“It kills me every time”: The best introduction Brian Wilson he ever heard
The art behind any great Beach Boys song was going to come from what Brian Wilson did.
Although the surf-rock giants may have been known for being a little bit more juvenile than what their contemporaries were doing at the time, there’s a good chance that anyone would have given their life savings to write anything close to what Wilson could come up with, especially when they started to break out of the typical song conventions on tracks like ‘Good Vibrations’ and ‘Surf’s Up’. But building the perfect tune means working on every single piece of the musical puzzle until it is absolutely spotless.
They didn’t call Wilson the rock and roll version of Mozart for nothing, and when looking at his track record, some of the biggest tunes that he ever made were all about trying to fill the song out with as many hooks as possible. ‘I Get Around’ might still be firmly in their surf-rock period, but going through every single piece of the song, it’s like Wilson was using the tune to show off every single piece of the band, whether it was the soaring harmonies or the driving beat behind everything.
He did have a lot more chances to stretch himself when working with The Wrecking Crew, but building his masterpieces meant trying to hook people in at every opportunity. And while every band usually followed the typical verse/chorus structure, no one was going to be roped in properly until they heard the right intro to set the scene for everything before the band fully dropped in.
Because if you look through every one of the band’s masterpieces, they all have a distinct opening to kick everything off. ‘Good Vibrations’ might just open with the verse and that high-register bass part, but even on their biggest hits, ‘Wouldn’t It Be Nice’ sounds like opening a music box before Hal Blaine’s snare drum comes in, and ‘California Girls’ practically sounds like a massive musical overture unfurling before that signature swinging bass line sets the tone for the rest of the song.
But sometimes the best intros aren’t the ones that are trying to blow you away. Not every one of Wilson’s ballads needed to pile on the melodrama whenever they started playing, and while his more downtempo songs were a lot less immediate when you heard them, ‘The Little Girl I Once Knew’ was everything that Wilson expected out of a great song when he first heard the intro in his head.
Wilson had everything else perfected for the song, but with only a few chords, he was already trying to get the listener up to speed with the melancholy behind the tune, saying, “That is my very favorite introduction in a song in my whole life. It kills me every time. It might have been the first time the music stopped and started again on a record. I wrote the intro at the studio before we cut the thing. And, [session musician] Larry Knechtel, it was his idea to keep the music rolling. We tried one, and then I put a second guitar overdub on top of the other guitar. And the rest of it was history.”
And when you look at how it works with the rest of the lyrics, keeping it to sparse chords was exactly what the intro needed to set the scene. If you think about it, the entire song is about trying to get back with a girl that you had a crush on back in the day, and while she has a boyfriend in the context of the song, those first chords are like a musical form of nostalgia before any other instrument comes in.
This might have been the precursor to what Wilson was going to be doing on Pet Sounds, but given how well he could marry lyrics and melody together, his job as a musician went well beyond finding the right chords. He was a tone painter in many senses, and he wanted to make every one of his songs sound absolutely pristine whenever he walked out of the studio with a new hit.
