The mundane and the sublime

It’s hard to imagine a Beach Boys fan — a real Beach Boys fan, that is — who doesn’t have a warm place in his or her heart for 15 Big Ones and The Beach Boys Love You, the two widely ignored and often derided albums they recorded and released in 1976 and ’77 respectively in their new Brother Records studio in Santa Monica. The superficial view took them as acts of desperation following years in which only greatest-hits albums like Spirit of America and Endless Summer kept their name alive. The first was an album of mostly covers, the second an attempt to haul Brian Wilson back into a role front and centre of the group’s activities in the studio. Both were recorded in an atmosphere of uncertainty over what they needed to do in order to reassert themselves as a creative and commercial force. Neither album had a lot of polish, certainly not at the level of Surf’s Up or Holland, their studio predecessors. And there were certainly few vestiges of the rapt introspection of Pet Sounds or the…