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THE BEACH BOYS

Beginning their career as the most popular surf band in the nation, the Beach Boys finally emerged by 1966 as America's preeminent pop group, the only act able to challenge (for a brief time) the overarching success of the Beatles with both mainstream listeners and the critical community. The Beach Boys have riveted audiences for more than twenty-five years with songs celebrating the California dream. Promising a sundrenched paradise of fast cars and fast girls, where the surf's always up and the summer never ends, the all-American-looking musicians dominated the contemporary music scene for a good part of the 1960s.

The group's original lineup consisted of brothers Brian Wilson, Dennis Wilson, and Carl Wilson, their cousin Mike Love, and their friend Al Jardine. After Brian Wilson decided to stop touring with the band to concentrate on his work as a songwriter, Glen Campbell filled in for him for about six months. Their 1966 album "Pet Sounds" is widely regarded as one of the greatest and most influential albums of all time and always features in critics' polls of the best ever albums. The Beach Boys are one of the most critically acclaimed, commercially successful, and widely influential bands of all time. The group had over eighty songs chart worldwide, thirty-six of them US Top 40 hits (the most by an American rock band), four reaching number-one on the Billboard Hot 100 chart. The Beach Boys have sold in excess of 100 million records worldwide, making them one of the world's best-selling bands of all time.

Albums