Pet Sounds is the eleventh studio album by the American rock band The Beach Boys, released May 16, 1966, on Capitol Records. It has been widely ranked as one of the most influential records ever released in western pop music and has been ranked at number #1 in several music magazines' lists of greatest albums of all time, including New Musical Express , The Times and Mojo Magazine. In 2003, it was ranked #2 in Rolling Stone' s 500 Greatest Albums of All Time list.
Pet Sounds was created several months after Brian Wilson had quit touring with the band in order to focus his attention on writing and recording. In it, he wove elaborate layers of vocal harmonies, coupled with sound effects and unconventional instruments such as bicycle bells, buzzing organs, harpsichords, flutes, the Electro-Theremin, and dog whistles, along with the more usual keyboards and guitars.
Background
The track "Sloop John B" predated the recording of the rest of the LP by some months, but it proved to be a pivotal point in the album's development. It was a traditional Caribbean folk song that had been suggested to Wilson by group member Al Jardine. Wilson recorded a backing track on July 12, 1965, but after laying down a rough lead vocal, he set the song aside for some time, concentrating on the recording of what became their next LP, the 'live in the studio' album Beach Boys' Party! .
The real catalyst for Pet Sounds was the U.S. version of The Beatles' new LP Rubber Soul , which was released in December 1965. Wilson later recalled his first impressions of the groundbreaking album:
In early January 1966 Wilson contacted Tony Asher, a young lyricist and copywriter who had been working on advertising jingles, and whom Wilson had met in a Hollywood recording studio months earlier. Within ten days they were writing together. Wilson played him some of the music he had been recording, and gave him a cassette of the finished backing track for a piece with the working title "In My Childhood"; it had lyrics, but Wilson refused to show them to Asher, who took the music away and wrote new lyrics. The result was eventually retitled "You Still Believe in Me" and the success of the piece convinced Wilson that Tony Asher was the collaborator he was looking for.
"The general tenor of the lyrics was always his," Asher later recalled, "and the actual choice of words was usually mine. I was really just his interpreter."
Writing and composition
Most of the songs on the album were written during December 1965 and January 1966. While most were composed with Tony Asher, "I Know There's an Answer" was co-written by another new associate, Terry Sachen.
Mike Love is co-credited on the album's opening track, "Wouldn't It Be Nice", and on "I Know There's an Answer" but with the exception of his co-credit on "I'm Waiting for the Day,"(originally copyrighted in February 1964, to Wilson alone) his contributions are thought to have been minimal. The exact degree of Love's contribution to "Wouldn't It Be Nice" is still hazy, but under oath in a court of law, Tony Asher has stated that it consisted of the tag "Good night my baby/Sleep tight, my baby."
Love, in addition to Dennis Wilson and Al Jardine, was taken aback by Brian's new sound (and Asher's lyrics) when they returned from touring the Far East to record their vocals. Love in particular was nonplussed by Brian's complete abandonment of the "fast cars, cute girls, and sunny beaches" formula that had marked the group's hit-making career up to that point.
Love's main influence on "I Know There's an Answer" is reputed to have consisted of his strenuous opposition to the song's original title, "Hang On to Your Ego", and his insistence that it be partially rewritten and retitled. The original lyrics created quite a stir within the group. "I was aware that Brian was beginning to experiment with LSD and other psychedelics," explained Love. "The prevailing drug jargon at the time had it that doses of LSD would shatter your ego, as if that were a positive thing... I wasn't interested in taking acid or getting rid of my ego." Jardine recalled that the decision to change the lyrics was ultimately Wilson's. "Brian was very concerned. He wanted to know what we thought about it. To be honest, I don't think we even knew what an ego was... Finally Brian decided, 'Forget it. I'm changing the lyrics. There's too much controversy.'" Terry Sachen, who co-wrote the revised lyrics to this song, was the Beach Boys' road manager in 1966.
The album included two sophisticated instrumental tracks, the wistful "Let's Go Away for Awhile" — with a working parenthetical title of "And Then We'll have World Peace" — and the brittle brassy surf of the title track, "Pet Sounds" (originally "Run James, Run", the suggestion being that it would be offered for use in a James Bond movie). The subtitle of "Let's Go Away For A While" was a catchphrase from one of Wilson's favorite comedy recordings, John Brent and Del Close's How To Speak Hip (1959) (which Wilson can be heard talking about in a session outtake included on the Pet Sounds boxed set). Both titles had been recorded as backing tracks for existing songs, but by the time the album neared completion Wilson had decided that the tracks worked better without vocals and so left them as such. A third instrumental, called "Trombone Dixie," had been fully recorded, but it remained in the vaults until its inclusion on the album's 1990 remastered CD release.
Recording process
With writing well under way, Wilson worked rapidly through January and early February 1966, recording six backing tracks for the new material. When the other Beach Boys returned from a three-week tour of Japan and Hawaii, they were presented with a substantial portion of a new album, with music that was in many ways a radical departure from their earlier attempts. Both Asher and Wilson state that there was resistance to the project from within the group, but on this occasion, Wilson's belief in his new work convinced the other members of the group.
All the backing tracks for Pet Sounds were recorded over a four-month period, using major Los Angeles studios (Gold Star Studios, United Western Recorders and Sunset Sound) and an ensemble that included some highly regarded session musicians, including jazz guitarist Barney Kessel, bassist Carol Kaye, and session drummer Hal Blaine. All tracks were produced and arranged by Brian Wilson. He also wrote or co-wrote every track except "Sloop John B."
Wilson had developed his production methods over several years, bringing them to their zenith with the recording of Pet Sounds during late 1965 and early 1966. Wilson's approach was in some respects a refinement and development of the famous "Wall of Sound" technique created by his mentor and rival Phil Spector. In fact Wilson has stated that he named the album using Spector's initials. With new Ampex 8-track recorders, Wilson produced tracks of great complexity using his regular team of 'first call' players, sometimes known collectively as "The Wrecking Crew".
Audio samples of Pet SoundsWilson's typical production method on Pet Sounds was to record the instrumental backing tracks for each song as a live ensemble performance direct onto a 4-track recorder. His engineer Larry Levine has reported that Wilson also typically mixed these backing tracks live, as they were being taped. Like Spector, Wilson was a pioneer of the 'studio as instrument' concept, exploiting novel combinations of sounds that sprang from the use of multiple electric instruments and voices in an ensemble and combining them with echo and reverberation. He often doubled bass, guitar and keyboard parts, blending them with reverberation and adding other unusual instruments. The deceptive simplicity of Brian's music often veiled the fact that his arrangements were among the most musically adventurous and complex in pop music.
Although the self-taught Wilson often had entire arrangements worked out in his head (which were usually written in a shorthand form for the other players by one of his session musicians), surviving tapes of his recording sessions show that he was remarkably open to input from his musicians, often taking advice and suggestions from them and even incorporating apparent 'mistakes' if they provided a useful or interesting alternative.
In spite of the availability of complex multitrack recording, Wilson always mixed the final version of his recordings in mono, as did Phil Spector. He did this for several reasons; one of which was that he felt that mono mastering provided more sonic control over the final result that the listener heard, regardless of the vagaries of speaker placement and sound system quality. It was also motivated by the knowledge that, back then, radio and TV were broadcast in mono, and most domestic and automotive radios and record players were monophonic. Another and more personal reason for Wilson's preference of recording in mono was due to his being almost totally deaf in his right ear, rumored to be the result of childhood injury to his eardrum caused by a blow from his violent father Murry Wilson, although Wilson has claimed that he was born deaf in one ear.
These backing tracks were then dubbed down onto one track of an 8-track recorder (at Columbia studio, the only facility in LA with an 8-track), and, although much of the fine detail in the arrangements was often covered by the group's rich vocal harmonies, they interacted effectively with the vocal tracks. This mono recording meant that a stereo mixdown could not be achieved.
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