Pet Sounds: How a Beach Boys album resulted in Blood, Sweat and Tears
Despite being the faces of clean-cut America, the origin of many 1960s experimentations can be traced back to The Beach Boys. Brian Wilson’s keen creative vision mixing classic harmonies with more modern details and a major interest in production, resulting in a sound that is instantly recognisable. While unique and singular in their sound, The Beach Boys were a key inspiration to a whole host of musical talents.
In 1966, when the band started the Pet Sounds sessions, Brian Wilson was obsessed. Produced, arranged and almost solely composed by Wilson, the album truly is his masterpiece. His mission was simple: to make “the greatest rock album ever made” that would beat out the rising competition from The Beatles and producer Phil Spector. Wilson wanted to create an album that was at once both experimental and totally seamless, with no filler on the tracklist but plenty of sonic exploration.
Over the 13-track album, he more than succeeded. Pet Sounds has gone down in history as one of the greatest albums of all time. It’s home to some of their most commercially successful cuts, including ‘God Only Knows’ and ‘Wouldn’t It Be Nice’, but that doesn’t mean Brian Wilson compromised on his experimental vision.
Inspired by the increasing hold of psychedelics in the 1960s, Wilson’s own relationship with marijuana, and spiritual enlightenment, the result is an album that throws genre concepts out of the window. Refusing to simply be a radio-friendly rock band anymore, Pet Sounds takes strains of jazz, classical, psychedelia and what would become chamber pop. Wilson himself dubbed the album “Chapel Rock” during an interview with MOJO, describing it as “commercial choir music. I wanted to make an album that would stand up in ten years”.
This experimentation in sound took over the studio, with the album taking almost a year to record. From July 1965 to April 1966, the Pet Sounds sessions saw the band taking tapes out of the studio to record train noises, bringing full orchestras in to create instrumental epics and even trying to get farm animals to perform for them. When it all came together, the result was an album that inspired musicians across all genres.
One person who was instantly hit by the power of Pet Sounds was Al Kooper. After he’d finished playing with Bob Dylan and his own band, The Blues Project, announced their break up, Kooper was at a loose end when he found himself at Brian Wilson’s house. Listening to recordings of Pet Sounds, Kooper was hit with an idea.
In his autobiography Backstage Passes & Backstabbing Bastards: Memoirs of a Rock ‘N’ Roll Survivor, Kooper recalls hearing the orchestral elements and the horns on Pet Sounds and dreaming up “a band that could put dents in your shirt if you got within fifteen rows of the stage”. He started to think about his “little fantasy” in the shape of a band that was “somewhere in the middle was a mixture of soul, jazz, and rock”. Pet Sounds made him think it was possible.
Soon after, Kooper formed Blood, Sweat & Tears, an American jazz rock band that fulfilled his dream of genre-bending. Mixing classic rock and pop with elements of big band jazz, listening back to their early works, you can hear the influence of Pet Sounds in their swelling horns.
While Al Kooper would depart the band soon after their formation, if it wasn’t for him and his run-in with Brian Wilson, the world may never have known hits like ‘Spinning Wheel’ or ‘When I Die’.
