Pet Sounds: Most Overrated Album of All Time?

Geez, if George Martin and Paul McCartney were heaping praise all over an album, and I didn't "hear what all the hoopla is about", I would not admit it in public. ;-)

I'm in the minority (though not alone) in considering Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band album the most over-rated album in Pop music history. Both Rubber Soul and Revolver are better albums. IMO. 

I love how Pet Sounds ends: with the sound of a far-away train clattering down the tracks, a distant dog barking in response. When I was a little kid, we lived a few blocks from the train tracks that run alongside San Fernando Blvd. in the Valley, and I awoke every morning to that exact sound. If that ending doesn't give you a clue as to what the album is about, and the emotional response the music is intended to evoke in the listener, I don't believe I'm interested in knowing you. No offense intended. 

Good post @lonemountain. I was a huge Beach Boys fan through the All Summer Long album (1964), and they were the first group I saw live (that summer). I had a ticket to see The Beatles on their ’64 tour, but decided to pass. I wasn’t yet sold on them, but did see them the following summer.

The next BB album was The Beach Boys Today in March of ’65, and by the time it came out Pop music had changed dramatically, the harder sound of the British Invasion bands making the BB’s sound passe’, far too gentle and "white". I never even heard the next album Summer Days, and The Beach Boys were effectively dead to me.

No one I knew bought Pet Sounds when it was released in ’66, and I heard it only after accidentally getting a copy of Smiley Smile in early ’68. In the midst of the Blues revival and psychedelic madness of 1968, here comes the strangest music I had ever heard. I became obsessed with SS, and Brian Wilson in general. So I then bought all the albums I had missed after All Summer Long, including of course Pet Sounds.

The album is rather poorly recorded, making it hard to hear all the marvelous voicings in Brian’s piano playing, or to fully appreciate the sublime chord progressions (I consider "God Only Knows" a masterpiece of a song, one of the best written in the 20th century) and orchestration he wrote for The Wrecking Crew musicians to play. You have to work to hear through the "fog" (lack of transparency and inner detail) of the recording, but it’s worth it.

Paul McCartney:

"The thing that really made me sit up and take notice was the bass lines on Pet Sounds. If you were in the key of C, you would normally use the root note...a C on the bass. But you just get a completely different effect if you play a G when the band is playing C. There’s a kind of tension created."

That tension is created because when the brain hears an inversion (what McCartney is in the above quote referring to), it yearns to hear the chord "resolve" (return "home"). Brian Wilson uses chord inversions (which he played on piano) throughout "God Only Knows", to great effect. But remember, Wilson often wrote parts for three basses: a 4-string electric, a 6-string electric, and a 4-string upright acoustic. He has them playing all kinds of interesting musical parts throughout Pet Sounds. Very sophisticated writing, far above the level of his peers. I consider "God Only Knows" to be amongst the greatest songs of the 20th Century.

Learning about inversion is what radically changed McCartneys bass playing, first heard in the Revolver album. Very different from his playing on Rubber Soul, before he had heard and absorbed Pet Sounds.

To hear the master of using inversion in bass playing, listen to James Jamerson in Jimmy Ruffins recording of "What Becomes Of The Brokenhearted", as well in "Ain’t No Mountain High Enough" by Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell.

@edcyn: Licorice Pizza! I knew the manager of their store on Sunset (very near the Tower store), and the bassist in my Pop group worked in the store on Topanga Canyon Blvd. That manager eventually got busted for dealing coke out of his office.

I just watched the David Leaf film Beautiful Dreamer-Brian Wilson And The Story Of Smile. To establish the context for the creation of the amazing Smile album (a subject for another time), Leaf covers Pet Sounds, the album that proceeded Smile. Quotes about Pet Sounds from scenes in the film:

- Jimmy Webb: "Pet Sounds is probably, um, really, the most significant album of our generation." Wow.

- Burt Bacharach: "I think it is one of the, THE great albums."

- George Martin: "It floored me. I thought it was fantastic, and it gave The Beatles great inspiration. And it gave a challenge to them."

- Rob Reiner: "We used to play that all the time in the writer’s room because we thought this is like the most incredible Rock ’n’ Roll album we had ever heard." Pet Sounds "Rock ’n’ Roll"? Not from where I come from, but okay, maybe I’m taking the phrase too literally.

Are the opinions of the above any more credible than those with whom they disagree? Again, just a matter of opinion.

There is a YouTube video in which a pianist sits at his keyboard, explaining and demonstrating the "bones" (chord progression, modulations---aka key changes, melody, counterpoint) of "God Only Knows" as he leads you through the musical construction of what is not only the "best" song on Pet Sounds, but imo one of the best songs ever written. The craft involved in creating that song, the musical knowledge and wisdom required to do so, is far above what most Rock songwriters are in possession of, and apparently far above what some listeners are capable of appreciating, as is the beauty of the song. No offense intended. ;-)

But I completely understand why some don’t care for the Pet Sounds album. It is NOT Rock music, and sounds in a way "quaint". Most Rock music contains at least trace elements of Blues, which gives the music a "hard" edge, which people like their Rock to have. Pet Sounds contains zero Blues, and sounds gentle, soft, very "white". Is it okay to say that? ;-)

One songwriter who DOES appreciate "God Only Knows" is Paul McCartney, who still considers it his all-time favorite song, and Pet Sounds his favorite album.

Once you’ve heard Pet Sounds’ follow-up---the aborted Smile---PS just sounds like Brian Wilson warming up to do Smile. That Smile was not completed in 1967 and released prior to Sgt. pepper---as was intended---is one of Rock ’n’ Roll’s great artistic tragedies. Hope that doesn’t sound too "grand". ;-)

@stuartk: Amen, brother! Rubber Soul and Revolver are much better. 

One of my favorite things about Pet Sounds is how the album ends: with the far-away sound of a train running down the tracks, a dog barking in response. Brilliant! So evocative, so nostalgic, so sentimental. The album’s theme is all about becoming an adult, looking back at childish innocence, with a feeling of loss, of longing and yearning.

From the time I was a few months old until seven, we lived in a house a few blocks south of San Fernando Blvd. in Pacoima, California (SoCal residents will know the street), on the other side of which are a set of railroad tracks. I awoke early every morning to that exact sound, and hearing it as side two of Pet Sounds fades to silence takes me back to my early childhood, exactly as Brian intended.

Pet Sounds is to my way of thinking the first Pop/Rock, if not concept album, at least theme album. Brian’s next project---the eventually-scrapped Smile---was an ambitious one: Manifest Destiny set to music, lyrics courtesy of Brian’s new collaborator, the genius Van Dyke Parks. I acquired the Smiley Smile album (an abbreviated version of Smile) in early 1968, and had my little teenage mind blown. If you don’t know the Smile saga, you can read all about it in the book Outlaw Blues, written by Paul Williams (not the song writer). The chapters covering Smile were originally published in three issues of Crawdaddy Magazine as the album was being recorded, and are a rivetting account of the evolving and eventually abandoned masterwork.

Around the same time, Leonard Berstein was taping his television special on the new "Artistic" movement in Rock ’n’ Roll. In the show Brian sings and performs "Surf’s Up" on the grand piano in his Bel-Air mansion living room (on Belagio Drive, one block above Sunset. I and a songwriter I was recording with made a pilgrimage to the house in ’75, to see about Brian producing us). Berstein is very effusive in his praise of the song. So much for all Rock music being "garbage", a sentiment one particularly smug and snobby Audiogon member has been spewing.

Though I hold Brian Wilson in as high esteem as anyone, and consider him to have written a fair number of the best songs I’ve ever heard. I don’t love Pet Sounds as much as I am "suppose to". I had loved All Summer Long, but didn’t at all like it’s two follow-ups. The British Invasion had really "toughened-up" white Rock ’n’ Roll, putting Blues back in the mix, and by 1965/6 The Beach Boys already sounded like an oldies act---passe’. By the time of Pet Sounds’ release, I wasn’t even interested enough to check it out; no one I knew did.

But then by way of a fluke (too long a story to recount), in early 1968 I happened to hear Smiley Smile (the watered-down version of the Smile album, which was to be the follow-up to Pet Sounds), and my little teenage mind was blown! There was a lot of acid-drenched music being made in 1968, but SS was more mind-altered than anything else I had heard. Very odd, deeply-revolutionary music. Give a listen to "Heroes & Villains" and "Fall Breaks And Back To Winter (W. Woodpecker Symphony)". Brian Wilson had truly---to quote BB singer Mike Love---f*cked with the formula. Their structures are more akin to Classical compositions than songs. The music on Smiley Smile make Hendrix, Syd Barrett’s Pink Floyd, or any other psychedelic music (except for perhaps the 2nd and 3rd Grateful Dead albums) sound downright traditional in comparison. In my opinion, the collapse of the Smile album is the artistic tragedy of our lifetimes. Am I being too dramatic? ;-)

What brought this thread back to life ten years later?! I could say a LOT about Pet Sounds, but why bother? If one doesn’t "get" the album, so be it. Having said that, I will in fact say a few words about it; I owe that much to Brian Wilson.

I can understand why a person would find Pet Sounds underwhelming; it sounds very "old fashioned", and isn’t at all Rock music. In addition, it’s recorded sound quality is mediocre at best; it’s so veiled as to make hearing "into" the music difficult. In spite of that, it remains Paul McCartney’s all-time favorite album. Go figure! Dave Alvin (The Blasters, solo, work with John Doe of X, new album with Jimmy Dale Gilmore) said a while back that he himself never understood why others he respected liked Brian Wilson and/or The Beach Boys so much. Until, that is, very recently, when all of a sudden he had the epiphany, finally hearing what others had for decades. Better late than never!

For anyone interested in understanding why "God Only Knows" is considered one of the three greatest Pop songs ever written (by someone "close" to me ;-), head over to You Tube and find the video wherein a music professor (well la de da) sits at a piano, breaking down the song, demonstrating and explain the brilliance of it’s composition. Not as dry and academic as that may sound. Thrilling, actually. I would provide a link to the video, but remain stubbornly computer illiterate.

Up above one listener characterized Pet Sounds as depressing; I think of it rather as melancholy. Another said it was influenced by Brian Wilson’s discovery and use of LSD. Only somewhat; the Smile recordings (the never-completed follow-up album to Pet Sounds), on the other hand, are dripping with the stuff. In the Smile album (a musical dramatization of Manifest Destiny), Brian had finally found a lyricist---the brilliant Van Dyke Parks---his equal.