{"id":473006,"date":"2026-02-11T14:33:08","date_gmt":"2026-02-11T14:33:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/473006\/"},"modified":"2026-02-11T14:33:08","modified_gmt":"2026-02-11T14:33:08","slug":"the-beach-boys-we-gotta-groove-review-box-set-of-lost-70s-music-has-all-of-brian-wilsons-turmoil-and-talent-beach-boys","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/473006\/","title":{"rendered":"The Beach Boys: We Gotta Groove review \u2013 box set of lost 70s music has all of Brian Wilson\u2019s turmoil and talent | Beach Boys"},"content":{"rendered":"

We Gotta Groove \u2013 The Brother Studios Years, a new 73-track box set, picks up the story of the Beach Boys at a deeply peculiar juncture in their career. On the face of it, they were back on top. Their commercial fortunes had been revived by the huge success of some timely compilations: in the US, 1974\u2019s Endless Summer sold 3m copies, while 20 Golden Greats became Britain\u2019s second-biggest-selling album of 1976. Their leader Brian Wilson<\/a> was apparently, miraculously, match fit after years of addiction and mental health struggles. \u201cBRIAN IS BACK!\u201d ran the advertising slogan for 15 Big Ones, the first Beach Boys album to bear his name as sole producer since Pet Sounds, and the first to be made at their newly founded Brother Studios. Buoyed by a media campaign that included an hour-long TV special, it duly became their most successful album of new material in 11 years.<\/p>\n

The artwork for We Gotta Groove. Photograph: Capitol Records<\/p>\n

But, as ever with the Beach Boys<\/a>, it was more complicated than it initially seemed. As a succession of features noted, Wilson didn\u2019t seem to be terribly well at all. A Rolling Stone writer dispatched to meet him was startled when Wilson asked him for drugs midway through the interview, and expressed grave doubts about Eugene Landy, the controversial psychologist supposedly responsible for Wilson\u2019s recuperation. A Melody Maker journalist who saw the Beach Boys live that summer declared that Wilson \u201cshouldn\u2019t be subjected to being propped up onstage\u201d, noted that he looked visibly distressed and made no musical contribution. Rather than a triumphant return, 15 Big Ones was a hastily thrown-together mess of cover versions and wan new material, its sessions marked by disagreements, not least over whether Wilson was even capable of producing an album. The band\u2019s members openly disparaged it on release: Dennis Wilson bluntly described one track as a \u201cpiece of shit\u201d. The public who bought it seemed to lose interest quickly: the Beach Boys did not score another Top 10 album of new material for 36 years.<\/p>\n

There are people who have made some wild retrospective claims for 15 Big Ones\u2019 artistic merit, among them Brian Wilson himself, but this box set\u2019s compilers tactfully skirt around its existence despite its roots in Brother Studios. The original album isn\u2019t included, its presence here confined to a scattering of outtakes, none of which seem fit to cause anyone to reassess their views, unless your opinion is likely to be swayed by the sound of Mike Love crooning his way through Johnny Preston\u2019s Indigenous American-themed 1959 novelty hit Running Bear. Indeed, the inclusion of a handful of tracks that predate 15 Big Ones (from sessions abandoned because of Wilson\u2019s reluctance to get involved) suggest the Beach Boys might have been making better music before his \u201crecovery\u201d: even in their unfinished state, Dennis Wilson\u2019s Holy Man and 10,000 Years Ago are vastly superior to anything the Beach Boys\u2019 comeback had to offer.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

The Beach Boys: We Gotta Groove \u2013 video<\/p>\n

Instead, We Gotta Groove concentrates its attention on 15 Big Ones\u2019 less commercially successful successor. Entirely composed and mostly played by Wilson, 1977\u2019s Beach Boys Love You was both a radical departure \u2013 it\u2019s dominated by the sound of synthesisers \u2013 and a drastic improvement: the opening seconds of Let Us Go on This Way have more life in them than every track on 15 Big Ones put together. That isn\u2019t the same as suggesting it\u2019s a masterpiece. Your enjoyment of it is likely to depend on whether you view Wilson\u2019s lyrics as charmingly naive, a fascinating insight into a damaged psyche or just completely excruciating. \u201cHe sits behind his microphone, he speaks in such a manly tone,\u201d offers his appraisal of talk show host Johnny Carson. \u201cSaturn has rings all around it,\u201d notes Solar System. \u201cI searched the sky and I found it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Still, you don\u2019t want for melodies beautiful enough to suggest that Wilson\u2019s primary songwriting skill remained intact, despite all that had been visited upon it in the preceding decade: The Night Was So Young, I Wanna Pick You Up, Airplane. Whatever you make of the lyrics to Roller Skating Child \u2013 \u201cI go and get my skates on and I catch up with her \/ We do it holding hands, it\u2019s so cold I go \u2018brrr\u2019\u201d \u2013 the tune and the stacked vocal harmonies are fantastic.<\/p>\n

The back cover of We Gotta Groove. Photograph: Max Aguilera-Hellweg<\/p>\n

Despite its muted commercial response, Beach Boys Love You appeared to embolden Wilson further. His next project was a set of songs that drew on pre-rock\u2019n\u2019roll pop, an idea out of left field, but not one entirely without precedent. Wilson was a huge fan of George Gershwin and the Four Freshmen, a 50s vocal group whose oeuvre drew extensively on pre-war pop and jazz: a cursory listen to their 1955 album Four Freshmen and 5 Trombones reveals how much they influenced the Beach Boys\u2019 harmonies. Moreover, his own work had occasionally seemed to reach back past the birth of rock\u2019n\u2019roll. It\u2019s not a huge stretch to imagine Pet Sounds\u2019s You Still Believe in Me or Don\u2019t Talk (Put Your Head on My Shoulder) hailing from the 30s or 40s rather than 1966, although they were less explicit in their intentions than his new material: Wilson intended for Frank Sinatra to sing Still I Dream of It. Sinatra turned him down, but no matter: it\u2019s hard to imagine a version more potent than Wilson\u2019s, his cigarette-ravaged voice amplifying the effect of its wistful lyrics. Another sumptuously orchestrated ballad, It\u2019s Over Now, is similarly great, as is Wilson\u2019s cover of the 1930s hit Deep Purple.<\/p>\n

The concept wasn\u2019t completely out of step with contemporary trends \u2013 not long after Wilson recorded these songs, Willie Nelson released Stardust, an exquisite album of Great American Songbook standards that sold millions \u2013 but somehow things went off piste. First, Wilson taped a selection of tracks that seemed to have nothing to do with his original idea, among them the frankly appalling Hey Little Tomboy, a song that\u2019s even creepier than its title suggests. Then the tracklisting of the projected album, Adult\/Child, was padded out with early 70s outtakes, apparently in the belief that the world was desperate to hear HELP Is on Its Way, a 1971 paean to organic food, and its capacity to guard against \u201cdoughy lumps, stomach pumps, enemas too\u201d (neither the outtakes nor Hey Little Tomboy are here, the latter presumably excised on the grounds of taste). Then the whole thing was scrapped: in a weird echo of Smile, Mike Love\u2019s response to the 40s-style songs was: \u201cWhat the fuck do you think you\u2019re doing?\u201d<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a question that seems more germane to the remainder of the Beach Boys\u2019 recording career. Their next release turned out to be the abysmal MIU Album, home to the tennis-themed Match Point of Our Love, which succeeded in making the lyrics on Beach Boys Love You seem as erudite and multi-layered as Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands. It says something about the Beach Boys\u2019 increasingly catastrophic judgment that the only track to survive the Adult\/Child sessions and make it on to MIU was Hey Little Tomboy. You might have thought MIU represented the band\u2019s artistic nadir, until you heard its follow up, LA (Light Album). And if you thought that was their nadir, you hadn\u2019t heard 1980\u2019s Keepin\u2019 the Summer Alive, and so on and so on.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a sorry story that places the music on We Gotta Groove in context: wildly variable in quality, even at its best not in the same league as the stuff that made the Beach Boys famous; for fans only. But, filled with strange diversions and what proved to be dead ends, it\u2019s seldom boring: in fact, the Beach Boys would never be so interesting again.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"We Gotta Groove \u2013 The Brother Studios Years, a new 73-track box set, picks up the story of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":473007,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[64,63,134,136],"class_list":{"0":"post-473006","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-music","8":"tag-au","9":"tag-australia","10":"tag-entertainment","11":"tag-music"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/473006","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=473006"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/473006\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/473007"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=473006"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=473006"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=473006"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}