Review: 'The Beach Boys Pet Sounds: Classic Albums' Blu-ray

Next year the BBC’s Classic Albums documentary series turns 20, and it’s kind of amazing that the album many would rate as the definitive classic album has taken so long to be featured. Turning fifty this year, Pet Sounds has finally found its place in the series’ canon with most of the major players showing up to sing its praises and give an interior perspective of its making. Brian Wilson is there, and though he is most responsible for creating The Beach Boys’ most lauded work, it is the other guys who often make this discussion of such a much-discussed record fresh and interesting. Al Jardine provides the most candid perspective, admitting to bitter feelings about being shut out of the session for “Sloop John B.” after he’d done so much to develop it as a Beach Boys record and describing the arduous “Wouldn’t It Be Nice” vocal sessions in less than romantic terms. Mike Love bats down his “Don’t fuck with the formula” reputation and admits to his discomfort with the acid-tinged lyrics of “Hang on to Your Ego”.

The most fun part of any Classic Albums doc is when an engineer starts fading the original multi-track recording in and out, spotlighting various instrumental and vocal bits, and though the album under discussion has already received this treatment on the Pet Sounds Sessions box set, it’s still fun to see remastering engineer Mark Linett sitting down with Brian to pull out additional choice segments of the ultimate mono album.

The importance of Pet Sounds’ mono mix, however, is one of the important issues that got passed over in the broadcast edit of The Beach Boys Pet Sounds: Classic Albums. Fortunately, that discussion has found a place among the significant bonus material on Eagle Rock Entertainment’s new Blu-ray of the documentary. Amazingly, “Caroline No” is another essential piece of Pet Sounds left out of the broadcast version that gets addressed in the bonus interviews, as is “Good Vibrations”, an important example of how the group continued to build upon their Pet Sounds developments. Unfortunately, SMiLE is not discussed at all (though footage from the “Mrs. O’Leary’s Cow” promo makes up the bulk of a full-length “Good Vibrations” video included on the disc). I’d like to think that this is because a SMiLE: Classic Albums documentary is on the horizon, but if it takes the BBC another twenty years to make it, we probably won’t be getting much insight from the boys who made it.

Review: The Beach Boys' 'Pet Sounds 50th Anniversary' Box Set

The Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds is so essential, influential, and culturally significant that a tired phrase like “It’s an album that needs no introduction” really does apply. Capitol/UMe’s new box set devoted to the 1966 monolith may require a bit more background though, especially since Pet Sounds has been remastered and rereleased so many times. This five-disc, 50^th Anniversary collection is really an expanded, reconfigured rerelease of the landmark 1997 box The Pet Sounds Sessions, which was the first time the ultimate mono album was presented in stereo. It also gave a behind-the-scenes glimpse into the mythical, mystical sessions with a series of “tracking date highlights” devoted to each of the original album’s thirteen songs and the outtakes “Hang on to Your Ego” and “Trombone Dixie”, as well as an early version of “Good Vibrations”. These highlights are much tidier than the ones on the more sprawling SMiLE Sessions box (which included a demanding disc consisting of nothing but “Good Vibrations” sessions). Consequently, they do not demystify the sessions completely but do provide a fascinating keyhole-peek at Brian Wilson’s working methods. His directions to his musicians could be incredibly specific or as unhelpfully general as “Can we do a real good one this time?” The guy’s sense of humor definitely comes out in these sessions.

Everything that was on The Pet Sounds Sessions is on the 50^th Anniversary box, though in a different order, and it’s expanded with eleven live tracks spanning 1966 to 1993. There are also previously unreleased alternate mix and vocal sessions for “I Know There’s an Answer” (the sessions feature some grand moments but may also test your tolerance for Mike Love doing “funny” voices) and a master track of “Good Vibrations”. Disc Five consists of the previously released mono, stereo, instrumental, and 5.1 mixes in Blu-ray Pure Audio with a few bonus tracking date highlights and “Summer Means New Love”. The lead-up single “The Little Girl I Once Knew” would have been a much better choice than that 1965 instrumental. Nevertheless, these are all basically welcome additions, but the 50^th Anniversary set could have really been the ultimate Pet Sounds box by including the stray material that didn’t find a place on The Pet Sounds Sessions for whatever reason. Where’s the Brian-solo version of “Hang on to Your Ego”—the best version of that song and “I Know There’s an Answer”— and the mono mix of “Trombone Dixie” from the 1990 CD? “God Only Knows” is one of the greatest songs ever written, but I would have been happy to lose half of the four live renditions of it included here to make room for those missing versions of “Hang on to Your Ego” and “Trombone Dixie”. These tracks are important and unique enough that wishing they were included amounts to more than fan-boy bellyaching.

Fortunately, there’s little to bellyache about in terms of sound quality. I don’t have everyone of the multitudinous Pet Sounds rereleases on hand for comparing and contrasting, but I can say that Mark Linett’s latest remastering job is livelier and more detailed than the flat CD he oversaw in 1990 and warmer and quieter than Ron McMaster’s slightly harsh 1999 remaster. The book-style box is pretty (the fuzzy textures of the album title and goat on the cover is a nifty touch), but the CDs fall out of their slots too easily and the contents are too light on track notes and history. Of course, Pet Sounds is an album that needs no introduction, so you probably already know everything there is to know about it. It’s beautiful, and it sounds beautiful on this 50^th Anniversary set.

Review: The Beach Boys’ 'Made in California' Box Set

A lot has happened since the 5-disc, career-spanning box set Good Vibrations: Thirty Years of The Beach Boys was released in 1993, and much of it was unthinkable at the time. Carl Wilson was diagnosed with cancer in 1997, and we lost him the following year. Brian Wilson worked past his aversion to touring and performing, and even more incredibly, gave us both a solo version and approved a Beach Boys box set of his unfinished masterpiece SMiLE. He has reunited with the often-feuding surviving members of his group for a fiftieth anniversary album and tour. This year marking the five-decade anniversary of The Beach Boys’ unchallenged dominance of pop music (at least in America where the British Invasion was still a year away), it’s a good time to update Good Vibrations, and Capitol/UMe has released a 6-disc set called Made in California that brings the story to the present.

20 Things You May Not Have Known About 'Pet Sounds'

45 years ago today, The Beach Boys unveiled a record that would stimulate Rock & Roll’s evolution like few others. You’ve listened to Pet Sounds, you love Pet Sounds, now it’s time to get hip to 20 Things You May Not Have Known About Pet Sounds!


1. While Mike Love was on tour with The Beach Boys in Japan, Brian Wilson was forced to look elsewhere for a lyricist to help him compose the tracks that would comprise Pet Sounds. He decided on Tony Asher, who made ends meet as a jingle writer. Asher only took a brief leave of absence to work with Brian Wilson on Pet Sounds. As soon as his involvement in the project was finished, he returned to the advertising world. Asher later collaborated with John Bahler on a number of songs for TV’s Partridge Family.

2. To achieve a “live” sound, Brian took the unorthodox approach of recording many of his vocal parts at the same time the engineer mixed the album.

3. In the mid-‘90s, Mike Love sued Brian for co-writing credit on a number of Beach Boys songs, including “Wouldn’t It Be Nice”. When the Pet Sounds Mailing List asked what Love’s involvement in writing the song was, Tony Asher replied, “None, whatsoever.” Love claims he helped co-write the bridge.

4. The bridge of “Wouldn’t It Be Nice” was the source of further controversy when The Beach Boys took the song on the road. While working out backing-vocal arrangements for live performances without Brian, Carl Wilson and Al Jardine clashed on the “words.” Wilson believed them to be “Run-run-wee-ooh,” while Jardine favored “Run-run-ree-ooh!”

5. Despite Love’s legal issue with “Wouldn’t It Be Nice”, and his general ambivalence about the entire Pet Sounds project, he admitted it was his daughter’s favorite song in 2006.

6. “You Still Believe in Me” began life as a composition with a rare Brian Wilson lyric called “In My Childhood,” which is why bike horns and bells can be heard honking and ringing at the end of the track.

7. Although Phil Spector’s house band, The Wrecking Crew, recorded the

June 28, 2010: 21 Underrated Beach Boys Songs You Need to Hear Now!

Summer’s here again, which means it’s time to listen to copious amounts of The Beach Boys. But where to start; where to start? That raggedy old copy of Endless Summer perhaps? Or a stack of tracks covering the usual sandy paths: “Good Vibrations” and “I Get Around” and “Fun, Fun, Fun” and “Wouldn’t It Be Nice” and “Surfin’ USA”? Perhaps you’d like to branch out a bit, and a discography as rich with buried treasure as that of The Beach Boys is certainly worth a deeper dive.

When I composed similar “21 Underrated Songs” lists for The Rolling Stones and The Who, I had little trouble deciding what constituted an underrated song. I basically just stuck with anything that hadn’t appeared on a major Greatest Hits type album. The Stones released very few of these, so a wide portion of their catalogue was ripe for inclusion. The Who released a ton of them, but nearly every one of their “Best of” collections consists of picks pulled from the same pool of 20 or so songs. The Beach Boys have also put out a lot of compilations, but there is wider variation among them. So, I basically stuck to songs that were not released as single A-sides or on the first two Beach Boys comps I bought: Endless Summer and Good Vibrations: Best of the Beach Boys.

This means some exceptional tracks that are relatively underplayed did not make this list: “The Warmth of the Sun”, “Girl Don’t Tell Me”, “Let Him Run Wild”, “Friends”, “Surf’s Up”, “Sail On Sailor”, etc. Those all deserve to be heard more often than they are, but I set some parameters for myself and stuck to them, damn it. That being said, maybe you’ll discover something that will wow your soul among these 21 Underrated Beach Boys Songs You Need to Hear Now!

1. “Lonely Sea” (from the album Surfin’ USA!) 1963

The common misconceptions of those skeptical of the artistic value of The Beach Boys’ music and the cult it inspired is that the group didn’t show signs of progress until Pet Sounds and, in the words of Rolling Stones magazine’s Dave Marsh, “Brian Wilson became a Major Artist by making music no one outside his own coterie ever heard” (Marsh is talking about SMiLE, which I’ll discuss more further down this list). This is wholly untrue, and evidence of Wilson’s “Major Artistry” (those are Marsh’s smugly mocking caps, by the way) is apparent as early as The Beach Boys’ second album, Surfin’ USA. For those who don’t think the ecstatically fresh title song is enough to qualify Wilson as an important artist (i.e.: people who neither care about nor understand Rock & Roll), there’s “Lonely Sea”. In this one largely forgotten ballad is all of the harmonic inventiveness and heart-wrenching pathos that would help make Pet Sounds the monster classic it has become. Unlike Pet Sounds, the arrangement is as sparse as could be. Some lightly brushed drums, barely-there bass, and a gently picked, heavily tremeloed guitar are the only backdrop to Brian’s chilling lead vocal and the guys’ gossamer harmonies.


2. “We’ll Run Away” (from the album All Summer Long) 1964

Another beautiful ballad, this one pulled from The Beach Boys’ first great album, All Summer Long. One of the few songs from that album that has not become an overly-familiar favorite, “We’ll Run Away” is like a precursor to