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Greatest Hits from The Beach Boys! Watch and listen to The Best Of The Beach Boys in this playlist
- Baby Blue
- The Lonely Sea
- Disney Girls
- Wind Chimes
- Little Honda
- It’S About Time
- Be True to Your School
- Wendy
- Cuddle Up
- Help Me, Rhonda
You have to tread carefully when it comes to the Beach Boys’ late-70s albums: patchy is putting it mildly. But Baby Blue – a refugee from Dennis Wilson’s unfinished second solo album, Bamboo, parachuted on to the largely awful LA (Light Album) – is fantastic: fragile, ethereal, alternately romantic and pained.
An overlooked anomaly amid the Surfin’ USA album’s twangy instrumentals and paeans to catching a wave, The Lonely Sea is slow, shimmering and eerie. It makes the sea sound faintly sinister – a reminder of life’s transience – rather than a source of fun, its dreamy ache a sign of where Brian Wilsonwas headed.
Bruce Johnston’s songwriting could tend to schmaltz: see the ghastly Deirdre, from Sunflower. But the gentle, descending melody on his contribution to Surf’s Up – an evocation of 50s America that couldn’t have been less fashionable in 1971, decorated with wah-wah guitar or not – is disarmingly charming.
LSD didn’t make Brian Wilson relax and float downstream: it scared the shit out of him. You can hear the fear in Smile’s supine, compelling but distinctly creepy Wind Chimes. It’s creepier and more compelling still in the ragged re-recording on Smiley Smile, and nothing like anything else the Beach Boys recorded.
Brian and brother Carl had a row in the studio over Brian’s insistence that Little Honda needed a distorted guitar. Brian won, and the result was as close as the Beach Boys came to garage-rock toughness: nothing to scare the Shadows of Knight, but its vague hint of pounding aggression is really thrilling.
The Beach Boys seldom rocked out convincingly – it just wasn’t their forte – which makes It’s About Time, a collaborative effort involving Dennis and Carl Wilson and Al Jardine, a truly rare pleasure: Dennis’s vocal is raw and powerful, the guitar solo stings, the Santana-inspired Latin percussion rattles along.
He’s an understandably controversial figureamong Beach Boys fans, but Mike Love nevertheless makes Be True to Your School as exciting as it is: his lyrics are weirdly belligerent, and he sings them with a punkish snarl at odds with its perky cheerleader chants and ra-ra backing vocals, as if intent on provoking a punch-up rather than lauding his al...
Wendy was intended as a homage to the Beach Boys’ east coast competitors the Four Seasons: you can definitely hear the influence of their then-current hit single Ronnie, particularly in its intro. But the Four Seasons’ overcast Newark toughness is replaced by dreamy melancholy that feels sunlit even as it ponders a future that looks “awful dim”.
The overlooked Carl and the Passions – So Tough feels distantly related to 1965’s Beach Boys Today! Both albums feature a second side consumed by ballads, but here they’re darker, wearier, the sound of a band horribly bruised by the excesses of the late 60s. The highpoint is the wonderful Cuddle Up: Dennis in gorgeous battered romantic mode.
For a man supposedly hopelessly square – his LA hipster friends tended to snigger behind his back at his terrible taste – Brian was a serious risk-taker: Help Me, Rhonda’s original version spends its final minute inexplicably fading in and out. Even without that coda, the single version is great: the lyrical misery at odds with the melody.
- 4 min
- Alexis Petridis
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The Beach Boys: Greatest Hits. Album • The Beach Boys • 2014. 16 songs • 33 minutes More. Play. Save to library. Save to library. Surfin' 2:14. Country Fair. 2: ...
The Beach Boys Greatest Hits. Playlist • Kylie Lether • 2023. 27M views • 16 tracks • 40 minutes. The Beach Boys ~ Surfin' Safari (1962) TheOldrecordclub. 2:08. The Beach Boys - Surfin' USA. beatlettese. 2:27.
Sounds of Summer: The Very Best of The Beach Boys is a greatest hits album of the American rock band the Beach Boys, released on June 10, 2003 by Capitol Records.
