Fact #113788

The Making of Pet Sounds by The Beach Boys
by Johnny Black

Pet Sounds, The Beach Boys album which would establish a new high water mark for studio creativity in the mid-1960s, became virtually inevitable on December 23, 1964.

With their latest single, Dance Dance Dance, bulleting into the US Top Ten, December 1964 had been an intensely busy month for The Beach Boys, shuttling across America between recording sessions, live gigs and tv appearances, but most of the pressure fell squarely on the shoulders of the band's presiding genius Brian Wilson.

His responsibilities to the group were enormous. He was not only a performing band member, but also their songwriter, arranger and producer. As Brian's brother Carl noted, "He never did like touring, ever. He didn't like flying, or being away from home or anything."

Adding to his mental anguish was the fact that, at the start of the month, he had married Marilyn Rovell of Californian girl group The Honeys, but the relationship was already fraught with tension because Wilson was convinced that his new bride was having an affair with the band's lead vocalist, Mike Love. Brian, a 22 year old survivor of parental abuse, found such burdens intolerable, and he had lately turned to marijuana in search of escape from his torments.

With Christmas just two days away, The Beach Boys boarded a plane in Los Angeles, heading for a gig in Houston but, before it landed, Brian had snapped. He charged up and down the aisle of the plane, screaming abuse at staff, passengers and the other Beach Boys until his brothers wrestled him to the floor and, reluctantly, had him sedated.

Brian began seeing a psychiatrist and soon came to the conclusion that the best way to deal with his unbearable workload was to stop playing in the band. "It was just a thing that was bound to happen," reckoned Carl philosophically, "He just said, 'I don't want to tour. I want to stay home. I want to make good music.'"

From that moment on, the studio was Brian Wilson's home. He became increasingly aware that a recording studio could be as much of a creative tool as any musical instrument, and Pet Sounds became the embodiment of that philosophy.

Hand in hand with this realisation came another change in Wilson's world view. In the spring of 1965, he took LSD for the first time, and told Marilyn that the experience had been a spiritual confrontation with God. Now the stage was set. There's little doubt that the perceptual changes triggered in Wilson by the drug contributed to his creativity over the coming year but it would, ultimately, wreak havoc with his already parlous mental state.

Although no firm plan – or even title - for Pet Sounds had yet entered Wilson's head, the earliest recording to appear on the album took place on July 12, 1965 at Wilson's favourite studio, Western Recorders in Hollywood. Beach Boy Al Jardine had brought Wilson a somewhat gloomy Caribbean folk song, The Wreck Of The John B. In the space of one day Wilson re-created it as Sloop John B, using the finest West Coast session players available, pushing the tempo up and introducing an optimistic glockenspiel backing. "All we had to do was show up and sing," recalled Jardine.

As instrumentalists, the other Beach Boys were beginning to find themselves effectively – and infuriatingly – redundant, but Wilson applied the same rigorous standards to himself. He was a perfectly capable bass guitarist but, for recording sessions, he used legendary sessioneer Carol Kaye. "Sure, I could play bass," Wilson has explained, "but I could see the bigger picture if I left that to someone else so that I could stay in the control booth and produce the session."

However, even with Kaye on board, virtually every bass note was written by Wilson, and he had the final say on every aspect of the production. He was in total control and this would be the blueprint for every track on Pat Sounds.

It was around this time that advertising copy writer Tony Asher dropped by the studio and was introduced to Wilson. The pair threw some ideas around and Wilson – never a sophisticated lyricist - was sufficiently impressed by the young wordsmith to mentally file his name for future reference.

The instrumental parts for another Pet Sounds track, You Still Believe In Me, were recorded on November 1, under the title In My Childhood. Neither this nor Sloop John B were, however, recorded as part of Pet Sounds. They were simply tracks.

Everything changed on December 6, when The Beatles released their new album, Rubber Soul in America. In Wilson's own words, "When I heard Rubber Soul, I said, 'I have to top that.' Then I did Pet Sounds and McCartney said, 'I'll top that with Sgt Pepper.'"

The aspect of Rubber Soul that sparked Wilson's excitement was that every track seemed to have been recorded with the same care and attention normally lavished on a single. Until this time, pop albums were regarded by the music industry as a way to cash in on hit singles. The prevailing wisdom held that rock'n'roll was a passing phase, so an album tended to consist of nine formulaic tracks quickly recorded to fill up the space between two or three carefully created singles.

Brian Wilsonnow decided that his next album would meet and even exceed the quality levels set by Rubber Soul, so that the entire album would stand as a coherent and creative whole.

Within days, consumed by his new vision, Wilson was back in Western Recorders finishing off Sloop John B. After trying out every member of the band on lead vocals, he decided to do it himself (much to Al Jardine's dismay), and paid guitarist Billy Strange $500 to add a distinctive 12-string guitar backing.

For most of January 1966, The Beach Boys were touring the Far East, leaving Brian in Los Angeles, where he took full advantage of their absence to push ahead with his new project. On January 18, he entered Western Recorders, and set to work on the instrumental track Let's Go Away For A While. Pet Sounds was now officially under way.

Wilson had also now begun working with Tony Asher as a lyricist, sometimes presenting him with complete instrumental tracks, sometimes just with melodies or even fragments of melodies. "The general tenor of the lyrics was always his," says Asher, "and the actual choice of words was usually mine. I was really just his interpreter."

By the 22nd Brian had shifted to Gold Star studios and moved on to another new song, Wouldn't It Be Nice. Mark Linett, who produced the later stereo and 5.1 surround sound versions of Pet Sounds, points out that the richness of sound on tracks made at Gold Star came, to some extent, from the relatively small size of the studio. "You hear these huge records that Brian and Phil Spector made and you think it must be an enormous space," he explains. "Well, no, it's a very small space, because that allowed the coincident information to be useful. If you were in a huge room like Studio 1 at Western, the bounceback from instruments to the other mics would have been objectionable, whereas in a small room, it added another dimension to the sound."

Returning to Western on the 24th, Wilson laid down tracks for the haunting ballad You Still Believe In Me. In his ongoing efforts to find unique new sounds, he devised a piano introduction which required sessioneer Larry Knechtel to play the keyboard while another musician clambered inside the piano and plucked the strings to make them ring out.

The Beach Boys' Far Eastern tour came to an end with a gig in Hawaii on the 29th, after which they took a well-earned rest, while Brian ploughed on with the new album.

The collaboration with Tony Asher was proving fruitful. Listening to Brian speak about his high school crush on a girl called Carol Mountain, Asher had come up with a lyric titled Carol I Know, but Wilson mis-heard the phrase and sang it as the much more poignant Caroline No. One of the pair's loveliest songs, recording of the wistful Caroline No was started on January 31.

Suitably refreshed after their break, the other Beach Boys joined Brian in Western Studios on February 9. As Asher has pointed out, they were "hoping for and expecting more of what had been hits for them all along."

Instead they were confronted by a radically more sophisticated style and sound, which didn't seem to require any input from them other than their voices. "We were a surfing group when we left the country," observed Al Jardine, "and now basically we came back to this new music. And it took some getting used to."

"There was resistance," Wilson revealed later. "There was a little bit of intergroup struggle. It was resolved in that they figured it was a showcase for Brian Wilson, but it was The Beach Boys. In other words, they gave in." Asher has confirmed that the band was unenthusiastic about the new songs, and couldn't understand why their proven hit-making formula needed changing.

"Mike was very confused by it," said Jardine. "I wasn't exactly thrilled with the change but I grew to appreciate it as soon as we started work on it. It wasn't like anything we'd heard before. I already had a lot of classical music in my household. My parents played in the orchestra - violin and clarinet. I'd bring this stuff home and play it for my folks and go, 'Isn't this great?' They said, 'I don't get it, but it is great.'"

Wilson was back in Western on the 11th without the other Beach Boys, working on what he has described as, "one of the sweetest, most loving songs that I ever sang," - Don't Talk (Put Your Head On My Shoulder)

During a session on the 14th, Wilson made his first use of an electro-theremin in the backing for I Just Wasn't Made For These Times. Played by another sessioneer, Paul Tanner, the instrument was a variation on an earlier device invented in the 1920s by the Russian scientist Leon Theremin. Both instruments emit the same eerie sound, halfway between a violin and a soprano voice, but the original theremin was apallingly difficult to master, because pitch and volume were varied by the performer's hands moving around in a magnetic field generated by the instrument. Accurate production of notes was much simpler on the electro-theremin which used a slider control for pitch and an amplifier for volume.

The following day saw the entire band rendezvous at the petting paddock in San Diego Zoo to shoot a cover for the album. The best that can be said of the resulting shot is that it has a certain naïve charm, and it ties in with the album title, which Wilson says was chosen, "because we specialised in certain sounds. It was our best - the songs were our Pet Sounds."

It's a case of spilt milk, to be sure, but it is hard not to wonder what might have resulted if the long-cherished wish of Peter Blake, who devised the iconic collage cover for The Beatles' Sgt Pepper, had come true. Blake has since revealed that he was a huge Beach Boys fan, and would much rather have adorned Pet Sounds than Pepper.

Later the same day, the entire band assembled in Western and recorded That's Not Me, a song whose lyric deals with Wilson's rationale for giving up touring. The track is remarkable for being the only one on the album to feature the band playing its own instruments, although even on this cut they were augmented by session players.

With the album sessions in full swing, Wilson now set to work on Good Vibrations, but this classic single would not be completed in time to be included on Pet Sounds.

Much of the next month and a half would be occupied by the band adding its vocal parts under Brian's supervision. Recalling this long and painstaking process, Mike Love has stated, "If there was a hint of a sharp or flat, we would have to do it again until it was right." At times, Wilson would stop the group to pick up on some tiny error which no-one else had even noticed.

Even at this point, however, there were three new songs still to be recorded, Here Today, I'm Waiting For The Day and, taking pride of place, God Only Knows.

After a couple of days of Brian working on backing tracks without the band, they joined him in Columbia Studio A on the 10th. "When I walked in on God Only Knows," remembers Beach Boy Bruce Johnston, "I realised that something wonderful was happening."

The song wasn't completed until a month later when Carl Wilson recorded his transcendently beautiful lead vocal, widely regarded as his finest moment with the band. With God Only Knows in the can, Pet Sounds was effectively complete.

It was released on May 16 but, although it is now recognised as a benchmark album, it stalled at No10 in the US chart because Capitol Records simply didn't support it in the market place. "They didn't promote Pet Sounds," reasons Bruce Johnston, "because they said that it wasn't commercial and the people wouldn't understand it.

The British audience liked it better, sending it to No2, and the unswerving British devotion to Pet Sounds seen it re-evaluated over the years, often topping critics polls as the best album of all time. In Paul McCartney's own words, "It blew me out of the water."

It's well established that Pet Sounds set a new benchmark which The Beatles now felt they would have to beat, but what's less well known is that it was also a musical inspiration for The Cream. "Believe it or not," says Eric Clapton, "when Cream was evolving its ideology of what we wanted the sound to be, the thing we were listening to most, apart from the blues, was Pet Sounds. Jack was very interested in Brian Wilson's viewpoint, and saw it as the new Bach."

Speaking of Pet Sounds some years after its release, The Beatles' producer George Martin observed that, "It gives you an elation that is beyond logic." And that, surely, is the point at which music intersects with magic.

(Source : by Johnny Black, first published in the book Albums from Backbeat Press, 2007)