Just a decade after the release of Pet Sounds, the Beach Boys had tumbled from pop’s avant-garde pinnacle to washed-up Golden Oldies. Endless Summer, a compilation of songs from 1962 to 1965, was a huge, nostalgic hit in 1974, and they followed it up with the toothless 15 Big Ones, a record that paid homage to classic rock’n’roll in a way that pushed precisely no envelopes. Brian Wilson was back, as the promotional campaign around 15 Big Ones excitedly proclaimed, and that meant the rockin’ good times were here to stay.
And then, as happens so often with this most enigmatic of bands, the pendulum swung back. The group’s next album, The Beach Boys Love You, was a proto-synth-pop bomb with songs about Johnny Carson and “Honkin’ Down the Highway,” and its intended follow-up, Adult/Child, was a mixture of big-band jazz and adolescent reverie that was shelved for fear it would further upset the group’s already bemused fanbase. This is unlikely territory for a band to re-evaluate. But that’s exactly what they do on We Gotta Groove: The Brother Studio Years, a new 73-track box set loosely hung around recordings Brian Wilson made in the group’s Brother Studio from 1976 to 1977.
This is not the Beach Boys box set to win over doubters and welcome newbies to the band. It covers one of the least renowned periods in the Beach Boys’ history. Love You has, over the years, gained a cult following, but for a long time it was a curio that fans tended to explore many years into their Brian Wilson obsession: It was the band’s 21st studio album and, back then, it probably only just edged into their top 20 best. This was a period when the Beach Boys powered down blind alley after blind alley in search of their lost mojo, and the decision to go full orchestral swing, on Adult/Child songs like “Life Is for the Living,” wasn’t one of their best.
And yet, for all these reasons, 1976 to 1977 is among the most fascinating periods of the Beach Boys’ career, a time when songwriting brilliance and mythical vocal interplay met Wilson’s rudderless genius and a desire to expand the band’s sound in ways that looked to both the future and past of pop music. The counterpoint to the sharp, “Surfin’ U.S.A.”-style early Beach Boys is not Pet Sounds’ baroque pop arrangement; it’s “Mona”’s rough synth swing next to “Johnny Carson”’s rollicking boogie and very literal lyrics about Ed McMahon, sequenced in a way that probably has only ever made sense to Brian Wilson circa 1976.
Throughout Brian Wilson’s psychological torment, he still wrote excellent songs. And the Beach Boys, for all their sometimes grating complaints about his output, kept singing them, delivering incredible vocal harmony even when they didn’t fully grasp the material. Love You is historically important for its pioneering use of synths and Moog-heavy production, like David Bowie’s Low on Californian zinfandel. But it also contains stunning pop songs that shine through the novelty. “The Night Was So Young” is a touching tale of thwarted love, sung like a nostalgic angel by Carl Wilson; “Let’s Put Our Hearts Together” is a charming duet between Brian and his then-wife Marilyn, which runs warm through the veins like love itself.
Adult/Child is similarly haphazard. On the box set, the disc is titled the Adult/Child Sessions in reference, perhaps, to the fact that it misses a couple of songs generally thought to belong on the lost album. “Life Is for the Living,” with its gratingly peppy lyrics and jaunty swing, would almost certainly have been better as a Frank Sinatra record, for whom some of the songs on Adult/Child were apparently intended, while “Deep Purple” and “New England Waltz” are unpalatable schmaltz. “It’s Over Now” and “Still I Dream of It,” on the other hand, are among Brian Wilson’s greatest songs. Their elegant, time-worn melodies point to an unrealized future where the Beach Boys mutated into a creatively vibrant pop act of the third age, with death at their elbow and a mind full of memories.
That both these songs have already been released, on the Good Vibrations: Thirty Years of the Beach Boys box set in 1993, points to the slightly awkward position in which We Gotta Groove finds itself. The Beach Boys have an incredibly deep catalog of unreleased material. But anyone with enough interest in an unreleased Beach Boys album from 1977 will have already sought it out online, and the unreleased songs on We Gotta Groove aren’t as strong as on the recent glut of Beach Boys box sets like 1967 - Sunshine Tomorrow and Feel Flows.
The dozen 15 Big Ones Outtakes are essentially 12 Slightly Smaller Ones, a handful of rock’n’roll covers that add very little to vintage songs like “Shake, Rattle and Roll” and “Mony Mony,” alongside “Short Skirts,” a lower-middling Brian Wilson original, and a handful of backing track mixes. The outtakes and alternate mixes of Love You are largely for completists, while Brian’s cassette demos from the same period are moving in their distressed beauty. But they are fundamentally solitary works rather than representing the Beach Boys’ gilded group dynamic, bereft of the band’s powerful harmonic interplay.
But there is unreleased gold in there. “Sherry She Needs Me,” a Love You outtake with a long history, showcases Brian Wilson’s voice at its most lost and lovely, as it curls up against the comforting radiance of the band’s fraternally perfect backing vocals with the distinct air of Pet Sounds reverie. “Everybody Wants to Live,” one of the Adult/Child tracks that hasn’t seen the light of day, is lavish and wistful, like a synth-y Surf’s Up. And “We Gotta Groove” and “Shortenin’ Bread” give us the Beach Boys at their most sloppily, gloriously funky.
The undeniable highlights, though, are the 1974–1977 outtakes. “Holy Man (2025 Mix Carl Wilson Vocal),” a song whose existence seems to have surprised most fans, is an elegiac take on a great tumbling wave of a Dennis Wilson track that was originally intended for his Pacific Ocean Blue album. “Carl’s Song 2 (Angel Come Home) (2025 Mix)” is an embryonic instrumental version of a song that would turn up on L.A. (Light Album), its velvety guitar ambience like the Durutti Column crossed with the Eagles; and “String Bass Song (Rainbows) (2025 Mix)” tastes like heartbreak in an expensive hotel suite.
Raked over like this, We Gotta Groove sounds like an academic exercise, a foot-noted path to explore one of the wildest times in Beach Boys history and make some sense of their bizarre choices. It’s an artifact, too, a multi-disc object for Beach Boys obsessives to fawn over. But the streaming era, for all its woes, has opened up what would once be little-heard historical documents like We Gotta Groove to an audience of interested, rather than merely hardcore, fans. And, shorn of all context and dusty import, We Gotta Groove still works. You’d have to be in a particularly loose frame of mind to listen to it top to tail; but there is enough of the Beach Boys’ singular genius—perhaps the expression in pop of a musical mind pulled to and fro by the heavy weathers of psychological torment—to deliver. This is the Beach Boys at their best, their worst, and most frustratingly human—just like we want them to be.
