Culture

"Kokomo:" The Last Great Song by America’s Greatest Band

Clayton Trutor

I may be alone on this one, but I think “Kokomo” is a great song. Cocktail might not be much of a movie, but at least Tom Cruise’s follow-up to Top Gun gave us the last Beach Boys’ song worth remembering. The cults surrounding Pet Sounds and the long-awaited Smile have made the Beach Boys, or more specifically Brian Wilson, fashionable among rock canonists, but this approach to the band’s music shortchanges their magnificent early works and later-day gems like “Kokomo.” The omnipresence of “Kokomo” made it tiresome in the late 80s, but that hardly merits its continual exclusion from discussions of the band’s finest work.

Brian Wilson wasn’t behind the board for “Kokomo,” but the Terry Melcher produced single sounds enough like Brian’s work, by way of Phil Ramone’s Billy Joel records, to remind you what band is coming through your car stereo. It’s the vocals that make “Kokomo” for me. Mike Love employs his best “California Girls” phrasing as he lists off a half-dozen possibly fake islands. The late, great Carl Wilson, the finest harmonizer this side of the Atlantic ever produced, belts out the baroque chorus, “we’ll get there fast and then we’ll take it slow.” To my ear, it sounds just like his “if you should ever leave me, life would still go on, believe me,” in “God Only Knows,” the Carl-sung centerpiece of Pet Sounds. Uncle Jesse anchors the rhythm section with some of the meanest slaps ever laid to a bongo.

“Kokomo” turned out to be the band’s last great song. The Beach Boys ceased as a recording entity when Carl died in 1998. Brian has worked things out and recorded some fine music this decade, but nothing as canonical as “Kokomo.” “Kokomo” offers a final flash of the old greatness. It is as definitive a part of their legacy as the baroque pop on Pet Sounds and Smile or the iconic singles compiled on Endless Summer. Part of the song’s power comes from its subject matter. “Kokomo” wrestles with the band’s complex legacy as conspicuously as any song in their catalog. It combines two typically discreet themes in the band’s recordings: their triumphant depiction of the American lifestyle and their discomfort with modernity. The band that had “Fun, Fun, Fun” till daddy took the T-Bird away also “Wasn’t Made for These Times.” Beneath “Kokomo’s” fun in the sun lyrics lay a world-weary “Warmth of the Sun” pathos. It all seemed fitting in the aftermath of Dennis Wilson’s 1983 drowning death off Marina Del Ray. The “Kokomo”-era Beach Boys had taken time enough to reflect on the loss of their brother and band mate. They responded with a song that encapsulated the group’s quarter century together. In particular, Carl’s voice evokes this sensibility. He sings as a man looking back on a youth in which every decadence and trend was made available to him. His only desire is to leave that all behind and spend his time with the ones he loves.

“Kokomo” couldn’t have come at a better time for the Beach Boys. The band spent the 70s self-mythologizing, as Mike Love made the conscious decision to transform them into the original oldies act. They recorded a number of pleasant albums which contained plenty of catchy tunes. Little on those Brian-less albums struggles with the band’s legacy. Years after they quit recording regular albums, the Beach Boys came back with “Kokomo,” a single as infectious as “Help Me Rhonda” which gave listeners the sense that all the great music they’d recorded belonged under one big tent. A combination of overexposure and the band members’ subsequent legal squabbles over the rights to the “Beach Boys” moniker have led people to associate the song with walking through the mall on a weekday morning or the tiresome money-grubbing that has characterized the band’s public image for the past twenty years. This is unfortunate. “Kokomo” deserves another listen. Lend it your ears the next time you hear it emanating from a supermarket sound system.