If you haven’t heard this story, and even if you have, let’s take a moment to rediscover the time The Beach Boys visited the San Diego Zoo for the “Pet Sounds” cover shoot. A Twitter account and website dedicated to sharing news and facts about The Beach Boys reminded the internet and us that Tuesday was the anniversary of The San Diego Union-Tribune publishing a story about the wild visit on Feb. 13, 1966.

How wild?

The band was banned. A zoo official said, “The Beach Boys are not welcome back and never will be.”

Here’s the rundown on what happened.

Union-Tribune columnist Frank Rhoades talked to zoo officials shortly after the Beach Boys’ trip to San Diego and they told him the animals were “about to crack up.” The band posed with several different animals — reportedly as an attempt to throw some shade at rival band The Animals — and ultimately landed on the cover of what would turn into one of the most famous records of all time, surrounded by goats.

The details:

One band member bounced a carrot off the head of a tiger.

Another band member tried to stick the head of an antelope through some iron bars.

They carried around puppies and baby chicks and would set them down in the open and walk away.

The zoo’s superintendent at the time, John Muth, said the Beach Boys were banned forever from returning to the zoo.

Here’s the full column from Rhoades.

The San Diego Union-Tribune

Yikes. The Union-Tribune’s own music critic talked to The Beach Boys in 2016 about the album shoot, which took place in the children’s petting zoo and has existed as a landmark for all to visit for decades. (That will soon change. A new $69 million children’s zoo has been announced to replace the piece of Beach Boys history.)

For their part, the band has long contended that the shoot wasn’t fun for them either.

“The goats were horrible,” Bruce Johnston said several decades after the photo shoot. “They (would) jump all over you and bite. One of them ate my radio. The zoo said we were torturing the animals, but they should have seen what we had to go through. We were doing all the suffering.”

Brian Wilson says he’s never been back to the zoo.

Check out a collection of more photos from the Beach Boys’ time at the zoo on their website here.

Email: abby.hamblin@sduniontribune.com

Twitter: @abbyhamblin

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