The “lost” Brian Wilson album fans will never hear
Any album can get to feel like an artist’s child after a while. It takes a lot of courage to decide to take a song into the studio to record, so when it’s shaping up to sound like the version that they’re hearing in their head, most people would move the Earth to make sure that it sounds absolutely perfect when the final tape is handed into the record company.
But Brian Wilson has had more than his fair share of horror stories when getting some of his greatest material in the can for The Beach Boys.
Because once he ventured outside the realm of surfing songs and tunes about cars, he never wanted to go back to that creative well again. Had he continued to make cheeky California pop songs, he would have been typecast, and Pet Sounds was the first time that he blew the doors wide open for popular music. Every song felt like a finely-crafted work of art, but that didn’t mean everyone had to like it, either.
Despite it being a masterpiece, Wilson was met with a lot more apprehension from his higher-ups for not having a surefire hit like the last few albums. And if that wasn’t bad enough, the idea of drugs being referenced in the song was enough to shake some of the band’s squeaky-clean image. But if a few drug references meant getting the strange sounds on ‘Good Vibrations’, it was all worth it.
Right as the afterglow of Pet Sounds ended, though, Wilson already started going off the deep end a little bit. Smile felt like it was going to be one of the greatest albums that any pop act had ever made, but after Wilson’s mental breakdown and The Beatles starting to outpace them with records like ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’, what was supposed to be their magnum opus ended up sitting on a shelf for years before finally getting finished.
But just because Wilson took a back seat to the Beach Boys didn’t mean he stopped making music. He had a lot of inspiration inside him, but whereas some of his later albums could get problematic, like The Beach Boys Love You, Sweet Insanity sounded like it would have been phenomenal if not for some shady insider stealing the whole thing for themselves.
Wilson had the entire album finished and ready to go, but instead of re-recording the entire thing, he shelved it after the tapes went missing, saying, “I did an album called Sweet Insanity and someone made off with the tapes. Someone stole them, so we lost the album.” But given its backstory, the fact that the recordings went missing might only be one of the explanations for why Wilson didn’t go back to it.
Yes, from the sounds of it, some of the tunes feel like they would have been fantastic like Tom Petty and Bob Dylan featuring on the song ‘The Spirit of Rock and Roll’, but since this was also the time when Wilson was trying anything, the idea of hearing him try on a hip-hop song on the track ‘Smart Girls’ feels like the kind of unholy collaboration that should have been nixed the minute Wilson suggested it.
It’s anyone’s guess whether Wilson’s estate will give the album any kind of reissue or anything, but given the fact that it was made in the years when Eugene Landy was a big part of Wilson’s life, it’s understandable that he wouldn’t have wanted to go back to that place. Because no matter how good the music might be, it’s always better to have peace of mind than listen to a song that could reopen an old wound.
