The song Brian Wilson said “taught him how to sing”
No one gets to be the greatest in their field by accident. Even though it looks like second nature seeing the biggest stars in the world doing their thing onstage, there are only so many times that you can look at them and not think that they’ve sold their soul for their talents. While Brian Wilson got to his position by being one of the greatest songsmiths of all time, his knowledge of how a vocal works came from listening to Rosemary Clooney.
Before The Beatles had come to America boasting their trademark harmony vocals, Wilson was already carving out the sound of California sunshine with The Beach Boys. Beyond the songs that talked about surfing, cars, and going out with your girlfriend, Wilson was playing the kind of music that was indebted to artists like The Four Freshmen, having the same kind of vocal blend heard on the band’s first singles like ‘Fun Fun Fun’ and ‘Surfin’ Safari’.
Then again, harmony singing wasn’t exactly a new thing in pop music. While most of the biggest rock stars in the world at the time, like Chuck Berry and Little Richard, shied away from too many voices stacked on top of each other, the ongoing soul trend from Motown Records made harmony singing almost expected, like The Temptations bringing their silky smooth sounds to the masses.
For Wilson, though, the love of music went back before Elvis Presley had even started cutting his teeth. When Rosemary Clooney started making her first hits, the pop world was still firmly positioned in the realm of show tunes. Throughout Clooney’s time in the spotlight, she had some of the biggest hits of her career based around the kind of delivery commonly found in Broadway or even jazz singers on songs like ‘Tenderly’.
While Wilson didn’t realise what he was listening to when he heard the song, he knew that he wanted to make something of that calibre, writing in I Am Brian Wilson, “She just came sweeping in, and her phrasing was perfect: when she said the evening breeze caressed the trees, you could see the trees moving. I hadn’t really heard a song like that before. I feel like I learned to sing from that song”.
Although none of The Beach Boys’ classics sound that much like Clooney’s songs, there are more than a few orchestral cues that Wilson took from her compositions. Looking back on the way that albums like Pet Sounds were made, Wilson practically made a pop album that could stand alongside the sophisticated songs that Clooney was used to performing, practically making a classic-style vocal arrangement on ‘God Only Knows’.
Wilson would even get the chance to meet Clooney later in his life when his idol mentioned that she wanted him to write a song for her to sing. Unfortunately, Clooney would not be able to see that song get made, eventually passing away in 2002 before she got the chance to lend her skills to a Wilson masterpiece.
For all of the influence that Clooney gave The Beach Boys, this was not meant to be the kind of sophisticated music of yesteryear. Wilson was making the sounds that would define the next generation of rock and rollers, and Clooney’s brand of music was about to become a thing of the past.
