Читать книгу The Mojo Collection - Various Mojo Magazine - Страница 64

Record label: Capitol

Produced: Brian Wilson

Recorded: Western, Sunset Sound, and Gold Star Studios, Los Angeles; July 12, 1965 and November 1, 1965–April 13, 1966

Released: May 16, 1966

Chart peaks: 2 (UK) 10 (US)

Personnel: Brian Wilson (v); Carl Wilson (v); Mike Love (v); Bruce Johnston (v); Al Jardine (v); Dennis Wilson (v); Carol Kaye (b); Hal Blaine (d); Terry Melcher (v); Banana and Louie (dogbarking); Chuck Britz, Larry Levine and Ralph Balantin (e)

Track listing: Wouldn’t It Be Nice; You Still Believe In Me; That’s Not Me; Don’t Talk (Put Your Head On My Shoulder); I’m Waiting For The Day; Let’s Go Away For A While; Sloop John B (S); God Only Knows (S); I Know There’s An Answer; Here Today; I Just Wasn’t Made For These Times; Pet Sounds; Caroline, No (S)

Running time: 36:25

Current CD: EMI 5262662 adds Hang On To Your Ego and features the album in both mono and stereo mixes.

Further listening: Good Vibrations: 30 Years Of The Beach Boys (1993); 4-CD box set Pet Sounds Sessions: Remastered (1997)

Further reading: Brian Wilson And The Beach Boys: The Complete Guide To Their Music (John Tobler, 2004); The Beach Boys Pet Sounds 33 1/3 (Jim Fusillli, 2005); www.thebeachboys.com

Download: iTunes

Tony Asher thought it was a joke when someone at his ad agency told him Brian Wilson was on the phone, one day late in 1965. He’d played some songs for Wilson several months earlier, but since then had dumped songwriting for a more profitable gig as a copywriter. But Wilson couldn’t have been more serious. He’d just heard The Beatles’ Rubber Soul and decided he wanted to make a meaningful album of his own – without the aid of The Beach Boys’ resident sun-and-fun lyricist Mike Love, who was on tour with the rest of the Boys.

Recent exposure to heavy doses of LSD-25 had also boosted Wilson’s interest in mind-expanding music that would affect people on a deeper level. Wilson remembered Asher and felt that he was a writer who could give a voice to his musical introspection. He couldn’t have been more right.

‘It’s fair to say that the general tenor of the lyrics was always his and the actual choice of words usually mine,’ Tony Asher told Nick Kent. ‘Brian was constantly looking for topics that kids could relate to. Even though he was dealing with the most advanced arrangements, he was incredibly conscious of this commercial thing, this absolute need to relate.’

As the fluffiest of all Beach Boys’ hits, Barbara Ann, was topping the British and American charts, Brian began tinkering with a song called Good, Good Vibrations and another called God Only Knows. When Mike ‘Don’t Fuck With The Formula’ Love returned from Japan to lay down his vocal tracks, he pronounced it ‘Brian’s ego music’. It’s true that I Know There’s An Answer was originally called Hang On To Your Ego (until Love insisted the lyrics be changed, and Brian’s chauffeur Terry Sachen obliged) but what Love hated most about Pet Sounds was its LSD influence. He later asserted that ‘some of the words were so totally offensive to me that I wouldn’t even sing ’em’. Actually, Brian didn’t need many of Love’s vocals, because he could do all the parts himself. When Brian wasn’t singing, he was arranging the orchestra, creating dense, lush arrangements that owed at least as much to Nelson Riddle as they did to Jack Nitzsche.

With the notable exception of Sloop John B (a hit single that Capitol stuck on the album against Wilson’s wishes), every song on Pet Sounds evinced a spiritual tenderness that opened new doors in rock. ‘I thought of it as chapel rock,’ Wilson later explained, ‘commercial choir music. I wanted to make an album that would stand up in ten years.’

Make that 37 and counting.