California Classics for Summer: Love and 'Pacific Ocean Blue'

Summer means road trips, and road trips mean long stretches of uninterrupted music-listening time. That’s why record labels are diving into their back catalogs for that that forgotten summertime classic deserving of reevaluation.

A staple on critics’ 'Top Albums of All Time' lists since its release in 1967, Love’s Forever Changes isn’t exactly a forgotten classic. As a matter of fact, the psychedelic masterpiece already got the remastering treatment in 2001. But this summer finds a new, definitive edition hitting stores – a two-disc 'Collector’s Edition,' featuring a 'previously unissued alternate mix' of the album’s 11 cuts, as well as ten bonus tracks on an entirely different CD.

And that actually speaks to a personal pet peeve of mine: There’s nothing worse than having a great album’s effect ruined by a bunch of tacked-on studio chatter and false starts. Big ups to Rhino for resolving that.

For those of you who have never heard Forever Changes, you should pick it up in one form or another. Love leader and self-proclaimed 'first black hippie' Arthur Lee wrote most of the songs while hanging around an abandoned Hollywood Hills mansion that once belonged to horror actor Bela Lugosi. And it was there that he got the idea of marrying images of fear and chemically induced paranoia to some of rock’s most uplifting and sumptuous orchestral arrangements.

Opener Alone Again Or might sound familiar to the uninitiated, as it was used to great effect in the 1996 Wes Anderson film, Bottle Rockets.

Out of print for the last decade or so, Dennis Wilson’s Pacific Ocean Blue is getting its first reissue treatment from Carobou/Epic/Legacy, a division of Sony BMG. The reissue will celebrate the album’s 30-year anniversary (despite the fact that it came out in 1977) and include a bunch of previously unissued tracks.

Often referred to as the least talented Beach Boy, Dennis Wilson struck out on his own for this set of harmony-drenched power pop (though he did receive vocal help from brother Carl on a few tunes). In the wake of commercial indifference, Wilson practically disowned the album, promising a stronger follow-up that never happened. He drowned in 1983.

These days, Pacific Ocean Blue has taken a place alongside the Doors’ L.A. Woman and Neil Young’s Tonight’s the Night as one of the all-time great 'nail-in-the-coffin' albums, a whiskey and coke-fueled portrait of a wild, lonesome soul.

Forever Changes: Collector’s Edition is out now and Pacific Ocean Blue is scheduled for release June 17.