Pet Sounds 60.
The Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds, issued on May 16th, 1966, will forever be remembered as an album delivered far ahead of its time. The collection, which was the group’s 11th studio set in just over three years, continues to serve as popular music’s creative signpost for excellence, beauty, and artistic bravery.
Leader, writer, and producer Brian Wilson — then, still only 23 — saw his previous concessions to the business of pop record making finally give way, spurring him to create a new work, pouring everything in his heart directly onto tape. Together with primary lyricist Tony Asher, Brian pulled together the sound of his life, both inspiring and pre-dating the singer/songwriter movement by several years.
For Brian Wilson, this new music charted the changes he had seen up to that point, while employing the quickest and most talented studio musicians to translate his musical vision onto wax: “Pet Sounds was more of an advanced kind of a lyric idea. It wasn’t about cars, or surf, or flashy ideas. It was more of an introspective album with very, very good lyrics. It took about four months of working — writing all the time and recording as much as I could. We had 15 players. They were very crowded in a little room. 15 players in a real little room. When you record like that, you have to get the mix while you’re doing it. It was a little bit harder to produce records in those days. You had to come up with something cool.”
“It wasn’t about cars, or surf, or flashy ideas. It was more of an introspective album with very, very good lyrics.” — Brian Wilson
Dennis Wilson and the rest of the band were well aware that while The Beach Boys were away on tour celebrating the now, Brian was busy at home crafting their future: “While The Beach Boys were on the road, Brian recorded over half the album with musicians in town. It was a whole new concept to record and approach getting a sound in the studio. That’s when I really think the doors opened up for Brian musically and creatively. It was phenomenal for him. Brian was so fruitful at that time, he could do anything he wanted, then we would come home and do the vocals.”
For co-founder Al Jardine, the switch from playing one-nighters across the country — along with squeezing in the group’s first tour of Japan — to the upshift of the Pet Sounds sessions felt almost as if they were living a double life: “We were just in a touring mode almost constantly up to that point. We’d just come back from Japan and it was a total revelation to us. We’d be all alone in this gigantic cavern of a recording studio called Columbia — Columbia Studios on Sunset Boulevard. It was like being inside of a giant space station (laughs) and you’re trying to sing these tender, beautiful, and moving harmonies. And we did it. Somehow, we pulled it off. But it was strange, like living in a vacuum.”
Frontman Mike Love, who co-wrote three songs on the album, was equally blown away by the material he didn’t compose with his cousin. He remains particularly fond of the album’s first ballad, the timeless and incredibly mature “You Still Believe In Me,” and rates it as both a major work for Brian as a songwriter and The Beach Boys as artists: “It’s a great lyric. It’s a fantastic song. It’s a beautiful orchestration, a beautiful arrangement. I mean, who doesn’t get disappointed in a relationship? It happens all the time. It’s very identifiable. When you think about it, it’s really touching, because there is that aspect of forgiveness in people and it’s great to practice it yourself and it’s great to have it practiced on you, believe me, because none of us are perfect and we all inadvertently or consciously — or unconsciously — screw up. And I think that song sums it up pretty well, that forgiveness is a huge deal.”
Throughout the process of recording Pet Sounds, Brian leaned on his younger brother Carl Wilson, who once again served as his most trusted musical ally. Over the years, Carl, perhaps better than anyone else, recognized that Brian’s raw emotions were the wellspring from which all flowed musically: “I think that a person who is operating on that level a lot of times is not necessarily in balance. You just get hurt. Is that sensitivity part of the reason for his genius? Absolutely. You have to be sensitive to really be able to give in and let it hang out with the song you’re writing and let the feelings go. Maybe it’s the other side of being vulnerable. I mean, you have to be vulnerable enough to let the thing in to get it out.”
Brian Wilson always viewed music as an extension of not only his emotional life, but a link to his spiritual existence. He understood the role that music played for people and was cognizant that good intentions and true love needed to permeate the recordings: “Carl and I had meetings a couple of weeks before we started the production. I had written almost all of the songs before we got going on it. And he and I were praying for the goodness of mankind to create something for people that would last through their whole lives, and a spiritual love. We believe so much in spirituality, you wouldn’t even believe it. We’re crazy for it.”
For Pet Sounds, Brian Wilson utilized Tony Asher and his cousin Mike Love to convey the ebb and flow of a maturing heart in the songs’ lyrics. And although The Beach Boys were no strangers to cutting instrumental tracks, the album’s title track and “Let’s Go Away For Awhile” crossed the boundary past rock or pop into a more adult musical plateau. Until the end, Brian Wilson always regarded the recording as one of his favorite moments as a record maker: “‘Let’s Go Away For Awhile’ was a satisfying piece of music to make. I applied a certain set of dynamics through the arrangement and the mixing and got a full musical extension of what I’d planned during the earliest stages of the theme. I used a lot of musicians on the track — 12 violins, piano, four saxes, oboe, vibes, a guitar with a Coke bottle on the strings for a semi-steel guitar effect. Also, two basses and percussion. The total effect is ‘Let’s Go Away For Awhile,’ which is something everyone must have said at some time or other. I think Burt Bacharach had influenced me a little. If you analyze it, there were a lot of chord changes similar to the way he would put something together. I’m definitely proud of that tune.”
Over the years, Pet Sounds has been celebrated and revisited more than most albums of the rock era — certainly more than any other Beach Boys long-player. For Al Jardine, the album has only resonated more deeply with him over time: “My favorite on the album might’ve been ‘I Know There’s An Answer.’ I liked that one. It was originally called ‘Hang On To Your Ego’ — I had to sing it twice because of the lyric change. I thought that was a cute song. I enjoyed that one a lot and I finally got to sing it on stage with Brian when we did Pet Sounds together in 2006.”
The album’s lead track, “Wouldn’t It Be Nice,” proved to be an instant classic and a concert staple from the moment it was released. Although true believers have always studied the great Beach Boys albums in an effort to dissect the precise recipe of what makes this music work on so many levels, Bruce Johnston believes it’s an amalgam of the right elements building the perfect musical foundation: “I think it’s always going to be the songwriting first. Why is it something wonderful all these years later? Great song, great production, great singing, great leads, great backgrounds — and it just still works. I wouldn’t be surprised if every great musical talent of all time is spinning around inside Brian Wilson’s great blender.”
Creating groundbreaking music was not easy, and the band have often likened the vocal sessions for Pet Sounds as nothing short of a Herculean task. Mike Love pointed out that perfecting “Wouldn’t It Be Nice” brought the group to the brink of exhaustion: “We actually had a tremendously difficult time doing the backgrounds. I can remember at least 27 passes of just one section. And that’s the time in which I started calling Brian Wilson ‘dog ears.’”
“If you could write, just, maybe the bridge to ‘Wouldn’t It Be Nice,’ that would be an accomplishment for most writers for a lifetime. Just the bridge.” — Al Jardine
Like his bandmates, Al Jardine understood that the cut of songs Brian Wilson was providing for The Beach Boys went far beyond what other groups were offering up at the time: “If you could write, just, maybe the bridge to ‘Wouldn’t It Be Nice,’ that would be an accomplishment for most writers for a lifetime. Just the bridge.”
Personal music took on a whole other shape within the confines of Pet Sounds. Deeply introspective lyrics partnered with incredibly complex and beautiful music were not entirely uncommon in the hit parade, but laying oneself so bare on record was not the norm. On songs like “I Just Wasn’t Made For These Times,” a new genre of pop music was being created with zero thought given to the confines of the Top 40. Mike Love recognized that Brian Wilson was showcasing his truest self in the group’s new music: “That is so Brian because he was way ahead of his time musically. That’s just quintessential Brian Wilson right there. ‘I Just Wasn’t Made For These Times’ — once again, a fantastic track. How can a guy make that many fantastic tracks on one album? That’s what I’d like to know. It’s so sensitive. It’s so emotional. It’s so vulnerable. You’re so vulnerable. You feel alone. It’s so Brian Wilson. I don’t know, it should probably be his theme song.”
Al Jardine recognized that the work Brian Wilson was providing for the band was important on a level far beyond simple entertainment: “He’s a musical visionary as well as a social visionary. He sees things I don’t think the rest of us see — and hears things, certainly, that we don’t hear. He’s got a special receiver going on up there in his brain.”
For music like this to work, there needs to be a trust between a creator and artist — something that Brian Wilson enjoyed while relying so closely on his brothers, cousins, and friends. Dennis Wilson admitted: “Wherever Brian would go, I would follow and support. We’d be in a studio; he’d start playing us a song and we’d start crying — it was so great. I mean, it was like, ‘How can this possibly be happening? How did you write that?’ Brian did something on Pet Sounds. He opened the door for a lot of people — especially me. He’s taught me so much. When Brian plays something for us, we just gape. It gets very emotional.”
One of the many highlights on the album is the classically tinged “Here Today.” Mike Love tackled the lead vocal on a tune that, like so many on Pet Sounds, effortlessly shifts emotions, time signatures, and musical styles. Mike remembers the song as mixing hope and cautiousness when dealing with matters of the heart: “It’s really a neat song. It’s kind of warning people to be careful when you go out on an emotional limb: ‘I hate to be a downer / but I’m the guy she left before you found her.’ It was good contributing to that. It’s in a high vocal range for me, but yeah, although it gave me a hernia, I had a good time singing it.”
“Sloop John B.,” the only cover on Pet Sounds, was suggested by Al Jardine. Released as a single just short of two months before the album’s release, it soared up the charts, topping out at Number Three on the Billboard Hot 100. Al Jardine shed light on how he convinced Brian to consider the song for the group: “I tried persuading Brian to record the track a year before we finally cut it. I sat and played these chord progressions, basically three chords done on a guitar, banjo, and keyboards. I knew it had to have keyboards, otherwise it wouldn’t get his attention.”
Carl Wilson, who quickly had to learn the track’s guitar part for live performance, was amazed at Brian’s reinvention of the simple three-chord folk tune: “The way Brian put it together was truly brilliant and it was totally unique for that song because it was a folk song written for acoustic guitars. And then Brian came up with that ostinato, that guitar figure that keeps repeating itself, and there are two of them actually that give it that sound. And the bassline — it was loaded. He was really coming into his mastery. I mean, that’s when he really was demonstrating that he was a master.”
Although there were joyous moments throughout Pet Sounds, there was a healthy dose of melancholy marking the end run of adolescence and the pain of regret mixed with the sorrow from dashed hopes. No song better underscored those emotions than the album closer, “Caroline, No.” The tune holds the distinction of being the album’s first single, albeit billed solely to Brian Wilson, and earning the Beach Boys leader his only Top 40 solo hit. Years later, Brian Wilson recalled, “I never knew a girl named Caroline. It was about one of my high school sweethearts. I always wanted her but I could never have her. So instead of being brokenhearted and running from it, I chose to create and get into the creative aspect of it.”
For Mike Love, “Caroline, No” was yet another example of Brian Wilson tapping into the core universal themes of growing up and drifting away from their past: “I mean, people change. People do. Some people for the better, and some people stay the same. They don’t change with the times, or they do. Some get more materialistic and some get more spiritual. But (those lines) ‘Where did your long hair go / Where is the girl I used to know? / What made you lose that happy glow?’ That happy glow can go if you make the wrong choices in life.”
For many, the track that exemplifies Pet Sounds is “God Only Knows.” Tony Asher, Brian Wilson’s collaborator, recalled the creation of the song: “We did have this concern about using the word ‘God’ in the lyric at that time. It was a relatively controversial thing. And I think we would have given it up if we could have come up with absolutely anything else that would have satisfied us. Whatever we came up with wasn’t nearly as good as that. In the end, we just couldn’t come up with anything better and we did really like the way it all sang and worked together.”
For Mike Love, “God Only Knows” and the voice of his cousin and bandmate Carl Wilson will forever be intertwined: “I wouldn’t be the only one to say it’s a fantastic song. Carl Wilson did the most beautiful lead you could possibly imagine, and he did it just about every night he was on tour with us until he passed away in February 1998. So, I miss that tremendously. That is a stellar song and performance by Carl — and a beautiful track by Brian. You can’t say enough good about ‘God Only Knows.’”
“It was a glorious album in our ears.” — Carl Wilson
Carl Wilson understood exactly what Pet Sounds meant for both its creator and its audience: “Pet Sounds had rhythm and power in it and yet the chords and constructions were quite classical. The disappointment and the loss of innocence that everyone must go through when they grow up and find everything’s not Hollywood is the recurrent theme of that album. It was far more adult and human than what we had done before. We knew that this was really good music. It was a glorious album in our ears.”
Brian Wilson lived most of his life being reminded and thanked for Pet Sounds. He told this writer he had felt numerous emotions regarding the watershed collection — often all at the same time. The album represented a key moment and was a constant part of his life. Not too long ago, Brian revealed, “Pet Sounds came from an emotional standpoint. I was in seriously bad emotional pain and had to cry out loud at times, but I got it done. ‘God Only Knows’ was quite representative of that. When the song came out, Paul McCartney called it the greatest ever written. If that’s so, what was there left for me to do?”
Pet Sounds was not the blockbuster the record label had hoped it would become, charting no higher than Number Ten. That said, Al Jardine has never taken for granted that the music has survived in a way that keeps it forever relevant and new: “The album was difficult to market (in its time) but, fortunately, the public climbed on board. Future generations appreciated it for what it is. When I listen to Pet Sounds now, I realize how incredible it is. I’m proud that it has stood the test of time.”
“Pet Sounds is the greatest album of all time, and it has nothing to do with rock ’n’ roll.” — Bruce Johnston
Bruce Johnston pulls no punches in his pride and admiration for what history has unofficially declared The Beach Boys’ creative masterpiece: “Pet Sounds is the greatest album of all time, and it has nothing to do with rock ’n’ roll. It’s just Brian being Debussy or Rachmaninoff in the mid-’60s. He just happened to be able to have four-to-eight tracks to work with a little bit. It just doesn’t fit in the rock ’n’ roll genre to me. It’s so far above it, but it came out at a time when he was a very young guy and rock ’n’ roll was blasting all over the radio — which is great. But Pet Sounds is its own foundation for future and modern composers.”
One of those future composers who studied and revered Pet Sounds upon first listen was none other than Elvis Costello, a songwriter of the highest order and lover of all of The Beach Boys’ eras: “You can’t praise Pet Sounds highly enough. Even hearing it pulled apart and presented without the vocals — very few records could stand up to that kind of investigation as it did. As time goes by, as you learn about music, as you get more experience, I started to come to appreciate how beautiful the songs are. The pure compositions are quite extraordinary. There’s a purity and a boldness in them. Songs like ‘Don’t Talk (Put Your Head On My Shoulder)’ and ‘You Still Believe In Me,’ I could imagine them being played a hundred years from now. That’s my belief.”