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The Great Vinyl Purge Part 6: Wiping Out The Beach Boys?
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Clearly, that Sammy Hagar lookalike is checking out this Surfer Girl's pineapple!
There isn't a band in my stupid record collection that I've had to defend against space hungry girlfriends more than the Beach Boys. For some reason, girls that I've known have hated the Hawthorne boys with a passion usually reserved for guys who forget to return the toilet seat to its rightful position.
What inspired such hatred? Maybe a woman's intuition about Mike Love's inherent sleaziness or else maybe they were beaten repeatedly with a copy of 15 Big Ones as a child—who can say?
And it's not just the surf and car stuff that's maybe too alpha male oriented. Try to steering a chickaroo towards the artistry of Pet Sounds or "In My Room" and risk hearing her say "Euuuuck! That's just wimpy!" "Sensitive male" schmen-sitive male! These are women you daren't cry in front of, not if you want the phrase "horizontal hold" to mean something besides a button on an antiquated TV set.
Quentin Tarantino was right about there only being two kinds of people —Elvis or Beatles people— and the Beach Boys are usually assigned the former solely because of the excessive amount of time Elvis clocked in on the beach throughout his film career doing "The Clam."
Over the years. I've slowly purged the Beach Boys section, mainly because those wonderful two-fer CDs with bonus cuts that Capitol Records put out in 1990 made a lot of inferior budget reissues on vinyl seem superfluous. Now I'm left with only FIVE remaining Beach Boys albums to make the case for why my good friends the Beach Boys oughta be represented in black vinyl..
Beach Boys Rarities - If I was a Beach Boy completist (and I'm not), I'd keep this simply because a couple of these rarities are still unavailable on CD. Among the ones I like best are the version of "In My Room" sung in German and the Beach Boys' immediate response to Sgt. Pepper, — cutting a cover version of "With a Little Help From My Friends" and letting Bruce Johnston sing it like Kermit the Frog. And I enjoy this sexist cover art where clearly the Sammy Hagar lookalike is checking out this surfer girl's pineapple!
Smiley Smile - I’ve got two copies of this on vinyl, an original on Brother Records and a Capitol reissue. Looks like I’m keeping both. This album contains “Good Vibrations,” pop music’s most famous use of the theremin and “Fall Breaks and Back to Winter (W. Woodpecker Symphony),” pop music’s most sinister use of the woodblock.
20/20 - Speaking of sinister, this is the record with the Charles Manson song "Cease to Exist" renamed "Never Learn Not to Love" and credited to Dennis Wilson alone. Almost as creepy is the foldout inner sleeve, where Brain Wilson's pictured hiding from the world behind an eye chart.
Stack-o-Tracks - Back when thrift shops weren't picked clean for collectibles, I found a copy of this ancient karaoke Beach Boy album with the booklet containing all the chords to all the songs for a buck. The cover claims it’s stereo and the record says it’s duophonic. Well, which is it? The cover also says this package contains “Many photos of the Beach Boys.” By many, they mean seven.
Surf’s Up - This is that strange period where the Beach Boys played concerts with the Grateful Dead and tried to pass themselves off as politica. Surf's Up is top heavy with songs about ecology and one about student demonstrations. So what is any sane person supposed to make of “A Day in the Life of A Tree,” the goofiest song they recorded since “I’m Bugged at My Ol’ Man” which in retrospect wasn’t all that goofy. Maybe the Beach Boys’ manager Jack Rieley, who wooden;y narrates as the said tree, was dead serious when he said, “One day I was full of life / My sap was rich and I was strong.” It’s a hoot – so don’t pollute!
Read More:
The Great Vinyl Purge pt 5: None of yer B's Wax! B-52s, Band, Bangles, Bad Company, Bay City Rollers
The Great Vinyl Purge part 4, Animals, Archies, Armadtrading and the Association
The Great Vinyl Purge part 3: Adam Ant, Aerosmith, Alpert and Angel
The Great Vinyl Purge Part 2: Have the ABBA records met their "Waterloo"?
The Great Vinyl Purge Part 1: Admitting there's a problem
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