Sound Chaser

Outside of Vincent Van Gogh, Brian Wilson had the most infamous—and ultimately the most valuable—left ear in the world. Wilson—the chief architect of countless Beach Boys pop classics, who passed away at age 82 on June 11, 2025—lost the hearing in his right ear at an early age (footnote 1). One could reasonably argue that he only ever heard all the sonic masterpieces he constructed, for that quintessential California band he cofounded, in mono.

In fact, he told me as much during a March 2015 phone interview. "I only have one good ear, so I only hear mono anyway," he confirmed. "My goal is to try to make the listener know and feel what I sound like—and I know in my head, in my brain, how to do it. Mono was very important. I like what Phil Spector did in mono, and a lot of different artists like the Beatles. The Beatles inspired me. They didn't influence me, but Rubber Soul inspired me to make a great album." (footnote 2)

The "great album" he was speaking of was Pet Sounds, the May 1966 Beach Boys Capitol LP that spurred Paul McCartney and his fellow Beatles to reach for the stratosphere with their own acclaimed masterstroke, June 1967's Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band—and also, very likely, portions of its predecessor, August 1966's Revolver.

One man who can shed direct light on the connective threads between the Fabs' and the Boys' respective universes is producer-engineer Giles Martin, son of Beatles producer Sir George Martin. In recent years, the younger Martin helmed several remixes for key entries in both bands' catalogs, in various stereo and multichannel incarnations. "The otherworldly sounds of Pet Sounds came from a combination of instruments, instrumentation, and orchestration in the same way the traditional classical composers would do the same thing," Martin explained to me during a Zoom interview in June 2023. "For example, Ravel"—yes, he means the 19th century French composer—"famously tried to create sunrise and shimmering strings, and that was where Brian was going, and what Brian did, in his arrangements. Funnily enough, I think that probably influenced my dad to a certain degree for what he did with the Beatles. Because people hadn't heard anything like it before, it was probably surprising for the Beach Boys as well, who were essentially thought of as a pop band—or even a boy band—at the time. The fact is, Pet Sounds is actually not otherworldly. It's fairly traditional, but only as far as what instruments were used on it. Probably the best way of putting it is they were strange in how they were used."

In the first quarter of the 13-month window bookended by Pet Sounds and Sgt. Pepper—a pair of albums that both required time to pass before they reached their corresponding zeniths of acclaim—Wilson upped the ante with "Good Vibrations," which the Beach Boys released as a standalone Capitol single in October 1966. It reached No.1 on both sides of the Atlantic by December.

In a prior phone interview, in 2011, Wilson agreed with me that "Good Vibrations" set a clear new standard for the pop-song construct. In it, cello, harpsichord, harmonica, Hammond organ, and Wilson's shimmering theremin—along with the Beach Boys' unmistakable multipart harmonies—combined to take "Good Vibrations" to a level unimagined previously. "'Good Vibrations' represented our growth musically," Wilson said. "When we did it, we took one big step forward in music. 'Good Vibrations' was like a pocket symphony. It was a very artistic record, and it had a great message. It was fantastic."

I then asked Brian if he had drawn any inspiration for "Good Vibrations" from "When You Wish Upon a Star," which first appeared in the evergreen 1940 Walt Diney animated film, Pinocchio (footnote 3). "Yes. That's a song I knew as a little kid. It's a great piece of work with a beautiful melody."

Following the one-two breakthrough punches of Sounds and "Vibrations," Wilson continued to toil on his aural white whale, SMiLE. The strain of trying to top the topmost of his production craft eventually became too much. He retreated from the band and wrestled with mental illness and other recurring problems for the rest of his life. Some tracks from SMiLE would emerge on ensuing Beach Boys albums, including the pseudo-psychedelic saga "Heroes and Villains," which leads off the September 1967 pastiche LP Smiley Smile, and the transformationally divine title track that closes out August 1971's Surf's Up.

In perpetual search of achieving in the real world the exact sound he heard in his head, Wilson booked countless hours at Gold Star Studios in Hollywood, California, where his production idol Phil Spector layered (and layered!) his patented Wall of Sound, marinated in Gold Star Studio's secret sonic sauce, the customized echo chambers built to painstaking spec by studio cofounder David Gold. "Oh, wow, you know about that!" Wilson exclaimed after I mentioned this to him. "The echo chambers were what they were famous for! And using two echo chambers at once gave recordings twice as much echo."

Wilson then pulled the curtain back a little bit farther. "One of the advantages of recording at Gold Star with four-track and eight-track was that I could put a lot of instruments together and get my theremin and cello parts on separate tracks. I like hearing the feel of people playing together and the vibe that evokes, as well as hearing the instruments together. Before that, we had to make do with what we had." (Ponder, if only for a moment, Wilson considering Beach Boys perennials "I Get Around," "In My Room," and "California Girls" as mere "make-do's.")

It took 38 years to get it to the finish line, but Wilson's vision for his masterwork finally emerged with Brian Wilson Presents SMiLE released on Nonesuch in September 2004, complemented with an expanded-band tour that brought it all to stunning life. I had the honor and pleasure of seeing it live at Carnegie Hall in New York City on October 12 of that year. A few years later, Capitol saw fit to chronicle Wilson's decades-long creative process with a lavish monaural box set, October 2011's The SMiLE Sessions, comprised of five CDs with session outtakes galore, two LPs with a side of unavailable-elsewhere alternate mixes, and a pair of 45s.

SMiLE Sessions co-producer Alan Boyd told me around that time that "Good Vibrations" was the nexus point. "So much of the modular fashion of recording that Brian employed—the way he would direct the musicians in the studio and then put all the fragments together later—really starts there." Co-producer Mark Linett added, "In one sense, the technology of the day limited the completion of SMiLE because it made those modular techniques so difficult to fully realize. On the other hand, that technological limitation meant Brian needed to record the way he did, with so many musicians in the room and blocked for sound for two or sometimes three tracks. I've always felt it worked to his advantage because he could go with his instincts as a flow. If they hadn't been so good, and technology hadn't forced things to be compressed down to a point, it would have been even more difficult to keep that going."

Even with all that went on in the studio, Wilson was adamant that SMiLE was a mono record. "That is the way he intended his records to be made," Linett continued. "He started out as a kid listening to AM radio, which was in a mono format, but also, he truly believed mono was the only way the listener was guaranteed to hear what he intended. Stereo presented the listener with too many variables—like speaker placement and whether they're in phase—to guarantee what Brian wanted to be heard. By and large, to achieve what Brian wanted in terms of multiple tape transfers and dubbing various tracks as he went, mono was really the only way to create pop music." Giles Martin concurred in a separate interview. "Part of what makes Brian's work so brilliant is because he planned on it being in mono. For the textures and the density, those elements need to be together."

Speaking of things needing to be together, a word (or a hundred) is called for now about the Beach Boys' ever-enchanting, multilayered harmonies. Pet Sounds' "God Only Knows"—which even Sir Paul McCartney has long acknowledged as "the greatest song ever written"—shines on as a universally lauded example of how to marry baroque textures with secular intentions. In June 2015, Dave Edmunds told me from his home in Wales, "It's a miracle of pop record making. It's one of my favorite records, and I dismantled it musically in my head over the years many, many times." He studied it religiously so he could cover it for On Guitar ... Dave Edmunds: Rags & Classics, which was released the same month on RPM. "I took it apart by listening to it over and over again. I finally figured out the cascade vocal on the end of the Beach Boys version only has three vocal parts—Brian does two [the top and bottom], and Bruce Johnston does the other one [the middle]. Carl [Wilson]'s voice got tired, apparently, so he left—and they finished it off with just the three-part harmony." (footnote 4)

Besides "God Only Knows," Brian Wilson told me he also loved the harmonies in "California Girls"—who doesn't?—and "Surfer Girl." Another proponent of the harmonies in "Surfer Girl," as well as those in "In My Room" and "The Rhythm of the Sun," (footnote 5) is one of the men who participated in actualizing many of them, Brian's cousin and lyrical foil, Beach Boys cofounder and frequent lead vocalist Mike Love. "The secret ingredient for me in all of it is the love of creating those harmonies together," Love relayed to me over the phone in September 2016. "Because of Brian's incredible ability to structure harmony and put our vocals together, it's not only about singing the notes; it's about blending them into that seamless blend of sound. That was always our goal: to create the best blend and the most sophisticated harmonies in a rock song. If you listen to the background vocals of 'Little Saint Nick', (footnote 6) it's like we're the Vienna Boys' Choir. It's beautiful choral harmonies in a rock song."

Love next avowed something many of us believe to this day. "Those harmonies absolutely distinguish the Beach Boys from so many other groups," he said. "There are dozens of great groups—hundreds of them—but none of them can do the harmonies and the blends the way we do. Not everybody gives that much importance to harmonies, but we, of course, did. We were obsessed with doing them beautifully."

Besides his harmonic aptitude, Wilson had an inherent knack for composing songs entrenched in optimistic melancholy: the emotional numbness of "The Warmth of the Sun"; the hopeful pleading for "Love and Mercy," the opening cut on his first solo LP on Sire, July 1988's Brian Wilson; or the step-back acceptance of "Summer's Gone," the very last track on the Beach Boys' final studio album on Capitol Records, June 2012's That's Why God Made the Radio.

In one of our last exchanges, I asked Wilson to encapsulate his overarching goal as a producer, singer, songwriter, and lifelong music maker. "I want for people to enjoy it," he concluded. "It has a lot of sentimental meaning. It's as simple as that. My instinct always tells me the right thing to do, you know?" Dear Brian, God only knows where our collective ears would be without your eternal, magical body of work.

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Footnote 1: Reportedly, the permanent hearing loss Brian experienced in his right ear resulted from a physical altercation instigated by his father, Murry Wilson, the frustrated songwriter/manager who was often outwardly hostile toward his son's talents.

Footnote 2: Rubber Soul was released in December 1965 on Capitol.

Footnote 3: Sung by Cliff Edwards as Jiminy Cricket in Pinocchio, "When You Wish Upon a Star" was composed by Leigh Harline with lyrics by Ned Washington. Wilson later covered "Star" on his 2011 CD on the Disney Pearl Series label, In the Key of Disney.

Footnote 4: Edmunds added that one of the reasons he loves mono recordings so deeply is that he could directly relate to Wilson's single-ear predicament: "He's the same as me. I've got one good ear. I've had tinnitus in one ear for over 30 years [now over 40 years and counting], and the top frequencies have downed severely."

Footnote 5: "California Girls" is on 1965's Summer Days (And Summer Nights!!). "Surfer Girl" is the title track to the Beach Boys' third studio album in 1963. "In My Room" is also on Surfer Girl. "The Rhythm of the Sun" is on 1964's Shut Down Volume 2. All of these LPs are on Capitol.

Footnote 6: "Little Saint Nick," originally released as a holiday single by Capitol in December 1963, was reissued by Capitol/UMe as a Record Store Day 45 on ice-blue vinyl in November 2024.