The Beach Boys album Brian Wilson considers his favourite
Brian Wilson was operating on a higher wavelength than any other individual for a period. While contrarians may claim otherwise, The Beach Boys peaked artistically with Pet Sounds, which single-handedly changed the scenery of the 1960s, and Wilson believes it to be their best work.
Wilson poured blood, sweat and tears into making Pet Sounds. It was an all-consuming obsession for him, but all the pain was worthwhile in exchange for the final product. Although it wasn’t as immediately successful as some of their previous releases, everybody who listened to it was blown away, and artists began to take influence from the record.
Creating Pet Sounds drove Wilson to the brink, and he even stopped performing live with The Beach Boys because he couldn’t focus on anything else apart from ensuring his creative vision come to life. His plan was simple, according to his wife at the time, Marylin Wilson-Rutherford, who told Rolling Stone in 1976: “He just told me one night, he says, ‘Marilyn, I’m gonna make the greatest album, the greatest rock album ever made’. And he meant it”.
“Boy, he worked his butt off when he was making Pet Sounds,” she remembered. “And I’ll never forget the night that he finally got the final disc, when they finished it, dubbing it down and all that, and he brought the disc home. And he prepared a moment. We went in the bedroom, we had a stereo in the bedroom, and he goes, ‘OK, are you ready?’ But he was really serious — this was his soul in there, you know? And we just lay there alone all night, you know, on the bed, and just listened and cried and did a whole thing. It was really, really heavy”.
The moment of completion when Wilson realised he’d made his dream a reality by successfully pulling off the impossible is a golden memory of a happier time for Wilson-Rutherford. Simultaneously, it adversely affected his sanity as Wilson reached new heights of artistry from that place and recorded an album everybody should own.
Over half a century later, Wilson still feels as proud of Pet Sounds as he did when he first listened to it with Wilson-Rutherford in 1966. In a Spin feature, he championed his Beach Boys 1966 masterpiece as one of the five records he couldn’t live without. Explaining his decision, Wilson eccentrically said: “I love the music…of course…and the album means LOVE”.
After hearing Pet Sounds, Paul McCartney felt he needed to elevate his output to Wilson’s level and responded with Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. “I figure no one is educated musically until they’ve heard Pet Sounds,” he once said of The Beach Boys’ opus. McCartney even described it as “the classic of the century”, which is the crème de la crème of compliments. It’s no wonder Pet Sounds occupies a special place in Wilson’s heart.
