Unheard #2 : PET SOUNDS/The Beach Boys

I hated the Beach Boys. They were the short haired robots of the great clean cut American blandness whose daggy songs about surfing and California girls made you laugh the same way that those crappy old Cliff Richard movies did, like the drunk uncle at Christmas lunch making the floppy jokes that are meant to be risque. Everything about them was fake and try hard. They were one half generation away from hippy (which was just as bad) and in the talk of their era we would have called them squares.

Sometime during grade 9 I heard a really beautiful song on a motorbike ad. Well, the verse was beautiful but then the chorus stormed in with a lot ba-ba-ba-ba backing vocals which made it sound like some crappy old doo-wop dorkiness. At school we found out it was called Good Vibrations and it was by the Beach Boys. A few years after that I bought a compilation with a lot of 60s stuff on it including that. The song worked when you heard it all at once.

That was about the time that RAM reprinted a mammoth story about Brian Wilson which portrayed him as a frail genius crushed by the business and his own family, grinding to a halt during the recording of Smile. Pet Sounds got a mention but as it had been released and was widely admired it faded into the shadow of the ruined Xanadu of the later album. A little later Pet Sounds kept popping up in interviews with the emerging 60s-influenced post punk bands like the dBs which got me interested. I needed to hear it. Couldn't find it. Dropped the thread.

Between that time and the mid 90s the album had assumed an importance in the indy music scene with which I was still affined. Its fans held it in the blinding reverential light where resides every cultural artefact perceived to have been unjustly served by history. Usually this is done at the expense of something more famous which is then reviled as though it had been directly responsible for the concealment of the underdog. Knowing this too well at this stage I decided not to bother with trying to hear it.

Then in the mid 90s while on the way home from work on payday I stopped in at a record shop and picked up a copy along with whatever else I found that day. I put it on when I got home and after a few of the more famous tracks my reception was lukewarm at best. Some unarguably glorious harmonies and instrumental cascades of aural colour burst into the light of my room but at what felt like regular intervals each piece ran out of breath and slid into a brief coma before bursting to life again. That seemed to be the case with every song. I finally heard all of God Only Knows with its dreamy melody that was ruined like a party dickhead invading every photo taken with the appearance of the ba-ba-ba doowop harmonies which made me in my thirties feel as disgusted as I had in my teens.

I'm sorry but if you were thinking this was going to be a road to Damascus moment I'll have to let that one down. I liked the fact that the cd was still the original mono mix. Unconvinced of my own initial reaction and borrowing some reverence from friends I even bought a copy of the album as a DVD-Audio with 5.1 uncompressed LPCM. At that point everything was cleaner and bigger and brighter and while the surround mix was fun and done without the gimmickry that let down so many surround remixes I found I was more thrilled by the audio than the music. That's like admiring the cinematography of a boring film. I can still put this album on but I have never connected with it.

Here are, however, the bits I like:

Wouldn't It Be Nice: Sheer pop dazzle, so brilliant you gotta wear shades. Every upward looking pop song with vocal harmonies and quirky instrumentation has been modelled on this. The opening arpeggios, which I always thought were done on a harp were actually electric 12 string guitars. They just didn't sound anything like the way the Byrds used them. Full marks all around.

Sloop John B.: See above. Same thing.

God Only Knows: Sublime melody finally not sung in the dorky squeak most of the rest of it is. Carol Kaye's bass is front and centre amid a garden of brightly coloured textured natural and processed sounds. A humble rather than a self-eviscerating lyric and vocal harmonies you can float on. I still hate the doowop elements but this is a great effort.

Caroline No: I really like the fade out with the train crossing sounds and the dog. A rare occasion where Brian Wilson didn't give in to embarassing literalism with the use of sound effects. I like that aspect more than the song itself.

The rest of it sounds to me like slightly different drafts of the same song interrupted by some airport muzak instrumentals.

I can imagine, though, how stunning and new this would have sounded in 1966 but when I listen to Revolver I don't have to imagine anything. Pet Sounds influenced Revolver and even more so the following year's Sgt Pepper and I'm sorry sorry sorry sorry but I will never be able to prefer it over those albums. Ever. There's no connection between us. I'm just not feeling ... what I should be feeling.