Beach Boys Reunite For Pet Sounds 40th

The Beach Boys put their differences aside to reunite to celebrate the 40th anniversary of one of the landmark albums of the rock era, “Pet Sounds.”

The surviving founders of the Beach Boys — Brian Wilson, Mike Love and Al Jardine — made their first public appearance together in 10 years Tuesday, standing atop the historic Capitol Records building in Hollywood.

The trio gathered to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the landmark “Pet Sounds” album and the recent double-platinum certification of 2003’s “Sounds of Summer: The Very Best of the Beach Boys.” The trio was joined by veteran band member Bruce Johnston and former Beach Boy David Marks. “It’s always good to do this while we’re living,” Jardine quipped to reporters before the event, in which band members were presented with framed plaques each containing two platinum vinyl records. Plaques also were issued posthumously to Wilson’s brothers, Carl and Dennis — both original Beach Boys members.

The reunion of the Beach Boys came after decades of animosity between Love and Wilson, who are cousins. Love sued Wilson in November, saying Wilson “shamelessly misappropriated (Love’s) songs, likeness and the Beach Boys trademark, as well as the ‘Smile’ album itself” when Wilson was promoting 2004’s “Smile.” Love previously sued his cousin in the mid-1990s, seeking more songwriting credit on the band’s back catalog.

The two shared a friendly rapport Tuesday, standing side by side and patting each other on the back. In thanking his bandmates, Love lauded “my cousin Brian Wilson, for his incredible abilities that gave us all this amazing life.” When asked if all hatchets have been buried, Love pointed to his back. “The hatchets are right here,” he said with a laugh. Loved added that between the band members “there’s issues that arise, and you resolve them over time.”

Of the reunion, he said: “We’ve been together, just in different configurations and different situations. But this is a great one because everybody’s in a celebratory mood, everybody’s on their good behavior and everybody’s enjoying the fact that our records have been recognized even 40 years after we first put (them) out.”

The heyday of the Beach Boys is well before my time; indeed, Pet Sounds came out when I was still in diapers. Their music hasn’t stood the test of time in the same way that that of contemporaries like the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Led Zepellin, or the Who. On the other hand, their sound was quite unique.

As to the album, WikiPedia offers a useful if pedantic history:

Pet Sounds is a 1966 album recorded by American pop group the Beach Boys. Often regarded as the masterpiece of composer-producer Brian Wilson, it has been hailed as one of the best and most influential albums in popular music. In 1995, nearly thirty years after its release, a panel of top musicians, songwriters and producers assembled by MOJO magazine voted it “The Greatest Album Ever Made.” In 1998 Q magazine readers voted it the 31st greatest album of all time; critics of German magazine Spex voted it the best album of the 20th Century; in 2003 the TV network VH1 placed it at #3. It also placed #2 on Rolling Stone’s list of the 500 greatest albums of all time to Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band by The Beatles. In 2004, it was one of 50 recordings chosen by the Library of Congress to be added to the National Recording Registry.

In many ways more of a Brian Wilson solo project, Pet Sounds was created after Wilson had stopped touring with the band, focusing his attention on writing and recording. Wilson created elaborate layers of beautiful harmonies by The Beach Boys, sound effects and unusual instruments like bicycle bells, buzzing organs, harpsichords, flutes, the theremin, and even dog whistles, on top of conventional keyboards and guitars.

Music critic Jerry McCulley offers a gushing review at Amazon.com, where you can download MP3 samples.

If you need some pointy-headed pundit to sell you on the merits of Pet Sounds, your money might be better spent on an ear specialist. Brian Wilson’s gift to 20th-century music elevated this pop album into a beguiling musical and emotional cogency that still operates outside pop culture’s fickle space-time continuum–and limited critical lexicon. There’s never been another record to compare (Rubber Soul, its inspiration, is close; Sgt. Pepper’s, its response, misses the point), and certainly no album has been as dissected, overanalyzed, and predigested for public consumption. In 1997 Capitol Records devoted an entire four-disc box set, The Pet Sounds Sessions, to its thorough deconstruction. The techno-marvel centerpiece of that project–the album’s first true stereo mix, painstakingly conjured out of multitape session sources by producer-engineer Mark Linett (under Wilson’s supervision)–was at once heresy and revelation. Now the label has gratifyingly seen fit to offer both mixes on a single disc (along with alternate versions of “Hang On to Your Ego,” the original title of “I Know There’s An Answer”), an idea that should please the orthodox and heretics alike. And while the album has always clearly been The Brian Wilson Show featuring the Beach Boys, biographer Brad Elliott’s concise new notes attempt to be more inclusive of a wider band perspective. The result (three of the five band members claim credit for the album title) sometimes resembles Rashomon. If Pet Sounds forever crystallized the band’s various creative (in)differences, it also became Wilson’s grand karmic joke on his band mates; its burgeoning reputation (Mojo magazine’s panel of pop experts once elected it greatest album of all time) guaranteed they would sing its songs–and praises–until the end. And if putting two different versions of the same album on one disc seems like overkill, look at the bright side: it’s a perfect excuse to listen to the glorious Pet Sounds twice.