Pet Sounds, Part I

"In December of 1966, I heard the album RUBBER SOUL by the Beatles. It was definitely a challenge for me. I saw that every cut was very artistically interesting and stimulating. I immediately went to work on the songs for PET SOUNDS" These words adorn the short explanation written by Brian Wilson on the 1990 re-release of Pet Sounds. Pet Sounds was a direct response to Rubber Soul, but was certainly a cut above it. Brian had been developping into a more sophisticated songwriter for quite some time before Pet Sounds. He was told to stick with the commercial songs that went to the Top Ten by his producers and record label. By 1966, the music industry was a different place. With bands on the West Coast beginning to tamper with the way their music was produced and assembled, artists were now being given the liberty to experiment with their music. At the time, it was a victory for both the bands and artistic liberty, but the records companies found a way to turn in to their advantage a few years down the line. With this newfound liberty, Wilson took to experimenting with producing his own music. It took some time, but he finally mastered it, and began seeing music as something more than just pop hits. He incorporated orchestras and choirs, something which had never before been conceived for a pop song. He transformed the whole idea of what constituted a rock song and made it an art. Brian Wilson was an artist, and Pet Sounds was his masterpiece.

Wilson understood the sound of every instrument. He could walk into the studio with only a basic chord pattern and turn it into music for every individual performe, change tempos, and point out missed enterances. He was a vewry hands-on producer, which made sure that the final product was exactly what he had envisioned at the beginning. Brian used these instruments and their sounds to duplicate emotions and concepts. After the instrumental parts of the song had reached perfection, Brian met with his friend Tony Asher to write the words. Asher said that by the end of a day, they'd have a melody, a few lyrics and occasionally a bridge. Brian had complete control over everything, from start to finish. Lyrics written by Asher were often edited and re-written. Any contributions from instrumentalists or backing vocalists were accepted graciously, and occasionally used, but only after strict examintation by Brian. Anything that came out of the studio while he was producing was the product of his genius. In fact, it was this album that led people to the acceptance that something as popularily accepted and commercialized as rock could be the product of someone's genius, and not just mass-produced chart-toppers. Rock music became accepted as the voice of yet another wave of baby-boomers, those who wanted to protest the constraints put on them by both their parents and the wave of boomers before them. Pet Sounds became the inspiration for a legion of acid-rockers, from the Grateful Dead to Jefferson Airplane, Big Brother and The Holding Company to Pink Floyd.

Go To Page: 1 2

Articles in this Topic    Discussions in this Topic