The Beach Boys - Pet Sounds (VINYL)
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Music CD Cover
Artist: The Beach BoysEdition: Vinyl
Audio: English (Unknown)
Format: Limited Edition
CD Release Date: 2008-09-02
Music Label: Capitol
Free Music Notes for Pet Sounds (VINYL)
Free Music Review: Surprise, Surprise! This review is about content, not medium
Hit: 5 Stars
.
At the time of this writing Amazon lists 365 reviews of PET SOUNDS under one or another CD release (and I won't be offended if you choose to read some of them!). I'm writing this review for the benefit of people who are contemplating the purchase of PET SOUNDS and are interested mostly in the music, not the source medium -- here, vinyl.
Many years later, a biography of the Beach Boys revealed that Brian Wilson thought he was in a competition of innovation against the Beatles. When PET SOUNDS was released in 1966, Brian Wilson, already prone to depression, fell into a depression when the critics gave it mostly slighting reviews -- and his depression intensified upon the 1967 release of the Beatles' SERGEANT PEPPER'S LONELY HEARTS CLUB BAND, a technically much more advanced LP and a critical darling. Perhaps Brian, as well as many critics, missed the point. True, PET SOUNDS wasn't an immediate critical success like the epochal SGT. PEPPERS'S, but IMHO both albums are significant and superlative and both incomparable . . . especially not to be compared with each other. PEPPER was one of the first concept albums; all but one of the tracks is performed not by the Beatles as themselves, but by their slightly fantastic alter ego, the psychedelically-dressed foursome whose full name is the album's name. In its mix of musical styles and idioms, it's a head trip, much enlivened by John Lennon's imagery and wordplay and Paul McCartney's juxtaposition of musical styles.
PET SOUNDS, on the other hand, is a heart trip largely consisting of Brian Wilson's *cri de coeur* of teenaged angst and longing. The curse of the intelligent adolescent: to be appalled at present circumstances and able to project that bleakness into the future, without having taken into account the hope provided by a more mature personality. It was definitely a departure from the group's "Fun, Fun, Fun" type of single earlier in the Sixties that had made AM hits and broken LP record sales. Most of PET SOUNDS' songs are personal, lyrical, and downbeat. Yet their haunting beauty stays in the mind (and inhabits the soul) much better than some other works of "classic rock" from the mid-Sixties.
Three of my favorites from PET SOUNDS:
(1) "Caroline, No" is a paean to lost love built around the repetition of "Caroline, No" at the end of each stanza of a song that builds in richness by exploring the devastated emotions of the lover. The song is a carefully worked-through exploration of relationship and self in which the singer (Brian Wilson) realizes that despite his emotions (like many of his songs, blending romantic yearning with dawning depression), any further contact with Caroline is going to be out of the question.
(2) Probably "God Only Knows" is the best remembered song from the original PET SOUNDS release, as well as the one that caught the bulk of critical praise. This is a simple love song and not quite about personal depression, more of the singer's coming to an existential awareness of how helpless he would be without his loved one ("God only knows how I'd live without you"). Try this: transcribe the song lyrics and read them as poetry. Also consider that Wilson believed in God so the title was no mere cliche to him. The plot of this song doesn't quite have him losing the girl, but clearly he has envisioned that future with anticipatory sorrow. IMHO "God Only Knows" just gets better and better with the passage of time.
(3) "Wouldn't It Be Nice?" is an ironic title. Brian Wilson shares credits for the lyrics with Tony Asher and Mike Love, but while the sentiment of frustated love is general to most pop songs, the lyrics still bespeak Brian Wilson. Warren Beatty wisely chose to play (and practically resurrect) the song over the closing credits of his movie SHAMPOO (1975) about a studly 1968 hairdresser who was anything but thwarted sexually yet, disillusioned by movie's end, could only conceive of the joy it would be to "wake up in the morning when the day is new" with his lover, an innocent pleasure he has fast-forwarded over while tumbling into bed with multiple women. "Wouldn't It Be Nice" is too complex and original to be a jingle, yet too conflicted to be a ballad. Partly personal and partly political, the song in its movement and complex tug-of-war emotions between a stifling present and a hopeful future is probably much closer to the "anthem" type of musical-comedy showstopper like the idealistic "Climb Ev'ry Mountain" than it is to an exuberant outburst like "Surfin' Safari."
Or perhaps, in an era that lionized "anti-heroes" on the screen, "Wouldn't It Be Nice?" is a type of "anti-anthem," since there's no resolution, no clean-cut road out like faith or self-determination; longing and frustration become more and more mixed during the song. As in "Caroline, No," repetition of the title at the end of each stanza is key. Here, "Wouldn't it be nice?" becomes progressively more cynical, sung with a jeering intonation at its last appearance. The Beach Boys, plural, employ their legendary close-harmony style to good effect but the "voice" is clearly that of one frustrated teen ("Wouldn't it be nice if we were older, then we wouldn't have to wait so long?"). He feels held back by society's laws, but his only recourse is to envision something better -- a quite unexpected coda adds to the pain by bursting in with: "You know it seems the more we talk about it, it only makes it worse to live without it, but let's talk about it." He's stuck in the present and legal majority seems impossibly far away. Compare this chagrin and resignation to another 1967 song, Janice Ian's "Society's Child," in which the singer has to accept her mother's kneejerk racism for now, but looks forward to a better future of action and autonomy (fueled, it is hinted, by anger if necessary).
"Would't It Be Nice" also seems to have the ability to speak to different people at different stages in their life. Those who have seen Michael Moore's ROGER AND ME will recall that it's the song (especially the sarcasm inherent in the repetition of the title) that pushed Moore's laid-off autoplant buddy over the edge from reigning-it-all-in to something like a nervous breakdown when the song unexpectedly came playing over the radio. I'm gay, and I find very plangent certain lyrics like "Wouldn't it be nice to live together in the kind of world where we belong?" Or, more recently, "We could be married, and then we'd be happy . . . oh, wouldn't it be nice?" (Yes it would, Senator.)
PET SOUNDS is anything but dance music. It won't make you happy. You might even want to stay away from playing it if you're feeling depressed. I think it is Brian Wilson's great gift to us that, troubled and depressed as he was, he pulled it together and did so much of the songwriting and singing, and all of the sound engineering for PET SOUNDS. By the way, my first album was a vinyl LP, although the retronym "vinyl" with LP hadn't yet come into use. I own another PET SOUNDS LP, shrink-wrapped and inviolate, but I play my CD.
A final and somewhat related note on sound quality: Anything you hear in PET SOUNDS that smacks of stereo has been added by sound engineers at some point after the album's initial release in 1966. Brian Wilson recorded the entire album in mono, which by then was practically unheard of. Years later, when an interviewer asked why, Wilson replied that his father had earlier boxed his ears over some misbehavior, causing one of them to rupture and bleed and make him deaf in that ear. He didn't think of stereo because he didn't hear in stereo. (There may be some redeeming feature in that Wilson used echo effects and natural reverb to perfection.) Regardless of what you play music on, though, don't let that keep you from this amazing work.
Pet Sounds (VINYL) Poster
180 Gram/Audiophile pressingOriginal printed sleeve
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