‘Adult/Child’: The other infamously scrapped Beach Boys album
Shortly after the release of Pet Sounds, Brian Wilson set about returning to making the tracks for The Beach Boys’ next masterpiece, Smile. Having begun writing it prior to the release of Pet Sounds, the primary songwriter for the group always believed some faults needed ironing out from his magnum opus, and with Smile, everything had to be perfect.
This sense of perfectionism ultimately derailed the entire process, allowing the record to live in infamy as one of the most famous scrapped and unfinished musical projects of all time.
While it never came to fruition at the time, the album has since been revisited by Wilson as a solo album in 2004, and was remastered from the scrapped recordings and compiled into The Smile Sessions in 2016. Neither of these is exactly how Wilson envisaged the album, nor was the compromised follow-up, Smiley Smile, but all three of these incarnations add to the air of mystery that has always surrounded the record and has helped it gain recognition as a lost masterpiece.
However, this isn’t the only time Wilson and The Beach Boys abandoned a truly spectacular record, as 1977’s Adult/Child is a further example of his brilliance not being realised to its full potential and ultimately finding its way into the trash. Its peculiar big band sound and synth-heavy songs were considered far too out there for a band in desperate need of rejuvenation, and the outright strangeness of Adult/Child was never going to provide the band with a viable route back into the limelight.
Comprised of a handful of old recordings that hadn’t made it onto previous albums and some new ones that were written specifically for their next release, Adult/Child supposedly explored the two sides of Wilson’s brain – the side which favoured maturity and growth, and the side that still possessed an infantile naivety. The songwriter’s mental state had been fluctuating for many years, and having gone through lengthy periods in the 1970s where he was reluctant to commit to the studio, working on this album injected his passion of old into him.
An obsession with Frank Sinatra, for whom a number of the songs were intended to be offered to, was what encouraged Wilson to adopt the big band sound, and the production that he provided was bolstered on four tracks by the presence of Dick Reynolds, who had previously worked with the band as an orchestral arranger. Despite this full sound, it was so starkly different from anything else the band had achieved success with in the past that certain members of the band, namely Mike Love and Al Jardine, didn’t see any possibility for commercial success. It was the mid-1970s – very few people were going to be warm to the idea of a Beach Boys record that sounded like it could’ve been made in the ‘40s.
However, beneath the supposedly dated sound of the record is some of Wilson’s strongest songwriting of the decade. Amidst the covers of traditional songs and pop staples are songs like opener ‘Life Is for the Living’, which sees Wilson explore themes of getting fit and healthy: “get up at eight, feelin’ so great / cut out the sweets and start eating three times a day”, and having a general joie de vivre about his existence. Later on, the themes of health and diet are explored on ‘H.E.L.P. is on the Way’, which features a brilliant line about “doughy lumps, stomach pumps, enemas too / that’s what you get when you eat that way”.
Healthy lifestyles aren’t exactly a new theme for Wilson, with songs like ‘Vegetables’ having cropped up in the past, but there’s an overall goofiness in Adult/Child that felt as though it had been gradually evaporating from the band’s output in the years since Smile had failed to come to light. The fact that the whimsy of the album was one of the major factors that irked other members – surprise, surprise, it’s Mike Love again – meant that the group adopted a sense of seriousness for their late ‘60s and early ‘70s releases, but all of Wilson’s childlike curiosity and sensibilities were on full display with this record.
Many of the tracks were outtakes from their 1976 album, The Beach Boys Love You, and a handful were eventually tweaked and put on the 1978 M.I.U. Album, but as a whole, only bootlegs exist of Adult/Child, despite retrospective praise being doled out for the record and its sublime strangeness. It’s unabashedly representative of Wilson and his eccentric self, but that was when he was arguably at his finest. It might not be on the same level as Smile, the Beach Boys’ other ‘lost’ album, but it’s certainly a lot more lost, that’s for sure.
