The best Beach Boys songs

I don’t know how I got onto this, perhaps because I came across The Beach Boys song “Heroes and Villains” the other day. I immediately thought of the group, which I liked a lot as a teenager, and wondered “what were their best songs?” And so I pondered a bit (I don’t really have to look up their music) and came up with four tunes, which I present for your delectation.

The Beach Boys were an excellent group–one of those who helped make the music of the Sixties the best of any decade (those who disagree are wrong)—but they were not the best group. They were not the Beatles, nor even Buffalo Springfield. Brian Wilson (75 this year) was a genius at production, but less so at songwriting—not nearly as much of a genius as were John Lennon and Paul McCartney.  Still, he and his band produced some wonderful music, and a lot of fairly good music.  I can take or leave their attempts to be psychedelic—the Beach Beatles—with songs like “Good Vibrations” and “Heroes and Villains.” Where they really shone were the romantic ballads (all of my four selections are in that genre), as well as the surfing, high school, and car songs. Their ballads shone with lovely tunes, great harmonies, and an economy of words. (I left out “California Girls,” but that would have been #5.)

Here are my four selections, in decreasing order of quality (but all great):

Caroline, No

God Only Knows (should be “Only God Knows”, but it wouldn’t sound the same)

Wouldn’t It Be Nice

Don’t Worry Baby

“Caroline, No” (1966) is the last song on their great album Pet Sounds, which also contains #2 and #3 on my list. Written by Brian Wilson and Tony Asher (the album was produced and arranged by Wilson), the short song (2:16) had this genesis:

It was initially written as “Carol, I Know”. When spoken, however, Brian Wilson heard this as “Caroline, No.” After the confusion was resolved, the pair decided to keep the new title, feeling that it brought a poignant earnestness to the song’s sad melody.Asher believes the song encapsulated “Brian’s wish that he could go back to simpler days, his wish that the group could return to the days when the whole thing was a lot of fun and very little pressure.” Asher says his contributions were inspired by his former girlfriend, who had moved to New York and cut her hair: “I had recently broken up with my high school sweetheart who was a dancer and had moved to New York to make the big time on Broadway. When I went east to visit her a scant year after the move, she had changed radically. Yes, she had cut her hair. But she was a far more worldly person, not all for the worse. Anyway, her name was Carol.”

and production:

For “Caroline, No”, harpsichord and bass flutes accompany more typical pop/rock instrumentation in a sound that, like other compositions from this period, reflects a jazz influence. The percussive exchange that opens the song features a tambourine and a large empty water bottle from the studio, played either by drummer Hal Blaine or percussionist Frankie Capp. Brian later stated, “‘Caroline, No’ was my favorite on the album, the prettiest ballad I’ve ever sung. Awfully pretty song. The melody and the chords were like Glenn Miller … a Glenn Miller-type bridge. The fade-out was like a 1944 kind of record … Listen for the flutes in the fadeout.”

This song takes me back to high school, when a broken heart felt like forever. (I graduated the year after this song came out.) Who could guess how many breaks would follow?

For a superb version by Eagles member Timothy B. Schmit, with Wilson looking on and harmonies by the Beach Boys, go here (don’t miss it; it also has comments by band members).

“God only knows” also came from Pet Sounds. Notable for its repetition at the end (not at all bothersome), it’s one of the few rock songs featuring the word “God” over and over again. It’s a poignant love song with a grandiose opening, characterizing the album’s Spector-like “wall of sound”:

The song names God in its title and lyrics, unusual for a pop single of its time, as Asher recalled: “Unless you were Kate Smith and you were singing ‘God Bless America’, no one [in 1966] thought you could say ‘God’ in a song.” The sentiments expressed in its lyric were not specific to any God, and could be addressed to any higher force, being a song about moving forward after loss. Wilson explained that his and Asher’s intention was to create the feeling of “being blind but in being blind, you can see more”.

Sung by his younger brother Carl Wilson, the Beach Boys’ recording was produced and arranged by Brian using an unorthodox selection of instruments, including French horn, accordions, sleigh bell, harpsichord, and a quartet of violas and cellos heard throughout the piece in counterpoint. The musical structure has been variously cited for its harmonic complexity, inspiring tension through its disuse of authentic cadences and a definite key signature. Its closing section features perpetual rounds, a device that was not normally heard in popular music of the era.

“God Only Knows” was voted 25 in Rolling Stone magazine’s 500 Greatest Songs of All Time the second of seven Beach Boys songs to feature (the first being “Good Vibrations” at 6), and was ranked by Pitchfork Media as the greatest song of the 1960s. The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame included it as one of “500 Songs That Shaped Rock and Roll”.

In “Wouldn’t it be nice”, the first song on Pet Sounds, the boys contemplate an impossibly idyllic life after marriage. Some Wikpedia notes:

Earlier Beach Boys songs celebrated adolescent fun and teenage love; “Wouldn’t It Be Nice” subverts this convention in its very first lyric: “wouldn’t it be nice if we were older“. In the Endless Harmony documentary, Wilson described the song as “what children everywhere go through … wouldn’t it be nice if we were older, or could run away and get married”.  Wilson added in 1996, “‘Wouldn’t It Be Nice’ was not a real long song, but it’s a very ‘up’ song. It expresses the frustrations of youth, what you can’t have, what you really want and you have to wait for it.” The song expresses “the need to have the freedom to live with somebody,” according to Brian. “The idea is, the more we talk about it, the more we want it, but let’s talk about it anyway. Let’s talk it over, let’s talk about what we might have if we really got down to it.” Asher has said that Wilson was “constantly looking for topics that kids could relate to. Even though he was dealing in the most advanced score-charts and arrangements, he was still incredibly conscious of this commercial thing. This absolute need to relate.”

The instrumental track was recorded at Gold Star Studios on January 22, 1966. The session was engineered by Larry Levine and produced by Brian Wilson. It took 21 takes of recording the instrumental track before Brian deemed it the master. The musicians present on that day were a group of Los Angeles session players commonly referred to as The Wrecking Crew. Wilson says, “Listen for the rockin’ accordions and the ethereal guitars in the introduction. Tony and I had visualized a scene. We had a feeling in our hearts, like a vibration. We put it into music, and it found its way onto tape. We really felt good about that record.” During the recording, the two guitarists who played the intro were plugged directly into the mixing board, and no one in the studio could hear them. Drummer Hal Blaine was required to wear a pair of over-the-ear headphones so that he could signal the rest of the band.^[

There’s a nice live performance on video here.

“Don’t Worry Baby” shows off the group’s fantastic harmonies. Released in 1964 and written by Brian Wilson and Roger Christian, it’s a “car song”, with the singer reassuring his girlfriend, after accepting a challenge to drag race, that things will be all right.

Wikipedia notes that the song influenced the Byrds’s version of Dylan’s “Mr. Tambourine Man“:

Much of [that] track’s arrangement and final mixdown was modeled after Brian Wilson’s production work for the Beach Boys’ “Don’t Worry Baby”