Billed as the ‘Brian’s back’ album, hopes were high for 15 Big Ones. Except the resulting record, largely made up of covers, suggested their one-time leader wasn’t quite yet ready to return to the fold

While one of their very best albums, Sunflower, has the ignominy of being The Beach Boys’ lowest charting LP, this tired and misconceived 1976 effort would, in contrast, win the band their best performing album since 1965’s Beach Boys’ Party!

While the band was at its lowest ebb commercially in the first years of the 1970s, they were, at least, moving forward creatively. But then, in June 1973, their fortunes changed when Capitol released Endless Summer, a compilation that would spend a total of 155 weeks on the Billboard albums chart and be certified triple-platinum by the RIAA. With the teenagers of the 1960s now in their thirties, the music of The Beach Boys was being marketed as a nostalgic throwback to a more innocent time. And with the success of Endless Summer, their live shows were being booked out too.

Rock And Roll Music

With the increased interest in the band, came renewed interest in Brian Wilson. The media was awash with ‘Where is he now?’ features, speculating on the whereabouts of the band’s one-time leader. With Brian now under the supervision of a new therapist, The Beach Boys reached out to their former songwriter-in-chief, with an idea of bringing him back into the fold. In the event, 15 Big Ones would be the first Beach Boys record to have a solo ‘Produced by Brian Wilson’ credit since Pet Sounds 10 years before.

With Brian’s mental health still shaky, the plan was to ease him back in gently. 15 Big Ones contains just a handful of Brian originals, with the rest of the tracklisting made up of rock and roll covers. “It was a little scary because [The Beach Boys and I] weren’t as close,” Wilson recalled. “We had drifted apart, personality-wise. A lot of the guys had developed new personalities through meditation. It was a bit scary and shaky. But we went into the studio with the attitude that we had to get it done. After a week or two in the studio, we started to get the niche again.”

The album’s first single, and its opening track, is a spirited, if unimaginative cover of Chuck Berry’s Rock And Roll Music which gave the band its first Top Five US hit since Good Vibrations. The single version is slightly different, with added synths.

Got It Covered

Fellow single It’s OK is, for better or worse, classic 60s-era Beach Boys and gave the band their highest-charting original song of the 1970s, peaking at No.29. Certainly it’s the kind of track anyone who’d bought the album off the back of Endless Summer would have welcomed. Had To Phone Ya is pleasant and light and feels like a Friends leftover while Chapel Of Love is a feathery cover of The Dixie Cups’ Phil Spector-produced 1964 hit and features Brian’s first lead vocal on the album.

Everyone’s In Love With You is another Transcendental Meditation-inspired Mike Love number, with lovestruck lyrics aimed at the Maharishi: “Everyone’s in love with you/ They all can see your love shine through/ It comes from deep within the heart of you.”

Talk To Me is another cover version, this time a medley of Joe Seneca’s Talk To Me and Freddy Cannon’s Tallahassee Lassie. Brian returns after this with That Same Song, a typically – for the album – bare bones number about the history of song. No less insubstantial is T M Song, one more Transcendental Meditation track, with Al Jardine doing his utmost to find conviction in some truly dire lyrics (“Maharishi gave it to me/ And I wonder if it set me free/ And it did”).

A cover of Freddy Cannon’s Palisades Park starts Side Two in style, before Susie Cincinnati kicks in. Written by Al Jardine, this had first seen the light of day in 1970 as the B-side to Add Some Music To Your Day An uncomplicated rocker, it was released as 15 Big Ones’ third single, but failed to chart.

I Found My Thrill

A Casual Look features Mike Love singing lead on a Six Teens cover, while Blueberry Hill is another Love-covered number, this time of the song made popular by Fats Domino in 1965.

Back Home is a Brian composition that dates back to 1962 and featured on a rejected early version of Sunflower. The fact that it took this long to exhume is sadly testament to its quality. Still, at least it has more life than In The Still Of The Night, a lumbering cover of 1956’s Five Satins doo-wop classic.

Finally, Just Once In My Life is The Beach Boys’ version of The Righteous Brothers’ 1965 hit and finishes the album on a high, with a dual vocal from Brian (whose voice is noticeably raspier than earlier records) and Dennis. A beautifully bombastic closer.

15 Big Ones benefitted from an unusually ferocious publicity campaign from Warners, centred around the return of Brian Wilson. But anyone thinking that having Brian at the wheel would be a return to the glory years was quickly disappointed. The album had little of that Brian production magic, and the over-reliance on covers, especially of songs that were already well known, appeared lazy. Though the album did well (No.8 on the Billboard), the band were unhappy with it. “People have waited all this time, anticipating a new Beach Boys album, and I hated to give them this,” recalled Dennis. “It was a great mistake to put Brian in full control. He was always the absolute producer, but little did he know that in his absence, people grew up, people became as sensitive as the next guy. Why do I relinquish my rights as an artist? The whole process was a little bruising.”

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