The one song so good it scared Brian Wilson: “I’m very, very fond of it”
By the time Brian Wilson finished Pet Sounds, he could have officially retired from listening to any new music.
There was nothing else that was ever going to come close to what he did, and while The Beatles provided sufficient inspiration for the whole thing, it’s not like Paul McCartney was looking over his shoulder thinking that he was going to write a better love song than ‘God Only Knows’. It held together as a body of work that no one could touch, and yet Wilson knew that there would always be someone there to push the envelope.
Because, really, no one should expect their legacy to be set in stone for that long. Although people like Wilson, McCartney, Keith Richards, and Jimmy Page have each done brilliant things for rock and roll, there’s bound to be someone who would take over. Most folk singers didn’t see someone like Joni Mitchell coming, and even the biggest names in hard rock thought they were safe before Kurt Cobain started making waves in the 1990s.
But Wilson was never trying to play the game of trends. He followed what was in his heart, and even if most people were dumbfounded listening to The Beach Boys Love You for the first time, it was more an excuse for him to rediscover what made him love music in the first place. When a band like Queen came along, though, everyone was waiting to see what the hell they had up their sleeve after tracks like ‘Killer Queen’.
The band were practically studio technicians when they went into the studio, and looking at the way they layered sounds, it’s safe to say that Wilson’s attention to detail played a massive role in getting them to think outside the box. Although Wilson wasn’t interested in every new musician in town, ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ was the first time he was gobsmacked in a long time.
He used to be competing with the likes of ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ on the charts, but when looking at the six-minute epic, Wilson knew that every rock band had a new standard to follow, saying, “I’m very, very fond of it and scared of it at the same time. It’s the most competitive thing that’s come along in ages. It’s just totally amazing what people do when they lose their noggins. When they lose their heads and go in there and freak. That’s exactly what Queen did. They had enough of what was happening, and by God, they went in and did their thing and stomped.”
Which is insane, considering that most of the tune was written almost by accident. Freddie Mercury never had the intention of making this pop opera at first, but when combining every piece into its own entity, it felt totally natural hearing them go from a heartbreaking ballad to straight-up opera to one of the greatest rock and roll climaxes that anyone has ever put together.
And looking at the rest of the rock world, few have been able to keep up with a song like ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’. There have been other bands that have made tunes with different movements throughout their runtime, but whenever you listen to a tune like Green Day’s ‘Jesus of Suburbia’ or Radiohead’s ‘Paranoid Android’, they’re all working off of what people like Wilson and Mercury have done before.
That’s not to say that other people can’t take it further. Most listeners didn’t know that they even needed songs like ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ or even ‘Good Vibrations’ in their lives when they first came on the radio, but music doesn’t exist to only please in the moment. It’s there to make sure to keep the conversation going about how far people could push themselves to create musical art.
