‘Good Vibrations’: The 1960s precursor to ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’
‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ didn’t get the accolades it received by accident. While Queen had been one of the most extraordinary acts of the 1970s before they conquered the world, Freddie Mercury’s idea of combining three disparate ideas into one song to create a mini-opera is still one of the best strokes of genius anyone has ever done on a mainstream pop hit. The tune is more than worthy of joining the ranks of ‘Stairway to Heaven’ and ‘Hey Jude’ as a hardened classic of the genre, but Brian Wilson may have done it all first when working on The Beach Boys’ ‘Good Vibrations’.
That’s not to take anything away from Mercury or his willingness to experiment with operatic moments in his material. He was still a great song craftsman, but Wilson’s approach to the craft was much more thorough when putting different sections together under one roof.
While The Beatles had started expanding the idea of different song fragments alongside The Beach Boys with ‘A Day in the Life’, Wilson wasn’t just looking to make a brilliant pop song anymore. He had grown too much since the cars and surfing songs, so hearing him take a swing on a tune with multiple movements was either going to be brilliant or an absolute trainwreck by the time it started.
And when he came up for air, Wilson made Mercury’s art project look tame by comparison. Because let’s unpack ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ for a second. There are many brilliant movements set up throughout the tune, but you can practically hear where the breaks happen. Right after Brian May’s epic guitar solo, the opera section seems to come out of nowhere, and while the rock section is a lot more tastefully done, Wilson makes those changes without people even noticing.
Because let’s face it: what is necessarily “the chorus” of ‘Good Vibrations’? Trick question: there is none. There are multiple periods that sound like they could be a chorus, but every section sounds more like Wilson trying to outdo what he just did, whether it’s giving Mike Love’s baritone a chance to shine or the glorified bridge on the lyric “gotta keep those good vibrations happening with you”, which in itself could be a chorus for a completely different track.
And just as Mercury built to that massive high note right before the guitar riff comes in, Wilson bringing all his fellow Beach Boys in on that one magical chord right before the final section is like a ray of sunshine hitting your face. So, in essence, everything that Mercury had in mind for ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ is just a disassembly of the method that Wilson used almost a decade earlier.
Does that mean that ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ should be treated any differently? Hardly. Both of them deserve spots in rock and roll Valhalla for their daringness to do something different, but ‘Good Vibrations’ was the very push someone took into using the studio that way.
The Beatles were already paying attention to what Wilson was doing, and looking through rock history, it’s easy to paint a straight line from ‘Good Vibrations’ to any other episodic track from each subsequent decade. Wilson may have influenced Mercury to some degree, and that in turn probably inspired Thom Yorke when putting together ‘Paranoid Android,’ while also serving as the basis for what Billie Joe Armstrong was doing when layering parts on top of each other for Green Day’s ‘Jesus of Suburbia’.
‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ may have the more iconic legacy for rock fans these days, but anyone brushing up on their history knows that Wilson is the true mastermind behind that kind of creative ingenuity. Some may try to match him, but for 1966, Wilson had put together the kind of tune that was appreciated in its time but opened many more doors than anyone could have imagined.
