The Brian Wilson Legacy: Pet Sounds vs. Everything Else

The Beach Boys mean kitsch to most. That’s not an improper point of view to have. Songs like “Surfer Girl” and “409” are so pervasive in Western culture as to have made the group, even looking back at the quartet in its prime, a parody of early ‘60s rock music. By the middle portion of that decade, though, Brian Wilson and his assortment of brothers, friends and cousins were hailed as the vanguard of pop music. Mounting personal problems, occasional drug use and being incapable of dealing with fame, Brian Wilson sat out for a few years as his band continued to tour with various replacements in tow.

The time that Wilson spent out of the spotlight gave fans and the press ample time to speculate about what was actually going on. Over inflated accounts of his drug use – specifically LSD – were rampant as stories even persist today. It’s become a part of his legacy, a part of what supposedly, led Wilson to write and produce some good music. By the time Pet Sounds was released in 1966, Wilson and company were somehow both a popular success as well as being experimental. Today, most of the album’s melodies sound like songs primed for children, but behind each keyboard line and guitar chord is a bevy of supplemental production noise, whistling and more than enough Theremin to sate any fan.

After releasing the touted and incredibly catchy Pet Sounds, Wilson re-entered the studio prepared with a few songs that were to be fleshed out by band mates and production embellishments. It’s during 1967 that Wilson became more and more detached from normalcy.

In a heated race with the Beatles, which released Rubber Soul and Revolver consecutively in ’65 and ’66, to come up with the next big thing, Wilson strained himself to the point of exhaustion. And despite the follow up to Pet Sounds being due to Capitol Records, the composer and keyboardist continued to work and rework compositions.

The process dragged on for months with a number of songs having upwards of three versions or mixes. Wilson’s detractors, unfortunately, chalked it up to mental problems and drug abuse. What resulted, though, was an album called Smile, which wasn’t properly released until 1990. Bootlegged versions cropped up during the intervening time and raised the album to mythical status. Regardless of the recent re-recording of the album and Wilson’s tour that followed, it’s the original, version of the disc that should define the man’s career. The album is an odd mixture of sounds, but an original one and one unmatched even by the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967).

Subsequent to getting out of bed and rejoining society, Wilson and the Beach Boys released a spate of ‘70s classics. Each album has to jostle for position with Pet Sounds taking the lion’s share of acclaim, but efforts like Sunflower (1970) and Surf’s Up! (1971) served to expound the writing talents of not just Brian, but all Wilsons involved.

More fully incorporating Denis and Carl Wilson into the song writing process produced a brief early ‘70s renaissance for the Beach Boys. The albums didn’t do terrifically well in the market place and even today radio stations doggedly play selections from earlier periods in the ensemble’s catalog. That proclivity only makes the original vinyl albums easy to track down. A few of discs from this transitional portion of the Beach Boys catalog still fetch hefty sums, but it’s relatively easy to track down the 1973 album Holland for just a buck.