Pet Sounds: The Story of Two Bands
How the ‘inside world’ shaped The Beach Boys’ classic
Pet Sounds is the story of two bands, each of whom is the same band. It’s also the story of two bands who were not the same band, one being from the sunny West Coast of America, the other from the rainy North West of England. Because nothing is ever straightforward with The Beach Boys.
Formed in the early 1960s, The Beach Boys were schizophrenic right from the start. As a bad biopic might say (and I’m pretty sure one actually did), it’s like Brian Wilson – songwriter, visionary, confused human being – sat down next to Mike Love – cousin, blowhard, lyricist – and said, “You know, Mike, if we could only combine the vocal harmonies of The Four Freshmen with the rock ’n’ roll guitar sound of Chuck Berry, we could have ourselves a hit record.” And that of course is what happened, with the current hip trends of young Californians (cars, girls, surfing), thrown in.
Early Beach Boys records were whiter than the sand the brothers posed on, wearing their Pendleton shirts and holding a surfboard the right way round, blonder than the boys’ hair and only slightly less anodyne than Pat Boone and the new castrators of pop – but they were also brilliant. The Boys’ harmonising talent did much more than sweeten their sound (compare the use of strings by their contemporaries), it added a strange new sound, at once joyful and thrilling. Listen to ‘Fun, Fun, Fun’ and the sheer glee as The Beach Boys transform a corny lyric about driving into a hot dog stand into an cartoon explosion of pleasure. Thrill to ‘Surfin’ U.S.A.’ with its financial debt to Chuck Berry and the most surreal opening line of all time – “If everybody had an ocean…”
In a few very short years The Beach Boys had defined the sound of young California – sunshine, freedom, youth, and innocent pleasure – and invented a music that managed to be both completely new and exciting but also unchallenging and conformist. This was an endless summer ™ where you picked your girl up at eight and didn’t bring her home late, where you raced cars or surfed waves but you never got high or stoned and you certainly never went too far. How long it would last you didn’t know, but for now, life was a contained, perfect party.
As it turned out, this life had a crack in it. And that crack was nothing to do with the outside world, but rather the inside world: the emptiness you felt inside, when the sun went down and your girl had gone home. All that was inside The Beach Boys and inside Brian Wilson and inside ‘In My Room’, Wilson’s first great introspective song. Co-written with Gary Usher, its beautiful harmonies and haunting melody are matched by a lyric all about sanctuary and solitude and the idea that sometimes the world is too much and you need to get away from it. It was released, perhaps ironically, as the b-side of 1963’s ‘Be True To Your School’.
There was in existence one Beach Boys but now a second Beach Boys was growing alongside the first; and this Beach Boys wasn’t a fun-time beach party group but something darker, more melancholy and questioning. And it was this Beach Boys – a reflection of the interior world of Brian Wilson rather than, say, Mike Love – that was coming to the fore. Naturally, this being the early-to-mid ‘60s, there was a lot of pressure on Brian to concentrate on the fun Boys – pressure from his appalling father Murry Wilson, pressure from Capitol Records, who knew what sold, and pressure from Mike Love, who never left a boat unrocked. The Beach Boys had found a formula and it worked, so why change it?
Brian Wilson knew the answer to that. There was much more inside him than Chuck Berry riffs and songs about (increasingly dated) teen themes. And while California in the mid-60s was hardly middle America, the times were changing, with or without an a-, and so was music. The Beach Boys’ sound had been remade by harmonic pop acts as diverse as The Association and The Byrds, the latter being famous for their sweetening of Bob Dylan songs. And there was another band, too: the biggest band in the world. The Beatles had taken over the planet, colonising every aspect of music, and they brought to America not just their love of black American pop and a fresh rebelliousness, but a sense that a pop album was more than just some singles and filler, but a place to experiment, a laboratory of sound. Records like A Hard Day’s Night had already raised the bar for songwriting brilliance but songs like ‘I Feel Fine’ and ‘Paperback Writer’ and albums like Rubber Soulsuggested new possibilities in the studio.
All this was a spur to Brian to move the Beach Boys sound into a more modern mode. He could hear in his mind new sounds, new ways of combining the skills Phil Spector had brought to studio pop with the more mature lyric-writing skills of The Beatles: but his desire to experiment, coupled with melancholy words by his current collaborator, jingle writer Tony Asher, clashed with the commercial demands of The Beach Boys and their label.
Nevertheless, freed from touring in a way prefiguring The Beatles’ later refusal to work outside a studio, in 1965 Wilson began putting together with Asher a set of songs that reflected both his interest in orchestral pop and his more introspective view of the world. The result, despite the best efforts of Capitol Records, was the astonishing Pet Sounds, an album that was both a response to The Beatles’ developing genius and also a farewell to the old Beach Boys of surf, sun and repetition fame.
Pet Sounds has acquired, rightly, all the standard acclaim. After its initial commercial reception (the label only really liked ‘Sloop John B’), its status has grown over the years and for many it’s one of the greatest records ever made. This new release (offering mono and stereo mixes as well as the usual remasters) brings nothing particularly new to the table, but does at least allow us another chance to hear Pet Sounds with fresh ears. From the spring-fresh bounce of ‘Wouldn’t It Be Nice’ – a song full of deferred optimism to the strange dream of ‘Caroline, No’, this is a record crammed with new ideas and new sounds, a mixture of styles where Bacharach and Spector meet teen pop and adult lyrics. In ‘God Only Knows’, there’s a song which sounds like daybreak and romance all at once (and what an opening line…)
But there’s also doubt. ‘I Just Wasn’t Made For These Times’ opening lines are “I keep looking for a place to fit in” while ‘I Know There’s An Answer’s title goes on to say, “but I have to find it myself.” Tony Asher may have been the lyricist, but he later said he was just translating Brian’s worldview to the songs, and it shows: Wilson’s future is in this music, and its brilliance, but it’s also in these lyrics full of fear.
Pet Sounds is an astonishing record, one that turned out to be the last official Beach Boys release that came out the way it was intended: there were great moments to come, but nothing ever contained Brian Wilson’s pure vision like this album did.
Written by David Quantick. Pet Sounds is reissued on Friday 15 May 2026.
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The Beach Boys
Pet Sounds Sessions Highlights - Amazon exclusive 2LP yellow vinyl
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Tracklisting
Pet Sounds The Beach Boys / 60th anniversary editions
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LP1
Side One
- Wouldn’t It Be Nice (Vocals Only)
- You Still Believe In Me (Vocals Only)
- I’m Waiting For The Day (Vocals Only)
- Sloop John B. (Vocals Only)
- God Only Knows (Vocals Only)
- Here Today (Vocals Only)
- I Just Wasn’t Made For These Times (Vocals Only)
Side Two
- Wouldn’t It Be Nice (Stereo Track and Backing Vocals)
- Don’t Talk (Put Your Head On My Shoulder) (Brian Wilson’s Instrumental Demo)
- I’m Waiting For The Day (Mike Sings Lead)
- Sloop John B. (Carl Sings First Verse)
- God Only Knows (Sax Solo, Alternate Version)
- Hang On To Your Ego (Alternate Mix)
- Here Today (Alternate Version)
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LP2
Side One
- Wouldn’t It Be Nice (Highlights from Tracking Date)
- Trombone Dixie (Highlights from Tracking Date)
- Don’t Talk (Put Your Head On My Shoulder) (Vocal Snippet)
- Don’t Talk (Put Your Head On My Shoulder) (Vocals Only)
- That’s Not Me (Highlights from Tracking Date)
- Here Today (Stereo Backing Track)
Side Two
- I’m Waiting For The Day (Vocals Only)*
- Caroline, No (Stereo Mix, Original Speed)
- God Only Knows (Highlights from Tracking Date)
- Good Vibrations (Highlights from Tracking Date)
- Good Vibrations (Stereo Backing Track)
*Track is included on both LP1 and LP2
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LP1
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By david quantick
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