15 Big Ones

Richard (July 4, 2011)

This album was not even close to their best work, but what I do remember about around the mid 70's and early 80's was that the Beach Boys were huge here in America, every 4th of July they would play a huge concert in Washington D.C., anyhow I remember everyone would be blasting the Beach Boys all the time. I think it all started with their "Endless Summer Greatest Hits Album" was released in the early 70's.

Bruce Beatlefan (February 17, 2009)

"Fifteen Big Ones" was the first album of new Beach Boys material in over three years (remember that the Beach Boys used to release three or four albums per year). The album had seven new original songs and eight cover songs. The album charted higher than any Beach Boys album of new material in several years, and spawned two charting singles, including their first top ten hit since "Good Vibrations" in 1966. The playing and singing are pretty decent.

And hardly anyone cared. Fifteen Big Ones may be the most insignificant album in the Beach Boys entire library. Between 1973 and 1976 events outside the Beach Boys lives completely changed the course of their career. After working six years in a deep dark shadow of the music consciousness, releasing one excellent album after another that fell on deaf ears, the world again placed The Beach Boys at the top of the music scene in 1974, due to the Capitol Records release of "All Summer Long". That two-record compilation of their 1960's music rocketed to the top of the charts, and rode the crest of the nostalgia rage that lulled America during the post-Nixon, post-Vietnam era.

Whatever artistic achievement had been accumulated up to that point by the mostly Brian Wilson-less Beach Boys, including the classic albums Sunflower, Surf's Up, and Holland, became washed away in this fresh flood of interest in their good-time harmonies from their Capitol Records years.

Warner Brothers Records, The Beach Boys current record company, decided that it was high time for them to benefit from this newfound popularity, and decided that it wasn't going to come from the complex musical statements of social consciousness written by the other members of the group--the ingredents that made Holland such an outstanding album. No, it was time for Brian Wilson to write hits and work his studio magic again! Hence, coupled with this renewed enthusiasm for Beach Boys music, was the mass publicity given the greatest news of all: Brian's Back!

Well, history confirms that Brian was back in body but not necessarily in spirit. The resulting album, Fifteen Big Ones, indeed bears the byline 'produced by Brian Wilson', and boasts some new music written by the man that gave us "Good Vibrations", but the bloated, depressed, and crack-voiced man in this record bore no resemblence to the ambitious studio wizard of Pet Sounds.

It's not so much that Fifteen Big Ones is a bad album, it's not, really. It was just flat, musically adequate, and amazingly anti-climactic. None of the seven original songs are bad, a couple are pretty good, but little is memorable. More disappointing are the eight covers. Recalling the brilliant re-workings of songs like "Do You Wanna Dance" or "Sloop John B", the eight oldies on Fifteen Big Ones come off as polished but passionless, even when Brian injects some imaginative and surprising changes in their arrangements. Again, not bad, just rather pedestrian.

By the end of the 1970's, the artistic aspirations of the Beach Boys was pretty much finished. There were no more endeavors to pursue new messages or new sounds; the Beach Boys had been reduced to rehashing what they had been in their glory days, and it was with this album that this decline began. My enjoyment of this album actually increases the more I play it, and that is due to the level of effortless professionality that the Beach Boys had reached by this stage of their career. But it remains their album with the least creative spark, and Fifteen Big Ones cannot be rated any higher than ordinary.