Apparently, on its release in 1966, Pet Sounds proved a bit jarring to most Beach Boys fans. They’d been accustomed to jangly, summery, Californian pop music like “Surfin’ USA”. Then Brian Wilson had a nervous breakdown from all the touring and rock’n’roll excess, and withdrew to the studio to conjure something altogether more complex and innovative. And thus was born half a century of platitudes about his ‘studio wizardry’, how he pushed the envelope by incorporating new instruments and new ways of recording that totally redefined popular music, etc. etc. All well and good. But speaking personally, I was born almost two decades after this record came out, and I heard it for the first time in 2023, so I couldn’t give a rat’s ass about Brian’s technical innovations. I came to Pet Sounds totally cold, and I judged it on its own merits, or tried to.
I have only the vaguest knowledge of the Beach Boys, their feel-good hits, and their status as American rivals to the Beatles. Actually, I’ve always kind of filed them away as good-natured half-wits singing pleasant pop songs about sun, sea, sand, and surf. And how I wrong I was, for Pet Sounds is a record about madness, alienation, and despair, more Ian Curtis than Lennon and Macartney. Around half the songs are about failed or damaging relationships with lyrics so candid, naïve and desperate that they could have been written by a 12-year-old – except for (or precisely because of) the profound darkness and turmoil that underpins them. Baby One More Time meets Black Celebration, basically.
Nowhere is this more apparent than on the album’s opener, “Wouldn’t it be Nice”. The lyrics are about how great it would be to have sex, except the sexual revolution hasn’t happened yet, so sex before marriage remains unthinkable. But beneath the song’s lush Californian jauntiness beats a dark heart. Even the first ten seconds are profoundly unsettling. The angelic harp chords, then the jarring drumbeat, and then the verse in a slightly different key – a barely detectable but significant discordance that immediately puts the listener on edge. The bridge is punctuated by an unexpectedly deep, sinister trombone. It’s a bizarre mixture of sun-kissed pop and something much darker, much more troubled. When the childlike sentiments of the lyrics are juxtaposed against this strange mixture of jangly, but occasionally raucous pop music, the overall impression is one of, well, creeping madness.
This combination of childlike lyrics and haunting, then suddenly cacophonous music defines Pet Sounds. Thematically, around 70% of the album comprises ostensibly bouncy but profoundly troubled relationship songs. “You Still Believe” has a strange, dreamlike, angelic quality which becomes suddenly, almost brutally manic toward the end, with Brian thanking his girlfriend for sticking with him, despite the fact that he is “not where I should be” (translation: batshit crazy). The ghostly organ and remarkable candor of the lyrics on “That’s Not Me” are intended to communicate Brian’s disillusionment with fame and his independent life in the city, his desire to return to the vanilla tranquility of the suburbs and that “just one girl”. “Don’t Talk” is a meditation on the importance of physical contact over mere words, while “Here Today” is about some femme fatale playing with Brian’s heart. It kicks off with chiming bells and sparse organ notes, before the ominous trombone and the familiar crashing, Gotterdammerung-esque chorus kick in. And then, of course, there’s the quite beautiful and heartbreaking “God Only Knows”, which glides by like a spring day, despite its worryingly codependent lyrics which hint at suicide in the face of abandonment.
This mixture of childlike lyrics about relationships, haunting organs and then sudden, crashing choruses is the template for most of Pet Sounds. Perhaps the maddest example is “I’m Waiting for the Day”, which tells the sad story of a guy in love with a girl who was recently dumped and is now rebounding, using (presumably) Brian to get over it. Once again, this lyrical formulation of the Oedipus complex is set to a discordant, unhinged soundtrack of jabbed organ notes and then sudden stormy drums and guitars. When, during the fadeout, Brian sings ominously about his inability to let the girl go without a fight, my primary concern is for the safety of the girl in question. Restraining orders have been issued for less.
Surely nobody finds any of these “love songs” even remotely romantic. To me, they’re deeply unsettling – the combination of childlike lyrics and eerie, and then suddenly cacophonous music freaks me the fuck out. But a few of the songs on Pet Sounds don’t quite fit this thematic template. These are consigned mainly to the album’s second half, which is where Brian’s palpable madness becomes more explicit and less refracted through gloopy love songs. “Sloop John B” is laugh out loud funny, though I’m not sure if it’s intended to be. It’s about a drunken sailing voyage, the narrator getting into fistfights, tangling with the sheriff – the worst trip Brian has ever been on – all set against the familiar, deceptively bouncy organs, bells, and that sinister trombone. “I Know There’s an Answer”, meanwhile, seems to be a chastisement of hippies, a thoroughly weird number which never actually elucidates the ‘answer’ alluded to in the song’s title. Does Brian know that there’s a way to deliver hippies from their malaise of inauthenticity, but he doesn’t know precisely what that way is? Your guess is as good as mine, but overall, it’s both amusing and unsettling, like the ravings of a messianic preacher on the subway.
The album’s closing songs – aside from the strange, fragile, instrumental title track – represent the catatonic stupor that customarily follows a psychotic fervor. “I Just Wasn’t Made for These Times” is very worrying. Long gone are the thundering choruses of previous tracks; the whole song remains in the same melancholy register. The album’s closer, “Caroline, No”, is also perturbingly lowkey, with Brian chastising Caroline for “losing that happy glow” and, it seems, cutting off her hair. The subdued sound of these two songs closes out Pet Sounds – except for a brief soundbite at the very end, a faint choral echo of the verses to “Wouldn’t It Be Nice”. This sends shivers down my spine; it sounds like the weary brain of a heavily medicated psychotic suddenly conjuring a ghostly memory of happier times, before the madness detonated and consigned him forever to his stupor.
From what I’ve read, Brian Wilson’s tendency toward depression was indeed escalating into psychosis during the recording of Pet Sounds. I’ve also come across the opinion that this album narrates an ‘age of innocence’ in the mid-60s which was shortly thereafter shattered by Vietnam and the Manson murders. If that’s so, then this ‘innocence’ was merely the outward manifestation of a profoundly disturbed society. This whole album is clearly the work of a mad scientist, and the degree of experimentation that Wilson engaged in is perhaps indicative of the kind of eccentricity that denotes incipient insanity. By the end he was apparently putting his piano in a box of sand. I’m not sure if that enhanced the quality of his recordings, but it’s certainly a nice metaphor for rock’n’roll induced eccentricity. And this is why Pet Sounds is one of the great, dark, maniacal albums of rock history – more In Utero, The Downward Spiral or Unknown Pleasures than Revolver.
* * * *
Highlights: “Sloop John B”, “God Only Knows”, “I Just Wasn’t Made For These Times”