Porpoise songs
etween December 1965 and April 1966, while working on what would become Pet Sounds, Brian Wilson always took time out to watch Flipper. A hugely popular television series featuring a domesticated, crime-preventing dolphin that communicated through body language and sound, Flipper got Brian right in the gut. According to Tony Asher, the advertising jingle writer hauled in to work on lyrics for the project, his creative partner would lap up Flipper’s weekly wordless exploits with tears in his eyes. It had been a difficult 12 months for Brian Wilson. On December 23, 1964, little more than two weeks after marrying his teenage sweetheart Marilyn Rovell, he suffered a mid-air nervous breakdown that prompted his withdrawal from live performances. The biggest, most talented and senior Beach Boy, Brian was also the most hardworking, writing, arranging and producing the songs that, by late 1965, confirmed The Beach Boys as the USA’s biggest rivals to The Beatles. Hearing The Beatles’ latest, Rubber Soul, in December, was a game-changer. “It was the first album I listened to where every song was a gas,” Brian explained later. He knew that pop was changing fast, that his work was only just beginning. By mid-January, with the rest of the group selling The Beach Boys’ effervescent brand of sun, surf and girls to eager audiences in the Far East, Brian began to venture out from his new luxury home in the Hollywood Hills to start recording his masterpiece. More than ever a prisoner of his own ambition, Wilson picked up the pop-as-art baton and ran with it. Unlike The Beatles, The Byrds and Bob Dylan, who all thrived by feeding off each other, he took off in a different direction entirely. When Pet Sounds appeared in May, one US magazine ran a piece that asked: “The most progressive pop album ever? Or as sickly as peanut butter?” It wasn’t jangling folk rock, that much was certain. Beach Boys frontman Mike Love also knew what it wasn’t. On the group’s return from Japan, he complained that his cousin had “fucked with the formula”. Love disliked the prospect of singing one song, Hang On To Your Ego, so much that Brian rewrote it as I Know There’s An Answer. With the
Bmaterial roughly divided between songs of personal development and the vicissitudes of love, doubt lay at the core of everything. Years later, Brian Wilson insisted he had a halo over his head during the making of Pet Sounds. Marilyn remembers it differently, insisting that her 23-year-old husband seemed “tortured” by the project. “I experimented with sounds that would make the listener feel loved,” Brian explained in 1990. But as this latest release confirms so comprehensively, his complete immersion in oceans of healing sound, draping intricate, cathedralised voices over vast, weightless-sounding instrumental backings, was a blessing that would never come easy. It would take dozens of musicians, 27 separate recording sessions, multiple takes of all 13 songs and a lifetime’s obsession with sound ignited by hearing Gershwin’s Rhapsody In Blue at the age of two for Brian Wilson to emerge with the 36 minutes of music that constitutes Pet Sounds. If no record has ever made the sense of being alone in the world seem so comforting, that’s because Pet Sounds is Brian Wilson’s extended love letter to music and melody, his higher power, his raison d’•tre. Like dolphins, whose hearing is up to 10 times more acute than the average human being’s, Brian was able to hear frequencies inaudible to other humans. That’s why, despite his partial deafness in his right ear (which made working in mono a virtual necessity), Mike Love would call him “dog ears”. Now, thanks to the survival of well-preserved masters, and the miracle of modern mastering, those of us with more orthodox hearing will fall in love with Pet Sounds all over again. While much on this 4-CD/Blu-ray Collectors Edition was initially unearthed for 1997’s The Pet Sounds Sessions box set, the intervening two decades has seen a considerable upgrade in clarity, exemplified here by a fifth Blu-ray disc that presents Pet Sounds in mono, stereo and instrumental formats in 5.1 Surround Sound. If that brings us closer to the album widely regarded as rock’s first and finest shot at longevity, the 35 tracks that constitute the Pet Sounds Sessions part of the set takes us right into the heart of Brian Wilson’s methodology. Some of the dialogue – “Brian, I cannot hack this without your help,” says Al Jardine as he struggles through I Know There’s An Answer – is priceless. And while at one point Brian asks for a horse to be delivered to the studio, we are left with the overriding impression of a composer in full charge of his faculties, and determined that what’s in his head ends up on magnetic tape. Fifty years on, Pet Sounds still stands up as one of pop’s most remarkable achievements. Knowing that those are not harps but ethereal guitars on the intro to Wouldn’t It Be Nice, that Brian originally conceived Caroline No to play at a slower tempo, that Marilyn Wilson made a cameo on I Just Wasn’t Made For These Times, might be ephemeral in the scheme of things. But given that it’s the detail, as much as the wider canvas, that makes Pet Sounds what it is, this definitive edition (at least until the next time), complete with instrumental and vocal-only takes, 11 previously unreleased live versions and working versions of Good Vibrations, more than justifies its existence.