(Credits: Far Out / YouTube Still)
Tue 23 September 2025 19:30, UK
Brian Wilson seemed to be put on this Earth to make people happy every time he walked into the studio.
Even though The Beach Boys were your average rock and roll outfit for the first few years of their career, Wilson could have been considered the musical equivalent of Mozart in his field whenever he put together one of his arrangements. But despite his presence elevating pretty much any song he worked on, there were bound to be tunes that didn’t resonate with everybody.
That’s simply human nature. The Beach Boys were the epitome of fun in the sun, and while there are always going to be people that are cynical on principle, it’s hard not to think of the summertime whenever ‘Surfin’ USA’ or ‘California Girls’ comes on unless you are literally living your life inside of an igloo. But are there tunes that seem cheesy now? Absolutely.
Is a lot of that down to Mike Love’s presence on the song? Possibly. You see, The Beach Boys did have a reputation of being the more preppy version of rock and roll, but even though Wilson was willing to experiment as much as he wanted to, Love definitely lived up to the stereotype of being the straight-laced asshole that everyone secretly hoped none of them actually were.
But no amount of Love’s insistence could have prevented Wilson from thinking outside the box. Even if they had a contract to make six different versions of ‘California Girls’, Wilson’s talent needed to be unleashed, and it wasn’t until Pet Sounds that people knew his experiments could work. Everyone in The Wrecking Crew knew that Wilson had created a legitimate masterpiece with his new album, and if he wanted to go further, he was going to have some stiff competition to contend with.
The Beatles had already begun expanding their own sound, and when listening to ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’, the Fab Four had thrown down the gauntlet for what rock and roll could sound like. But whereas that song had a foreboding atmosphere, ‘Good Vibrations’ took everything profoundly strange about Pet Sounds and turned it into a bite-sized symphony of pop music, complete with theremin, cellos and those signature harmonies.
And while Wilson never got to truly deliver on his next album, he knew that ‘Good Vibrations’ had the magic he was looking for to follow up Pet Sounds, saying, “The damn thing is so together and cohesive. It comes together so beautifully that people can’t resist loving it. The first time I heard Good Vibrations on the radio I cried my eyes out.” But it’s about more than the catchy melodies as well.
Looking at how avant-garde the structure is, this paved the way for what other bands could do if they thought of the right musical sections to stitch together. Wilson may have been following his muse at the time, but without ‘Good Vibrations’ coming first, Queen wouldn’t have had the confidence to make a masterpiece like ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’, and perhaps Radiohead wouldn’t have dared to think outside the box for ‘Paranoid Android’ two decades down the line.
Was Wilson thinking that hard about where his music was going to lead to? Probably not, but that’s not what he was put on this Earth to do. The greatest complement he could receive is hearing that he inspired someone to make their own masterpiece, but as long as he left the audience smiling, that was all he ever cared about.
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