Making a list of the best rock albums ever is easy: Something old (the Beatles), something new or newer (perhaps Radiohead), something borrowed (the Rolling Stones’ blues or disco pastiches) and Joni Mitchell’s “Blue.”
And, of course, bursting into the top 10 — and often higher — of any respectable list: “Pet Sounds.”
The overwhelming brainchild of Brian Wilson, the Beach Boys’ chief songwriter whose death at 82 was announced on Wednesday, “Pet Sounds” is beautiful — with gorgeous vocal harmonies, haunting timbres and wistful lyrics of adolescent longing and estrangement. It was a landmark in studio experimentation that changed the idea of how albums could be made. But one thing that stands out about the Beach Boys’ masterpiece is how gradually it came to be widely celebrated, compared with many of its peers.
“When it was released in the United States,” said Jan Butler, a senior lecturer in popular music at Oxford Brookes University in the United Kingdom, “it did pretty well, but for the Beach Boys, it was considered a flop.”
Released in the spring of 1966, “Pet Sounds” represented a break from the catchy tunes about surfing, cars and girls that the group had consistently rode to the top of the charts. The opening track is called “Wouldn’t It Be Nice,” but previous Beach Boys songs had described how nice it was.
The album peaked at No. 10 — low for one of the most popular acts at the time — and was the first Beach Boys album in three years not to reach gold status, Butler wrote in a chapter of an academic book. The Beach Boys’ record company, Capitol, rushed out a greatest-hits that outsold the album of original music.
“They were known for AM singles that were catchy, with good-time lyrics,” said John Covach, professor of music theory at the University of Rochester in New York. “When you come along with an album like ‘Pet Sounds’ — the melodies are great, the harmonies are great, but the songs are not the same radio airplay tunes. It seemed — even to the other guys in the band — that the music was too complicated, going over the heads of the fans.”
But in the United Kingdom, Butler said, a dogged publicist named Derek Taylor arranged for listening sessions for prominent musicians — including his former clients John Lennon and Paul McCartney — ginning up press interest and leading “Pet Sounds” to greater success.
Taylor also kick-started conversations around the album’s studio innovations and Wilson’s singular genius. McCartney said that “Pet Sounds,” itself inspired by the Beatles’ “Rubber Soul” (1965), pushed him toward the pathbreaking music of “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” (1967).
Back in the United States, though, the Beach Boys were increasingly seen as passé. Jimi Hendrix is said to have made a dismissive comment about “surfing music” during an appearance at the 1967 Monterey Pop Festival. Wilson’s planned “Pet Sounds” follow-up, “Smile,” failed to come together in a haze of erratic behavior and drug use.
“They were seen as old-school, corny, naïve music that didn’t fit the hippie aesthetic,” Covach said, recalling that when he saw the Beach Boys perform in the late 1970s, they were a nostalgia act.
But popular consensus in the United States on “Pet Sounds” began to come around. By the early 1990s, when the aspiring indie rock musician Robert Schneider was establishing a recording space in Denver, he knew what to name it: Pet Sounds Studio.
A native of Cape Town, Schneider moved with his family from South Africa to northern Louisiana and found the sounds of his childhood in the Beach Boys’ early songs. When he listened to “Pet Sounds” for the first time in high school, he said in an interview, “it blew my mind.”
“They had done this majestic work,” he added, “something that was on the level of Mozart or Mingus. I identified with the character of the singer: the melancholy, the displacement, the growing up.”
Bands like Neutral Milk Hotel, of Montreal and Schneider’s own the Apples in Stereo, all members of the Elephant 6 collective he helped found, claimed the Beach Boys as a crucial antecedent.
“Those guys were just trying to record ‘Sgt. Pepper’s’ or ‘Pet Sounds’ on their cassette machines,” said Kevin Sweeney of the Sunshine Fix in a 2022 documentary about Elephant 6. “And they did!”
The Beach Boys did have a final No. 1 hit in 1988, “Kokomo,” with its catalog of Caribbean islands; Wilson was not involved. But by then the momentum of “Pet Sounds” as a key part of the canon was already gaining steam, and only continued through the ’90s as CD reissues helped make that earlier album’s studio wizardry come through clearer than ever. And acts as varied as Tame Impala, Daft Punk and Barenaked Ladies signaled their debt to the Beach Boys.
When Rolling Stone did its own list of the best albums of all time in 2003, “Pet Sounds” ranked second; when the magazine did another, in 2020, the album stayed there. It may not have been made for its times, but “Pet Sounds” lasted for all time.
Marc Tracy is a Times reporter covering arts and culture. He is based in New York.
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