Summer in Paradise by The Beach Boys: 30th Anniversary Review

The past week marked the 30th anniversary of The Beach Boys’ Summer in Paradise. I’ve been filling in the gaps in my Beach Boys album review page, so it seemed a good time to revisit the most maligned album from America’s Band.

Mike Love was still riding on an ego wave when The Beach Boys released their 27th studio album, Summer in Paradise. After years as an oldies act, The Beach Boys scored a surprise #1 hit with ‘Kokomo’ in 1988. In 1988, Love also made an infamous Rock and Roll Hall of Fame acceptance speech. He neglected his meditation that day, and threw out a series of challenges, claiming that Mick Jagger has “always been chickenshit to get onstage with the Beach Boys.”

1989’s album Still Crusin’ was their best charting record since 1976. It still failed to crack the top 40, a fact that Love blamed on the dilution of his concept.

The theme of that album was to have been songs that have been in movies. It was basically a repackage. But then it got watered down with politics, meaning Brian’s Dr. Landy forcing a song called “In My Car,” which was never in a movie, and a song by Jardine, which ultimately ended up on the album, called “Island Girl,” which was never in a movie either. So to me the concept was a little bit diluted there politically.

Mike Love, Interview with Goldmine

So despite the failure of Still Cruisin’, with full creative control of the next project, Love’s hopes were high. In an infamous 1992 chat with a sycophantic interviewer, he told Goldmine that:

Every song and whatever producer we used would have to be okayed by me, I would have the authority to exercise what I felt was the most commercial and creative strengths of all the guys. I was objective enough, along with Terry Melcher, to create ‘Kokomo’. I took a real strong hand in the writing and co-writing.

Make lightning strike twice hopefully, and do something that’s commercially viable and acceptable to the mindset of our core fans. The idea for a summer thematic album appealed to me…. The arrangement of ‘Remember (Walking in the Sand)’ is so hot it’s just a mindblower. We’ve got the most modern up-to-date, beyond up-to-date technology, to do this thing. We’re recording it right onto a hard disk with this Protools equipment.

Mike Love, Interview with Goldmine (transcribed by me, apologies for any errors).

While Dennis Wilson had passed away and Brian Wilson wasn’t involved, The Beach Boys still had four of their 1960s-era members when they made Summer in Paradise. While Summer in Paradise is often singled out as one of the worst albums of all time, the album has the advantage of the vocal synergy between Love, Carl Wilson, Al Jardine, and Bruce Johnston. The harmonies were always The Beach Boys’ strength, and there’s still some magic here.

The original songs on the album were largely written by the creative axis of Mike Love and Terry Melcher. The son of Doris Day, Melcher started his career in a vocal duo with Bruce Johnston, produced The Byrds’ ‘Mr Tambourine Man’, and cowrote ‘Kokomo’.

It’s easy to see why this album sounded ridiculous in 1992 – aging rock acts had enjoyed popularity in the late 1980s, with albums like Tom Petty’s Full Moon Fever and Don Henley’s The End of the Innocence. But Nirvana’s Nevermind had changed the musical tides in the early 1990s, leaving the synthetic and light-hearted Summer in Paradise looking hopelessly old-fashioned – one of the most high-profile boomer albums of 1992 was Eric Clapton’s Unplugged, the polar opposite of Summer in Paradise.

The production is awful, with synthetic-sounding drums, while the arrangements pile on saxophones, hard rock guitars, and synths. The Beach Boys were clearly short on ideas, covering 1960s chesnuts, including a couple of their own tracks. The record sold less than 1000 copies upon release, sending the distributor Navarre bankrupt.

Is Summer in Paradise Mike Love’s masterpiece? Let’s break it down, track by track.

Track 1 – Hot Fun in the Summertime

Summer in Paradise opens with a cover of Sly and the Family Stone’s ‘Hot Fun in the Summertime’. Despite the tacky 1980s production and gross sax solo, it’s one of the stronger tracks here. DELETE

Track 2 – Surfin’

The Beach Boys remade their debut single with tacky guitars and synthetic-sounding drums. No reason to listen to this rather than the original. DELETE

Track 3 – Summer of Love

‘Summer of Love’ is a misleading title – it should have been “old dudes staring at young nubile bodies on the beach”. The Beach Boys have recorded a bunch of tacky material in their career, as anyone’s who’s heard ‘Student Demonstration Time’ or ‘Ten Little Indians’ can testify. But this is the only Beach Boys song that features Mike Love rapping. DELETE

People all around the world in every nation
Like to get together for some excitations
If you’re a girl appreciates her recreation
Why don’t you let me take you on a love vacation

Summer of Love

Track 4 – Island Fever

This one’s pretty enough, but it smells like a limp rewrite of ‘Kokomo’. DELETE

Track 5 – Still Surfin’

Love’s trying to write an early 1960s-style surf song and dress it up in “beyond up-to-date” production – it’s a trick he did successfully on 1969’s ‘Do It Again’. But it works here too – there’s energy and a decent verse melody. KEEPER

Track 6 – One Summer Night

This song is pretty but the overbearing snare sound is disgusting. DELETE

Track 7 – Strange Things Happen

Tucked away in a bad Beach Boys album, ‘Strange Things Happen’ is surprisingly good. It’s almost power-pop, with a memorable chorus and some creative guitar. KEEPER

Track 8 – Remember Walking in the Sand

There’s a typically excellent Carl Wilson vocal on this cover of The Shangri-La’s classic. But the arrangement is a hot mess, with more saxophone, the tacky organ, and the bizarre backing vocals. DELETE

Track 9 – Lahaina Aloha

It’s a shame about the production, because there’s a gorgeous melody on ‘Lahaina Aloha’. Even the lyrics are pretty decent – if there’s a lost classic on this record, it’s this song. If you listen carefully, there’s some accordion from Smile collaborator Van Dyke Parks in the mix. KEEPER

Track 10 – Under the Boardwalk

Another superfluous oldies remake – it’s better than ‘Remember Walking in the Sand’, but it’s unnecessary. DELETE

Track 11 – Summer in Paradise

This ecologically conscious sermon is the kind of song you’d expect from a Mike Love project. His heart is in the right place, but it’s not nuanced enough to work as a song. The harmony arrangement on the “summer in paradise” hook is lovely though. DELETE

Track 12 – Forever

It’s a terrible idea to give Full House actor John Stamos the microphone on a remake of this 1970 Dennis Wilson classic. But it’s much better than I expected – Stamos is surprisingly similar to Wilson. The arrangement is tacky and the dramatic guitar solo doesn’t fit, but it still works fine. It’s an underappreciated song in the band’s catalogue, and I like them revisiting it. KEEPER

The Track Score is 4 of 12 Tracks or 33%.

I have reservations about even the best songs on Summer in Paradise – the tacky production is a particular issue. But there’s a handful of decent tracks here – with some better production and nicer arrangements, there’s a surprisingly strong four-track EP buried here. Summer in Paradise is tacky and full of bad ideas, but a handful of decent tunes and some trademark Beach Boys harmony vocals mean it’s far from the worst album of all time. Terry Melcher deserves some credit for contributing some good tunes to an otherwise doomed project.

*It’s beyond the scope of this review, but Love also gave his thoughts on levitation to Goldmine.

Why did I say defy gravity? Because in the practice of the TM city programs there’s sutras, where you develop the ability to levitate.

Have you ever levitated?

Yeah, I practiced doing this as part of my TM city programs.

And it’s worked?

Yeah, well, I mean we’re fledging hoppers. But the idea is with perfection of the mind and the body you can actually defy gravity. So it actually showed up in the song “Kokomo.” A hundred years from now people will be defying gravity as a normal course.

Mike Love, Interview with Goldmine, transcribed at https://troun.tripod.com/mikelove.html

Read More

• Beach Boys Album Reviews
• 10 Best Beach Boys Songs
• Thanks to 2loud2oldmusic, whose track-by-track review style I borrowed for this article