It’s all happening at the zoo.
On February 15th, 1966, The Beach Boys — Brian Wilson, Mike Love, Dennis Wilson, Carl Wilson, and Al Jardine — along with not-yet-official member Bruce Johnston, made the trek to the San Diego Zoo with photographer George Jerman to shoot the cover for their upcoming album, Pet Sounds.
Although no strangers to iconic album sleeves, it’s common knowledge that The Beach Boys had no particular preference as to how to represent themselves on the cover of their 12th long-player in just over three years. Sixty years on, everything about Pet Sounds has become legendary: its title, font, photograph, color scheme — and that’s not even touching on the part that really counts: the game-changing, era-defining music resting between the sleeves. As rock met the crossroads of adulthood, with Pet Sounds, The Beach Boys created a signpost for aging up, moving forward, and personal change.
Mike Love recalled how the animal-centric title first came into being: “I named the album because Brian didn’t know what to call it. And at the end of the record, you have this dog barking at the sound of this train going by. And I said, ‘Well, why don’t we call it Pet Sounds?’ Double entendre, of course.”
Brian Wilson, who had slaved over this labor of love and put his brothers, cousin, and friends through the paces while creating what he felt was the group’s masterpiece, was absolutely thrilled: “I went ‘Whoa!’ We couldn’t believe it. Great title, y’know? So, about a couple days later, we hauled ass down to San Diego Zoo and took a picture with some goats. And that’s supposed to mean the pets — the pet goats.”
Decades later, Al Jardine was still bemused about the excursion to the zoo’s “petting paddock” for the famed photo session and had to admit it felt too obvious a tie-in to the album title, telling The San Diego Union-Tribune, “I was always under the impression Pet Sounds was about romance and unrequited love. And here we were, at this zoo in San Diego, posing for the album cover with goats. It was a little bit at cross-purposes!”
“We all looked so good. We were so young and happy and smilin’ and great, y’know? The cover was beautiful.” — Brian Wilson
With L.A.’s Griffith Park Zoo still open and only 13 miles away from Brian Wilson’s house, we asked Bruce Johnston why the band decided to make the five-hour round trip to shoot the cover down south in San Diego: “I don’t know why. Maybe they didn’t do album covers at the zoo in L.A. — maybe it’s as simple as that.” Brian Wilson also was at a loss for why San Diego was the final destination, telling KCRW, “I don’t remember who thought of going to the zoo. When we got there, we got some apples and we cut ’em in little pieces and we fed ’em to the goats. We all looked so good. We were so young and happy and smilin’ and great, y’know? The cover was beautiful. I can’t explain the mood, we were all just young kids feeding goats apples.”
Mike Love added that hitting the road to the zoo was far from a personal hardship for him: “I remember I drove my new yellow XKE convertible down to the shoot. Driving down Highway 1, ’cause you take the coast route if you know what you’re doing, you don’t go down the 5 (freeway), you take the beach route, right? So, we cruised by Trestles and Swamis and all the good places and went to the zoo.”
For Bruce Johnston, who was a touring and recording member of the band for nearly a year by that point, the San Diego Zoo shoot marked the third time he narrowly missed getting on a Beach Boys album cover. Although he was present for the photo sessions for the previous year’s Summer Days (And Summer Nights!!) along with Beach Boys’ Party!, being signed to rival Columbia Records prevented his face from gracing anything more than the back cover of Pet Sounds: “I was in the band under a year and kind of a newbie. I didn’t make the album cover — but I made the back. I just remember all the animals — pet sounds — but it was fun to be in the pictures. It took me a year to get out of the contract, but how could I know I would ever be asked to be on an album cover so soon? They had to have an album cover. I’m not in the band. I’m singing on the album, I’m signed to Columbia Records as an artist and a producer, but I’m not ‘in’ The Beach Boys — and no one knew what to do with me. They said, ‘Why don’t you come on the trip down to San Diego Zoo? We’re going to shoot an album cover.’ I said, ‘Okay.’ I mean, I didn’t even know if I was in it, on it, under it, or over it. So, I got in some of the pictures. I wasn’t trying, and I was in some and not in others.”
“Pet Sounds is the high-water mark of songwriting and production so meticulously rendered that you ache hearing these songs.” — Cameron Crowe, Rolling Stone
For many, the cover and music of the album remain forever intertwined. Back in 2003, the great Cameron Crowe extolled the virtues of Pet Sounds in Rolling Stone, where he wrote in part: “Those strange guys feeding animals at the zoo understood; even the music sounded like I felt. When you find songs so personal that they feel like someone’s been reading your diary, you tend to study the album credits to find out who the hell wrote this stuff. And that leads you to the heartbreaking genius of Brian Wilson. Pet Sounds is the high-water mark of songwriting and production so meticulously rendered that you ache hearing these songs.”
By 1966, rock’s burgeoning graphic artists were starting to make their mark with the albums of the day, which were replete with infrared and blurred images, exploding Day-Glo colors, fish-eye lenses, stark line drawings — even bathtubs and toilets. Viewing it today, the then-conservative-looking Pet Sounds remains ultimately more timeless than every one of those “progressive” eye-popping and au courant album sleeves. The Beach Boys — who shared the exact same art department as The Beatles at L.A.’s Capitol Records — issued an album featuring cover art with no substantial difference to the “Fab’s” 1965 releases The Early Beatles and Beatles VI — as well as all the initial trial proofs of “Yesterday”… and Today from ’66. It was what it was and it was how it was done.
Yet the look of Pet Sounds, along with The Beatles’ Rubber Soul and Simon & Garfunkel’s Sounds of Silence, felt part of a stylistic triptych that represented a very specific mood, age, and time. The vibe of the album cover ushered in a new aesthetic for the group — Brian, looking ultra-hip in his cold-weather pea coat, appearing like the son of Sloop John B.’s captain with shag hair — a distinctive move away from both summer and the Hollywood-based, Jay Sebring-designed dry pompadour. Mike Love appears fully adult with a beard and a leather jacket. Al and Dennis, chilling in Rubber Soul-quality suede, and Carl, as sweet as ever, looking more like a member of The Turtles than most of that group ever did. Due to its simplicity, the album cover has had its detractors over the years, but The Beach Boys look so cool, the font is THE BEST, and how can you possibly go wrong with a bright green and yellow color scheme? It sings SPRING. As far as this writer is concerned, it meets — and beats — the mark. It’s immediately and unmistakably Pet Sounds.
“We were a surfing group when we left the country at the start of 1966 and we came back to new music.” — Al Jardine
The move into maturity wasn’t lost on The Beach Boys, who spent the early part of 1966 touring Japan while Brian Wilson stayed in California conceiving the music for Pet Sounds. Soon enough, Al Jardine — along with the entire group — realized what they were creating transcended pop music and sat comfortably amongst the century’s greatest works of art: “We were a surfing group when we left the country at the start of 1966 and we came back to new music. It took some getting used to. It was a different kind of singing. The public wasn’t ready for something that completely new. There just isn’t anything like what we did out there, and there won’t ever be again, because it’s the genuine article.”