How Tom Cruise Helped Beach Boys Stay Relevant Into Late ‘80s and Beyond (Twice)

Decades after the Beach Boys hit the pinnacle of their fame with hits like “Surfin’ U.S.A.” and “Good Vibrations,” they returned to the cultural zeitgeist with the help of a movie star enjoying his apex of celebrity: Tom Cruise.

Indeed, achieving international fame and relevance amidst the highly oversaturated and competitive world of pop music is one thing. Maintaining that foothold for decades is another entirely—something the Beach Boys were learning the hard way as their popularity began to slip in the late 1970s and ‘80s. Then, Cruise came along.

How Tom Cruise Helped the Beach Boys Stay Relevant

In the late 1980s, the Beach Boys’ legacy depended almost entirely on the sunshiney, coastal music they released two decades earlier. Indeed, it was this kind of sun-soaked pop the producers of Tom Cruise’s 1988 rom-com, Cocktail, were looking for. And if the Beach Boys’ sound was what they were after, why not skip the imitations and go straight to the source?

“They asked us to do the song because, in the movie, Tom Cruise was going from New York to Jamaica,” Brian Wilson later recalled (via Far Out Magazine). “So, we just wrote the song, and the director of the film heard it and said, ‘This is the biggest hit that you’ve had since “Good Vibrations.”’ We had no frame of reference on it. We were just writing by assignment to the movie.” The island song, of course, was “Kokomo.”

Just as director Roger Donaldson predicted, “Kokomo” became one of the Beach Boys’ biggest—albeit controversial—hits. It topped the pop music charts in the United States, Australia, and Iceland for weeks. The song even garnered the Beach Boys a Grammy Award for Best Song Written Specifically for a Motion Picture or Television in 1988, though the band lost to Phil Collins’ “Two Hearts” from the film Buster.

Some diehard fans denounce “Kokomo” for its commercial appeal and vexing lack of Brian Wilson. Critics at Rolling Stone went so far as to call it a “joyless ditty” (they added that the album “Kokomo” was on, Still Cruisin’, was the “absolute pits”). Nevertheless, the song undeniably pulled the Beach Boys out from outdated obscurity back into the mainstream. For as many people who hated the song, its overwhelming success proved there were just as many people who loved it.

From Rom-Coms to Psychological Thrillers

If Tom Cruise’s 1988 rom-com Cocktail showed what the Beach Boys could do when following a rubric for a film, Cruise’s psychological thriller, Vanilla Sky, showed off the California surf pop band in their prime. The 2001 film Vanilla Sky tells the story of a magazine publisher, David Aames, who struggles to determine what’s reality and what isn’t following a severe disfigurement from a car crash.

The Beach Boys’ “Good Vibrations” slowly creeps into the background of one particularly harrowing scene, offering an unsettling contrast to the events happening between the actors on screen. The sunny, carefree sound of “Good Vibrations” becomes sinister and ominous, offering listeners a chance to enjoy one of the Beach Boys’ most iconic hits in a different way.

If we had to choose between one Beach Boys hit or the other, we might take the saccharine, pseudo-Caribbean flair of “Kokomo” over having to watch Tom Cruise wear that creepy prosthetic mask while “Good Vibrations” plays in the background.

Photo by Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images