Pet Sounds

Pet Sounds is the eleventh studio album by the Beach Boys, released by Capitol on May 16, 1966. Brian Wilson produced and arranged it, wrote the music for every track except the traditional “Sloop John B,” and wrote most of the lyrics with Tony Asher, an advertising copywriter. He recorded most of the instrumental tracks in Los Angeles between July 1965 and April 1966 with the session musicians later known as the Wrecking Crew. Much of it was recorded while the rest of the band was on tour, and the band sang on the record after it returned.

The songs are about growing up, and about the doubts and losses that come with love, sung in stacked harmonies over arrangements for accordions, harpsichord, flutes, French horn, timpani, bass harmonica, sleigh bells, a bicycle bell and an Electro-Theremin. The album ends with a passing train and the barking of Wilson’s two dogs.

It reached the American top ten, peaking lower than the band’s three previous albums, and two months later Capitol issued a collection of the band’s older hits that climbed higher. In Britain it reached No. 2 and stayed in the top ten into the new year. George Martin, the Beatles’ producer, later called their Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band an attempt to equal it. In 1993 the NME’s writers and The Times each ranked it the best album ever made, Rolling Stone has placed it second in every edition of its 500 greatest albums, and in 2004 the Library of Congress added it to the National Recording Registry.

Background

Brian Wilson wrote and arranged most of the Beach Boys’ songs for Capitol, produced their records himself after the first few, and until the end of 1964 toured with them. After a breakdown on a flight to Houston in December 1964 he stopped touring; Glen Campbell took his place on the road, and then Bruce Johnston.¹ At home in Los Angeles he wrote and recorded. The second side of The Beach Boys Today! (1965) is a run of slow, inward songs, and the musicologist Jadey O’Regan finds that reflective songs “dominate the songscape on side 2 of Today and on Pet Sounds.”²

Wilson later wrote that Loren Schwartz, a talent agent, introduced him to marijuana and LSD, and also to Tony Asher.³ In December 1965 he heard the Beatles’ Rubber Soul in the edition Capitol issued in America, which replaced several of the British album’s electric songs with acoustic ones. He recalled that it “felt like it all belonged together,” and that he wanted to make an album like it.⁴

In January 1966 the band left for a tour of Japan, and Wilson engaged Asher to write lyrics with him. Asher wrote jingles at the Carson-Roberts advertising agency and, by his own account, had met Wilson at a recording studio in 1965, where Asher was recording a commercial and Wilson was making demos.⁵ “It’s fair to say that the general tenor of the lyrics was always his,” Asher said, “and the actual choice of words was usually mine. I was really just his interpreter.” His part in the music, by his own account, was to say whether he liked a phrase better going up or down.⁶

Recording

The first session was the backing track for “Sloop John B,” cut at Western Recorders at midnight on the night of July 12, 1965. Most of the album was recorded between January and April 1966, and the last overdub, a part added to a finished track, was made on April 17.⁷ Wilson used four studios: Western’s Studio 3 and Gold Star for most of the backing tracks, Sunset Sound for “Here Today,” and Columbia’s Hollywood studio for vocals.⁸ The players were Los Angeles session musicians, among them Hal Blaine on drums, Carol Kaye and Lyle Ritz on bass, Campbell and Barney Kessel on guitar, Larry Knechtel and Don Randi on keyboards, Steve Douglas on saxophone, and Carl Fortina and Frank Marocco on accordion.⁹ The exception is “That’s Not Me,” which Brian, Carl and Dennis Wilson played largely themselves with Terry Melcher sitting in; the session list in the 1997 box set and Brad Elliott’s sessionography disagree on who played drums.¹⁰

Most of the backing tracks were played live, the whole ensemble at once, and the instruments on “Wouldn’t It Be Nice” and “God Only Knows” were each finished in one long session with nothing added afterward. “Wouldn’t It Be Nice” and “I Just Wasn’t Made for These Times” were cut at Gold Star with the engineer Larry Levine on three-track tape. The vocals came afterward, over weeks, and about a third of the album was copied to eight-track tape at Columbia to make room for them.¹¹ Al Jardine remembered that most of the tracks had been cut by the time the band came back from Japan. Mike Love remembered the band reworking its harmonies until nothing in them was even slightly sharp or flat.¹²

Wilson wrote most of the songs before the sessions and worked out the arrangements and the sound in the studio, often during the session itself. The introduction of “Wouldn’t It Be Nice” was invented at its session on January 22, 1966, when he took the last four bars of the guitars’ part from the song’s bridge and put them at the start, unaccompanied.¹³ On “God Only Knows” he sang the French horn line to Alan Robinson at the session, and Blaine added the sleigh bells on his own initiative.¹⁴ On “I Know There’s an Answer” he liked the blend of organ and tack piano, a piano with tacks in its hammers for a brighter attack, so much that he made it the new opening during the session.¹⁵ The musicologist Daniel Harrison writes that in this music “arranging, producing, and songwriting together comprise the compositional act,” and that Wilson did all three.¹⁶

Carl Wilson sang the lead on “God Only Knows” three times over a month, and the last take, from April 11, is the one released.¹⁷

“I Know There’s an Answer” began as “Hang On to Your Ego,” written by Wilson with Terry Sachen, the band’s road manager, in the language of LSD culture, where losing the ego was a goal. Accounts of the change differ. Love wrote that he persuaded Wilson to take his new words and title; Jardine remembered Wilson deciding for himself: “Forget it. I’m changing the lyrics. There’s too much controversy.” Wilson himself later tied the original words to his own drug use. The released song is credited to Wilson, Sachen and Love.¹⁸

The album was assembled on April 4 and mastered at Capitol the next day, then withdrawn. Douglas, who also worked as a Capitol executive, remembered the master as “full of noise. You could hear him talking in the background.” Wilson re-cut vocals, and the album was assembled again and remastered on April 17.¹⁹ He mixed it in mono.²⁰

“Caroline, No” was recorded at Western on January 31, 1966, with Brian singing alone, his voice recorded twice and layered. He recalled that his father, Murry Wilson, heard it and told him, “You oughta speed that up a whole note; it’ll sound better,” and the record plays faster and higher than the take as sung. To close the album Wilson taped his dogs, Banana and Louie, on March 22, and found a passenger train among some sound-effects tapes. The coda was added for the album and is not on the single.²¹

Music

The album is baroque pop: pop songs arranged for orchestral and chamber instruments. A few harmonic devices recur from song to song. Andrew Hickey observes that “almost every new song on the album contains a key change down a minor third.” A half-step is the smallest step in Western music, from one piano key to the next, and a drop of a minor third moves the home note of a section down three of them, as the bridge of “Wouldn’t It Be Nice” moves from F to D. Hickey hears it as a repetition a listener does not consciously notice, one that holds the album together. Philip Lambert finds bass lines that step down by half-steps for all or part of their way, in the title instrumental, “Here Today” and the second half of “Let’s Go Away for Awhile,” recurring as “a thematic element in the songs of Pet Sounds,” and a tense four-note chord, the half-diminished seventh, used for “drawing attention to an important word or phrase,” as on the line in “Don’t Talk” about looking into the lover’s eyes.²² Of the album’s instruments, Craig Slowinski’s session research finds accordion, vibraphone, timpani, French and English horn, bass saxophone, mandolin, sleigh bells and harpsichord already on Today! and Summer Days (and Summer Nights!!) in 1965; the flute as a recurring color, the bass harmonica, and the bicycle bell and horn were new.²³

“Wouldn’t It Be Nice” opens on its unaccompanied introduction for two electric twelve-strings, one of them Kessel’s Danelectro Bellzouki, an electric twelve-string shaped like a bouzouki, whose tone in the echo chamber the sessionography likens to a harp. A single drum hit announces the verse in F, where accordions drive the shuffle. It has a slower half-time section, in which Frank Marocco shakes his accordion’s bellows to make the sound tremble, and its ending layers the voices one over another. Wilson described the lyric as two young people wanting a serious life together that the world will not yet give them.²⁴ “You Still Believe in Me” opens on the strings of a grand piano plucked from inside the lid, a sound Asher and Wilson made together, and it has no drum kit. A bicycle bell and horn, kept from the track’s first form as a song about childhood, “In My Childhood,” sound in the second refrain and the fade, and the title line lands on the flat sixth, a chord borrowed from the minor key. The lyric is a confession of the singer’s failings and of his wonder at a lover’s faith in him; Wilson called it “a little ‘Boys Choir’-type song with me doing the soprano.”²⁵ “That’s Not Me” has no chorus, and it changes key at each bridge, ending in a different key from the one it began in. Wilson described it as a song about measuring who you have become against who you were.²⁶

“Don’t Talk (Put Your Head on My Shoulder)” is built on a Hammond organ, with strings added on April 3. Blaine plays nothing but a ride cymbal, so the beat is barely marked, and Kaye, on a muted bass, called the tempo “unearthly slow”; the timpani sound once, at the end of the bridge, as a heartbeat. No chord repeats in the verse, and the song never settles into a clear home key. Wilson sings alone. Asher said the idea of a song about the value of not talking came from a conversation the two had about dating.²⁷ “I’m Waiting for the Day,” an older song Wilson revived, is driven by timpani, with the drum kit adding only offbeats, and alternates loud sections with quiet ones, an English horn answering the voice. Its lyric is a pledge to a girl recovering from another man’s hurt. Wilson said in 1996 that he liked the song and disliked his own singing on it.²⁸ “Let’s Go Away for Awhile” is an instrumental in two halves that never return to the start, the first in 4/4, four beats to the bar, and the second in 6/8, a lilting meter of two beats each divided in three. Kessel’s archtop guitar, vibraphone, saxophones, oboe and strings carry it; Wilson called it “the most satisfying piece of music I’ve ever made.”²⁹ “Sloop John B” is the West Indian folk song Jardine brought to Wilson from the Kingston Trio’s version. Flutes and glockenspiel play its opening figure over a cricket clicker, two interlocking electric twelve-strings carry the verses, and a bass saxophone joins the basses. At one point the band drops out and the voices sing alone, a cappella, which the notes to The Pet Sounds Sessions, Capitol’s 1997 box set, call uncommon for a pop record of 1966. Harrison hears it as a cheerful-sounding “downer” to close the first side.³⁰

“God Only Knows” opens with a French horn, which Robinson played sliding between notes, glissando, because Wilson asked him to. The key is uncertain from the start: the introduction seems to be in A, the horn’s line pulls toward E, and the song never confirms either, which Lambert and Hickey both describe. The bridge, a wordless passage for three voices, Bruce Johnston’s, Carl’s and Brian’s, repeats the verse’s chords in another key, and the chorus returns in that key and slides back into the verse; of that return Harrison writes that “there is no moment in rock music more harmonically and formally subtle than this transition.” Under the voice a swung shuffle runs on a piano with strips of masking tape across its strings, which damp the notes to a short, thumping attack, a harpsichord an octave above, sleigh bells, and cut-down drink containers struck with a mallet for a clip-clop, while the accordions hold chords like an organ. The song ends in a round, the same melody entering in several voices one after another. The lyric opens by admitting that the singer’s love might not last, and Asher said most of the time they spent on the song went into arguing whether to use the word God in it.³¹ “I Know There’s an Answer” sets the organ and tack piano under Mike Love and Al Jardine on the verses and Brian on the chorus, with Campbell on banjo and a bass-harmonica solo by Tommy Morgan. Its lyric is about finding a way through confusion alone.³² “Here Today” is sung by Love, and its lead instrument, in Wilson’s account, was a bass guitar played an octave higher than usual; a trombone sounds in the choruses, and studio chatter can be heard in the instrumental break. Wilson said he did not really know what it was about, and David Leaf, who co-produced The Pet Sounds Sessions, describes it as bemoaning “the tenuous nature of love.”³³

“I Just Wasn’t Made for These Times” brings in the Electro-Theremin, an electronic instrument with a gliding, wavering pitch that the trombonist Paul Tanner and the inventor Bob Whitsell made in the 1950s. Tanner plays it here; it had been heard on film soundtracks and television but never before on a Beach Boys record. The chorus repeats a pair of chords that normally lead back to the home chord, three times, and never arrives, which Lambert hears as “the refusal of tonic” that “accentuates the singer’s existential despair.” Wilson said the song was about feeling out of step with the people around him, and Asher said it was the one song whose feeling he could not share.³⁴ The title instrumental was cut in November 1965 as “Run James Run,” meant as a possible theme for a James Bond film; a “low, lazy, twangy lead guitar,” in Harrison’s words, carries the tune, Ritchie Frost plays two empty Coca-Cola cans for its percussion, and Harrison suggests its backing “may also be the thickest wall of background sound that Brian ever produced.”³⁵ “Caroline, No” opens with Blaine striking an upturned empty water bottle, then harpsichord, flutes and a ukulele under Brian’s voice, raised in pitch by the speed-up. Lambert hears its opening chords implying “no key whatsoever” before the song settles. Asher remembered that Wilson had long wanted to write a song about lost innocence, about a girl who loses something as she grows up, and the lyric mourns a girl who has changed, down to her cut hair. The people involved give three accounts of who Caroline was. Asher said he sang Wilson a line about his own former girlfriend, Carol, and that Wilson misheard it as the title; Wilson later recalled a high-school crush named Carol Mountain but said the song owed most to the changes in his own young marriage to Marilyn Wilson; and she took it as partly about her own short haircut.³⁶

Title and artwork

The cover was photographed on February 15, 1966, in the petting zoo of the San Diego Zoo, with the band feeding goats. By Brad Elliott’s account the title had already been chosen, and the photograph played on it.³⁷ Accounts of who chose it differ. Carl Wilson thought it was Brian, naming a collection of the sounds he loved, his pet sounds. Mike Love wrote that he suggested it himself, with the album’s barking dogs in his ears.³⁸

What it inherits and what it introduces

Wilson’s model as a producer was Phil Spector, whose early-1960s singles built the dense, echoing Wall of Sound. Wilson used Spector’s session players and his studio at Gold Star, recorded two tracks with Spector’s engineer, and mixed for mono as Spector did. Mark Linett, who remixed the album in stereo in 1996, calls Spector Wilson’s “main production influence” and writes that both believed mono let a producer present a record exactly as he meant it to be heard.²⁰ Wilson’s harmonic model was the Four Freshmen, the vocal quartet from whose records, he said in 2015, he had learned to play chords on the piano. Lambert traces the album’s harmony to Four Freshmen arrangements and jazz standards, and Wilson named Burt Bacharach as the model for “Let’s Go Away for Awhile.”³⁹ The immediate spur was Rubber Soul.

Harrison finds the album’s unusual chord progressions and phrase lengths already present in “The Warmth of the Sun” and “Don’t Back Down” (1964).⁴⁰ He wrote in 1997 that in song structure “there is comparatively little advance,” and that what was new was “a new style of lyrics and instrumentation.” Lambert wrote in 2008 that its musical ideas were “mostly culminations of Brian Wilson’s earlier work,” new in their “unprecedented artistic context.”⁴¹ It is often called a concept album, and the label is disputed: Larry Starr calls it “arguably a ‘concept album,’” Lambert “one of rock’s first,” and Hickey rejects the term while granting the record its unity.⁴²

Bruce Johnston played the album to John Lennon and Paul McCartney in London in May 1966, and recalled that they made him play it twice and said the vocals on “Wouldn’t It Be Nice” helped them write “Here, There and Everywhere,” which the Beatles recorded that June for Revolver.⁴³ George Martin, the Beatles’ producer, said in 1996 that the album led to their next one, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967): “Without Pet Sounds, Sgt. Pepper wouldn’t have happened. Revolver was the beginning of the whole thing. But Pepper was an attempt to equal Pet Sounds.”⁴⁴ Wilson’s own next step was “Good Vibrations”, begun during these sessions and kept off the album, and the unfinished Smile.⁴⁵

Release

Capitol released the album on May 16, 1966, in mono and in Duophonic, the label’s simulated stereo. Two of its songs were already out as singles. “Caroline, No” was issued in March under Brian Wilson’s name alone; Steve Douglas later said he had urged it. “Sloop John B” followed in March and became a hit on both sides of the Atlantic.⁴⁶ “Wouldn’t It Be Nice” came out in July with “God Only Knows” on the other side. Capitol first promoted “God Only Knows,” and American radio played “Wouldn’t It Be Nice,” which became the bigger hit; in Britain EMI issued “God Only Knows” as the A-side, and it did better there than in America.⁴⁷

Karl Engemann, Capitol’s liaison with the band, remembered that when the album was played at a sales meeting “the marketing guys were really disappointed,” because “it wasn’t the normal ‘Surfin’ U.S.A.’ ‘Help Me Rhonda,’ ‘Barbara Ann,’ kind of production.”⁴⁸ Capitol bought full-page advertisements in Billboard and made radio spots for the album, which, in Jan Butler’s reading, “gave no indication of the new sound.”⁴⁹ In America the album peaked below all three of the band’s previous albums, Today!, Summer Days and Beach Boys’ Party! (1965). About two months after its release Capitol issued Best of the Beach Boys, a collection of the older hits, which climbed higher and was certified gold in April 1967; Pet Sounds was not certified gold until 2000, when Rolling Stone reported that Capitol had been unable to find its early shipping records.⁵⁰ Whether Capitol undercut the album is disputed. Tom Smucker, writing for the Library of Congress, names the Best of as the means. Peter Doggett calls the idea that Capitol sabotaged it a pop myth and writes that Capitol promoted the album “just as heavily as any of their previous releases.”⁵¹

EMI released the album in Britain at the end of June and advertised it in Disc and Music Echo and Melody Maker as “THE MOST PROGRESSIVE POP ALBUM EVER!”⁵² Derek Taylor, the Beatles’ former press officer, was the band’s publicist that year, and he later claimed the line “Brian Wilson is a genius” as his own.⁵³ In Britain the album stayed in the top ten from July 1966 into January 1967; in America it had left the top twenty in mid-September.⁵⁴

Reception

The American trade papers were favorable. Billboard’s Pop Spotlight called it an “exciting, well-produced LP” and picked “Wouldn’t It Be Nice” as a likely single, and a Cash Box column the same week called it “a philosophical and musically inspired work of art.”⁵⁵ American rock criticism had begun only that February, with Crawdaddy!, and in September Paul Williams praised the album as the band’s best in a news item in its fifth issue.⁵⁶

Norman Jopling reviewed it track by track in Record Mirror in July. He began by calling it the most widely heralded pop LP in some time, then found every track “terribly complicated and cluttered up with vocals and backings galore” and doubted the album would win the band any new fans.⁵⁷

Legacy

Stephen Davis, reviewing it for Rolling Stone in 1972, called it a “trenchant cycle of love songs” with “the emotional impact of a shatteringly evocative novel.”⁵⁸ The NME’s writers had placed it third among all albums in 1974, and in 1993 they and The Times each put it first.⁵⁹ It was first issued on compact disc in 1990, and in 1997 Capitol issued The Pet Sounds Sessions, a four-disc box with the album’s first stereo mix, the tracking sessions, and the vocals alone.⁶⁰

Among American record makers, Lenny Waronker, then of DreamWorks and formerly president of Warner Bros. Records, said in 1996: “Creative record-making took a giant step, and it affected everybody who was caught up in it. It was a landmark record.”⁶¹ In the 1990s Robert Schneider and Jim McIntyre named their home studio Pet Sounds Studio, and records by the Apples in Stereo, the Olivia Tremor Control and Neutral Milk Hotel were made there.⁶²

The album entered the Grammy Hall of Fame in 1998 and the Library of Congress’s National Recording Registry in 2004.⁶³ Wilson first performed it live in full in 2000, on a summer tour with symphony orchestras.⁶⁴

Further reading

• Philip Lambert, ed., Good Vibrations: Brian Wilson and the Beach Boys in Critical Perspective (University of Michigan Press, 2016) — open access; Harrison, Lambert, O’Regan and Starr on the music
• Daniel Harrison, “After Sundown: The Beach Boys’ Experimental Music,” in Understanding Rock (Oxford University Press, 1997) — a musicological study of the album and the records around it
• The Pet Sounds Sessions booklet (Capitol, 1997), transcribed at albumlinernotes.com — the participants’ own accounts, including Asher’s and Wilson’s
• The Beach Boys: A Sessionography, Pet Sounds — track pages built from the session tapes

See also

• “Be My Baby” (1963) — the Spector single Wilson said he studied to learn how records were made
• Presenting the Fabulous Ronettes Featuring Veronica (1964) — Spector’s method on an album, with many of the same players
• The Beach Boys Today! (1965) — the earlier Beach Boys album whose second side set the mood
• Rubber Soul (1965) — the album that set Wilson off
• Revolver (1966) — the Beatles album being recorded when Johnston played them Pet Sounds
• Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967) — the album George Martin called an attempt to equal it
• The Smile Sessions (2011) — Wilson’s next project, begun from “Good Vibrations”
• The Wrecking Crew — the session players on the record
• The transatlantic feedback loop — the exchange between American and British records that this album belongs to
• The songwriter-performer divide — a record made by one member with hired players and sung by the band