“I didn’t own any Beach Boys records because I was a jazzer who bought only 10-inch albums, but every time you heard their new single, you knew it was a hit from the first two bars. Brian was writing unbelievably sophisticated music, especially vocally – no one was doing those Four Freshmen-style harmonies in rock’n’roll.
“I first met Brian in a recording studio. I was a copywriter working on a jingle, and I recognised him and said Hi. He said, ‘Come listen to this,’ and played me a few bits and pieces. That was typical of Brian. I once saw him grab the postman and ask his opinion of a tune he had just written. He was childlike in his excitement over something he’d done.
“He’d only want to talk about music at the start. But later on, we got into discussions of philosophy, and I soon saw a complex personality emerge. The lyrical ideas he’d suggest were a combination of naivety and romanticism, with a sadness behind it. He’d gaze into the distance and say, ‘There was this one time with my mother walking down the street…’ or, ‘Did you ever know a girl in high school, the most beautiful woman, but now she’s changed?’ which became Caroline, No.
“We could ramble for a couple of hours and whatever the mood became would influence what we’d end up writing. We’d migrate to the piano, me with my little yellow legal pad and pencil. I never wrote a lyric and then brought it to him, and only onn Wouldn’t It Be Nice did Brian want to finish a song before asking for the lyric. It amuses me that people think we conceived a theme, in that Pet Sounds starts at innocence with Wouldn’t It Be Nice and ends at experience with Caroline, No. Maybe Brian sensed something which influenced the sequencing, but I just wrote one song at a time. We smoked grass a few times. One time, we made hash brownies from the Alice B Toklas cookbook, but we put way too much in and we were just basket cases.
“Of the lyrics I wrote with Brian, I’m proudest of God Only Knows. ‘I may not always love you’ is a daring way to start a song. It still gets played at weddings and means so much to people. I Just Wasn’t Made For These Times was an unusual, interesting emotion I shared with Brian – I was a softie, too. It was wonderful, and embarrassing, that Pet Sounds re-emerged, to be voted the greatest album ever. Years later, some guy told me it saved his life. His drunk dad kept beating up his mum; the son would go to his room, think of jumping out the window, but put on Pet Sounds and somehow get through. It bowls you over.”
As told to Martin Aston.
This article originally featured in MOJO 223.
Photo: Getty/Michael Ochs