The Genius Behind the Beach Boys
Monday Music Club with Will Anderson
This episode explores the profound musical legacy and personal struggles of Brian Wilson, the mastermind behind the Beach Boys. Host Will An
Key takeaways
- Brian Wilson utilized a revolutionary modular recording style for 'Good Vibrations,' piecing together disparate musical motifs.
- The production of 'Pet Sounds' was heavily influenced by Phil Spector's 'Wall of Sound' technique.
Main topics
- The creation of Pet Sounds
- The modular production of Good Vibrations
Notable quotes
Brian was a genius musician, but an amateur human being.
Conclusion
A poignant look at how unparalleled musical vision can coexist with de
Transcript preview
Speaker 2 (0:00) Support for Monday Music Club comes from Sonos. There's no denying that an amazing sound system can elevate a song's emotional impact. Sonos lets you sink into a song and hear it the way it was meant to be heard. Sonos is a holistic sound system with speakers and tech that work together and bring you sound throughout your home. Keep an eye or an ear out for a segment later in the episode where I'll show you how I use my Sonos Adventure Set to elevate all the audio I listen to in my home and on the go. Visit Sonos.com and build your system. Sonos. Love the sound. Feel the system. Speaker 1 (0:35) Megan Rapinoe here. This week on Why Are You Like This, I am talking with comedian Amber Ruffin. We dig into all the twists and the turns of her journey from losing the White House Correspondents Dinner and missing out on SNL to becoming a writer for Seth Meyers and getting her own Peacock TV show. Plus, I'm giving you a behind-the-curtain look on Rebecca Hunt's documentary about me. Check out the latest episode of Why Are You Like This wherever you get podcasts and on YouTube. Speaker 2 (1:07) Somewhere in the depths of Western Recorders, a studio in the heart of Hollywood on Sunset Boulevard, Brian Wilson and the Beach Boys are singing into a microphone. It's the kind of room you can mistake for a doctor's office. There are pegboard walls, fluorescent lights overhead, but gathered around in a circle are the five boys that had just burst onto the scene only four years earlier, singing their songs about surfing and California and girls. But this song is different. Sure, it's got the usual references to the beach and a positive outlook on life, but the music the band members are hearing in their headphones is unlike anything they've heard before. Cellos keep time along with the drums. Horns and woodwinds are interplaying along the edge of intricate melody lines that seem like they could careen off the tracks into chaos at any moment. The percussion is loud. The drums are monstrous. And as abruptly as one section ends, another one with a completely different feel begins. It's a patchwork of musical ideas that all seem like they begin and end with no rhyme or reason. Some of the guys in the Beach Boys are confused. Others don't like it. But there's one man in the circle who knows exactly what he's doing. He knows this song is special, as weird as it is, and he's right. The song they're recording would go on to be a number one hit. It would sell over three million copies and become an all-time classic of the American songbook in the process. The man running the show in that recording studio is Brian Wilson, and the song the Beach Boys are recording is Good Vibrations. That song, along with the album that preceded it, Pet Sounds, would be the peak of Brian's creative powers. It brought him both critical acclaim and crippling anxiety as he tried to follow it up with another album. With the help of David Leaf, writer of the book Smile, The Rise, Fall, and Resurrection of Brian Wilson, this episode will dive into just that. the genius and the tragedy that is the man himself, Brian Wilson. I'm Will Anderson, and this is the Monday Music Club. Speaker 2 (3:22) One of my first early memories is listening to the Beach Boys. They were one of the first bands that I was obsessed with. But I gotta be really honest, I didn't know much about the personal lives of the Beach Boys or the drama that surrounded them or what went into making an album like Pet Sounds for Brian Wilson. But it is undeniable how good he was. I guess I just didn't realize at the time that I first started listening to them how much he was the driving force of the Beach Boys. I'm really excited to dive into this. He is one of the most fascinating characters in rock and roll. And I think in order to understand him at the time that he started making Pet Sounds, you really have to understand where the Beach Boys were in those early years, because it was like a rocket ship how fast they took off the United States. Speaker 2 (4:12) So the Beach Boys were formed in Hawthorne, California in 1961. And of course, there were five main members, Brian, Dennis, and Carl Wilson, who were the brothers, and their cousin, Mike Love, who was also, I guess, kind of the lead singer. He was a lyricist with Brian. He was definitely kind of the secondary main member, if that makes sense. And their buddy, Al Jardine, who was also... just an incredible voice. But they were managed by Brian and the brother's father, Murray Wilson, who was a failed songwriter and kind of seemed like a terrible human in his own right. He was abusive towards his sons, especially Brian, and he was really, really hard on them. Their mother was their main source of refuge, but their father, it seemed like Brian and the rest of the guys were just this vehicle for him to achieve his dreams that he never got to achieve himself. And it was really hard on Brian because Brian was the songwriter. He was kind of the creative force behind it all. But his father was really the one who was driving the business side of all of it. The Beach Boys really got going when they released their 1962 record, Surfing Safari, because from there on out, it was like a rocket ship. They had a streak of 16 consecutive top 40 singles. And Brian was really the creative force, both in the studio and on stage. He was an intensely musical kid. He learned how to record with a reel-to-reel tape recorder he had received on his 16th birthday in 1958. And it was pretty much his ship and the other guys were along for the ride. Even though people could argue otherwise, I genuinely believe that the Beach Boys would not have been the Beach Boys at the beginning, especially without Brian Wilson. Speaker 2 (5:48) So in 1964, as the Beach Boys were the biggest band in America, Brian married a 16-year-old named Marilyn Rovell on December 7th. And right after that, he left for a short tour of the Southwest. They were on a plane, and Brian got paranoid that she was flirting with Mike Love. And he had a nervous breakdown on the plane. He started having panic attacks. He made it through the flight. But basically, when they got home, the band called his mom, Audrey Wilson. and asked her to meet them at the airport to pick up Brian. The Beach Boys finished the tour without him, but he convalesced at home with his mother. And there were two big changes at this time that completely revamped how the Beach Boys were going to work. In 1964, the group had fired Murray Wilson, their dad, as their manager. It had gotten too much, and they decided that they needed to be self-managed for a while as well. And then in mid-1965... Brian decided he was no longer going to tour with the band, and he only wanted to be in the studio making music and writing music. Author David Leaf has spent decades writing about Brian and the Beach Boys, and he says the road was never where Brian belonged. Speaker 3 (6:57) I think that Brian never was happy performing live, ever, in the Beach Boys era of, we're talking about 62 to 64. The sound was lousy. There were no onstage monitors. He only had one good ear. So the road was, in that time, not a place that he was happy. And so eventually he kind of put his foot down and said, I'm not going to do this anymore. Speaker 2 (7:24) Two things you should know about Brian in the studio. First, Brian idolized and felt a keen competition with Phil Spector, who was the biggest producer in Hollywood at that time. who had his own specific sound that people tried to emulate called the wall of sound, he saw Phil as the bar to clear in order to be considered a great producer. But also Brian was a perfectionist. He knew what he wanted to hear in his head and he wouldn't be satisfied until he heard it in the studio coming from the musicians that he was working with. In the fall of 1965, the Beach Boys released The Little Girl I Once Knew as a single. It was a little bit more experimental than their previous pop songs. It was Brian kind of touching his toes into the water, seeing what he could get away with, but it only got to number 20. And Capitol, of course, Beach Boys being their cash cow at that time, wanted another Beach Boys-esque album. So they recorded an album called The Beach Boys Party, with an exclamation point. They basically recorded it in one room. They literally had girls hanging around making party noises. But they did have a hit song with it. Barbara Ann, which was initially a cover that they kind of did as a joke, went to number three and was a huge hit in England. But the more experimental little girl that Brian loved was overshadowed by this joke song, Barbara Ann. That's the conundrum Brian was dealing with. The more he wanted to push the Beach Boys forward, the more the world seemed to reward them for sounding exactly like the old Beach Boys. So he decided the next record wasn't just going to be another hit. He wanted to make something undeniable. He