Pet Stories

we did six shows in london the audience reacted very very positively i really got a good reaction out of it it was quite amazing there's loviness in the music that people can relate to the love regardless if you're two years older you're 92 years old i'm very proud of myself for people who tell me that it's the greatest album of all time to me the greatest show of all time is the phil spector christmas album that's my personal favorite brian wilson used to come around once in a while to the spectre sessions as an observer and because i like the way he sat at the piano i liked the way he talked i liked his voice i liked his face i liked the way he looked i liked him what can i tell you we didn't really know who he was i was a frustrated artist and producer that wanted to do something great like spectre you know i wanted to do something good like phil spencer phillip had his wall of sound every producer in town used to come by to peek in because they knew that the word was like wildfire phil spector's recording for usually friday nights he used to use a bunch of musicians that were really really ahead of their time really good players so i used them for past times they were trying to learn what the the magic dust phil spector was sprinkling on records i wanted to take the wall of sound and do my own thing with it and try a new wall of sound when brian was signed by capital he wanted the wrecking crew guys and that's how i got involved now blaine carol kay ray pullman billy pittman jamie glory steve douglas frankie capp tommy morgan billy strange and glenn campbell yeah larry nettle don randy i said i want this to be as good as phil spector's records and they all started laughing you know i said i'm serious i wanted to be as good as phil spector well the first time i i saw brian uh he was a very young man but something was different though about him because i noticed that everybody respected him a lot and so uh word got out among our studio musicians because we talked about the people that we worked with first of all most of the rock and rollers are very nice that we work for but we always had to invent lines for them but with brian no he brought in his own music see i would write the music on paper music paper and i go in and i say here's your paper here's your paper here's your paper here's your piece of paper and they all read the notes on the paper together we respected that that whole that whole idea that he had you know we didn't try to destroy it we were the band and he was the leader brian was firm about what he wanted he he was able to express himself and and let you know what you should do and he was always always pretty cool in the studio breaking cap had a bag of tricks like you wouldn't have 20 different kinds of percussive instruments tambourine maracas wood blocks temple blocks triangles cowbell all kinds of hand percussion anything that would make a sound so we try one thing we didn't like it fibrophone marimba try another thing timpani orchestra bells which come glockenspiel orchestra bells is what they really were after about eight or nine tries we finally got oh there's the one that's the one we want brian wanted wanted the take to be to be exactly right and if it was a half hour or an hour over or if it took another total session it didn't matter go he would go until he got what he wanted and and that's why he got good good tracks and hit songs he was very creative and very investigative certain musicians can read notes they can actually read fly off a paper that's how well they read and that's tommy morgan i think the way i originally got involved with brian wilson was through hal blaine and i guess there was need of harmonica not everybody needs harmonica my career has been based on people thinking they need harmonica tommy morgan was the best harmonica player i ever worked with i could not believe his his plan it was just really good i like people who know what they want i like people who who have prepared for things i like them that that are in control of what they're what they're doing and and have ideas that you can bounce off brian was excellent how did brian give me the information sometimes play the piano sometimes sing in my ear but the communication was there it was very positive communication brian when he was playing the organ he'd be explaining the same time he was playing because we weren't recording yet and he said i'm gonna you know i'll be moving around here and and i would play something and and he would and i would look over there and he has some good-sized hands too so he and he knew how to pull the the the what they call the feet the bars on the organ on the b3 and uh i would be playing something and he said oh yeah stay with that you know and then you'd work you'd work off each other you know and that's what made it so much fun there's never been a don randy he played for phil spector's records i think he was on be my baby i'm not sure but i think he was john the most versatile hard-rocking swinging rock and roll piano player that ever lived phil's practice would say try this and he tried before phil could answer ask him the question you already have the notes does that quick i was doing most of phil's dates and the word got out i was doing that and other things and uh brian called me and of course at that time remember that we were adults maybe approaching 30 31 years old and these kids were 16 17 year old kids singing about surfing and what the heck did we know about surfing so in the beginning this was very infantile music to us so when brian all of a sudden started singing these falsetto things we thought what is this what is he doing i mean it was impossible but this is a paycheck and we were in there to do a best that we could and we did and of course it seems like within weeks we were hearing it all over the radio hal blaine was the funniest guy i've ever met he was the glue that kept the sessions together he would crack jokes so much he could get them he'd get the guys musicians in stitches you know the difference between an oboe and an english horn an oboe takes longer to burn but meanwhile and he wouldn't listen to me still keep going i go hell stop joking around brian never wanted to be interrupted when he was listening to something because the wheels were clicking constantly never stopped he was meshing he was putting together his soul you know it's what he loved and what he wanted and what he wanted to be perfect and that's how he worked that's all there was to it and we all quickly appreciated that he was focused into the music the reason why we play music in the first place is we we had that very same focus to play music it was our life it was our breath to him music was his life and his breath and we understood that with pet sounds i wanted to write some songs that reflected how i really felt i really felt about life something that i felt in my soul rather than just car songs sir songs you know something more introspective like taking a good look at yourself see how you feel and then see what you should do to improve yourself that was my way of coping with with those kind of things that come up in every man's life i tried to make it the most artistic loving album ever made and it was one of the best when we first began to work brian said i want to do something unlike anything the beach boys i've ever done before so don't think in terms of past beach boys songs a friend of mine knew knew tony and he said if i needed to collaborate tony was very good at words because he was working an advertising agency and i got this call and and uh voice on the other and said this is brian wilson he came over and we hit it off just like that we started writing songs right away was there an intimidation factor on your part i don't know maybe he was intimidated to ask him he was just a very cool person with a cool attitude the right kind of attitude for me to work with he wasn't egotistical he wasn't outgoing and braggadocio kind of person he's like a cool laid-back kind of person essentially it was a collaborative experience which is to say that brian was composing melodies at the same time that i was composing lyrics and we would stand next he'd be sitting at the piano and i'd be standing with a legal pad writing lyrics as they came to me i would write part of the melody and write part of the lyrics and i'd write more melody right more lyrics once in a while while i'd have a whole melody written for him to write lyric but usually it was like little melody little words little little words you know like that he told me that the real problem was that he was i think there was something like a year late with the album or many months late with the album and needed to turn out a lot of songs in a short period of time and everybody that he had written with before was out of the country the boys were in japan i think i told the boys that i wanted to get off the road in 1965 i told them i want to write some songs while you're on tour and when you come back we'll record so they agreed i said well mike i'm running with another collaborator he goes what another collaborator he says i thought i was your collaborator i said well for this one album tony asher is my collaborator and he understood so tony and i did pet sounds and when they got back the tracks were all ready for them all ready to go all they had to do is go in and learn their parts and that was that tony was a little more meticulous mike was real spontaneous you know before every time we would meet to write we'd spend at least an hour uh just sitting in the living room not even next to the piano talking about our life experiences mostly dating women love affairs heartbreak that kind of stuff and that would put us in a certain mood and then based upon that mood we'd write a song of a certain kind a perfect example probably is carol i know where we talked about how sad it is to see a girl after you have had this crush on her and you see her several years later and she's kind of grown up and gotten hardened by the world and so forth i know we sat down and wrote that song i wrote it for carol i was in love with her in high school and as soon as high school was out i went to the piano and played a four freshman song and i was thinking about her and i started crying because i realized i'd never be able to have her so later on when tony and i got together i thought carol ein for carol so i wrote for carol i had heard it as carol i know carol okama i know and brian who was hearing it as caroline that only lasted for a couple of minutes because we decided what it was going to be but that's kind of an interesting little play on words and because i don't think i would have written the words caroline no it's not a phrase that i would ever use but it's so uh poignant you know a phrase to use just to say no you know like no no don't do that you know and uh and it really adds so much to that song so i think it was a great improvement as it turns out carol i know my dad told me to put a uh speed up on the tape on the tape machine and speed it up about a half a note and he said it'll sound sweeter i said dad i can't do that he goes he goes son look trust me try it you'll love it i tried it and it worked i loved it i asked capitol records to put caroline no out it's a single under the name brian wilson because i wanted to promote my name and they did and the song didn't make it the darn thing didn't make it yeah if it had do you think it might have marked the end of the beach boys oh no if it was a hit i might have released another one but i'm glad it didn't because i'm glad the beach boys kept going wouldn't it be nice it's one of the happiest songs i ever wrote very happy song brian just loved the idea of of you know wouldn't it be nice to be a young couple that could do whatever you wanted to do and want to be great when we can tony and i wrote that song for people for young people who who us like to fall in love and be happy and spend the day together and all that you know we wanted people to relate to those lyrics wouldn't it be nice brian played me a little part of the of the melody but he hadn't finished it and so periodically i'd ask him about that and they'd say you know how's that song coming or he'd say let's work on something else what do you want to work on i said what about that song you were you know played me the other day oh i haven't finished that yet i haven't finished that yet so that continued and eventually he said to me okay now i'm finished i can play it to you so he did he played me the whole thing all the way through no lyric then we began to to compose that i mean i began to write a lyric to it but because he had completely finished the melody at that point all he focused on for the first time in our collaboration was my lyric and he was focusing on absolutely every syllable and it was terribly difficult for me to write as you know there are lots of syllables and lots of words in that lyric because it has so many notes and about five minutes into the process i said this is not gonna work because in the past when we wrote together he had something else to concentrate on which was writing the melody but in this case there was nothing else for him to do his work was done so i said why don't you just play this into a cassette corner i'll take it home and write it and when i brought it back it was again one of those situations where he listened to it and said it's great the word the lyrics by tony were really exceptionally good you know on that one wouldn't it be nice brian wanted to beef up the end of the phrase so he had me play uh bum on the timpani to kind of help beef up what hal was doing because hal was playing a figure there too with hal sometimes he would be a little headstrong he want to play it his way so i had a couple arguments with him i've heard other musicians talk about his charts i never saw a chart we had court sheets you know that started here and ended here and maybe a stop in between and the rest of it was do what you feel i don't know wouldn't be nice i said look i'm really looking for more of a school instead of a boom boom you know and he goes well what's wrong with this boom boy you're not getting the b it's not boom boom he goes oh i see i see that's how it would work brian was a beautiful young man who had a very strong feeling for for music we sensed the the artist in him uh and we knew that he was self-taught uh but there was something burning in him to create great things and when his music got better and better as far as his arranging and and the kind of tunes that he wrote like that we saw a genius explode with pat sounds i want people to hear what i felt inside my soul because i knew there's so much i have such a big soul that i wanted to share with people well when i first started working on the album with brian he was in a very creative very productive sort of mood and while i'm sure he felt pressure from capital it didn't seem like a panicky kind of situation at all and it seemed to work very well i mean it just flow we we sort of uh buoyed each other up and uh i mean he was always very supportive and complimentary about what i was doing and i was genuinely uh just knocked out by the things he was doing so it was fun we just sat and said wow that's great try this you know do that we were on all eight cylinders we uh we really kind of kicked butt together you know it was really great i'd been hearing thoughts and things in my head and finally i got it out to tony i got across the tony a feeling and he got a feeling back across to me it was really amazing when you write with someone at the piano you always wonder if you're a lyricist you always wonder what they're really hearing in their head because what they play on the piano is limited by how well they can duplicate what they're hearing in their head and what i didn't know of course was what kinds of things brian was hearing that was one of the things that was so exciting about hearing the final mixes and the final recordings because all of these string flute uh you know other instrument things i never heard because they were in brian's head but i wasn't privy to that we used to go and do these sessions we never heard finished product we knew we made a track and in one day one night you're driving home from the studio and you turn and all of a sudden you hear the record that you did a few weeks ago and my god it's a it's magnificent what was so interesting when we were laying down the tracks you'd see his eyes going and you'd look in and he'd be talking to you and he was hearing the structure of where the vocals were going to be see now we didn't know where that was going to end up he knew we never knew the song but when we did hear it on on the radio or whenever and we said yeah that's what we did it really made it because brian pulled it all together with his with his song and his vocals the only thing that i regret is that i never was there when he did the vocals i would have loved to watch them do that i would take the beach boys in the studio and here's what we'd do i would take one song at a time say guys i want to do godly nose today i would say carl here's your part i want you to do this and what did you do and he was saying that and mike i thought he was seeing his part and al same thing he had to stand in a box he was so short he had to stand up on a box to sing on the microphone and dennis of course of course he was saying dennis was saying yeah they learn it quick they're real quick learner real fat sometimes two songs per day but mostly just one but basically i didn't want things to over i didn't want to overwork their voices you know i wanted their voices to be in shape i always felt the best parts were the vocals anyway we were we were the underscore we we laid it down and and thank god we did it was fun for us and and we knew brian was going to take this someplace that nobody expected i'll make you so sure with the tune god only knows it was a very sad song i felt you know you could feel the the emotion in it but i think then too i think about two or three of us i mean we were going through the break of over marriages or something like that so it was kind of added to that you know god only knows took me and tony about an hour to write we it came very fast it came just like that and we he and i were both astonished with it we said we have a classic song on our hands here and i almost got tears i mean it was like a beautiful tune that we had written together you know i never gave any thought to who would actually you know sing lead on what song the only exception to that i recall is that when we were writing god only knows i can remember brian at some point saying carl's going to sing this and it's going to be fantastic i said you know this would be really good for carl he goes you're right it would be good for carl i said no maybe i should do it he goes no carl so we talked to carl and he went in there and knocked it out it's my favorite carl vocal of all the vocal even better than darling let me tell you something about god only knows we didn't know the title of that so when we were playing it you knew it was kind of a very special song just the way it's courted from nothing else i mean you're saying oh my god this is absolutely beautiful and then when you hear the lyric oh my god i mean it was priceless just wonderful now this next song is a song that paul mccartney told me that was his favorite tune but i don't know if it was or not the inspiration for his pet sounds was rubber soul that was the one that got me going november of 65 at my house in beverly hills my friend goes i want you to listen to this out by the beatles and i got so blown out that i went to the piano and started writing songs start making melodies i wanted to try to top it i felt competitive with the beatles you know it's a funny thing it's funny but i felt competitive with it when we were beginning to work on pet sounds brian and i both talked about rubber soul and said let's try to do that let's try to put the bar up there where where this album had put it you know after the beatles heard pet sounds they wanted to make a greater album so they did sergeant pepper's lonely hearthstone band and it was a very very very great album right up there with pet sounds and it was like really good the beatles they were completely hooked on pet sounds i was told that personally by john lennon by george harris and then we came out with vibrations and they came out with uh penny lane and all those songs you know the beatles and the beach boys were chasing each other up a spiral it's like the neverending spiral we expected every date that we did from him to to be a huge hit because he was producing more and more he was very focused and very sure about his music and the music was great he'd sit down and play the tune uh so that we got the idea of the tomb and then he'd go in the booth and any any uh he would give us orders from the booth there would be a number of guitars sometimes two three maybe even four barney kessel sometimes glenn campbell and uh there was always a drums bass and organ and piano or organ or piano either brian would play one i would play something else or sometimes he would just stay in the studio and use two of us uh um in those days larry nectal i think did some i did a lot of them uh there were a number of pianists that he could have used through that that time everybody was in the same room and eye contact was there and it was wonderful because you know in those days if it felt really good brian was happy also it wasn't just how it sounded and how to feel good too we had that beautiful spot inside of his soul that we worked with and it was back and forth and he knew that we could play and we knew that he could write and and so there was a wedding of us all age didn't matter he he could write and he was a good person to us because he knew he respected us and when you have that that's the greatest type of person to to work for it we just wanted to make fun records that felt good and that's what we did every time we went in to work with brian okay here's a story about snoop john b al jordan came to me he said would you like to try to do slip john b and a beach boy style and he played the king central's version and i took down the chords of the song and i went in my into my panty room and wrote an arrangement of it just like that i said i love it i love it he goes i can't wait to hear it and he goes in the street he goes brian you've done it again you've done it again brian did everything with a sense of humor he was marvelous we the joking around was just great and you know you you knew that something was going to happen that was going to be nothing but greatness with past sounds i tried to make a sketchbook that represented my whole life and uh and i did he was learning as he was going to you know he he was trying this sound and that sound and he had to have the freedom to to do that and we understood that carol k played with the pick right so she got the top the click sound of the bass and the boom sound of the bass at the same time so i gave her the click boom sound i usually played with with a lot of bottom on my bass uh for instance on on some things let's see um here here's what what i would say was my normal sound see and so um then he he wanted more high-end along with the bottom so it was more like this he thought bass lines and that's obvious a good classical trained musician thanks bass lines as well brian thought bass lines albeit he was a bass player and played piano and that sort of thing but the bass was a very important part of his uh rhythm structures a lot of it was jazz this is jazz that's a walking line that that's that's a good jazz walking line uh but then he got off in in symphony he put the bass in the right hand part c which was uh more more classical in nature and it still had a groove you got brian has a great group i've watched him play bass and he's got a terrific group he gets up there and he he makes the whole band sound good it didn't groove until he got up there and started playing all of a sudden the groove just fell right in see he might not have have his hand just right or something but he plays you know he he has a crew so he all of his records groove too he imparted that groove to us and and it was a good feeling so when you got the you've got the sounds and you got the groove you have a great record well it's about people who don't want to express themselves to other people they should keep their own self they're afraid to be with people and to say here's how i feel this is what i went through you know it's just about that kind of thing it's no big deal all of the rhythm parts doubling the bass line in that were were dictated by brian and so those were very specific which brian controlled and i played exactly what he wanted when it came to the solo then i was given a little bit of freedom which was an interesting thing because it's the first time i ever had a solo on on one of brian's albums and to my mind the first time that the bass harmonica had been used as a solo instrument in in a rock record and so i improvised that that part brian was also very interesting from the standpoint of when he was finding out what base harmonica could do he knew what he wanted but if it ran off the end of the instrument or something he was quick to make an adjustment and and make a change or if it was impossible play very awkward something like that then he would make a change he didn't come in with with 29 notes that he wanted each note that way he wanted 29 notes you could only do 25 of them well he would change the other four and he could make a decision quickly i wasn't really a slave driver i just you know told people what to do if he parked at us that was great because we knew he knew what he wanted you don't want anybody nice you want to get it done you still believe in me was the first thing i wrote brian already had a track for that he didn't ever play me the original lyric there was a it was recorded i guess with a lyric in my childhood he picked out the melody on the piano which was then recorded over that track and i went home and wrote the lyric to that melody it reminds me of a little child you know the child in me i know perfectly well you know that just the kid in me wanted to come out and play but essentially he said yeah that's great let's do another tune you know that was pretty much it which was quite amazing to me i was trying to capture the innocence of childhood yeah the best i could you know so was tony he tried to get the lyrics to inspire little kids the little horn that you hear honking at the end of you still believe in me was actually put on in the recording session that was that was done for um in my childhood and the idea behind that was that that apparently at the end there's a bicycle bell as well i think although i don't know if you can hear it and it was just all the you know sounds of a person's childhood that brian added and it was it wasn't possible to get that out because they've been mixed in with the track brian and i were in the studio with nobody else except chuck britts i think the engineer brian decided he wanted to have those strings plucked so i said to brian you sit at the keyboard and push down the notes and hold down the pedals and i'll pluck those strings because i know i can do that you know but of course in the when you look inside the piano it's much more difficult than you think because there are three strings for every note and so forth so of course i didn't get it right and then he finally lost patience and you sit at the piano and i'll pluck the strings of course he wasn't any better at it than i was you know and it took us the longest time to get that just that simple little phrase it was it really took like i don't know 45 minutes or something i remember one day we were together brian and i and he began playing a rhythmic feel on the piano and said i'd really like this field don't you and i said yeah he told the story about his mother and the dog maybe everybody knows that story when i was an 11 year old kid this dog was barking at us right she goes a dog that barks at us may not bark at somebody else because he picks vibrations up from us but 11 years later i i said to myself dogs barking at people because they pick up vibrations and i sat at the piano vibrations vibrations you know fooled around finally i got a little bum bum bum beat michael love came over to my house and he goes how's this i'm picking up good vibrations she's giving me the xrt i said that sounds great took a long long time to do that song there were 18 sessions for good vibrations um long in five different studios it's like oh here we go again it cost us 16 000 to me i had not a clue over a period about two months some days we would come in and we would play for three four five minutes ten minutes tops brian would say thank you gentlemen and it would be gone when he asked me to keep doing this part over and over again all i was doing was holding a low note i think it was a low b flat and it was on the organ on the hammond b3 and it was for him to have the basis for that unbelievable modern chord that they do and it's it's just amazing because i kept doing it over and over i said what a chord is he going to be putting against this thing i'm playing one note you know so i didn't know the chord i knew it was the bottom part of it and we kept doing it over and over and over and i had worked all that morning and the night before i can't remember for who we were working on another project i think with jack nichi and somebody and i was start a little tired when i got there and now we kept going on hour after hour over this one thing so this is the god's honest truth at one point i got a pillow and i put it on the low b flat that i just kept holding it and he kept stopping and starting going back and forth and i laid down and i actually took a nap for 15 minutes i was fast asleep while playing the note with my head it was just like a low decibel you know and then finally they said i think we got it you know oh great you know i thank god you know let's get to some action here you start off with a blank piece of paper and then wait for brian to come around and many times you'd leave the room for a couple hours and uh when the sessions start five how long you been in the studio haven't made it yet but we're waiting and we'll get there and we just continued every time we'd go in sometimes we'd work for hours and hours and hours just to get the feel of this doom and we never knew what the heck we were doing on good vibrations we would go from one studio to another because they had the instruments that i needed at those studios so we go to the studio use the piano thanks guys we're done take the tapes over to rca put the cello on get the ceremony on take the tapes over get the base over at western the base sound that i like and then put the tampering on at cbs and you've got good vibration how did the cello happen actually here's what happened we got the cbs and carl said you know what i sound good on this as a cello i said what do you mean he goes well the cello haven't placed him on a cello and all of a sudden i got this idea for him and he put it on tape and it went glued the record and put the record on the map it was like perfect brian wasn't afraid to try anything you know if there was a sound that he wanted whether you pick up a stick and hit a string with it or have me play the inside of the piano i thought that one of the most brilliant ideas on a rock and roll record ever was a thurman who did that no one that's eerie sounding theremin had you ever heard one before yeah i had my mom and dad knew i had a friend who had a theremin where you put your hand near this this bulb and if you pull your hand away the sound gets higher and you push your hand down toward the bowl it gets lower it couldn't go like that actually i didn't know a thurman player was coming in and i said uh oh there was played by a guy named paul tanner i said try it worked it worked my god it was just a piece of uh one of the great moments of rock and roll and with the key changes with the time changes it was like a masterpiece it was like a symphony it's unbelievable that brian this young kid could come along and do harmonies that were never done his stuff was powerful it was a lot more powerful than the spectre dates i mean the wall of sound kind of stopped and he didn't go on with something else brian would always change the ideas i felt like i was trying to pour something out of my like i was a little teapot that i wanted to pour water out of i feel like a little teapot i want to thank you brian for being such a consummate musician and creating such happy good music brian you're incredible you always will be and you're a very important part of my life and i love you i'm quite sure that he knows i adore him and really wish him only the best it's been a it's been a huge uh part of my life and it'll never go away i mean it's i'm associated with it and i'm so grateful for that i miss making records with you i know you're out there with some great guys and i i think it's wonderful and all i can say is you know we say right on just keep it up keep those wonderful things happening but meanwhile these two guys walked into a bar me thank you thank you very much you

Channel: Brian Wilson

Views: 527,323

Keywords: Pet, Stories

Id: Q0vAL8dHBxA

Length: 39min 31sec (2371 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 14 2012