Original Members Recall a Classic

Once upon a time, “Pet Sounds” seemed like the runt of the Beach Boys‘ litter, at least on the record company ledger, if hardly by artistic reputation. But as the album turns 60 years old this weekend, it’s thought of less of a cult record, as it was considered for years or even decades after its release, than it is as a landmark work with virtual household-name recognition. Who doesn’t revisit this virtually symphonic song cycle about lonely adolescence without considering it one of the 10 best records ever made? Or, if you don’t, would you dare admit that in polite company?

The 60th anniversary of the May 16, 1966 release is being celebrated in multiple ways. For starters, there are fresh vinyl reissues of the original “Pet Sounds” album, in everything from the visually fun zoetrope picture-disc format to a far pricier, individually numbered “one step” edition aimed at the most serious audiophiles, along with more standardized choices that exist between those extremes. There is also the separate release on vinyl, CD and streaming formats of “The Pet Sounds Sessions Highlights,” breaking out vocal-only tracks or alternate takes that put a spotlight on what both the vocalizing Boys and the instrumental Wrecking Crew were up as they channeled music that still seems more divine than human-made, even when we’re hearing the evidence in stems.

Another way to celebrate: getting to talk with the individual surviving Beach Boys about the making and aftermath of a masterwork. This past week, a party was held at the (soon to officially reopen) Capitol Tower in Hollywood to commemorate the anniversary, with Mike Love, Al Jardine and Bruce Johnston in attendance to accept 60 years’ worth of good will on behalf of themselves and the three Wilson brothers who are no longer with us. Green-and-yellow cake was shared along with champagne, extended family members came to toast, and a “Pet Sounds” flag was erected over the building at Hollywood & Vine.

Variety spoke with Jardine, Johnston and Love at the reception and over subsequent days. We’ve combined excerpts from those separate interviews for the condensed and edited Q&A, below. As I talked with Jardine, he noted the presence of seagulls flying around outside the Hollywood landmark’s upper-story windows, a sign that maybe even the Pacific was offering its blessing on an album that just maybe was made for these times.

At the Capitol party, UMe president Bruce Resnikoff said “Pet Sounds” was the first album he ever bought, and, without wanting to insult any other artists he might work with, strongly implied he thought it was the best of all time. But clearly no one in the Capitol Tower in the ’60s was making those kinds of claims. Could you even have imagined a fete like this a few decades ago?

Mike Love: No way. I mean, I don’t think any modern artist thinks in terms of celebrating their album 60 years down the road. It’s pretty amazing. and I want to thank UMe and Capitol Records and Iconic [the Beach Boys’ current management] for getting this celebration together this year.

Al Jardine: It’s unbelievable. It’s just dawned on me that this is also the rebirth of the tower, so this is their way of celebrating the tower in a way, as they finish renovating. The last time we did anything like this was about 30 years ago, in ’96, when they brought a sand lot in.

Love: The promotion and marketing people back then didn’t know what to do with it because it was so different and so unique. It was completely thematic. The tracking was amazing, and the vocals were as well. And it was one of the first albums, I think, that really got people thinking about being more coherent and more thematic in their albums. You know, McCartney has said that “Pet Sounds” is his favorite album — “God Only Knows” is the perfect recording — and Sir Paul knows a thing or two about writing great records, that’s for sure. The Beatles with their “Sgt. Pepper’s” album and future albums as well got more serious about doing a comprehensive album. Whereas, before, a hit single record or two would give rise to the creating of an album to take advantage of the popularity of the 45s. This was the reverse. We wanted to create an album that was comprehensive in nature and then come out with it, but it was so different than our Top 40 records that led up to it, so it was a bit much for Capitol at the time to know what to do with it.

It’s just been certified double-platinum now, but it did not even go gold until the year 2000. Some say it would have been earlier if the label had submitted it earlier. But anyway, that is some delayed gratification, for a classic.

Bruce Johnston: What went gold while “Pet Sounds” should have been going gold was when I went to the dentist and had some fillings.

I think other albums came along that required the promotion money. Like, the bean counters probably loved the fact that the first volume of the Beach Boys’ greatest hits eventually sold three and a half million copies. After all, it is a business. But I look at it more as… the lack of the success that we had hoped for kind of slowed Brian down. You know? He was very disappointed in that.

Brian really was down afterward about how the album was received?

Love: He put so much into it, so much effort, that yes, he had to be depressed at the reception that Capitol Records gave it. Maybe not what John and Paul gave it overseas, but yeah, it’s not great when your record company doesn’t understand what to do with your newest product. So I’m certain he was not happy about the way they treated the album.

As most fans know, at the point in time “Pet Sounds” was being done, Brian had retired from the road, and he would stay home and write and then have material ready to record when everyone got back from tour. There had been so many albums in quick succession, too — three in 1965 alone. Do you remember whether this material felt seriously different, once you got back to L.A. to learn and record it, or whether you were just too busy to sense it feeling like a left turn?

Jardine: We had been in Japan and only had a day of rest or so before he asked us to come in and listen, and it was pretty monumental. We had to adjust our sights, but that’s what we always did. We’d come back from touring for three weeks or a month, and he’d have something new generally. He was always composing and coming up with ideas, and he wanted to share them with us. He missed the guys, you know? He missed us because we were his feedback. In this case, where “Pet Sounds” is concerned, he really didn’t seem to need the band to be around because he had the Wrecking Crew, of course, by then, but he was still really looking forward to our coming home. We were always very good in the studio. It was just a matter of turning us on to the music.

But the subject matter was melancholy. It wasn’t a fun, fun, fun album. It had a lot of deep, moving, romantic and soulful moments. And that took a while for us to get around.

Johnston: Hit-wise, I just thought, “Well, okay, what are the hits on this album? Probably ‘God Only Knows.’” Wrong! Great, great recording. “And ‘Wouldn’t It Be Nice’” — right. [“God Only Knows” was released as the B-side to “Wouldn’t It Be Nice,” but never issued as an A-side on its own. “Wouldn’t It Be Nice” peaked at No. 8 on the Hot 100.]

I just thought it was just like people wearing more formal, great-looking clothes, you know?

Love: We knew the production quality was higher overall, per song. Listening to the tracks that Brian did with the Wrecking Crew, the greatest musicians in town at that time, they were unbelievable. I listened and said, “How did he come up with that?” My mind was blown by the brilliance of the tracking. And then we went to work when we got back from touring on the vocals and worked our bums off on those vocals.

Some of them were easier — like, Carl Wilson sang lead on “God Only Knows,” and he sounded brilliant, and there weren’t a whole lot of harmonies to do with it, but they supported it. But something like “Wouldn’t It Be Nice,” we must have done 25 or 30 takes of one part to get it perfect. I thought it was perfect along the way, but Brian said, “No, do it again.” So he was a real taskmaster at that point in time. It’s just that when we did 22 takes of one section of “Wouldn’t It Be Nice,” I didn’t want to sit there and do the 23rd or 24th or 25th. That’s when I called him “dog ears.” I said, “You’re hearing the stuff that most human beings don’t or can’t.”

“God Only Knows” didn’t fit any classic Beach Boys formula.

Johnston: I love the whole album, but that song… Think of this: There are only 10 lines — two verses, five and five — of “God Only Knows,” and then the third verse was like when Peter Noone of Herman’s Hermits went, “Second verse, same as the first.” Brian just had five lines of lyrics. But the harmonies,  the arrangement, it was fabulous. At the end of the day, it got a little top-heavy with too many people on it, so we wound up singing it with just three parts, like Crosby, Stills and Nash, me, Brian and Carl.

“Pet Sounds” is a great title. You were inspired to come up with that, Mike, by hearing the sounds of Brian’s dogs that he was putting into the recording. And of course it’s a double entendre or maybe even triple entendre, when you think of all the applications. But not everyone thought as highly of the actual album cover. Wasn’t that the one thing Paul McCartney was kind of disparaging of?

Love: Well, we did have a conversation when we were India at Maharishi’s place, and he said, “Hey, Mike. You really should take more care in your album covers.” And I said, this is the guy who’s the mastermind of the “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” album cover, which is brilliant… and our photograph was taken at the San Diego Zoo. That became our album cover. But what I said to him was, “Well, Paul, you’re absolutely right. But we always felt it was more important what went in the sleeve, than the sleeve itself.”

Bruce, you are known for being the guy who actually first played the album for the Beatles… which supposedly had a big influence on what they did next.

Johnston: It’s true, and that was 60 years ago this week. A young guy and I were going out to dinner — Keith Moon from the Who — and we were told Lennon and McCartney were waiting for me upstairs in my suite, and they wanted to hear “Pet Sounds.” I happened to bring two monos with me, and back in those days, I had a record player in the room that came with the hotel in London. I played it for them twice, and they loved it. They dressed great. They were so polite and they just complimented us as a group on the singing. I was the only guy in the band there, for that playback for them. And later I heard that Paul used the vibe, if you will, of “Wouldn’t It Be Nice” for his harmonies for “Here, There and Everywhere” on the “Revolver” album.

You probably weren’t consciously thinking, “OK, the Beatles are gonna pick up a thing or two from what we’ve been doing.”

Johnston: I don’t think it’s that at all. I think we’re two equal bands, from parallel planets, at the same time, you know? It’s only 12 notes in a scale. I mean, it’s just how you arrange it.

Mike, you’ve been supportive of “Pet Sounds” over the years and certainly play a lot of that material live to this day. But there was a rumor that you said “don’t mess with the formula,” or something to that effect, when you heard how different what Brian was writing was. You’ve denied that.

Love: Well, it was simply not true. I never said that. But the funny thing about being in a group is, some people are disparaging of an individual member, when it takes a village, you know? The whole is greater than the sum of its parts. People have said that John Lennon is the Beatles, and, well, what’s up with Sir Paul, I’d like to know? Anyway, there was a tendency by some people to focus on a person and deify them and denigrate the others. And I was a victim of that too, to a small degree for a little bit of time.

I came up with the album title. And I went with Brian to Capitol Records to present it to our A&R person. And he simply told us, “Hey, this is great, you guys, but can’t you come up with something more like ‘California Girls’ or ‘I Get Around’ or that kind of thing?” We did come up with “Good Vibrations” a few months later, and that went to No. 1. But it took quite a while for “Pet Sounds” to get the recognition from the public. From the beginning, it was admired by the other recording acts.

This was not a “fun, fun, fun” album, as you said, yet you brought some of that in, Al, when you brought “Sloop John B” to Brian, and that ended up being added to the album. [Issued as a single two months before the release of “Pet Sounds,” “Sloop John B” was the most successful hit associated with the album, peaking at No. 3 on the Hot 100.]

Jardine: You’re right. That was from the very first day Brian and I decided to have a band. I said, “I wanna do a couple of folk songs.” And of course we got derailed really quickly by Dennis Wilson, who was our sex-symbol surfer, and then the Carl era, and then the other eras. And pretty soon I didn’t think we were ever going to do a folk song. But, I said, “Brian, let’s add a chord [to “The Wreck of the John B,” as it was previously known]. We’ve got one or two different chords… we can stretch out the harmonies. I think we can turn this folk song into a Beach Boys song.”

And thank you, Capitol Records, for having the Kingston Trio [who recorded “The Wreck of the John B” in 1958] on your label, because it really, really helped motivate me to have this great opportunity. A lot of their bands here were harmony bands. Not really rock ‘n’ roll, but more like the Four Preps doing “26 Miles Across the Sea” and all that stuff [“26 Miles (Santa Catalina)”]. They had the Four Freshmen, and then they came on with Beach Boys.

Is there a sleeper track on the album for you, Mike?

Love: Yeah. For years we’ve done “God Only Knows,” “Sloop John B” and “Wouldn’t It Be Nice” on our shows, but lately we’ve added “I’m Waiting for the Day.” So many people have said they’ve lost a love and it’s taken a while for them to be able to get back to believing in a relationship again, and that’s the whole premise of “I’m Waiting for the Day”: when you can love again. I think it’s a great song.

Speaking of beautiful songs, you were instrumental, Mike, in having “Hang On to Your Ego” turn into “I Know There’s an Answer.” [The original draft is included on the “Pet Sounds Sessions” collection.] You didn’t care for the original lyrics, right?

Love: Yeah. At the time, there was a lot of stuff going on with LSD, maybe not so much in the group, but all around, and I thought those lyrics were a bit drug-oriented, at the time, just because of the the hyperbole going on about drugs, in particular LSD. So yeah, I thought “I Know There’s an Answer” would be more upbeat without those connotations.

Let’s talk about future plans. Mike, you will be with the touring edition of the Beach Boys at the Hollywood Bowl this summer…

Love: It’s with the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra, and we have our symphonic (charts) that we can take with us to whatever place around the world. We’ve done it in Washington, D.C.; we’ve done it in London. so it’s pretty darn neat to hear some of these songs accompanied by an orchestra. I love hearing it that way, so it’ll be special, those three nights, the 2nd 3rd and 4th of July at the Bowl.

Al, you continue to play “Pet Sounds” material with your touring band, which mostly consists of Brian’s former touring band…

Jardine: I’ve been listening to the album again recently because we’re reimagining it now with some new singers and new players, since Brian’s gone, of course. So we have to bring it up to speed and, in a sense, relearn some of the phrasing, getting everybody on the same level. Some of the guys are gone — they’ve passed away from Brian’s band — but we still have the kernel. The nucleus is still there. And man, are they good.

Al, your focus with your touring band this past year has been more on the “The Beach Boys Love You” album from 1977, performing that in its entirety for the first time. And there was promotion around the great boxed set that came out earlier this year commemorating that album [“We Gotta Groove: The Brother Studio Years”].

Jardine: Wait till you hear it live.

Oh, we did see your tour this year…

Jardine: No, I mean the album we recorded live (of the Jardine band performing “Beach Boys Love You”). I just heard it the other day, and it’s a monster. So we’re gonna try to get it out there for Record Store Day (Black Friday), if we can just squeeze it under the deadline.

All right, we had no idea there’d been a live record made of the “Love You” material.

Jardine: It’s astounding. It makes the actual recording that we did then (in 1976-77) sound primitive. All the synth gear we have now is unbelievable, and it makes Brian’s compositional skills come across even brighter.

Bruce, your history with the band is an interesting one, timeline-wise. At the Capitol party, people were joking, still, about you being the “newcomer” in the group. You had come on in 1965, not so very long before “Pet Sounds” was recorded, although it was not your first album with the band. Still, you were relatively fresh out of a label gig.

Johnston: Well, I was an A&R man, back at Columbia Records. And Mike called me, because I knew everybody. He said, “Glen Campbell’s been sitting in, as you know, Bruce, but he’s not available, and Brian’s not available.” And I said, “I’ll make some calls.” I called 12 people and nobody was available, so I said, “Look, I’ll come down right now to New Orleans” — April 9, ’65 — “and I’ll just sit in on the two shows for the weekend.” And then when I went back home, they requested me back out again, and I realized that maybe I should be doing that instead of wearing a suit to the office.

I loved what I did up there at Columbia, but this was unique. I’d never stood up and sung harmony in my life. I mean, I could sing harmony. When Terry (Melcher) and I were producing recordings together, we’d do the four-part harmonies, between the two of us; it was easy. But I’d never been in a group that sang harmony, and great harmony. This just had more chords, more sophistication, and I learned quickly how to do group singing. So “Pet Sounds” was my third album that I recorded with Brian, and I loved the challenge of the chords, and it was wonderful.

It was recently announced that you were retiring from being a part of the current Beach Boys lineup led by Mike, as you had been for many, many years. What is in store for you?

Johnston: What am I doing? I’m surfing. And I’m finishing a really wonderful song. It’s so nice it scares me. I said, “Did I write that?” You know, I have a rusty Grammy for songwriting from years ago [for composing Barry Manilow’s hit “I Write the Songs”], so who knows what’ll happen.

I don’t think I want to be unpacking once a day and packing again the next day and unpacking. I don’t want to do that anymore. However, Mike, who’s my buddy, says, “You make sure you join us in some high-profile concerts, and please play with us at the Hollywood Bowl.” It’s symphonic, which is great. And I wrote the overture.

So we’ll hear that at the Bowl. What is the overture like?

Johnston: It’s called “The Beach.” Well, I wrote it 25 years ago, and we added it to our symphonic concerts. There’s 14 songs in five minutes. And no one told me what to do or what I couldn’t do. So I thought, “God, there’s this climbing up part” — “da, da, da, da, da, da, da,” from the song “Friends” — “I’ll put that in.” I did all kinds of stuff that I liked.

But there’s nothing wrong. I don’t need time off. I need time to get back to work. I have stuff I have to do that I know I can do now, while I’m still healthy. I’m gonna finish my writing career. And I can surf more. I have no interest in being an artist. My kids are out of grad school — some of them are married now — and I do have a little more time to see them. And I’ll probably come out to some of the Beach Boys shows, and it’ll be all right.

So all these years we heard about how there really weren’t actually very many surfers in the Beach Boys. But with you, it wasn’t casting against type. You were a surfer then and you’re still at it. How often do you go now?

Johnston: About three days a week. I live right at my surf spot in Santa Barbara.