A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs - Episode 142: “God Only Knows” by the Beach Boys

Episode Date: January 31, 2022

Episode one hundred and forty-two of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “God Only Knows” by the Beach Boys, and the creation of the Pet Sounds album. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on “Sunny” by Bobby Hebb. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt’s irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ (more…)

A history of rock music in 500 songs by 100 Hig. Episode 142 God Only Knows By the Beach Boys We're still in the run of episodes that deal with the LA pop music scene Though next week we're going to move away from L.A. While still dealing with a lot of the people who would play a part in that scene. But today we're hitting something that we're hitting something that we're

requires a bit of explanation. Most artists covered in this podcast get one or at the most two episodes. Some get slightly more, the major artists who are present for many revolutions of music or who have particularly important careers, like Fats Domino or the Supremes. And then there are a few very major artists who get a lot more. The Beatles, for example, are going to get eight in total, plus there will be episodes on some of their solo careers. Elvis, has had six, and we'll get one more wrap-up episode. This is the third Beach Boys episode, and there are going to be three more after this, because the Beach Boys were one of the most important acts of the decade. But normally, I limit major acts to one episode per calendar

year of their career. This means that they will average at most one episode every 10 episodes. So while, for example, the episodes on Mystery Train and Heartbreak Hotel came close together, there was then a reasonable gap before another Elvis episode. This is not possible for the Beach Boys, because this episode, and the next two Beach Boys ones, all take place over an incredibly compressed timeline. In May 1966, they released an album that has consistently been voted the best album ever in polls of critics,

and which is certainly one of the most influential, even if one does not believe there is such a thing as a best album ever. In October 1966 they released one of the most important singles ever, a record that is again often considered the single best pop single of all time, and which again was massively influential. And then, in July 1967, they released the single that was intended to be the lead-off single from their album Smile, an album that didn't get released until decades later,

and which became a legend of rock music that was arguably more influential by not being released, the most records that are released managed to be. And these are all very different stories, stories that need to be told separately. This means that episode 142, episode 146, and episode 153, are all going to be about the Beach Boys. There will be one final later episode about them too, but the next few months are going to be very dominated by them, so I apologise in advance for that, if that's not something you've been.

interested in. Though it also means that with luck, some of these episodes will be closer to the shorter length of podcast I prefer, rather than the 90-minute mammoths we've had recently, though I'm afraid this is another long one. When we left the Beach Boys, we'd just heard that Glenn Campbell had temporarily replaced Brian Wilson on the road, after Wilson's mental health had finally been unable to take this train of touring while also being the group's record producer, principal songwriter, and leader. To thank Campbell, who at this point was not at all well known in his own right, though he was a respected session guitarist and had released a few singles, Brian had co-written and produced Guess I'm Dumb for him,

a track which prefigured the musical style that Wilson was going to use for the next year or so. It's worth looking at Guess I'm Dumb in a little detail, as it points the way forward to a lot of Wilson's songwriting over the next year. Firstly, of course, there are the lyrical themes of insecurity, and of what might even be descriptions of mental illness in the first verse. The way I act don't seem like me, I'm not on top like I used to be. The lyrics are by Russ Titleman, but it's reasonable to assume that, as with many of his collaborations,

Brian wrote in the initial idea. There's also a noticeable change in the melodic style, compared to Wilson's earlier melodies. Up to this point, Wilson has mostly been writing what get called horizontal melody lines, ones with very little movement and small movements often centred on a single note or two. There are exceptions, of course, and plenty of them, but the typical brown-wool Somalady up to this point

is the kind of thing where even I can hit the notes more or less okay. Well, she got her daddy's car and she cruised through the hamburger stand now. It's not quite a monotone, but it's within a tight range and you don't have to move far from one note to another. But Gesang Dome is incorporating the influence of Roy Orbison and more obviously of Baccarac and it's ludicrously vertical with gigantic leaps all over the place

in places that are not obvious it requires the kind of precision that only a single like Campbell can attain to make it sound at all natural. Bacharach's influence is also noticeable in the way that the chord changes are very different from those that Wilson was using before. Up to this point, when Wilson wrote unusual chord changes, it was mostly patterns like the warmth of the sun,

which is wildly inventive, but most of the use as very simple triads and sevenths. Now he was starting to do things like the line, I guess I'm dumb, but I don't care, which is sort of a tumbling set of inversions of the same chord that goes from a triad with the fifth in the base to a major sixth, to a minor eleventh, to a minor seventh. Part of the reason that Brian could start using these more complex voicings

was that he was also moving away from using just the standard guitar-based drums line-up, sometimes with keyboards and saxophone, which had been used on almost every Beach Boys track to this point. Instead, as well as the influence of Bacarach, Wilson was also being influenced by Jack Nitchie's arrangements for Phil Spectre's records, and in particular by the way that Nitchie would double instruments and have, say, a harpsichord and a piano play the same line, to create a timbre that was different from either individual instrument.

But when Nietzsche and Specter used the technique, along with a lot of reverb and overdubing, to create a wall of sound which was oppressive and overwhelming, and which obliterated the sounds of the individual instruments, Wilson used the same instrumentalists, the wrecking crew, to create something far more delicate. Campbell does such a good job on Guess I'm Dumb, that one has to wonder,

what would have happened if he'd remained with the Beach Boys. But Campbell had, of course, not been able to join the group permanently. He had his own career to attend to, and that would soon take off in a big way, though he would keep playing on the Beach Boys' records for a while yet, as a member of the wrecking crew. But Brian Wilson was still not well enough to tour. In fact, as he explained to the rest of the group,

he never intended to tour again, and he wouldn't be a regular live performer for another 12 years. At first, the group were terrified. They thought he was talking about quitting the group, or the group splitting up altogether. But Brian had a different plan. From that point on, there were two subtly different line-ups of the group. In the studio, Brian would sing his parts as always,

but the group would get a permanent replacement for him on tour, someone who could replace him on stage. While the group was on tour, Brian would use the time to write songs and to record backing tracks. He'd already started using the wrecking crew to add a bit of additional musical colour to some of the group's records, but from this point on, he'd use them to record the whole track, maybe getting Carl to add a bit of guitar as well if he happened to be around, but otherwise just using the group to provide vocals.

It's important to note that this was a big change. A lot of general music history sources will say things like, The Beach Boys never played on their own records, and this is taken as fact by people who haven't investigated further. In fact, the basic tracks for all their early hits were performed by the group themselves. Surfing, Surfing Safari, 409, Surfer Girl, Little Deuce Coop, Don't Worry Baby, and Many More, were entirely performed by the Beach Boys, while others, like I Get Around, featured the group with a couple of additional musicians augmenting them.

The idea that the group never played on their records comes entirely from their recordings from 1965 and 66. And even there, often Carl would overdub a guitar part. And at this point, the Beach Boys were still playing on the majority of their recordings, even on sophisticated sounding recordings like She Knows Me Too Well, which is entirely a group performance, other than Brian's friend Russ Tytelman, the co-writer of Guess I'm Dumb,

adding some percussion by hitting a mic. microphone stand with a screwdriver. So the plan to replace the group's instrumental performances in the studio was actually a bigger change than it might seem. But an even bigger change was the live performances, which of course required the group bringing in a permanent live replacement for Brian. They'd already tried this once before, when he'd quit the road for a while and they brought Al Jardine back in. But David Mark's quitting had forced him back on stage. Now they needed someone to take his place for good. They phoned up their friend Bruce Johnston to see if he knew anyone, and after suggesting a couple of names that didn't work out, he volunteered his own services,

and as of this recording, he spent more than 50 years in the band. He quit for a few years in the mid-70s, but came back. We've seen Johnston turn up several times already, most notably in the episode on LSD-25, where he was one of the musicians on the track we looked at. But for those of you who don't remember those episodes, he was pretty much everywhere in California music in the late 50s and early 60s. He had been in a band at school with Phil Spector and Sandy Nelson and another band with Jan and Dean, and he played on Nelson's Teen Beat, produced by Art Lebo. He'd been in the house band at those shows Lebo put on at El Monte Stadium we talked about a couple of episodes back. He'd been a witness to John Dolphin's murder, he'd been a record producer

for Bob Keane, where he'd written and produced songs for Ron Holden, the man who had introduced Louis Louis to Seattle. He'd written The Tender Touch, for Richard Berry's backing group, The Faroes, with Barry singing backing vocals on this one. He'd helped Bob Keane compile Richie Valenz's first posthumous album. He'd played on LSD 25 and Moondog by The Gamblers. He'd arranged and produced the top ten hit Those Oldies But Goodies Remind Me of You, for Little Caesar in the Romans. Basically, wherever you looked in the LA music scene in the early 60s, there was Bruce Johnston somewhere in the background. But in particular, he was suitable for the Beach Boys, because he had a lot of experience in making music that sounded more than a little like theirs.

He'd made cheap surf records as the Bruce Johnston surfing band. And with his long-time friend and creative partner Terry Melcher, he had, as well as working on several Paul Revere and the Raiders records, also recorded hit Beach Boys sound-alikes, both as their own duo, Bruce and Terry. And under the name of a real group that Melcher had signed, but who don't seem to have sung much on their own big hit, the rip chords.

Johnston fit him well with the band. though he wasn't a bass player before joining, and had to be taught the parts by Carl and Al. But he's probably the technically strongest musician in the band, and while he would later switch to playing keyboards on stage, he was quickly able to get up to speed on the bass well enough to play the parts that were needed. He also wasn't quite as stronger falsetto singer as Brian Wilson,

as can be heard by listening to this live recording of the group singing I Get Around in 1966. Johnston is actually an excellent singer, and can still hit the high notes today. He sings the extremely high falsetto part on Fun Fun Fun Fun at the end of every Beach Boys show. But his falsetto was thinner than Wilson's, and he also has a distinctive voice which can be picked out from the blend in a way that none of the other Beach Boys' voices could.

The Wilson brothers and Mike Love all have a strong family resemblance, and Al Jardine always sounded spookily close to them. This meant that increasingly the band would rearrange the vocal part, on stage, with Carl or Al taking the part that Brian had taken in the studio, which meant that if, say, Al sang Brian's high part, Carl would have to move up to sing the part that Al had been singing, and then Bruce would slot in singing the part that Carl had sung in the studio. This is a bigger difference than it sounds,

and it meant that there was now a need for someone to work out live arrangements that were different from the arrangements on the records. Someone had to reassign the vocal parts, and also work out how to play songs that had been performed by maybe 18 session musicians playing French horns and accordions and vibraphones with a standard rock band line-up, without it sounding too different from the record. Carl Wilson, still only 18 when Brian retired from the road, stepped into that role and would become the de facto musical director of the Beach Boys on stage

for most of the next 30 years, to the point that many of the group's contracts for live performances at this point specified that the promoter was getting Carl Wilson and four other musicians. This was a major change to the group's dynamics. Up to this point, they had been a group with a leader, Brian, and a frontman, Mike, and three other members. Now there were a more democratic group on stage

and more of a dictatorship in the studio. This was, as you can imagine, not a stable situation and was one that would not last long. But at first, this plan seemed to give, go very, very well. The first album to come out of this new hybrid way of working, the Beach Boys Today, was started before Brian retired from touring, and some of the songs on it were still mostly or solely performed by the group. But as we heard with She Nose Me Too Well earlier, the music was still more sophisticated than on previous records,

and this could be heard on songs like, When I Grow Up to Be a Man, where the only session musician is the harmonica player with everything else played by the group. But the newer sophistication really shows up on songs like Kiss Me Baby, where most of the instrumentation is provided by the wrecking crew, though Carl and Brian both play on the track. And so there are saxophones, vibraphones, French horn, core anglae, and multiple layers of 12-string guitar. Today had several hit singles on it.

Dance, Dance, When I Grow Up to Be a Man, and their cover version of Bobby Freeman's Deer Wanna Dance, all chartered. but the big hit song on the album actually didn't become a hit in that version. Help Me Ronda was a piece of album filler, with the harmonica part played by Billy Lee Riley, and was one of Al Jardine's first lead vocals on a Beach Boys record. He'd only previously sung lead on the song Christmas Day on their Christmas album. While the song was only intended as album filler,

other people saw the commercial potential in the song. Bruce Johnston was at this time still signed to Columbia Records as a artist and wasn't yet singing on Beach Boys records and he recorded a version of the song with Terry Moucher as a potential single. But on seeing the reaction to the song, Brian decided to re-record it as a single. Unfortunately, Murray Wilson turned up to the session. Murray had been fired as the group's manager by his sons the previous year, though he still owned a publishing company that published their songs. In the meantime, he'd decided to show his family who the real talent behind the group was by taking on another group of teenagers and managing and producing them. The Sunrays had a couple of

minor hits, like, I Live for the Sun. But nothing made the US top 40, and by this point it was clear, though not in the way that Murray hoped, who the real talent behind the group actually was. But he turned up to the recording session with his wife in tow and started to. to produce it. This is going to be a hell of a hit. Let's go. Loosen up, loosen up a little. So dad, Brian, I'm a genius too.

Let's go, huh? Turn down his playback thing because it's my ears going out. I'm sorry. The mic's too close. Got it? Is that better? Yes. Much better.

Just come in a little mic, but watch your low notes, okay? Brian, forget who you are, will you? Let's go. Let's roll. No one can hear what I'm saying because he's too far away within the mic. It's ended up with Brian physically trying to move his drunk father away from the control panel in the studio and having a heartbreaking conversation with him where the 22-year-old, who is recovering from a nervous breakdown only a few months earlier, sounds calmer, healthier, and more mature than his 47-year-old father. I've protected you for 22 years, but I can't go on. if you're not going to listen to an intelligent man.

Okay. Against many people that tried to hurt you. Are you going now? I am... No. This is all awfully unfair for you. Are you going to stay? I want to know.

It's going to what you want. If you want to fight for a success, I'll go all loud. No, I don't, we don't do that. You think you got it made? No, we don't. Son. We would like to record under an atmosphere of calmness and you're not presenting there.

My mother loves you. We like to relax this session. First of all, you should never have all these people here. Second of all, they're not saying anything. You're the one who's talking. Knowing that this was the family dynamic helps make the comedy filler track on the next album. I'm booked at my old man,

seen rather less of a joke than it otherwise would. But with Murray out of the way, the group did eventually complete recording help me ronder. And for those of you reading this as a blog post, rather than listening to the podcast, yes, they did spell it two different ways for the two different versions. And it became the group's second number one hit. As well as Murray Wilson, though, another figure was in the control room then, Lauren Darrow, who at the time went by his birth surname, but I'm going to refer to him throughout by the name he chose. You can hear, on the recording, Brian Wilson asking Darrow if he could turn him on,

slang that was at that point, not widespread enough for Wilson's parents to understand the meaning. Darrow was an agent working for the William Morris Agency, and he was part of a circle of young, hip people who were taking drugs, investigating mysticism, and exploring new spiritual ideas. His circle included the birds. Darrow, like Roger McGuin, later became a follower of Suburd, and changed his name as a result, as well as people like the songwriter and keyboard player Van Dyke Parks,

who will become a big part of this story and subsequent episodes, and Stephen Stills, who will also be turning up again. Darrow had introduced Brian to cannabis in 1964, and in early 1965 he gave Brian acid for the first time, 125 micrograms of pure Owsley LSD 25. Now, we're going to be looking at acid culture quite a lot in the next few months, as we get through 1966 and 1967, and I'll have a lot more to say about it,

But what I will say now is that even the biggest proponents of psychedelic drug use tend not to suggest that it is a good idea to give large doses of LSD in an uncontrolled setting to young men recovering from a nervous breakdown. Darrow later described Wilson's experience as ego death, a topic we will come to in a future episode, and not considered entirely negative, and a beautiful thing. But he has also talked about how Wilson was so terrified by his hallucinations that he ran into the bedroom,

locked the door, and hid his head under a pillow for two hours, which doesn't sound so beautiful to me. Apparently after those two hours, he came out of the bedroom, said, well, that's enough of that, and was back to normal.

After that first trip, Wilson wrote a piece of music inspired by his psychedelic experience, a piece which starts like this, with an orchestral introduction very different from anything else the group had released as a single. Of course,

when Mike Love added the lyrics to the song, it became about far more earthly and sensual concerns. But leaving the lyrics aside for a second, it's interesting to look at California girls musically, to see what Wilson's idea of psychedelic music, by which I mean specifically music inspired by the use of psychedelic drugs, since at this point there was no codified genre known as psychedelic music or psychedelia actually was. So, first, Wilson has said repeatedly that the song was specifically inspired by Jesus Joy of Man's Desiring, by Bark. And it's odd, because I see no real structural or musical resemblance

between the two pieces that I can put my finger on, but at the same time I can totally see what he means. Normally at this point I'd say, this change here in this song relates to this change there in that song, but there's not much of that kind of thing here. But I still, as soon as I read Wilson saying that, for the first time, more than 20 years ago, thought, okay, that makes sense. There are a few similarities, though.

Barke's pieces based around triplets, and they made Wilson think of a shufflebeat. If you remember way back in the second episode of the podcast, I talked about how one of the standard shuffle beats is to play triplets in 4-4 time. I'm going to excerpt a bit of recording from a YouTube drum tutorial, which I'll link in the liner notes, showing that kind of shuffle. Now, while Barks' piece is in Walt's time, I hope you can hear how the da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da in Barks piece may have made Wilson think of that kind of shuffle rhythm. Barx piece also has a lot of emphasis of the first, fifth and sixth notes of the scale, which is fairly common, and not something particularly distinctive about the piece, and those are the notes that make up the bass riff that Wilson introduces early in the song. That bass riff, of course, is a famous one. Those of you who are listening,

the very earliest episodes of the podcast, might remember it from the intros to many, many ink spots records. Swallows, come back. Happy straddle. That's the day you promised to come back to me. But the association of that baseline to most people's ears would be Western music, particularly the kind of music that was in Western films in the 30s and 40s. You hear something similar in The Trail of the Lonesome Pine, as performed by Lovell and Hardy in their 1937 film Way Out West. but it's most associated with the song Tumbling Tumbleweeds, first recorded in 1934 by the Western group Sons of the Pioneers,

but more famous in their 1946 re-recording, made after the Ink Spot success, where the part becomes more prominent. That song was the standard of the Western genre, and by 1965 had been covered by, everyone from Jean Autry to the Supremes, Bob Wills to Johnny Ray, and it would also end up covered by several musicians in the LA pop music scene over the next few years, including Michael Nesmith and Kurt Beecher, both people part of the same jumble scene as the Beach Boys.

The other notable thing about California girls is that it's one of the first times that Wilson was able to use multi-tracking to its full effect. The vocal parts were recorded on an 8-track machine, meaning that Wilson could triple track both Michael Love's lead vocal and the group's backing vocals. With Johnston now in the group, California Girls was his first recording session with them. That meant that on the record, there were 18 voices singing, leading to some truly staggering harmonies. So that's what the psychedelic experience meant to Brian Wilson, at least. Bark, orchestral influences, using the region. recording studio to create thicker vocal harmony parts and the Old West. Keep that in the back

of your mind for the present, but it'll be something to remember in 11 episodes time. California Girls was of course another massive hit, reaching number three on the chart, and while some Beach Boys fans see the album it was included on, summer days and summer night, as something of a step backward from the sophistication of today, this is a relative thing. It's very much of a part with the music on the earlier album and has many wonderful moments, with songs like Let Him Run Wild among the group's very best. But it was their next studio album that would cement the group's artistic reputation, and which would regularly be acclaimed by polls of critics as the greatest album of all time, a somewhat meaningless claim. Even more than there is no first anything in music,

there's no best anything. The impulse to make what became pet sounds came, as Wilson has always told the story, from hearing the Beatles' album Rubber Soul. Now, we've not yet covered Rubber Soul, we're going to look at that and at the album that came after it in three episodes time, but it is often regarded as a major artistic leap forward for the Beatles. The record Wilson heard, though, wasn't the same record that most people nowadays think of when they think of Rubber Soul. Since the mid-80s, the CD versions of the Beatles albums have, with one exception, magical mystery tour, followed the track listings of the original British albums, as the Beatles and George Martin intended. But in the 60s, Capital Records were eager to make as much money out of the Beatles as they could.

The Beatles albums generally had 14 songs on, and often didn't include their singles. Capital thought that 10 or 12 songs per album was plenty, and didn't have any aversion to putting singles on albums. They took the three British albums, Help, Rubber Soul and Revolver, plus the non-album Day Tripper We Can Work It Out single, and Ken Thorne's orchestral score for the Help film, and turned that into four American albums, Help, Rubber Soul, Yesterday and Today and Revolver.

In the case of Rubber Soul, that meant that they removed four tracks from the British album, Drive My Car, Nowhere Man, What Goes On, and if I needed someone, and added two songs from the British version of Help. I've just seen a face, and it's only love. Now, I've seen some people claim that this made the American Rubber Soul more of a folk rock album. I may even have said that myself in the past, but that's not really true.

Indeed, nowhere man, and if I needed someone, are two of the Beatles' most overtly folk rock tracks, and both clearly show the influence of the birds. But what it did do was remove several of the more electric songs from the album, and replaced them with acoustic ones. I've just seen a face I can't forget the time or place where we just met She's just a girl for me and I want all the world to see we've met Had it been another day I might have looked the other way And I'd have never been a word

But I said as I'll dream of her tonight This completely inadvertently gave the American rubber soul line up A greater sense of cohesion than the British one Wilson later said, I listened to Rubber Soul, and I said, How could they possibly make an album where the songs all sound like they come from the same place? At other times, he's described his shock at hearing

a whole album of only good songs and similar phrases, because up to this point, Wilson had always included filler tracks on albums, as pretty much everyone did in the early 60s. In the American pop music market, up to the mid-60s, albums were compilations of singles, plus whatever random tracks happened to be lying.

around. And so, for example, in late 1963, the Beach Boys had released two albums less than a month apart, Surfer Girl and Little Deuce Coop. Given that Brian Wilson wrote or co-wrote all the group's original material, it wasn't all that surprising that Little Doose Coop had to include four songs that had been released on previous albums, including two that were on Surfer Girl from the previous month. It was the only way the group could keep up with the

demand for new product, from a company that had no concept of popular music as art. All the Beach Boys' albums had included padding such as generic surf instrumentals, comedy sketches like Cassius Love versus Sonny Wilson, and in the case of the Beach Boys Today, a track titled Bull Session with the Big Daddy, consisting of two minutes of random chatter with the photographer Earl Leaf while they all let burgers. Well, are we on? No, look, we don't even have to talk about what we're talking about. We just introduce early, so. Earl three.

Hi, fig. Did they have one? Did you get a malt? Didn't bring any malt. Did you get us? I mean a cheese, but here's cheese. Oh, it's mine. Did you order one?

No, I'm kidding. Oh, good. What did you get me in? Oh, good. Oh, thank you. No, that's her wrong. Hey, there's onions on this, so I hope all you guys have one. Hi, Earl.

This is not to attack the Beach Boys. This was a simple response to the commercial pressures of the marketplace. Between October 1962 and November 1965, they released 11 albums. That's about an album every three months, as well as a few non-album singles. And on top of that, Brian had also been writing songs during that time for Jan and Dean, the Hunnies, The Survivors and others, and had collaborated with Gary Usher and Roger Christian on songs for Mussel Beach Party, one of American International Pictures series of Beach Party films.

It's unsurprising that not everything produced on this industrial scale was a masterpiece. Indeed, the album the Beach Boys released directly before Pet Sounds could be argued to be an entire thriller album. Many biographies say that Beach Boys Party was recorded to buy Brian time to make pet sounds, but the timelines don't really match up on closer investigation. Beach Boys Party was released in November 1965, before Brian ever heard Rubber Soul, which came out later. and before he started writing the material that became Pet Sounds.

Beach Boys' Party was a solution to a simple problem. The group were meant to deliver three albums that year, and they didn't have three albums worth of material. Some shows had been recorded for a possible live album, but they'd released a live album in 1964, and hadn't really changed their set list very much in the interim. So instead, they made a live in the studio album, with the conceit that it was recorded at a party the group were holding.

Rather than the lush wrecking-through instrumentation they've been using in recent months, everything was played on acoustic guitars, plus some bongos provided by wrecking crew drummer Hal Blaine, and some harmonica from Billy Hinchie of the boy band Dean Odessie and Billy, whose sister Carl Wilson was shortly to marry. The album included jokes and false starts, and was overlaid with crowd noise, to give the impression that you were listening to an actual party

where a few people were sitting around with guitars and having fun. The album consisted of songs that the group liked and could play without rehearsal. Novelty hits from a few years earlier, like Alleyoop and Hully Gully, a few Beatles songs, and old favourites like the Everly Brothers hit devoted to you, in a rather lovely version with two-part harmony by Mike and Brian, which sounds much better in a remixed version released later without the party noise overdubs. But the song that defined the album, which became a massive hit, and which became an albatross around the band's neck,

about which some of them would complain for a long time to come, didn't even have one of the Beach Boys' singing lead. As we discussed back in the episode on Surf City, by this point, Jan and Dean were recording their album Folken Roll, their attempt at jumping on the folk rock bandwagon, which included the truly awful The Universal Coward, a right-wing answer song to the Universal Soldier, released as a Jam Berry solo single.

Dean Torrance was by this point getting sick of working with Barry and was also deeply unimpressed with the album they were making so he popped out of the studio for a while to go and visit his friends in the Beach Boys who were recording nearby. He came in during the party sessions and everyone was suggesting songs to perform and asked Dean to suggest something. He remembered an old doo-wop song that Jan and Dean had recorded a cover version of

and suggested that. The group had Dean sing lead and ran through a sloppy version of it where none of them could remember the words properly. And rather incredibly, that became one of the biggest hits the group ever had, making number two on the Billboard chart, and number one on other industry charts like Cashbox, number three in the UK, and becoming a song that the group had to perform at almost every live show they ever did,

together or separately, for at least the next 57 years. But meanwhile, Brian had been working on other material. He had not yet had his idea for an album made up entirely of good songs, but he had been experimenting in the studio. He'd worked on a handful of tracks which had pointed in new directions. One was a single, The Little Girl I Once knew. John Lennon gave that record a very favourable review, saying, This is the greatest, turn it up, turn it right up.

It's got to be a hit. It's the greatest record I've heard for weeks. is fantastic. But the record only made number 20, a perfectly respectable chart placing, but nowhere near as good as the group's recent run of hits, in part because its stop-start nature meant that the record had dead air,

moments of silence, which made DJs avoid playing it, because they believed that dead air, even only a second of it here and there, would make people tune to another station. Another track that Brian had been working on was an old folk song suggested by Alan Jardine. Jardine had always been something of a fokey of the Kingston Trio variety

and he had suggested that the group might record the old song The Rec of the John B which the Kingston Trio had recorded. The trio's version, in turn, had been inspired by the Weaver's version of the song from 1950. Come on the Sloop John B my grandfather and me

Nassau town drinking all night we got into a fight I feel so break up. Brian had at first not been impressed, but Jardine had fiddled with the chord sequence slightly, adding in a minor chord to make the song slightly more interesting, and Brian had agreed to record the track,

though he left the instrumental without vocals for several months. The track was eventually finished and released as a single, and unlike the little girl I once knew, it was a big enough hit that it was included on the next album, though several people have said it doesn't fit. lyrically it definitely doesn't but musically it's very much of a piece with the other songs on what became pet sounds

but while Wilson was able to create music by himself but while Wilson was able to create music by himself he wasn't confident about his ability as a lyricist now he's not a bad lyricist by any means he's written several extremely good lyrics by himself but Brian Wilson is not a particularly articulate or verbal person, and he wanted someone who could write lyrics as crafted as his music, but which would express the ideas he was trying to convey.

He didn't think he could do it himself, and for whatever reason he didn't want to work with Mike Love, who had co-written the majority of his recent songs, or with any of his other collaborators. He did write one song with Terry Sassion, the Beach Boys Road Manager at the time, which dealt obliquely with those acid-induced concepts of ego death. But while the group recorded that song,

Mike Love objected vociferously to the lyrics. While Love did try cannabis a few times in the late 60s and early 70s, he's always been generally opposed to the use of illegal drugs, and certainly didn't want the group to be making records that promoted their use, though I would personally argue that hang on to your ego is at best deeply ambiguous about the prospect of ego death. Love rewrote some of the lyrics, changing the title to I know there's an answer, though as with all such bad loyalisation efforts,

he inadvertently left in some of the drug references. But Wilson wasn't going to rely on Sashon for all the lyrics. Instead, he turned to Tony Asher. Asher was an advertising executive, who Wilson probably met through Lom and Darrow. There is some confusion over the timeline of their meeting, with some sources saying they first met in 1963, and that Asher had introduced Wilson to Darrow,

but others saying that the introductions went the other way, and that Darrow introduced Asher to Wilson in 1965. But Asher and Darrow had been friends for a long time, and so Wilson and Asher were definitely orbiting in the same circles. The most common version of the story seems to be that Asher was working in Western Studios, where he was recording a jingle. The advertising agency had him writing jingles because he was an amateur songwriter, and as he later put it,

nobody else at the agency knew the difference between E-flat and A-flat. Wilson was also working in the studio complex, and Wilson dragged Asher in to listen to some of the demos he was recording. At that time, Wilson was in the habit of inviting anyone who was around to listen to his works in progress. Asher chatted with him for a while and thought nothing of it, until he got a phone call at work a few weeks later from Brian Wilson, suggesting the two write together.

Wilson was impressed with Asher, who he thought of as very verbal and very intelligent, but Asher was less impressed with Wilson. He has softened his statements in recent decades, but in the early 70s he would describe Wilson as a genius musician but an amateur human being, and sharply criticise his taste in films and literature, and his relationship with his wife. The attitude seems at least in part to have been shared by a lot of the people that Wilson was meeting and becoming influenced by.

One of the things that is very noticeable about Wilson is that he has no filters at all and that makes his music some of the most honest music ever recorded but that same honesty also meant that he could never be cool or hip he was and remains enthusiastic about the things he likes and he likes things that speak to the person he is not things that fit some idea of what the in-crowd like and the person Brian Wilson is

is a man born in 1942 brought up in a middle-class suburban white family in California, and his tastes are the tastes one would expect from that background. And those tastes are not the tastes of the hipsters and scenesters who were starting to become part of his circle at the time, and so there's a thinly veiled contempt in the way a lot of those people talked about Wilson, particularly in the late 60s and early 70s. Wilson, meanwhile, was desperate for their approval, and trying hard to fit in, but not quite managing it. Again, Asher has softened his statements more recently, and I

don't want to sound too harsh about Asher. Both men were in their 20s and still trying to find their place in the world, and I wouldn't want to hold anyone's opinions from their 20s against them decades later, but that was the dynamic that existed between them. Asher saw himself as something of a sophisticate, and Wilson as something of a hic in contrast, but a hick who, unlike him, had created a string of massive hit records, and Asher did always respect Wilson's musical abilities, and Wilson in turn looked up to Asher, even while remaining the dominant partner, because he respected Asher's verbal facility. Asher took a two-week sabbatical from his job at the advertising agency, and during those two weeks, he and Wilson collaborated on eight songs that would make up

the backbone of the album that would become pet sounds. The first song the two worked on was a track that had originally been titled In My Childhood. Wilson had already recorded the backing track for this, including the sounds of bicycle horns and bells to evoke the feel of being a child. The two men wrote a new lyric for the song, based around a theme that appears in many of Wilson's songs, the inadequate man who is loved by a woman who is infinitely superior to him, who doesn't understand why he's loved, but is astonished by it. The song became You Still Believe in Me.

That song also featured an instrumental contribution of sorts by Asher. even though the main backing track had been recorded before the two started working together Wilson came up with an idea for an intro for the song which would require a particular piano sound to get that sound Wilson held down the keys on a piano while Asha leaned into the piano and plucked their strings manually the result with Wilson singing over the top sounds utterly lovely note that I said that Wilson and Asher came up with new lyrics together there has been some slight dispute about the way songwriting credits were apportioned to the songs. Generally, the credits said that Wilson wrote all the music,

while Asher and Wilson wrote the lyrics together. So Asher got 25% of the songwriting royalties, and Wilson's 75%. Asher, though, has said that there are some songs for which he wrote the whole lyric by himself, and that he also made some contributions to the music on some songs, though he has always said that the majority of the musical contribution was Wilson's, and that most of the time the general theme of the lyric at least was suggested by Wilson. For the most part, Asher hasn't had a problem with that credit split, but he has often seemed aggrieved, and to my mind justifiably,

about the song wouldn't it be nice? Asher wrote the whole lyric for the song, though inspired by conversations with Wilson, but accepted his customary 50% of the lyrical credit. The result became one of the big hits from the album. But, at least according to Mike Love, in the studio he added a single line to the song. When Love sued Brian Wilson in 1994, over the credits to 35 songs,

he included Wouldn't It Be Nice in the list because of that contribution. Love now gets a third of the songwriting royalties, taken proportionally from the other two writers, which means that he gets a third of Wilson's share and a third of Asher's share. So Brian Wilson gets half the money for writing all the music. Mike Love gets a third of the money for writing Good Night Baby, sleep type baby, and Tony Asher gets a sixth of the money, half as much as love, for writing all the rest of the lyric. Again, this is not any one individual doing anything wrong. Most of the

songs in the lawsuit were ones where Love wrote the entire lyric or a substantial chunk of it, and because the lawsuit covered a lot of songs, the same formula was applied to borderline cases like wouldn't it be nice, as it was to clear-cut ones like California girls, where nobody disputes Love's authorship of the whole lyric. It's just the result of a series of reasonable decisions, each one of which makes sense in isolation, but which has left Asher earning significantly less from one of the most successful songs he ever wrote in his career than he should have earned. The songs that Asher co-wrote with Wilson were all very much of a piece, both musically and lyrically. Pet Sounds really works as a whole album better than it does individual tracks,

and while some of the claims made about it that it's a concept album, for example, are clearly false. It does have a unity to it with ideas coming back in different forms. For example, musically, almost every new song on the album contains a key change down a minor third at some point,

not the kind of thing where the listener consciously notices that an idea has been repeated, but definitely the kind of thing that makes a whole album hold together. It also differs from earlier Beach Boys' albums in that the majority of the lead vocals are by Brian Wilson. Previously, Michael Love had been the dominant voice on Beach Boys Records, with Brian as second lead and the other members taking few or none.

Now, Love only took two main lead vocals, and was the secondary lead on three more. Brian, on the other hand, took six primary lead vocals and two partial leads. The later claims by some people that this was a Brian Wilson solo album in all but name, are exaggerations. The group members did perform on almost all of the tracks, but it is definitely much more of a personal individual statement than the earlier albums had been.

The epitome of this was I Just Wasn't Made for These Times, which Asher wrote the lyrics for, but which was definitely Brian's idea rather than Ashes. That track also featured the first use on a Beach Boys record of the Electrotheramine, an electronic instrument invented by session musician, Tanna, a former trombone player with the Glenn Miller band, who had created it to approximate the sound of a theramine while being easier to play.

That sound would turn up on future Beach Boys' records. But the song that became the most lasting result of the Wilson Asher collaboration was actually one that is nowhere near as personal as many of the other songs on the record, that didn't contain a lot of the musical hallmarks that Unified the album and that didn't have Brian Wilson's singing lead. Of all the songs on the album, God Only Knows is the one that has the most of Tony Asher's fingerprints on it. Asher has spoken in the past about how when he and Wilson were writing, Ash's touchstones were old standards like Stella by Starlight and How Deep is the Ocean, and God Only Knows easily fits into that category. It's a crafted song rather than a deep personal

expression, but the kind of craft that one would find in writers like the Gershwins, every note and syllable perfectly chosen. One may not always love you, but long as there are stars above you, You never need to doubt it, I'll make you so sure about God only knows what I'd be with. One of the things that is often wrongly said about the song, is that it's the first pop song to have the word God in the title. It isn't, and it isn't even the first pop song to be called God Only Knows. as there was a song of that name recorded by the doo-wop group The Caprize in 1954.

But what's definitely true is that Wilson, even though he was interested in creating spiritual music, and was holding prayer sessions with his brother Carl before vocal takes, was reluctant to include the word in the song at first, fearing it would harm radio play. He was probably justified in his fears. A couple of years earlier, he produced a record called Pray for Surf by the Hunnies,

a girl group featuring his wife. That record hadn't been played on the radio, in part because it was considered to be trivialising religion. But Asher eventually persuaded Wilson that it would be okay, saying, What do you think we should do instead? Say heck only knows. Asher's lyric was far more ambiguous than it may seem. While it's on one level a straightforward love song, Asher has always pointed out that the protagonist never says that he loves the object of the song, just that he'll make her believe that he loves her.

Coupled with the second verse, which could easily be read as a threat of suicide if the object leaves the singer, it would be very, very easy to make the song into something that sounds like it was from the point of view of a narcissistic, manipulative abuser. That ambiguity is also there in the music,

which never settles in a strong sense of key. The song starts out with an A chord, which you'd expect to lead to the song being an A, but when the horn comes in you get a D-sharp note, which isn't in that key. And then when the verse starts, it starts on an inversion of a D-cord, before giving you enough clues that by the end of the verse, you're fairly sure you're in the key of E. But it never really confirms that.

So this is an unsettling, ambiguous song in many ways. But that's not how it sounds, nor how Brian at least intended it to sound. So why doesn't it sound that way? In large part it's down to the choice of lead vocalist. If Michael had sung this song, it might have sounded almost aggressive. Brian did sing it in early attempts at the track, and he doesn't sound quite right either. His vocal attitude is just not right.

I may not always love you, but long as there are stars above you, you never need to doubt it, I'll make you. But eventually Brian hit on getting his younger brother Carl to sing lead. At this point Carl had sung very few leads on record. There has been some dispute about who sang what exactly, because of the family resemblance which meant all the core band members

could sound a little like each other. But it's generally considered that he had sung full lead on two album tracks, Pompom Play Girl and Girl Don't Tell Me, and partial leads on two other tracks. covers of Louis Louis and summertime blues. At this point, he wasn't really thought of as anything other than a backing vocalist, but his soft, gentle performance on God Only Knows is one of the great performances. God only knows what I'd be without you.

If you should ever leave me, the life would still go on, believe me, the world could show nothing to me, So what good would live? God only knows what I'd be without you. The track was actually one of those that required a great deal of work in the studio to create the form which now seems inevitable. Early attempts at the recording included a quite awful saxophone solo.

And there were a lot of problems with the middle until session keyboard player Don Randy suggested the staccato break that would eventually be used. And similarly, the tag of the record was originally intended as a massive harmony, including all the Beach Boys, The Hunnies and Terry Melcher, before Brian decided to strip it right back and to have only three voices on the tag, himself on the top and bottom, and Bruce Johnston singing in the middle. When Pet Sounds came out, it was less successful in the US than hoped. It became the first of the group's albums not to go gold on its release.

and it's only made number 10 on the album charts. By any objective standards, this is still a success, but it was less successful than the record label had hoped and was taken as a worrying sign. In the UK, though, it was a different matter. Up to this point, the Beach Boys had not had much commercial success in the UK, but recently, Andrew Lou Goldham had become a fan, and had become the UK publisher of their original songs,

and was interested in giving them the same kind of promotion he'd given Phil Spector's records. Keith Moon of the Who was also a massive fan, and the Beach Boys had recently taken on Derek Taylor with his strong British connections as their publicist. Not only that, but Bruce Johnston's old friend Kim Fowley was now based in London and making waves there. So in May, in advance of a planned UK tour set for November that year,

Bruce Johnston and Derek Taylor flew over to the UK to press the flesh and schmooze. Of all the group members, Johnston was the perfect choice to do this. this. He's by far the most polished of them in terms of social interaction, and he was also the one who, other than Brian, had the least ambiguous feelings about the group's new direction, being wholeheartedly in favour of it. Johnston and Taylor met up with Keith Moon, Lennon and McCartney, and other pop luminaries, and played them the record. McCartney in particular was so impressed by pet sounds, and especially

God Only Knows, that he wrote this inspired by the song, and recorded it even before. for Pet Sounds UK release at the end of June. As a result of Johnston and Taylor's efforts, and the promotional work by Oldham and others, Pet Sounds reached number two on the UK album charts, and God Only Know has made number two on the UK singles charts. In the US, it was the B-side to Wouldn't It Be Nice, though it made the top 40 on its own merits too.

The Beach Boys displaced the Beatles in the Reader's Choice Polls for Best Band in the NME in 1966, largely as a result of the album, and Melodymaker voted it joint best album of the year, along with the Beatles Revolver. The Beach Boys commercial fortunes were slightly on the way in the US, but they were becoming bigger than ever in the UK. But a big part of this was creating expectations around Brian Wilson in particular.

Derek Taylor had picked up on a phrase that had been bandied around, enough that Murray Wilson had used it to mock Brian in the awful Help Me Ronder sessions, and was promoting it widely as a truism. Everyone was now agreed that Brian Wilson was a genius and we'll see how that expectation plays out over the next few weeks. A history of rock music and 500 songs is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Each week Patreon Backers will get a 10-minute bonus podcast.

This week's is on Sunny by Bobby Heb. Visit Patreon to sign up for as little as a dollar a month. A book based on the first 50 episodes of the podcast, from Savoy Swingers to Clock Rockers, is now available. Search Andrew Hickey 500 songs on your favorite online bookstore, or visit the links in the show notes.

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