Thirty-three years ago next month, the ex-drummer of Rory Storm and The Hurricanes and his three mates released an album that not only irrevocably changed the course of modern music but also presaged the most fascinating musical duel we have ever witnessed. The Beatles' Rubber Soul represented a vertical shift in the development of the then still-nascent rock/pop idiom. It was a unified and coherent piece of work (not a few hit singles placed alongside fillers) and it ushered in the "album" era.
Out in California it landed on the turntable of one Brian Wilson. "I just flipped when I first heard it," Wilson says of Rubber Soul. "I remember saying to people `I want to make an album like that', it was a whole album with all good stuff. I really wasn't quite ready for the unity. It felt like it all belonged together. It was a collection of songs that somehow went together like no album ever made before, and I was very impressed. I thought: that's it, I really am challenged to do a great album."
Great is indeed the word. It's oft-quoted that The Beatles went from Love Me Do to Sgt Pepper's in less than five years, but consider, if you will, the distance covered by Brian Wilson in less than six months. In December 1965 he was recording covers like Papa-oom-mow-mow and Alley Oop for a fatuous, record company-pleasing album called Beach Boys' Party! (dig the exclamation mark) but in the first few months of 1966, and heavily influenced by Rubber Soul, he began to compose a series of songs that would effectively kill off his "fun in the sun" song-writing image and radically overhaul his status as a songwriter.
He started with a song called In My Childhood (no coincidence, maybe, that one of the stand-out tracks on Rubber Soul is In My Life) and the slowed-down melancholic melody seemed to capture what he wanted to get over, and thankfully wouldn't allow Mike Love ruin with lyrics about hamburgers and cars. Unsure of the lyrics he had written, he drafted in writer-around-town Tony Asher to help him out. Left to their own devices (the rest of the band were away on tour) the two changed In My Childhood into the song we now know as You Still Believe In Me. It's a remarkable song and according to a classically-trained musician, it "compositionally embodies the unique manner in which Brian writes music. In a sense, Brian created a new way of using the scale. His progressions are always going up, then pausing before they go up again . . . as you'll hear so clearly on this song, Brian doesn't come down in the middle of a progression."
The trademark bicycle bell and horn heard on the song are a legacy from its previous incarnation as In My Childhood and its atypical beginning is due to, as Tony Asher once noted, "our desire to try and do something that would sound, sort of, I guess, like a harpsichord but a little more ethereal than that". The mechanics of how they got that particular sound, Asher remembers, involved Wilson holding down the notes on the keyboard while Asher plucked the strings by leaning inside the piano. Over the next few weeks, the pair added such gargantuan songs as I Know There's An Answer, Caroline No, Let's Go Away For A While and God Only Knows to come up with the finished Pet Sounds album.
What Rubber Soul had done to Wilson, Pet Sounds did to The Beatles. "That album blew me out of the water," Paul McCartney once said of it, "I totally flipped when I heard it. It was definitely our inspiration for making Sgt Pepper's, it was the big influence. That was the big thing for me back then, I just thought: Oh dear me. This is the album of all time. What are we going to do?"
The stakes at the time were pretty darn impressive: after Pet Sounds, Wilson threw out Good Vibrations as a taster for his new album, and The Beatles responded by putting out Strawberry Fields and Penny Lane just before Pepper's. Sadly, though, we never got to officially hear Wilson's new album - the mythical Smile album. What can be officially heard for the first time (box sets aside) is the new, Brian Wilson-supervised stereo mix of Pet Sounds - available now on the Capitol label.
