Endless Summer

Barnes & Noble

The Beach Boys' crossover to the counterculture was one of the most welcome, if strangest, phenomena of the late '60s. After all, though leader Brian Wilson had been on the board of the Monterey Pop Festival, the 1967 event that essentially announced the new rock to the world, he refused to perform with his own band for fear that the hippie audience would laugh them off the stage. By the early '70s, however, the band's popularity was waning: Wilson's eccentricities had begun to devolve into serious, highly public episodes of mental illness that left the band rudderless and on the verge of becoming, for all intents, an oldies act. Perhaps sensing this, the group's former label, Capitol Records, released this two-LP collection of the band's '60s hits in 1974, and to everybody's shocked surprise it quickly went platinum (ending up, in fact, the Beach Boys' biggest hit of the '70s). There have been better-sounding reissues since, but ENDLESS SUMMER is the best collection of the group's most influential and endearing material -- a mix of surf songs, ballads as beautiful as "Don't Worry Baby," and timeless odes to cruising, carburetors, and girls. Steve Simels

All Music Guide

This was the album by which millions of sons of late baby boomers (and sons and daughters of the early ones) first really discovered the Beach Boys, beyond hearing the occasional oldie on the radio. It was the summer of 1974, and the Beach Boys were still trying to get themselves back on track commercially after a seven-year commercial dry spell, when this double LP of their 1963-1966 material (all but one cut predating Pet Sounds) came along and did the job. Endless Summer, which was assembled in consultation with Mike Love, soared to number one and charted high over two subsequent summers (spending three years on the charts, the longest of any of the group's albums), and attracted the enthusiastic attention of millions of listeners too young to have bought their singles back when. The programming was a little thin, not even running an hour total, spread among two LPs, but most of the group's best loved singles were represented -- no notes, not a word of historical context, just a great collection of songs that proved irresistible to many shoppers. The packaging was nigh perfect, a simple, celebratory sun-lit graphic that spoke volumes about the music. Although it's been supplanted by other compilations (including the British 20 Golden Greats), on LP and CD alike, Endless Summer was a sentimental favorite for many listeners, sufficient to justify not only a standard CD release but a resourced, recompiled audiophile disc as well from DCC Records. Bruce Eder