The first time I listened to the Beach Boys’ Love You, I thought it was a joke - the kind of elaborate musical prank mischievously released to the public under the guise of a serious artistic statement, along the lines of Lou Reed’s grating Metal Machine Music (which people still like to defend, for some reason) or Bob Dylan’s purposely awful attempt at character suicide, Self Portrait (nobody has ever defended this one). To say it’s odd is a severe understatement - this album, with its minimalistic synthpop sound and childlike lyricism, is thoroughly enigmatic.
Right from the album’s opener, “Let Us Go On This Way,” listeners are hit with an unapologetically clumsy barrage of brassy synths, reverberated snare, and carnivalesque organs. It’s a harsh, jarring effect, especially surprising to those who were expecting more radio-friendly summer surf vibes from the group (but really, after Pet Sounds and Smiley Smile, who was?). It sounds a lot like a parody of the “Wall of Sound” technique pioneered by Brian Wilson’s idol, legendary producer turned murderer Phil Spector. Since being given greater creative control around 1965 with the release of The Beach Boys Today!, Wilson aspired to emulate this production; he once remarked in an interview, upon being asked about his religion, “I believe in Phil Spector.” But where Pet Sounds’s approach to the Wall of Sound was full of nuance thanks to Wilson’s meticulous, maximalist arrangements, here it comes off as surreal, amateurish, rudimentary. All of this being said, it’s not a bad first impression, though, just a hell of a strange one. The tune isn’t bad - it may not hold a candle to the group’s finely crafted symphonic rock of their earlier offerings, but it’s an interesting progression of the synth punk snarl that Alan Vega and Martin Vega performed as the duo Suicide in the early 70’s.
Then, after “Mona,” a Ronettes-esque rocker that’s easily the best song on the album, “Johnny Carson” begins, and makes “Let Us Go On” sound about as strange as “Don’t Worry Baby.” Mike Love, known to criticize Brian Wilson’s lyricism when he finds it too out of left field, delivers the lead vocal with an unusually serious tone: “He sits behind his microphone / He speaks in such a manly tone.” And immediately, you realize that the song is exactly what the title suggests - an ode to the Tonight Show host. “Who's a man that we admire? Johnny Carson is a real live wire.” It’s far and away the weirdest moment on the album. One can imagine Brian writing this during his reclusive period, in which he confined himself to his room for months, watching television and consuming candy and drugs, after years of in-studio mental stress.
Despite all of this, I adore this album.
Love You was released in 1977, a year after the widely maligned 15 Big Ones. In many ways, it compensates for that album’s failure; much of (all of, actually) the marketing campaign for Big Ones touted Brian Wilson’s return to a significant songwriting position within the group after an absence of several years. It turned out to be the group’s most poorly received album at that point; it was seen as shallow, lazy, and retrograde. If that’s the case, then Love You is the perfect counter to that; it’s full of genuine emotion as a result of a complete lack of snarkiness or smug self-awareness. It’s also ballsy as hell - nobody expected that weird (but prescient) sound forty years ago, and newcomers exploring the band’s discography still get caught off guard by it today.These are its strengths - after the initial shock of the album’s idiosyncrasies, it grows on you, endears itself to you. There really is nothing quite like it.
