Wouldn’t It Be Nice

(Brian Wilson – Tony Asher – Mike Love)

Full score available here: https://www.sheetmusicdirect.com/en-US/se/ID_No/1820784/Product.aspx

Personnel

Brian Wilson – lead, harmony & backing vocals
Mike Love – lead, harmony & backing vocals
Carl Wilson – harmony & backing vocals
Dennis Wilson – harmony & backing vocals
Al Jardine – harmony & backing vocals
Bruce Johnston – harmony & backing vocals
Al De Lory – grand piano
Larry Knechtel – tack upright piano
Bill Pitman – archtop acoustic guitar
Barney Kessel – electric 12-string guitar
Jerry Cole – electric 12-string guitar
Ray Pohlman – electric 6-string bass
Carol Kaye – electric bass
Lyle Ritz – double bass
Hal Blaine – drums
Frank Capp – jingle stick, timpani, glockenspiel
Carl Fortina – accordion
Frank Marocco – accordion
Roy Caton – trumpet
Steve Douglas – tenor saxophone
Plas Johnson – tenor saxophone
Jay Migliori – baritone saxophone

Larry Levine – engineer (Gold Star)
Chuck Britz – engineer (Western)
Bowen David – assistant engineer (Western)
Ralph Valentin – console engineer (Columbia)
Bill Brittan – console/recording engineer (Columbia)
Pete Romano – recording engineer (Columbia)

 

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According to Brian, the first germ of “Wouldn’t It Be Nice” came to him in the corridor outside of Western Studio 3, perhaps during one of his sessions in late 1965. “I walked out of a studio and there was this honky tonk piano in the hallway,” he remembered, “and I was playing along, and all of a sudden I created a chord pattern on this piano and I went home and finished it. We made a song out of it.”

At another time, Brian recalled in more detail, “I wrote that just outside the studio, in a corridor at Western Recorders in Hollywood at 6000 Sunset Boulevard. I wrote the basic part of the first verse on this little upright tack piano. Bompa, bompa, bompa. Not the melody, just the beat and the chord pattern. I took it home and went to my piano and finished it. Took me two hours and that was it.”

A bouncy walking bassline to a shuffle beat blossomed into one of Brian’s most joyful compositions, and one of his most structurally ambitious works to date, weaving its way through dramatic shifts in both key and tempo between the different sections. He had the title and lyrical hook, “Wouldn’t It Be Nice,” and a general concept about young lovers dreaming of a future where they could be together.

When Brian began a concerted effort to record a new album in early 1966, this song was the second of his recent compositions to begin production, with him taking it to Gold Star Recording Studios on Saturday, January 22, while the rest of the Beach Boys were finishing up their first tour of Japan. Brian hadn’t worked at the studio on Santa Monica Boulevard in roughly a year, the previous visit on B.B. business being his January 1965 attempt to bottle the Wall of Sound into “Do You Wanna Dance.” Brian was back again that February to help Phil Spector out with a Darlene Love version of “Don’t Hurt My Little Sister,” and dropped in on numerous other sessions held by his idol/rival in the months to follow (including new personal obsession “This Could Be the Night”), but otherwise he wasn’t in the habit of using Gold Star a whole lot when it came to his own group. By early ‘66, “Wouldn’t It Be Nice” was percolating in Brian’s head as the next possible single, and there was a certain boom and scale in mind for the track that could only be realized by Spector’s favored echo chambers.

The Tracking Session

Setup

The tracking session was booked to start at 7:00pm, with 16 musicians contracted by Steve Douglas (including himself and session leader Hal Blaine) joining Brian and engineer Larry Levine in Gold Star’s Studio A. Barney Kessel and Jerry Cole sat in the booth with Brian and Larry, as they would be playing guitars directly into the recording console. The rest of the musicians were out on the studio floor: Hal Blaine leading the band on drums, Lyle Ritz on upright bass, Carol Kaye on electric bass, Ray Pohlman on electric 6-string bass, Bill Pitman on acoustic guitar, Al De Lory and Larry Knechtel seated at two pianos (a 7’ Steinway grand and a tacked upright respectively), Frankie Capp handling various percussion instruments, Carl Fortina and Frank Marocco on two accordions, and a horn section consisting of Roy Caton on trumpet, Steve Douglas and Plas Johnson both on tenor saxophones, and Jay Migliori on baritone sax. While Brian dashed around the room teaching the musicians the arrangement, one at a time, Larry set up the microphones and concocted a three-track mix of the 12 signals coming through the board (the maximum amount that could run into Gold Star’s recording console).

The structure of “Wouldn’t It Be Nice” eludes verse, chorus, verse, chorus classification, so for readability, this is how we’ll interpret each section:

A – 1st section of 1st verse
B – 2nd section of 1st verse
A – 1st section of 2nd verse
B – 2nd section of 2nd verse, followed by refrain and transition to bridge
C – bridge, followed by refrain
A 1st reprise – short repeat of verse A material into ritardando
D – half-tempo extended verse B section, followed by refrain
A 2nd reprise, or E – tag round based on verse A material

One of the more distinctive features of the arrangement is its use of piano accordions as featured rhythm instruments. Many an accordion can be heard in Beach Boys songs of yore, but the way Brian positioned them in the past was usually in a role adjacent to the horn section, as a sustained pad — more often than not playing fifths, analogous to a couple of saxophones. Here, Fortina and Marocco propel the shuffle beat with swung eighth note chords in the “A” section of the verses (and wherever that material returns), switch to staccato quarter notes in the “B” section (“you know it’s gonna make…”), and lead into the bridge with a riff. The accordions play different voicings to cover a wide frequency range and engage different reeds for a chorusing blend. Both were gathered around one mic; no evidence of how this might have been set up has been uncovered, but it is easy to imagine an RCA 77 or 44 being used to exploit the figure-of-eight polar pattern so that the accordionists could comfortably get close to either side of the microphone.

During the extended reprise of the verse’s “B” progression, a.k.a. the “D” section finale, Frank Marocco recalled that Brian’s request for a specific kind of held tremolo sound spurred them both to resort to what he called a “triple bellow shake,” which is essentially a controlled jiggle of the bellows to create a rapid blinking effect — expressing the same sort of movement that, say, mandolins, violins, or other stringed instruments might typically be used for. Needless to say, spasmodically jiggling one’s limbs in a consistent, sustained way take after take was an exhausting ordeal, and Marocco quickly regretted making Brian aware it could be done, calling it the most difficult thing he ever had to play. But the effect was perfect for the song, so it went in. Marocco: “We probably used the violin reeds to get the string sound. I remember that session well, because I played a triple bellow shake, quickly moving the bellows in and out to simulate a shaking sound. Brian really liked that, but I created a real monster, because I had to do that for the whole session — one take after another. I was as sore as hell, and remember going home saying, ‘Never again will I tell anyone I can do that!’”

The pianos used one microphone apiece, which means certain compromises needed to be made about emphasizing a given range of the piano’s compass. The few extant photographs of mic’d-up Gold Star pianos indicate that they liked to stick a Sennheiser 421 under the lid of a grand, and that a Sony C37a would be placed very close to the hammer point of the tack piano to really get the impact of the metal tacks hitting the strings. In “A,” the keyboardists pound the walking bassline with left hands and essentially strengthen what the accordions are doing with right hands, combined to the ear as one sound; De Lory’s grand piano provides the rich body, Knechtel’s tack piano an octave below adds a percussive texture to the rhythm. Tack piano was a texture entirely absent from the Summer Days album, last appearing on a Beach Boys production in “Please Let Me Wonder.” It’s possible that Brian’s enthusiasm for tack-modified pianos was reignited because “Wouldn’t It Be Nice” originated on one.

In “B,” the pianos continue in that octave spread playing eighth notes with alternating hands. Both stick to triads and allow other parts of the ensemble to flesh out the chords. De Lory vamps that same alternating eighth note rhythm through the bridge (or “C”), while Larry adds the sparkle around it with bright stabs thrown on the offbeats and partly-improvised left-hand accents that shift the harmony as the section develops. They lay out in the slow “D” section and return for the tag.

Billy Pitman’s archtop acoustic guitar likewise is used for supporting texture, a “felt but not heard” role meant to ever so slightly pad out what the accordions are doing. Be it acoustic or amplified, Brian would quite often employ a near-inaudible “box” rhythm guitar in his productions for the sake of thickening the body of a track and adding a little driving motion. Pitman strums a pattern of mostly quarter notes in the opening verses, strums tremolo chords under the accordions’ triple bellow shake in the final verse, then strums eighth note triplets in the tag. Acoustic guitars at Gold Star were mic’d with ribbons or dynamics, not fussily placed but roughly at the bridge of the instrument. There is a crunchiness present on this input that suggests the tube amplifier in the console was doing its job.

The next three inputs would be basses. Lyle’s double bass likely had a dynamic mic pointing at the F-hole of the instrument, and the electric instruments would have dynamic mics near the speakers of their amplifiers. Carol played her Fender Precision Bass through a Fender Super Reverb amplifier and Ray played a recently acquired Fender VI, probably through a Fender Bassman. One important element of these large-scale sessions is the surprisingly low volume on guitar and bass amps; many photos show that guitarists and bassists routinely sat with their amps on chairs, speakers facing them for monitoring, ruling out anything louder than a whisper. 

Three basses on a session was not actually such a typical amount for Brian — in most situations he’d max out at two, unless particular ideas called for another part. In “A,” all of them play the same walking line in unison. Rather than exploiting the Fender VI for its trademark “click,” Ray plays along gently and invisibly to reinforce the body of the line. Carol does also play her P-bass bass with a pick, but a deep, rounded-off tone without much of a discernible attack allows her instrument to blend with Lyle’s into one solid undercurrent. At “B,” Ray’s 6-string bass moves an octave up from the others into its guitar-like register on the lighter strings as they play a dancing arpeggiated line across the chords, which is repeated and extended during the “D” verse.

At the bridge, the three basses are in the same octave again, all playing a bouncy, syncopated melody dictated by Brian that confounded Lyle Ritz when he started rehearsing it with the other instruments. “I think the most amazing thing I ever saw him do was writing the section of a song in two keys,” Lyle remembered. “That’s when the music was getting deeper. One night, we were at Gold Star, I think it was on ‘Wouldn’t It Be Nice.’ And I was playing a bassline in the key of D. But the rest of the band was in another key. I knew that was wrong. So during a break, I looked at everybody else’s music to see if it was a mistake. Because you can’t do that. But he pulled it off; it was a melodic bassline.” What’s happening here to throw off Lyle’s compass is that the keyboards play A major to D major triads, but the moving bassline emphasizes the fourth and sixth of each chord while avoiding the root, coloring the harmonies into implied major and minor seventh slash chords from below. Basically, Lyle noticed he was playing D to G to F# to B instead, and looked around the room to make sure his chart wasn’t in the wrong key. This harmonic ground all would’ve been covered between both hands on the piano when Brian wrote the song, but in arranging it for a band, elements of the chord structures were parceled out to different places. Ray digs in with the VI here for that clicky emphasis on the attack. At the fade, Carol and Lyle return to the verse figure while Ray plays a loping fill every two measures.

Only two inputs were needed for the drums. Unlike current practice, drums were still thought of as one instrument in the three-track era, and Gold Star in particular stuck to one overhead microphone, with another mic down low to capture the bass drum if needed. Here, definition on the kick was important, so it was mic’d on its own, very likely with a ribbon microphone, another bygone practice. Limited photo evidence from this time shows that Gold Star often used the no-frills Electro-Voice 666 as an overhead, but sometimes one of the studios’ condenser mics would fill in — the Neumann U47 or the Sony C37a. On this large session, very little is to be gained from the sharper resolution of a condenser mic on the drums, so the 666 is the likely choice. The overhead mic would be positioned quite low, set up to get a good balance from the toms without the snare or cymbals overpowering.

Hal’s drumming on this track is kept simple but weighty, in the verse body sticking exclusively to the kick pedal, backbeat smacks on the snare and floor tom together, and sparse cymbal crashes on the transitions into each section. The drums drop out at “B” and build quarter notes to the exit. Fills in and out of the changes were developed with specific instructions from Brian, who left little room for variation in each take. A subtle marching snare figure is introduced halfway through the bridge, descending triplets on the toms slow us down through the ritardando into “D,” and a recurring floor tom fill is always used to return to the “A” material, which then repeats every two bars during the tag.

The high-end rhythmic space around Hal’s drums in “A” is filled by Frankie Capp hitting some variety of jingle stick, which may have been a DIY home creation. It’s a dry, cutting sound punctuating the hi-hat or tambourine frequency range without unwanted splash. In other sections, Frankie moves to two timpani tuned to C and F, which he recalled wheeling out at Brian’s request to strengthen certain drum parts: “Brian wanted to beef up the end of the phrase, so he had me play a ba bom ba bom on the timpani — to kinda help beef up what Hal was doing, ‘cause Hal was playing a figure there too.” Indeed, the timpani double his drums on that fill whenever it occurs. Frankie also builds quarter notes throughout “B,” louder and louder, joined by Hal as the intensity ramps up to the next part. In “C,” Frankie initially tried ringing out exactly three notes on finger cymbals behind the “we could be married” part (this was later swapped for a glockenspiel). He thwacks the timpani on two and four during the short reprise of the verse material, repeats the timpani quarter notes alone in the second half of “D” as a steady tempo anchor behind the accordions, and plays under Hal on ba-bom fills during the tag. Given the limited number of signal paths, percussion at Gold Star was grouped physically close together and often captured with one utility mic. A dynamic mic suspended over the timpani would also have been responsible for getting a reasonably direct sound from the hand percussion.

Likewise, the horns would’ve gathered around one microphone to accommodate the limited inputs. The baritone sax’s bell was likely right up on the mic (it would need to be close to get the extra deep proximity effect we hear on the track), which was probably an RCA 44 or 77, with the other players on the other side huddled in a group of three. The trumpets and saxes hold deep, four-part block harmonies in “B” and “D,” voiced in such a way that puts them all down toward the bottom of their playable registers. The accordion riff that segues into the bridge is doubled by both tenors an octave down, which they repeat once following the end of the bridge, and loop through the tag round while the bari adds a low accent on the downbeats.

The last musicians to have parts doled out to them by Brian would be the guitarists sitting in the control room. Perhaps the defining sonic characteristic of “Wouldn’t It Be Nice” was added here, a merry little ostinato between two electric 12-string guitars playing high up on the neck, all through the bridge section in the key of D (or A mixolydian). The dominant, slightly detuned lead guitar figure is played by Barney Kessel on a Danelectro Bellzouki, one of the earliest commercially available electric 12-string instruments built in the teardrop shape of a bouzouki. Brian once wrote to Barney, “Thank you for your happy guitar on ‘Wouldn’t It Be Nice.’ It brought a kind of ring-a-ding sound. It gives people a boost, a real good boost.” It sure does.

When plugged direct and swimming around the Gold Star echo chambers, the bright, choked-off timbre of the Bellzouki in that register almost veers closer to a harp than a guitar. A few special factors contribute to this instrument sounding so exotic; one, Danelectro guitars of the time had mahogany bridges with limited capacity to intonate with precision — thus the slightly out of tune quality the line has, despite being played by one of the greatest guitarists of all time. Playing so high on the neck exacerbates this problem, and also makes physically fingering the frets a challenge. Another contribution to the alien quality of the timbre is that the early Bellzoukis had one pickup only, in a neck position, which on its own results in a fuller end to the bass frequencies, and it’s not a sound associated with the classic ‘60s “chimey 12-string” at all. It’s likely that Larry boosted the high-frequency EQ a bit. The lower of the two parts, a sort of harmony/support to the lead line in half notes, is played by Jerry Cole, probably using either a Fender or Mosrite. It is probable that Jerry would have had to soften the tone on his guitar to compensate for any high-end EQ added to Barney’s top line. The two instruments in the booth were likely ganged up to go in the same input, with volume balance between Barney and Jerry being adjusted on the instruments themselves. A typical solution was a simple 2-to-1 Y-cord, but many period patch bays offered similar coupling functions. 

Gold Star had its two famous echo chambers, and very likely an EMT plate or a spring reverb unit. Other outboard gear was very minimal. In addition to using a mono tape machine for slap delay, they had limited EQ available for each input (which was remoted to 12 small outboard EQ units housed in a rack under the console) and perhaps one or two limiters, used not for effect, but very simply to limit hot signals.

Any input could have reverb applied to it; a simple rotary knob on each channel would send that dry signal to one of three reverb send outputs, which normally correspond to the three program busses but can be overridden on the patch bay. The reverb outputs then go to the reverb chamber, where they are piped into space and picked up again by a microphone. That mic then goes back into the console, and can be boosted or cut to nothing before being recombined with the corresponding program output.

So, in summary, we have the 12 inputs:

1 – drums overhead (sent to chamber)
2 – drums kick
3 – Lyle’s bass
4 – Carol’s bass amplifier
5 – Ray’s bass amplifier
6 – acoustic guitar (sent to chamber)
7 – percussion (sent to chamber)
8 – accordions (sent to chamber)
9 – horns (probably sent to a limiter)
10 – grand piano
11 – upright piano
12 – electric 12-string guitars into Y converter direct (sent to chamber)

Once the instruments were all set coming into the console, they were routed to three output busses: basses, drums, and percussion went to track 1 (or “Left”); horns to track 2 (or “Center”); and pianos, guitars, and accordions to track 3 (or “Right”), plus all reverb sends from one or both chambers also to track 3. Bleed from instruments into other mics across channels is very apparent, and not discouraged, as the live room’s resonance makes up an essential component of the Wall of Sound glue when packed together in its monaural end state. The grouping of instruments at this stage was crucial, because it set in stone what could be adjusted later. The choices made here make sense — a rhythm track to adjust for drive, the horns alone to adjust how much pad comes through, and the reverb-laden oddities could be brought up or down according to taste. Although the three reductions listed above are what hit the three-track tape, Brian never would’ve listened to these groupings individually; the three program buss outputs were reduced to a single mono output within the console, and it’s that output that would have hit the main monitor speaker in Gold Star’s control room.

Recording

Once the ½” tape reel began rolling on Gold Star’s Ampex 300 three-track machine, 21 takes were required to land a master, with the entire instrumental arrangement being performed live — no overdubbing. Brian kept the musicians into overtime until 11:30pm in his efforts to coordinate the tricky orchestration, probably not starting to record until well after the standard three hours were already up.

The spontaneity of Brian’s ad hoc, head arrangement approach to developing ideas with the musicians quite often inspired him to make important structural changes right there on the spot. “Wouldn’t It Be Nice” was one of those occasions; as the disparate pieces were coming together, Brian got the lightbulb notion to take the last four measures of the 12-string guitars’ parts in the bridge and glue them onto the front of the song as an introduction, unaccompanied. Immediately, the track (and the whole album, really) found its signature moment — a tranquil invitation of whimsy, nostalgia, innocence, whatever descriptors you like, before a key change to F whomps us into the first verse with so much added impact.

“I usually go in very prepared,” Brian explained of his process that year. “Before I ever get to the studio I have a general idea of how it’s going to come out. But a lot of things develop in the studio out of enthusiasm about what’s happening at the time. Usually, the record comes out a little bit differently than I originally conceived it, but only different because it’s more expanded. I don’t mean that the original conception was buried with all kinds of ideas that were generated in the studio; the original conception always shines right through. Things happen in the studio that don’t happen at home — there’s an atmosphere working in a studio, and only there can certain things be generated.”

Because Barney and Jerry would be playing direct, inaudible to the rest of the band on the other side of the glass, this necessitated a hastily set up situation where Hal Blaine wore a set of headphones (an atypical practice at Gold Star) cabled into the control room so he could follow along with their guitars and cue the other musicians. This was evidently still being ironed out when Larry hit the record button.

As soon as the tape starts, Hal can be heard calling out, “Don’t yell in the mic, Murry!” chastising Brian for his overly enthusiastic direction which was blaring in the headphones. Brian slates, “Here we go, ‘Wouldn’t It Be Nice,’ take one,” Hal counts, the guitars play, but Brian stops it immediately after hearing Hal’s busy fill into the first verse. “No! Don’t start it like that.” Most of the musicians start laughing. “To hell with that!” someone remarks. 

“Hal, here’s how I wanna do it,” Brian says, and instructs Hal on the drum part by singing it over the talkback: at the fourth bar, a downbeat thwack on the floor tom, snare, and kick together announces the key change for the entrance of the vocal on beat three, then a single eighth note pickup carries us into the verse. “First beat on the last bar of the intro,” he explains, “you’ll go BOOM, two, three, four, BA BA, and then start the song, alright?”

But Hal doesn’t appreciate the volume. “DON’T YELL IN THE MIC! I can hear ya,” he complains back.

Larry offers to help: “Hal, would you like me to lower the ‘phones? Do you need them as loud? … You only need them for the intro anyway, right?” Take 2 is slated by Larry, which Brian also stops right away, not liking the articulation from Barney’s guitar.

Hal misses his intro again in take 3, causing Brian to give him a deadpan “What are you doin’?” He once again explains what he wants the drums to do, but Frankie gets confused over not knowing where the downbeat is because he can’t hear the guitars (Hal: “Ohhh! Well, you watch me, you’ll know!”). Brian reassures that he’s not playing in the intro and just needs to come in with “the thing… CHOO… the… the thing” (a.k.a. the jingle stick) in the verse. Barney, however, misunderstands, and stops playing in the fourth bar of take 4, prompting Brian to re-explain.

Take 5 is stopped when Hal still isn’t playing exactly what Brian wants as his opening fill, and only after the breakdown is Brian finally able to properly communicate the part. “Ba bom — got it. Got it, man!” Hal says, having that moment where it clicks.

Larry skips take 6 altogether, and take 7 is where the band finally go beyond the intro and have a chance to get a feel for the track. It’s a little loose out of the gate; mistakes are made by percussionists in the second verse, and in the bridge, the guitarists in the booth become rhythmically out of sync with the rest of the musicians on the floor — Hal also starts getting lost. Carol helpfully advises on when he’s supposed to play. Brian takes the opportunity to fix some issues he’s been hearing, like busy timpani fills from Frankie that need to be simplified, part of the concern being giving him enough time to drop the jingle stick and pick up the mallets. Barney tunes up his guitar while they talk.

Take 8 is another false start. Brian stops take 9 in the second verse, claiming that “we lost the accordion sound,” a vital part of the arrangement for him to have hitting the board in exactly the right way. “You’re both up in the same register, I hope? Let me hear you guys alone.” Tape is stopped while he reviews the balance between Fortina and Marocco.

Brian re-slates take 9, which he promptly stops in the intro. Take 10 is sounding much tighter, and makes it to the bridge, but Brian halts the take to make further suggestions. Take 11 is the first to play all the way through the ritardando into the slow verse and out again into the fade, albeit with a slightly awkward a tempo that only barely gets back to speed in time. Larry paused for a playback here and noted the length as 2:25.

Take 12 breaks down in the intro, and Brian takes another moment to focus on the accordions’ entrance: “Accordions, stay in that same groovy thing we had, because if we lose it… It’s that certain vibration, or frequency thing; when you’re both about the same distance, it comes through great. Can I just hear you one more time? Play the verse thing.” They shuffle alone for a while, revealing magical candor into the particular way they resonate with each other, and the microphone, and the room, and interact with Gold Star’s echo chambers to create a whole new sound on the other end of the recording chain, unrecognizable from the dry leakage picked up on the adjacent horn track.

The slate for take 13 is circumvented by Hal, who’s obviously in a superstitious mood and suggests they go for 14 instead. “I’d like pianos to be good and strong, all the way,” Brian comments. He immediately aborts the next one: “Little bit slower. Something didn’t happen quite right; let’s do it again.”

Brian stops take 15 during the second verse and calls for a break: “One more please. Getting very close now — I think we’ll have it. Make one more. We’ll wait for like, twenty-five seconds, huh? Cool the arms? Wait for like a minute so that the piano players can cool.”

He’s really drilling the musicians by this point; they’re almost there, approaching the home run, but just need that little bit of refinement to reach a perfect take. “Horns! Work tight to the mic,” Brian calls, then emphasizes how sudden the ritard should be coming out of the bridge on the tail of Hal’s triplets. Take 16 is complete, and nearly perfect, but Brian wants to keep going. The time is noted on the tracksheet as 2:25 by Larry, indicating that it was followed by a playback for review. Following this take, Brian has Frankie give up the finger cymbals in the latter stage of the bridge in favor of him ringing out single notes on a glockenspiel.

Larry stops take 17 during the intro because people on the floor are making noise. Take 18 is also stopped short as Brian comments, “something distorted on the very last note there.” Take 19 naturally breaks down among the musicians during the second verse, and take 20 is another short false start. At  23 minutes into the reel, the band nail take 21, which Brian intuitively recognizes is The One. Tape stops rolling in the tag section as soon as they have enough fadeout material. 

Larry noted the runtime of the master take as 2:30. Brian listened to the track, got Hal’s nod of approval, thanked the musicians, and sent them on their way. The evening likely then took him to Gold Star’s cutting room, where it was Brian’s ritual to make a dub from three-track directly onto a mono trial disc (skipping over the step of doing a rough mix to ¼” tape), which he’d take home and play for his own satisfaction and development of the vocal arrangement, endlessly, until the grooves wore out.

Brian had walked into the studio that night with the title “Wouldn’t It Be Nice,” all of the backing music, a concept, and at least some semblance of melody and words. At one point during the session, Brian tells Frankie Capp, “You know in the part: ‘We could get…’” and then, “Well, like he knows the lyric, right?” He appears to be floating an early version of the line “We could be married” in the bridge, but all other evidence indicates that Brian hadn’t yet finished the song or recruited a co-writer at the time of recording.

During the last week of January, looming pressure from Capitol Records to deliver product and desire for a fresh approach prompted Brian to enlist Tony Asher as his new lyrical collaborator. The very first thing the two did together was load up the half-inch reels in Brian’s playback room and listen to the tracks he’d already recorded, most likely including “Sloop John B.” (which had been completed), “Trombone Dixie,” “Run, James, Run,” an untitled instrumental (in future called “Let’s Go Away for Awhile”), and “My Childhood.” Because Brian’s Scully 280-4 1/2″ four-track machine didn’t have heads configured to play three-track tape, “Wouldn’t It Be Nice” would not have been among these. Instead, according to Asher, the song was occasionally aired at the piano, but kept at a distance during their early writing sessions while Brian continued to tinker with the melody, which he was apparently still developing — it wasn’t unusual for him to keep working on a song in this way after already recording a backing track.

“On ‘Wouldn’t It Be Nice,’ Brian played me a little part of the melody, but he hadn’t finished it,” Tony remembered. “And so periodically I’d ask him about that, and I’d say, ‘How’s that song coming?’ Or he’d say, ‘Let’s work on something else. What do you wanna work on?’ I’d say, ‘What about that song you 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.’”

Most other writing sessions between Wilson and Asher were an interactive process — primarily Brian handling the music and Tony the words, but nonetheless bouncing off of each other as their ideas developed in tandem. This one was a little different. “Because he had completely finished the melody at that point,” explained Tony, “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. 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 recorder and 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, ‘That’s great.’”

The Vocal Sessions

Western I

Following Japan, the Beach Boys spent the end of the month vacationing in Hong Kong and Hawaii, played a show in Honolulu on January 29, then flew back to Los Angeles for another two weeks of R&R while Brian and Tony carried on writing. On February 3, Carl Wilson married Annie Hinsche, and on February 10, the reunited group took photos for the cover of the album at the San Diego Zoo, surrounded by Jardine-aggravating goats, and it’s only after this that they headed into the studio to begin recording vocals for Brian’s new tracks.

“Wouldn’t It Be Nice” was one of the earliest songs that the Beach Boys worked on together in 1966, perhaps the fourth, with a vocal session taking place at Western Recorders most likely on February 16. A missing ½” tape and tracksheet mean this date lacks absolute certainty, but mono mixdowns and other material evidence nonetheless give us a good picture of exactly when and how the production came together. Brian and engineer Chuck Britz started by dubbing the three-track instrumental parts together onto track 4 of a second generation four-track reel, freeing up three available tracks for vocal overdubbing. Another Western engineer, Bowen David, appears to have been assisting on some sessions at the time.

Brian had mapped out an intricate vocal arrangement involving all six Beach Boys singing in six-part harmony at times, not even including the lead vocal, which would have to be recorded separately. Since Brian wanted to double-track both the backing vocals and the lead vocals, some internal combining was necessary to fit everything on the tape; when the group doubled their parts, Chuck ping-ponged the original performance together with the new layer, meaning the old track could then be taped over, and another was still open. This allowed the mono instrumental track, doubled backing vocals, and two layers of lead vocals all to share space on the same four-track tape.

One of Brian’s pet projects in 1966 was the vocal development of Carl Wilson. As his little brother took flight leading the band on the road, Brian accrued heightened confidence in Carl’s abilities as a performer during the months leading up to Pet Sounds. Brian saw Carl as his most promising protégé, a trusted musical sounding board with whom he could test out ideas and connect with on spiritual matters. The two of them even held prayer rituals, where they’d light a candle, pray for people, pray to bring about love, and pray for an album better than Rubber Soul. And there was Carl’s lead voice, coming to the forefront on “Girl Don’t Tell Me,” much of the Party! album, and “The Little Girl I Once Knew,” which introduced a promising if unrefined extra dimension to the group’s sound. While working on the new album, Brian seemed determined to coax out the potential of his youngest sibling and amplify his importance in the group. 

All this is to say that in “Wouldn’t It Be Nice,” Carl sings the second-highest harmony part below Brian in a stack of six, which would’ve been unthinkable several albums ago (not least because the group didn’t always have six members). Carl singing those notes in falsetto was a new frontier for him, previously always Al’s de facto role in the stack. This choice is a very tiny (and overelaborated by us), but important symptom of Brian’s changing attitude to using Carl in his music, which would be borne out in other more obvious ways across the Pet Sounds album.

The backing vocals were handled by all of the group singing around two Neumann U47s (with Mike on his own), though probably punched in section by section based on other examples of Brian’s work at the time. Their first instance comes at the “B” section of the first verse (“you know it’s gonna make wee-ooh”), where everyone fits into a four-part harmony stack designed to link up with and underscore the lead: Brian on top, Carl and Al together on the second part, Bruce and Dennis together on the third, Mike on the lowest. The “A” section of the second verse is where the six-part arrangement fires up: Brian and Carl sing the highest lines moving together with “run, run, wee-ooh” phrases; Al, Bruce, and Dennis take the more static parts below in descending order, also breaking into an “after having”; and Mike sings a tumbling bass vocal. Backing vocals for the second “B” section (“happy times together we…”) were recorded in the same fashion as the first, with all six vocalists covering the four parts.

Next came the bridge, for which Brian wrote a six-part “run, run, wee-ooh” stretching out into a long, brilliantly woven harmony pad through the rest of the section, sung in descending order by Brian, Al, Bruce, Carl, Dennis, and Mike. Four-part backing vocals for the final slow verse “D” section were sung in the same configuration as before. In the tag, Brian and Carl reprise their two-part “run, run, wee-ooh” harmony from the second verse and repeat it as a round.

Moving onto lead vocals, Brian kept everybody but Al Jardine on the floor. Although only Brian and Mike would be featured lead vocalists on the song, other small cameo pieces were needed from Carl, Dennis, and Bruce. A brighter sound from Brian than the others suggests that he was singing alone into a Shure 545, which Chuck usually liked to use on him to capture a certain character of his tonality. Brian performs the opening verses, which at this point began with the lyric: “Wouldn’t it be nice to live together / In the kind of world where we belong?” In an odd little decision, Brian had Mike on hand at the mic just to sing the word “such” before “happy times together…” in the second verse.

Mike sings the “maybe if…” lead vocal for the first part of the bridge, then Brian takes over at “we could be married,” and Carl echoes Brian’s two lines with a lower countermelody. Following Brian’s singing of the title line, Dennis comes in with a “ba ba ba ba” scat vocal matching the sax riff, which is faintly harmonized by Bruce a third above.

Brian returns to lead for the slow half-verse, and after his final “wouldn’t it be nice,” Dennis and Bruce reprise their harmonized scat part through the fade. Mike sings a doo-wop-esque lead couplet in the tag that he made up during the session, a part that was ultimately responsible for awarding him a belated writer’s credit: “Good night, whoa-ho, baby / Sleep tight, whoa-ho, baby.” 

On February 16 (as mentioned earlier, the probable date of the vocal overdubs), Brian and Chuck mixed the song and spliced it onto a 1/4” compilation reel of mono masters. [Where to hear: The Pet Sounds Sessions (1997, Capitol Records) CD 3 track 27, Pet Sounds: 50th Anniversary Edition (2016, Capitol Records) CD 3 track 21.] This version was considered a satisfactory final product at the time of mixing, but after living with a dub copy of the song for a while, it dawned on Brian that he wasn’t feeling good about… well, any of the vocal performance.

His own lead vocal was one issue. It was aggressive, pitchy, and chronically behind the beat. Starting on a belted A4, then diving all over the place and frequently reaching back up to the top without many opportunities to catch breath, this was one of the most challenging melodies Brian had ever written for himself to sing, and he was clearly still figuring out how to approach it (although Mike’s part in the bridge was probably his best ever attempt out of several to come). The backing vocals had pitch problems of their own (largely coming from Brian on the highest parts, admittedly), and Brian was stuck on the feeling that they lacked the power, punch, and rhythmic precision to lock in with either the track or the lead singer. Rhythm was his primary concern — “California Girls” had never satisfied him in that respect, and he was determined to drill the Beach Boys into thinking about their vocals more like percussionists. 

Western II

On a few occasions, Bruce Johnston recalled an interesting scenario in which Brian tried to re-attempt the parts in his home playback room on Laurel Way. “We could not execute the rhythmic parts of his arrangement for him,” Bruce said. “So we recorded it several times, and we even went to his house, and he had a Scully four-track machine, and we recorded it there, and then I think we went back to the studio. There are a lot of subtle rhythmic moves.” 

However that turned out (as no mixes with home-recorded vocals survive), the gang were back at Western either on or shortly before March 3 to completely re-record their parts (we aren’t sure if vocals were taped the day they were mixed or earlier). Painstakingly erasing and replacing the existing voices, the collective Beach Boys overdubbed a nearly identical backing vocal arrangement piece by piece, albeit with a couple of tiny adjustments: the lines “know it’s gonna make wee-ooh,” “happy times together we,” and “seems the more we talk” are expanded upwards to five-part harmony, with Brian singing a new high note and Carl breaking off above Al to cover Brian’s old spot; the lower four harmony parts in the second verse now follow the top two into the same “run, run, wee-ooh” breaks; the harmonies also support the words “but let’s” in the last verse, where the lead had been unaccompanied in the earlier mix (someone goes very out of tune there). All parts were doubled, as before.

In redoing the lead tracks, Brian made other subtle alterations to the plan, while also changing his singing approach — sweetening it up a little, as Murry would say. The second half of the bridge features a third “we could be married” response from Mike, and the harmonized “ba ba ba ba” scat part is turned into a unison vocal between Dennis and Bruce. With all background and lead parts revised and doubled, Brian made one last tweak before dubbing it down: he replaced that “ba ba ba ba” part at the end of the bridge (but not the tag), singing and doubling it himself, which consequently forced him to re-sing the “oh, wouldn’t it be nice” that precedes it as a punch-in on other tracks, slightly cutting off Carl’s “then we’d be happy.” On March 3, amid a session otherwise devoted to “I Know There’s an Answer,” Brian and Chuck mixed “Wouldn’t It Be Nice” to mono for the second time, taking three complete attempts to perfect the balance. [Where to hear: The Pet Sounds Sessions (1997, Capitol Records) CD 3 track 13, Pet Sounds: 50th Anniversary Edition (2016, Capitol Records) CD 3 track 9.] But again, upon playback review at home, Brian wasn’t happy with the way the song sounded; it just wasn’t making the cut. Diving back in would require a drastic rethink.

Western III

By early March, Brian’s perfectionism was starting to feel the pinch of recording on only four tracks. The previous year, at the suggestion of Bruce Johnston, much of the Summer Days (And Summer Nights!!) album was finished in Studio A at Columbia Records, home to the first 1” eight-track tape recorder in Los Angeles (and conveniently located across the street from the United-Western complex). Being the label’s own studio, a designated CBS facility not just meant for any old group to wander into, Bruce and his longtime collaborator Terry Melcher used their staff producer status and the sway of the Beach Boys’ name to get the group inside. Capitol can’t have been too happy, but they’d already given Brian carte blanche to record wherever he wanted. Flash forward to Pet Sounds, and Bruce and Terry again pulled strings to get Brian time at Columbia, where he hoped to quickly fix up and complete the remaining songs for the project with their unique tape machine, permitting a much greater flexibility in recording the Boys’ voices. 

They seemingly couldn’t get into Columbia right away, so on Tuesday, March 8 (a session handily dated by a Carol Deck report in KRLA Beat), the entourage came back to Western to record some preparatory work on four-track, probably already anticipating that it would be copied to eight-track for more vocal parts later in the week. With that in mind, Brian wanted to change the way he was handling “Wouldn’t It Be Nice” to resolve those rhythmic issues that were nagging at him — basically, by doing the lead before the main backing vocal section this time so the others would have a reference to synchronize with. 

However, that wasn’t actually the first thing he did. The entire group knew the arrangement inside and out by this point, and with the promise of eight tracks, all of the parts were like a shopping list that Brian just had to run through and check off in whatever order he liked. Everything on tape thus far was disregarded, and the new set of overdubs began with Brian and Carl recording several key background parts on track 3 — parts that were previously sung in tandem with the full group, but could now afford their own space on tape. They started at the second verse’s highest two moving harmonies, “run, run, wee-ooh” included, as well as Carl harmonizing to “after having.” The brothers then sang the response vocals in the bridge, with Carl echoing the “we could be married” and “and then we’d be happy” lines, and Brian adding the second “we could be married” countermelody between them (formerly Mike’s spot). In the fadeout, they reprised their two-part “run, run, wee-ooh” round. These vocals were recorded with a healthy amount of reverb printed to tape and Brian didn’t feel they needed to be doubled. 

Brian re-sang the lead for the opening verses, second half of bridge, and final verse onto track 1, which he doubled onto track 2 with both signals combined together (recorded dry). Mike was right there beside him, adding his “well, such” cameo in the second verse, and nothing else. Why the rest of his parts weren’t recorded at this time isn’t quite explainable. The most notable aspect of Brian’s third lead vocal performance (aside from it being another steady improvement) is that the opening lines are now swapped around, starting with the more evocative: “Wouldn’t it be nice if we were older? Then we wouldn’t have to wait so long.” On track 3, Brian punched in the scat vocal riff at the end of the bridge, and doubled it only during the second round on track 2, being careful not to erase any of his lead.

Columbia I

On Thursday, March 10, Brian brought along several tapes to Columbia’s Studio A in the CBS Columbia Square building, those being “God Only Knows,” “I Just Wasn’t Made for These Times,” “I’m Waiting for the Day,” and “Wouldn’t It Be Nice,” which were all transferred from ½” four-track to 1” eight-track one after the other. That evening, the full group (observed by Tony Asher and Terry Melcher) got busy laying down vocals for three of those songs (sans “I Just Wasn’t Made for These Times”) before the touring unit had to fly out for a show in Cleveland on the night of March 11. After that concert, a worn out Dennis apologized to a reporter for his sleepiness and told her, “When you stand on your feet for 10 hours and holler, then hop a plane to the next show, you’re beat,” alluding to a lengthy recording session the night before their travels.

Recording vocals at Columbia Studios would’ve been a dramatic contrast to working at Gold Star or Western. Those studios were independents, which meant that, despite their very successful track records, they did not have the resources of a major label industry behemoth like Columbia. That sweet CBS money had built a magnificent, state-of-art facility across the street from Western, with a giant live room (described as feeling like a big, dark spaceship) and a well-stocked, luxurious control room. In addition to a custom 16-input console, the facility had dozens of reverb options and many more outboard processing units that Western or Gold Star could, frankly, not fit in their tiny control booths. And, another great luxury at Columbia was their collection of fine Austrian tube condenser microphones. The AKG C12 is a legendary microphone, with originals selling for tens of thousands of dollars at the time of this writing, and it is this microphone that Columbia engineers loved to use on vocals. Most photos of the band singing at Columbia show them singing around the AKG C12.

The group would sing around one or two mics (and at CBS as elsewhere, Mike often got his own mic when singing low parts) which would feed into the custom Columbia board. Because their facilities offered a little more flexibility with the capacity to handle eight-track tape, Columbia engineers tended to record the Boys’ voices completely dry, leaving reverb till the mixing stage. Also evident on these vocals is the increased use of extensive compression and limiting. Again, this was helped by the bevy of options in the control room, ranks of custom CBS limiters and EQ units, plus the usual suspects from Pultec, Universal Audio, RCA, Hycor, Cinema Engineering, and others. Because of this extra processing, a lot of the vocals from Columbia sessions hit the tape with a heavier, tighter sound than those done at Western, as the voices meld together through dozens of vacuum tubes.

The engineer at this initial session was William Brittan, seen in a photograph behind the console with Brian. Bill had been with Radio Recorders and Capitol in the 1950s before moving to Columbia, where his work took him to stints at the label’s studio facilities in both New York and Hollywood. In 1970, he was named by Billboard as the Sunset Boulevard studio’s chief engineer.  Knowledge of other Columbia staff engineers who worked on these sessions is a spotty subject, owed to the lack of names or even initials written on nearly all of the tracksheets prior to late 1966. Every date would have an assigned “Console Engineer” and a “Recording Engineer” (otherwise known as the second engineer, or tape operator). Rafael Otilio “Ralph” Valentin was another Beach Boys session regular, also formerly of Radio Recorders and a veteran of “I’m Bugged at My Ol’ Man” and “Summer Means New Love” (at least), who was fondly remembered by Brian for being one of the more willing engineers to get in on the fun and let clients touch the board. However, though he’s the most recognized name, Ralph didn’t handle everything on Pet Sounds — the handwriting of at least three individuals populates the tracksheets, one of them almost certainly being Bill Brittan. Others known to have worked on Beach Boys material include Jerry Hochman, Donald Thompson, and Peter Romano, but there were many, many others on staff at the CBS Columbia Square building. By the end of the decade, the studio employed 30 engineers.

First order of business for “Wouldn’t It Be Nice” on its third-generation tape was filling in Mike’s bridge lead vocal, which he performed on track 5 and doubled on track 8 (delivered a little more aggressively than before). On the same tracks, Mike added the “good night” tag lead vocal while Brian sang the scat part into the same mic.

On tracks 1 and 6, all six of the group recorded a new set of the main backing vocals packed with thick compression, aided by having Brian’s lead in the headphones this time to give them something to follow. Mike recalled this session being an especially brutal one in the effort to satisfy Brian’s desires,  and the gruelling process of recording these vocal parts over and over prompted him to land on a new nickname for their producer. Mike: “I remember one session in particular at the CBS records studios on Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood. The song was ‘Wouldn’t It Be Nice’ … I’ll never forget just how much a slave driver Brian was when he produced the session. We did upwards of 30 takes on just one section of backgrounds for ‘Wouldn’t It Be Nice.’ About the 20th take, frustrated by what seemed the zillionth attempt to get the sound he was looking for, I started calling Brian ‘dog ears’ (with affection). They say dogs can hear sounds that humans cannot, and I swear Brian must have been part canine because he was reaching for something intangible, imperceptible to most, and all but impossible to execute.”

The “you know it’s gonna make” “B” section parts (still a little rushed, probably to Brian’s dismay) were divided up with some unison into Brian and Bruce together at the top, then Carl and Al, then Dennis, then Mike, with Carl splitting off above Al for the five-part harmony on “wee-ooh” in the first verse and “we” in the second. In the second verse’s “A” section, the most historically difficult passage to pull off, Brian simplified the lower four parts to save himself a headache. They became a less mobile stack of oooooh’s, performed by six singers in the same groupings, removing the “run, run,” keeping the harmonized “after having,” and ditching Mike’s agile bass line for a static part. In the bridge, the group absolutely nailed the six-part harmony pad in its original configuration of Brian, Al, Bruce, Carl, Dennis, and Mike. The final verse was tackled like the earlier ones; without needing to punch in, Brian and Carl launched straight from there into the “run, run, wee-ooh” tag, which actually doubled and tripled the version already on track 3.

On track 7, Carl and Brian doubled the bridge response vocals. Brian can be heard complaining about a splinter in one of his knee bones while waiting for the mark: “I swear to God. (sigh) It’s all fucked up.”

While the other Beach Boys flew away for a short stretch of shows across the country, Brian mixed “Wouldn’t It Be Nice” to mono for a third time, trying out two different approaches. One take was attempted with track 3 muted entirely, leaving out the Brian and Carl higher background vocals and Brian’s main scat vocal at the end of the bridge, while the other mix take left this track up in the balance. [Neither of these mixes have been released at time of writing.] Preferring the latter, Brian brought the tape over to Western and spliced it onto a compilation reel of the album’s mono masters. Did this mean he was done with the song? Of course not!

Columbia II

Sometime during that week in Los Angeles without the other Beach Boys, in the window of March 13 to 19, Brian was back at Columbia again, tweaking “God Only Knows” and recording a new lead vocal in the verses of “Wouldn’t It Be Nice.” He did not intend to erase his original doubled performance on track 2, because he still wanted to used the “We could be married / And then we’d be happy” lines in the bridge. To steer clear of that, the new vocal was overdubbed onto tracks 5 and 8 (with live tape echo helping him along). This was definitely his most assured performance to date, finally capturing the sweetness that he’d sacrificed in order to hit the notes in earlier versions, and now without the “such” interjection in the second verse. Brian also replaced the scat vocal at the end of the bridge on 7 and 3, changing the end of the phrase from a “ba ba ba” to a “de do do.” The song was remixed again, feeling quite worthy this time (despite Mike’s bridge vocal double being pulled up slightly late), so Brian wrote down “FINAL MASTERS” under both titles on the box. [Where to hear: Mistakenly included on Made in U.S.A. (1986, Capitol Records) and Still Cruisin’ (1989, Capitol Records).]

But wait! There’s more! There’s always more.

Columbia III

On Friday, March 25, while also working on “Here Today,” Brian had Mike re-sing his lead vocal in the bridge with a gentler delivery, performing the passage a bit closer to the way he’d originally done it at Western. “Wouldn’t It Be Nice” was then given a sixth mixdown, and at last, Brian actually seemed to be at peace with it. This mix stands out from the others due to swathes of reverb on the verse lead vocal and heavy overall limiting, resulting in some crunchy distortion. Brian’s earlier combined lead vocal on track 2 hadn’t been erased from the tape, and as such, elements can still be discerned underneath its replacement in this dubdown, manifesting as hints of a quadruple-tracked Brian Wilson. [Where to hear: The first minute of this mix has not seen official release, but beginning at the bridge, this is the version that can be heard on any mono edition of Pet Sounds.]

The Pet Sounds album was assembled at Capitol on Monday, April 4, with this most recent version of “Wouldn’t It Be Nice” as the opening track on side A. Lacquer parts were cut the following day, but that somehow isn’t even the end of the story. Partly due to the urging of Capitol A&R man Steve Douglas, who thought the mixes seemed rushed and messy, Brian recalled the entire album and realized he wasn’t entirely happy about the vocals on several songs. To no surprise at all, “Wouldn’t It Be Nice” was one of those cuts deemed in need of further revision. Once the Beach Boys came back from a short tour around Texas and Florida, the group spent a further three or four days re-recording vocals in a gallant final effort to make the album as good as it possibly could be.

Columbia IV

On Monday, April 11, “Wouldn’t It Be Nice” was a focal point of the fix-up project. Ralph Valentin engineered, and Pete Romano served as second engineer. Only Brian, Dennis, Carl, and Bruce were in the Columbia studio this day, operating on a lean and mean plan to right the ship. They first set about re-recording the lower harmonies of the verse backing vocals, a neater four singers for the four parts, stacked Brian, Bruce, Carl, then Dennis — who, in a notable turn, sings a version of the moving bass vocal in the second verse that used to be Mike’s, now fully restored to the arrangement and fleshed out to a more important role.

Dennis wouldn’t usually sing this sort of part, but like Carl and his miraculous heretofore untapped high voice, Brian was on a kick nurturing vocal niches within his group that previous Beach Boys music hadn’t really allowed them to explore. Mike may have had the warm, rounded tone, and was more precise about his pitch, but Dennis actually possessed a stronger voice in that deep register, capable of projecting his notes over a powerful track — which is exactly what “Wouldn’t It Be Nice” called for. To overcome Dennis’ nervousness about doing the part and to help him stay directional on the mic, Brian suggested to him a novel technique. “One of the features of this record is that Dennis sings a special way, cupping his hands,” he said in 1966. “I had thought for hours of the best way to achieve the sound and Dennis dug the idea because he knew it would work. So we practiced for hours until it did.” With his hands functioning as a skin foghorn, Dennis found exactly the right energy he needed to power the part home.

Carl, too, remembered this being a breakthrough moment: “Dennis did the bass vocals in the verse, and he did a great job on it. He was thrilled at the way it sounded, so proud that it came out so cool.” Overhead, the Brian, Bruce, Carl trio in the middle lean into the doo-wop stylings, trading the old “run, run, wee-ooh” for “wop-bop-badoo” phrases. In the last verse, Brian reverted the stack on the word “talk” to its earlier four-part configuration. These vocals were overdubbed onto tracks 2 and 5, without the heavy compression, a thinner and rougher timbre to cut through the mix, that finally executed the rhythmic precision Brian was after all along. Still, Carl came to feel that they didn’t quite nail it. “Brilliant parts,” he reminisced. “It was hard to sing without getting tears in your eyes. We all seem to remember singing it a lot. Many times. Many days. In fact, I don’t think we ever got ‘em right. It still feels a little rushed. I wish they were sung more on time, not so on top of the beat.”

Brian next sang another new verse lead vocal on tracks 3 and 8 (his fifth overall). This attempt was recorded dry and pitched slightly differently again: a little more pinched, a little more ragged, a little younger-sounding, a little gentler on the high parts. He really sounded like he meant it this time. So many revisions, and this was the reading that tipped it from a good performance to a perfect one. Finally, Brian and Carl re-recorded the high parts in the second verse onto tracks 1 and 6, doubled to match the rest of the stack, and forgoing the “after having” harmony.

Reviewing the tapes brought Brian to the realization that actually, he did still like most of the current master mix that had been on his album assembly. So he merely dubbed the new opening verses to mono (attempt #7) and stopped the tape at the bridge, where he planned to splice the two mixes together. [This partial mix has not been released as of writing.] But there were still wobbles.

Columbia V

The final, final, actual real last additions to “Wouldn’t It Be Nice” were recorded on an undocumented later date; potentially Wednesday, April 13, based on similar annotations made that day to another dated tracksheet, or they could’ve been shortly afterwards in the window of April 14 to 18. Brian decided to replace Mike’s lead in the bridge and sing it himself, which he did on tracks 5 and 8, completely erasing the old parts in the process. Some odd harmonic distortion got stuck to the vocal on track 8, but otherwise he handled it beautifully. The section’s former vocalist was actually around when this happened — during the same session, Mike was at the studio to tweak some parts on “Here Today.” Also wishing to re-record both the lead and response vocals for the following line (but not wiping the old performance), Brian re-sang “we could be married, and then we’d be happy” on track 5, while Carl sang his response vocal, and Mike took Brian’s old second response part live into the same mic. For the very last overdub, these three voices were ping-ponged to track 8 while being lightly doubled. A technical malfunction caused more harmonic distortion to occur and the second layer to be nigh on imperceptible.

Moving behind the board for what would be the final mixdown, Brian decided that he did like the first lines of the bridge that he now sang, but not the revised “we could be married” etc. that the trio just recorded. “Wouldn’t It Be Nice” mono mix number eight included the first part of the bridge with Brian’s new vocal, but he stopped rolling tape in the middle of “we could be married” — and then, Brian second-guessed himself again. He opted to ditch the whole revised bridge section and go back to Mike’s lead vocal, essentially deciding not to use any of the day’s work, so an edit was made splicing mix #8 (up to the bridge) into mix #6 (from the bridge). [This is the final composite mix heard on the mono album; the unused partial bridge from mix #8 with Brian’s lead has not been released.] (Note: The old backing vocals still on the multitrack jut in at “never ending.”)

With that, “Wouldn’t It Be Nice” was finally, genuinely, completed. It was by far, without contest, the most extensive amount of time Brian Wilson and the Beach Boys had ever devoted to the production of a single song to this point. Production spanned three multitrack tape formats at three different recording studios: ½” three-track at Gold Star, ½” four-track at Western, and 1” eight-track at Columbia (with some alleged unused work done in Brian’s house). On Tuesday, April 19, the Pet Sounds album was re-compiled at Capitol with the new mixes implemented in the same sequence. Final equalization and limiting were applied to the entire album as it was mastered to lacquer, and the LP was released on May 16.

Back on February 15, in the midst of recording lead vocals for “That’s Not Me,” Brian asked Mike if “Wouldn’t It Be Nice” should be a single. “God, it better; I hope so!” Mike replied. “If it doesn’t sound too big. Freaky, man!” But following the release of Brian’s solo “Caroline, No,” and the Beach Boys’ “Sloop John B.,” Brian decided that the next Beach Boys single to follow the LP should be “Good Vibrations,” a song which he’d begun and then held back from the album. Facing dissatisfaction with production of “Good Vibrations” through June, Brian bought some time by authorizing a release of “God Only Knows,” which was to be backed with a Capitol-assembled medley of songs from Pet Sounds (beginning with the intro and opening verses of “Wouldn’t It Be Nice”) in order to promote the LP. Soon after, the idea of the medley was scrapped, and “Wouldn’t It Be Nice” took its place to become the A-side after all, released July 18.

The hybrid edit compromise means that several of the last elements recorded don’t feature in the final mono master. Not only were the bridge revisions bypassed, but Brian’s lead vocal and the group backing vocals in the slow verse section recorded April 11 aren’t used either. All of these components can however be heard in Mark Linett’s 1996 stereo mix; both sets of backing vocals in the closing verse actually still co-exist on the eight-track master, so a quadruple-tracked wall of Beach Boys are used in that version. The later 2001 stereo mix syncs part of the mono mix with Mike’s bridge lead to elements of the multitrack, restoring the “correct” vocal in that section that listeners were familiar with for 30 years.

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In the process of collecting research for this project, we’ve developed a sessionography cataloguing format meant to disambiguate the chronological production of each master in a consistent, understandable chart of information, applicable to any music recorded on multitrack tape. But recording music isn’t a mechanical process — it’s fluid, it’s analog, it’s real life, and it defies neat categorization. So if you scroll below, this might look like the most confusing thing in the world. It needs a little explaining.

The structure to each entry is mapped out as follows:

• The song title, any alternate titles, the numbered version, and the section designation of a song if those apply.
• A date heading each session. These are at the top of each set of work in italics (YYYY-MM-DD).
• The tape format and generation heading each set of work. These may be accompanied by notes about copies, reduction mixes and edits where available.
• Color-coded contents of the basic track, and each subsequent overdub in order of recording. These may include small print notes about take numbers, the manufacturer and model of instruments where known, sometimes clarification about what role people are playing, and explanation of vocal parts. Vocals are the most difficult thing to cleanly categorize, and out of necessity have to be listed in a slightly different, more changeable way to the instruments (it can’t all just say “vocal:” in its fleshy literal form as nature intended). A vocal harmony stack written as “Brian>Al>Carl>Mike” would represent that Brian is singing the top part, then Al is below, then Carl is below him, then Mike is on the bottom.
• Other production events noted in the chronological order, such as an edit or mixdown.
• A fuller list of recording session dates, locations, engineers, and other relevant information.
• A breakdown of what’s on every track of each generation of multitrack tape, including erased parts where known.

This essay has been written as an introduction of sorts to the wider project; you’ll find a lot of information and concepts discussed above that would actually have been encountered by the Boys much earlier, such as the setup of a recording session at Gold Star, which Brian started using in 1963, or the same at Columbia, which the group used in 1965. We decided to throw it all in anyway and start with “Wouldn’t It Be Nice” — because, well, it’s the first track on side A of Pet Sounds! Where else? However, “Wouldn’t It Be Nice” also happens to tower ominously at the apex of extensive, confusing Beach Boys productions, owing to so many vocal sessions and meticulous re-recordings of parts. So the entry below is a bit of a mess, if taken as a starting point. We should’ve done “Surfer Girl” first. Most other songs on this site won’t look nearly as complicated, and the chart is very much meant to be viewed alongside the essay to provide context. Once you’ve read that, we hope it’ll make a little more sense.

 

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Sources

Special thanks for additional research: Cameron Mott, for discovering a key session date via KRLA Beat; Pat, for matching William Brittan’s face to a name and back to a face.

Tapes and associated documentation from Brother Records and Capitol Records.

AFM Local 47 Contract 195427.

Carol Deck, “One Day on the Beat,” KRLA Beat, April 9, 1966.

Uncredited writer, “Some Producers’ Hints From Beach Boy Brian,” KRLA Beat, April 30, 1966.

Derek Taylor, “Building the Beach Boy Empire,” Hit Parader Magazine, October 1966.

“The Brian Wilson Interview,” Western One Radio Programmes, June 7, 1985 – transcribed in Beach Boys Stomp 53, February 1986.

Brian Wilson interviewed by Mr. Bonzai, Mix Volume 20, Number 3, March 1996.

Mike Love, Carl Wilson, Lyle Ritz – interviews conducted by David Leaf, appear in “The Making of Pet Sounds,” The Pet Sounds Sessions, Capitol Records, 1997.

Uncredited writer, Break Away With Brian Wilson, Issue No. 4, Fall 1997.

Bruce Johnston, Frank Marocco – interviews conducted by Charles L. Granata, appear in “Wouldn’t It Be Nice: Brian Wilson and the Making of the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds,” Chicago Review Press, 2003.

Tony Asher, Frank Capp – interviews appear in “Pet Stories,” directed by John Anderson, Brian Wilson Presents Pet Sounds Live in London, DVD, Sanctuary Visual Entertainment, 2003.

Andrew Doe, www.bellagio10452.com.

Ian Rusten, www.beachboysgigs.com.