Don’t Talk (Put Your Head on My Shoulder)

(Brian Wilson – Tony Asher)

Music: Brian Wilson
Lyrics: Tony Asher, Brian Wilson
Arrangement: Brian Wilson, assisted by the studio musicians

Producer: Brian Wilson
Engineers: Chuck Britz, Bowen David

Personnel:
     (voices)
Brian Wilson – lead vocals
     (instrumentation – basic)
Al De Lory – electric organ [Hammond C-3]
Glen Campbell – electric 12-string guitar [Mosrite Mark XII]
Billy Strange – electric 12-string guitar [Mosrite Combo XII]
Carol Kaye – electric 6-string bass [Danelectro UB-2]
Lyle Ritz – double bass
Hal Blaine – ride cymbal
Frank Capp – vibraphone, timpani
     (instrumentation – overdubs)
Sid Sharp – violin
Arnold Belnick – violin
Ralph Schaeffer – violin
Tibor Zelig – violin
Norman Botnick – viola
Joseph Saxon – cello

Recorded to 1/2″ 4-track (4 to 4):
February 11, 1966 (9:00am-12:30pm) / Western Recorders – Studio 3 (track)
April 3, 1966 (10:00pm-1:00am) / Western Recorders – Studio 3 (transfer, vocals, strings)

Mixed to 1/4″ mono:
April 3, 1966 / Western Recorders – Studio 3

Initial Release:
1966 Mono Mix – Pet Sounds LP (Capitol Records, 1966)
1996 Stereo Mix – The Pet Sounds Sessions (Capitol Records, 1997)

 

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Songwriting

Late 1965

The song that would come to be known as “Don’t Talk (Put Your Head on My Shoulder)” had its origins in a chord pattern Brian composed in late 1965 – a startling, dense series of changes drawn from the theme of non-verbal communication between lovers (with at least the “Don’t Talk” part of the title already conceived), structured in ABABAB form with a cyclical verse and chorus. In this piece of work, we reach what might actually be the apotheosis of Brian’s pursuit of the lushest extended harmonies he could confect. Deeply chromatic in its inner voice movements, no chord is used twice in the verse, and if one plays through the progression on a keyboard instrument, it becomes easier to visualize Brian’s unique compositional anchors of the time, using his fingers as a bit of a puzzle: How few fingers can he move to create an entirely new direction in a song? Which voices can he move against which that aren’t moving? What if we move the middle finger and pinky while the index and ring fingers remain stationary? It’s remarkably mathematical in a way, and while Brian had (and has) dined out for his whole career on a certain two-chord version of this, “Don’t Talk” is a richer, romantic sweep through subtle emotional turns and passing shades of color. 

The home key of the composition could be thought of as Eb minor or its relative Gb major, although the constant movement, lack of an obvious tonic, and ambiguous tonality make it almost pointless to confine the piece in such a way. Halfway through the second bar of the verse progression (which starts on an Ebm7), an F7 is the first in a series of twists as the chords slalom around a steadily descending bass line. The chorus is mostly a back-and-forth between Db7 and Abm7 (the V and ii chords if one considers this song to be in a major key). At the end of the last phrase, Brian finally lands on an almost plain Gb major, albeit with a Db (the fifth) in the bass; it’s fitting that the only near-resolution reached in the song is voiced in second inversion, suspending the satisfaction and contributing to the floaty, dreamy feel of the progression. 

Brian set down an instrumental demo at home in October or November of 1965. This wasn’t something he was usually in the habit of doing, but having a new Scully 280 four-track machine for personal use at Laurel Way got him excited enough to tape a few bits and pieces, mostly on the reel containing basic tracking for “The Little Girl I Once Knew.” Dissatisfaction with the sounds for lack of proper mixing equipment meant Brian would not dive far into the home recording scene – at most, two or three days trying out various ideas – but it did thankfully last long enough to preserve this piece of music. (Evidence indicates that Brian made all of his extant ’65 home demos after October 13 but before November 17.) 

Brian first recorded a basic track on the black 1934 Chickering 105D grand piano that was gifted to him by Murry. A left-hand vamp intro drawn from Jan Berry’s arrangement of “Dead Man’s Curve” (a song Brian co-wrote and sang on) opens up into the patented “webbed hand” right-hand eighth note rhythm, played mid-tempo. Brian is actually still mapping out the song as he plays here and cuts some measures down from verse to verse. Off-mic, he can be heard faintly singing in the choruses where he had begun to develop a melody, including the title words “don’t talk.” Onto this basic piano recording, Brian overdubbed Fender bass (with Marilyn talking to four-legged friends Banana and Louie in the background), and then drums – a meaty snare backbeat and jittering fills on the toms, rough in their execution by the non-drummer, but following along decently enough to hint at the shape of a more fleshed-out band arrangement. 

Early 1966

The composition resurfaced in late January or early February 1966 when Brian and Tony Asher started to write an album in earnest. Describing the typical way in which a song might come about, Tony recounted, “Maybe there’d be a few notes that he’d been working on for I don’t know how long, maybe something he’d had in his head for months, or even years. Or we’d be talking about a record that we had heard that was currently out or had been out recently that had a certain kind of feel to it and then he’d say, ‘Oh, you know, here’s a feel I love,’ and then it would start that way. Or maybe he had said, ‘I’ve always wanted to write a song about this kind of subject’ …” 

“Don’t Talk” was revisited in one of these scenarios, i.e. Brian bringing up an existing composition and concept and developing it with Tony from there. He slowed the music way, way down and revised the end of the chorus, raising the melody a step and a half higher over an expanded chain of non-diatonic chords and another descending bass part, which all serves to smooth over the transition back to the verse. In those verses, he worked out a sweeping, somewhat angular lead melody stretching all across his vocal range, set to heart-meltingly intimate lyrics penned by Tony on the theme of a couple expressing feelings without saying words. According to Brian, the song was “something that I think was the result of the fact that there are so many different ways to tell somebody you love them.” 

“It’s an interesting notion to sit down and try and write a lyric about not talking,” said Tony. “That came out of one of those conversations where we were talking about dating experiences. These conversations that we’d have would go in funny little directions, and I think at some point we were talking about how wonderful non-verbal communication can be between people. Hard subject to write a song about, but I think we pulled it off.” 

“Oh boy, that’s a beautiful song,” Brian concurred. “Some of these songs just came real fast… That’s wonderful, a lot of love in it. Tony had remarked to me many times while we were writing that he very much liked how I sang… People say, ‘Hey Brian, you sound good. You’re doing good.’ That helped me out, got me going.” 

Its chorus lyric and full subtitle, “Don’t Talk (Put Your Head on My Shoulder),” was doubtless influenced by Paul Anka’s “Put Your Head on My Shoulder,” which features a similar melody over the titular phrase. Tony distinctly remembered that “Don’t talk, take my hand, and listen to my heart beat” was a Brian line. The song’s structure was also expanded to ABABCB, fading on a repeating chorus and now including an instrumental bridge of drifting, through-composed chords that would be filled in with texture later – what exactly that would be, Brian probably didn’t know for certain yet. 

Tracking Session

Setup

A basic tracking session took place at Western Studio 3 on Friday, February 11, starting fresh and early at 9:00am – Brian would probably have liked to be in bed, being a nocturnal creature, but he usually made his booking arrangements last-minute and would take studio availability whenever he could get it. Musicians were a smaller unit than the typical Pet Sounds fare, consisting of Al De Lory, Billy Strange, Glen Campbell, Carol Kaye, Lyle Ritz, Hal Blaine, Frankie Capp, and Steve Douglas. Chuck Britz was listed as the session contractor to get him an extra paycheck, but details of the AFM sheet bear all the hallmarks of Steve Douglas’ paperwork (he was down as “leader”). Following the trend of shifting musician-to-A&R responsibilities, Steve didn’t have an instrument to play at this session, and gladly got paid extra union scale to do some admin work for Brian. 

The arrangement Brian sculpted for this song from its plunky piano origins is nothing short of astonishing. So much of the track is marked by long, languorous lines and blocks of sound, most notably in Al De Lory’s organ. Here, the Hammond provides crystalline, cloudlike sustained pads with ambiguous timbral composition, gluing the tone of the piece together, most likely played in a two-manual style. The higher register tonewheels create an eerie ringing, like the sound of singing water glasses just at the edge of hearing. 

 Closely complementing the held organ chords is Brian’s arrangement for the double bass, played with a bow, arco, by Lyle Ritz. Always seeking the fattest low-end sounds he could get onto tape, Brian fell deeply in love with the timbre of a bowed big bass fiddle in his work around this time, valuing both the nebulous fullness it could add to the floor of a track and the delicate trebly expression of the bow hairs’ friction against the strings. As such, he liked to have it close-mic’d, to capture every detail of the instrument’s voice onto tape. Lyle sustains under the organ for most of the track, with descending pizzicati passages at the end of each chorus, where it briefly binds together with the other bass part played by Carol Kaye. 

 Carol’s Danelectro UB-2 6-string bass was plugged in direct from the control room. Her bubbly palm-muted line sits in the middle of the instrument’s range and tone, a ba-bum pulse like a heartbeat to go with the song’s lyric. It’s gentler than a lot of the percussive tic-tac bass Brian liked to use, but it’s just snappy enough to provide effective rhythmic contrast to the deep spectral soup below. “Pretty tune,” reviewed Carol. “Unearthly slow. Imagine playing this without any lead (like the rest of his tracks). You still had to keep good time no matter how slow. Nice chord changes … lots of suspensions and close harmonies, something Brian was getting more and more into.” 

Also playing DI were the guitarists, Glen Campbell and Billy Strange, squeezed into the booth elbow-to-elbow with the producer and engineer. They both would’ve used their 12-string Mosrite axes, though it’s unclear who played which part at this session. As in other arrangements of Brian’s from this period, Glen and Billy are here to play single-string lines, not to strum chords; De Lory’s organ is the only harmonic instrument in the basic track arrangement. While the combination of two direct electric 12s is not a new idea in Brian’s music, what is unique is the nearly constant tremolo picking of one, as if it were a mandolin. It’s a voice in the arrangement that has no cousin in the Wilson oeuvre, equal parts Dick Dale and operatic violin. The other 12-string is used minimally (like a lot of the instruments here) as a bell-like counterpoint to its brother at regular intervals. Both the guitars and the Dano bass enter at the fifth bar of the first verse.

Recreation by Joshilyn of the two 12-string guitar parts:

 

Hal Blaine’s gig is one all drummers dream about – all he had to do was hit something (his ride cymbal) with a stick over and over again, slowly! The cymbal is the only piece of the drum set in use, keeping time for the duration with a hypnotic quarter note beat, no variation at all from beginning to end. The lack of any subdivisions in Hal’s playing makes the rhythm of the song, like the key, a bit ambiguous; quarter-note and eighth-note triplets appear in the melody and instrumental countermelodies about as frequently as straight eighth and sixteenth notes. 

The task initially handed to percussionist Frankie Capp was similarly sparse. He plays the timpani exactly once in an important cameo role to cement the climax of the piece, echoing the lyric “listen to my heart beat” with a boom, ba-boom, ba-boom pickup at the end of the bridge. At some point into the session, Brian decided to have Frankie play the vibraphone too, coming in at the chorus: single notes on the downbeat of each measure, lonely fifths hanging in the air. The vibes continue through the second verse adding poignant harmonics.  

For the planned instrumental break, the organ, vibes and guitars drop out to leave only basses and cymbal holding down the fort for six bars. All instruments save for the dry string bass were swimming in reverb. Inputs coming into the board would’ve included: 

1 – organ speaker (sent to chamber)
2 – double bass
3 – cymbal (sent to chamber)
4 – timpani (sent to chamber)
5 – vibraphone (sent to chamber)
6 – electric 6-string bass – direct (sent to chamber)
7 – electric 12-string guitar – direct (sent to chamber)
8 – electric 12-string guitar – direct (sent to chamber) 

Recording

Unfortunately, the first generation “Don’t Talk” session reel was stolen decades ago and remains missing from the Beach Boys’ archive as of writing. We therefore can’t detail some important things about the production, such as the take number of the final master or its track configuration. Chuck was probably recording onto two or three tracks here; it’s a safe bet that the percussion and guitars were each bussed together, and it seems possible that any option from the string bass, or Dano bass, or organ might’ve gotten its own space for control in the mix. It could’ve all been mono except for one element, or it could’ve been divided equally between percussion/bass(es)/others. We can only guess, basically. However, mono cassette audio from this missing tape leaked onto bootleg collections in the early 1980s, and from that, we do have a glimpse into the first four-and-a-half minutes of the recorded session. 

Tape rolls on a rehearsal take that’s reaching the end of the instrumental break. Brian stops the band from the control room when he hears a mistake: “No, uh, De Lory? Al, you forgot to come in…” After a break in the recording, Brian slates the first proper take and makes sure Frankie Capp is aware of his role in the arrangement. “Alright, this is ‘Don’t Talk,’ take one. Now, you know, there’s a pickup on the kettle just before the last… You know where it is, Frankie?” 

Though the timpanist claims to have played it in the earlier rehearsal, Brian lets him know he was doing it in the wrong spot. He struggles to explain however where the right spot is in the maze-like sequence of chords he’s created. “It’s the last bar of the bridge, man. I mean the chorus, you know?” 

Frankie asks if it’s the Gb bar, and Al De Lory says it seems like it would be, but Brian gets twisted again thanks to his own slash chords: “It’s that, it’s the C sharp— oh shit, no man. I mean shoot. No, it doesn’t matter what the chord is, it’s just the last bar of the chorus.” It was in fact the last bar of the bridge. Al tells Frankie he played in that spot before, but that Brian said no. 

“Well, I’m trying to decipher which bar that is,” Frankie says. 

“Rather, you know the instrumental break?” Brian tries to explain. “There’s five bars, and in the fifth bar of the instrumental break, it’s the last two beats of that bar.” 

Brian finally corrects himself to say that it’s a six-bar break, and the musicians realize where it all went wrong. Carol can be heard laughing in the booth throughout the exchange while Lyle noodles jazzily on his upright, passing the time. Brian gets Lyle’s attention and Hal starts to count in take one, but Chuck asks him to count it louder, as “they’re gonna have to hear this.” 

“Yeah, there’s a little vocal thing,” Brian confirms, appearing to reference a vocal part that will be overdubbed right at the top of the song. 

“I’ll snap,” Hal concludes, and cues the band in while snapping. Take one is nearly a complete performance, revealing a drier sound than the eventual master with the organ mixed right up front. Other differences include some tasty slides performed by Carol on the 6-string bass, and Frankie’s fill out of the bridge is a wild run of smashy triplets. All goes well until the fadeout, when Carol anticipates the regular chord change at the end of the chorus, not having gotten the memo that only the first two phrases are being repeated here in a loop. 

“Nope, it goes actually through the whole chorus,” Brian confusingly tells the band, either accidentally saying the opposite of what he meant, or revealing a structure different to the one that was used in the eventual master. After Chuck slates take two, the bootleg audio ends. 

More reverb was applied after this first take to both the Dano bass and organ, augmenting the whole production into an even more ethereal swirl. Frankie’s timpani fill was eventually tamed into the heartbeat pattern, and he was also given his simple vibraphone part to play around it (for which he was paid extra). On the master take, the vibes mostly seem to be captured via soft leakage into the nearby timpani mic, allowing their accents to melt into the organ as the mallet instrument’s ring seamlessly overlaps with the Hammond’s tonewheels. The vibraphone’s own dedicated microphone is faded up in the mix at about the fifth bar of the tag. After taking the session 30 minutes into overtime, a backing track was in the bag by 12:30pm and Brian called it a day. 

“God knows where he discovered those chords, those ideas for arranging a certain song,” Tony Asher commented. “I can vividly remember for example the first time he played me his finished track for ‘Don’t Talk (Put Your Head on My Shoulder).’ I was just literally speechless.” 

It’s not completely clear what Brian had in store for the song’s overdubs at this stage. His two most recent studio productions to date, “Caroline, No” and “Hang On to Your Ego,” had both been written for solo lead vocals, which he overdubbed on his own at Western as soon as he’d finished tracking the band. It may be difficult to imagine vocal harmonies on “Don’t Talk” (which seems to almost beg for a solo vocalist), but for reasons we’ll get into soon, it’s entirely possible that Brian was thinking about this at the time of tracking. After all, Chuck does say on the tape, “They’re gonna have to hear this,” and the lead vocal melody doesn’t start on the first beat of the first bar. And there was the instrumental bridge to contend with. 

Oddly, Brian didn’t return to this production for almost another two months, despite having a stunning backing track on tape and presumably a full lyric draft to go with it. His hesitation to further work on the recording may have been related to the words. On February 23, Capitol’s A&R director Karl Engemann included the song on an internally distributed memo listing the titles, writers and publishers of the prospective tunes for the Pet Sounds album – but a March 3 follow-up note indicated that the title “Don’t Talk (Put Your Head on My Shoulder)” would no longer be included as it was being renamed to something else entirely (along with “My Childhood,” “The Old Man and the Baby,” and “Hang On to Your Ego,” which were all changed). 

Whatever Brian’s hang-up with the title or lyrics may have been, he left his problem simmering on the backburner and instead diverted attention to completing the rest of the LP’s songs. A rush of vocal overdubbing work leading up to the Beach Boys’ departure for a short tour on March 11 did not touch “Don’t Talk.” After his bandmates left town, Brian continued to re-record his own vocal parts for the album and mix new versions of several songs. He didn’t draw up the in-progress production of “Don’t Talk” then either, but he did return to its music in an intriguing sidestep. See the page on the song’s unused a cappella piece for more information: https://beachboyssessions.com/pet-sounds/dont-talk-a-cappella-section/

Overdub Session

 With plans presumably made ahead to assemble the Pet Sounds LP at Capitol Records on Monday, April 4, Brian left it until the last possible moment he could to return to “Don’t Talk (Put Your Head on My Shoulder)” – which was going back to its original title and lyric after all (possibly after making tweaks). A session at Western Recorders was booked on the night of Sunday, April 3 for Brian to complete the song on his own, the rest of the band being away on tour. This wasn’t the first time he’d waited until the others were out of town to put the personal finishing touches on a record. It was almost an album wrap party, a final extra special bow on the project to get it over the line. Chuck Britz was unavailable (possibly due to the last minute scheduling), so Brian’s other favorite Western engineer Bowen David ran the session in Studio 3. 

The first order of business was to balance and combine the instrumental tracks from the (now missing) first generation reel, all in mono on track 4 of this new second generation four-track tape. Only one reduction mix was needed, and leader was placed at the head of the take for reference. 

Next, it was time for Brian’s double-tracked lead vocal, which he overdubbed onto tracks 1 and 3. Punch-in artefacts on the tape channels imply that Brian recorded his vocal in three separate stages of continuous singing: first verse and chorus, second verse and chorus, then fade, doubling each section on track 3 as he went. His performance here is an absolute tour de force, deeply emotional yet so carefully measured in its phrasing, swooning with a crystal-clear blend between chest and head voice registers as the melody sits right in the range where he best crosses over. Listen to the shade of voice change on the words “hear so” before coming back in the same breath – an unparalleled usage of the Brian Wilson Whine. A subtle word painting is created in the first verse, where he sings “sighs” across a falling, three-note “sighing” phrase, a musical motif which occurs somewhere in almost all of the Pet Sounds era melodies. An EMT plate was used for reverb, mixed in with the vocal on both tracks. 

At this juncture in the evening, Brian and Bo loaded up another 1/4″ reel and mixed the song to mono, probably just to hear what it sounded like with the voices; the instrumental break was still naked. The final piece of the puzzle would be the addition of a string sextet, overdubbed onto the remaining track 2. Six musicians were called in to begin their part in the session at 10:00pm, consisting of violinists Sid Sharp (concertmaster and leader/contractor), Arnold Belnick, Ralph Schaeffer and Tibor Zelig, violist Norman Botnick, and cellist Joseph Saxon. 

Brian’s comfort with writing for strings waxed incrementally, presumably through exposure and experience. He’d used mini-string sections in his Beach Boys work before – “In the Back of My Mind” and “Summer Means New Love” are earlier examples that have groups of violins and violas. But by 1966, he was finally ready to bring it all together and started to make the fiddles a more fully-realized presence in his productions, also featuring on “Let’s Go Away for Awhile,” “I’m Waiting for the Day,” and “God Only Knows” in varying shapes and sizes. On this occasion, he asked Sid Sharp to bring him four violins, one viola, and one cello. Presumably, Brian just felt as though he understood violins better, because a more traditionally minded string arranger would probably balance the group more with one more viola. Brian’s usual allergy to instruments playing in anything but their lowest register applies here; nobody in the string section is doing the kind of sappy, high shimmer that afflicts so many popular music productions. Instead, the strings stay tight within the confines of their respective staves, moving around a fair bit – certainly more than the droning arrangement we’d hear on “God Only Knows.” One has to respect the accomplishment here, that this 23-year-old kid with just enough musical training to be dangerous was able to voice out one of his most harmonically complex songs and have it not only sound competent, but strikingly beautiful. 

Although certainly these experienced Hollywood string players were not all sticks-in-the-mud, most of them were of a different ilk than the rockers and jazzers that cut Brian’s basic tracks. They would’ve needed explicit, through-composed scores prepared before recording, and as was the case in many of his sessions, the parts were taught to the musicians by way of Brian singing each harmony off the top of his head, which they’d take by ear and commit to paper. “Sometimes, Brian would come in with music or chord charts,” Sid Sharp recalled, “but for the most part, even if he did, he would change those. Most of the time, there would be no music, nothing written. He would bring in blank music paper and sing the parts to me and to Jesse Ehrlich who was my first cellist [note: it was Joe Saxon on this occasion]. We used to write it down and then pass out the parts. He had preconceived ideas of what he wanted. He would sing one string line, then another … We were always very impressed with him because he heard not only the melodic line but he heard the accompaniment, the counterpoint.” 

The arrangement Brian devised for the sextet is a close six-voice harmony, everyone following their own part, beginning in the middle of the second verse and continuing throughout the rest of the piece. Under “We could live forever tonight,” two violins start by duetting downward and the other four players enter a bar later. From there, it’s the cello (Saxon), viola (Botnick), and top violin (Sharp) that take turns to create melodic movement, with the other strings sustaining like Beach Boys ooohs to build block harmony around whichever is wandering off the beaten track. The viola especially is given notable prominence – it occasionally doubles Brian’s vocal line in the same octave, and in the bridge Botnick plays a hummable featured melody that makes sense of the winding chords. As with the music-to-lyric simpatico of “sighs,” this overdub was clearly planned out with careful consideration to the words: at the end of the second chorus, after Brian’s “listen to my heart beat,” the cello breaks from its long held notes to repeat a jagged ba-ba-BOM rhythm that mimics a pulse, and the following “listen, listen, listen” accompanies the strings swelling into the instrumental break, as if Brian is breaking the fourth wall, asking the listener to pay close attention to his music. Answering melodic lines wrap around the vocal in the chorus and fade, as the viola and highest violin trade a chromatic falling phrase back and forth, almost a tinge of country creeping in. When melding with Lyle Ritz’s arco contrabass on the basic track, this really becomes a seven-part string section in practice. 

Since the six players were overdubbed, Bowen had the flexibility to use many microphone inputs on the group, but in all likelihood, there were probably three – two overhead to capture the five da braccio strings, and one to get the cello. But other configurations are possible; U47s, Sony C-37a’s, and RCA 44s or 77s were all viable choices for recording strings in Western Studio 3. 

Describing the setup in these situations, Sharp said, “The rhythm track had been put down, and we would hear it in our headphones. Brian never conducted, per se. He would count off the rhythm, and he would listen in the booth. For the most part, we had headphones on, heard the rhythm, heard what he sung us, made sure it was in time with the rhythm track. If it wasn’t right, he would tell us, and we would do it again. If somebody misplayed something, he would say, ‘That isn’t what I said. This is what I want.’ We found him to be extremely musical, very bright, and he knew what he wanted. He remembered everything that he sang to us.” 

The whole section was instructed to play with heavy vibrato in their bowing throughout. A frequent visitor to these sessions, Danny Hutton, remembered the unique way Brian would give this direction to the musicians: “He went in there trying to get emotion out of them. And I think a lot of them were shocked, because they were just used to playing the notes correctly, and he’d go in and say ‘No, I want you to lean on the note more. Make it sound like crying.’” And, you know what, it does sound like crying. 

Sculpting a particular feeling and emphasis to the string parts was paramount to what Brian was after in those days, just as much as configuring the score itself. As co-writer Tony Asher noted, “I liked it rhythmically as well as almost anything else. I mean, the notes are wonderful, the voicings are just fabulous, but he has those moving sort of counter lines – he really made them play behind the beat. There’s sort of a triplet feel to the whole thing, it’s really laid back, and that kind of coaxes all of the emotion out of it.” 

The strings were overdubbed in one continuous take. The full track (sans vocal) was played over headphones for the musicians, even though they wouldn’t need to come in until the second verse, likely so they could count their measures properly without needing to become intensely familiar with the song. At the end of the master, Brian says over the talkback, “Thank you, I think we’ve got it.” All of the fiddle men left within the standard three-hour timeframe before 1:00am. 

Finally, it was time to re-dub the song to mono, following on from the first mixdown take attempted earlier in the night. After an uncounted false start, takes 2 and 3 were both complete mixes with the strings now in place – a little EQ, a little extra reverb, not much to do except balance the tracks and add a fade. Take 2 (lasting 2:45) was chosen as the master mix and leadered on the tape reel. Shortly after, Brian played the completed work for Tony, who’d had no forewarning of what was going to be done with the final sweetening. “The first time I heard that, I fell down,” he remembered. “I mean, I just said, ‘Oh my God!’ And I assumed he had hired some great string writer to come in and do that little section. And he said, ‘No, I wrote it myself.’ I thought, shit, how’d he do that?” 

The following day, Brian assembled the master tape for Pet Sounds at Capitol, and on April 5, the album’s initial draft was mastered, with “Don’t Talk (Put Your Head on My Shoulder)” sequenced as the fourth track. It is the first song to appear on the LP with no contributions at all from the other Beach Boys, a Brian Wilson solo track in all but name. Over the next couple of weeks, he re-recorded and remixed other songs for the album before compiling it again on April 17, but “Don’t Talk” did not undergo further changes. 

 

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Sources

Based on original research by John Brode, Will Crerar, Joshilyn Hoisington and Craig Slowinski.

Tapes and associated documentation from Brother Records, Capitol Records, and private collection.

AFM Local 47 Contracts 105852, 105894.

Nick Kent, “Brian Wilson: The Last Beach Movie Part 1,” New Musical Express, June 21, 1975. 

Brian Wilson, Tony Asher, Carol Kaye, Sid Sharp – interviews conducted by David Leaf, appearing in “The Making of Pet Sounds,” The Pet Sounds Sessions, Capitol Records, 1997. 

Tony Asher interviewed by Charles L. Granata, 2003, featured in Discografitti Podcast, 2025. 

Andrew Doe, www.bellagio10452.com.

Ian Rusten, www.beachboysgigs.com.