If anyone was entitled to craft New Age-y yacht-rock with a dash of disco by the dawn of 1979, it was the Beach Boys. Except that’s giving them way too much credit, as if they’d planned to do exactly that — when in fact L.A. (Light Album), perhaps the group’s most forgettable collection, is nothing but a hodgepodge of solo material patched together to keep CBS Records from suing them for breach of contract, lest they turn in zero music two years after signing to that label.
To say they were in disarray at this point is an understatement. All three Wilson brothers plus Mike Love were either entering into divorce proceedings or just coming out of them. Brian, virtually absent from this atrocity, was nearing a drug-induced all-time low, disappearing for days only to turn up penniless and barefoot, mooching heroin money off Dennis (who in turn withdrew cash out of Carl) and getting himself institutionalized by the end of ‘78.
Mike had fallen in love with a Korean woman — so he wrote a song about her called ‘Sumohama’ and sang in Japanese. That’s merely piffle like Carl’s and Al Jardine’s contributions here. The 11-minute disco redo of their ‘67 tune ‘Here Comes the Night,’ on the other hand — that’s still abominable. Even its robot voice is uncool, and robot voices are almost always cool.
Dennis was arguably the only one creating anything of quality during all this hazy acrimony, coming off his acclaimed flop Pacific Ocean Blue (see previous post). So naturally they nicked two tunes from the follow-up he’d been working on, Bambu, which he failed to finish before his death in ‘83.
That’s where Christine McVie, the sole reason I returned to this LP, enters the picture. Still enjoying the happier start of her eventually stormy relationship with Dennis as the ‘80s arrived, she provides faint vocals to the piece ‘Love Surrounds Me.’ I hear her twice in the bridge — once on the word ‘desire,’ then on the phrase ‘put your arms around me.’ Sounds like her high coo at the tail-end too. That’s it.
Look, I did say this was a deep dive.
These are the murky pearls you find sometimes.