20 Things You May Not Have Known About Brian Wilson

As the head Beach Boys turns 70 today, Psychobabble takes a look at twenty things you may not have known about brilliant Brian.

1. Murry Wilson instilled a fascination with the Old West in his oldest son, believing frontier tales would make Brian a rugged individualist… and possibly, a singing cowboy. Old West themes would later play a central role in SMiLE.

2. Brian has often blamed the deafness in his right ear on a punch he received from Murry as a toddler. His doctor, however, believed it to be nerve impairment, while his mother thought the deafness was either a congenital disorder or the result of a street fight with a fellow two-year old!

3. When he was a boy, Brian’s favorite ride at Disneyland was the Matterhorn Bobsleds rollercoaster.

4. Brian scored As and Bs in all of his twelfth-grade classes. Well, all but one. He received a C in piano and harmony. One of the reasons he got such a relatively poor grade in his area of expertise was the F he received for a sonata-writing assignment. Apparently, “Surfin’” is not a sonata.

5. Brian is renowned for his beautiful falsetto, but one man is not a big fan. The singer, himself, was always ambivalent, often embarrassed, about his high voice and confided to the women in his life that it was one his biggest “hang ups.” Although he has said he purposely wanted to "sing like a girl" on Pet Sounds, he apparently nixed "Let Him Run Wild" from the Good Vibrations: 30 Years of The Beach Boys box set because he hated his sublime performance, feeling he sounded "like a little girl... a sick chick." Al Jardine later theorized that Brian purposely ravaged his voice with cigarettes and drugs to get a rougher, more “manly” voice, like his brother Dennis.

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