The underrated Beach Boys song Brian Wilson called “one of his favourites”
One of the great things about being a music journalist is getting to pick the brains of your favourite artists. Asking questions first-hand, that unravel answers of sonic discovery that you may not have otherwise experienced. There’s one The Beach Boys song that forever reminds me of this privilege, whenever I play it.
My Beach Boys fandom started, and sometimes ended, with Pet Sounds. Like everyone, I was introduced to their 1966 magnum opus at the very beginning of my music journey, and it was consistently recommended to me with the preface of how it inspired The Beatles‘ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.
Steering clear of the clean-cut boyband music of the pre-Pet Sounds years and merely dipping my toe into the later work, my attitude robbed me of a song that would later become one of my all time favourites. It wasn’t until my journalism put me in the same room as Getdown Services who insisted I listen to ‘Cool Cool Water’ from their 1970 record Sunflower.
Receiving a first-person recommendation from a musician you admire is a gift like no other, especially when you end up loving the recommendation in question. Because when I swiftly followed the orders I was given, I realised exactly what my parochialism had deprived me of.
Along with ‘All I Wanna Do’ from the same album, ‘Cool Cool Water’ became a heavily rotated song in my life, for it showcased all of the brilliant harmonies I want from the Beach Boys, with the sort of refined melodic arrangement that foregrounds them best.
It’s a structurally obscure song that never really gets going, nor does it ever seem to stop and just feels like The Beach Boys at their most playful, experimenting with sounds and ideas at free will, which essentially, is what it was. Brian Wilson and Mike Love stumbled upon a synthesiser of sorts, which played a myriad of lifestyle sounds that eventually sparked the idea of writing a song around the thought of water.
“It was an instrument that had programmed tapes on it. And you push one of the keys of the keyboard, and it’ll go [crows] like a rooster. Or you push the thing and you get like water drips, so we programmed water drips.”
Wilson continued to explain how the instrument opened up a realm of possibilities with sounds, “One made the other one happen. One instrument will get you like a bass or a guitar. Guitar will get you drums. Drums will get you percussion. Percussion will get you violins. Violins will get you backwards. It’s endless. It’s totally endless.”
The endless result was a hypnotic myriad of sounds that resulted in Wilson conceding, “Oh, that’s one of my very, very favourite songs that we ever did. One of my very favourites.” Many critics muse over the drop off in quality that happened after the release of Pet Sounds in 1966, and how Wilson and co were never able to reach the same creative heights shown on that seminal record. While that is largely true, I can’t help but feel like ‘Cool Cool Water’ was one last siren call from a sinking ship, because should this song have featured on Pet Sounds, it would have fit right in.
