The Beach Boys

Sail On Sailor – 1972

CAPITOL/UME Six-CD/five-LP box sets featuring Beach Boys albums, live material and out-takes from early 70s.

By 1972 the Beach Boys were drifting apart into various factions. They were a group coming to terms with the high achievements of their recent past, a past which they were forced to replicate live in the present day, as the Carnegie Hall material featured here attests. Their future was uncertain. With Brian Wilson now peripheral to the band’s studio work, although still a creative force, it fell to brother Carl to take control of the group. Hence Carl And The Passions – So

Tough (1972), which sees the group take a country-rock-ish, Band-like feel at times, although style-wise it drifts from the Spectoresque Marcella to Carl’s Feel Flows-like All This Is That to Brian’s masterly, pertinent You Need A Mess Of Help To Stand Alone. Critically panned at the time, retrospectively the album’s diamonds in the rough have been appreciated.

Holland followed in 1973, made without Bruce Johnston.

Steamboat, an inward, hankering voyage to Mark Twain’s America, and California Saga are wreathed in the hankering, implacable nostalgia that is key to the Beach Boys. Carl offers the blue-eyed, well-meaning

The Trader, opining that slavery was bad. But it’s Brian’s Mt. Verrnon & Fairway, A Fairytale that is most striking, a narrative about a Young Prince and his transistor radio that is somewhere between Peter

And The Wolf and John Cale.

Among the out-takes, acoustic sketches, etc here, it’s the a-capella versions of various tracks that touch the most, displays of harmonic unity in the midst of disharmony.