‘Don’t Talk’: The Beach Boys song Tony Banks has spent the most time deconstructing
During their most prominent spell, The Beach Boys were often revered as the sun-soaked Californian answer to The Beatles. The harmonious family unit, featuring co-founding brothers Dennis, Carl and Brian Wilson, set out with a genre-defining surf-rock sound but soon evolved to accommodate a contemporary psychedelic rock sensibility.
Although The Beach Boys’ work was markedly pioneering, like The Beatles, they maintained a potent presence in the mainstream. This was primarily thanks to the genius of Brian Wilson, one of the era’s most celebrated songwriters and composers, whose acute ear for resonant melody was largely unrivalled.
The Beatles appeared to have one up on The Beach Boys until 1966 when the surf-rockers released their masterpiece album Pet Sounds. The album prompted John Lennon and Paul McCartney to raise the game heading into their late 1966 release Revolver and Sgt. Pepper thereafter.
“You know, Brian Wilson sort of proved himself to be like a really amazing composer,” McCartney beamed in a 2013 interview with Rolling Stone, discussing Wilson as one of his favourite songwriters. “I was into chords, harmonies and stuff at that time, and we ended up with this kind of rivalry. We put a song out, Brian would hear it and he’d do one. Which is nice, like me and John, you know, we kind of try to top each other all the time. But he eventually came out with ‘God Only Knows’ that was a sound stomper on Pet Sounds. I just think it’s a great song… melody, harmonies, words.”
The Beatles and the Beach Boys’ rivalry proved to be a fruitfully symbiotic relationship that embodied the most pop-inclined pillar of the psychedelic rock era. Releases such as Pet Sounds and Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band laid the blueprints for the prog-rock era that dawned approaching the 1970s.
Among the emerging titans of prog was Surrey’s very own Genesis. Initially led by Peter Gabriel, the band was co-founded by longstanding members bassist Mike Rutherford and keyboardist Tony Banks. As a British group, they were intensely influenced by The Beatles’ latter work but couldn’t help but discern the compositional excellence of Brian Wilson in Pet Sounds.
The 1966 album was packed with complex, groundbreaking compositions, including the famous contrapuntal harmonies heard in ‘God Only Knows’. However, for Banks, the Beach Boys song worthy of most attention was ‘Don’t Talk (Put Your Head on My Shoulder)’.
The Pet Sounds classic was composed by Brian Wilson, with Tony Asher handling the curious lyrics. “It’s an interesting notion to sit down and try and write a lyric about not talking,” Asher reflected in the liner notes of the album’s 1999 reissue. “That came out of one of those conversations where [Brian and I] were talking about dating experiences… I think at some point we were talking about how wonderful non-verbal communication can be between people.”
In a past interview with Songfacts, Banks revealed ‘Don’t Talk (Put Your Head on My Shoulder)’ as one of Genesis’ particular favourites and the song he spent most time deconstructing. “I’m always more interested in the harmony and chords, so The Beach Boys Pet Sounds was always a bit of a challenge for me,” he said.
“When it came out, there had been nothing quite like it in terms of the sort of harmonies it was using,” Banks continued. “So, the song that really puzzled me, and it still partly puzzles me, is the song ‘Don’t Talk (Put Your Head On My Shoulder)’, which doesn’t sound as complicated as all that, but it just goes through all these key changes as it goes along. To me, it’s just such a wonderful construction and beautiful piece of music.”
Listen to The Beach Boys’ beautifully complex song ‘Don’t Talk (Put Your Head on My Shoulder)’ below.
