Best of 2023: The Beach Boys 1992 Flop Summer in Paradise Was All About Mike Love, Drum Machines and a Horrifying Foray into Hip Hop
In 1988 The Beach Boys scored their first number one hit in twenty-two years with “Kokomo” but creatively the band kept hitting new lows. The 1992 album Summer in Paradise is widely considered the band’s bleak nadir commercially as well as creatively.
It reportedly sold less than one thousand copies upon its release. That seems apocryphal to me. I can’t imagine that even the worst album by one of the most popular and influential acts in music history would sell far fewer copies than my various self-published books about “Weird Al” Yankovic, all of which you can, and should, buy directly from me through this site’s store.
Summer in Paradise is notable for having zero contributions by Brian Wilson, the heart and soul of the band. The album was instead masterminded by preeminent musical villain Mike Love.
It’s easier to endure Summer in Paradise if you imagine Mike Love and his stupid hat grinning like an idiot as he recorded what he delusionally imagined would be his masterpiece only to be greeted with screaming headlines like “The Beach Boys Put Out Worst Album in the History of Music” and “Summer in Paradise Somehow Sells Negative Four Hundred and Three Albums In Its First Week of Release.”
Very cool!
Summer in Paradise was designed by Love as the “quintessential soundtrack for Summer.” Three decades into an increasingly unimpressive career the Beach Boys were still about girls, fun and sun but at a certain point it got a little sad.
The Beach Boys’ biggest flop finds the then-fifty-one year old Love cosplaying as a fun-loving kid who loves to surf. On Summer in Paradise Love wants to be perceived as anything other than what he was: a deeply un-cool, non-surfing fifty-something multi-millionaire whose best days were behind him.
The album feels like the pop music equivalent of the “How do you do, fellow kids?” Gif/meme/moment from 30 Rock.
The Beach Men sing that “they can do what they want to” because they’re “out of school” on the Sly Stone cover “Hot Fun in the Summertime.” They can do what they want to because they’re wealthy, powerful adults and also it’s been probably a good three decades since they saw the inside of a school room.
The harmonies remain the band’s sonic signature but they’re ruined rather than augmented by the band’s failed attempts to keep up with the times through an entirely synthetic rhythm system. Who needs a drummer or a bass player when you can replace them with soulless machines?
The abysmal Sly and the Family Stone cover that opens the album is followed by a newfangled take on “Surfin’”, a single the band put out in 1961, when their name was not ironic or wildly inaccurate.
“Surfin’” is the album in a nutshell, a shameless act of self-cannibalizing that takes the sounds, style and lyrical concerns of the past and fused it with the worst of the present to create something uniquely unappealing.
Summer in Paradise is filled with songs about surfing and surfers and the irresistible appeal of surfing as a lifestyle and not just as a form of exercise and recreation despite none of the old men behind the album actually surfing.
The only Beach Boy who actually surfed was Dennis Wilson, who was also the coolest and the sexiest member of the band and drowned to death in 1983.
The Beach Boys engage in the surfing equivalent of stolen valor here and throughout their discography. It’s fascinating to me that Murry Wilson, the monster who terrorized his sons and their asshole cousin Mike Love into becoming great musicians, didn’t also bully them into becoming proficient surfers, if only for the sake of the band’s image.
Then comes the album’s biggest departure and most unforgivable mistake. Love’s grandchildren apparently hipped him to the existence of a crazy new form of music called “Hip Hop.”
Like so many deluded old people Love figured that rapping must be so easy that literally anyone could do it, even a fifty one year old white musician primarily known for being an asshole.
Love wanted “Summer of Love” to be a collaboration between himself and fictional cartoon character Bart Simpson but The Simpsons wisely passed on an opportunity to get in on possibly the most embarrassing moment in Baywatch history.
Your ears don’t deceive you: “Summer of Love” opens with scratching before Love unleashes quite possibly the whitest, most middle-aged flow in the history of Hip Hop.
Things get off to a dire start when Love raps, or rather “raps” ”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!”
Love sounds disconcertingly horny for a man his age when he promises a beach bunny undoubtedly young enough to be his daughter, “Yeah I'll take you to the movies/But I'm no fool/First I'll get you on the beach/Or in a swimming pool/Doing unto others is the golden rule/But doing it with you would be so very cool!”
You know what’s not cool? Mike Love. Mike Love is not cool, Summer in Paradise is not cool and Mike Love rapping might be the least cool thing ever.
Love doesn’t just come up short when compared to actual rappers; he can’t compete with the Fruity Pebbles commercials where Barney Rubble pretends to be a truly Old School rapper in order to trick Fred into giving him a bowl of cereal.
The Simpsons decided that “Summer of Love” wasn’t even good enough for The Yellow Album but Baywatch happily scooped up the long-running animated institution’s rejects and invited The Beach Boys to come on the show to perform the song.
Bands usually get invited on TV to perform their biggest hit. The Mike Love-led Beach Boys instead got to perform their biggest flop on what was once the most-watched show in the world but that’s probably because Love shoe-horned in a reference to the show in the lyrics.
On the sappy ballad “Strange Things Happen” Love sings about how every time he touches his baby, strange things happen. I’m pretty sure he’s referring to getting an erection and while that doesn’t strike me as particularly strange I can understand how Love might be very pleasantly surprised that he’s still capable of getting it up at his advanced age.
Brian Wilson had nothing to do with Summer in Paradise but sitcom actor and part-time musician John Stamos makes his presence felt by singing, badly, the closing love song “Forever.”
Stamos also drummed for The Beach Boys so I love the idea of him volunteering hit the skins for Summer in Paradise only to be told by Love that they were going with a drum machine instead.
Summer in Paradise combines the worst of the past with the worst of the present. It finds the Boys still pretending to be fun-loving kids well into their forties while implementing synthetic sounds from the late 1980s and early 1990s that couldn’t be more wrong for a band like The Beach Boys.
Summer in Paradise was largely the work of the infamously unlovable Mike Love as well as longtime producer Terry Melcher. Melcher is famous for being Doris Day’s son and a very successful producer as well as his unfortunate association with Charles Manson and the Manson family.
Melcher made the terrible mistake of at least considering working with Charles Manson, an egregious error in judgment that led to multiple deaths and one of the most brutal massacres in American history yet Summer in Paradise is still the single worst thing he has ever been involved with.
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