The 1966 song Brian Wilson knew he never belonged on: “I didn’t really like”
Brian Wilson seemed to have a sixth sense for where every one of his songs was going half the time.
It didn’t take a rocket scientist to see why The Beach Boys were making hits in their early days, but if the formula of surfing songs and car songs was wearing thin, you could at least see why they were so beloved when they broke out into those stellar vocal arrangements. Wilson was making songs that captured the greatest harmonies of all time, but he was humble enough to know when he shouldn’t have graced us with his voice on some of their more beloved classics.
But Wilson was the one who brought the real emotion to half of their records. Some of his songs could sound like he was weeping on every single one of their tracks, and even though there were many moments where he seemed to be like Mozart whenever he was at the piano, he always broke down all of his harmonies in a manner so simple that everyone could appreciate it whenever they sang.
That kind of ingenuity certainly wasn’t going to come home to Mike Love any time soon, but the fact that Love wanted to put a damper on Wilson’s experiments is more than a little bit frustrating. Some of the work that Wilson did with Van Dyke Parks features some of the most brilliant material of his career, but since the simple idea of the band alluding to drugs was off the table, Love’s insistence on scrapping some of Parks’s ideas was a huge waste.
Then again, Wilson could continue making the best music that he could, no matter who he was working with. He had already been given total creative freedom when he decided to take a step away from the touring circuit, and when he did eventually come back to the studio, he had everything in his head to create a masterpiece on par with what The Beatles were doing on Pet Sounds.
The record may not have reached the public as it was supposed to at the time, but listening through every song, Wilson created a masterpiece on every track. The melodies he wove together fit perfectly with Tony Asher’s lyrics, and while Love should be given his flowers for his vocal and lyrical contributions, this really is the ‘Brian Wilson Experience’ in lots of ways. It’s just a shame that Wilson didn’t think so when listening to a track like ‘I’m Waiting for the Day’ again.
He was always generous with giving his songs away to other members of the band, but he felt that ‘I’m Waiting for the Day’ was a song that should never have had his voice on it, saying, “Vocally, I thought I sounded a little bit weird in my head. That’s the one cut off the album I didn’t really like that much. But, you know, it’s okay, it’s not a case of liking or not liking it; it was an appropriate song, a very, very positive song. I just didn’t like my voice on that particular song.”
At the same time, that begs one question: who the hell would sing the song? Love’s nasal voice wouldn’t have worked on the tune, and Dennis’s voice sounded a bit too gruff to pull off a song like this, but had they given it to Carl to perform and had Brian sing ‘God Only Knows’, we would have been dealing with a far different album than the one that went down in the history books half the time.
It’s ultimately Wilson’s opinion on whether he thought that the song worked out perfectly, but even if he wasn’t satisfied with his vocal, that doesn’t stop the song from being one of the greatest pieces on their best album. Wilson was working with something much more interesting, and he wasn’t going to let anyone stand in the way of him writing the best tunes on the planet whenever he worked.
