The one guitarist Brian Wilson said could play anything: “He was dynamite”
Throughout the 1960s, Brian Wilson was practically a sponge for any kind of new music that held his interest.
While there was always a central Beach Boys sound, it was easy to see him taking cues from everyone, from the country artists he loved to the occasional Beatles technique in his work after the Fab Four started gaining prominence. But even for someone that many consider to be a musical genius, there were always going to be other people helping to make his dreams a reality.
Then again, it’s almost not fair for anyone to try and match what Wilson’s heroes were doing. He was following some of the greatest songwriters of that generation, and even John Lennon and Paul McCartney were calling him one of the reigning geniuses of popular music; it wasn’t like he was trying to match anything that he saw from the likes of Phil Spector or The Ronettes. For someone who lived and breathed music as Wilson did, though, he wanted to learn from what they could do.
It’s not like the songs were the most complicated thing in the world when they came over the airwaves, and when listening to everyone from The Miracles to Phil Spector’s greatest productions, Wilson was slowly stockpiling ideas for what he wanted to do later down the line. And when he finally had the freedom to run around the studio all he wanted, The Beach Boys Today was the first time that he began working in studio techniques no one had thought of before.
At this point, Wilson was becoming a liability on the road, so putting him in the studio to work magic was the perfect middle ground for everyone. But while Rubber Soul was what got him to dream bigger on Pet Sounds, Wilson wasn’t trying to simply copy what The Beatles did. He was out to conquer the whole world, and across all 13 tracks, he wanted to make sure that he had a record that could go down in the history books.
It’s not like he was alone, either. The Wrecking Crew helped bring a lot of those songs to life, and even Al Jardine suggested making a song like ‘Sloop John B’ into a classic, but there were always certain members of the band who helped bring those songs to life. Hal Blaine was the best studio drummer anyone could have asked for, but alongside Carol Kaye as a rhythm section, Barney Kessel was the unsung hero, helping to bring the guitars to life on some of their greatest tunes.
The rest of the band members had long since been demoted to just vocalists at the time, but Wilson felt that he could throw anything at Kessel and get something much better than he could have ever dreamed of out of it, saying, “Whew, he was dynamite. Just a really amazing guitar player; that guy was dynamite. He played the RUN introduction on ‘Wouldn’t It Be Nice: Whew! Jazz guitar, any kind of guitar you want, he could play.”
The lines Kessel weaved might not sound like that much in isolation, but if you look at them in context, he was a master at serving the song whenever he needed to. Wilson may have written that beautiful guitar line that kicks off ‘Wouldn’t It Be Nice’, but from the effects that are put on the guitar, Kessel practically sounds like he’s coming from a dream world before Blaine’s snare hit wakes everybody up.
But would you expect anything less from a band that was known for being the greatest players in California? They lived and breathed music the same way that Wilson did, and since music this sophisticated didn’t come around every day, they wanted to make sure that everything sounded absolutely perfect by the time it was finished.
