The music icon Brian Wilson would get “jealous” of
Part of the beauty of music is having little sense of competition whenever making a song. Everyone from John Lennon and Paul McCartney to Mick Jagger and Keith Richards fed off of that creative game of ping-pong, but for someone like Brian Wilson, he had to look outside The Beach Boys for the real people he wanted to compete with.
That’s not to say that any of the band members were lesser musicians because of it. There were plenty of fine members of the group who made fantastic contributions to every one of their albums, but all their talents seemed to be another kind of musical paint for Wilson to use half the time. Mike Love may have had his own say in what songs could and couldn’t be used, but it was going to be impossible for anyone to look at a song like ‘Good Vibrations’ and claim that they could make something better.
Looking at Wilson’s schedule, his sonic brain seemed to be operating faster than what the music business could handle. The entire idea of him spending his days making surf music was a thing of the past once Pet Sounds was born, but even with his creativity firing off every time he entered the studio, there were moments when it got the better of him, like when Smile had to be shelved as a result.
If anything, the one song that managed to come out exactly how Wilson wanted it was ‘Good Vibrations’. No one had reached those heights of production yet, and when The Beatles started taking cues from Wilson, he knew he had reached the big leagues. But even in his salad days, he knew that whatever he did could get done by Phil Spector in half the time whenever he brought out the Wall of Sound.
Sure, Spector’s track record may have given him free rein over whatever he wanted to make, but what blew Wilson away was the pacing of everything. Whereas he could spend a few months trying to make a song sound absolutely note-perfect, Spector would be able to release songs like ‘Be My Baby’ or ‘River Deep Mountain High’ in no time at all.
While Wilson had a goal to reach at that point, it’s not like he wasn’t a little bit jealous, either, saying, “I was jealous of Phil Spector at one time. He seemed to be able to release a record right after he recorded it. Before you know it, his record was on the market. For The Beach Boys, it wasn’t as fast a releasing system. You’d think it would cause a negative in me, but it makes me get in there and try harder.”
In the grand scheme of things, Wilson did have a few more things levelled against him as well. Alongside the massive hangups in his personal life, he and his label didn’t always see eye-to-eye on things, either, which caused Pet Sounds to be bypassed in its time when it didn’t sell nearly as well and led to the label releasing a greatest-hits record to make up for the disappointing numbers.
Then again, he was always dealing with the wrong kind of musical crowd. He was clearly an artist caught in the middle of the industry, but even if he took a little bit longer to release his greatest works, no one could deny that they sounded spectacular when every classic song finally arrived.
