Stack-o-Tracks

AMG Review of Stack-o-Tracks

Richie Unterberger
All Music Guide

One of the oddest albums released by a major ock group in the '60s, Stack-o-Tracks consisted of instrumental backing tracks to 15 of the Beach Boys' more famous songs, stripped of their vocals to encourage karaoke-like singalongs. It's an indication of how low the Beach Boys' commercial stock had fallen at Capitol that the label was desperate enough to put out the kind of release that usually only surfaces via bootleg. It's thus of interest mostly to collectors and Beach Boys scholars who want to dig a little deeper into the instrumental tracks than they can otherwise (although on some of the tunes, you can hear some faint remnants of the vocal lines bleeding in). A 1990 Capitol CD combines this and Beach Boys' Party! onto one disc, adding three previously unreleased backing tracks (of "Help Me, Rhonda," "California Girls," and "Our Car Club") to the Stack-o-Tracks half of the program.