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for  Let s Go Away For Awhile, Don t Talk (Put Your
Head On My Shoulder), and even the title instrumental,
are starry-eyed and flamboyant. If there is a unity to Pet
Sounds, it s in the way that musical phrases build from a
broad palette of timbres that ebb and flow; lyrical turns
of phrase are more about the way vocals blend, fold in
and out of each other, and bloom into warmth than the
meaning of the words themselves. It s the terrific idiosyn-
crasy of this music that makes whatever conception of
rock history one might ascribe to it seem not enough.
As an album, its aesthetic design follows a peripheral
course of forward movement that evokes the work of
Brian s other musical kinsmen, arrangers/composers/
film scorers like Henry Mancini, Juan Garcia Esquivel,
Martin Denny, and Les Baxter. Pet Sounds is the score
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to a film about what rock music doesn t have to be. For
all of its inward-looking sentimentalism, it lays out in a
masterful way the kind of glow and sui generis vision that
Brian aimed to expand in a radical way with Smile.
Groovy Psychedelic Theremin Vibration Trip
In March 1966, two months before the release of Pet
Sounds, The Beach Boys played some shows in the Pacific
Northwest area of the U.S. at the University of Oregon
and Oregon State University. Traveling with the group,
Los Angeles Times critic Art Seidenbaum witnessed a
hilarious encounter and wrote about it an article titled
 Beach Boys Riding the Crest of Pop-Rock Wave.
Ushered by their manager across the University of
Oregon campus, Beach Boys Carl and Mike crossed
paths with a university student and asked her if she d be
attending the group s performance that evening.  The
girl in the booted uniform of modern feminism, shrilled
 no,  Seidenbaum wrote.  The manager asked,  Why
not?   Cause I don t dig their music, man. It s white man s
music, said Brandy Feldman, an undeniable Caucasian.
The two Beach Boys loved the put-down because they
understand the illogic of where they are. Pop mountain is
the least logical, most precarious place on earth. In spite
of whatever hip benediction Brandy Feldman seemed so
convinced she possessed, Seidenbaum had a point. By
the end of the summer, Pet Sounds came and went; Dylan
and The Beatles released albums that in their breadth
and depth of vision made a feeling of the counterculture
available to anybody. The brilliance of Revolver and
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Blonde on Blonde is that they blurred the lines between
hip and mainstream outlook with a sense of excitement
and expectancy, reconfiguring the terms of advancement
over a wider field of possibilities. But by the fall, the next
great pop acquisition was up for grabs.
 Our new single,  Good Vibrations, is gonna be a
monster, Brian told Los Angeles Times journalist Tom
Nolan.  It s a song about a guy who picks up good
vibrations from a girl. Of course, it s still sticking pretty
close to that same boy girl thing, you know, but with a
difference. And it s a start, it s definitely a start. For all
the sense of adventure that went into Pet Sounds, such
words could have petered out into little more than empty
bluster except Brian was right.  Good Vibrations was
released on October 10, 1966, and its massive success
hurled The Beach Boys into an ambit of pop beyond any
obvious explanation of how such an event should have
happened.
In its conviction and nuance, there is little that
distinguishes  Good Vibrations from the music that
wound up on Pet Sounds. A Capitol Records memo
dated February 23, 1966 circulated within the company
and notified executives that, at least at the time, Brian
even had plans to include  Good Vibrations on the
forthcoming Beach Boys album. But as work on this
heady theremin-and-R&B concept record got more and
more expansive, second-guessing and tinkering almost
became ends in themselves, distracting Brian away from
actually finishing the track. For roughly six months,
his production work meandered through increasingly
elaborate recording sessions and a multitude of ideas
and versions. At one point he thought of selling the
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rights to Warner Bros with the intention that the song
be matched with a group of black vocalists; then he
considered offering the song to his friend and then-
aspiring musician Danny Hutton as an opportunity for
him to launch his own pop music career. In the end,
though, it was The Beach Boys harmonies and Carl s
restrained R&B modulations in particular that Brian
used to give  Good Vibrations the glow he wanted.
Once out in the world, the finished version of  Good
Vibrations embodied just the kind of life that great pop
music strives for. It was a number-one hit and became the
first-ever Beach Boys single to go gold in America. Brian
himself made a rare personal appearance on L.A. s local
KHJ-TV Channel 9 Teen Rock and Roll Dance Program
to introduce the record to the show s teenage watchers.
Longstanding Beach Boys chronicler Domenic Priore
remembered an effusive Brian talking up the process
of making  Good Vibrations before it was played for
the in-studio audience. In its plainness of description,
the scene Priore sets invites us into the mindset of this
music, and then it starts to evoke wildly.  Then, it was
played, Priore writes,  and during the dance segment,
the camera cut back to Brian and the host giving their
nods of approval to the kids acceptance on the dance
floor. It s a marvelous image, one that arises less and
less in the years that followed. Across the Atlantic, the
pop press ran dramatic pieces with headlines like  EMI
giving The Beach Boys biggest campaign since the
Beatles. But maybe the most portentous headline of this
period ran in an early December edition of New Musical
Express, announcing the results of their annual readers
poll: The Beach Boys were voted number one  World
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Vocal Group, edging out The Beatles, The Walker
Brothers, The Rolling Stones, and The Four Tops, in
that order. Beyond the media hype, though, the record s
tangible success also affirmed that Brian was as ambitious
as he d ever be, and ready to bring The Beach Boys with
him to more expanded and uncertain areas of musical
advance.
Years later Brian told Rolling Stone that  Good
Vibrations was an attempt to make  advanced R&B
music. The record lives on as the best pop single
The Beach Boys ever made. Though it emerged from
the same progressive milieu as Pet Sounds an uncanny
constellation of theremin, cello, flute, organ, jazz bass,
a masterful use of Beach Boys harmonies  Good
Vibrations doesn t sound to me like a document of
pyschedelic-outasight-freaked-up mentality. It shows an
impulse to pleasure and accessibility that make whatever
countercultural requirements rock history could foist
into it look like the inanities they are. The images and
sensations it conjures are of an aesthetic vision The
Beach Boys had only been hinting at in songs like
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