“He always had a surprise for us”: Brian Wilson’s bizarre return to the Beach Boys in 1976
Half a century ago, The Beach Boys proclaimed “Brian is back!”, and the world, not wrongly, assumed they’d be getting another masterpiece to add to the pile.
Without wanting to put it too bluntly or be overly disparaging, what they got was something a little less than that admittedly tall order. After all, Brian Wilson had just spent the past number of years prior to that point in various phases of mental health crisis, addiction, and recovery. In terms of his return to The Beach Boys… well, Rome wasn’t built in a day.
All of this is to say that the audience’s anticipation had been built up to a fever pitch, helped along by an iconic catchphrase, which likely led to widespread disappointment. It also placed significant pressure on Wilson himself. The album that emerged from this period was 15 Big Ones, but its impact fell short of expectations.
The album was panned and poorly received across the board – it was the first of the band’s records to be solely credited to Wilson since the release of Pet Sounds a decade before, and in the context of everything he’d been through, his lack of return to form in the moment was, quite honestly, understandable.
Despite all this, and the tensions that could too often plague them, the band were ultimately very relieved to see their brother in arms back in action. If anything, after years upon years of constant global success, the ability to step back a little due to the period of less popularity was probably comforting for them, at least to see their master at work.
As Al Jardine later put it, “Brian was always a surprise. He always had a surprise for us, and that was great — something brand new that we could sing and enjoy singing and playing on and recording. That’s what it was all about — evolution, growing musically.” And even though the success of his return didn’t exactly go to plan, in a lot of ways, that was the only thing that mattered.
That’s not to say that things weren’t difficult. In classic Beach Boys fashion, there were plenty of fights in the studio, disagreements over the direction that Wilson wanted to head in, and the unwelcome intrusion of his psychologist Eugene Landy adding an extra tether to the tension that no one asked for.
All of that combined to make a lot of sense when it came to the album’s failure, but the person often forgotten in the midst of all of it was Wilson himself. The management could splash the cash all they wanted on creating a flashy return for him, but if they were never prepared to actually look after him, they were never going to get anywhere.
15 Big Ones was a commercial and critical flop. “Brian is back” didn’t exactly live up to the heady expectations that were set for it. Wilson had been through hell and back, and it took the band a few more years to get fully back into their swing. It was telling that once they eventually did, that was when the frontman’s genius finally came back out to play.
