Beach Boys legend Brian Wilson on ‘beautiful choir’ that came together for Pet Sounds

SO, Brian Wilson, what’s your happiest memory of creating Pet Sounds?

The Beach Boys’ icon rummages through the fog of time to the heady days of 1966.

“Well, I loved making God Only Knows with my brother Carl. He had a good voice,” he replies.

It is an understated and heartfelt tribute to the angelic tones of his youngest brother, who died from cancer in 1998.

Brian finds interviews un­comfortable, struggling to articulate memories of his life in music. What sustains him, I sense, are those timeless feel-good songs that helped define popular music.

Yet I find him polite, gracious and occasionally offering shafts of Californian sunlight on his feelings.

He says he was striving to “make a choir, a nice choir” with Pet Sounds. Through Carl and the rest of the group’s glorious lead and harmony singing, he succeeded.

I love Pet Sounds and it’s a thrill to perform it... we make it sound like the original record

Brian Wilson

“I knew it would be a very special album,” he says. “I just knew it.”

In his new memoir, I Am Brian Wilson, he elaborates further: “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.”

Brian took lead or shared lead on many of the album’s tracks — Sloop John B, Caroline No and Wouldn’t It Be Nice among them.

He is responsible for the sweeping symphonic arrangements and wall-of-sound production that doffed a hat to Phil Spector’s girl-group work but took it to whole new places.

Then there were weird and wonderful effects — bicycle bells, harpsichords, flutes, theremins (early electronic instruments), trains, Hawaiian strings, Coke cans and barking dogs.

“And we had little toy instruments,” recalls Brian. “We just thought we’d put those in there for the kids.”

I meet Brian in a hotel at the foot of The Westway in London’s Marylebone to discuss The Beach Boys’ defining album, released 50 years ago.

The mop of dark brown hair of his Sixties heyday has long since been replaced by a neat, grey elder-statesman cut.

The 74-year-old is in the middle of a world tour focusing on Pet Sounds in its entirety — while not forgetting the great hits such as Good Vibrations, Barbara Ann and Surfin’ USA.

“It’s a thrill to perform (Pet Sounds) because I love the album and people love the way we make it sound just like the original record,” says Brian.

“The trips are going great. We just went to New Zealand, Australia and Japan and the people in those countries just flip for it. They love it.”

The original band, formed in 1961, consisted of brothers Brian, Dennis and Carl Wilson, Al Jardine and Mike Love and epitomised a post-war incarnation of the American Dream.

With their clean-cut, college-boy good looks and songs filled with joie de vivre, they were the West Coast’s answer to The Beatles.

They sang about the sun, the sea, surfing, girls and open-top cars, rolling in on the crest of a wave called the California Sound.

By the time of their 11th album, Pet Sounds, Brian Wilson’s composing and production techniques were at their zenith.

He was ready to make 1966 one of the most significant years in music history. At Abbey Road, London, The Beatles recorded Revolver, an incredible flowering of their writing talents and continuing Rubber Soul’s transition from simple boy-meets-girl love songs to psychedelic sonic explorations such as Tomorrow Never Knows.

In Nashville, Tennessee, Bob Dylan had been searching for “that thin, that wild mercury sound”.

He discovered it through the songs on Blonde On Blonde, a sprawling double album bearing masterpieces such as Visions Of Johanna, One Of Us Must Know (Sooner Or Later) and the 11-minute Sad Eyed Lady Of The Lowlands.

Without Pet Sounds, Sgt Pepper wouldn’t have happened

Sir George Martin

Revolver, Blonde On Blonde and Pet Sounds are permanent fixtures in top ten best-album-ever lists.

In his book, Brian acknowledges the huge impact of The Beatles: “I met Paul McCartney later in the Sixties, in a studio. I was almost always in a studio back then.

“He came by when we were at Columbia Square, working on vocal overdubs, and we had a little chat about music. Everyone knows now that God Only Knows was Paul’s favourite song — not only his favourite Beach Boys song, but one of his favourite songs period.

“It’s the kind of thing people write in liner notes and say on talk shows. When people read it, they kind of look at that sentence and keep going. But think about how much it mattered to me when I first heard it.

“I was the person who wrote God Only Knows and here was another person — the person who wrote Yesterday and And I Love Her and so many other songs — saying it was his favourite. It really blew my mind. He wasn’t the only Beatle who felt that way. John Lennon called me after Pet Sounds — phoned me up, I think the British say — to tell me how much he loved the record.”

Pet Sounds was the product of a change of tack in the career of Brian Wilson, leading to his rare mastery of instrumentation, harmony and recording technology of the day. The Beach Boys had already left surf-themed albums behind and, in December 1964, Brian had suffered a panic attack on a flight just hours after appearing on TV show Shindig!.

This prompted him to give up live appearances and concentrate on writing and production. His giant artistic strides began.

You have to remember it was also the era of psychedelic drugs, notably LSD, and Brian was one of countless musicians to try them out, curious about their effect on songwriting.

By the summer of 1965, he began work on Sloop John B, today regarded as one of the Beach Boys’ greatest recordings.

“Al Jardine brought over Sloop John B by the Kingston Trio (an American folk group) and he played the melody and the chord,” recalls Brian.

“What I did was arrange it to make a good record for the Beach Boys,” he adds.

Today, it is one of the songs he enjoys performing most, along with Pet Sounds’ opener Wouldn’t It Be Nice.

Brian gazes into the middle distance before reflecting: “Wouldn’t It Be Nice has a very personal lyric. Very personal.”

The song — written by Brian, collaborator Tony Asher and Mike Love — provided the album’s stellar opener and second single. It is about the pains of growing up.

In 1996, Brian described it thus: “It expresses the frustrations of youth, what you can’t have, what you really want and you have to wait for it.”

Another song on Pet Sounds, I Just Wasn’t Made For These Times, revealed a darker side to Brian’s work, the lyrics dealing with depression and social alienation. It was a stark contrast to the sentiment of a Beach Boys hit written two years earlier, Fun, Fun, Fun, and further showed the new depth in Brian’s writing.

Two original tracks — the title song and Let’s Go Away For Awhile — were instrumentals, signalling his confidence to release music without those to-die-for harmonies. Perhaps the greatest accolade for Pet Sounds came from late Beatles producer Sir George Martin, who said with deep sincerity: “If there is one person I have to select as a living genius of pop music, I would select Brian Wilson.

“Without Pet Sounds, Sgt Pepper wouldn’t have happened. Pepper was an attempt to equal Pet Sounds.”
As for Brian, it was the perfect endorsement of his greatest achievement.

“The producer of The Beatles said that about me. It was hard to even imagine,” he says. “I was so honoured.”

The Deluxe Special extended edition of Pet Sounds: 50th Anniversary is out now. Brian’s memoir I Am Brian Wilson will be out on October 11 (Coronet, £20), published by Hodder. Brian Wilson performs Pet Sounds (UK Festival Exclusive) at Together The People Festival, Saturday, September 3, Preston Park, Brighton.