Well, back in time with just a rhythm and rhyme
Gregorian chants were a real big thing
They took that chant and added harmony
It was a different sound
But had the same meaning
I know it took us a long while
To go and find us a rock style
I know that we can take it one more mile
—“That Same Song”
Many days I have the same routine. I wake up. I come downstairs to sit in my chair. I watch my family move around in the house. Some days I find my way back up to the piano. This house where I live now has a separate music room, though it’s upstairs rather than downstairs like in Illinois. In the house where I lived just before this one, the piano was right out in the middle of the living room. This way is better. I have a little more privacy. Everyone else in the house can hear that I’m playing, but they aren’t right there watching me. Sometimes after I figure out a melody, I’ll bring it to Melinda. She’ll tell me if she likes it, and she’ll also tell me if she’s not sure she likes it.
Those melodies I’m working with sometimes stick around for a while and become songs. Even if I have a title or some lyrics, I like to bring them to a collaborator to finish. But that first part of the process, the part where I’m at the piano just playing and listening to what I’m playing—that’s the way I discover new songs. What is a song, exactly? It’s something that starts as an idea and becomes more than that. It becomes physical and emotional and spiritual. It comes out into the world. It can soothe you when you’re feeling at your worst. It can make you happy when you’re sad.
But if you spend your life trying to find songs, you realize pretty quickly that you’re not the first. People have been doing that as long as there have been people. And if there are periods in your life when you stop doing it—because something distracts you or makes you weak—you realize how important it is to jump right back into the game. Songs are out there all the time, but they can’t be made without people. You have to do your job and help songs come into existence.
My experience making Imagination with Joe Thomas wasn’t perfect. I wasn’t sure about some of the things he did on that record. Sometimes when I listened to it, I heard more of him on it than I heard of me. That was strange because it was my name on the cover. So why wasn’t I hearing myself in the music? I felt the way I had when I came in and the string overdubs were happening without me. I felt like my control was being taken from me.
But the album was a great experience in other ways. It got me making music again. It got me back on the road. And in the summer of 2000, I released a live album of the Imagination tour. I recorded it at the Roxy in West Hollywood with my new band. The Roxy was a great place with lots of history. Lou Adler opened it back in the ’70s. I knew Lou from the old days. He managed Jan and Dean and produced Tapestry with Carole King, which is one of the great records of all time. The Roxy concert was an amazing experience all around. We played lots of old Beach Boys songs and even two new songs. One of the new songs was called “The First Time,” a love song that was also about personal peace.
In the nighttime when it’s dark and cold
I find peace of mind ’cause I have you to hold
When we’re sound asleep
And we’re breathing slow
Angels up above
And the devil below
Performing “The First Time” for the first time in concert was a real experience. This was during those early years when the Wondermints first came to be my band and I was getting used to being onstage again. During those years it was especially hard for me. Sometimes my mind would wander or I would hear voices and blow a cue. Going back onstage to play “The First Time,” or really any song, was a learning experience. I had to learn everything all over again, from the ground up. Once during a show, right in the middle of “Caroline, No,” I completely spaced out. I just forgot every single word. I started yelling into the mic. “Stop, stop, everybody stop!” I said. “Let’s start at the top of the bridge.” The crowd loved seeing me take control like that, and I saw a big smile on Darian’s face. That gave me more confidence. Once in Japan we were doing “Barbara Ann” and I got so excited that I stood up from my keyboard, grabbed the mic, and walked around the stage singing my parts. During the instrumental break, I even flipped the mic behind my back and caught it with my other hand. All the guys in the band were laughing their asses off. When you feel better that way, you can do all of it better: play the old songs, bring in the new songs, connect with the band, connect with the crowd, connect with yourself.
Once we were playing a concert in Baltimore, by the harbor. We were in the middle of “Sloop John B,” and when I looked out onto the stage, I saw Jerry Weiss in the audience with my daughter Daria on his shoulders. I kept on singing, but every time I looked out into the crowd, I saw Jerry with Daria. It was distracting the hell out of me. My mind was wandering anyway in those days, and I couldn’t deal with seeing Daria out there without Melinda. I decided I had to do something about it. Right in the middle of a verse, I yelled into the mic really loud. “Jerry Weiss,” I said. “Jerry Weiss. Bring my daughter back to her mother.” I went right back to singing, but I was the only one. The rest of the band was laughing. Since then, almost every time Jerry walks into the room during a sound check, one of the guys in the band leans into the mic and imitates me: “Jerry Weiss . . . Jerry Weiss.” Jeff Foskett started it, and now it’s usually Nicky Wonder who does it, sometimes Probyn Gregory, too. I love it. It makes everyone laugh—like it did the first time onstage, like the mic flip during “Barbara Ann”—and that makes me feel like one of the guys.
Those early tours got me connected with the band, and also with everyone else. When you’re on the road, moving from place to place, you see people in each city: fans, musicians, friends of friends. And when we played in Los Angeles, it was even more special. I remember we had a date at the Wiltern Theatre early in that tour. It was like a reunion. Almost everyone I knew was there. I was so happy to see my daughters Carnie and Wendy at the show. That meant so much to me. They mean so much to me. David Anderle was there—he worked with me and Van Dyke and helped set up Brother Records for us in the early ’70s. And another David, my friend David Leaf, was also there helping me out, like he did on all tours in those days. David is originally from New York and is a huge New York Yankees fan, like me. After sound check, David and I watched the World Series with Ray Lawlor, who’s also a Yankees fan. It was the first game. I forget who the Yankees were playing, but I know they won.
I wrote “That Same Song” for an album called 15 Big Ones, though it wasn’t called that originally. This was back in the mid-’70s, and I had spent some time away from the Beach Boys. I was always either coming back into the group or drifting away from them. It was like a tide. I came back because it was my family. It was where I felt comfortable. But it was hard to be there when I wasn’t able to get my ideas heard the way I wanted, and in those times the whole thing started to make less sense to me. Plus, there were drugs and there were problems with the way I was seeing things. There was destruction all around me.
Sometimes when I stepped away from the Beach Boys, I got into my own head more than I wanted to. Sometimes I managed to find another place to land. In the mid-’70s I started working more with a group of guys I knew. Bruce Johnston, who had replaced me in the Beach Boys when I stopped touring, had recently left the band, and he was thinking up a new project with Terry Melcher. They were collaborating with Gary Usher, who had written some of the early Beach Boys songs with me, and a guy named Curt Boettcher, who had come out from Wisconsin and made some nice records with a bunch of different bands. Dean Torrence, from Jan and Dean, was also there. All of the guys were trying to make new songs that were actually old songs. They loved the rock and roll we grew up with, and they wanted to make it new again with everything they had learned about making music in their other groups.
There were lots of names for that group. I was thinking about names all the time back then. A few years earlier I had worked on an album with Marilyn and her sister Diane. I made the record with a guy named David Sandler. We called that group Spring, but that ended up confusing people for some reason, and everywhere outside of the United States they were called American Spring, which seemed even more confusing. The Pendletones had become the Beach Boys when we weren’t even looking, and that new name did well for us. It was easy to remember and put an idea in people’s minds of what they were about to hear. The group with Bruce and Terry and the rest called themselves the Legendary Masked Surfers, which was kind of a Lone Ranger name. A few songs came out with that name, but it didn’t stick. They ended up calling themselves California Music, because all the guys had ideas about California music, and they were different from other people’s ideas—different from the singer-songwriters like Jackson Browne, different from groups like Fleetwood Mac, different from people like Van Dyke. They had their own sense of rock and roll, of harmony and vibe and tempo.
California Music never really got off the ground. The group made some records according to the original idea. I actually produced a version of “Why Do Fools Fall in Love,” the Frankie Lymon song, that included a little spoken-word snippet that was a nod to the Beatles’ “Get Back.” They did a version of “Jamaica Farewell,” a calypso song that everyone knew from the Harry Belafonte album. Everyone had that record, the one with the red background where he was wearing a green shirt. It looked like one of his hands was coming right out of the cover photo. I helped out with some other songs, but I wasn’t in the best shape. I felt unsure as a producer because I felt unsure as a person. But I tried.
During the time Terry and Bruce were doing California Music, they had a company called Equinox Records. I signed a contract with them, even though the Beach Boys were still with Reprise Records. No one was happy about my deal with Equinox, and everyone started to lean on me to go back to the Beach Boys. Marilyn did lots of leaning. She thought it was wrong of me to turn away from the group. She had seen lots of times when I’d drifted, but she thought that I was drifting too far, and that I didn’t have a life preserver. The drugs and the problems in my mind were dragging me down. It was right around then that she brought in Dr. Landy for the first time, and I ended up going back to the Beach Boys. First time, same song.
It was a strange time to rejoin the Beach Boys. The group was on Reprise, but it had been a while since we had released a record. The last record was Holland, which the label didn’t like. They weren’t even going to release it until we added a song that could be a hit. The song we ended up adding was “Sail On Sailor,” which I wrote with a record producer and singer named Ray Kennedy, and with Van Dyke. I don’t mean that I wrote it with both of them. There were two separate times. I wrote it once around 1970 or 1971 with Ray and Danny Hutton, because I thought it would be a good song for Three Dog Night. But we didn’t finish it. It got too complicated. Then a few years later, when Reprise didn’t like Holland, Van Dyke came over and played me something he had, and I worked on that with him. All of it together became “Sail On Sailor.” That went on Holland and became one of our biggest hits in the early ’70s. But we hadn’t given Reprise anything since Holland, and I wasn’t sure where things were headed.
I was spending most of my time at the Bel Air house, with Marilyn and the kids. I remember once a young guy came up to the house. He had met Dennis at a show and Dennis gave him my number and address and told him to come see me. I didn’t know that, but I knew that one day there was a ring at the doorbell and I opened up. “Hi!” I said.
The guy had a kind of surprised expression on his face. Maybe I didn’t look the way he expected. My hair was longer than it was on the Holland album, my beard was bigger, and I was heavier. Most of the extra weight was in my gut, and that’s where the guy was looking. “Hi, Brian,” the guy said. “You don’t know me, but I wanted to come and meet you. I got your address from your brother Dennis in New York.”
“In New York? What was he doing there?”
“He was playing a Beach Boys concert.”
“Oh,” I said. “Come on in.” We went to the music room. I asked him why he’d come to see me, and he said that he wanted to thank me for all the music I’d made. He said that the songs had helped him through some hard times. “You really want to see me?” I said. “Are you sure you don’t want to see John Lennon or Harry Nilsson? I’m all washed up.”
The guy laughed. He must have thought I was joking. But I wasn’t joking. I didn’t know where things were heading. I didn’t want to think about it. As far as I was concerned, the California Saga was the best thing on the record we had just finished.
I stayed sitting at the piano and played the guy some songs I was working on: “Just an Imitation,” “Spark in the Dark,” “Shortenin’ Bread,” “I’m into Something Good,” “Ding Dang.” I must have played about a dozen songs. Then I got impatient. That happened all the time. I didn’t like what I was doing and I wanted to do something else. “Hey,” I said. “Let’s go over to my friend Danny Hutton’s house.” We jumped in the guy’s car.
First, I decided we needed to make a pit stop, so we went to the first liquor store we passed. I wanted something sweet for a buzz. There was a chocolate liqueur that I drank all the time in Holland called Vandermint, and I went through the place looking for it. It was up on a top shelf and I scored it. I was tall enough to reach. I opened the bottle right there in the store and took a few chugs. “Well,” I said to the guy, “I guess we bought it.” He started to laugh. “Hey,” I said. “Do you have any money?” He stopped laughing and gave me a twenty-dollar bill.
At Danny Hutton’s house in Laurel Canyon, there was a party going on. Danny always had a party going on back then. There were girls and drugs and everything. I went straight to his records, found the 45s, and started pulling them one by one. The Four Tops. “Nope,” I said. Ray Stevens. “Nope.” Rare Earth. “Nope.” I didn’t stop until I found the one I wanted, and then I held it up so everyone could see it. “I knew Danny would have this one,” I said. It was “Be My Baby,” sung by the Ronettes, written and produced by Phil Spector. I put it on the turntable.
The opening of that record, the thumping drums, sent me back a decade, to the fall of 1963. This was before the Kennedy assassination, before “The Warmth of the Sun.” I was driving down the street listening to the radio and the DJ came on and announced a new song. It was “Be My Baby” and it just knocked me out. I think I said something out loud, even though I was the only one in the car. I said, “What in the heck?” and then I pulled over to the side of the road and listened to the rest of the record so I could hear the chorus again. I tried to figure out how all the instruments were working.
Before Spector, people recorded all the instruments separately. They got great piano, great guitar, and great bass. But he thought of the song as one giant instrument. It was huge. Size was so important to him, how big everything sounded. And he had the best drums I ever heard. The song was on the radio, which meant that it was coming to me from far away, but it was also right there with me in the car. It reminded me of the BB gun I had when I was young, which was the strangest thing. There was a bean field to the east of our house, and one day there was a guy sitting out there on a motorcycle. When I fired the BB gun, the guy just fell off his motorcycle. I thought maybe it was because I had hit him with the BB. It could have been a coincidence, but I thought about it in that way, that I had affected this guy in the bean field. That’s how great music worked, too. You were out in a bean field and something hit you when you were least expecting it and knocked you off your motorcycle.
In Danny’s house that day, when I put “Be My Baby” on the record player, I couldn’t stop listening to the intro. Those drums were so huge the way that Phil Spector did them. I played the beginning ten times until everyone in the room told me to stop, and then I played it ten more times.
In the meantime our old label, Capitol, had put out Endless Summer, a double album with all our early hits that was named after the famous surf movie. Endless Summer, the album, came out in 1974 and started selling like crazy, and that made Capitol put out a second set of hits, Spirit of America. Both of them had cool illustrated covers. Endless Summer had all our faces. Spirit of America had Mickey Mouse and a baseball glove and a girl lying down with the Playboy bunny logo on her underwear.
Al and Mike noticed how well the two Capitol albums were doing—there was no way not to notice. They figured it was a sign we should capitalize on people’s love for our old music. Our record label, Brother Records, temporarily got the rights back to our old songs and put out a compilation of our own, Good Vibrations, on Reprise. That sold pretty well but not as well as the Capitol records. But Al and Mike weren’t just interested in rereleases. They wanted to make more music like “I Get Around” or “The Warmth of the Sun.” There were other ideas in the room, too. I rejoined the group with ideas similar to what the guys in California Music were doing. I wanted to do covers only of old songs, to make a record about the records that I loved. Dennis and Carl wanted to keep going forward and making new music like what we were making on Holland. They didn’t want to go back to the ’60s, or the ’50s either.
We had long discussions about the best direction—endless discussions, you could say. And Dr. Landy was in lots of them. He was trying to get me into shape, but he thought that also meant getting the group into shape and putting himself in the middle of the way we talked to each other. He dragged us through some real marathon conversations. I remember one that lasted six hours, without a break. Everyone said what they thought, and also said they heard what everyone else was saying, and then said they thought it was important for everyone to be heard. Even though I was the only one officially with Dr. Landy, lots of the guys had gotten into similar things, gurus or meditation or special diets. Mike had been into it for years, since the late ’60s, and it had been in his songs.
We talked so much that I decided we should call the album Group Therapy. That was the name of a band Ray Kennedy was in back in the ’60s, and that might have been in the back of my mind, but mainly I thought of it because it summed up everything that was happening at the time. It summed up the arguments over creative direction, and the difficulty of me coming back to the group, and the arrival of Dr. Landy. But the band didn’t go for it. I guess they thought it showed people too much of what we were going through. We renamed the album 15 Big Ones, because we had been making music for fifteen years and there were fifteen songs on the record. I didn’t like the cover for that album very much. It was an Olympic year so they made an Olympic cover, with five rings and the guys from the group inside them. It ended up looking like a game show, Hollywood Squares or something. I’m in the top middle ring, which is white on the album cover but black in the Olympics logo.
I loved the version of “That Same Song.” Marilyn sang the high part on it because it was out of my range. She has a great voice. But those moments were rare. That album was a compromise. No one was really in control. You need control in life. You need self-control, and you need control over ideas. The reason for control is that it lets one idea happen instead of two or more ideas that don’t happen. That’s why you have a control room in a recording studio or a TV studio. But control isn’t all good. It can make harmony, but it can also lead to hurt feelings from the people who aren’t in control. That can happen with husbands and wives. That can happen with parents and children. That can happen with doctors and patients.
A lack of control leads to other problems. When 15 Big Ones came out, the record company made a big deal that I was on it. They had a big campaign with a “Brian’s Back!” slogan, and they had a TV special for us where we sang “That Same Song” with a gospel choir and did a comedy sketch with the Blues Brothers. Well, they weren’t the Blues Brothers in that sketch. They were the guys from the Blues Brothers and they played cops who came and got me out of my room and made me go outside and surf. It was kind of a kick. Belushi and Aykroyd—funny guys.
But I was really thinking about the album, and how the ghost of that original album I wanted to make, the old rock and roll record, was there underneath everything else. And the parts of the record that were great in so many ways. Carl was out of sight on “Palisades Park.” It’s one of my top five Beach Boys vocals. He nailed it. I always heard one lyric, “the girl I sat beside was awful cute,” as “the girl I sat beside was . . . aw, fuck you.” It makes no sense in the song, but that’s how I heard it. The great original was by Freddy Cannon, who also did “Tallahassee Lassie,” but Carl knocked it completely out of the park. For “Just Once in My Life,” he and I sang together and I played the synthesizers and piano. We had a great time singing. With that and “Chapel of Love,” I had laryngitis. I wasn’t using my normal voice. It was an assumed voice. I had to make it up to get through all the singing. For me, it’s basically a laryngitis album.
It’s also a Phil Spector album. Many of the songs on 15 Big Ones are songs he did first. As a producer, Phil did the originals of “Just Once in My Life” and “Chapel of Love.” His version of that, with the Dixie Cups, was on top of the charts when the Beach Boys first charted in 1964. There was even a song of his that almost no one knew, “Talk to Me.”
Phil Spector is one of the main reasons I wanted to make 15 Big Ones a record about old rock and roll, because he’s one of the main reasons I wanted to make rock and roll. His records meant everything to me when I was learning how to become a producer. If albums are all about control, he was the ultimate in control. I knew about voices, or at least knew something about them, from pretty early on. I listened to harmony groups and figured out how all the voices came together. I worked with lots of other producers when I was young, and lots of them taught me things—tricks with vocals or instruments, how to double track or where to place a microphone—but I think I learned the most from listening to Phil Spector’s records. I always say he’s the one who taught me how to produce records.
Hearing “Be My Baby” in my car was the first lesson. A few days after that, I drove over to the studio in Ventura where Phil Spector was working. I went in to meet him. He knew about the Beach Boys because “Surfin’ U.S.A.” had been a big hit and everyone was talking about board shorts and huaraches. I told him that I had heard “Be My Baby” and it was fantastic. We talked about other songs. “Then He Kissed Me” was just a few months old. He told me he was just starting on a Christmas album, which was exciting for me to hear. But “Be My Baby” stayed so important to me.
Years later I went to see Phil Spector at United Western Recorders. It was in the mid-’90s, and he was producing Celine Dion for a big comeback record that never ended up happening. Phil sometimes had bowling parties, and he sometimes invited me. Melinda and I were going to go and then I crapped out. Phil never invited me again. And then years after that, I was playing at B. B. King’s in New York and songwriter Ellie Greenwich came backstage to see me. I hugged her. “Every single day I wake up and thank you,” I said. She looked confused. “You know,” I said, “for writing ‘Be My Baby’ for me.” That’s how I felt—that it was just for me. There have been other songs that hit me almost as hard: “Rock Around the Clock,” “Keep A-Knockin’,” “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feeling,” “Hey Girl.” But it’s hard to re-create the feeling of first hearing “Be My Baby.”
When you think songs are just for you, you pay special attention to them, and then you grow from them. It’s like a building going up. You have a foundation, and then you keep adding stories until you look down and you’re so far from the ground that you don’t know how you got up there. That’s how it’s always been for me.
When I was first interested in music, I took a class in high school with a guy named Fred Morgan. He was an interesting teacher. He taught us that music was a contrast, pale parts versus emotional parts, and that not all the instruments in a song had to go in the same direction. He failed me in the class because I didn’t know how to write classical music, but he got me thinking about some of the different ways music can work. Later on I ran into him at a high school reunion. “You failed my class, but you scored big in music,” he said. My own ideas were just beginning, but I knew I was on the right track when I heard myself playing the boogie-woogie Uncle Charlie taught me.
A little later I learned how to write manuscript music from a friend of my dad’s named Dean Brownell. He taught me how to really notate: to get down quarter notes, half notes, eighth notes. Around that time my dad got me a tape recorder, a Capitol, and it did this thing called ping-pong where you could record many voices and mix them down to a single track. I tried to record a Four Freshmen song on that by having my mom, dad, Dennis, and Carl sing on the tape recorder with me. The song was called “It’s a Blue World”: “It’s a blue world without you / It’s a through world for me.” We all sang together and it was beautiful.
After the Freshmen, I heard bits and pieces of melody in my head, but I couldn’t focus on anything concrete. It was like watching goldfish swim around. They dart one way and you see a little flash of orange, but you don’t really know whether they’re coming or going. But then one afternoon I was in my car and I thought of a piece that grew into a longer piece. It started out with me humming a Disney song, “When You Wish Upon a Star,” which Dion and the Belmonts sang. Their record was red like the Harry Belafonte album with “Jamaica Farewell.” I started humming that, but it changed in my head. It combined with other songs I knew, like the Four Freshmen’s “Little Girl Blue,” and eventually it didn’t sound like anything I had heard before. It sounded like maybe it was my own. I wrote part of it in my head in my car, and then I finished it when I got back to the house. That song ended up being “Surfer Girl.” It was a slow ballad. The harmonies I heard in it were sort of like the harmonies I heard from the Four Freshmen, but they were only a foundation. I built something on top of that foundation, and it was sort of my own house. We recorded it at Hite Morgan’s, but that version never got released. I mean, much later it did, on a big box set, but it wasn’t released on a real record. The one that everyone knows was recorded later. Still, even then, I had done it. I had written a song and the group had recorded it.
It’s been more than fifty years now, and I wonder all the time about what let me think I could write something of my own, that I could build something on top of the foundation I got from other singers and groups. What made me think I could have my own songs? There must have been something deep inside me, another kind of foundation. Part of it came from my dad, who also loved music and who also wrote songs. Part of it came from all the people around me who loved music and wrote songs. Al wrote songs. Mike hummed things he heard and tried to make them into something. But there was something deep down in there that wasn’t in other people.
In lots of interviews people have asked me what I would have been if I’d been born in a different time. I think I would have been a classical composer. But not like Mozart, Beethoven, or Tchaikovsky. I would have been like Bach, using counterpoint, layering things. Of all the composers, he’s the one who makes the most sense to me. Switched-On Bach, the Walter Carlos record, was one of the most electrifying albums I ever heard. When I first heard it, which was right around the time we were finishing Friends, it turned me on so much that I can’t even explain it. It was so intricate and so clear at the same time.
I didn’t grow up in a time of classical music, though. I grew up in a time of pop music. And “Surfer Girl” was the first real song I wrote. It didn’t come out for a while, though. In fact, it didn’t come out until our third album. It had just come out when I met Phil Spector. I don’t remember if he mentioned it. It seems like the kind of thing I should remember but I don’t. I just know that hearing “Be My Baby” on the car radio made me feel so alive. And what it did to my brain and the sounds that were in there was like a rebirth. It was a leap forward.
Those early years were all leaps forward.
When we put out “Surfin’” as our first single on Candix, I didn’t know where things were headed. We were all running around in the street thrilled to hear it, but maybe it wouldn’t be any more than that. Maybe we would be older and working in different jobs and call each other on the phone and remember that time when it came on the radio and we ran around in the street. People in rock and roll have long careers now, but the whole thing was pretty new back then. Would it last a year? Would it last two years? I remember my dad talking about our hits and saying it was hard to imagine it going much past that.
But it went a little past one song, at least. “Surfin’” was moving along and people were asking us for a second song. I had written “Surfer Girl,” but it wasn’t time for that yet. It was a ballad. Mike and I had another fast song. We had written “Surfin’ Safari” and we went in and recorded it for Hite Morgan. At that point, because “Surfin’” was a hit, we knew we needed to sign to a bigger label. We looked for one. My dad looked with us. He brought us around to everyone. We sat in so many offices and heard Dad explain our kind of music to guys his age. They usually nodded slowly. Sometimes there were younger guys in the room who nodded more quickly. But when we left it wasn’t with a good feeling. We were rejected by labels like Dot and Liberty. Decca, who turned down the Beatles, turned us down also.
Eventually we met with a guy named Nick Venet from Capitol Records. Nick was a little older than me, but he had been around for a while. He had started off in jazz, working with people like Chet Baker and Stan Getz, and then came to Capitol, where he signed the Lettermen. They had a hit with “The Way You Look Tonight.” Nick understood harmonies and he understood song and he liked our sound. My dad arranged for him to take us onto the label. People say that my dad was pushy, and he sure was. But he had a sense of how songs got put together and how to fight to have songs heard. There are so many things that I wish wouldn’t have happened with my dad, but without him, nothing would have happened. That’s the thing about a foundation. You have to have it to build up from it.
Capitol liked “Surfin’ Safari” as our second song. But they said we needed to rerecord it. Whenever we made new songs, I would write and arrange them and Nick and my dad would produce them. Nick was the most pleasant guy, and I learned so much from him.
We started to work with other people, too. A friend of ours named David Marks, who used to come over to the house to sing, joined the band playing rhythm guitar, and another friend of ours named Gary Usher started working with us writing new songs. Gary’s uncle lived near us in Hawthorne and got to talking with my dad about music. Someone said that we had a band, and someone else said that Gary was a good musician and that he could also write lyrics. That was great for me, because I liked having someone who could take the things I was thinking and turn them into the right kinds of words.
Gary also had some production knowledge, even though he was only a few years older. He taught me how to open up my voice by putting track on top of track. The first Beach Boys song we tried that with was “Surfin’ U.S.A.” I went to Mike and told him what Gary told me, that you could sing on top of your own singing. We also did some songs where Gary was out in front, though they didn’t get released. One was called “One Way Road to Love.” We sang backup on that and we didn’t really mesh with Gary’s vocals—he had a kind of early-rock hiccupping thing going, a Buddy Holly sound. Another one was called “My Only Alibi.” We hung back on that with the backing vocals, and that made it better. Phil Spector taught me to put in everything, but other people taught me that sometimes what you didn’t include was as important as what you did include.
Why do you expect more than my love, dear
Why can’t you accept it as it is
I can only love you just so much, dear
Don’t you know that’s all that I can give?
Human
I’m only human
At some point along the way I ended up producing a song. What that meant was that I was the one telling people what to do, and that the song had my name on it. As a producer, I also said that I thought we needed to do the song at Western Recorders, which was a place Gary liked, instead of at Capitol’s own studio. I was proud of making decisions but also scared. If you made decisions, if you had control, then that meant you were responsible for what happened. That first song I produced was “Surfer Girl.” I had sung it so many times in my own head, and the group had sung it at Hite Morgan’s. But at Western it was different. The melody was sweet and had a little rise and fall like waves. The band back then was just the family—the extended family, with Carl playing guitar and Dennis drumming and me playing bass and David Marks also playing guitar. Some producers maybe went into the studio without ideas, but I was too nervous for that. I had everything worked out in my head before. It was the only way I could imagine getting from one place to the next. But to keep everyone moving forward I also tried to joke a little bit. I would say, “Take two” and then before anyone played a note say, “Take three.”
“Surfer Girl” was a song about love, or at least a song that wondered about love.
Little surfer, little one
Made my heart come all undone
Do you love me, do you surfer girl
Surfer girl, my little surfer girl
The guy in the song sounds like he hasn’t even talked to the surfer girl. He just watches her and thinks about her. That was me. I was kind of shy, and whenever I started talking to a girl she would end up talking to Dennis or Mike instead. They were slicker and more aggressive, and I sort of got moved off to the side to wonder if the girl ever liked me or was interested at all. I felt a little lonely at times, but I also knew that it made for good songs. Loneliness was something that everyone felt but that people were afraid to talk about. That was something I learned from the Four Freshmen. They always had an ache in their songs—not just in their voices but about the things they were singing.
The big early song everyone wants to point to as being about loneliness is “In My Room.” People say it’s about how I pulled back from the world. The funny thing is that it was a song Gary wrote with me and we all sang on it—me and Dennis and Carl and Mike and Al. Two people wrote a song about loneliness, and five people sang it. We worked out the harmonies over and over again until they had a certain sound. I didn’t think of it as sad, really. I wanted it to be beautiful. I think that came through. When Gary and I first wrote it, we were in Hawthorne playing outside. We were probably throwing a baseball back and forth and pretending we were the Yankees. Then we went home and thought of the idea for the song. It came together quick, maybe an hour to get the basics. My parents were coming in and out while we were working. My mom loved it. She told Gary that it was beautiful. Even my dad liked it. He was a tough critic, but he told Gary he did a good job.
Time jumps from the fall of 1961, when we heard “Surfin’” on the radio, to the summer of 1963, when we heard “Surfer Girl.” It jumps from 1958, when I was in my bedroom with my brothers teaching them “Ivory Tower,” to 1965, when we were all over the radio.
Time jumps and sometimes time lands. It really landed in 1964. That seemed like more than one year. We played more than a hundred shows, all over the world, and recorded all or parts of four albums. We had our first number one hit with “I Get Around” in May, over “My Boy Lollipop.” The flip side of “I Get Around” might be one of the best songs I ever wrote, “Don’t Worry Baby.” I wrote it with Phil Spector in mind. I thought it could be the follow-up to “Be My Baby” for Ronnie Spector, but Phil Spector didn’t go for it. That year, it didn’t matter. It was Beatlemania and it was Motownmania, but it was also us-mania. We were one of the biggest things going. And then we were one of the biggest things gone: the year ended with my freak-out on the plane to Houston. That shook everything down to its foundation. It turned out what we were building the whole year went up too fast, and it toppled.
But all year, we built. We started 1964 with Shut Down Volume 2, an album that we started recording on New Year’s Day. The name was a little strange—maybe a little more than strange. We hadn’t recorded a Shut Down Volume 1. We had a song called “Shut Down” that had been on our album Little Deuce Coupe, and when Capitol released a compilation of hit songs in 1963, they included that song and even named the record after it. It was enough of a hit that people thought it made sense to name our next album Shut Down Volume 2. Did it make sense? We had a title song on there, but it wasn’t really anything like “Shut Down.” It was an instrumental that Carl wrote. Carl also sang his first lead on “Pom, Pom Play Girl.”
When we were making “Surfin’” or “Surfer Girl,” we still played like we were a real band. We had my piano and bass and Carl and David Marks on guitar and Dennis drumming. But for Shut Down Volume 2, we had started to be a real thing, both in California and in the country, and that meant that when we went into the studio to record, we got to play with older studio musicians. The ones we used were the best in LA. You could play them a song once and they would play it right back to you, and add in their own ideas along with yours. Later on, people called them the Wrecking Crew, but at the time I don’t think people called them that. But they called them all the time. They worked with Phil Spector, which was one of the reasons I knew about them, and they worked with Jan and Dean on “Surf City.” That was a song I wrote, or started writing but didn’t finish, and Jan and Dean finished it up. It was a huge hit for them, the first surf song to go to number one.
It was a little weird that another group had a number one with my song. My dad wasn’t happy about it at all, but I didn’t mind. I thought it was cool that there was a sound starting to happen, a sound that had started with “Surfin’.” It was like a little family of songs. It was melodies I was making and lyrics that other people were adding and sounds that arrangers and players were making. The guys who would later be called the Wrecking Crew were on “Surf City.” Hal Blaine drummed, and so did Earl Palmer. Billy Strange, who arranged the record, liked to have two drummers, and so did Jan. It made it bigger, closer to the huge sound that Phil Spector was getting.
I especially didn’t mind Jan and Dean having a number one hit with “Surf City” because it taught record companies that it made sense to spend money on groups like us. It’s another kind of foundation, a business foundation: when you see that there are lots of people going to a store to buy things, you add another floor to the store. At that time there were actually two families of songs that were close cousins: surf songs and hot-rod songs. Surf songs were about going to the ocean and getting sun and catching waves and looking at girls. Hot-rod songs were about getting in the car with your buddies and driving around with the top down and getting burgers and looking at girls. Our car songs were written with Gary Usher and sometimes with a guy named Roger Christian, who wrote “Little Deuce Coupe,” “Shut Down,” and “Car Crazy Cutie”:
Well, my steady little doll is a real live beauty
And everybody knows she’s a car crazy cutie
She’s hip to everything, man, from customs to rails
And axle grease imbedded ‘neath her fingernails
Wo yeah (Run a-run a doo ron ron)
Wo oh oh oh (Wo run a-run a doo ron ron)
Oh oh oh now cutie (Wo run a-run a doo ron ron)
Oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh (Wo run a-run a doo ron ron)
That was on the Little Deuce Coupe album, too. Those are the songs that got people to think we were into car culture, and I guess we were, through them.
Even though “Shut Down” and the Capitol compilation album were part of the hot-rod thing, most of the songs on our Shut Down Volume 2 album weren’t. “Fun, Fun, Fun” was, and it was a big hit. But other songs were love songs, like “The Warmth of the Sun” or “Keep an Eye on Summer.” Thirty-five years after we did Shut Down Volume 2, I rerecorded “Keep an Eye on Summer” for Imagination. Remaking a song is strange, especially when it’s a song you did when you were young. You try to remember the things about it that made you happy the first time so you can get some of those feelings into your singing. Otherwise it’s just new technology and new musicians doing the same song. Another thing about a remake is that you’re aiming at a target. The second “Keep an Eye on Summer,” even if it had different ideas from Joe Thomas or me, was still trying to get parts of the original. The original was the bull’s-eye.
It was completely different when we took songs in for the first time. When we showed up at the studio with a song I had written, there wasn’t any bull’s-eye yet. We were firing arrow after arrow. There wasn’t any foundation yet. We were pouring concrete. When I try to think of an example of how that worked, I think about the crazy year of 1964, and I think about one of the most important songs from that crazy year, “When I Grow Up (To Be a Man).” We did that song in early August, and it was out by the end of the month. That’s how fast everything went back then. The building was going up overnight.
We did that song at Western, too, in room three, which was the best. We did almost forty takes over six days. Can you believe that, forty takes? You can hear me counting each one out. Sometimes we got as far as a few bass notes from Al Jardine before it fell apart. Sometimes we got through my first piano part. We didn’t even get to the vocals for a while, but when we did, those gave me fits, too. I wanted it to sound like an update of the Four Freshmen, but my voice sounded too thin. People tell me you can find those tapes sometimes circulating around, with names like “When I Grow Up (To Be a Man) (2nd vocal overdub take 14).” It’s exhausting to look at, and to think of how far we went in search of the perfect thing. We didn’t know we were making history. But that’s what we were making.
Sometimes, even when I worked as hard as I could, I didn’t line up with the rest of the band. Sometime during that crazy year, I wrote a song with Russ Titelman called “Guess I’m Dumb.” It took a while to get it right because I was trying something more adult. I was trying to score a Burt Bacharach vibe. I think we did twenty-three takes of that one. When I was finished, no one from the band wanted to sing it. The message was okay, but maybe it was just the idea of being dumb. Glen Campbell had been singing my parts in concerts so I gave it to him.
The way I act don’t seem like me
I’m not on top like I used to be
I’ll give in when I know I should be strong
I still give in even though I know it’s wrong
I guess I’m dumb but I don’t care
It’s a sad song, and also one that was easy to think about when I was in charge of the band. Later on, when I didn’t run the band as much, it was difficult for me to listen to. The Beach Boys never recorded it, but Glen played it in concert for most of his career.
There are so many songs from that period they seem like one big song. We’re singing that same song. All year long I picked things up and tried to make them into songs. Usually I didn’t even have time to really look at what I was picking up. In summer 1964 we put out All Summer Long. There is a real maturing of our sound on that record. There’s a start-stop cadence on “I Get Around” with a driving bass. Nobody had done a record like that before. There’s a great instrumental break on the title song, all these subtle shifts that then feed back into a really stellar group harmony. In “Little Honda” I used a fuzz-tone bass. Carl thought it sounded like shit, but I knew it would be great. Our last real surf-type song, “Girls on the Beach,” is on that record. Dennis does a nice job on the bridge, and our harmonies are just out of sight. That whole album is a turning point for me and for the band—or maybe it makes more sense to say it’s a turning point for how I understood how to write for the band.
After that we rolled right into our Christmas album, and after that I got on the plane to go to Houston. Houston and everything that came after it was a change, definitely, because after that I started to use the studio differently. I tried to take the things I had learned from Phil Spector and use more instruments whenever I could. I doubled up on basses and tripled up on keyboards. That made everything sound bigger and deeper. I was able to do more ballads and give them their own feel. The Beach Boys Today!, which came out in early 1965, was made both before and after Houston. It was the first time I could do songs like “Please Let Me Wonder” that had all this space in them. I was also smoking a little bit of pot then, and that changed the way I heard arrangements.
Chuck Britz was our engineer on those records. He liked the way I worked, to have ideas coming in and then add more ideas, and put everything in place right away. He wasn’t the kind of person to linger in the studio and wait for inspiration. I remember him telling Mike that he needed to stay focused. “You can’t screw around because I gotta go in a half hour,” he’d say. And he meant it, too. If Mike didn’t listen, Chuck would just split.
But that was also the beginning of control issues. Capitol didn’t get the hits they wanted from The Beach Boys Today! The songs were great. Everyone thought so. “Do You Wanna Dance?” and “Dance, Dance, Dance” were successful. But they weren’t successful the way Capitol imagined. They imagined a situation where the tower of hits would just keep going higher and higher. After The Beach Boys Today!, they put pressure on us to bring them big sales. If it’s what they wanted, it’s what I wanted to give them. The next record, Summer Days (And Summer Nights!!), was probably our best rock and roll album. It had “Help Me, Rhonda,” a song Al sang lead on that was a remake of a song from The Beach Boys Today! It went to number one. That was one of the hits that Capitol wanted. There was another big hit on that album, but I don’t remember what it was at the moment. Oh, I remember: “California Girls.” I was just joking. How could I forget “California Girls”? It’s one of my favorite songs of anything we ever did. It’s our anthem song. If you ask people to name one Beach Boys song, that’s probably the one they’ll name.
The idea of “California Girls” is that there’s this guy who thinks about girls all the time, so much that he starts to imagine all kinds. But there’s only one kind he really wants, and that’s the kind that’s right there at home. The music started off like those old cowboy movies, when the hero’s riding slowly into town, bum-ba-dee-dah. I was playing that at the piano after an acid trip. I played it until I almost couldn’t hear what I was playing, and then I saw the melody hovering over the piano part.
When we got into the studio with Chuck, he said that he wanted Carl’s twelve-string guitar in the intro to sound more direct. I didn’t know what that meant. “Can he play it in the booth?” Chuck said. I had never thought about that before, but it seemed like a good idea. Carl was standing next to me in the booth and all the other musicians were out in the studio. I conducted it like an orchestra. It’s not often that you get a perfect song, but that was one of them. It was so perfect that when David Lee Roth did it twenty years later—and reached the same spot on the charts, number three—he used Carl to sing backup on it to keep the vibe. I love that version. My favorite part is where he ad-libs, “I dig the girls.”
When we released “California Girls” as a single, we put another great song on the B-side, “Let Him Run Wild.” When I came off the road after I freaked out on the flight to Houston, I spent lots of time in my apartment, thinking about the perfect songs for the group. We had done so many surfing songs and so many hot-rod songs by that point, and I wanted to branch out. I wanted to write songs about relationships. I was growing in my normal life and I wanted to grow up musically. I thought about how love worked sometimes but went bad other times. “Let Him Run Wild” was about a girl who was dating a guy who didn’t stay close to her. The guy singing wants the girl to let her boyfriend run around and eventually leave her so he can come in and get her. He wants a bad thing to happen so that it’ll turn into a good thing.
We recorded that song with the Wrecking Crew again, just like on Shut Down Volume 2. Leon Russell played piano for us. Carol Kaye played bass. Those are two pretty great ways to replace yourself on instruments. The only thing wrong with it was me. I never liked my lead on it. It’s a crapped-out lead. It’s an abortion of a lead. Sometimes I think about going back and fixing it. I could, but I haven’t. But I can hear everyone else and how great they’re doing; I can hear Carl, Dennis, Mike, Al, and Bruce. I can pick out Carl especially. The whole thing goes by in a little more than two minutes, and even with the screechiness, there’s one part I can never get past without remembering how great it felt to make songs with the band. It’s the pair of lines that lead into the final chorus:
And now that you don’t need him
Well, he can have his freedom
Some songs come and go. Other songs last. “Let Him Run Wild” was one of those songs that lasted. I ended up rerecording it for Imagination.
But those weren’t the only songs on the record I liked. I liked “Salt Lake City” and “Amusement Parks U.S.A.” as much as anything we ever did. I really got off on them. When I listened to them again in later years, they brought back memories. I remember going to Salt Lake City on tour, and on a day off we went to the lake itself. It was amazing. It was so salty that you didn’t have to paddle. You could just lie on the top of the water and float. Also, in town there was a bar called the Lagoon with more pretty girls than you could ever imagine. We put that in the song. My dad was with us on that tour and he wouldn’t let us drink beer. It was like we were Mormons ourselves. Except that Dennis and Mike didn’t listen. They went off on their own. I mostly kept to myself or stayed at the hotel and talked to girls down in the lobby. One girl stayed and talked to me for a long time and a few weeks later sent me a letter. Marilyn read it and didn’t like it at all. The girl had ideas about how things might go with us that weren’t what a wife would want to see. It made things harder at home for a little while there.
We weren’t working in a vacuum. The year was busy for us, but it was busy all around us. Rock and roll was taking over, and it was taking over fast.
One of the most important parts of the takeover was the Beatles. During Summer Days (And Summer Nights!!), I wrote a song called “Girl Don’t Tell Me.” It was one of the first songs that Carl sang lead on, and one of the only songs we did from that time where we didn’t sing in back of him. It was almost like a different sound. That’s because I had written it with John Lennon in mind. I even thought about giving it to the Beatles. People said it sounded like “Ticket to Ride,” but I didn’t mean for it to sound like any one song of theirs. It just had that feel. People talk about a rivalry between the Beach Boys and the Beatles, but that’s not the right word. There were messages that got sent back and forth across the ocean. They would do something and I would hear it and then I would want to do something just as good. When they played on Ed Sullivan in February of 1964, the world went crazy. Seven months later, we were on Ed Sullivan, too. And they were putting out records almost as fast as we were—The Beatles’ Second Album and A Hard Day’s Night right after the Sullivan show, and later Beatles for Sale and Beatles VI and Help!
But the one that really got me was Rubber Soul, which came out at the end of 1965. Rubber Soul is probably the greatest record ever. Maybe the Phil Spector Christmas record is right up there with it, and it’s hard to say that the Who’s Tommy isn’t one of the best, too. But Rubber Soul came out in December of 1965 and sent me right to the piano bench. It’s a whole album of Beatles folk songs, a whole album where everything flows together and everything works. I remember being blown away by “You Won’t See Me” and “I’m Looking Through You” and “Girl.” It wasn’t just the lyrics and the melodies but the production and their harmonies. They had such unique harmonies, you know? In “You Won’t See Me,” Paul sings low and George and John sing high. There’s an organ drone in there, a note that’s held down for the last third of the song or so. Those were touches they were trying, almost art music. What was so great about the Beatles was you could hear their ideas so clearly in their music. They didn’t pose like some other bands, and they didn’t try to stuff too much meaning in their songs. They might be singing a song about loneliness or a song about anger or a song about feeling down. They were great poets about simple things, but that also made it easier to hear the song. And they never did anything clumsy. It was like perfect pitch but for entire songs. Everything landed on its feet.
I met Paul McCartney later in the ’60s, in a studio. I was almost always in a studio back then. He came by when we were at Columbia Square working on vocal overdubs, and we had a little chat about music. Everyone knows now that “God Only Knows” was Paul’s favorite song—and not only his favorite Beach Boys song, but one of his favorite songs period. It’s the kind of thing people write in liner notes and say on talk shows. When people read it, they kind of look at that sentence and keep going. But think about how much it mattered to me when I first heard it there on Sunset Boulevard. I was the person who wrote “God Only Knows,” and here was another person—the person who wrote “Yesterday” and “And I Love Her” and so many other songs—saying it was his favorite. It really blew my mind. He wasn’t the only Beatle who felt that way. John Lennon called me after Pet Sounds—phoned me up, I think the British say—to tell me how much he loved the record.
But Paul and I stayed in touch. Another time not too long after that he came to my house and told me about the new music he was working on. “There’s one song I want you to hear,” he said. “I think it’s a nice melody.” He put the tape on and it was “She’s Leaving Home.” My wife, Marilyn, was there, too, and she just started crying. Listening to Paul play a new song let me see my own songs more clearly. It was hard for me to think about the effect that my music had on other people, but it was easy to see when it was another songwriter.
More than thirty years later, I was opening for Paul Simon, which I didn’t like. It was okay to share a bill with him, but we were playing to older crowds, and that meant the first act, which was me, played when the sun was still up and the crowd was still filing in. It was hard to have a good relationship with the people in the audience under those conditions. At the Greek Theatre in Los Angeles, I started the show when it was less than half full. We opened with “The Little Girl I Once Knew,” then played “Dance, Dance, Dance,” then “In My Room,” and then a cover of the Barenaked Ladies’ song “Brian Wilson.” That was the strangest song we played back then. I didn’t know about it until the guys in the band brought it to rehearsal. It was a song about a guy who is trying to write a song and can’t and he compares himself to me when I was under the treatment of Dr. Landy. In the song, the guy has a dream that he gets up to 300 pounds and then starts floating until the ground is so far away that he can’t see it anymore. I never had that dream, but I was cool with playing the song if we did a good job.
We went through some more hits: “California Girls,” “I Get Around,” “Wouldn’t It Be Nice.” After “Add Some Music to Your Day,” we started in on “God Only Knows.” Right at that moment, the side door opened and Paul McCartney walked in. Everyone saw him. The theater erupted with applause and everyone stood up cheering for him. I saw Carnie in the audience put her hand to her mouth in shock. It was an “oh my God” moment. I waved from the piano. But waving wasn’t enough. We were going into the final verse and I changed the lyrics on the fly to “God only knows what I’d be without Paul.” After the set Pablo came backstage. That’s what I call Paul sometimes, Pablo. I was happy to see him. He said that when he was coming up to the Greek in the limo, he rolled down the window so he could hear the music. “I wanted to hear those Brian sounds,” he said. He had a question about the intro to “You Still Believe in Me.” There was a keyboard in the dressing room, so I just played it for him. We did harmonies. It was incredible, Paul McCartney and I harmonizing on the intro to “You Still Believe in Me.” Can you believe that?
The other Beatle that got to me was George Harrison. He was so spiritual. He had a way of making things simple: “Give me life / Give me love / Give me peace on earth.” I remember that during the early years of the Beatles, it was hard to think of him as a separate songwriter. But after “Here Comes the Sun,” I started to pay attention to his songs as their own kind of thing. Maybe every group needed someone like that, a deeply soulful presence who wasn’t exactly at the middle of the band. We had Carl. I never met George, but many years later I did a show for him. In 2015 his widow Olivia called and asked me to play at George Fest in Hollywood. “Hell yes,” I said. We played “My Sweet Lord,” but I would have done any of George’s songs. He wrote beautiful ones.
The Beatles may have been at the top of the heap, but the Rolling Stones weren’t far behind. They had so many great riff records. They always got me with whatever they had coming out: “Satisfaction,” “Get Off of My Cloud.” My favorite Rolling Stones song was from a little later, “My Obsession,” from Between the Buttons. I was invited to the studio when they were mixing it down. The Stones were in and out that day. I didn’t meet all of them at any one time. But I was blown away by that song. It has that opening that’s close to “Get Off of My Cloud,” Charlie Watts drumming, and then that awesome combination of organ and piano in the left track. Later on they come back but with backing vocals, too, a string of ooh babys that are sort of like the woo-woos they would do later on in “Sympathy for the Devil.” And the ooh babys are almost R-rated; it’s really a record about a girl’s body.
What’s great about “My Obsession” is that it isn’t just a riff record. Because Keith Richards came up with such awesome riffs, people forget to look deeper in; if they do, they’ll find these complex production tricks and moments of sophistication and beauty. In a song like “Sad Day,” which isn’t a record that most people know, there’s a great little piano part by Jack Nitzsche, who was a Phil Spector—like producer on his own. He wrote “The Lonely Surfer,” which had one of the earliest examples of that guitar sound in spaghetti westerns. The Stones took all those influences. They could. Their own personality as a band was so strong. That’s sort of how the Beach Boys worked. Whatever we brought in ended up being ours.
Over the years I have written some songs that are tributes to the Stones. There’s “Add Some Music to Your Day.” You can hear their guitar in there, especially at the beginning, and that driving vocal part where we sing, “add some, add some, add some music.” Our voices are likes the Stones’ guitars, and the arrangement is, too. Listen real close. I tried for their vibe. And I mentioned them in the lyrics, too: “There’s blues, folk, and country, and rock like a rollin’ stone.” But our Stonesiest song ever was probably “Marcella,” which is on Carl and the Passions—So Tough. “Marcella” isn’t deep like some other songs. It’s not “Sail On Sailor” or “‘Til I Die.” It’s about a girl who worked at this massage parlor I used to go to. It’s a lust song, plain and simple, like “My Obsession.” Just before and after the two-minute mark, you can hear the Stones, or at least my version of them. I did most of that session, but then I went upstairs for a while because I was tired. When I was up there, they added the “hey, yeah, Marcella” part, which Al Jardine sings. My favorite lyric there is one of my favorite Beach Boys lyrics in general. Carl sang it:
One arm over my shoulder
Sandals dance at my feet
Eyes that knock you right over
Ooo Marcella’s so sweet
Complicated ideas and simple ideas—so much of rock and roll is both of those. People thought rock and roll was party music at first. They liked hearing about the simple things, about partying and girls and teenage life, and that’s what rock and roll showed them. There were always complicated things in my life, but I kept them in or put them off to the side. But then things around me started changing, and things in me started changing. The flight to Houston and the time I spent alone writing without the band after that was a big change, but it wasn’t the only change. Everything started shifting. Maybe some of it was because of smoking pot and relaxing. When I wasn’t quite so nervous I wasn’t quite so afraid of things being complicated. Maybe some of it was learning more about songwriting and producing and how I could put more musical ideas into the songs I was making. “California Girls” was a huge pop hit, but it had another piece of music at the beginning that was nothing like a pop song. And even though Summer Days (And Summer Nights!!) was further toward the pop side of things, there was a little symphony on there called “Summer Means New Love.” That was me on grand piano, and a whole string section. There were times I thought I was building on the foundation and times I thought I was tearing down what we had built and starting a whole new foundation.
What did that new foundation look like? It looked like it sounded. It was complicated, with many parts that stuck out in all directions, but if you looked at it from the right angle, you didn’t see anything sticking out at all. You just saw that it was beautiful.
I started building that foundation after the plane flight to Houston. I did it with Beach Boys Today!, which was a step forward, and Summer Days (And Summer Nights!!), which was another step. I did it with Pet Sounds, which was a great experience, and with SMiLE, which was such a bad experience in some ways that it has sometimes made it hard to talk about the great experience of Pet Sounds. That doesn’t mean I won’t talk about it. It just means that it’s a situation like the situation with my dad. I need to think a little more carefully about how to talk about it. The one case where it’s easy to talk about the new foundation I was building is “Good Vibrations.” There’s been lots written about how that song happened. People say that the record label and the band thought I was going too far into art music and that I needed to come back to hits. That’s probably true. But that’s not how the song got made.
How it got made was that I was high after smoking pot and sitting at the piano, relaxed, playing. Mike came through with the lyrics for me on this one. He heard me playing and singing the “Good, good, good vibrations” part. That excited him and he went from room to room talking out the idea of good vibrations—what it meant, that it was connected to the peace and love happening in San Francisco and everywhere else. When I started the song, I was thinking of it differently. I was thinking of how people sense instinctively if something is good news or bad news—sometimes when the telephone rings, you just know—and I was thinking of how my mom used to say that dogs could read a situation or a person immediately. I already had some lyrics—some that I wrote, some that Tony Asher wrote—but I was not happy with them. But as soon as Mike started rolling, I knew that there was something bigger in the lyric idea. It grew from there. Mike finally wrote the lyrics on his way to the studio in his car. It was the night we were cutting the lead vocals, and what he wrote fit perfectly.
There are so many moving pieces inside that song, so many musicians and ideas. Don Randi is on it, playing amazing keyboards as usual, though Larry Knechtel plays the organ parts. Carl plays one of the bass parts. There’s the theremin sound, like the one I heard at my uncle Wendell’s, though putting the theremin on the song was actually Carl’s idea. He wanted it. Maybe he remembered Uncle Wendell’s, too. So I called up the musicians union and they said they had a guy named Paul Tanner who played an electro-theremin, which isn’t the kind that makes half steps or notes. It just goes wooooo. That’s the one we used, obviously—wooooo. That’s the most famous part of the song.
But there are so many other things, too. There’s some Stephen Foster, in the “Gotta keep those lovin’ good vibrations happenin’ with her” part. I wouldn’t say he was an influence, exactly, but one of his melodies drifted into there. There’s the rhythm in the chorus, with those cellos playing triplets, kind of a nod to Phil Spector’s trip. He did something similar on “Da Doo Ron Ron” with pianos. There’s the lead vocal, which was supposed to be Dennis but ended up being Carl, except for the high notes on the verses, which I did. Dennis had a sore throat. “Good Vibrations” was like a musical autobiography of everything I had heard up until that time.
The most amazing thing was how many places it went, not just musically but actually. I wrote it all at the piano but then picked different studios to record different parts. The verses were done at Gold Star. The backup for the chorus was done at Western. And then there’s a section in the middle, the “Ah, my, my, what elation,” that was done at Sunset Sound. That’s another reason I say that it was a musical autobiography, the way we passed back through all those other studios we used when we were young. This is your life. These are the sounds you made. Here they are, all in one song. Assembling the whole song was really something. I didn’t know what I was in for. I didn’t know until I got into it, and then I got so far into it that I got lost in it. There are more than eighty hours of tape if you add up all the parts and all the takes. And I didn’t even play on the tracks. I sang. I directed. I wrote. I produced. The whole thing took about seven months, and the cost was gigantic, more than fifty thousand dollars. At the time, a Cadillac DeVille cost around five thousand.
But it worked. I knew we had it the night we cut the vocal at RCA Victor. The guys and I looked at each other and we just knew: number one song. When I finished the final mix, everyone was stunned. “I just can’t believe this record,” Carl said. Or maybe it was Mike. It was both of them. It was all of them. They all said it. I couldn’t believe it either. My engineer was blown away. It was one of the greatest moments of my life. It’s hard to say that one song is the top floor of the building you’re trying to build. “California Girls” is near the top. “Caroline, No” is near the top. “The Warmth of the Sun” is near the top. They might be as high as anything else. But nothing’s higher than “Good Vibrations.” It gives people so much happiness and probably also will.
Todd Rundgren did a version of it about ten years after we made it where he tried to re-create the song exactly, all the instruments and all the voices, and he did a great job. He came real close. For years, because I wasn’t touring, I couldn’t play it live. That was a loss. That was something missing. In 1999 when I started going back onstage with the Wondermints, one of the most fun things was to play “Good Vibrations.” We liked to stretch it out. At the Roxy, we made it last for more than six minutes. Any minute playing “Good Vibrations” is a minute that I feel spiritually whole. I hope that any minute hearing it is the same.