Pet Sounds – The Beach Boys

Western and Gold Star, May 1966: Wilson off the road

In the spring of 1966, while the Beach Boys toured Japan, Brian Wilson stayed in Los Angeles and built an album that no longer depended on the beach. Pet Sounds opens on the bright rush of Wouldn’t It Be Nice, but the brightness is already a wish, not a beach photo. Harmonies stack in close layers. Under them the bass moves slowly, and a pop song here can carry grief without raising its voice. The Capitol sleeve is almost shy: green type, and a snapshot of the group feeding goats at the San Diego Zoo. The photo is a joke. The music is not. Released on 16 May 1966, the album sounds, from the first bar, like a man who has left the road and shut the door.

Wilson had left the road after a panic attack on a flight late in 1964. The months at home became a workshop rather than a rest. Sessions moved between Western Recorders and Gold Star, with the Wrecking Crew close around him: Hal Blaine’s drums, Carol Kaye’s bass, keyboards, horns, and a small cabinet of objects that most producers would have left in the hallway. Bicycle bells, Coca-Cola cans, and, at the close of Caroline, No, the barking of Wilson’s dogs Banana and Louie all found a bar of their own. Tony Asher, a young advertising writer, sat beside him and turned private sentences into lyrics the group could actually sing. When Mike Love, Carl Wilson, Dennis Wilson and Al Jardine came back from Japan, the architecture was already drawn. They sang it with a precision that still startles. They did not always recognize the boy who had written it.

What they sang is a suite in the shape of a dozen pop songs. God Only Knows, given to Carl, is the quiet center: a love song that begins by admitting what it does not know, and then refuses to look away. I Just Wasn’t Made for These Times states the fear in plain words, a theremin flickering at the edge and never quite finishing its line. Sloop John B, the folk song Wilson insisted on keeping, is the one older, sunnier song, and even that melody is tired, a tourist melody sung by someone who wants to go home. Let’s Go Away for Awhile has no voices at all. The title instrumental has no voices, and it holds the quiet after the sung songs stop. Nothing here is built for a dance floor. The parts listen, then answer in harmony.