The song The Beach Boys regretted not putting on ‘Pet Sounds’
Nobody trumped California’s The Beach Boys in terms of sheer output during their commercial heyday. Across barely five years, the Hawthorne hitmakers had racked up ten LPs and a plethora of surrounding singles before psychedelia cast aside surf boards for sonic innovations in the studio. Tired of the incessant demand for the shiny 45″ single, principal songwriter Brian Wilson sought to pour greater time and creative energy into his work, reflecting the growing lyrical maturity, exploring his melancholic musings on life and love.
A key moment in pop’s emerging sophistication, 1966’s Pet Sounds would endure as The Beach Boys’ most pivotal record, heralding the arrival of the album era. Conceiving their 11th LP as a coherent statement in its own right, Wilson moved heaven and earth to ensure a sonic uniformity and cohesive offering as opposed to the haphazard LP compendiums of yore.
Combining his love of Phil Spector’s Wall of Sound production, avant-garde arrangements and complex harmonies, Pet Sounds landed in a strange intersection of pop mainstream and lysergic counterculture charged with heady evocation but grounded in Wilson’s infectiously innocent anchorage.
The fastidious studio time and novel pop experiments reached their apex on The Beach Boys’ most famous cut. Preparing the abandoned Smile sessions while deep in Pet Sounds production, the shimmering pop marvel of ‘Good Vibrations’ stood as a significant creative bridge between the two projects in Wilson’s mind, even if his bandmates were several steps behind his unpredictable vision.
“Brian decides not put it on Pet Sounds,” rhythm guitarist Al Jardine revealed. “‘I’m saving it for later’ [Wilson says]. Saving it for what!?… We worked six months on this to get it just perfect…we’ll park it over here and then we ended up putting ‘Sloop John B’ on the album.”
‘Sloop John B’s’ a respectable Beach Boys number, but one can’t help but wonder if Pet Sounds would be that much more immaculate and eternally dazzling with a concise, ten track ordering and ‘Good Vibrations’ sharing album prestige along immortal cuts like ‘Wouldn’t It Be Nice’ and ‘God Only Knows‘. The pop world didn’t care, topping the charts on both sides of the Atlantic and cementing the “genius” marketing campaign that would drum up the eagerly awaited Smile—a project officially seeing the light of day in 2004 as a Wilson solo record.
‘Good Vibrations’ ended up as 1967’s Smiley Smile lead single, nearly a year ahead of its release. A compromised version of the fabled Smile opus, Wilson eschewed grand avant-garde masterworks for some homespun lo-fi proto-stoner pop. While a great record in its own right, and imbued with a charming sooth countering the heady excesses of the pop climate around them, ‘Good Vibrations’ leaps out of the speakers with a dynamism at odds with Smiley Smile‘s bedroom aesthetic.
Jardine’s right. ‘Good Vibrations’ colourful pop gem still astounds nearly 60 years later and feels wedded to the magic and innovations The Beach Boys channelled during Pet Sounds‘ alchemic burnishing. Wilson would reinterpret his acclaimed piece on 2004’s Smile, alluding to the song’s rightful place in their core canon.
