Beach Boys' Party!

Bruce Beatlefan (May 5, 2008)

The three successive Beach Boys albums beginning with Beach Boys' Party! (and followed by Pet Sounds and Smiley Smile) provide an excellent microcosm of the history of rock and roll music from 1960-1969: we begin with uncomplicated Chuck Berry guitar riffs accompanied with joyful scat singing, followed by the increase in ambition and sophistication resulting in the classic mid-1960's masterpieces, followed by the druggy escapism from utopian flower-power dreams cashing and burning.

Heavy statement aside, let's take a good honest look at this album, Beach Boys' Party!, which is mostly swatted aside like a pesky fly in our rush to place Pet Sounds on its sacred pedestal. I listen to Beach Boys Party! and find it every bit as enjoyable as Pet Sounds (or anything else the Beach Boys did). I notice that it's here and nowhere else in the entire Beach Boys library that you hear a genuine duet by Brian Wilson and Mike Love (in their excellent Everly Brothers cover "Devoted to You"). It's also here where you hear the normally inhibited Brian Wilson sing with his greatest gusto in the song "Papa-Oom-Mow-Mow". In fact, all the Beach Boys, supported by girlfriends and fellow musician Dean Torrance, are in top form, both in voice and in fun and laughter.

You're not dealing with heavyweight issues like lyrical content and sonic/productive brilliance in this album, but here's a couple of issues that Beach Boys' Party! confronts head-on:

(1) In the era of recorded music, the experience of friends/family assembling together for a group sing (with someone at the piano and someone else playing a guitar or banjo or harmonica) has greatly declined, being replaced by slapping a CD in the boombox and listening to professionals do what everyone used to take a stab at. In Beach Boys' Party! the boys are bringing music right back where it belongs, in the living room, with folks chattering and laughing in the background, singers forgetting the words, and folks clowning with the song's lyrics. I feel very inadequate singing along with Brian Wilson when he is singing "Wouldn't it Be Nice"; I have no problem at all making a hash of his version of "Papa-Oom-Mow-Mow"!

(2) Rock and roll music, which started as an extension of folk/blues, has been elevated(?) to a very orthodox and proper art form, complete with critics carefully teaching us how to distinguish between the high art classics and the low art pretenders. In Beach Boys' Party!, the boys teach me the bottom line that only the oldies radio stations seem to know: it's all just rock and roll, fun music whether its "Like a Rolling Stone" or "Snoopy vs. the Red Baron". That's a valuable lesson, and it's instructive to hear the Beach Boys
find a similar enjoyment in the music, whether it's "The Times They Are a-Changing" they are singing, or "Alley-Oop", or making a total farce out one of their own songs.

The Beach Boys' Party! album belongs, hands-down, in the company of their best albums ever, with its fun and inclusive atmosphere. It was a brilliant concept for an album, and it raises questions every bit as deep and significant as those raised by its more stratified successor.