How Tom Cruise inadvertently gave The Beach Boys one of their biggest hits
In the grand scheme of things, The Beach Boys never needed any help to gain success. With Brian Wilson’s sheer genius alone, they became one of the best-loved acts in music history while also being deeply innovative and experimental. However, not once but twice, the band was helped out by Tom Cruise, of all people.
Across their career, The Beach Boys proved that an act can be both commercially successful and experimental. When they first broke out, it was their sun-kissed, California style that made them stars, as their surfer tunes provided the perfect mainstream song that was just countercultural enough to be cool. They bridged a gap between the worlds of psychedelia and the squares, allowing them to cash in on both sides. Then, when they made their 1966 opus, Pet Sounds, they established themselves as one of the most innovative acts in history, with everyone from The Beatles to Bob Dylan bowing to the band.
The Beach Boys have sold over 100 million records worldwide. As a band, they’re a household name as it would be a tough task to find someone who didn’t at least know a song or two. Part of that reason comes down to not only the group but also a Hollywood A-Lister.
As always tends to be the case, The Beach Boys struggled to modernise into new eras. Especially after the death of Dennis Wilson in 1983, the group were stalling when a new brief landed on their desk. “We were asked to do a song for a movie, Cocktail,” Brian Wilson said of their contribution to the 1988 movie.
Starring Tom Cruise, the band were asked to essentially write a theme song for his character. “They asked us to do the song because in the movie Tom Cruise was going from New York to Jamaica, and so we just wrote the song, and the director of the film heard it and said, ‘this is the biggest hit that you’ve had since ‘Good Vibrations’,” Wilson said. The song was ‘Kokomo’, the high-energy, optimistic pop song that now stands as one of their most successful.
Having had no proper inspiration for the track or given it much thought beyond giving the film team what they’d asked for, the success of ‘Kokomo’ took them by surprise. Wilson said, “We had no frame of reference on it, we were just writing by assignment to the movie.” But something worked as the track hit the top of the charts and stayed there. “That song was number one for eight weeks in Australia,” Wilson said. “That’s a long time to be number one.”
As well as in Australia, ‘Kokomo’ topped the charts in the US and was in the top ten in Canada, Netherlands, Germany, France and beyond. But that was a major achievement given the awful reviews Cocktail recieved critically. Despite being the eighth highest-grossing film of the year, largely due to Cruise’s star power, it received overwhelmingly bad reviews and even won the Golden Raspberry Award for Worst Picture.
Oddly enough, this wasn’t the last time Cruise would help bring a Beach Boys track to the masses. Years later, in 2001, his role in Vanilla Sky reminded the world of ‘Good Vibrations’ as the track played during a key scene in the sci-fi film.
