“My favourite album”: Brian Wilson and his masterpiece that was an overlooked 1970s oddity
When talking about The Beach Boys and masterpieces, Pet Sounds is the obvious done deal. Case closed, end of story.
Yet for Brian Wilson, as much as he absolutely could be complimentary about his 1966 opus, his mind seemed to wander to a different place any time that chatter about masterpieces once again, inevitably, arose. Given everything that Pet Sounds represented, especially at a point where we’re six decades down the line, it seemed that the masses never wanted to know what his real truth was.
After all, it was easy to gloss over what came at the expense of the album, masterful as it may have been. The period that predated the album was a time of teetering on a terrifying brink for Wilson, plagued by mental health episodes in a landscape where no one had the language to articulate as much. Pet Sounds was a solace away from the noise, as much as it was a revolution.
As such, it was easy to understand why the frontman might have viewed the success of the record through varying lenses, and led him to pick a perhaps unexpected choice as his real top Beach Boys effort. After all, Love You seems to be an album which rears its head time and time again when it comes to the band’s legacy, but not always for the same reasons.
For Wilson’s part, he clearly felt as though it was the real underrated definition of a masterpiece. “This is my favourite album we ever did. It’s funny because now people are beginning to see it as a classic. It was quite revolutionary in its use of synthesisers. It’s got so much good stuff on it – ‘Ding Dang’, ‘Let Us Go On This Way’ and ‘The Night Was So Young’. I think it’s overlooked. Everything’s going on in there,” he once said.
And while his pleading of the case was valid in many respects, the reality was that it only truly told part of the story, as far as the other Beach Boys were concerned. It was an album which, contrary to many of the usual dynamics of a band, was pretty much a Wilson solo number in terms of most of the ideas and songs.
Of course, this came at a time when the landscape at large was looking rather bleak for The Beach Boys, after a period of years that saw them in commercial freefall without the frontman at the helm. His return was a welcome, if majorly over-dramatised, one, and Love You, despite its oddities, was the glimmer that recovery could be possible.
Naturally, there’s no denying the fact that the main reason Wilson favoured the record so much was that he had free rein over all the buttons, tools, and levers that his heart desired. In many ways, that spoke volumes even outside the studio, particularly with his toxic relationship with psychologist Eugene Landy, and his fight to regain control.
When you look at it that way, Love You was symbolic of so much more than just a few weird sounds and an underrated sonic reception. It may not have been as necessarily polished as The Beach Boys’ previous turns, but in terms of Wilson getting back on the horse and showing the world, at long last, who was boss, it was a more pivotal experience than any other album could create.
