I feel the same ambiguity towards The Beach Boys’ "Pet Sounds." On some days, I wish that more people would listen to this terribly underrated album and head out to the nearest Tower Records outlet and snatch a copy of their own, granted, of course, that Tower Records actually have it on their shelves. On some days, however, I feel selfish, and I just want to bury the album in some underground cave somewhere, and pretend that I’m the only existing person who ever listened to it. Well, of course, that wouldn’t be possible. Pet Sounds has inspired millions of musicians like Paul McCartney, Elvis Costello, Matthew Sweet, Of Montreal’s Kevin Barnes, and surprisingly, some stalwarts in our local music scene such as The Itchyworms’ Jugs Jugueta and Jazz Nicolas, and Ciudad’s Mikey Amistoso, all self-confessed Brian Wilson fans.
A few days ago, I finished a book called Wouldn’t It Be Nice: Brian Wilson and the Making of the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds. Having been devoted to The Beach Boys’ music since high school, the book, truthfully, and this is not payola talking, is an enchanting read. The writer Charles L. Granata cleverly courses through the Beach Boys’ life story with out the luridness of an E! True Hollywood Stories episode; Granata plots their musical evolution intelligently with the integrity of a responsible journalist and the sincerity of a die-hard fan.
Granata starts from their early days as the teeny-bopper, sunshine-and-surfboard band to the Wilson’s eventual downward spiral into amphetamines and Charles Manson-inspired mayhem. The anecdotes are funny, too. My personal favorite is when a young, barely-in-his-teens Brian Wilson sneaks into the offices of one of LA’s biggest recording companies and impresses a crowd of executives when he sings all four or five singing parts of a Four Freshmen song that he memorized by heart. Trailing just short behind this is an episode where Brian Wilson requests that a horse be dragged into the recording booth, photographed and be served as their album cover! The Wilsons’ story never runs out of eccentricity.
For budding producers and sound engineers, there’s a rainforest of insight in several chapters. The credo goes that, not only was Pet Sounds written beautifully, but it was also recorded beautifully. The book proposes that masterful recording techniques were implemented, such as vari-speeding (where film is sped up to send the pitch up one or two notes higher) and Phil Spector’s patent-pending Wall of Sound (where different instruments play the same notes, thereby producing weird electric-guitar/oboe or xylophone/Hammond organ sounds). In a track-by-track analysis, Granata spends a lot of time investigating the song that Paul McCartney deems the most beautifully written song in the world: "God Only Knows." Though God only knows how many movies have used this song (from P.T. Anderson’s ensemble pieces to the exit sequence of Love Actually) and driven it to the ground, I don’t blame him. "God Only Knows," as some other writer once put it, "…is not a song. It’s a living thing."
Legend says that when Brian Wilson was starting his Pet Sounds project, he was in his car, driving on the freeway, with his wife Marilyn. He told his wife, "I am going to write songs that people will pray to."
Thankfully, a growing number of listeners have bowed their heads and blew a subservient amen.