#122
The Beach Boys
Keepin’ the Summer Alive
Genre: Dinosaur Beach
Allen’s Rating: 1 out of 5
Geo’s Rating: 2.25 out of 5
Highlights:
Keepin’ the Summer Alive
School Days (Chuck Berry cover)
Some of Your Love
It’s worth remembering there was a day when the Beach Boys were the home-grown heroes standing tall as America’s champions while the British Invasion swamped America’s musical art form, Rock ‘n Roll. Some musical scholars opine that day was a Wednesday. Other scholars, less fans of beach and cars music, insist it was really more of a Tuesday after work Happy Hour kind of deal. It was, after all, Pet Sounds that forced Paul and the boys to look to their laurels and respond with Sgt. Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band. Nevertheless, there is universal agreement that whatever day it was, that day was NOT in 1980. *
By 1980, when they went into the studio for their 24th(!) album, there was ample evidence the wheels had come off the musical creative bus that was the Beach Boys, and personal issues amongst various members of the band were at the very least significant contributors to that result, if not the primary cause. The drug abuse and mental illness issues are well-chronicled now, decades later, but at the time the band and its recording studio were trying to soldier on with the pretense that the Beach Boys were still titans of American rock.
Just for full disclosure, and so you know I come at this review from a sympathetic place, in 1980 I typically went to sleep each night with a stack of five or six albums on a turn table at lowish volume sending me to lullaby land. More often than not, two of those discs would be from the Beach Boys double LP, Endless Summer. What that 16 year old boy in his bedroom in a small western Pennsylvania coal-mining town did not realize, is his (and a few million friends) regular spinning of Endless Summer (A 1974 reissue of their 1962-1965 hits that was a smashing and enduring commercial success) had created an existential crisis for the Beach Boys. What would they be going forward? Caught forever unchanging in the commercially pleasing amber of 1965, or a living, breathing, evolving musical legacy?
Having said that, by the standards fans had every right to expect from the great band they had been, Keepin’ the Summer Alive is a train wreck. It’d be the last album from the Boys original lineup (drummer Dennis Wilson would soon be dead from substance abuse), but even then only courtesy of scooping a 1972 reject out of the vault for inclusion here. Brian Wilson wanted it to be an album of covers of classic rock standards, but Brian rarely made it into the studio. Dennis got disgusted and quit showing up, his only contribution via that ’72 reject. The label thought Brian would be producing –Bruce Johnston ended up being the decision maker.
Hey, look, even the relatively better stuff here is at best 2nd class Beach Boys. My contemporaneous notes next to the title track note “BTO homage to the BB” –I thought I was being cute, then my research revealed Randy Bachman actually co-wrote that track with Carl Wilson –that gets it a highlight from the Rock Curiosity point of view. “School Days” –the sole surviving classic cover from Brian Wilson’s original conception for the album-- would not have caused Chuck Berry to feel threatened in the least, but at least it has some energy and the classic BB harmonies giving it an interesting twist. “Some of Your Love” at least has the old BB energy and feels authentic classic Boys, if 2nd rate.
“Goin’ On” is the official single, topping out at an embarrassing, yet somehow generous, #83 on Billboard --meh.
*Hey, I couldn’t resist the joke –I know it wasn’t actually a day. The amazing thing is that beach music was the American entrant left to fight for American pride in Rock ‘n Roll at all, and actually did so reasonably effectively for a period of time.
https://open.spotify.com/album/2WGzXMW0t9Zo7raTRUYDzB?si=KekOPo9VRIm4zpM8ateCQw
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