Today is the last Friday of summer. Autumn officially begins on Monday. Perfect for a superb BBC documentary on the Beach Boys' Pet Sounds. The documentary was written by Mark Lamarr, who appears on camera as the narrator and interviewer, and was directed by Sarah Aspinall. It first aired on the BBC in 2002.
Conceived, composed and recorded as a response to the Beatles' Rubber Soul, Pet Sounds wasn't about pets or the sounds that emanate from them, as the cover would have you believe. The album title refers to the sounds the Beach Boys love or Brian Wilson's favorite sounds, since he produced—a misty moodscape of confessional love songs and innocence backed by a forest of instrumentation topped by falsetto and rich vocal harmony.
The last time I saw Brian, we were in an air-conditioned trailer at California's Mid-State Fair in 2016 a few hours before he would perform Pet Sounds with Al Jardine and their band. It was August, and I was there to interview Brian and Al about the Beach Boys' hit Good Vibrations for my WSJ "Anatomy of a Song" column. The temperature outside was a blistering 106, but the air in the trailer was in the 70s as we sat around on sofas and talked about one of the group's most important and innovative songs. Good Vibrations was to be included on Pet Sounds, but Brian held it for their next album, Smile, which wound up being held by Capitol at the time. [Photo above courtesy of Brian Wilson]
Later, at the concert in the humid twilight, Brian and the band sang and played Pet Sounds in its entirety, along with Good Vibrations and other hits. As dusk turned to evening, color-drenched neon-framed rides turned and spun in the distance. The music seemed ethereal, like the soundtrack to a California dream. Beach balls were punched over the crowd and kids in bathing suits danced to their parents' music. Listening to the songs in that setting was akin to hearing opera in Milan or bebop in Greenwich Village. Pet Sounds outdoors in the hot summer evening air in central California was at home, and the visual gave new meaning to Wouldn't It Be Nice, God Only Knows, Sloop John B, and Caroline No.
On this pre-fall Friday, our summer of 2019 is fading to just a memory. Happy times together we've been spending / I wish that every kiss was never ending.
Here's the 2002 documentary. It's one of the finest documentaries on the Beach Boys and Pet Sounds, airing originally as part of the BBC's Art That Shook the World series...
