Was Brian Wilson’s Pet Sounds better than Sgt. Pepper’s?

Pet Sounds is part of the towering legacy of Brian Wilson, but was it greater than Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band? | HAVE YOUR SAY

Brian Wilson in August 2007 in Los Angeles, California. Picture: Getty Images.

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On hearing the music his cousin, Brian Wilson, had written for the Beach Boys’ next album in 1966, the often unpleasant Mike Love called it “ego music”. Wilson recorded in his biography, Wouldn’t It Be Nice: “After one stormy session, he let his disgust surface and snapped at me, ‘Who’s gonna hear this shit? The ears of a dog?’.”

Love had not just brushed off a genius, but inadvertently inspired the name for the album many believe to be the best in rock music history: Pet Sounds. Had Capitol records had its way, Pet Sounds may have sunk without trace. The US label that had turned down the Beatles considered not issuing it at all. Executives thought Wilson was challenging recording industry norms, perhaps antagonising his overbearing, abusive father with songs radio would not play.

They were half right. The music wasn’t used in the perfunctory radio ads for the album, which limped to No. 10 on Billboard. But the band hired the Beatles’ sharp publicist, Derek Taylor, to handle the release of Pet Sounds in the UK. He came up with the “Brian Wilson is a genius” line. No one in those early years of pop music, not even Paul McCartney and John Lennon, had been so described.

Taylor also had produced a video clip for God Only Knows – Brian’s finest achievement, crowned by brother Carl Wilson’s sweetest vocal. To Americans, “God” was barely acceptable in song lyrics and the song, hailed by McCartney and Jimmy Webb as the greatest ever, was hidden as the B side of Wouldn’t It Be Nice. In the UK it was the A side and raced to No. 2, where it was kept from the top by the Beatles’ dodgy Yellow Submarine.

The Beach Boys in June 2012 in New York: from left, Bruce Johnston, David Marks, rear, Brian Wilson, Mike Love and Al Jardine. Picture: AP

Also in England, the Rolling Stones’ manager, Andrew Loog Oldham, took out a full-page ad in Melody Maker declaring Pet Sounds “the greatest album ever made”. He’d met Wilson the year before in Los Angeles and the big Beach Boy had calmly said “One day I will write songs that people will pray to”. He already had: Don’t Worry Baby, his response to the Ronettes’ Wall of Sound masterpiece, Be My Baby, had arrived the year before.

On March 31, 1966, Wilson and the band worked out the final sequence of the 13 richly diverse songs that made up Pet Sounds, all but Sloop John B written by him. At first reluctant to remake the Kingston Trio’s hit version of the traditional Bahamian folk song, he was happier after subverting the lyrics with a drugs reference, adding, “this is the worst trip I’ve ever been on”.

The Beach Boys' 1966 album Pet Sounds.

Most of the lyrics not written by Wilson were contributed by a journalist turned ad man, Tony Asher. Asher thought Wilson was mad, a “genius musician but an amateur human being”. The whole Beach Boys experience was unpleasant for Asher and he attended just a handful of recording sessions.

When the album flopped, he blamed its title. But Asher’s work on ideas for songs, their titles and his lyrics fit perfectly together. Wilson did not tell Asher, but his anxiety through the sessions was driven by what he saw as his need to re-establish himself as music’s pre-eminent songwriter. He understood that the Beatles’ Rubber Soul album had stolen that title from him as it sailed to the top of the album charts, as had the ­previous five Beatles’ albums, as would the following six. Wilson listened to Rubber Soul right through with friends. When it finished they turned to him with a look that sought his royal approval. “I’m flipped by it. I can’t believe it,” he told them. “Those guys are geniuses … they put only great stuff (Michelle, Norwegian Wood, In My Life, The Word) on the album. That’s what I want to do.”

Paul McCartney and Brian Wilson at the Coachella Music and Arts Festival in 2009. Picture: Kevin Mazur/MPL.

He was not just in competition with Lennon and McCartney. They also had George Harrison and the guiding hand of producer George Martin. In recording Pet Sounds, Wilson had broken the mould of how bands worked. He did everything. He wrote, played, sang, arranged and produced. And he composed beautiful instrumentals that fully displayed a sometimes childish charm – happy music that made him forget the trauma of having a dad like Murry Wilson. Even accidents were turned into moments of haunting brilliance, like the misheard words of Asher: “Carol, I know” became the final song, Caroline, No. The sound of a train passing a dog barking prefiguring the final seconds of Lennon’s yet-to-to come Good Morning, Good Morning.

The re-evaluation of Pet Sounds started in a 1971 feature by my old Times colleague Richard Williams, who wrote that it “dwarfed all the rest of pop music”. In 2003, it was runner-up to the Beatles’ Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, McCartney’s response to Wilson, in Rolling Stone magazine’s list of the greatest albums ever made. Revolver and Rubber Soul were No3 and No5. By 2020, the somewhat woke list had Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On at one, but Pet Sounds still at two. Sgt Pepper came next.

McCartney can have the final word. He said in 1990: “Pet Sounds – that blew me out of the water. I love that album so much. I’ve just bought my kids each a copy of it for their education in life – I figure no one is educated musically ’til they’ve heard that album.”