“The only genius of pop”: The song that defined Brian Wilson’s creative legacy
“If there is one person that I have to select as a living genius of pop music,” The Beatles’ producer George Martin once proclaimed. “I would choose Brian Wilson. Without Pet Sounds, Sgt. Pepper wouldn’t have happened. Pepper was an attempt to equal Pet Sounds.” Given who he worked with, that is high praise indeed for the late Beach Boys’ mastermind, but it is easy to see why he revered Wilson so much. Even Paul McCartney added: “I figure no one is educated musically ’til they’ve heard Pet Sounds.”
The album is a sacred watermark in pop music. There is a before Pet Sounds and there is an after Pet Sounds with the masterpiece representing the moment that pop went baroque and stood firmly on the shoulders of all that had gone before, gazing ahead and forecasting a future bright enough to warrant a trip to the beach.
It subverted typical musical forms with keyless songs, augmented harmonies, experimental syncopation and and an array of other unprecedented pop techniques. This subverting of musical forms was achieved, in part, by channelling a three-track recording of the instrumental onto a single channel of an eight-track tape to allow for seven overdubs and vocal takes to be added to the mix if needed.
Nobody was doing this prior to Wilson, not only because the technology was so brand-new, but also because nobody had thought it was all that necessary. Wilson was reaching beyond necessary. But he wasn’t doing so in a bid to break new ground or to stun a few nerdy producers; he was doing so to reach a sense of transcendence hitherto unknown in pop. The world was looking for liberation, and while The Beach Boys might have been largely apolitical, Wilson endeavoured to provide it musically, to create something free-form and magnificent.
The brilliance is that even though Pet Sounds might have all of that studio wizardry in the welter, it is subsumed in pure beauty so that the listener can skip along its strange contours with butter-cutting ease, like assailing Everest in an elevator. It was a concept album of sorts, written in tribute to God and music.
This journey began three years earlier with a song that defines Wilson’s creative legacy. “‘In My Room’ was the defining point for me,” David Crosby once said. “When I heard it, I thought ‘I give up – I can’t do that – I’ll never be able to do that’.” He wasn’t alone either; John Fogerty said, “You know that Brian Wilson song ‘In My Room’? It’s the truth,” and Rufus Wainwright called it “one of the great signature songs.” Continuing: “I mean, Brian Wilson wrote countless brilliant tunes, but I think this one really represents him.”
To understand how truly representative it is of Wilson’s genius, we must delve into the backstory. In the liner notes to Surfer Girl / Shut Down, Wilson explained: “There is a story behind this song. When Dennis, Carl and I lived in Hawthorne as kids, we all slept in the same room. One night I sang the song ‘Ivory Tower’ to them and they liked it. Then a couple of weeks later, I proceeded to teach them both how to sing the harmony parts to it. It took them a little while, but they finally learned it. We then sang this song night after night. It brought peace to us.”
Peace was sorely needed, too. The young boys were ruled over by Murry Wilson, their iron-fisted father. He had been a frustrated songwriter himself, and he looked at their own creative endeavours in the harshest possible way. But music always offered salvation. It offered a chance for Wilson to reach beyond the mundane and the miserable, to find a greater poetic depth in life, as he would soon play out in Pet Sounds.
But it was the humble ‘In My Room’, that began as a lullaby in their childhood, that led the way. As Wilson explained, “When we recorded ‘In My Room’, there was just Dennis, Carl and me on the first verse … and we sounded just like we did in our bedroom all those nights. This story has more meaning than ever since Dennis’ death.” Wilson cogitated on the melody and the setting that spawned the song endlessly following that night in their cramped, little bedroom.
When he eventually sat down to write it with Gary Usher late one evening, it simply flowed out of him, forming a perfect vignette for the transcendent power of music that got him through the isolation of suffering from agoraphobia. “The song was written in an hour,” Usher recalls. “Brian’s melody all the way. The sensitivity … the concept meant a lot to him.”
The pair had passed the curfew time that Wilson’s authoritarian father had enforced. But rather than cower, for once, Wilson didn’t seem to care—as though he was upholding a higher calling than his capricious father. Fortunately, the anthem was deemed good enough to grant them an excuse.
“We got Audree [the Wilson brothers’ mother],” Usher continues, “who was putting her hair up before bed, and we played it for her. She said, ‘That’s the most beautiful song you’ve ever written’. Murry said, ‘Not bad, Usher, not bad,’ which was the nicest thing he ever said to me.” And Wilson was certain that music was his means to salvation.
In many ways, every Beach Boys song that followed was written in its image. The stands it pretty close to the centre of the family tree of all modern pop music. Beyond the subtle complexities of melody and it’s peculiar flat VII A major chord, there is a resonant sense of depth that pushes the baroque nature of the music to poetic heights. There’s a world beyond the room that Wilson sings of, and the whirling music is the conduit to reaching it.
