The one word which saw The Beach Boys banned from the radio
For their 11th studio album, The Beach Boys embraced the studio as an instrument in its own right on an unprecedented scale.
Enamoured with Phil Spector’s in-house Wrecking Crew band responsible for his beloved Ronettes records and realising the LP format’s scope for creative unity, principal songwriter Brian Wilson became lost in the various Hollywood recording facilities used to cut 1966’s seminal Pet Sounds.
While Wilson’s pop melancholy had reared its head on The Beach Boys Today! two years earlier, before label pressure pushed for lighter hits, the full breadth of his introspective songwriting would shimmer all through Pet Sounds’ eclectic chapters. Existential wanderings, the stinging echoes of love and loss, and misfit dissociation all trek across a surrealist chamber marvel with an emotional weight far beyond its author’s tender age of 23.
Led by ‘Caroline, No’ and ‘Sloop John B’ two months before Pet Sounds’ release in July, it would be the double A-side punch that would stand as one of the band’s finest pop offerings. Accompanying ‘Wouldn’t It Be Nice’s’ wistful cheer was the celestial love song ‘God Only Knows’, an immaculate romantic gem plucked from the ether that lyrically details the ebb of a significant relationship while spiritually pointing to somewhere much deeper. Often touching on divination when discussing his songcraft over the years, Wilson imbued his ostensible break-up song with a stirring affection of faith and private communication with a higher power.
Aiding ‘God Only Knows’ baroque awe was its explicit lyrical confession. While it was never clear if he’s confiding in God as a literal believer or merely as a desperate call to the void, many a secular person can lapse into, the direct namechecking of the divine entity seemed both potentially blasphemous to the establishment as well as tone-deaf to an emerging youth scene rejecting the dogmas of church and organised religion.
“The first time I heard it, Brian played it for me at the piano,” then wife and The Honeys singer Marilyn Wilson-Rutherford recalled in 1997, “And I went, ‘Oh my god, he’s talking about God in a record’. It was pretty daring to me. And it was another time I thought to myself, ‘Oh, boy, he’s really taking a chance’. I thought it was almost too religious. Too square.”
“Too square” was nothing new to The Beach Boys, routinely praised for their sunny harmonies and inventive popcraft, but often lagging in their countercultural stature across the decade, reaching a nadir a year later when a refusal to play the cutting-edge Monterey Pop Festival cost the former surf outfit much hippy cache.
It was the conservative ‘Bible Belt’s’ reaction to the mere mention of God that caused greater concern. Radio stations across the US’ southern states pulled ‘God Only Knows’ from many of their schedules and playlists for simply featuring the lord in its title. Perceived blasphemy could still evoke the ire of the nation’s religious right, as was dramatically revealed by John Lennon’s “bigger than Jesus” quip the same month.
Luckily for the rest of the music world, America’s liberal coasts were less bogged down with heresy and hellfire, spinning The Beach Boys’ golden masterstroke and ensuring its eternal standing as one of the band’s definitive cuts. While Pet Sounds’ critical acclaim came much later, ‘God Only Knows’ dazzled the moment it was unleashed into the pop-sphere, a radiant conjuring of love’s higher purpose that’s brought some of the greatest songwriters of modern history to stunned veneration and moved to tears.
