“I cried”: When Brian Wilson knew he had crafted the perfect pop hit in 1966
If you’ve written the greatest song of all time, you’re going to be proud of that fact and very much aware of the impact that it’s had. Brian Wilson spent a large portion of his career pursuing this dream to achieve such a thing, and while his perfectionism frequently got in the way, he was arguably able to achieve this.
Even prior to the release of what most would call The Beach Boys’ magnum opus, their unparalleled 1966 album Pet Sounds, Wilson had written a number of pop songs that sounded unlike anything else that had been released before. Their 1965 hit, ‘California Girls’, is a fine example of how his approach to gorgeous vocal harmonies, luscious arrangements and indelible hooks were completely separate from what the rest of the pop landscape was producing at the time, but it was far from the first example Wilson had delivered.
Earlier than this were songs like ‘Help Me, Rhonda’ and ‘I Get Around’, and even though they’re not considered to be up there with the best he ever produced, there’s still a sense of magic about them. Even when they weren’t performing at their best, The Beach Boys had something that separated them from their peers, and it’s hardly surprising that other contemporaries like The Beatles were looking up to them as the benchmark for forward-thinking pop
And yet, this wasn’t quite enough for Wilson. After he’d put all of these hits to his name, as well as the aforementioned Pet Sounds, which featured songs like ‘Wouldn’t It Be Nice’ and ‘God Only Knows’ among its highlights, he was hell-bent on making something even more grand that he could definitively call his pop masterpiece.
He had always been interested in the idea of creating a song cycle of epic proportions, which would result in him trying to piece together Smile, an album that would eventually be scrapped and reworked into Smiley Smile. With all of the compositions bleeding into one another, and with motifs that hinted at certain ideas before they’d been properly introduced, Smile was undoubtedly the biggest project that Wilson had ever taken on, and one that would prove to be too much for him to handle.
The album, as Wilson had conceived it, was meant to reach its climax with ‘Good Vibrations’, which the album had been hinting at throughout. It may be frequently regarded as his best song, but for the longest time, he had a troubled relationship with the song, given how his pursuit of perfection had not been able to come together as he had initially planned.
However, cut forward from 1966 to 2007, and Wilson had changed his views on the song, and was seemingly having the time of his life when performing the track as part of a six-day run of shows at the Royal Festival Hall in London. Around this string of dates, he told Classic Rock exactly what he thought of the track, and how he came to realise that he’d potentially made the greatest song of all time.
“The damn thing is so together and cohesive,’ Wilson exclaimed, thrilled at the mere mention of his finest work. “It comes together so beautifully that people can’t resist loving it. The first time I heard ‘Good Vibrations’ on the radio I cried my eyes out.”
He’s right, it is hard to resist it, and even though the grand idea of Smile didn’t come together in full, ‘Good Vibrations’ is arguably as close to perfect as he or anyone else ever got in the quest to make the greatest pop song of all time.
