BEACH BOY TOURS ON— CONFIDENTIAL
BRIAN WILSON IS wrapping up his “Pet Sounds” tour in Atlantic City this month — but he isn’t disappearing into seclusion when it’s over. Once the tour concludes at the Golden Nugget Casino on Sept. 30 — 51 years after the classic Beach Boys album came out — he’s heading back into the recording studio to mix old and new. “Our plan is to write a rock and roll album, so if it’s going to be covers, we’re going to be doing Chuck Berry stuff and some of Phil Spector’s stuff — and some original stuff,” Wilson (photo inset) told the Daily News. Music fans who go to see Wilson’s 12-piece band re-create “Pet Sounds” at the Golden Nugget should also be familiar with the Beatles’ “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” album, which came out months later and has been compared to it a million times in the half-century since. The two albums
will always be linked historically. But Wilson says they’re very different masterpieces.
“‘Pet Sounds’ is more an emotional experience and ‘Sgt. Pepper’s’ is more uplifting,” he says. Amazingly, Wilson, 75, says he doesn’t know how the Beatles felt about comparisons between the two.
“We have never discussed, comparing the two, but we’ve talked,” he said.
When asked if he’d like to have that talk with Paul
McCartney and Ringo Starr, the two remaining Beatles, he laughed.
“Nah,” Wilson said. One song he likes to discuss is the Beach Boys classic “California Girls,” which he calls the best song he’s written. And he loved the way David Lee
Roth covered it in 1988. “It blew me away!” he said. “I loved (the lyric) ‘I dig girls’ — the way he did it,” he added.
Wilson founded the Beach Boys in 1961, but hasn’t kept up with the group that has only longtime members Mike Love and Bruce Johnston on its roster. “I haven’t seen their concerts, but I’m sure they’re good,” he said.