Dave Simpson 

The Beach Boys: Made in California – review

This six-CD box set of Beach Boys outtakes, demos and rarities features some long-hidden masterpieces, and describes the band's musical trajectory rather eloquently, writes Dave Simpson
  
  

the Beach Boys.
Passing innocence and imminent discovery … the Beach Boys. Photograph: Michael Ochs Archives Photograph: Michael Ochs Archives

Twenty years after the Beach Boys' exhaustive five-CD Good Vibrations box set comes this even more stunningly packaged collection. The six CDs – including outtakes, demos, B-sides, live rarities and 60 unreleased tracks – follow the group's trajectory from early doo-wop-era home recordings, via surfing hits, Smile-era psychedelia and plenty of troubles and tragedy, right up to last year's comeback single, That's Why God Made the Radio. The real treasures here have remained long hidden: the late Dennis Wilson's haunting (Wouldn't It Be Nice to) Live Again – mystifyingly left off Surf's Up – is as great as anything in their canon, while other lost gems range from his brother Brian's long-lost Sunflower era Where is She? to fascinating oddities such as the Boys' 1964 backing track for Glen Campbell's I Guess I'm Dumb. When I Grow Up (To Be a Man) from the same year's mono BBC session beautifully captures a sense of passing innocence and imminent discovery as the Boys begin the odyssey that produced some of pop's greatest ever music.

 

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