Pet Sounds was the symphony of a man on fire

Oh, how merry it was to be fat, young, and obsessed with the beach. It’s too bad there aren’t shorelines in Ohio, unless you go to Cleveland and dip your toes in the radioactive tides. But my dad forbade it, on account of the Cuyahoga River fires and the dead fish in Lake Erie. I’d seen boundless water once, in Bogue Banks, but the mighty mother of brine stole my baseball cap and leveled my sand palace. Mom and Dad weren’t the types to know much about electric Kool-Aid acid tests or smoking pot or hating Lyndon Johnson. They thought old rock classics could cure subterranean vitamin D levels. Maybe that’s why I dreamed of suntans and Disneyland cowboys playing chicken with Indians, of surfer girls making my heart come all undone, of everybody having an ocean.

Somewhere along the way I got over the “Fun, Fun, Fun” and “Surfin’ U.S.A.” of it all. They were brilliant tunes, but they were no soundtracks for grief. I was young but running out of time, so I started craving music that was happy but hurting. One night you’re crying ugly to the white suburban doldrums of “In My Room”; the next, your first girlfriend is breaking up with you over text because she made out with her neighbor, and then your Beats Music app recommends “Don’t Worry Baby.” At your best friend’s graduation party, somebody drinks too many handles of sugary Smirnoff, eats a whole foil tray of pasta, and pukes it all into the kitchen sink—the chunks fly while “Barbara Ann” falls out of the outdoor stereo. And, if you’re really lucky, you smoke the fattest blunt of your life while listening to Pet Sounds and SMiLE back to back for the first time, put on Neon Genesis Evangelion, and start connecting the dots between “Child Is Father of the Man” and how much you hate your dad.

Now imagine a twenty-two-year-old Brian Wilson puffing on a spliff of his own while his thoughts of his dad Murry’s extramarital affairs bounced off the walls like a picture show. Oedipal pop songs aren’t new, but they aren’t all that common either, unless you’re John Lennon or the Doors. “Let Him Run Wild,” tucked away on side two of Summer Days (And Summer Nights!!), wasn’t fascinating to the average Beach Boys admirer sixty-one years ago. It wasn’t a single, nor was it featured on the album cover—just another track in the “…and other great songs” subtext. Cash Box called it an “interesting weeper.” George Harrison apparently kept a 45 of it in every jukebox he owned. But “Let Him Run Wild” hinted at something far greater than B-side filler. Al Jardine thought it wasn’t just a turning point, but what foreshadowed Pet Sounds altogether. 

When I ask Jardine about it, he remembers the chorus. “We had a great blend,” he tells me over the phone. “We had great tracks to work with. Brian was the fountain of incredible music.” He drifts back to “Surfin’,” the band’s first single from September 1961—famous for its “bom-dop-di-dip” hook, which Mike Love lifted from a Jan and Dean tune. The thought of it unlocks something in Jardine, as he comes back to Brian’s falsetto on “Let Him Run Wild,” which Brian himself famously dismissed as too girlish. “It was like pure consciousness in a voice,” Jardine says, “that he could sing that way.” Albums like Pet Sounds and Revolver got groups to start thinking in wholes rather than singles. “Let Him Run Wild” already had a greater emotional vocabulary than radio hits and surf songs. “Hang On To Your Ego” was similarly mature. “I was okay with it, although I was still wondering what an ego was,” Jardine laughs. “We are all pretty young and dumb, so it took a while to catch up, musically and lyrically, because we were basically a traveling jukebox. But Brian was leaping eons ahead [of us]. We were all very lucky to have each other, especially Brian. ”

The band didn’t feel so lucky when Pet Sounds came out and failed to chart higher than #10 on the Billboard 200. By then, the Beach Boys no longer fit their own image: surfing, cars, California youth. “It’s tough to overcome that,” Jardine says, “but you have to allow the composer a little breathing room, too.” Brian was done with the formula. Most sessions bands could cut a record in four hours, but he would spend hours on single tracks, even asking for twenty-five or thirty vocal takes for “Wouldn’t It Be Nice” alone. Twenty takes in, Mike Love thought the song was finished. Brian kept going. In the Columbia studio control room, Jardine told Brian, “It’s taken us six months to do the same thing.” Brian replied, “Eh, it’s only been a month.” 

Pet Sounds is peculiar now. Brian and his brothers are gone, and the surviving Beach Boys have spent sixty years telling the same story, reminding people of the “pretty good job” they did. I think about Brian Wilson’s “pretty good job” all the time. Pet Sounds seems to me like a portal—tall buildings of harmony, ribbons of sunbaked melody and windbeaten countermelody, an almost tropical sensation. And the person who made it seemed so ordinary: chubby, dark bangs combed across his forehead, a face I’d seen in mirrors before. When I think about the Sixties now, I don’t think of the Sixties at all, but about a night in my dorm, taking care of Alex during his second acid trip. He wanted music, so I played Pet Sounds. We lay on a twin-sized mattress, scrolling through the 2 a.m. pits of Instagram while clouds of timpanis and flutes gathered above us. I stayed quiet in the nebulous promise of “I’m Waiting For The Day,” but Tom barged in singing “‘til her daddy takes the T-Bird away” like an asshole. I remember thinking he and I were on totally different cosmic planes. “This is boring,” Alex piled on, between the farts of French horn, trombone, and tic-tac bass in “God Only Knows.” 

On Brian’s cosmic plane, the greatest song ever recorded was the Ronettes’ “Be My Baby” (or “Shortenin’ Bread,” depending on the decade). Everyone talks about Phil Spector and his Wall of Sound, but Gold Star Studios bassist Carol Kaye says it was more complicated than that—that Brian’s sophistication was survival, not mythology. “Phil never grew up, and he was childish, sometimes, in his way. Brian had grown up quickly because he had a dad who had drinking problems.” Brian had hearing loss in his right ear as a child. The diagnosis was a nerve impingement, but a corrective surgery in the Sixties couldn’t fix it. Some blamed his father Murry Wilson for Brian’s deafness, because he would do things like hit Brian with an iron while he was sleeping, but those yarns got disputed and denied for decades. 

I do wonder how Brian felt when Pet Sounds tanked after he’d devoted himself entirely to making it, and I wonder how thrilled Murry must have been to see his eldest son fail. “[Pet Sounds] didn’t get a chance to sink in,” Jardine sighs. Capitol Records didn’t know what to do with an album that no longer sounded like “California Girls” and “I Get Around.” So they put out The Best of the Beach Boys to recoup their losses. But music was like billiards sixty years ago, Jardine says. “One ball hits another, and, pretty soon, you never know where it’s going to end up.” Soon, “Good Vibrations” arrived with an entire album’s worth of twists and turns packed into a 3:35 runtime. Brian had been saving it for SMiLE, his chef-d’œuvre of modular fragments, word paintings, classical music, and tape splicing that he wrote with erstwhile jingler Van Dyke Parks but never completed.

When I was obsessed with Pet Sounds, no one else was. My college friends listened to Weezer, small-town Ohio country music radio, the Allman Brothers, 2013 Pitchfork darlings, and the Spotify pop autoplays forced on us. The most unique person around was Will, who couldn’t sleep without NyQuil, couldn’t wake up without Red Bull, and was obsessed with slam poetry rappers like Watsky. My mixes rarely made the queue. But then I contracted a month-long super-flu virus, missed weeks of class, and lost twenty-five pounds. Sometimes the fever got so bad I couldn’t stand up. The dorm was quiet during the early afternoon. I’d listen to Pet Sounds on the carpet, sweating through my clothes while the Gold Star Studios musicians’ pageantry ran hot beneath the Beach Boys’ voices. Images of fireman Brian cleansing the performance rooms with sage brought color to my half-awake hallucinations. More people in my life have walked through Pet Sounds’ doorway since. But all those years ago, it seemed the tracks Brian made with the best boppers and bouncers on Santa Monica Boulevard were all mine. 

Brian hired drummer Hal Blaine, guitarist Glen Campbell, and some forty other players to record Pet Sounds before his bandmates returned from a tour in Japan. Love says they were the “best recording musicians in town that we knew of.” Kaye and her associates were jazz musicians who knew thousands of chords that rock and rollers didn’t. But Brian heard combinations nobody else could. “I never liked rock and roll,” she laughs, “but that music that Brian wrote was far above all the rest of the rock and roll at the time. He was way past all that. To invent something more than do-mi-sol notes, no kid could do that.” She’s right. Brian put a major seventh as a bass note on “God Only Knows.” But it worked. “You just had to stand back and watch him,” Jardine says. “He was on fire.” 

I took a lot of one-credit courses in college to swindle my GPA onto the dean’s list. Freshman year, I landed in “The History of Rock and Roll,” a class for novice music fans. We didn’t have a textbook, just paper handouts. My crank professor had lived through every song she taught, but she treated rock and roll like an artifact instead of an eruption: The Beatles were good, not God; Haight-Ashbury was heady, not hallowed. The classes were stiff, the exams were broad. Studying rock and roll with her felt as bloodless as calculus or a foreign language. The Beach Boys were never in her lesson plans. 

For our final project, we had to give a presentation on any album of our choice and play songs from it for the class. I don’t remember what anyone else chose, but I picked Pet Sounds. We could rent CDs from the campus library, but I asked the professor if we had access to a turntable. Yes, there was one in the classroom. So I drove to my parents’ house to grab my LP. I thought it might make the whole thing feel real. When Hal Blaine starts playing the Sparklett’s water jug in “Caroline, No,” it changes the air in the room, and you want everyone to know what that’s like. I studied every face during the “Wouldn’t It Be Nice” key change, but not a single eye went starry. Maybe Brian Wilson heard too much: bicycle bells and barking dogs and entire civilizations hiding inside chord changes. The average person doesn’t care about bobby pins on piano strings or Dixie cup percussion when all they can hear is beach music. Nobody cared about the water jug. Nobody cared about the man on fire. “Now what?” After all those godless stares, I got an A-. 

Matt Mitchell is the editor of Paste. They live in Los Angeles.

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