Forever No. 1: The Beach Boys, ‘Good Vibrations’

Forever No. 1 is a Billboard series that pays special tribute to the recently deceased artists who achieved the highest honor our charts have to offer — a Billboard Hot 100 No. 1 single — by taking an extended look back at the chart-topping songs that made them part of this exclusive club. Here, we honor Brian Wilson, who died on June 11 at age 82, by looking at the third of The Beach Boys’ three Wilson-masterminded Hot 100-toppers: the absolutely singular “Good Vibrations.”

“Oh my God. Sit back and listen to this!”

Brian Wilson, the Beach Boys’ lead songwriter and inventive producer, was finally finished with “Good Vibrations,” a song he had been perfecting, on-and-off, for months throughout 1966. In the studio, artists often struggle to distinguish a hit from a dud. But Wilson’s feeling about “Good Vibrations” proved prescient: It went on to become the Beach Boys’ first million-selling single.

That level of commercial success is perhaps surprising for a song that Beach Boy Mike Love once described as “truly radical.” The track’s opening is keening and drum-less, with a swooning lead vocal from Carl Wilson, who sings with earnest devotion about a whiff of woman’s perfume. Then “Good Vibrations” bounds forward — a hard-driving bass line collides with the Beach Boys’ jubilant harmonies, while what sounds like a whistling teakettle, a noise created by an instrument called an Electro-Theremin, shrieks through the background. 

“Good Vibrations” keeps toggling between these modes, ravishing one moment and stampeding the next, inducing a pleasant sense of whiplash. “Instead of creating a single instrumental backing track at one session, [Brian] produced short, seemingly unrelated snatches of music and then pieced them together,” Love explained in his autobiography, Good Vibrations: My Life as a Beach Boy, written with James Hirsch. “It was like working with a vast jigsaw puzzle — record tiny fragments, then re-record some of those, then add a bridge or new section, then re-record that section, then make trial mixes, then re-record new sections” and so on.

After all this tinkering, when Wilson fit the last piece of the puzzle in place, the effect was intoxicating. “I could just feel it when I dubbed it down, made the final mix from the 16-track down to mono — it was a feeling of power, it was a rush,” he told Rolling Stone. “A feeling of exaltation.” 

The Beach Boys were reliable hitmakers in the mid-’60s – and they worked at a relentless pace, releasing three albums apiece in 1963, 1964 and 1965. 

In 1965, the group earned its second No. 1 single with “Help Me, Rhonda,” a cheerful plea from a newly single man looking to get over his ex in a hurry. They followed that with “California Girls,” a dazzling steamroller which rose to No. 3. When the next single “The Little Girl That I Once Knew” didn’t catch fire in the same manner — radio stations weren’t sure what to do with a song that came to a complete stop — Capitol Records decided to put out a cover of “Barbara Ann,” originally recorded in 1961 by the Regents, a wailing toe-tapper recorded for the quasi-live album Beach Boys’ Party that climbed to No. 2. 

Pop success is notoriously fickle, though. When the group released Pet Sounds in May 1966, it only peaked at No. 10 on the Billboard 200 albums chart, making it one of the Beach Boys’ worst-performing albums to date. The Beach Boys’ label had wanted the album to have more songs that sounded like hits, according to group member Al Jardine.

Adding “Good Vibrations” might have helped. Wilson had actually started the song early in 1966 while working on Pet Sounds, in between “I Just Wasn’t Made for These Times,” a gorgeously self-pitying, fish-out-of-water ballad, and the adoring “God Only Knows.”

But as Jardine told it, Wilson wasn’t yet ready to give “Good Vibrations” to the record company. “Like everyone else, I had lobbied to put ‘Good Vibrations’ on Pet Sounds, but it wasn’t to be,” Jardine remembered. “He had the say because he was the producer, and we respected his opinion, although we didn’t agree with him. We felt a bird in the hand was worth two in the bush, and knew that leaving it off the album was a mistake. As it turned out, we were right. If we’d included ‘Good Vibrations,’ Pet Sounds would have been a milestone for us.”

Wilson was operating on his own timeline, though, stepping away from “Good Vibrations” to work on other songs, then returning to it. In August, he played a version of the song over the phone for Carl. “Carl thought to himself, ‘How bizarre, how exciting, how strange and new,’” Love wrote.

Wilson had an unusual reference point in mind for “Good Vibrations:” He told Rolling Stone he wanted the song to have “a taste of modern, avant-garde R&B.” This is surprising because much of the Beach Boys’ music is decidedly unfunky. (Although there are occasional hints of groove sprinkled through the band’s discography — see 1968’s “Bluebirds Over the Mountain” and 1979’s “Love Surrounds Me.”) In God Only Knows: The Story of Brian Wilson, the Beach Boys and the California Myth, author David Leaf writes that “Brian once intended to sell the song to Warner Brothers for use by an R&B act,” possibly the soul dynamo Wilson Pickett. Parts of the song reminded Love of a James Brown record. 

Wilson had always been a stickler in the studio, the perfectionist who kept repeating takes, bean-counters be damned, until the song felt right. “He knew exactly how he wanted it, and if it wasn’t done that way, he’d do it until he got it that way,” the songwriter Tony Asher says in Leaf’s book. (Asher co-wrote eight songs on Pet Sounds and took an early crack at the lyrics of “Good Vibrations.”) “When the guys would make a mistake on only the second time they’d done something that was very difficult — he’d just go crazy.” 

Even so, Wilson’s bandmates and musicians were taken aback by his approach to recording “Good Vibrations,” as he hopped from one location to the next, recording bits and pieces of a song they couldn’t fully grasp. “They didn’t quite understand what this jumping from studio to studio was all about,” Wilson acknowledged in 1976. 

To Love, “it wasn’t clear that even [Brian] knew what he was doing. On some days the musicians would play for an hour; other days, ten minutes; and sometimes, all day. ‘We had no idea what the finished piece was going to sound like,’ [studio drummer] Hal Blaine later said. ‘I think we were working on the song for six months, and this was the same bunch of musicians that cut “MacArthur Park” [a seven-minute-plus orchestral pop epic from Richard Harris] in two takes.’”

The lore of “Good Vibrations” is filled with contradicting accounts. Wilson told Rolling Stone the song took “six months to make” and he skipped between four different studios — Gold Star, Western, Sunset Sound, and Columbia. 

In a separate interview cited in Wouldn’t It Be Nice: Brian Wilson and the Making of the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds, however, Wilson included a fifth studio, RCA Victor, in his run-down of recording locations, and said the song took “six weeks, working every day.” Meanwhile, engineer Chuck Britz claimed they “went to at least ten of the studios around town.” (Of this selection, Western had “the best echo chamber for what we were doing vocally.”)

Similarly, Leaf’s book notes that “Good Vibrations” represents the first time that the cello was employed “as a rock instrument” and suggests the idea came from Van Dyke Parks, a quadruple threat (singer, songwriter, producer, and multi-instrumentalist) who worked with Wilson around this time. Love’s autobiography claims that the cello was the result of Carl’s suggestion.

And then there’s the cost. Love offers an amusingly imprecise rundown: “’Good Vibrations’ required twenty-two sessions” — Leaf claims “approximately 15” — “and the cost has been estimated at $10,000 to $50,000 ($74,000 to $369,000 in 2016 dollars).” “I doubt Brian had any idea about the cost,” Love added, “nor did he care.” 

Funnily enough, composing the lyrics for “Good Vibrations” was as slapdash as the rest of the recording process was meticulous. The morning that Love was supposed to record the vocals, he got into his car, a yellow Jaguar XKE which contained a built-in record player, to drive to the studio, and proceeded to freestyle several of the lines that appeared in the final version of the track.  

His pregnant wife Suzanne Belcher, riding shotgun, jotted Love’s gems down on a notepad. “We were somewhere on the Hollywood Freeway when I recited the next verse,” he recalled — perhaps the most L.A. sentence ever written. 

“I’ll be the first to acknowledge that ‘excitations’ is not really a word,” he added. “But it rhymed.”

“Good Vibrations” came out in October of 1966. “Cousin Brucie, the leading DJ in New York, told me that he didn’t like it initially,” Love remembered. Others were more receptive: “Good Vibrations” debuted at No. 38 on the Hot 100, and by December, it topped the chart, replacing New Vaudeville Band’s ‘Winchester Cathedral” and staying at No. 1 for two weeks. The single also bested the chart in the U.K., where the London Sunday Express ran a breathless article about the Beach Boys headlined “They Found a New Sound at Last!”

Meanwhile, Wilson threw himself into recording Smile, which was supposed to be another mold-breaker. “Pet Sounds was a break from your standard Beach Boys fare,” David Anderle, who managed Van Dyke Parks in 1966, says in God Only Knows. “I think it was the exercise of Brian Wilson as a major musical composer or a major musical force, not just a person who can write hit songs. Smile was an extension of Pet Sounds in the fact that it took one step even further into the nature of exploring the musical idiom with a sense of pop.”

But Wilson became increasingly paranoid — holding meetings in his pool because he feared the house was bugged, according to Anderle — and his drug use increased. He later walked away from Smile, and told Rolling Stone that, for a time, he was “too concerned with getting drugs to write songs.”

So while “Good Vibrations” was a breakthrough, it also marked the end of the Beach Boys’ chapter as a commercially dominant group. The band scattered some gems across albums in the late ’60s and early ’70s — “‘Til I Die,” “All I Wanna Do,” “All This Is That” — but did not enjoy another top 10 single until 1976, when they covered Chuck Berry’s “Rock and Roll Music,” and didn’t hit No. 1 again until 1988’s “Kokomo,” which did not include contributions from Brian. 

“Good Vibrations” remains one of the Beach Boys’ enduring hits — their second most popular song on Spotify. “It fractured me when I heard it; I was happy with it,” Wilson recalls in Wouldn’t It Be Nice. “I said, ‘You couldn’t get a better record than this.’ I set out to do a good record, and I did.”