Customer Reviews

15 Big Ones / Love You

5 star:		(13)
4 star:		(19)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

When I first played this CD I was instantly transported back to 1976/1977, an innocent time of high-unemployment, double-digit inflation, and anomie, all of which made these albums such a giddy escape when I was much younger and not at all concerned about what was "hip" music. You will hear 15 BIG ONES attacked endlessly, but what made it seem like a letdown that Bicentennial summer wasn't the music but the "Brian is Back!" hype. In retrospect, the ablum is perfectly apiece with John Lennon's ROCK N ROLL or Bowie's PIN-UPs, cover albums that invoke the performer's love of the music of his youth. 15 includes do-wop, gospel, Spector, and amusement-park anthems. The originals are self-consciously lightweight, but who---beside the Eagles, for heaven's sake---didn't want to be lightweight in 76? The message can be summed up by Track 2: "It's OK." Not great, but good enough for fun.

LOVE YOU, by contrast, IS great. Go try and find another album less interested in image or self-consciousness ... it doesn't exist. It's a group of goofy, sweet, innocent odes to roller skating, young love, babies, and Johnny Carson (and not necessarily in that order). The compositions, however, are not as simplistic as their lyrics suggest. There are complex chord changes, time registers, doodle-bugging bass lines (most played on a Moog), and melodies galore. The innocence is infectious. Yes, your friends will think you're the squarest of the square when they catch you mouthing the words "Honkin down the gosh darn highway" or "Solar system brings us wisdom." But then again, the truly hip and in-the-know don't care if they seem goofy. Buy it, try it, share it with your little kids. They'll make you understand just how fun and sweet it is to love LOVE YOU.

Let's get 15 Big Ones out of the way first. This was Brian's first step back into production after a hiatus of the last three years. It consists of 8 covers, and 7 originals some of which were exhumed from the outtake archive. It's pleasant but mostly disposable,the high points being the vocal trading on "Had To Phone Ya" and the cover of Spector's "Just Once In My Life" in which Brian and Carl sound like they really mean it.

Love You! is just about all Brian in terms of production, composition and instumentation. Carl and Dennis help with some of the music, but Al and Mike are almost guest vocalists. This album is dominated by ancient (for 2000) synthesizers, making it very different to any other Beach Boys album and on another planet to Pet Sounds. Some people hate it for that, and you will probably see many different opinions in these reviews, so here's mine. It's brilliant. The songs are strong with tunes that survive any production treatment, the album is revolutionary in some ways in pre-dating new wave, and Brian writes as a disturbed thirtysomething pretending to be a teenager, and looking for love and acceptance and someone simply to hold him through the night.

You won't want to start your Beach Boys collection here, but if you are in any way serious about the group, you have to get this.

15 Big Ones contains some good new songs from Brian Wilson, "It's Ok" is a fun song. "That Same Song" is also pretty fun. I really love "Back Home," and although it was written in 1963 and not technically new, I think it is a good song to have here. I could do without most of the covers except "Just Once In My Life" which I think sounds great. Overall 3 stars for 15 Big Ones.

Love You is an album people seem to love or hate. I love it. I really like the song "Let's Put Our Hearts Together" I even recorded my own version of it. Other stand outs on this album are: "The Night Was So Young," "I Wanna Pick You Up," and "I'll Bet He's Nice." Overall 4.5 stars for Love You

At long last I can put my turntable in storage. Some of my favorite Beach Boy music is finally on CD. I can't imagine anyone who loves the classic Beach Boys' songs not appreciating some of the great music contained on these two albums in this double release. 'It's O.K.',' Rock and Roll Music', 'Let Us go on this way' and 'Honking down the highway' give you that old Beach Boy rock and Roll jolt while love songs like 'The Night was so young' and 'Let's put our hearts together' stack up pretty close to classics like 'Don't worry baby' or 'Warmth of the Sun'. Fresh new songs by Brian abound especially on the 'Love You' tracks with 'Solar System' topping my favorites. I'll admit there are some thin tracks on '15 Big Ones' but I also like 'That same Song' and 'Back Home' which were the 1st efforts of Brian's at new material in a while. Then came 'Love You' and with the exception of 'Ding Dang' I love every other track. 'I wanna pick you up'is one of the most beautiful songs ever written about the joys of being a parent of a newborn. My biggest dissapointment about this album was that it made you feel Brian was back and was going to flourish with more masterpiece albums and that never happened, after all the guys only human but boy did he fool us into thinking otherwise for so long. If he had written nothing else but 'God Only Knows' the world should still be grateful. Buy this album, put on a set of headphones and enjoy a lot of great Beach Boy music.

Love You is a smart album for smart people.

The vocals are not the smooth, angelic grace that most people associate with the Beach Boys. Instead, the are just rocking! And they are warm and human and a little rough around the edges. Give it a couple of listens, and you'll be hooked. The songs are goofy and strange, yes, but they rock. They are also sweet and infectious. How can anybody not like "Mona," for example? Or "Good Time"?

My girlfriend Penny, she's kind of skinny, and so she needs her falsies on. She don't like cookin', but she's so good lookin', I miss her when she's gone.

And when she gets to dancin', I feel just like romancin', especially when we're dancing close. she'll do the dirty boogie, and that's when I go up in smoke.

I mean, come on! This is a great tune on a great album. Loosen up, listen to Love You and groove on!

Fans might be thrown by the corpulent, greasy-haired Boys on the cover of this reissue, but buried underneath the predicatably awful and overly-nostalgic "15 Big Ones" is a minor masterpiece in the Beach Boys' canon -- "Love You." Sounding more like a lo-fi group like the Beta Band than the slick studio masters of the last decade, the album finds Brian Wilson in creative control but in a strange state of mind. The album is filled with odd odes to a plethora of un-self-conscious and almost childlike topics: television watching, planets, kids, airplanes -- really, anything but the sun-n-surf of their early work or the melancholy self-analysis of the mid-to-late-60s albums like "Pet Sounds." The songs have a funky charm that belie their simplicity -- the arrangements are bare bones and based around strange-sounding moog synth lines that churn like nothing else. It sounds weird and it is -- it's not only not a typical Beach Boys record, it's not even a typical rock record. Fans that find charm in the strange and surreal will enjoy this one immensely.

Four stars -- "15 Big Ones" only causes one star to disappear.

First of all I have to explain that this review will concentrate on The Beach Boys Love You. 15 Big Ones is okay but Love You is one of the most beautiful pure pop masterpieces ever made.
Many people consider Pet Sounds to be Brian Wilson's great masterwork but I would argue that this album, although very different, is at least it's equal. If Pet Sounds is the masterpiece of pop sophistication, this is the masterpiece of primitive pop. The lush, complex arrangements of a wide selection of "real" instruments blended together and angelic smoothe voices of Pet Sounds are replaced with clunky chunky synths and gruff vocals close to breaking up. However, as always with Brian, the songs aren't as simple as they sound at first. Beautiful melodies combine with, mostly, Brian's own pure and honest adult-child lyrics..." if Mars has life on it I might find a wife on it" WOW!. Solar System, I Wanna Pick You Up and The Night Young Was So Young are personal high lights but there isn't a bad cut on it. I've had the great pleasure of interviewing Brian and he has told a couple of times, unprompted, he considers Love You the Beach Boys finest album. He also confided his use of synths was inspired by Walter Carlos' Switched on Bach, which he still has in his CD jukebox.
For first time listeners the extreme difference from what they think of as the typical BB's sound can be a shock to the system but stick with it, the rewards are great. This is an album that was a radical step forward for pop music's single greatest artist. The use of synths and the songwriting are groundbreaking on many levels (check out that synth bass)... BUT Brian also succeeds in keeping the naivety, truth and childlike wonder that were in his very first recordings.
So go and get it, flip round the CD booklet so it shows Love You (and not 15 Big Ones) on the front, start playing the cd at track 16...then go out and spread the word to anyone who'll listen. What the world needs now is Love You.
(Honourable mentions go to Once in my Life, It's Ok and Had to Phone Ya from 15 Big Ones.)

Brian Wilson emerged out of his self-imposed exile from the world in 1976. At the same time, the Beach Boys had enjoyed a huge commercial resurgence thanks to the huge success of the retrospective ENDLESS SUMMER (1974). While it may have been thanks to their classic songs, the Beach Boys were on the public's A list for the first time in almost a decade, so some new material would be quite welcome from them.

While 15 BIG ONES (1976) was touted as such an album, the downside to it all was that the original material was only good and not fantastic. And with Brian only slightly regaining his main line, the album had to be filled out with cover songs, helping contribute to the image we have of the Beach Boys today as an oldies act. The success of it all may have been deserved, but as fine art, 15 BIG ONES can hardly be considered that. Their cover of Chuck Berry's "Rock & Roll Music" was the Beach Boys' first top 10 hit since "Good Vibrations", and while it was enjoyable, it was far from a radical departure from the original. 8 of the 15 "big ones" were covers, and the success of them range from inspired to "what the hell was the point?". The songs in the former category include The Six Teens' "A Casual Look", Freddy Cannon's "Palisades Park", the doo-wop standard "In The Still Of The Night" (a natural for wonderful vocalists like the Beach Boys) and the Righteous Brothers' "Just Once In My Life" (a rare time Brian and Carl Wilson were in virtual harmony, at least musically). The latter ones are "Chapel Of Love" (the one tribute to Phil Spector Brian Wilson doesn't succeed on), Little Willie John's "Talk To Me" and Fats Domino's "Blueberry Hill". The efforts are admirable, but the results are far from it. The originals are better, but not by much. "It's OK", "Had To Phone Ya", "That Same Song", "Back Home", and "TM Song" are Brian's contributions to 15 BIG ONES, and some of them feature a rather rough voice that you wouldn't believe came from Brian Wilson. This was probably due to the cigarette habit he had just adopted at around this time. The only other Beach Boys-written tracks are "Everyone's In Love With You" (courtesy of meditation buff Mike Love) and "Susie Cincinatti" (Al Jardine's veiled ode to a fabled female). On the whole 15 BIG ONES certainly didn't live up the hype that greeted its release, but taken on its own, it was a solid if not spectacular addition to the Beach Boys' catalog.

LOVE YOU (1977) was a huge change from the fractured atmosphere of 15 BIG ONES. All of it was under Brian Wilson's control, but this was because it was originally intended as a solo album for him. For the most part, LOVE YOU has been considered among the Beach Boys' best work ever, but it's only on some isolated moments, not as a whole. "Let Us Go On This Way" (one of only two songs written with an outside Beach Boy), "The Night Was So Young", "Airplane", "Let's Put Our Hearts Together" (sung with his then-wife Marilyn) and "Love Is A Woman" are the most inspired moments on LOVE YOU, and they show that for a few moments in time Brian Wilson's old tricks were still in full flower. They were in other places on LOVE YOU, that's for sure, but on material that bordered on the bizarre. "Roller Skating Child", "Ding Dang", "Johnny Carson", "Solar System" and "I Wanna Pick You Up" are typical of Brian's trademark childlike naivete, but in same cases like on "I Wanna Pick You Up", it's damn near frightening. These songs are probably not for the faint of heart or stomach. Other songs like the frankness of "I'll Bet He's Nice", the joyousness of "Honkin' Down The Highway", "Mona" and "Good Time" (written with Al Jardine) are further cases that Brian Wilson was back in his right mind when the situation was right. At its best, LOVE YOU was among the Beach Boys' finest work; at its worst, you can't help but wonder what they were thinking at the time they recorded it.

Shortly afterwards, the Beach Boys would retreat back to their old ways of making music for themselves and not the public at large, with some occasional hits along the way. Brian Wilson would contribute his parts here and there, but for the most part he was still at that point in time where he only recorded when the mood was right. Apparently, the Beach Boys could no longer withstand Brian's everchanging moods, for even now, they've concentrated mostly on live performing, and not on recording some of the music that Brian has made of late. Recently, it looks like Brian Wilson has finally come back to life and the worst days are far behind him. It would be great to see if the Beach Boys of today could ever reunite with Brian and record a new studio album. But I'm sure the relationship between Brian and the other Beach Boys is so strained at this point, such a dream may never be realized. We can always dream, after all.

15 Big Ones is a really corny album. It's over-produced, has way too many covers, isn't a full-fledged Brian Wilson album on any level with Pet Sounds. The production is pretty similar to Mark Hudson's (he has commited production overkill on many Ringo albums.)The production was an attempt to sound retro while taking advantage of the current recording technology and production trends. Therefore, even though this album is a tribute to rock and roll, the album doesn't rock. Any time that the Beach Boys really rocked, it was when the instrumental and vocal rawness rose above the production values. Mind you, there's not one bad instrumental sound or bad vocal. In fact, this album is really quite enjoyable despite the gripes. It's a really well-made prodcut. It just doesn't have quite enough soul. Carl still manages to get soulful and Brian does some pretty good, but slightly ragged singing. Just Once In My Life has the most emotional vocals from Brian and Carl. It's probably the best song on the album. The second best song Had To Phone Ya... which happens to be a Brian original. I also really enjoy That Same Song. It's a happy mixture of corny music and wonderful lyrics that talk about how music went from Gregorian Chant to Rock over time. A song like That Same Song almost makes 15 Big Ones feel like it's a lesser version of a concept album. Mike Love doesn't add much to this album. His originals are lame and his vocals don't make matters better for the cover of Rock And Roll Music. Carl's leadership and songwriting is missing on this album. He's relegated to his old role of best vocalist.

Once you get past that commercial stuff, we get to the real art. We get the REAL Brian Wilson. He was back and he delivered the goods! This album has production that works, fun lyrics, rocking songs, intricate instrumentals and vocal harmonies, and some songs that even have the same emotional power as the songs from Pet Sounds. Best of all, this album actually ROCKS. Even with the complex chord progressions and layers of synths! The lyrics are mostly simple, but fantastic. From the childlike fascination in the stars of Solar System to the fantastic love song The Night Was So Young. Solar system is actually a marvelous song and you feel Brian's wonderment evoked through his vocals. Brian actually sings the best vocals on the album. He sings with a true passion and more emotion that nobody would've expected back then. He did a wonderful and beautiful job on the vocals for The Night Was So Young and Let's Put Our Hearts Together. Both songs are actually pretty moving and poigniant. I Wanna Pick You Up and I'll Bet He's Nice have really sentimental lyrics and Brian and Dennis both provide great, ragged vocals. Carl's vocals are the best on the latter song, though. Carl Wilson sings a great lead vocal for Let Us Go On This Way and Roller Skating Child. He has soul that goes back to Wild Honey and it sounds like he's having a lot of fun. Mike even sounds pretty good during Roller Skating Child. Mona does EVERYTHING that 15 Big Ones failed to do. It's a fantastic tribute to rock and roll before The Beatles. I could imagine Phil Spector loving it... and being flattered for the mention of some of the songs he produced and his name. Great job, Brian. Johnny Carson is this great bluesy... um... rocker about... Johnny Carson! The lyrics are funny, but brilliant. Once again, Carl steals the show. He sings with such convincing soul... and Mike did another decent job. Honkin' Down The Highway has a great lead vocal from Al who sings the song's somewhat silly lyrics with fun and passion. Airplane has great instrumentals and harmonies... It actually would've been a good song for Bruce to sing during the choruses. Both Honkin' Down The Highway and Airplane actually sound like classic Beach Boys songs. The only song that i don't really like is Love Is A Woman. The synths are great, but this song is too much like the stuff from 15 Big Ones... You'll hear why. Ding Dang is better and way more fun. It's a nifty little rocker with catchy lyrics and more fun vocals from Carl. The Night Was So Young is the best song on the album. Everything about it is GREAT. Carl turned in fine lead vocals, the harmonies are perfect, Brian's couple of lead vocal parts and his falsetto vocals are fantastic. Long story short, this is a great Brian Wilson album and every song has fantastic lead and harmony vocals from the group. I CAN'T complain about the music OR production... everything is tastefully done down to the experimental use of synths and keys... so go listen to Love You. You will feel the love and you will love this wonderful album.

I agree that 15 Big Ones is no great achievement considering the creative overflow The Boys displayed on their previous four albums (Holland, So Tough, Surf's Up, & Sunflower).
The standout tracks on 15 Big Ones, for me, are: "It's OK," "Susie Cincinatti," and "Back Home" (which is freaking awesome).

Moving on quickly to "Love You," I don't know why this album is so highly touted. Yes, I understand that Brian was truly "back" for this album, but I agree with brother Carl who said they should never have allowed Brian undisputer control over production. At that point, Carl was the studio man, cracking the whip behind the board the way Brian used to (and doing a damn good job, mind you). "Love You" is WAY too synth-heavy (to the point where the music gets dragged down, unfortunately). The lyrics are at their all-time weakest. The only highlight is that we hear Dennis Wilson singing a lot (most on any album, I think...not positive, though).

Maybe I just haven't given "Love You" a fair-enough chance. Perhaps it will grow on me. If it does, I'll change my review. But if not, then three stars, I think, is quite generous.