The Beach Boys' Pet Sounds forever changed the
landscape of rock music in America and Britain alike. Brian Wilson's
meticulously complex and bizarre arrangements elevated the three-minute radio
tune to an art form it had yet to experience (but through the filler-free resplendence of the Beatles’ Rubber Soul or maybe Dylan’s
Highway 61 Revisited). Though Brian began the concept for his coming of age
drama early in early 1965, before the Beatles’ LP was released, Rubber Soul was
the catalyst of its brilliance. "Rubber Soul blew my mind," Wilson
said. "When I heard Rubber Soul, I said, 'That's it. That's all.
That's all folks.' I said, 'I'm going to make an album that's really good, I
mean really challenge me.' I mean, I love that fucking album, I cherish that
album."
Pet Sounds started with a panic attack. In
December 1964, while on a flight to Houston to start yet another Beach Boys
tour, Brian Wilson collapsed in the plane's aisle and began sobbing. He had to
return to California, where he (partially) recovered and realized that he could
no longer tour. "Listen, I'm going to have to quit the touring group. But
it's going to be well worth it, because I'm going to write you some good
songs." Nondescript as hell, and blatantly unreassuring. The other "Boys" just looked at each other. Throughout '65, while the rest of the band toured, Brian labored over the new project. He
arranged, composed, and produced the tracks and conducted an army of L.A.'s
best studio musicians (known as The Wrecking Crew). From square one, Wilson's infatuation with vocal groups like The Four Freshmen and The Lettermen defined The Beach Boys' sound, and early in his career, Brian began hanging about Phil Spector's Goldstar Studios, watching and studying his idol. Spector knew how to orchestrate, arrange and produce that great wall of sound; Wilson took those ideas and made them his own. He'd also
take a bevvy of Spector's hit-making musicians. At the age of 23, Brian Wilson had complete control over Pet Sounds, a feat that would all but elude The Beatles.
Halfway through the Pet Sounds sessions, Wilson
met Tony Asher working at a recording studio in L.A. Asher
was a young lyricist and copywriter who had been worked on advertising
jingles. Wilson played him some
of the music he'd been recording and gave him a cassette of the backing track
for a piece tentatively titled "In My Childhood." Within days, the two were collaborating. Although the tune had
lyrics, Wilson refused to show them to Asher. The result of Asher's tryout was
eventually re-titled "You Still Believe in Me," and the success of the
piece convinced Wilson that Asher was the wordsmith he'd been looking for. Said Asher later in the sessions, "We were trying to do something that would sound sort of like a harpsicord but a little more ethereal than that. I am plucking the strings by leaning inside the piano and Brian is holding down the notes on the keyboard so they will ring when I pluck them. I plucked the strings with paper clips, hairpins, bobby pins, until Brian got the sound he wanted.
Still, the real impetus of Pet Sounds' immensity was that
day in January 1966, the 16th to be exact, when at the Capitol
Records Building in Hollywood Wilson heard an early pressing of Rubber Soul.
Six days later, once again at Capitol Records, Brian revamped "Wouldn’t It Be
Nice" into an instrumental dream reminiscent of Burt Bacharach. The touring
Beach Boys returned in February to find Wilson over budget (not to mention
overweight) and anti-surf – the old Brian Wilson gone. None of the Beach Boys but Al
Jardine knew he’d been gone long before; knew that only the Brian standing before them
could have written "California Girls." After listening to the instrumental
track of “Wouldn’t It Be Nice,”Jardine turned to Mike Love and said, "And you
don’t want to be a part of that?"
In March of that year it took a full week to record the vocal
track for "Wouldn’t It Be Nice." Brian was so demanding that Mike Love took to
calling him "Dog Ears" because he could "hear things humans could not." Love joked that they'd have to re-record a take in case any of the members had
"an impure thought.”
Nonetheless, Brian's arrangements on Pet Sounds are so musically
complex and meticulous, meaning can be derived at a remarkably technical level,
as music critic Jim Fusilli does here: "'You Still Believe in Me'"
begins in B major, a key rarely used in pop, and remains in B major. The G#
major chord below the first, and only, time the word 'love' is
invoked in the song is particularly striking; on the second pass, the G# major
chord hits below the word 'fail.' In a rare example of the bassist
emphasizing the root in a Brian Wilson arrangement, Carol Kaye hits the G# in
both instances. It's as if Brian wanted there to be no confusion for the
listener: in his mind, at least in this song, love equals failure." Oh my
fucking God, for real? Is it truly that complex? Excuse my expletives but this
is a masterpiece here and I don’t have the right adjectives for this caliber
work – am I gushing? OMFinG! Aside from the dogs in Brian’s solo piece "Caroline,
No" (that’s Brian’s dogs, Banana and Louie), there are Coke cans, vibraphones, Theremins
bicycle horns, the plucked strings of a piano, accordions, timpani and water
jugs. Dark Side of the Moon my ass, this was seven years earlier!
Without the support of Capitol Records it deserved (they had
such little faith in the album that they nearly simultaneously released a
greatest hits album), Pet Sounds was, on Beach Boy terms, a failure, only
reaching No. 8 on the Billboard charts, but the album was hugely popular in the
UK. Before its release there, touring Beach Boy Bruce Johnston took two copies
with him to London and managed — through Beach Boys fanatic Keith Moon (!) — to
arrange a meeting with John Lennon and Paul McCartney to play it for them. They
listened to it once through, paused, and immediately asked to hear the album
again. Shortly afterward, the two began to work on Sgt. Pepper's Lonely
Hearts Club Band. Game on. Pepper was the Beatles' attempt to
equal Pet Sounds.
Interesting that the song that would have thrown Capitol
fully behind the project, "Good Vibrations," was left off the album. Brian
thought it "needed more work." "He wanted to call the song 'Good
Vibes,'" Asher said. "And I remember when he began to play this
little riff, which he said he had been working on, he was saying something
like, you know, 'Good, good vibes, I get good vibes,' or something like that.
And I kept saying to him, 'You know, it really ought to be vibrations.' And he
said, 'Yeah, but that's not what people say.'"
Later that year, Wilson took the same musicians from the Pet
Sounds sessions back into the studio — sometimes for 10 minutes, sometimes
for six hours, sometimes to work on the overall song, and sometimes to rework
one tiny section over and over and over again. To these musicians, it was clear
that this wasn't going to be your average rock single.
"You would sit with a music stand, blank piece of
paper, and you'd wait until Brian got around to giving you your notes, because
he knew exactly what he wanted," harmonica player Tommy Morgan says.
"He knew every note in his head."
Musician after musician said the same thing time and
again, with the same sense of wonder. He knew the bass lines he wanted. He knew
the organ sound, what stops to pull on the organ. He would use the studio and
get that idea from his head onto tape, and he'd do it by recording it in bits
and pieces, getting different sounds from three different studios. It was a
revolutionary idea for making records. "That wasn't your normal rock 'n' roll. I mean, it
wasn't 'Help Me, Rhonda' and it wasn't 'Surfin' U.S.A.,' " bassist Carol
Kay says. "You were part of a symphony." There were as many as 18 recording dates, and in the end, Brian had to piece together a song from
a stack of tapes three and a half feet high. Then, after months working in isolation, Wilson was ready
to play his miniature symphony for his brothers Carl and Dennis, his cousin
Mike and Al Jardine. Brian remembers the first time The Beach Boys
heard it. "They were very blown out. They were most blown out," he
says. "They said, 'Goddamn, how can you possibly do this, Brian?' I said,
'Something got inside of me.' I said, 'I had to do something,' you know, 'I got
it going.' They go, 'Well, it's fantastic.' And so they sang really good just
to show me how much they liked it. They sang for me."
