Pet Sounds: Most Overrated Album of All Time?

Just about anything, taken out of context, is over-rated decades after it was state of the art. We went from window fans to air conditioning, black & white TV to color and from launching a dog into space to man walking on the moon during that decade - and the music grew by leaps and bounds as well. If you weren’t there, you really can’t grasp how cutting edge Pet Sounds, Sgt Pepper, Hendrix etc were.

Compare 1963 pop music: Lesley Gore It’s My Party, The Chiffons He’s So Fine, The Kingsmen Louie Louie, The Cascades Rhythm of the Rain, to 1967: The Doors Light My Fire, The Beatles All You Need Is Love, Penny Lane, Procol Harum A Whiter Shade of Pale, Strawberry Alarm Clock Incense And Peppermints. Music was changing from mono singles and AM radio to stereo albums and FM radio - look at both The Beatles and The Beach Boys and how they evolved during these changes (that they were partially the cause of).

Hate to say it, but you had to be there.

@orgillian197

Well said.

Impressions and evaluations will always be subject to present circumstances but it's worth remembering that everything is/was initially of its own time.

I feel the same way about punk rock.

No one today who wasn't there can really know what it was like to watch it unfold back in 77 - 78.

lonemountain, "work of all originals"?

Hardly, the lead song, "Sloop John B" goes back to 1916.  

And I remember the Kingston Trio releasing it in 1958.

Not to detract from Brian Wilson's contributions, but let's be accurate at least.

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.

What an interesting thread.  Amazing how different people's perspectives are.  Funny enough, I was never interested in Pet Sounds when it came out, I was in love with the Beatles.  I was young so there was a bit "are you a Beach Boys or Beatles Fan?"  At the time many of us were picking one or the other- kinds of silly now.

Im in the miusic business now and I  get to go in the room Pet Sounds was recorded in (now known as East West Studios in LA).  What is most amazing about this record (and has been said in this thread) was Brian thought of his pop music like a orchestra with a zillion parts and layers. No one else was doing anything close to that.  All the other records of the day where built with a band playing/singing at the same time, like a concert.  No one was multitracking because none of the studios had the multitrack recorder system (developed by Les Paul BTW). 

Another amzing thing about the record is Brain figured out how to get all those layers and parts, created and recorded one part at a time, all put together and mixed properly in time and a the right level.  No easy feat a the time.  It was a ridiculous amount of work and no one but a madman/genius would go through that much work over music "he heard in his head". 

Another intersting fact about the album was the Wrecking Crew,.  The played on the entire record and the Wrecking crew was an extremely professional set of stuido musicians.   I was just at an event where they finally gave Carol Kaye a lifetime achievement award.  A female bass player was behind the wrecking crew almost all the entire time, while guitartists like Glenn Campell and and Tommy Tedesco played on some records and not others. 

Funny, the list of top records in that year, Wrecking Crew played on 75% of them (Association, 5th Dimension, Mamas and Pappas, Herb Albert/Tijuana Brass, on and on).  They were incredible musicians and could play any song perfect, in any style,  by the second run through with little or no sheet music.

IM not sure if any of you ever heard a Beach Boys album that is now out of print called SURF'S UP.  It was a next step after Pet Sounds and is absolutely amazing.  There were songs like "Feel Flows" on that record that used backwards tape mixed in and all kinds of production tricks to get the coolest sound- SO FAR AHEAD of the industry at the time.   

I see that many judge Pet Sounds on the strength of the songs alone- which is only part of the story.  At the time, I did too.  Now, I understand it and the tech behind it and it WAS as a technological leap.  If anyone watched that Hulu show with Rick Rubin and Paul McCartney were Paul explains the whole story from the beginning, they were dumbfounded by Pet Sounds.  It was WAY beyond anything being done in the UK and it took George Martin and Brain Epstien months to figure out how to do to it.   

Sgt Pepper was a brilliant album but keep in mind it wasnt Paul John Ringo and George that figured out parts and multitracks and layers and overlays, it was their engineer/producers (Epstien Martin).  So Paul said on that intereview they would come in with a a song, a guitar part and a maybe the vocals and lyrics and that was it!  The rest was those producers.   In the case of the Beach Boys, it was ALL BRIAN- engineering, writing the music, figuring out voicings, conducting the sessions- completely insane.  He was doing things no one had ever done before so there was no template, no experience to draw on, no one to ask.   That's why we consider Brian a genius and why the record is so special.   

Imagine if Frank Sinatra did all that, or Elvis or any other artist of the day.  The clsoest we have to that is Les Paul who developed multitracking.  After Pet Sounds, the recording industry began adopting it as the musicians all wanted to sound liek that too.

Brad