Ed Masley

The Republic | azcentral.com

Much has been made of the Beach Boys’ initial reaction to the music Brian Wilson had been working on in early 1966 when they came back from touring the hits in Japan and Hawaii.

Building on the more sophisticated writing style he'd mastered on the second side of 1965's "Today!," Wilson was well on his way to creating a masterpiece of richly textured orchestration and bittersweet melodic sensibilities now widely held to be among the greatest albums in the history of Western music.

“Pet Sounds” was a bold departure from the formula that made the Beach Boys famous, to be sure. And Wilson’s bandmates — Mike Love in particular — are said to have reacted badly.

In “Catch a Wave: The Rise, Fall, and Redemption of the Beach Boys' Brian Wilson,” Tony Asher, who wrote the lyrics to most of the songs on the album, is quoted as saying, “All those guys in the band, certainly Al (Jardine), Dennis (Wilson) and Mike, were constantly saying, 'What the f--k do these words mean?' or 'This isn't our kind of s--t!'”

Love, Wilson’s cousin, is said to have found the lyrics "nauseating," declaring the album "Brian's ego music," and urging Wilson not to "f--k with the formula."

"I never said that."

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Love has a book of his own coming out in September, “Good Vibrations: My Life as a Beach Boy” — written in part, he explains, to address “all the misconceptions or outright fallacies and inaccuracies” that tend to cast him as the villain in the Beach Boys’ saga.

“A lot of things have been attributed to me,” Love says. “For instance, with regard to the ‘Pet Sounds’ album, I said, ‘Don’t f--k with the formula.’ I never said that. In fact, I worked very hard on the ‘Pet Sounds’ album. I named the album, went with Brian to present it to Capitol Records. It was Capitol that had the problem.”

But that’s not how Wilson remembers it.

“They didn’t like it,” he says of his bandmates’ reaction. “They thought it wasn’t very commercial. And my company, Capitol Records, didn’t like it either. But about a month later, they all decided they liked it. So on May 16th, they released it.”

Question: I interviewed Mike and he says those stories about him reacting badly to the album aren’t necessarily true. You do recall him reacting badly?

Wilson: Not badly as much as he didn’t like it that much.

Q: But he did come around on it?

Wilson: Yeah.

Q: What was the label’s problem with it?

Wilson: They didn’t think it was commercial.

Q: Did you think it was commercial?

Wilson: No. It wasn’t a commercial album. But you know, it was something different.

Q: “Wouldn’t It Be Nice” sounds like a hit.

Wilson: It does. It could be a hit record.

Al Jardine has his own fairly vivid recollection of the moment he got his first taste of where Wilson was headed on “Pet Sounds.”

“We were standing in the control room,” he says. “We came in the day after we got back from Japan, which was, needless to say, a pretty long trip. But he wanted to get us in the studio so we could start singing. And it was quite a big deal because we had never been involved with music of that kind, so it took us a while to adjust to the new realities. But we dug in. We dug our heels in. It was quite a challenge. But after about three or four months, we got it down pretty well.”

According to “The Beach Boys: The Definitive Diary of America’s Greatest Band on Stage and in the Studio,” the last date of the Beach Boys Far East Tour was Jan. 29 in Honolulu. They took a break before returning to the studio on Feb. 9.

Is there any truth to the story of you guys not liking the album when he brought you in that day?

Jardine: Well, remember, we were having jet lag. You know what that is? Getting off a gigantic flight from Japan after being on the road for a month? You probably wouldn’t like Tchaikovsky if you heard “The Nutcracker Suite” for the first time after that. Who doesn’t like “The Nutcracker Suite?” That’s my point. That we were pretty tired. So we had a lot of adjusting to do, physically, mentally, emotionally, musically. Brian was anxious to get started and we were exhausted.

And some of the lyrics were a little esoteric, so Mike wanted to rearrange a couple lyrics. That’s only understandable. Brian had the luxury of not having to tour. He was able to stay home and write and explore his musical fantasies. And we’re out there plugging the hits. So it takes a little give and take. But we all synced in pretty well, I thought, and got it done. Michael was not involved in the writing aspect. None of us were really, other than myself with "Sloop John B" and Mike with "Hang On to Your Ego." He changed that to "I Know There’s an Answer." Other than that, it was pretty much a science experiment for Brian.

Love says his problem with Asher’s original lyrics to the song he retitled “I Know There’s an Answer” is they felt a bit too drug-related and he didn't like how those drugs were affecting his cousin.

“He was brilliant in the studio,” he says of Wilson. “There’s no taking that away from him. But there were people who were giving him things like LSD. Some of the hipsters around him were saying ‘Oh, this is the messiah.’ He did a song called ‘Hang On to Your Ego,’ which I said, ‘That’s a little too much acid alliteration.’ I said ‘I know there’s an answer.’ And I came up with a set of lyrics for that. Same song, same music but ‘I Know There’s an Answer’ rather than ‘Hang On to Your Ego’ because they’re talking about what LSD did to your ego.”

The people surrounding his cousin were treating him to “things that didn’t work out for him,” Love continues. “He’s even said in his own words, how the drugs he took really did him in.”

The making of a masterpiece or: ‘Where’s the single?’

The creation of “Pet Sounds” was fostered in part by an unusual arrangement that allowed for Wilson to stay behind and work on music while his bandmates continued to tour. He’d retired from touring after suffering a nervous breakdown on a flight to Houston in 1964, the year "I Get Around" became their first chart-topping hit.

“I thought it was great,” Love says of the arrangement. “It was a drag to see Brian leave the road because, you know, he’s Brian Wilson. He plays bass and sounds beautiful on the high part. But a high part, if you’ve got the right guy, can be replicated. If he’s gonna be unhappy on the road, why would you want him to be unhappy? Plus, his calling was to go into the studio and work with the musicians and do these great tracks, so it worked out to everyone’s benefit. We were out there performing and going to radio stations and bringing attention to the Beach Boys town by town, and Brian was in the studio.”

The “Pet Sounds” sessions ran from mid-July, 1965 to April, 1966, Wilson cutting the tracks with the Wrecking Crew, the L.A.-based session musicians who worked with producer Phil Spector, and adding his bandmates’ vocals as touring allowed. Other notable recordings made in that same stretch of time were “The Little Girl I Once Knew,” which somehow stalled at No. 20, and an album titled “Beach Boys’ Party.”

“Capitol wanted another album,” Love recalls. “And I came up with the idea, ‘Hey, let’s do a party album.’ So we did a bunch of tracks and called our friends and girlfriends in and sang live to the tracks. And we came up with ‘Barbara Ann.’ We weren’t even thinking of that as a single.”

A spirited cover of a doo-wop song that had already charted for the Regents, “Barbara Ann” hit No. 2 in January, 1966. A few months later, they submitted “Pet Sounds.” And the label didn’t hear a “Barbara Ann.”

As Jardine sees it, “It was an album that wasn’t made for these times, to quote the famous lyric. And they didn’t get it. So they released a best-of album on top of it and about five weeks later it was gone. Off the chart. Although it did get into the Top 10, so I don’t quite understand why they wouldn’t continue to promote it. But it didn’t have the kind of response they wanted. So they basically put it on the back burner and that was that – until about 30 years later when new generations of fans started appreciating it. And now we have our 50th.”

To honor that occasion, Capitol Records will release a 50th Anniversary Edition of “Pet Sounds” on Friday, June 10, in several configurations. There’s a remastered 180-gram vinyl edition in stereo and mono, a collectors’ edition that features four CDs and Blu-Ray DVD audio, and a two-CD deluxe edition. In short, it’s receiving the attention “Pet Sounds” could have used in 1966.

Released in advance of the album, their iconic reinvention of the folk song “Sloop John B” hit No. 3 on Billboard’s Hot 100. A second single, “Wouldn’t it Be Nice,” hit No. 8.

But Jardine says he understands what Capitol was thinking, refusing to acknowledge “Wouldn’t It Be Nice” as sounding like a hit.

“It was way out or our milieu at the time,” he says. “It was a totally different kind of music, a different kind of production value. Ultimately, it became a great stage tune. Of course, we’re all used to it now because it’s 50 years later, but at the time, it didn’t have the same impact as an ‘I Get Around’ or ‘California Girls,’ those epic singles.”

Jardine points to “Endless Summer,” a compilation of their early hits that came out in the ’70s.

“That’s true commercial power,” Jardine says.

And “Pet Sounds”?

“This is more aesthetic power. It takes a while for the aesthetics to sink in and once they do, they get ahold of you emotionally and then you really love it. But it took a while for that to happen.”

Jardine says they could have had it both ways if Wilson had listened to him and added “Good Vibrations” to the track list, even though the song was nowhere near completion by the time Wilson mastered the album.

And even if it had been finished, “Good Vibrations” was more of a piece with the modular approach to composition Wilson pioneered on “Smile,” the “Pet Sounds” followup he envisioned as a “teenage symphony to God.” When the creative process proved too daunting, the master tapes to Wilson's most ambitious work were shelved in 1967 and the Beach Boys soldiered on, their leader clearly broken by the whole experience.

So did you think the album would do well?

Jardine: It doesn’t matter what I think. But that album was always a work in progress, even when it was finished. I would prefer to have had ‘Good Vibrations’ on there. Then I could give you a different answer. It was clearly meant to be and then it didn’t happen. It would have had different results. That was the biggest psychedelic hit of that whole era. It was positioned perfectly. He just didn’t think it was finished yet, maybe.”

Completed four months after “Pet Sounds” hit the streets and released in October, “Good Vibrations” would become the Beach Boys’ biggest hit and for obvious reasons. It’s the perfect marriage of Wilson’s artistic ambition and the pop sensibilities that made those early singles so successful, pushing the envelope with a singalong chorus.

Were you concerned at the time that Beach Boys fans might not be ready for what you were doing on “Pet Sounds”?

Wilson: I don’t know. It seems like they might not have been. But now, 50 years later, they love it when we do it on stage.

It seems to be one of those albums that becomes more popular and more respected over time.

Wilson: Right. Yeah. Well, people like it, you know? It’s got a lot of good harmony.

That was the goal going into the sessions, Wilson says, “to make an album that people would like the harmonies, the melodies and the lyrics.”

I know you’ve said the Beatles ‘Rubber Soul’ inspired you as you were going in to make the record. What was it about that album in particular?

Wilson: Well, I like that it sounded like a collection of great folk songs. I like “Michelle” and “I’m Looking Through You.” They inspired me very much.

And yet your album doesn’t sound a thing like “Rubber Soul.”

Wilson: No, no, no. It didn’t sound like it.

It’s not like you were out to imitate the Beatles.

Wilson: Right.

Do you feel like you were maybe heading in that direction a bit on the second side of “Today”?

Wilson: Yeah. I wanted to head to a happy direction that had a lot of harmonies.

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The Beach Boys Today

Wilson and his touring band, which now includes Jardine (but not Love), will stage a sold-out performance of “Pet Sounds” at the Celebrity Theatre in July. The shows on this tour have been billed as the final performances of “Pet Sounds,” although Wilson may have changed his tune a bit.

“It may not be the last one,” Wilson tells me. “We don’t know yet.”

It’s a “great feeling,” he says, to play the album live in its entirety. “My band members reproduce it on stage exactly like the album.”

Wilson first toured “Pet Sounds” in the summer of 2000, earning rave reviews. In late 2003, he got it in his head to do the same for "Smile" and called in Parks to finish what they'd started. That resulted in a live performance of the newly sequenced “Smile” at London's Royal Albert Hall, which led to Wilson re-recording all the parts from scratch with members of his touring band, releasing the results as "Brian Wilson Presents Smile,” among the more acclaimed releases of 2004.

In mid-2010, the original recordings Wilson shelved in 1967 were dusted off and pieced together for the first official release of the frequently bootlegged “Smile” as the Beach Boys recorded it, using Wilson’s solo version as a road map. Released in 2011, “The Smile Sessions” took home a well-deserved Grammy -- Best Historical Recording.

A year later, the surviving members of the classic Beach Boys lineup set aside their many differences for a 50th Anniversary Tour, which was great, and an album called “That’s Why God Made the Radio.” Wilson’s brother Dennis, the only Beach Boy who actually surfed, had died in 1983, when the drummer dove off a slip at Marina Del Rey after drinking all day. His other brother, Carl, was diagnosed in 1997 with brain and lung cancer. A Beach Boy to the end, he spent his final summer on the road, requiring oxygen between songs, and died in February 1998.

How did it feel to work with the Beach Boys again on the 50th anniversary tour and that new album?

Wilson: Oh, it was a great thrill. I was very happy. It was probably the greatest tour I ever took in 50 years. The greatest tour I ever took.

Would you do it again?

Wilson: I would if I could. Yeah.

Endless Summer of Love

In the meantime, Love is still touring the hits at the helm of his latest collection of Beach Boys, including Bruce Johnston, who joined the touring band in 1965. Last year they did more than 170 concerts, from Australia to the Royal Albert Hall – despite the fact that many of the Beach Boys’ most devoted fans can’t stand the sight of him.

In many ways, that hatred is what drives him. It certainly drove the writing of his memoir.

“I’m doing it for my family, really,” Love explains, “and for my legacy because my children and my grandchildren, they all have to put up with wondering ‘Was my dad or my grandfather really that much of a bad guy?’ I know what I did and what I didn’t do.”

Love says one reason for those many misconceptions over what he did or did not do were the “people surrounding us back in the ‘60s.” At one point, he says, they were touring in two separate planes – a smokers’ jet, which “wasn’t only necessarily cigarettes,” and a non-smokers’ jet.

“The non-smokers’ jet was myself and Alan Jardine, Bruce Johnston and a couple other band members, living a little bit more of I would call it a healthy lifestyle,” Love recalls. “So there’s another reason for somebody to be looked at as not hip, not happening. If we’re not participating and getting high with everybody else, then we become the squares and they’re the hipsters.”

READ MORE:Check out more from music critic Ed Masley

What was your initial reaction when Brian played you the material that he’d been working on? If it’s not that negative response that’s been attributed to you, what was it?

Love: How could you be negative about a track like “Sloop John B,” “Wouldn’t It Be Nice,” “God Only Knows,” “Caroline, No?” Any of those songs on “Pet Sounds?” How could you possibly, if you were a musician, be anti-any-of-that? I didn’t write the preponderance of the words on the album. I contribute to a few but Tony Asher did a fantastic job, I thought. Where I didn’t like the lyrics so much was Van Dyke Parks doing the “Smile” album. That’s where I came up with the term “acid alliteration.” His lyrics are brilliant in a way that Lewis Carroll’s words are brilliant. It’s completely nonsensical but it’s a trippy nonsensical.

You can appreciate it from that standpoint. But guess what? Rock and Roll. Top 40. If you’re not successful, labels drop you like a hot potato. So in the interest of survival of the fittest, let’s marry art and commerce together. We can be experimental like “Pet Sounds.” We can be avant-garde and go out on a musical limb, and that’s beautiful.

“Good Vibrations,” I did the hook of “I’m pickin’ up good vibrations / She’s givin’ me excitations,” the music and lyrics. The next song was “Heroes and Villains” and that was Van Dyke Parks and Brian. I admit to being commercial-minded. Van Dyke Parks did a brilliant job but a different kind of brilliant – the kind that doesn’t bring you financial success. It’s a bit esoteric. That’s my personal opinion. And people will hate Mike Love for even saying that, but you know, I’m kind of used to it.

The people who will hate Mike Love for saying that will hate Mike Love regardless, right?

Love: Exactly (his tone noticeably brighter). Exactly.

In talking to Love, it’s clear that he’s been saddled with two qualities that guarantee a steady stream of fodder for the people who will hate Mike Love for even saying that – an unrelenting persecution complex and no filters whatsoever.

He can’t even just take credit for the naming of his cousin's finest hour without throwing in a passing reference to some other thing he did that makes him matter more than the legion of detractors he’s inspired would care to admit. "I was in the hallway outside the studio where I wrote the words to 'California Girls' the year before,” he says, “when they played the whole album through. The last thing was the train and the dogs barking and I said, 'Well, what about calling it “Pet Sounds?”'"

When the conversation turns to “Good Vibrations,” he can’t stop at taking credit for the chorus hook. He has to say it was “the total highpoint musically, only surpassed by ‘Kokomo’ (a song he co-wrote with no help from Wilson) 22 short years later.”

He’s vindictive, petty, deeply flawed and altogether human. But he loves his cousin and his band, which does not mean he will not sue them over writing credits if he feels it’s come to that.

“My Uncle Murry (Wilson) had it out for me,” he says. “And my cousin Brian, for whatever reason, didn’t rectify the situation. So I was left with the only avenue I had to establish my authorship, which was to go to court to prove it. Which we did. And it was not a fun thing. I grew up with my cousin Brian and had the greatest time with him. We had the greatest friendship. We both loved music and did these things together. Then he got off into some stuff that as his first cousin and friend, it was hard for me to see happen to him.”

And so, he just keeps doing what he knows, 170-odd nights a year. He goes on stage and leads his latest version of the Beach Boys in crowd-pleasing versions of “Fun, Fun, Fun,” “I Get Around” and “Surfin’ U.S.A.,” even “Heroes and Villains.”

Why?

It’s all there in the chorus of a song he ranks with “Kokomo” among the Beach Boys’ greatest triumphs.

“Gotta keep those lovin’ good vibrations a-happenin’.”