Pet Sounds is about 'growing up'--just. It's close-enough to being a crazy, invulnerable kid that it still has some rompin'-stompin' singalongs for gittin' those pretty beach girls to chirrup around the fire after you've all eaten hot dogs, and smoked and drank, and the stars have come out. Captiol demanded that there be at least one obvious hit, and Brian Wilson consented to putting "Sloop John D" on the album: but even "Sloop John D" is a rollicking sea-shanty about being on a horrible merchant voyage, being persecuted by the lawman, and having a drunk bunkmate eat all your supplies. In one of the most understated lines of 60s pop, Mike Love laments for the young sailor with the observation, "This is the worst trip/ I've ever been on." Well, one doesn't have to have been to too many unfortunate parties to see the double entendre in that.
With the remarkable, bleeding-edge orchestration, Brian Wilson pulled out his best wit in constructing the pop lyrics. There's an honest, open but circumspect realization in the songs about what adult life entails: there are recognitions of how we backslide in the hope that others will get our backs while we do so. There are a lot of songs about a kind of candidly desperate gratitude that we feel towards people (our best girls, mostly) who put up with our crap because they know us and love who they truly know. "God Only Knows" is one of those epically vulnerable love songs that become resplendent.
But everybody knows that the Beach Boys do love songs. There's something else that shows up on Pet Sounds: an adult's awareness of the preponderance of fakery and self-destructiveness in the world. (The fully restored) "Hang On to Your Ego" is Wilson offering the finger to all the hammy surf-clowns of California, while admitting that he know's that he's also guilty. And Ba-ba-ba Ba-barbara Ann--the all-American girl who's hot to go--becomes the emotional car-wreck you can''t bear to watch in "Caroline, No." [The melody's got some similarities to Elvis Costello's later "My Aim is True."]
So there was a shining moment when Brian Wilson was really lifting his weight as a song-writer. The tragic conclusion of "Surf's Up" from the long-time not-to-be-completed sequel of Pet Sounds, Smile, laments that "Surf's up before a tidal wave." And that was the vantage from which the songwriter was writing just before he wiped-out.
.gif)
