Brian wasn’t comfortable on the road, says The Beach Boys’ Mike Love as he marks 60 years of Pet Sounds with Al Jardine
IN the weeks before we lost The Beach Boys’ Brian Wilson on June 11 last year, he had two special visitors.
They were the group’s surviving founder members, his first cousin Mike Love, and his best friend from college, Al Jardine.
It was their chance to say goodbye to the man who, above anyone, brought “good vibrations” to the world and created their 1966 magnum opus Pet Sounds.
First to venture up the drive at Brian’s Beverly Hills mansion for one last time was Jardine.
“I last saw him at the very end,” he says. “I came up to the house and he just pointed at me.
“He said, ‘You started the band’, and I went, ‘Wait, come on, Brian, I’m sure you had a little something to do with it!’
“He was very direct at times — he could be very unfiltered — but I think our friendship meant a lot to him.
“He was always my best friend, right from when we started out.”
Despite Brian’s well-documented struggles with mental health, Jardine insists that his old buddy never lost his passion for music.
“His reputation remains solid,” he adds, before supplying an answer to his own question: “What’s the term? Legend.
“His work will be appreciated for centuries to come. He had his own style. Just listen to his arrangements and his chord changes — they’re just so unusual.
“His brother Dennis actually said it first, ‘Brian is The Beach Boys’. He created our sound and, as Mike Love would say, he heard things we couldn’t hear.”
Of his last visit to Brian, Love says: “A couple of weeks before he passed away, I was able to go and see him.
“We had a great time. We sang together, actually, which was a lot of fun.”
Love leads the latest incarnation of The Beach Boys, keeping their songs alive in concert, including Pet Sounds classics God Only Knows, Wouldn’t It Be Nice and Sloop John B.
“Brian’s still with us every night in that music,” he affirms
If Brian, younger brothers Carl and Dennis, Mike and Al started out by singing about surfing, girls and open-top cars in the California sun, it was the elder Wilson sibling who took things to the next level with Pet Sounds.
A themed song cycle employing pioneering production techniques, sublime harmonies, divine melodies and darker, soul-searching lyrics, it is regarded as Brian’s masterpiece.
He had been impressed with The Beatles’ sonic adventures on Rubber Soul — now he was pushing The Beach Boys to raise the bar higher, in turn inspiring their chart rivals to make Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.
Paul McCartney maintains that God Only Knows is his favourite song and that Pet Sounds is among his top three albums.
He once enthused: “The musical invention on that is, like, ‘Wow!’
“I just thought, ‘Oh dear me, this is THE album of all time, what the hell are we gonna do?’”
To mark its 60th anniversary, The Pet Sounds Sessions — including demos, alternate takes and outtakes — are receiving digital, CD and vinyl editions. They feature a host of a cappella tracks shining the spotlight on the breathtaking harmonies.
Which is why I’m speaking to Brian’s bandmates via video calls that seem entirely appropriate for singers who epitomise California’s sunny beach vibes.
As we’re connected, Love, 85, reports that he’s “driving down the Pacific Coast Highway outside of Malibu”.
In a separate call, Jardine, 83, is sitting in his solarium under clear blue skies in Monterey, gateway to the rugged Big Sur coastal region.
First, Love gives me insights into his Beach Boys journey, leading up to the groundbreaking Pet Sounds.
His mother Glee was the sister of Murry Wilson, father of Brian, Carl and Dennis, “so every holiday — Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year’s, Fourth of July — and birthday was celebrated with music.
“When Brian and I were teens, we’d get together and sing or listen to the radio, hearing groups like The Everly Brothers.”
When they formed The Beach Boys, the clean-cut image involving surfing, sun and girls was, he says, “environmental because we lived a few miles from the sea”.
Love continues: “We would often go to the beach for family outings. There, you’d find people who dressed a certain way, talked a certain way and had a certain attitude.
“They were the surfers who inspired our first song, Surfin’ [released in 1961].”
As to whether The Beach Boys joined the craze, he adds: “Dennis, Al and I had surfboards but we weren’t the greatest athletes. We appreciated it though, and we gave it a shot.
“I’m not sure Brian ever tried it. He could only hear out of one ear and didn’t have much balance. You need all the balance you can get when you’re surfing.”
Love recalls how he would “sit down at the piano with Brian while he figured out chord progressions, tempos and melodies.
“I felt it was up to me to come up with lyrics and sing lead on songs we were working on together such as Surfin’ USA, I Get Around and Fun Fun Fun.”
Jardine, who currently fronts The Pet Sounds Band of ace Brian Wilson associates, also casts his mind back to the early days but is interrupted by “actual pet sounds”.
“Hang on a second, we have a little dog outside and he’s barking — I gotta shut him up,” he reports.
When calm returns, I ask Jardine how he came to form a band with three brothers and their cousin in 1961.
He answers: “Well, Brian and I were classmates in high school but didn’t really know each other.
“We were on the football team — he was quarterback and I was full back. He would call the plays, either pitching the ball to me or somebody else.
“But we didn’t interact until we went to college. I’d heard him in concert and, in our second year, I bumped into him on campus and said, ‘We gotta start a band’.
“We walked over to the music room and started playing music for each other.
“I’d already been in a folk group and, when he heard me sing, he realised I had a gift.
“Then he said, ‘I’ve got my little brothers and my cousin, Mike. I’ll introduce you to them. I rented instruments from a local music store but we didn’t know how to express ourselves at first, so we just sang a cappella.
“Once we finally got around the piano, we were off and running.
“I soon realised that Brian was a fine-tuned instrument. He had a great voice, a great knack for composition and already had a duet thing going on with Mike.”
As for the surfer image, Jardine credits Dennis Wilson, the family rebel who played the drums. He says: “Dennis was a surfer and the rest of us were land lovers. He taught me how to surf but I sank like a stone.
“But surfing was the craze so we put lyrics to our first song and called it Surfin’.”
In 1964, Brian dropped the bombshell that he was stepping back from touring to concentrate on studio work.
Love provides this insight into his cousin’s state of mind: “Brian wasn’t comfortable on the road — he got nervous and unhappy. He missed home and he missed the studio.
“It was a drag to see him leave the live group but it was in his best interests.”
Afforded fewer distractions, Brian applied himself to Pet Sounds and, in tandem with it, the sophisticated sonic miracle Good Vibrations — a standalone hit deemed not a good fit for the album.
This period coincided with his experiments with LSD and marijuana.
He once stated that drugs helped him achieve a deeper level of creativity but later expressed regrets over the damage to his mental health.
Because of the complexity, Brian needed longer than usual to finish Pet Sounds so The Beach Boys released a stopgap party album, yielding one of their biggest hits, Barbara Ann.
Then, after a tour of Japan in January 1966, with Bruce Johnston taking Brian’s place, Carl, Dennis, Mike, Al and Bruce returned for the momentous sessions.
In their absence, Brian had employed lyricist Tony Asher and crack session musicians the Wrecking Crew, including, among many, Glen Campbell on guitar and banjo.
Love says: “The tracks Brian had done were completely amazing. Our main job was to finish them vocally and we worked very hard.”
One of the songs was God Only Knows, which he says was “sung so beautifully by my cousin Carl”.
“We lost him many years ago to lung cancer. For concerts these days, my son Christian sings lead.”
So what was Carl like? “He was our musical director on stage and the most proficient musician in the group,” replies Love.
Jardine adds: “Carl could knock it out of the park. He was right in the centre of our harmonies with Mike’s baritone below and me higher, with Brian higher still.”
And what about Dennis, who had a wild reputation and later befriended cult leader and killer Charles Manson?
Love says: “He lived a dangerous life because of the alcohol and drugs he got involved with. He died [from drowning] in 1983.”
Jardine adds: “Dennis was our Keith Moon. Oh boy, all he had to do was just stand up on stage and the crowd would go nuts.”
It was self-confessed folkie Jardine who brought Bahamian sea shanty Sloop John B to Brian. He says: “I was a Kingston Trio fan. They were big Capitol Records guys, same label as us, and they wore striped shirts.
“Learning all their songs was my musical training. When the time came to start The Beach Boys, I went out and bought striped shirts for us.
“Sloop John B was my idea. I said, ‘Brian, if we add one major and one minor chord, it’ll sound like us instead of The Kingston Trio’.
“He put it to good use. It became Pet Sounds’ lead single. Capitol always wanted a hit to sell an album.”
Recalling the sessions, Jardine says that Brian’s abilities had been “growing exponentially” while they’d been away.
“In spite of our jet lag, we were in the studio the day after we got home from Japan. We were extremely impressed with Brian’s arrangements.
“People forget that he was a masterful producer. He knew the language. He could go into a studio and the studio became an instrument for him.”
That said, it wasn’t all plain sailing, as Jardine explains: “Mike didn’t like the lyrics on some songs so he insisted on changing a couple around.
“He thought a song called Hang On To Your Ego was too sophisticated for our crowd so he changed it to I Know There’s An Answer.”
The story of Pet Sounds wouldn’t be complete without mention of the album title and cover shot of the boys among the goats at San Diego Zoo. Love says: “Brian didn’t know what to call the album.
“At the end [of final track Caroline, No], you hear a train going by and dogs are barking.
“Those were Brian and [first wife] Marilyn’s dogs. So I said, ‘Why don’t we call it Pet Sounds? It was a double entendre, of course — and it stuck.”
Jardine picks up the story of the photo shoot: “It was a total mystery to me.
“We had to drive to San Diego, which was 200 miles away. We had our own zoo in Los Angeles, for God’s sake!”
The resulting album cover has a quaint charm but it’s not exactly up there with Sgt Pepper’s iconic Peter Blake design.
Love smiles at the memory and says: “I was in India at the Maharishi’s place when Paul McCartney and I had a conversation one night.
“He was saying, ‘Mike, you ought to take more care with your album covers’.
“So I told him, ‘Paul, you’re absolutely right.
We should’.
“But we always felt that what went into the sleeve was more important than the cover itself.”
And speaking of goats, to many including Macca, Pet Sounds is the GOAT.