Riding The Crest Again

By JAY COCKS

PERFORMER: THE BEACH BOYS

ALBUM: GOOD VIBRATIONS

LABEL: CAPITOL

THE BOTTOM LINE: A historic five-CD retrospective restores the Beach Boys to their rightful place in the sun.

It has taken 26 years, but the Beach Boys have finally settled the score with Sergeant Pepper.

A little historical orientation: during the wild and heady days of Beatlemania, the premier rock group back in the U.S.A. was the Beach Boys. They were chart heavyweights but a little slight in the Serious Interest department: too light, too pop, too California. Then came Pet Sounds, a 1966 album that got glowing notices, heavy sales and -- crucial for the band's hipness quotient -- an awed response from the Beatles, particularly from Paul McCartney.

A rivalry began, at least in the mind of Brian Wilson, the Beach Boys' resident whiz kid, a musician of abundant compositional gifts and emotional fragility. The Beatles went to work on the album that would become the single greatest mainstream breakthrough in all of rock. Wilson, simultaneously, was in the studio working on a record called Smile that would turn into rock's most notorious grail. Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band made history. Smile never made it out of the studio.

Until now. Wilson scrubbed the release just a few weeks before the Sergeant Pepper debut. Why he did this has remained a subject of continued speculation and not a little mythmaking. But the centerpiece of this new, must-have, five- CD "anniversary collection" of classics and unreleased material is a 30- minute selection from the Smile sessions: unfinished, incomplete and glorious. The music is mystic, mad, wild and gentle, quite unlike anything anyone, including Wilson, had ever tried in pop before. The lyrics were as fleeting as a waking dream; the musical tracks were layered as if Wilson were a kid in his room stacking 45-r.p.m. records on top of one another. The songs that resulted seem random at first, off-beam and crazy, but they haunt.

The Beach Boys were nearly undone by Smile and by the eventual release of Smiley Smile, a much simplified version of the original that Brian's lead- guitarist brother Carl Wilson referred to as "a bunt instead of a grand slam." The seven albums that the Beach Boys went on to release between 1967 and 1972 sold something like a million copies, total. Wilson retreated, becoming rock's foremost eccentric, a kind of beach-bound Sasquatch; the band struggled on, often without his participation, becoming largely a nostalgia act, a confection for sentimentalists and California dreamers.

This set will put all misconceptions right and demonstrate, lastingly, that Brian and the Beach Boys made luminous music. If not all the music in this set made history at first, it can take its proud place in history now. There are 141 songs on this set -- more than six hours of music. Compilers Mark Linett, David Leaf and Andy Paley have included every one of the group's Top 40 hits, along with 40 previously unreleased tracks and assorted radio spots. The collection offers evidence of Brian's emotional delicacy and creative resiliency, from the unreleased H.E.L.P. Is on the Way, with its self-mocking references to being overweight ("doughy lumps, stomach pumps, enemas too"), to the soup-deep sorrow of 'Til I Die. It also gives fair play to Carl Wilson's gifts as a writer and lead guitarist, and to the freewheeling lyricism of a third brother, the late Dennis Wilson.

The Beach Boys still play around, of course, although Brian is now making solo music on his own. He is currently in the studio with Smile collaborator Van Dyke Parks, good news that demonstrates, like this great collection, that the creative tide is still strong. Surf's up!