The Beach Boys’ We Gotta Groove, The Brother Studio Years reviewed: their rocky yet often fruitful ’70s reassessed

For the Beach Boys and everyone around them, the year of 1976 was about putting an upbeat face on a situation that should’ve elicited very different feelings. Hence the marketing campaign that trumpeted “Brian Is Back!”, a slogan that celebrated the return of the architect of the band’s greatest triumphs after years of struggles.

More disconcerting was watching a man who’d long ago retreated from public view get thrust in front of cameras and onto stages. Brian’s worst humiliation arrived in The Beach Boys: It’s OK!, a TV special whose title reeked of the same forced good cheer.

In one segment, John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd played cops who barged into Brian’s home and charged him with offences including “failing to surf”. After being hauled off to the beach, the bearded recluse – so afraid of the ocean, he’d never learned to surf – gamely hit the waves alongside the Saturday Night Live stars. Sloshing around in a green bathrobe, Wilson looks as you’d expect: scared, bewildered and not a little pissed off.

The stunt helped promote 15 Big Ones, the first Beach Boys album to solely credit him as producer since Pet Sounds. It was also the first of the band’s albums to be recorded at Brother, the studio they established in Santa Monica in 1974. Since Wilson’s participation in new Beach Boys recordings was a condition in the Reprise deal, the band had struggled to keep him working.

When the 1974 compilation Endless Summer landed them back on top of the charts and boosted their draw as a touring act, it became even more imperative to have Brian “back”, regardless of whether he was in any condition to be there.

All that barely begins to suggest the fraught circumstances that sometimes impact the music on We Gotta Groove: The Brother Studio Years, the latest archival release to explore the Beach Boys’ rocky yet often fruitful era through the 1970s.

Newcomers to this saga can refer to 2021’s Feel Flows: The Sunflower & Surf’s Up Sessions 1969-1971 and 2022’s Sail On Sailor – 1972 to get up to speed. But even ardent Beach Boys scholars may be left seasick by their attempts to follow the band’s journey across the highs and lows of these particular turbulent waters.

By the time Belushi and Aykroyd kicked him out of bed, Wilson had already been remarkably busy by his standards. After a few false starts and enough internal rancour to justify the album’s working title of Group Therapy, most of 15 Big Ones was completed in the first half of 1976. One major sign of Wilson’s increased presence was the prominence of his Moog and ARP synthesizers, utilized partially to replace time-consuming sessions with string players.

Though the band initially focused on covers to warm up the musicians and defuse conflicts between songwriters over whose songs to use, the versions of oldies like “Rock And Roll Music” came to outnumber the originals on the final product. A few more covers – including a garish “On Broadway” – surface among the 15 Big Ones outtakes and alternative mixes on the last disc of We Gotta Groove.

Given the hodgepodge nature of the first release marking Wilson’s return, it’s not surprising the set devotes more attention to the two much more interesting albums that followed. Or rather, there would’ve been two had the commercial failure of The Beach Boys Love You in 1977 not prompted Reprise to cancel plans for Adult/Child, thereby ensuring the latter’s status as the second most mythic of The Beach Boys’ lost albums.

As was the case with the 21^st-century incarnations of Smile, the circulation of Adult/Child’s contents via bootlegs undercuts We Gotta Groove’s significance as the host of the album’s first official iteration. Likewise, its greatest song – the achingly beautiful “Still I Dream Of You”, which appeared on the Good Vibrations set in 1993 – and its most execrable – “Hey Little Tomboy”, a lowlight of 1978’s M.I.U. Album but thankfully excluded here – have long been available, too.

Yet the opportunity to behold such a comprehensive survey of Wilson’s artistry even in this compromised state can be both startling and staggering. That’s especially true of The Beach Boys Love You, an album that’s packed with deeply odd, synth-laden ditties about smooth-rolling sweeties (“Roller Skating Child”), super-cool talk-show hosts (“Johnny Carson”), and astronomical discoveries (“Solar System”).

The vocals-only versions of “The Night Was So Young” and “Let’s Put Our Hearts Together” and other demos emphasize the songs’ childlike spirit of joy and invention. The album’s most ardent defenders – like Peter Buck and Brian, too – become easier to believe, though those who call it The Beach Boys’ punk record go a step too far.

The same capacity for wonder and whimsy marks the forays into big-band balladry on Adult/Child. Disappointed when Frank Sinatra declined to record any of his offerings, Wilson and arranger Dick Reynolds concocted a swing suite that feels like a wonderfully wobbly counterpart to In The Wee Small Hours.

The group’s other songwriters get chances to shine, too. A song that Dennis Wilson failed to finish for Pacific Ocean Blue, “Holy Man” appears here with a gorgeous, mostly wordless vocal by Carl. An instrumental early incarnation of Carl’s “Angel Come Home” – later finished for 1979’s LA – is ready for a yacht cruise.

Then there’s “We Gotta Groove”, a Love You outtake whose chugging rhythm and down-pitched vocal harmonies epitomise the band’s zigzagging creative impulses through a very weird time. “We can groove it on this waaayyvvve,” they sing, the voices rising up as if to support poor Brian as he thrashes in the waves with Belushi. So maybe he’s waving and not drowning after all.