(Credits: Far Out / Capitol Records)
Sun 16 November 2025 15:07, UK
The original lineup of The Beach Boys consisted of the Wilson brothers, Brian, Dennis, and Carl, their cousin Mike Love, and friend Al Jardine. This close-knit family unit brought interpersonal harmony to the airwaves through the 1960s and beyond to bring some of the most beloved and influential music to ears worldwide.
Mike Love has, fairly consistently, been considered the villain of The Beach Boys’ story. A seriously determined individual, he seemed most keen to become a mega star among the other members. It was something that often saw him butting heads with the band’s chief creator, Brian Wilson. But to ignore Love’s contribution to the group is to ignore the drive he put into the band.
Most prominent through the 1960s as an American answer to The Beatles, The Beach Boys set out with a genre-defining surf-rock sound but soon incorporated a contemporary psychedelic rock sensibility. Although the Beach Boys’ work was markedly pioneering, like The Beatles, they maintained a potent presence in the mainstream.
The Beach Boys released their seminal masterpiece, Pet Sounds, in 1966. Although not included in this bold step into avant-pop, the classic 1966 single ‘Good Vibrations’ began its life during the same sessions. The song was primarily composed by Brian Wilson, but Mike Love contributed most of the lyrics.
“I had a lot of unfinished ideas, fragments of music I called ‘feels’,” Brian Wilson recalled in his memoir Wouldn’t It Be Nice: My Own Story. “Each feel represented a mood or an emotion I’d felt, and I planned to fit them together like a mosaic.”
The Beach Boys in 1964. (Credits: Far Out / Alamy)
Brian Wilson once explained the song’s conception to Rolling Stone. He said: “[My mother] used to tell me about vibrations,” he said. “I didn’t really understand too much of what it meant when I was just a boy. It scared me, the word’ vibrations.’ She told me about dogs that would bark at people and then not bark at others, that a dog would pick up vibrations from these people that you can’t see, but you can feel.”
In a 2022 interview with Uncut, Love and his bandmates, Jardine and Bruce Johnston, were challenged to pick out some of their favourite Beach Boys tracks. Love first shone a light on ‘Good Vibrations’ as a personal favourite, remembering how he wrote the hippie-resonant lyrics.
“I wrote the words; I came up with, ‘I’m picking up good vibrations/She’s giving me the excitations.’ I wrote the words on the way to the studio, I handed them to Brian, he handed them to Carl, and Carl did an amazing job singing it,” Love said. “It’s probably the most avant-garde song of its time from our point of view. I was just trying to write lyrics that would resonate with the times and the mentality of what was going on at that period of the ’60s”.
He added: “There was peace and love and flower power and all kinds of anti-war sentiments and immigration issues, but from my point of view, I wrote about a girl who was all about peace and love; that’s how I approached the writing of it. There’s a lot of love and positivity in that record. I consider that to be one of the greatest.”
From a modern perspective, ‘Good Vibrations’ may appear a somewhat archaic pop song of yore, but in its time, it was a slice of masterful production on Brian Wilson’s part. Innovative tape splicing, reverb decays and, of course, Paul Tanner’s Electro-Theremin converged to produce this enduring marvel.
A number one hit is all well and good, but you only really know you have a timeless classic when it’s allowed to age. Gracefully or otherwise. It’s fair to say that The Beach Boys’ ‘Good Vibrations’ is certainly in that category. Not only is it a cheery pop song, but also a subversive piece of artistic prowess. Wilson created the song following his interest in what his mother once determined as “cosmic vibrations” and how dogs bark at people with bad vibrations.
The track remains one of the most textured, cultured and delicately balanced pieces of pop music you will ever hear. As poignant and poetic as it is catchy and luscious. It is without doubt one of the finest piece of pop music ever composed and a mark of the sheer genius Brian Wilson had in his mind and at his fingertips.
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