Good Vibrations was recorded today.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=apBWI6xrbLY
It's more correct to say that recording of Good Vibrations started on this day in 1966, when Brian Wilson and the Wrecking Crew cut the instrumental track in its first incarnation. The track wasn't finished until September '66, and the result bore little resemblance to what was put on tape on Feb 17. It is arguably the most expensive pop song ever recorded.
The master tape is now lost.
It truly is a brilliant piece of work. In terms of musical complexity, nothing the Beatles ever did even came close. And yet for all its complexity, it is completely accessible and became a #1 hit. Frank Zappa put some compositions together that were more complicated, but they weren't as accessible.
People speak about the Beatles in reverent tones, but they were four guys working with a legendary producer in George Martin, and legendary engineers in Geoff Emerick, Glyn Johns, and Alan Parsons. Brian Wilson was composer, producer, engineer, musical director, and tape cutter. Mostly alone. It's no wonder he lost his marbles in the late 60's. Arguably, it took someone in a manic, drugged, and schizoid state to conceive and execute Good Vibrations, while his "band" was fighting him and his dad (and manager) was selling him out.
That's interesting but I still love the Beatles a lot more than I do the Beach Boys. Just saying.
As do I. With the exception of Pet Sounds, the Beach Boys discography is a bunch of classic, but mostly formulaic singles, and after 1966, the Beach Boys went to shit. Murray Wilson had sold out the band's publishing, Mike Love had wrested creative control from Brian Wilson, and Brian had a breakdown due to exhaustion and mental illness exacerbated by drug use.
The Beatles conceived the LP album as a collection of previously unreleased songs rather than an anthology of singles in 1965 with
Rubber Soul, Brian Wilson took that inspiration and came up with the idea of the LP album as an experimental artistic expression with
Pet Sounds in early 1966. The Beatles took that inspiration and came up with the notion of making a highly experimental album,
Revolver in late '66, and then conceive the LP as complete artistic departure from previous work, using artistic surrogacy, with
Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band in 1967.
Brian Wilson, knowing what the Beatles were up to, decided to make an album that was a song cycle -
Smile. Nobody had ever attempted to completely map a Classical Music concept into a pop album before. And nobody would pull it off until Pete Townshend in 1969 with Tommy, because the experimentalism that London embraced and demanded of pop music was resisted in Los Angeles, and both the Beach Boys and the record company resisted Brian Wilson's increasingly experimental, expensive, and erratic efforts. It was too much for one guy to handle, especially a young guy with a brutal family background. So Wilson breaks down, Mike Love gets control of the band,
Smile gets shelved, the Beach Boys immediately become a "nostalgia" act, and sans the competition with Brian Wilson the Beatles essentially revert to creating brilliant, but not necessarily experimental albums. Jimi Hendrix and Pete Townshend assume the royal mantles of Experimentalism, Jimmy Page revives Rock 'n Roll as a pop form and blows it up to monstrous proportions, the Beatles blow apart in 1970, and the Beach Boys just create reissue after reissue and repackage after repackage for 50 years, with the exception of a brief moment in 1988 when four mostly forgotten 60's artists get together and create "Kokomo," the Beach Boys' final hit.
But the Beatles left behind a discography that includes at least three albums that are just off-the-hook innovative masterpieces, and the rest ranges from the sublime to the ingenius, and what characterizes it is its timelessness. It sounds as fresh today as it did five decades ago. That's a monumental accomplishment.,
So yeah, the Beatles are the greatest rock band ever. And Brian Wilson is mostly a footnote. But it's an exceedingly brilliant footnote. "Good Vibrations" alone would be an exceedingly brilliant footnote.
