It Was 50 Years Ago Today: “Good Vibrations” by The Beach Boys
November 22, 1966
“Good Vibrations” by The Beach Boys
#1 on the Record Retailer Singles Chart (UK), November 17-30, 1966
In late November 1965, the Beach Boys released “The Little Girl I Once Knew” as the follow-up to “California Girls.” It was the record where Brian Wilson finally matched Phil Spector for orchestral grandeur – albeit with a more subtle layering than the towering Wall of Sound.
“Little Girl” pushed Wilson’s ambition even further, not only instrumentally but structurally. Between the verse and chorus, where a bridge might normally go, Wilson instead illustrated the song’s theme of missing time by completely dropping all voices and instrumentation for a couple of bars, resulting in stark stretches of near silence.
The Beach Boys’ most overtly experimental single yet also became the group’s lowest charting since 1962 – #20 for a group that almost never peaked outside the Top 10. Less than a month after its release, Capitol Records rushed out “Barbara Ann,” a throwback doo-wop cover from the Christmas market cobble-up LP Beach Boys Party!. It went to #2.
Undeterred, Wilson pushed forward with work on the ambitious, gorgeously crafted album Pet Sounds. British audiences sent the record to #2 on the UK album charts, but its reception in the US was more muted, though the accompanying singles “Sloop John B” and “Wouldn’t It Be Nice” both just fell short of topping the Hot 100. Having successfully honed his elaborate-yet-pristine production style, Wilson returned to the structural experimentation of “The Little Girl I Once Knew,” but with a more radical bent.
Spector may have referred to his own records as “little symphonies for the kids,” but beneath the orchestral ornamentation lay traditional pop framework. Wilson, in contrast, strove to create something symphonic not only in arrangement but in form. Assembling songs in terms of classical movements would permit him to pursue his musical imagination in whatever direction it took him, rather tying him down to the repetition of the verse-chorus cycle.
“Good Vibrations” also reflected the contemporary, proto-postmodern fascination with assemblage: William S. Burroughs’s cut-ups, Robert Rauschenberg’s combines, Bruce Conner’s montage films. While the Beach Boys and their collaborators constructed each of the elements they’d weave and mash together, Wilson would treat them almost as found sound.
The band’s first attempt at this type of symphonic form took 17 recording sessions over a six-month span; its $50,000 price tag made it almost certainly the most expensive single up to that point in time. Fortunately, it paid off.
“Good Vibrations” is a collage of six discrete sections:
- The minor key “I, I love the colorful clothes she wears”
- The major key “I’m pickin’ up good vibrations”
- The psych rock, loping rhythm of “I don’t know where, but she sends me there”
- The solemn, churchlike “Gotta keep those lovin’ good vibrations a-happenin’ with her”
- Wordless vocal harmonies, accompanied by tambourine
- The Electro-Theremin solo, giving the “good vibrations” the last word
The immaculate arrangements and harmonies within each individual selection collide with the dramatic shifts between them. (There are even audible seams between the first verse and chorus, and in the middle of the word “excitations” at the end of the second chorus.)
Yet for all the unexpected musical left turns, it still manages to tell a coherent story, albeit with a sort of daydream logic. The narrator begins by admiring a girl’s beauty from afar; having recognized some sort of encouragement from her (real or imagined), his mind swirls into a spiral of fantasy scenarios.
Perhaps one of the most mind-bending aspects of “Good Vibrations” is how it manages to pack all these elements into a brisk three and a half minutes. Yet for all its ambition, it never seems show-offy in a way that its imitators sometimes do. Instead, it feels like a genuine attempt to express a specific emotional progression, and does so in a way that never sacrifices the pop elements inherent to the Beach Boys’ sound (doo-wop backing vocals, hooks galore).
“Good Vibrations” marks the difference between psychedelic “expanding your mind” clichés, and music that truly ventures into unmarked territory, granting free rein to a fertile imagination.
While Wilson had managed to recover from the relative commercial disappointments of “The Little Girl I Once Knew” and Pet Sounds, the frustration and self-doubt of trying to follow the path set out by “Good Vibrations” would ultimately break him. The proposed LP Smile was supposed to best the relentless innovation of the Beatles; instead, Wilson burned himself out and more or less gave up. The Beach Boys, with Brian in a reduced role, continued to release (often terrific) music, but they had lost their breakneck creative and commercial momentum.
“Good Vibrations” would end up as not only the group’s last US #1 of the ’60s, but also their last Top 10 hit for a decade. In the UK, which had proven more receptive to Pet Sounds and the band’s more elaborate singles — and which had less of an attachment to the Beach Boys’ cars-and-surfing era — the group continued to chart regularly until 1970.
Even so, the only additional UK #1 the band would have would be 1968’s “Do It Again,” a self-consciously nostalgic return to the simple, early years, back before they got mixed up with that experimental arty stuff.
But even if “Good Vibrations” ended up as something of a dead end for the Beach Boys themselves, countless of the group’s contemporaries and followers learned its lessons, concocting elaborate productions and stringing together musical ideas into an open-ended, free-flowing composition.
Yet it would be a rare few who would manage to conduct the same electrical charge of”Good Vibrations,” a record as exciting for its freshness and emotional verity as for the potential it represented for a new kind of pop music.
An expanded version of this essay previously appeared on No Hard Chords.
It Was 50 Years Ago Today examines a song, album, movie, or book that was #1 on the charts exactly half a century ago.
