The Kokomo calamity: how The Beach Boys’ most detested song was made

Frank Marshall and Thom Zimny’s new Disney + documentary about The Beach Boys chronicles the group’s extraordinary adventures in pop – from the early success of singles such as Surfin’ to Brian Wilson’s mental health struggles at the peak of their fame. Amid the surf, sun and spectacle, however, one thing is conspicuously glossed over– the release in 1988 of The Beach Boys’ first number one in 22 years, Kokomo.

There are many dark chapters in the story of The Beach Boys. They include the malign influence of Murray Wilson, the band’s early manager and the father of singing siblings Brian, Dennis and Carl Wilson and the creative and financial tensions between Brian and vocalist Mike Love. The documentary (released on May 24) also covers their commercial decline in the early Seventies – a slump that came amid a streak of fantastic albums including Surf’s Up and Holland. But then there’s Kokomo – or, more accurately, the void where Kokomo should be.

Disney isn’t alone in shunning the track. No part of Beach Boys history has been ignored as conspicuously as Kokomo, even though it’s one of their biggest smashes, a hard-to-ignore 1980s pop moment and a catchy tune with a chorus that flows like syrup off a spoon. What Beach Boys lyrics do you know best? Admit it, Kokomo is right up there.

One reason Beach Boys diehards hate the song is that it was recorded without the ensemble’s resident genius, Brian Wilson. But it’s also because it is unapologetically, almost confrontationally commercial. Where the Beach Boys legend is founded on pop experiments such as Good Vibrations, Kokomo is a tacky ballad that takes the listener on a tour of holiday resorts around the Caribbean, starting with the entirely fictional Kokomo and then moving on to Aruba, Jamaica, Bermuda, Bahama, Key Largo and Montego. It’s cheese on a sick and widely reviled – by Beach Boys fans and music listeners in general.

“A monument to mediocrity… A textbook cautionary tale of a once-beloved group poisoning its own legacy,” said Stereogum in 2018. That was also the diagnosis of the (now defunct) magazine Blender, which listed Kokomo as one of the worst songs ever written, describing it as “a gloopy mess of faux-Caribbean musical stylings.”

Why wasn’t Brian Wilson involved? The tune was written specifically for the Tom Cruise romantic vehicle Cocktail at the behest of director Roger Donaldson. Obviously, when someone working with Tom Cruise gets on the phone, it’s all hands on deck. In the usual course, The Beach Boys would have deferred to Brian and allowed him call the shots. It was what they’d always done.

But he was in a mentally fragile state in the Eighties, when he was under the care of the notorious Dr Eugene Landy, a quack who started as Wilson’s shrink but later became the musician’s executive producer, business manager, co-songwriter, and business adviser (charged $400,000 a year for his services). The rest of The Beach Boys wildly distrusted him – their suspicions seemingly vindicated when news of the Cocktail gig reached Landy.

“We tried to get [Brian] to record with us on that song,” Love would say, “but he was under the tutelage, if you will, or under the spell, as some people would say, of Dr. Landy… who governed his every move. Landy wouldn’t let Brian record with us – only if Landy could be the co-writer or co-producer of the record.”

So Brian was out. Instead, Love hooked up in the studio with John Phillips – of California Dreamin’ writers The Mama & the Poppas – and Terry Melcher, music producer son of Doris Day and a musician with a strange cameo in Beach Boys history,

In the 1960s, Melcher was a staff producer at Columbia Records in LA, which is how he came to sing backing vocals on The Beach Boys’ 1966 masterpiece Pet Sounds. A few years later, Dennis Wilson introduced Melcher to an aspiring songwriter he’d met while buying marijuana from a mutual friend in San Fransisco –  an intense outsider named Charles Manson.

Both Dennis and Melcher felt Manson had talent. Melcher was open to producing him and interested in making a documentary about Manson’s hippy commune. But he was badly spooked when he visited Manson’s HQ at Spahn Ranch, a decaying movie set outside LA, where he saw the supposed spiritual leader fight a drunken stuntman.

Melcher backed away and Manson was stung by the rejection. He knew where Melcher lived – or at least he thought he did. He had visited Melcher several times at his home at 10050 Cielo Drive. However, when he called demanding to see Melcher, he was told the producer had moved on. He had indeed left, and the house was instead rented by filmmaker Roman Polanski.

It has been theorised that anger over Melcher’s refusal was a factor in Manson’s decision to target Cielo Drive in August 1969, when his followers murdered five people – including a pregnant Sharon Tate. One of the darkest chapters in the history of Hollywood had started with The Beach Boys and a random meeting.

Dennis Wilson drowned in 1983 during a drunken swim. Melcher, however, was still close to The Beach Boys. He agreed to help Love with his new movie commission. As it happened, John Phillips already had the bones of a composition, which he had previously recorded as a fluffy folk number. Hearing this early incarnation of Kokomo, Love had some suggestions. He changed the lyrics from past to present tense. And he added the chorus, starting with “Aruba, Jamaica…”

“We were asked to do the song for the soundtrack of the movie Cocktail, featuring Tom Cruise,” Love would recall. “So we were asked by the director to come up with a song for this part of the movie where Tom Cruise goes from a bartender in New York to Jamaica. So that’s where I came up with the ‘Aruba, Jamaica’ idea, that part…”

The tune ticked the boxes required by Cocktail’s Roger Donaldson. But it did not endear itself to Beach Boys fans or, indeed, to other Beach Boys. The first time Brian Wilson heard it, he didn’t recognise it as a Beach Boys track (though he admitted that he fancied the thought of visiting Kokomo). It also initially flopped – another failure to add to an ever-lengthening list.

Then, on July 29, Cocktail was released, and everything changed. Not only was Tom Cruise the world’s biggest movie star, but he could also turn pop dross into chart gold. Movie-goers recognised that Kokomo was the perfect musical metaphor for the film: gooey, a bit deranged, and, like every good cocktail, it went down slightly too easily. With one wiggle of Cruise’s imperious eyebrow, it was an enormous hit, displacing Phil Collins’s Groovy Kind of Love from the top of the US charts.

Yet if it brought The Beach Boys success, the dad-on-yacht vibes did little to enhance their legacy. To this day, Beach Boys fans wish Kokomo didn’t exist – a view apparently shared by the directors of the Disney documentary. “It’s not a great representation of the great music they created,” wrote one devotee on social media. “It makes them come off as a cheesy novelty act.”