by Brian Wilson
One of the first songs I did in that new style was “Wouldn’t It Be Nice.” Tony and I talked about the feel we wanted. We started with the idea that it was a song about childhood, about hoping that things would turn out a certain way. There’s nothing like being a kid before you see that life is going to force you to deal with certain things. That was the spark of it, though Tony’s lyrics pulled it more into things that teenagers would worry about. It’s as much a song about sex as “My Obsession,” though it’s completely different, because it talks mostly about the emotions behind it. What would it feel like when you didn’t have to ask parents for permission to be with a girl? What would it feel like when you could listen to your own inner voice without hearing all these voices of authority?
Wouldn’t it be nice if we were older
Then we wouldn’t have to wait so long
And wouldn’t it be nice to live together
In the kind of world where we belong
You know its gonna make it that much better
When we can say good night and stay together
The instrumental tracks for “Wouldn’t It Be Nice” were done pretty easily, because I made them with the Wrecking Crew when the rest of the band was out on the road. When I say that they were done easily, I don’t mean that they were done quickly. I lost track of how many takes we did at twenty. But we got there, and we had a song that sounded perfect. It was a totally new bag of sound for us—or anybody else, for that matter. On the intro I had Barney Kessel playing this really great guitar he had, a one-of-a-kind twelve-string mando-guitar built by Gibson. It sounded like nothing else. He played right into the board. And I had two accordion players who made this amazing vibrational tone when I buried them in echo. We didn’t add vocals until March, when the guys were back from a quick tour in Oregon. To me, it was complicated because I was trying to teach the band a new way to sing on a new kind of song and they were doing the thing they knew best, which was to sing the old way better than anyone.
There’s a story that I helped Dennis get over his shyness at the microphone, and that’s partly true. It’s hard for some people to give it their all while they’re standing at a studio microphone. It’s an artificial place to be, but you’re trying to get real emotions. Some people put their hands over their mouths, cup them there, to give them a little more privacy. I suggested that to Dennis, and it worked great for him. I sang lead, Mike sang the bridge, and he has been credited with the part at the end, the “Good night, my baby / Sleep tight, my baby.” That part is great. It’s really the whole idea of the song pushed into two little lines: the guy is finally with his girl, or maybe he’s imagining being with her and sending her wishes. I kind of knew that would be the first song on the record.
Because the guys were in and out of town, because I had so much time to go down to the studio and try take after take, the musical canvas for that record just got bigger and bigger. For “You Still Believe in Me,” I used a harpsichord, just decided to try it out to see if it would work. On “Don’t Talk (Put Your Head on My Shoulder),” I used a string quartet. I wrote out the parts in a manuscript and then I conducted. On “I Just Wasn’t Made for These Times,” I wanted it to sound eerie, and that ended up with a situation where I introduced a new instrument to rock and roll: the theremin. Lots of the songs had Don Randi on them—he’s an amazing keyboard player, one of my favorites of all time. And then there were percussion effects that were mostly trial and error, like one song where someone beat out a rhythm on an empty water jug, or another time when we had a bongo but played it with a stick instead of by hand. The musical experimentation got held in place by the lyrics, which were sort of about the same kinds of things as “Caroline, No”: how teenagers and other young people felt out of place, how the world wasn’t always a good fit, how love was supposed to save you but ended up sometimes deserting you when you needed it the most.
The title track was an instrumental I wrote that I thought might be a spy movie theme. I loved Thunderball, which had come out the year before, and I loved listening to composers like Henry Mancini, who did these cool themes for shows like Peter Gunn, and Les Baxter, who did all these big productions that sounded sort of like Phil Spector productions. The instrumental was going to be called “Run James Run,” and I made it without the rest of the band, just me and some session guys. Roy Caton played the trumpet. We had Jerry Cole and Billy Strange on guitar, and we fed them through a Leslie speaker. Richie Frost played percussion on two empty Coca-Cola cans. We talked about sending it over to the James Bond movie people but put it on the album instead. It wasn’t the only Coke thing we used on the record. “Let’s Go Away for Awhile,” the other instrumental, had a guitar where we strapped a Coke bottle to the strings so it sounded like a Hawaiian steel guitar. It was supposed to have words, but I liked it the way it was so we left it alone.
The guys didn’t always get what was happening. We were living such different lives. They were out moving around, getting to new places. I was in one place, at home. Someone played me a song once by Frank Black. He was in the Pixies, a band I don’t know very well, and then he had some solo albums. On one of them he did a cover of “I Know There’s an Answer” where he put the original lyrics back in, when the title was “Hang On to Your Ego.” I wrote that after taking acid, about taking acid. People took it to get away from themselves, but that wasn’t the right way to take it. It was supposed to make you go deeper into yourself. I wanted to remind people that they could survive everything best if they remembered who they were. Mike didn’t like that title. He didn’t like the idea of it. He kept telling me that he wasn’t going to sing a song about drugs. Eventually I decided that maybe he was right, partly because of what the song itself was saying. I had to remember who we were. We were the Beach Boys. It also reminded me of what my dad said in his letter to me. I changed the title and the lyrics.
There are so many songs on that record that I love, but there are a few that I love even more. “God Only Knows” gets named as people’s favorite Beach Boys song regularly. Some people pick it as their favorite song of all time by any artist in the rock era. Some people pick it as their favorite song of all time, period. So I could say that I really worked forever on it, that I spent a year imagining how the melody would work and another year on the lyrics. But the facts are that Tony and I sat down at a piano and wrote it in forty-five minutes. I guess we had some concepts in mind before we started, mostly in pairs of rhymes we wanted to use. If you’re writing about faith and you’re writing about emotion and you’re writing about being afraid of losing connection, it’s easy to imagine what they would be: love/above, leave/believe. But we were also trying to go big with the song. It opened with the line “I may not always love you,” which was a strange way to start a love song. True, but strange. It made it so there was something at stake.
Also, it was a little daring to mention God in the chorus or the title of a song, at least at the time. There were really old-fashioned songs that did it. When Tony has given interviews, he has mentioned Kate Smith singing “God Bless America.” But this was a different God. This wasn’t any public God or American God. This was something more private, whatever force helps a person control their hopes and doubts. That made people nervous. It made Marilyn nervous. It made me nervous. But it also made me calm, because it let me get to a new world of thought and emotion. The lyrics were perfect from the first word to the last. You cannot write a better lyric than that.
The song went so smoothly in the writing, and then we migrated it into the studio. We had a big orchestra lined up for that one. I think there were more than fifteen musicians, which was lots for a pop song at that time. But we needed to get the details right. The devil is in the details, but the details are in God. Does that make sense? It makes as much sense as having a cello and a flute and a clarinet and a viola and an electric bass and an upright bass and a baritone sax and an accordion and a harpsichord. Tony played the sleigh bells. I was especially proud of the French
horn part. I knew how I wanted it to sound and I hummed it to a guy named Alan Robinson. He was a great player who had been under contract at Twentieth Century Fox, and he had played on a bunch of movie soundtracks, including High Noon. I wanted him to do it glissando, which means sliding down the notes instead of skipping from one note to the next and leaving out the in-betweens. We went in and just kicked ass. If you look at the studio logs, it shows almost two dozen takes, but it didn’t feel that way at all. “God Only Knows” felt easy. It came out like melted butter.
When it came to the vocal, I had planned to do it myself, but I thought about other songs I had sung where I wasn’t able to do everything I wanted with the lyric. Mainly, I thought about how I would sing it as a lyric. I’d know where the meter was and where the rhyme was. But if I gave it to Carl, he could sing it just as a set of words that meant something. It would take away some of the self-consciousness. That was the advice I gave him: “Sing straight” I think I said. I didn’t mean that he needed to hit the words on the nose, only that the words were already there. The meaning was already there. Just do the words as they’re written. He did it, and he did a beautiful job with it. The first version had lots of other harmony vocalists on it, too, because that’s what we were doing around the time of Pet Sounds. It was me singing lower than Carl, and Bruce Johnston singing higher, and also Marilyn and her sister Diane, and Mike and Al, and Terry Melcher. I think I even spotted a guy who worked in the studio hanging around the edges hoping to get in. When I listened back to it, the layering was wrong. The song was so simple at its heart. It had just one voice. It’s an “I” song more than a “we” song. It had loneliness. It’s an anxious song, maybe, but also one that’s sort of at peace, because the character singing it—Carl, but Carl with the words of the song—can’t control it one way or another.
I’m proud of lots of my songs, but “God Only Knows” is one of the ones I’m most proud of because there’s a real message in it. And then there’s the way we ended it, with a round. I liked all those old songs that used rounds, like “Row, Row, Row Your Boat” (which I did a version of with Marilyn and her sisters in 1965) and “Frère Jacques” (which we used pieces of in “Surf’s Up”). I liked rounds because they made it seem like a song was something eternal. At the end of “God Only Knows,” that’s the feeling, that it could go on forever, that it is going on forever.
I love the whole Pet Sounds record. I got a full vision out of it in the studio. After that, I said to myself that I had completed the greatest album I will ever produce. I knew it. I thought it was one of the greatest albums ever done. It was a spiritual record. When I was making it, I looked around at the musicians and the singers and I could see their halos. That feeling stayed on the finished album. I wanted to grow musically, to expand our horizons and do something that people would love, and I did it. Lennon and McCartney were blown away. Marilyn was blown away. Carl was blown away.
Other people didn’t say as much about it, like Dennis and Mike. There was a feeling in the band at that point that maybe we were going too far away from hit records. “Sloop John B” was a hit and that was on the record, but it was different than the rest. The record company wasn’t sure either. They thought it was going in the wrong direction. But mostly everyone who wasn’t sure about it when it was released came around to it over time, even if they didn’t always admit it. And I did it all on four tracks, mostly. Bob Dylan said something nice about that: “The records I used to listen to and still love, you can’t make a record that sounds that way. Brian Wilson, he made all his records with four tracks, but you couldn’t make his records if you had a hundred tracks today.” I don’t know about that. There’s lots you can do with more tracks. But I know that four worked for me.
“God Only Knows” might be the best song on that record, but my favorite might be “Caroline, No.” I did it all by myself. I wrote the music. I sang the vocal. I even wrote the title, in a way. Tony was telling me about a new song he was working on. He wanted to call it “Carol, I Know,” and he said it on my right side, and I heard “Caroline, No.” He started to correct me but then he stopped. Caroline was a more beautiful name to sing than Carol. Chuck Berry had already done most of what anyone could do with Carol. Also, Caroline rhymed with Marilyn, and when I thought about the song and what it meant, I thought about Marilyn. We had been married for about a year and a half by then, but it seemed like so much longer. So much had happened. Maybe ten years of things had happened in less than two. I hadn’t lost my love for her, but I saw how love could be lost, and that scared me. Tony had experiences of his own that were the same or similar, and the song came together around those kinds of things. It was released as a Brian Wilson solo single two months before Pet Sounds.
Where did your long hair go?
Where is the girl I used to know?
How could you lose that happy glow?
Oh, Caroline, no
Who took that look away?
I remember how you used to say
You’d never change, but that’s not true
Oh, Caroline, you
Break my heart
I want to go and cry
It’s so sad to watch a sweet thing die
Oh, Caroline, why
Could I ever find in you again
Things that made me love you so much then?
Could we ever bring ’em back once they have gone?
Oh, Caroline, no
Even though “Caroline, No” was a sad song, it was fun in the studio. It’s kind of a Glenn Miller thing in the chords. It has that vibe. And I learned more about using certain arrangements or instruments to create the right emotions in whoever is listening. In that opening section, the one with tambourine, someone did percussion on a water jug, which had a lonely feeling. We had harpsichord and we had flute. When we were all done my dad made a suggestion that we ended up using, which was to speed everything up a half step so the vocals were even higher and more lonesome. At the end of the song there are some sound effects, a train and dogs barking. We were trying to think of the loneliest sounds. The dogs were my dogs, Louie and Banana. I recorded them at home and then we added them into the song. Louie was a Weimaraner. Banana was a beagle. Louie was my absolute favorite pet ever and Banana was my second favorite. People say the title of the record came partly from that, because Louie and Banana were making pet sounds when they barked. Some people say it’s about Phil Spector and that’s why it uses his initials. And other people say I named it that because the music is so personal. All of that is true and mixed together. The only thing that’s not true is that the album was named after the cover photo. We already knew what we were calling the record when we went down to the San Diego Zoo for the photo shoot.
Lots of other songs on Pet Sounds have sadness in them. They are all beautiful, but they are about how the world can be a hard place emotionally. “Wouldn’t It Be Nice” is a song about someone who doesn’t have something he wants. “God Only Knows” is as much a worried song as it is a peaceful song. “Here Today” sounds like it’s a love song, but the very next line shows that it’s a lost-love song: “Love is here today / And it’s gone tomorrow / It’s here and gone so fast.” And “Caroline, No” is about a girl changing over time, or changing in the mind of the guy who loved her. In the song, she does change for real, at least partly. Her hair gets shorter. But most of the change is in how the guy sees her. She doesn’t seem as happy to him, and when she doesn’t seem as happy, then she doesn’t make him as happy. It was a cycle that kept going.
I met Van Dyke Parks because someone played him an early version of “Sloop John B,” and that’s how we ended up working together. I think it might have been David Crosby who introduced us. At that time I had decided I was going to make a record even more amazing than Pet Sounds, and I asked Van Dyke to write lyrics with me. That led to the idea of SMiLE. SMiLE was a completely American record, in its music and in its ideas. We were right in the middle of an amazing time of music, but so many of the
bands were British bands. The Beatles were doing great stuff, and the Rolling Stones and the Who and the Kinks, and underneath that there were dozens of other bands. The Zombies—man, they made some great records, too. Van Dyke and I wanted to do something just as good but for American music. He had a funny quote about that that was also about me.
Everybody else was getting their snout in the British trough. Everybody wanted to sing “bettah,” affecting these transatlantic accents and trying to sound like the Beatles. I was with a man who couldn’t do that. He just didn’t have that option. He was the last man standing. And the only way we were going to get through that crisis was by embracing what they call “grow where you’re planted.”
I didn’t know about snouts or growing where I was planted. I thought about what we were doing in the SMiLE songs as a kind of travel line. You know when they show people in movies traveling on a bus or an airplane by showing a red line stretching across a map? SMiLE was a line like that, but through time also. It started at Plymouth Rock and went all the way across to Hawaii, and it stopped along the way at important places in America like Chicago and New Orleans. There was a song that used a piece of “The Old Master Painter,” a Beasley Smith and Haven Gillespie song that Frank Sinatra had recorded, next to a piece of “You Are My Sunshine,” a great song that was the state song of Louisiana because the guy who wrote it, Jimmie Davis, became governor. There was a song that used “Gee” by the Crows, one of the first rock and roll songs. But it wasn’t just about taking pieces of musical history. There were songs about being healthy, about being healthy for yourself and for nature. “Vega-Tables,” later reworked as “Vegetables” for Smiley Smile, is the one that people know about because we used the sound of Paul McCartney chewing celery as percussion. “Child Is Father of the Man” was about mental health and knowing yourself so you could do the right things in the world. And then there were two huge songs at the corners of the project, “Heroes and Villains” and “Good Vibrations.”