The Beach Boys

St. James Encyclopedia of Pop Culture, Jan 29, 2002 by Alexander Shashko

By 1963, the Beach Boys emerged as international stars and established their place in America's cultural life. But tensions between the band's chief songwriter, Brian Wilson, and the band's fan-base emerged just as quickly. Wilson was uninterested in his audience, driven instead to compete obsessively for pop preeminence against his competitors, especially Phil Spector and later the Beatles. To make matters worse, Wilson was a shy introvert, more interested in songwriting and record production than the limelight and the stage. He retreated into the studio, abandoning the proven style of his earliest hits for Spector's wall-of-sound sophistication on songs like "Don't Worry Baby" and "I Get Around." At the same time, Wilson's personal melancholia increasingly entered his songwriting, most notably on the monumental ballad "In My Room." Together, these changes altered the Beach Boys' public persona. "I Get Around" was a number one single in 1964, but "Don't Worry Baby," arguably the most creative song Wilson had yet written, stalled ominously at number 24. And "In My Room," while unquestionably about teenagers, deserted innocent fun for painful longing. It also topped out at number 23. The Beach Boys were growing up, and so was their audience. Unlike Wilson, however, the post-teen boomers already longed nostalgically for the past and struggled to engage the band's changes.

The audience was also turning elsewhere. The emergence of the Beatles in 1964 shook the foundations of the Beach Boys camp. Suddenly supplanted at the top of the pop charts, the rest of the band pushed Brian Wilson toward more recognizably "Beach Boys" songs, which he wisely rebuffed considering rock 'n' roll's rapid evolution during the mid-1960s. In addition, the entire band began living out the adolescent fantasies they had heretofore only sung about. Only now, as rich young adults, those fantasies meshed with the emerging counter-culture, mysticism, and heavy drug use of the late-1960s Southern Californian music scene. With the rest of the band tuning out, Wilson's Beatles obsession and drug abuse accelerated, Beach Boys albums grew more experimental, and Wilson suffered a nervous breakdown.

For two years after Wilson's breakdown, the Beach Boys' music miraculously remained as strong as ever. "Help Me, Rhonda" and "California Girls" (both 1965) were smash hits, and the live album The Beach Boys Party! proved the band retained some of its boyish charm. But no Beach Boys fan--or even the Beach Boys themselves--could have been prepared for Brian Wilson's unveiling of Pet Sounds (1966), a tremendous album with a legacy that far outshines its initial success. Completed by Brian Wilson and lyricist Tony Asher, with only vocal help from the other Beach Boys, Pet Sounds was Brian Wilson's most ambitious work, a dispiriting album about a young man facing adulthood and the pain of failed relationships. It also reflected the transformation of Southern California's youth culture from innocence to introspection--and excess--as the baby boomers got older. Moreover, Pet Sounds' lush pastiche pushed the boundaries of rock so far that no less than Paul McCartney hailed it as his favorite album ever and claimed it inspired the Beatles to produce Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. In subsequent decades, some critics would hail Pet Sounds as the greatest rock album ever made, and it cemented the Beach Boys' place in the pantheon of popular music. At the time, however, critics in the United States had already dismissed the band, and their fans, accustomed to beach-party ditties, failed to understand the album. Although two singles--"Sloop John B" and "Wouldn't It Be Nice"-- entered the top ten, sales of the album fell below expectations.