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Kokomo
The truth behind that annoying hit song ''Kokomo'' -- Why people still love the Beach Boys tune that ruled that airwaves the summer of 1988
By Scott Brown, Michael Endelman
It's been derided. it's been lauded. wait, no...it's just been derided. But it's also been listened to. A lot. Its pastel harmonies were a peppy elegy for a passing era, and its commercial success was the last stand of boomer dominance in a business on the brink of the hip-hop revolution. As such, it deserves our reminiscence, if not our reverence. The year was 1988. ''Cocktail'' was in theaters. And suddenly, unaccountably, there was a place called ''Kokomo.''
How did that magical imaginary island come to be? Through the hard work of a weird assortment of master musicians, rock legends all, who for a few days in the late '80s joined forces to evoke the innocuous, anonymous beach resort of the American imagination, giving this country a tropical contact high it would never forget. No matter how hard we tried.
Indeed, ''Kokomo'' proved positively metastatic. It sold more than one million singles and gave the Beach Boys their first No. 1 since ''Good Vibrations.'' It helped propel the ''Cocktail'' soundtrack (which also included tunes like Starship's ''Wild Again'' and Robbie Nevil's ''Since When'') to quadruple-platinum sales and the Beach Boys' comeback album ''Still Cruisin''' to gold. John Stamos thumped bongos in the video. And critics absolutely loathed it. ''Because it's just sooo syrupy pop,'' explains session drummer Jim Keltner (John Lennon, Bob Dylan, Elvis Costello), one of several uncredited famous musicians who helped create the song. ''But while the critics killed it with their words, they couldn't kill the 'hitness' of it. It's just a bona fide hit record, that's all there is to it.'' Bermuda, Bahama, come on, pretty mama...
It was the Beach Boys...and yet, not the Beach Boys. Not all of them, anyway. Drummer Dennis Wilson had drowned five years earlier. The emotionally fragile Brian Wilson, estranged from the group he guided to greatness in the '60s, was recording his own comeback album with therapist/caretaker/Svengali Dr. Eugene Landy.
The Beach Boys had been recruited to record a tune for ''Cocktail,'' a cheesy romantic comedy about a studly bartender in the tropics. Tom Cruise -- fresh from success with ''Top Gun'' and ''The Color of Money'' -- was set to star. It wasn't exactly a glamour assignment, but the Beach Boys needed the gig -- in the late '80s the band was floundering. Label-less and without a new album since 1985, they paid the bills playing oldies gigs at state fairs and amusement parks. In 1987, they had been reduced to recording a cover of ''Wipeout'' with corpulent rappers the Fat Boys.
The Beach Boys took on the assignment, but they were only partially involved in its composition. That task mostly fell to a weird trio of well-respected California-rock veterans. There was the late Mamas and the Papas founder John Phillips, the man who brought us ''California Dreamin''' and ''Monday, Monday.'' Also on board: Scott McKenzie, a longtime Phillips collaborator who's best known for his 1967 smash ''San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Flowers in Your Hair)''; and Doris Day's son, Terry Melcher, an L.A. music veteran whose numerous claims to fame include producing the first two Byrds albums and a tragic acquaintance with Charles Manson, who once tried to recruit Melcher to produce his music. (Not long after, Sharon Tate was murdered in the house she and Roman Polanski had rented from Melcher and his then girlfriend, Candice Bergen.)
''Kokomo'' started off innocently enough. ''John Phillips and I were writing in his SoHo apartment in New York when John got a call from our California friend Terry Melcher,'' says Scott McKenzie. Melcher told them he'd been hired to work with the Beach Boys on a song for a movie and asked if Phillips wanted to help. ''John and I began throwing around ideas, and in a few minutes he began to sing: 'Off the Florida Keys, there's a place called Kokomo. That's where you want to go to get away from it all...'
''I said, 'That's a beautiful melody, John, but what's with Kokomo? Kokomo's a place in Indiana. It's about as Caribbean as Fairbanks or Switzerland.'
'''That's exactly why it's a great title,' John replied. Which is only part of why John Phillips was a great songwriter.''
Phillips sent their composition to Beach Boys frontman Mike Love, who had a few important suggestions. ''I told John that it didn't groove enough for me,'' says Love. ''So I came up with the 'Aruba, Jamaica' part. And I changed a couple of words. He had it as 'That's where we 'used' to go.' I said, 'That sounds like an old man lamenting his lost or misspent youth.' I changed it to 'That's where you 'wanna' go.'''
Am I tired of that song? I'm more tired of that song than any other song on the planet.'' This is Jeffrey Foskett, who sang ''Kokomo'' more than 300 times while on tour with the Beach Boys as a backup singer throughout the '80s. But that doesn't mean he can flip the channel whenever it comes on. ''There are people sitting next to me in the car that say, 'Oh man, I love that song!' the minute they hear it. I'm about to reach for the button, and somebody will say, 'Oh, I love this part!'''
Let's just come out and say it: ''Kokomo'' is a stupendously maddening ditty, with a chorus that has an almost ''99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall'' quality about it. But it's also, in a strange way, something of a classic. ''It has a transporting power,'' rhapsodizes 23-year-old indie-rock favorite Adam Green, who does a bare-bones cover of the tune on the B side of his single ''Jessica.'' He first heard it when he was 7. ''I'd never been to the tropics at that point, but it had 'that feeling.' It had a huge effect on me.''
That feeling. '''Kokomo' is saying, in a blue-collar way, there's a better world somewhere,'' says guitar great Ry Cooder (''Buena Vista Social Club''), yet another music giant who played on ''Kokomo.'' ''People are having fun, they're having drinks -- they made it somewhere where life is good, even if it's only for a day, or a moment, or the duration of a three-minute song.''
After Melcher, McKenzie, Phillips, and Love had finished crafting the composition, another famous name got involved: Van Dyke Parks. Parks has been a close friend of Brian Wilson's since the '60s (he wrote the lyrics for Wilson's unreleased masterpiece, ''Smile''), and therefore hadn't worked with the Beach Boys for many years. He and Love didn't get along, but helping out ''was an attempt on my part to be civilized,'' Parks says dryly. ''Didn't work.''
Parks' case in point: Melcher invited him up to his house in Monterey, Calif., to help with the vocal arrangements. Parks chartered a small plane for the trip. On the way back, Love offered to share the plane and split the fare. ''He gave me his card,'' recalls Parks. ''When he got out of the plane, he INSISTED I call him to make sure he paid for the trip. So I called him the next day. He had changed his number.'' (Love denies this ever happened.)
In early '88, a parade of rock notables -- Cooder, Jim Keltner, Phillips, Melcher, saxophonist Joel Peskin (Frank Zappa, ''Weird Al'' Yankovic) -- attended a series of sessions to record ''Kokomo'' at Santa Monica's 4th Street Recording Studio. Despite the supposed plane incident, the resourceful Parks was also on hand, having been tapped to rustle up some steel drummers. He also played accordion on the track (yes, there is an accordion on ''Kokomo'').
Brian Wilson did not attend the sessions, although he did end up contributing some synthesizer to ''Still Cruisin','' the Beach Boys album on which ''Kokomo'' eventually appeared. Wilson (whose PR rep kindly explained to EW that he had no desire to talk about ''Kokomo '' anytime, with anyone, ever) was attempting his own comeback in 1988 with the long-awaited ''Brian Wilson.'' His first single, ''Love and Mercy,'' was released only three weeks before ''Kokomo.'' It was a total flop.
Opinion among the musicians who played on ''Kokomo'' was mixed. Parks found it ''formulaic'' in the best sense, ''what Randy Newman would call a well-crafted tune. I don't think it should be put down, because it's obviously intended only as a piece of entertainment.'' But not everyone saw it that way. ''I wondered why we were cutting this song,'' remembers vocalist Foskett, who now tours in Brian Wilson's band. ''It was baffling because it was such a departure from [earlier] Beach Boys. Quite frankly, I didn't think anything would happen with it.''
Foskett was right -- at least at first. When it came out in July of 1988, ''Kokomo'' didn't make much of an impact. ''It took a long time,'' says original Beach Boy Al Jardine (who left the group in 1998 and now tours with his own revue of Beach Boys music). ''At first, we got no response whatsoever when we played it live. I was thinking, Jeez, this is a difficult sell. Why are we doing this? But Love insisted. It just lay there like a flat tire. And frankly, it still does.''
But in the months after ''Cocktail'''s release, ''Kokomo'' slowly exploded. Finally, in November, it hit No. 1, and soon the tune had blossomed into a huge cultural phenomenon. The video -- which for some reason featured longtime Beach Boys fanatic and then -- ''Full House'' star John Stamos -- was in heavy rotation on MTV, VH1, and Nickelodeon. The Beach Boys hawked the tune everywhere from ''Sesame Street'' to an episode of Stamos' sitcom. ''I remember the Olsen twins were on Arsenio Hall's talk show,'' says Love. ''He asked them, 'Who's your favorite group?' They said, 'The Beach Boys!' It blew Arsenio's mind.''
''Kokomo'' seemed like a sure thing, going into the 1988 Grammys; a once-classic band enjoying massive commercial success made it prime Grammy fodder. ''Terry, John, and I sat together at the ceremony,'' McKenzie recalls. The trio watched the Beach Boys lose Best Song Written Specifically for a Motion Picture to Phil Collins' ''Two Hearts''; they held out hope for Best Pop Vocal Performance by a Duo or Group. But the award went to Manhattan Transfer. ''We sat silent for a few moments,'' says McKenzie. ''Then Terry quipped, 'Clean sweep.'''
The Beach Boys never had another hit (Mike Love still tours using the band's name, even though he's the only original Beach Boy still involved). But ''Kokomo'' lives on. ''It scores extremely well,'' says Charley Lake of WJMK-FM, a Chicago oldies station. ''In fact, it may be the only song from the '80s that we play.''
The song has lent its name to tropical-themed bars, vacation condos, a catamaran company in Antigua, even a restaurant in Minnesota's Mall of America. Joe and Lindy Roth, who own the Kokomo Beach Bar at the Holiday Isle Resort and Marina in Islamorada, Fla., are typical of the ''Kokomo'' cult. ''We're beach freaks,'' says Joe. ''We just watched ''Cocktail'' the other night. We have three or four copies of it. 'Kokomo' sounds like our lifestyle. Along with 'Don't Worry, Be Happy,' it's one of my favorite songs. We play it all the time -- probably once a day. It's on all the jukeboxes on the property.''
And if that seems like more ''Kokomo'' than any sane human -- even one with a fondness for fruity drinks and Hawaiian shirts, warm sand and cool ocean breezes -- could possibly endure, well, maybe there's just something wrong with you. As Mike Love puts it, ''Unless you're basically anhedonic -- meaning you can't experience pleasure -- it's just a great, fun song.'' All together now: Aruba, Jamaica, ooh, I wanna take ya...
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