The Beach Boys - Pet Sounds

So this review is supposed to be about The Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds, an album that all of you probably already own and, if you don’t, either have your reasons for ignoring it (meaning the residual effects of “Kokomo”) or live in an environment where music is forbidden. In short: shut down the computer and go get it now. That’s pretty much the review right there, because everybody knows that it’s required listening and that any true fan of music would hide their head in shame if this title isn’t found somewhere in their own collection.
At the same time, there is a point in every music fan’s life when they don’t have Pet Sounds in their collection, so I’d like to speak to that.
I had copies of Sgt. Pepper’s in the past, but not Pet Sounds. They were feeding animals on the cover, and I always attributed the band to surf music. But in college, one of the labs I worked at in the broadcasting division had about three or four albums for use, two of them were decent. One was The Cure’s Head On The Door and the other was Beach Boys’ Smiley Smile. I didn’t like Smiley Smile that much, but it did open up the possibility that the Beach Boys could do more than “Surfer Girl.”
At the public radio station, the Music Director was doing her damndest to convert some of the vinyl that the station had into compact disc. Having done this before, I can attest that it is a long and slow process, particularly for this radio station that literally had tens of thousands of records to convert. They wouldn’t be able to convert everything, they even had rare recordings from old 78s that were irreplaceable, but they were just beginning to change with the times and get some of the more notable records on cd. Pet Sounds was one of them. CDs were still somewhat of a novelty back then, the kind of novelty where you could have an absolutely shitty song on a promo cd and someone would take it if you left it sitting out because….well…because it was on a shiny aluminum disc. The fact that the Music Director, who I held in high regard for her eclectic musical tastes, specifically ordered this title as one of the first pop discs the station would have meant that it had to be good.
It was better than good. It was awesome. No wonder McCartney had a hard-on for this thing. And why hadn’t anyone bothered to spin “God Only Knows” the moment I started talking shit about The Beach Boys. That song is so fucking great that it’s now considered a hit even though it barely scraped the top 40 when it was originally released. How do I know it’s a hit now? Because my wife knows the words and she’s not the epitome of musical culture.
A few years later, I’m at Record Collector, looking through their impressive bins of used discs. It was always something of a crapshoot when you did this as some days you’d struggle to find anything while on others you had to return things and make hard choices as there were too many records that you wanted.
On this particular day, I was perusing the “B” section and both Sgt Pepper’s and Pet Sounds were sitting there. I pulled out both and brought them to the counter where the owner Kirk was ready to check me out.
“Dude! What the fuck?” I asked him, holding up the copies of two classic albums that someone had sold to him in return for an ungodly low figure.
Knowing exactly what I was in arms about, he agreed with my frustration.
“I don’t know man.” He said shaking his head. “I just bite my tongue and pay them the money.”
I went on to exclaim how there is no excuse, no matter how broke one may be, to sell back Sgt Pepper’s or Pet Sounds. Those are two records that you’ll need during dire straits, those “desert island discs” that you’ll return to again and again because they changed the course of music.
But no. Some fuckstick sold ‘em for a few bucks each and probably dropped the same amount on cigarettes or cheap vodka instead.
It wasn’t like today, where kids burn a copy on their hard drive and call it good. To me, that doesn’t count either. You need Pet Sounds to be prominently displayed somewhere and not smothering in the confines of a hard drive in between those ones and zeroes.
You need to go now and acquire it, knowing that you stand a better chance now than I did and running into a copy for yourself in much the same way that I did, as there’s probably more than a few people who are doing exactly what I was complaining about back then.
And if you’re one of those who may be tainted by the stigma of Mike Love and/or questionable career choices that the Beach Boys made and made often, consider that for at least one time, they made an album that changed the course of music and it can change the way you think about them.
Pet Sounds was released on this day in 1966.