Song of the Week #6 – “God Only Knows” by The Beach Boys
There has, to date, never been an album like The Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds (1966). This is a bold claim to make, I know, but it is not one I would make if I did not really believe it. It is a unique album, entirely in a league of its own. Indeed, there are other albums that use similar stylistic flourishes, but no album has ever caught lightning in a bottle quite like Pet Sounds. Pet Sounds is the first mature album in the Beach Boys’ extensive catalogue, and it is by far their most popular and highly-regarded album, and it is not hard to see why – for no album has ever captured the joys, fears, and sadnesses of youth quite like Pet Sounds.
The Beach Boys recorded Pet Sounds at a time when the teenager was coming to dominate and rule over popular culture. In the wake of Elvis and the Beatles, the teenage girl had become the de facto market force in music. And riding this wave, aptly, had been The Beach Boys, consisting of brothers Brian, Carl and Dennis Wilson, their cousin Mike Love, and family friends Al Jardine and David Marks, all watched over and managed by the Wilson patriarch, Murry Wilson. It was during Murry’s tenure as band manager that The Beach Boys cemented their reputation as a surf band, part of the surf rock explosion, and popular largely with teenagers and 20-somethings who were part of the craze.
Murry’s tenure would last until 1964, when he was ousted by his son Brian – largely due to Murry’s allegedly abusive treatment of his sons, his punishing touring schedule, and his insistence that the band stick to songs about partying and the beach. Brian, however, had loftier ambitions – the counterculture of the 60s, as with many of his contemporaries, got to him, and he felt that he needed to produce work of real artistic merit. After the release of Today! (1965) and with several albums under their belt, The Beach Boys, newly under the helm of Brian Wilson, began work on their newest project: The album that would become Pet Sounds.
Pet Sounds was a wildly different record from its predecessors in many ways: First and foremost, it dropped the beach theming that had been a constant with The Beach Boys’ output almost completely, with the exception of the song “Sloop John B.”, a cover of an old Jamaican folk song. The rest of the album was about the realities of youth, with many of the songs written by the twenty-one-year-old Brian. The lyrics are often profoundly frank and confessional, oftentimes brimming with angst that is all too recognisable to anyone that has ever been a teenager. In the song titled “I Just Wasn’t Made For These Times”, the singer laments his feelings of isolation, lethargy and disconnection from the world around him, despite seemingly having a lot going for him. The lyrics are perhaps a bit egocentric – for example, the singer laments “They say I got brains, but they ain’t doing me no good / I wish they could”, but then can’t we all recall times we exceeded expectations and felt the need to chase success, even when it was making us miserable? The album’s lyricism is so full of confessional, angsty, self-doubting lyrics that many music scholars consider it to be prototypical emo.
Pet Sounds differed from its predecessors in another way, in that it made greater use of Brian Wilson’s large team of session musicians known as the “Wrecking Crew”, in order to create vast walls of sound that would come through on the AM radios and low-fidelity audio reproduction equipment of the time, to the point that almost none of the actual Beach Boys are heard playing an instrument on the album, and their voices are also greatly reduced, to the point that Pet Sounds at times almost feels like a Brian Wilson solo album. Yet, it is those times where the harmonies – the Beach Boys’ most famous trait and by far their strongest suit musically – come through that the album achieves a new level of transcendent beauty.
The most famous song on the album is, by far and away, “God Only Knows”, a sincere and frank expression of love that rises above most love songs in that it does away entirely with romanticism and overwrought poetics – in my review of Gang of Four’s “Natural’s Not In It” from Entertainment! (1979) I talked briefly about how Entertainment! features a song called “Anthrax” in which love songs are discussed as being idealised and marketised products. “God Only Knows” is perhaps an example of how to do a love song right.
“God Only Knows” is an honest – a heartbreakingly, brutally honest – confession of love. Unlike many love songs, in which love is held up as an immortal, everlasting, happily-ever-after ideal, “God Only Knows” is very frank in its depiction of love as being mutable, ever-changing, and oftentimes fickle and waning. “If you should ever leave me,” sings Carl Wilson, “Though life would still go on, believe me / The world could show nothing to me / So what good would living do me?” Brian Wilson and Tony Asher’s lyrics subvert the tired cliché of saying that the singer could not live without his partner, by admitting that he could – of course he could – but that there would be no point in continuing to live, all the same.
Perhaps most startlingly, “God Only Knows” is a very short song, consisting of only two stanzas and a very short refrain. Yet its beauty and honesty carries it. It is helped by lovely instrumentation, featuring damn near an entire orchestra on backing, making its melody instantly recognisable. “God Only Knows” is simultaneously joyful and sorrowful, both an exaltation of how wonderful it is to love and to be loved, while also being regretful and disappointed that love, as with all things in this world, is a transient and often ephemeral thing, and that to love a person is to accept that change is an inevitability. It is all too human to be desperate to cling to the present while also being painfully aware of the future that awaits oneself. We can either despair or accept it. There are no alternatives.
Pet Sounds was perhaps the pinnacle of The Beach Boys’ musical career. The follow-up album, SMiLE (1967), was beset with problems. Brian Wilson’s mental health had already begun worsening in 1964 when he suffered a panic attack on a plane. By 1966, while recording Pet Sounds, Brian had become a heavy user of marijuana, LSD and amphetamines, which helped contribute to his creative process, but also exacerbated the downward spiral of his already deteriorating mental health. This culminated when, during the sessions for SMiLE, Brian had a complete nervous breakdown (in one infamous incident, he became convinced that a song called “The Elements – Fire” or “Mrs O’Leary’s Cow” had caused a fire down the road from the studio and ordered the tapes burned – his pleas, thankfully, went ignored), and became a recluse. While he has since toured with his old bandmates, he is clearly not the same man he once was.
As for The Beach Boys themselves, they never quite reached the heights of Pet Sounds ever again. While Smiley Smile (1967), the hastily-cobbled-together replacement for SMiLE in a desperate attempt to salvage something from the SMiLE session recordings, and Wild Honey (1968) are perfectly listenable albums – the latter because it is a white band doing a soul album before that became “cool” – neither are as lyrically complex or as endlessly replayable as Pet Sounds. The band attempted to continue making “mature” and “progressive” music in the 70s, including Sunshine (1970) and Surf’s Up (1971), both using material from SMiLE, but without Brian’s influence, they soon returned to producing radio-friendly surf-pop, which had been a long-standing desire of Mike Love’s, borne of his frustration with Brian’s more progressive and artistic ambitions during the recording of Pet Sounds. Most of their work since has been, for better or for worse, a return to what the band is best known for – carefree songs about the beach.
Pet Sounds remains The Beach Boys’ crowning achievement, perhaps the greatest American album of the 1960s. It is not an underrated album by any means, of course – it is a very widely known and appreciated album, so I will not deign to make such a claim. However, the album seems to slip under the radar of many people, perhaps because The Beach Boys are associated, in some ways unfairly, with whining falsettos and with songs like “Surfin’ USA” and “Kokomo”. Many people dismiss the album outright. I, myself, dismissed the album on a first listen as “bubblegum pop”. Pet Sounds, however, rewards multiple listens. The song “Let’s Go Away for Awhile” perfectly encapsulates this: Pet Sounds allows half an hour of escape from the world. And in these times we’re living in, perhaps that’s what we all desperately need.