with Al Jardine was a leftover from the sessions for Sunflower seven years earlier which is why Brian's falsetto is still intact on this track whereas his voice on the rest of the album has clearly been ravaged by years of smoking and drug and alcohol abuse.

"Honkin' Down The Highway" is an upbeat song sung by Al Jardine with pounding drums by Dennis who sings backing vocals with Brian who also provides synthesizers and Billy Hinsche who also provides electric guitars.

Next is the very short "Ding Dang" which was written during an amphetamine fueled session with Roger McGuinn formerly of The Byrds.

"Solar System" is a synthesizer heavy number by Brian that sounds like it could have been a rejected song for Schoolhouse Rock. It obviously is along the same lines lyrically as other "list songs" in the Beach Boys catalog such as "Surfin' U.S.A", "California Girls" and "Kokomo".

"The Night Was So Young" is without question the best song on the album and features vocals from all three Wilson brothers. The song was supposedly written about Brian's mistress at the time Debbie Keil.

"I'll Bet He's Nice" is a mini-Moog synthesizer-driven song in which all three Wilson Brothers sing lead at various points.

"Let's Put Our Hearts Together" is a duet by Brian with his wife at the time Marilyn. Ironically, they would amicably divorce less than a year later.

Next is the very uncomfortable "I Want To Pick You Up". The lyrics seem to be presumably written by Brian about his daughters Carnie and Wendy and in the recent performances by the Pet Sounds Band, longtime Brian collaborator and Wondermints keyboardist, Darian Sahanaja who sings lead on the live performance, while introducing the song implies as such, yet in an article from around the time of the album's release Brian himself seems to imply that the song is about a man who wants to pretend his lover is a baby.

"Airplane" sung by Mike and Brian opens with the sound of wind and is an organ-based song about a man waiting to land to meet his lover at the airport. A spoken countdown leads to the frantic ending coda.

Ending the album is "Love Is A Woman" sung by Brian and Mike. Brian would sing the song live solo at a piano on Saturday Night Live around the time of the album's release. The instrumentation is comprised of brass, flutes, drums and synthesizers.

Unfortunately, by the time of the album's release in April of 1977 the Beach Boys reputation as a nostalgia act had crystalized in the public zeitgeist and thus fans expecting another album along the lines of the retro-style 15 Big Ones were put off by the bizarre subject matter, uncomfortable lyrics and over-reliance on synthesizers. It also didn't help that Beach Boys manager, Stephen Love had gone behind the back of Warner-Reprise Records to sign a new deal with CBS records which gave Reprise very little incentive to heavily promote The Beach Boys Love You. I must admit that when I started to seriously get into the Beach Boys in 2005, I found this album to be quite off-putting and weird and keep in mind at the time I was watching the concert video for Brian Wilson Presents SMiLE on an almost daily basis so I am by no means averse to Brian's more adventurous and out-there music. Frankly it took me a while to "get" this album and why it is so respected by artists such as Fleetwood Mac's Lindsey Buckingham, R.E.M guitarist Peter Buck and most bizarrely Patti Smith as well as much of the fanbase. Really, it was seeing the aforementioned Darian Sahanaja's live arrangements for the recent "Pet Sounds Band" tour led by Al Jardine with what had been the final iteration of Brian Wilson's band prior to his 2025 passing to finally understand why this album is so beloved.