Here Today

(Brian Wilson – TONY ASHER)

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

Producer: Brian Wilson
Engineers: Bruce Botnick [Sunset Sound] / Chuck Britz [Western] / Bill Brittan, Ralph Valentin, Pete Romano [Columbia]

Personnel:
     (voices)
Mike Love – lead vocals
Brian Wilson – backing vocals
Carl Wilson – backing vocals
Dennis Wilson – backing vocals
Al Jardine – backing vocals
Bruce Johnston – backing vocals
     (instrumentation)
Don Randi – tack upright piano (detuned)
Larry Knechtel – electric organ [Hammond B-3]
Mike Deasy – acoustic guitar
Al Casey – electric 12-string guitar [Guild]
Ray Pohlman – electric 6-string bass [Fender VI]
Lyle Ritz – double bass
Nick Martinis – drums
Frank Capp – concert bass drum, tambourine
Jay Migliori – tenor saxophone
Jack Nimitz – tenor saxophone
Gail Martin – trombone
Ernie Tack – trombone
Brian Wilson & Tony Asher – tack upright piano (w/taped strings) [Wegman Cabinet Grand]

Recorded to 1/2″ 4-track and 1″ 8-track (4 to 4 to 8):
March 11, 1966 (7:00pm-10:30pm) / Sunset Sound Recorders – Studio 1 (track)
Likely March 12, 1966 / Western Recorders – Studio 3 (tack piano, transfer)
Circa March 13 to 22, 1966 / Brian Wilson’s house, Laurel Way (guide vocals)
March 23, 1966 / Columbia Recording Studios – Studio A (transfer, vocals)
March 25, 1966 / Columbia Recording Studios – Studio A (vocals)
Circa April 13 to 16, 1966 / Columbia Recording Studios – Studio A (vocals)

Mixed to 1/4″ mono:
March 25, 1966 / Columbia Recording Studios – Studio A (Mix 1)
Circa April 13 to 16, 1966 / Columbia Recording Studios – Studio A (Mix 2 – Master)

Initial Release:
1966 Mono Mix 2 – Pet Sounds LP (Capitol Records, 1966)
1996 Stereo Mix – The Pet Sounds Sessions (Capitol Records, 1997)
1996 Alternate Mono Mix – The Pet Sounds Sessions (Capitol Records, 1997)

Vocal Guide
– lead: Mike
– verse backing 1st ‘oooh’: Brian>Bruce>Al>Carl
– verse backing 2nd ‘oooh’: Bruce>Carl
– verse backing 3rd ‘oooh’: Bruce>Carl>Brian>Al
– chorus backing: Brian>Bruce>Carl>Dennis

 

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Songwriting

“Tony Asher worked for an advertising agency in Beverly Hills and someone told me he was real good with words. I love to create music, but two people are better than one. A collaborator opens your heart up, allows you to bring out of you something that you couldn’t bring out yourself. A collaboration is a marriage and lyrics and melody are a marriage. I think ‘Here Today’ was the first song Tony and I wrote together.”

Let’s rewind to important happenings in late January 1966. Brian Wilson began a songwriting partnership with Tony Asher by setting him a test: Tony was supplied an existing backing track – “My Childhood” – and an assignment to write a worthy lyric on a new theme they’d discussed together. The end result, “You Still Believe in Me,” confirmed Brian’s intuition about Tony’s lyricism, and the two agreed to start work on some fresh from the soil collaborations.

If Brian is to be believed (and we have no reason to doubt him in this particular case), the next time they met up at the house and sat down together at the Chickering grand piano, the result of their first joint writing session was the basic material for the song that became “Here Today.”

It’s only natural that a breakup song came out first; the topic of old romances and their endings had been at the epicentre of Brian and Tony’s introductory talks. But they didn’t set out to write a typical breakup song – this was a warning song, a cautionary presage to all the pain and sleepless nights that might transpire if one were to commit the dangerous act of falling in love.

Brian composed a long, 20-bar verse in three discrete segments: we’ll call these the “A” and “B” sections of the verse, and the pre-chorus or “C” respectively. The first eight bars (“A”) open with a riff-like melody that sits above alternating ii and I chords; a rare Wilson move to start minor, sowing some angst into Tony’s otherwise innocent lead-in.

It starts with just a little glance now
Right away you’re thinkin’ ‘bout romance now
You know you ought to take it slower
But you just can’t wait to get to know her

The next eight bars (“B”) ramp up the drama by ramping up the pace of the changes – in bar nine, every beat ushers in a new chord! Brian dips into his neurotic circus bag for a bass part and the melody lurches up into a higher register in tandem with the energy shift. Over two rounds of that little musical passage Tony lays out both sides of the coin:

A brand new love affair is such a beautiful thing
If you’re not careful, think about the pain it can bring

Finally, at measure 15 (“C”), the narrator tumbles into a despairing list of hurts and calamities that happen during an entanglement, tension building up and up to a boiling point by a stepwise ascent from Brian’s left hand:

It makes your heart feel sad
It makes you feel so bad
It makes your days go wrong
It makes your nights seem long

At the apex, the chorus (“D”) smacks us in the face, heavy: a descending bass figure dooms along below an A to D to Dm vamp in the right hand, creating a torrent of shape-shifting harmony, while the moral drifts ephemerally across broken melodic phrases that don’t quite synchronize to the music: You’ve got to keep in mind love is here today and it’s gone tomorrow. Straightforward as a sentence, but when sung, the effect is of a present being snatched away by contradiction almost as soon as it’s arrived – keep in mind love is here… today and it’s gone… tomorrow – very yin and yang, totally of a piece with the theme. Again, Tony Asher was quite good at this. Unusually, the chorus is a seven-bar section, ending on two measures of E7 outlined by a deep piano riff to turn us around into the verse.

The song had no definite title at the time of conception. Looking at the lyric, it isn’t all that obvious what the title should be. In 1975, speaking to NME’s Nick Kent, Tony recalled this tune as one to which he contributed most of the lyrics and some amount of the melody. We’re making a calculated assumption that the initial writing session resulted in at least two verses of lyrics as well as the chorus, which would’ve been all the raw material Brian needed to start crafting an instrumental arrangement and take it into the studio.

However, not everything was gelling from the start. According to Tony, “It was, as I recall, a song that I wrote quite a lot to, much of which we didn’t use. It was sort of a struggle before we got a lyric that Brian was happy with, that Brian and I were both happy with.” A later demo vocal in which Brian repeats the first verse would appear to corroborate a hurdle beyond that point; early, rejected drafts for the second verse that Tony alludes to have unfortunately been lost to time.

As the writing branched elsewhere and Pet Sounds grew, “Here Today” was plonked on the backburner to deal with another day. A February 23 Capitol memo detailing titles and publishing information for the album didn’t include this one on the core ten-song list, but a note below did appear to imply its existence: “There will be two more selections to be added to the album. One will be an instrumental written by Brian Wilson, the title yet undecided, and then one other tune for the whole group to work on which also hasn’t been named yet.” Circumstance suggests that those two selections were the yet-untitled “Pet Sounds” and “Here Today.”

It wasn’t until Saturday, March 11, the day the other Beach Boys flew to Cleveland for a short East Coast tour, that Brian decided he was finally ready to cut the last basic track for the album… a track that he hadn’t really finished composing or structuring.

Now, context: previous activity on March 10 involved tracking “God Only Knows” at four in the morning, sleeping or perhaps not sleeping, then grinding through the afternoon/night on tape transfers and group vocals for that and several other Pet Sounds songs. So Brian felt JUICED. He was riding a cosmic high of the sort usually reserved for aliens and angels. In the eye of that storm, bringing “Here Today” to the studio reads as him harnessing the momentum to force a troublesome composition to completion, like a form of procrastinator exposure therapy. The guy recognized that his best stuff came out under pressure.

So on March 11 itself, Brian called upon his reliable crew of musicians and attempted to reserve a session for that same evening. There was only one problem with that idea: at such short notice, usual haunt Western Recorders was booked out!

Sunset Sound

Setup

Enter Sunset Sound Recorders, a famed alternative one mile west on the same road at 6650 Sunset Boulevard. The full history of the place is not necessary to go through here, but the studio is notable for being a kind of halfway house between the indie pluck of Gold Star and the corporate lab of Capitol. Fiercely protective of his project, but buttressed by sweet sweet Disney coin, legendary Sunset owner Tutti Camarata built and ran one of the great studio complexes of all time.

Converted from an old car mechanic’s garage, Sunset’s main studio had a notable slope to the floor, following the drainage lines left from the days of needing to clear our car fluids. Much like Western Studio 3, Sunset Studio 1 was a modest room in the Goldilocks zone for rock ‘n’ roll, only marginally wider and longer (20×40) with a similarly low ceiling. Left a bit more naturally untreated than Western, and having notably different dimensions to Gold Star, it doesn’t take Smithsonian Ears to hear Sunset’s signature room sound on tracks that are unaffected by artificial reverb.

In some ways, Sunset’s control room situation was the most severe, stark setup in town. The console surface was mercilessly stripped of almost every possible control option, and anything you wanted to do with the signal beyond amplifying it and bussing it was offloaded to a meagre outboard rack. Unlike Western’s sophisticated integrated console, Sunset’s board didn’t have individual EQ options on each input. If that level of adjustment was desired, they’d have to patch in a rack unit; without so doing, an engineer would have had only three EQ units to work with, which adjusted entire buss feeds. The somewhat rare and underknown Fairchild 664 EQs were sort of artlessly attached to the control surface, and offered low and high shelf boost/cut options, with the bass frequency set (at 100hz or so) and an adjustable sweep of high frequencies from 4-15khz. That’s it!

The Beach Boys had worked at Sunset Sound once before in June 1964, when they sang “The Monkey’s Uncle” with Annette Funicello for the film of the same name. That one was officially a Tutti Camarata production. Brian had otherwise not cut a Beach Boys track there himself. Luckily, Bruce Botnick, by that point the studio’s lead recording engineer, quickly took to Brian and his way of working, having also run the board on the monkey song a year and a half prior.

“Steve Douglas was in the A&R department at Capitol,” remembered Botnick, “and the Beach Boys needed to record, and they couldn’t get into Western, so Steve suggested they come over to Sunset Sound. The minute I heard that I was working with Brian I was impressed, because I was really taken with their sound. The structure of the harmony, and how modern it was in their approach. I immediately liked it.”

Let’s get into the musical arrangement. What we have here sounds like a cerebral rock ‘n’ roll march tinged with R&B and carnival delirium. It’s dark, it’s intimate, it’s massive, it’s delicate one moment and smashy the next. A full roadshow of dynamic peaks and valleys are commanded by the band. Key ideas return from “Good Vibrations” and “I Know There’s an Answer,” but “Here Today” does largely stand as an individual beast in the Beach Boys canon.

Brian enlisted 12 musicians: two keyboardists (Don Randi and Larry Knechtel), two guitarists (Al Casey and Mike Deasy), electric and upright bass (Ray Pohlman and Lyle Ritz), two drummer/percussionists (Frankie Capp and Nick Martinis), two saxes (Jay Migliori and Jack Nimitz), and two trombones (Gail Martin and Ernie Tack). The theme is pairs. You may notice new names, and also the lack of some key familiar faces; the last minute nature of this session likely meant that some of Brian’s preferred instrumentalists were busy at other sessions.

The keyboards here are a dynamic duo of which Brian had become quite fond: tack piano combined with organ. As on “I Know There’s an Answer,” the organ’s manuals are set almost to the same stop settings, then the hands alternate between them in exactly the same voicing, which creates a sort of pulsation effect. Larry Knechtel had played that way on “Answer,” so Brian placed him at the organ again, and put Don on the upright piano – which is not only prepared with tacks, it’s also intentionally detuned! Bruce Botnick himself had gotten it tuned a very specific way to evoke an old honky tonk sound: “I had the piano tuner make sure it was perfectly in tune, and then de-tuned the left string down one cent and the right string up one cent and that became really wiry. So [Brian] began using that piano, renting it like crazy. After a while the piano was just kind of a wreck from being moved around so much, but he loved the sound of it.”

Brian fell in love with the sound of Sunset’s sonically multicolored tack piano at this session, and may have started thinking about making changes to his own piano at home… but we’ll revisit that in 1967. Don’s part in the verses is a right hand only deal, rhythm chords locked together with Larry’s organ. In the choruses, Don plays the menacing, downward walking bass figure with both hands in octaves, ending with the turnaround riff that leads back into the verse. The chorus melody is actually a reharmonized version of what the basses do in the verse sections!

1960s Los Angeles studio guitarists were almost all jazz people at heart. To them, a proper acoustic guitar is a classic jazz archtop, like a Gibson L series. So it’s almost jarring to hear a flat top western-style acoustic guitar on this track, played by avowed rocker Mike Deasy, who was sitting in on his first session for Brian Wilson. He glues together with Al Casey’s electric 12-string Guild (either a Starfire XII or a custom job) to provide the churning chords in the choruses, a simple strumming of A-A-D-Dm then A-A-D-D, filling the space left by an absence of piano chords; the two guitarists are both tacet during the verses. Again, somewhat unusually, and perhaps because of Bruce Botnick’s influence, Casey’s 12-string is not direct into the console – it’s out in the room being amplified, making this the only Pet Sounds track that features absolutely no directly recorded instrumentation.

“I wanted to present the idea of a bass guitar playing about an octave higher, showcased as the principal instrument in the track,” Brian said in 2008. Indeed, listening to the track alone, the high six-string bass part written for the verse could pass for the melody, and it would be a strong one! Ray Pohlman wouldn’t have known it at the time, but he was actually playing a harmony to the future vocal. The sparse verse intro of block chord keyboard(s) and a clicky, melodic bass used as a tenor voice is a page right out of the “Good Vibrations” playbook. Starting at the fifth bar of the verse, Lyle Ritz supports the part an octave down on string bass. The “B” verse section has both play in the same lower octave, but the electric bass jumps back up for the pre-chorus. Ray’s part climbs especially high here, as he and Lyle rise up to a climax before Lyle fills back down to low A. Ray then sits out during the chorus, leaving Lyle alone to provide the deep bass tumble and join the piano in the turnaround riff.

This track is a wonderful example of Brian’s continuing project of deconstructing the drum set. Nick Martinis, a jazzing newcomer to the world of Beach Boys, lugged his whole setup into the room, likely expecting to play a more conventional rock part. But Brian, being Brian, prohibited him from touching his cymbals and had him play only the drums of the kit (kick, snare, and two toms) as if he were manning quad toms in a marching band: a specific pattern of sixteenth note fills (“diddle-its” as Brian calls them on tape) are applied in the second half of “A,” four-on-the-floor quarter notes are played in “B,” and another distinct pattern of fills comes up in the chorus. Frankie Capp is meanwhile stationed at a big concert bass drum and holding a tambourine in the same hand as his mallet, so each wallop of the drum comes with added jingle. The effect of the configuration is something almost like a drumline at a parade, a style dabbled with on the single version of “Be True to Your School.”

Brian hired two saxophonists and two trombone players for the session, and their work is similarly unlike other Pet Sounds tracks in a lot of ways. The tenor saxes, in unison, play a countermelody rather briefly in “B,” in a sort of throwback rock riff that maintains a level of sophistication. There are no brasswind harmony pads here. The trombones are likewise deployed in unison, sustaining low, evil notes in the second half of “A” (also where the drums and upright bass enter), and a double to Don’s descending piano part, where they stand out as the featured instrument, sliding down at the very end to a low, low B. “The trombones gave it that masculine touch,” reasoned Brian.

There remains some question of whether these trombones were bass trombones or tenor trombones.  Here’s a brief trombone lesson that you didn’t know you wanted: In the old days, trombones were like other instruments in that there were different sizes. The classic orchestral trombone trio was conceptualized as an alto trombone in Eb or F, a tenor trombone in Bb, and a bass trombone in G or F or Eb.  The different types of trombones were actually pitched in different keys, like the saxes, say. But as technology got better and players got more and more virtuosic, trombone players came to a realization that the alto and bass trombones were no longer serving them. All of the notes notated for alto trombone were now quite easily playable on tenor trombones, so why have a separate instrument? (Never mind that they sound different… laziness has always been a key driver in the development of instruments.) Likewise, trombonists could get pretty much as low as they wanted on the tenor trombone, too, using pedal tones and improved technique. The issue then was not the lowness of the notes, but the fact that using pedal tones leaves some notes that a trombonist is not able to play, not because they are low, but because there is a gap. To fix this, trombonists installed valves on their instruments, like trumpeters and hornists had done, to allow different slide positions to now access these notes in the gaps. But! – you may scream – there are bass trombones in orchestras now, I see them all the time. Yes! But the difference between tenor and bass trombones now is not the range they can play – it’s the weight of the notes. Over time, trombonists who tended toward playing lower parts experimented with making the tubing of the instrument bigger and bigger, allowing more volume of air, and allowing for acoustical phenomenon that add rich low overtones to the tone.

So all that is to say – there is nothing about the trombone line in “Here Today” that would require tenor trombones or bass trombones favored over the other. We know that Brian had a bass trombone present on “Trombone Dixie,” and certainly, the identity of the trombones on “Here Today” is trombone as bass instrument. So, it’s a great possibility they were bass trombones. Does it matter? Not especially!

Bruce Botnick has stated that he liked to use really high quality microphones on everything. This is backed up by a precious, precious, lone photo of a mid-1960s tracking session at Sunset, showing this preference in practice. The guitar amps are lined up with Neuman U47s on most, Sony C37-As on some – the same Sony mics on the drums. First, this shows how prosperous Sunset Sound was. Gold Star was cranking out hit records day after day, but could not afford that many excellent imported microphones. It’s a luxury. And second, Botnick’s use of high-end condensers on everything would also make a difference to the sound of the track. It’d be very, very subtle because differences in microphones are somewhat overstated, but the additive effect is undeniable. There would be more bleed, and more high-end frequencies. Judge for yourself if you can hear it.

Both keyboard instruments and both guitar amplifiers received their own dedicated microphones, as did Ray, Lyle, and Frankie. Both saxophonists likely played into one mic, as did both trombonists. It’s possible that Nick’s drum kit had two overhead mics to capture all the tom-heavy playing equally, as well as a dedicated kick drum mic, but this is uncertain; there could just as well have been one or two microphones on the kit. Thus, here is our speculative list of 12 inputs coming into the board (which allowed for 14 simultaneous inputs):

1 – tack upright piano
2 – organ speaker
3 – acoustic guitar
4 – electric 12-string guitar amplifier
5 – electric 6-string bass amplifier
6 – double bass
7 – saxophones
8 – trombones
9 – concert bass drum, tambourine
10 – drums (kick)
11 – drums (overhead 1)
12 – drums (overhead 2)

The wonderful thing about unusual scenarios is what they teach us about the usual scenarios. Bruce Botnick brought a very different approach to the rest of Pet Sounds when it came to mapping inputs and tracks for this number, and that really does contribute to a different sound than if this had been recorded at Western. Keyboards, guitars and basses all went to track 1, those being the soupy elements Brian wanted to lock in and blend live. The two percussionists were captured dryly, and isolated quite well from the rest of the band on track 2. Like Chuck and Larry would’ve, Bruce afforded the horns their own space on track 3, but unlike the usual practice of those other two, he brought the primary reverb return for everything else onto track 3 as well – and yet, secondary reverb is still present on track 1, giving us a cavernous double-dose from the combination of chamber and EMT plate. Track 4 was left open for a potential overdub, but also because Sunset’s board could only send three unique outputs to the tape machine live – in this case an Ampex 300, modified by Bruce to utilize four-track recording and playback heads.

Recording

Before we get into the session proper, we should talk about the structure of this yet untitled, unfinished song that Brian was about to record. It would start right off with a verse, then a chorus, then a second verse, then a second chorus… and that was all Brian had by the time he and Botnick started recording. There was probably a general idea that the song would go into an instrumental break afterwards, but Brian hadn’t worked out how that break would go, or what would come next. Figuring it all out in the studio would give him the benefit of trying out different ideas with the musicians and being able to hear them immediately, and the pressure of time would motivate him to make his mind up. Besides, it had worked out okay with “God Only Knows” two nights earlier! So, generally, the band all had it written out on their charts that they’d be playing sections A, B, C, D, repeated ad infinitum. Brian promised them that once they got a good take of the opening verses and choruses, they could take a quick break while he wrote the rest of the song.

“‘I Don’t Have a Title,’ take one,” Bruce Botnick slates as soon as the recording begins. Interestingly, Lyle Ritz has been appointed the task of counting in each take at this session, a role typically reserved for the drummer. This is likely due to the fact that both Nick and Frankie seem semi-isolated from the rest of the group, and Lyle was standing among Ray and the two keyboardists, the only musicians that play from the top. Ray makes a mistake right off the bat and Brian asks for “one more please.” Realizing that the piano is mixed far too loud in relation to the organ, he turns it down during take 2, then stops the take. “One more please,” he says again. “Here we go, three.”

Take 3 gets as far as halfway through the second verse, showing the band in fine form, although there are a few issues. The trombones accidentally enter at the top of the second verse instead of the fifth bar, and Nick and Frank have some trouble remembering their rhythms; Nick clicks his sticks together a few times by accident (having lots of wide movement baked into his part) and Frank forgets to switch to quarter notes at measure 9. Brian stops the take: “We’re having a little- the drum thing seems to be a little inconsistent in those ‘diddle-it diddle-it diddleit dit’… Just a second, I gotta come out there.” Bruce stops the tape while Brian goes out to rehearse the drummers.

When the tape resumes, Brian slates take 4 and asks the trombonists to “move in” when they slide down to their low B note at the end of the choruses, since they lose volume as the note gets lower and they near the end of their breath. “Just blow your guts out,” Brian instructs, chuckling to himself. The drum pattern here is a little bit more refined with less action, but now Nick makes the mistake of forgetting to play only quarter notes at bar 9. Frankie’s part has also been changed up a little; he had previously been playing in the pre-choruses, which are now stripped back to just organ, piano, and basses. Possibly at his own suggestion, Ray adds a stylish little fall at the end of the pre-chorus: triplets tumble down his bass string in anticipation of the chorus, sounding like Dick Dale playing in slow motion. Something goes wrong with the trombones just before their low B, and Brian and Bruce can be heard discussing this when the talkback comes on. “Could we do take five please? Thank you,” Brian asks.

But first, he requests to hear Al Casey playing the chorus on his own. Brian decides he doesn’t like the constant eighth note strumming and calls for a new broken rhythm pattern. Both guitarists demonstrate the new rhythm and Brian likes it: “Fine, okay, let’s go.” Then to Bruce: “Can you turn Al down a little bit?”

“I can turn down if you want me to,” Al offers.

“No, it’s fine, we got you,” Brian responds. “Are we ‘setty’?” he asks, accidentally combining “set” and “ready.” “Set-wet-wet,” he teases himself. Take 5 is a false start caused by Ray not playing, and Frankie makes the same mistake in take 6 of forgetting his quarter notes at bar 9. A saxophonist plays a wrong note, but mistakes aside, the feel is really coming together. Brian interrupts the take to make a request to Nick: “Snare should be off until ‘B,’ you know? Flick it on just before ‘B,’ you know?” For those who don’t know, turning off a snare drum essentially turns it into another tom drum, removing the snappy highs that the snares on the bottom drum head create, and giving it a more defined pitch. This is yet another move away from traditional rock and roll drumming; snare drums turned off are more common in a jazz or concert band context.

Take 7 is the first to make it all the way through both verses and choruses. Nick sneakily turns his snare on late just a few bars into “B” while simultaneously playing quarter notes, but Brian is none the wiser. The band make no discernible mistakes, and the feel is great, but Brian stops them and calls for another attempt anyways: “I wanna do one more, and we’ll take our thing, okay? Let’s do take eight, and we’ll take our break. You hip?” A saxophonist squeaks in response. “Hey, that’s cool. Take eight! Ocho.”

But take 8 is stopped due to an unknown technical error. “Take nine please, I’m sorry, here we go.” Take 9 stops when Lyle continues clapping into the song while counting it off by mistake. “Hey wow, that clapping thing was really…” Brian interrupts.

“He wants a double,” someone jokes. “Atta boy, Lyle!”

Take 10 gets off nicely, but Brian changes his mind about the rhythm pattern Frankie plays in “A,” and instructs him on a new part during a break in recording, a “bom-bom! Bom-bom!” part that plays off the vocal melody a little better. “Dieciocho. Uh, uno,” Brian slates, forgetting the Spanish word for 11. “That’d be ‘once,’ wouldn’t it?” he corrects himself. Take 11, the second complete performance of the opening verses and choruses, becomes the one, despite a little bit of sloppiness between Nick and Frankie. But there’s really no necessity for the drumming to be frame-perfect here; the rhythmically imperfect rhythms actually help to drive the energy of the overall performance. “Fine, take your break, and I’ll see you at twenty-five after nine,” Brian tells the band as soon as they play into a third verse.

In that ensuing break, Brian hurried over to the piano and brainstormed an instrumental bridge right there and then. Ultimately, he worked out a semi-new section to the same chord sequence and structure as the verse, spotlighting the track arrangement without necessarily featuring any one instrument as a soloist. The stop-time hits behind the bass harmonica solo in “Answer” had been effective, and “Here Today” used a similar tempo and soundscape, so why not? DUN. DUN DUN. DUN. DUN DUN. Piano, organ, and acoustic guitar would play those hits together, with an answering rhythm of chords played by Mike Deasy on the acoustic, and Ray and Lyle playing underneath to keep time. Ray’s part was expanded into a barrage of palm-muted sixteenth notes, almost a throwback to the days of the low surfy rhythm guitar that had graced so many of Brian’s earliest arrangements! But this was 1966, so the part would be underscoring each chord with dominant sevenths instead of root notes, putting everything into the third inversion. There had to be a twist!

For the “B” section, Brian already had a killer bass line that could work as its own melody, so the basses and keyboards could just play that in unison while the drums go into double time: Frankie playing the downbeats and Nick playing the upbeats, like a true marching section. The combination of tack piano, organ, and basses playing that descending, chromatic melody in unison against the double time briefly gives the song an “evil carnival” vibe. In a good way!

Later evidence suggests that Brian may have originally intended for vocals to feature over this final pre-chorus, but the existing track arrangement there does work just fine on its own; Ray’s climbing bass line is even more intense and foreboding when it’s divorced from the vocal melody it once supported. In the final bar, instead of the falling triplets, Brian opted to have Ray bring back those crazy sixteenth notes, hammering his left finger on and off of the fret.

This instrumental bridge would naturally lead back into a third chorus. Brian made a slight change here to the turnaround riff heard in the final bars, revising the melody ever so subtly to keep the track dynamic. Without figuring out what would come after these new sections, Brian called everyone back to their instruments to teach them their new parts and do some group rehearsing before trying for takes. At this point, the saxophonists may have been sent home early as they no longer had anything to play, although they were paid for the full session, including a little overtime.

With everyone back in place and ready to try this new section (marked as “letter C” on everyone’s papers), Bruce Botnick hit record on the tape machine. “Take one, ‘letter C,'” he slates, while Brian gives the band their tempo.

“Take one for ‘letter C,'” Brian repeats.

Lyle claps out the rhythm and asks if they can hear the clapping in the booth. “Yeah, I can hear it,” Bruce says, “but when the take’s going, I won’t hear it, believe me.”

“Go ahead and count,” Brian tells him. Take 1 falls apart just a few bars in, as Ray’s sixteenth notes and Mike’s acoustic guitar stabs are not rhythmically in sync. An interesting engineering change occurred during the break: the reverb return on the horn track is now slightly delayed from the main signal. It’s unclear whether this was an intentional choice or an artefact accidentally introduced in the signal path. Whatever the case, it helps to make this second half of this song feel bigger than the first.

Bruce slates take 2, but Brian stops it halfway through “A” as he no longer likes the response parts he had given Mike Deasy: “Forget that on the guitar, just play everybody together. One more. Take three please!” He stops take 3 in the same spot to make another change to the arrangement. “Alright there, Frankie, you’ll start quarter notes on the fifth beat.” He means the fifth measure. Take 4 validates those arrangement changes, as the band are able to play much better without the additional guitar stabs, and the quarter notes make the section that much more dynamic. During “B,” Nick’s upbeats are played on the snare and floor tom, and Ray has now been instructed to play in the chorus, doubling Lyle in the same octave. Following the chorus, Ray plays his verse part, Mike plays the stabs in “C,” and everyone else drops out; clearly, no one had any direction on what to do next. “Alright, could we go to the top of ‘C’ again?” Brian asks, but people want to know what comes next!

“Do we go back to ‘C’ all the time now?” Frankie asks.

“I haven’t finished it yet,” Brian confesses. “Just do as much- we’ll probably go to that-” he starts singing the turnaround riff, but what he wants to come after it is unclear. Unfortunately, the recorded session outtakes pause here for a moment, as they were later taped over.

Several minutes of erased tape later, our recorded document of the session resumes as the band near the chorus of pickup take 10. Both Don and Ray make mistakes going into the turnaround riff. Interestingly, it’s apparent that at this stage, the structure involves a third verse coming after this third chorus. “What happened, Don?” Brian asks.

“I start a bar early every time!” Frankie chastises himself. A general sense of confusion floats around the room regarding the structure; Brian may have changed things around a couple times between takes 5 and 10. Bruce stops the tape, then starts it again a couple times when he thinks Brian is ready to slate another take. But changes are being made to the arrangement and structure, and a few beginnings of these instructions are briefly captured: “Okay, now here’s somethin’ else.” “Trombones, are you ready for that?” Context clues tell us that this is when Brian resolved to use a repeat of the chorus as a fadeout, and removed the third verse altogether. Structure-wise, the song was finally complete.

Brian slates take 11, but Ray (who’s taken over count-in duties from Lyle) gets twisted on his sixteenths. “One more, huh? Hit it a little harder, guitar,” Brian says before take 12. People aren’t quite together, so Brian stops it. “One more please, thirteen.” Take 13 is strong, nearly perfect outside of some unconfident playing in Ray’s fill before the chorus. But it really falls apart when the band get to the repeating chorus fade, which had just been introduced. Drums, trombones, organ, and both guitars all falter at their entrances; the musicians are still used to the verse being there instead. “We weren’t ready for it. Okay, let’s be ready this time. Let’s go, ‘letter C,’ fourteen, please.”

Brian stops the take at measure 5 when Frankie doesn’t come in with his marching downbeats: “Frankie, you’re quarter notes there. Quarter notes. Let’s go, fifteen for ‘C’ please.” Ray causes a brief false start, and immediately counts in the next take. Take 16 is strong, really strong, and hardly anyone makes any discernible mistakes; only Frankie falters at the top of each chorus, not quite understanding yet that it’s to be looped. Brian knows the feel can be just a little bit better. “I wanna do one more for ‘C’ please. Could be a little tighter on ‘B’ [the chorus], you know what I mean? It’s just… someone should, like… get into it. Frankie, you should-”

“I didn’t go back to ‘B’ every time. I didn’t, I was goin’ on,” he begins to explain.

“Get something going visually so we could get a little tighter,” Brian asks of him. “Seventeen for ‘C’ please, here we go.” Takes 17 and 18 are false starts, both essentially caused by Ray, who’s got a very difficult part to play! Take 19 goes semi-well, but the feel is not quite there. Nick even sneaks in a few light cymbal hits at the top of the pre-chorus and in between choruses. Perhaps because of his adding extra parts, he and Frankie start to fall apart from each other rhythmically as the take goes on. “One more! We gotta do another one. Let me hear the guitars and the-” Brian starts to ask, cut off by Bruce stopping the tape.

“Twenty for ‘C,'” Bruce slates when the tape resumes. Ray counts it out, and the feel is just perfect all the way through. After four-and-a-half choruses, Brian presses down the talkback to tell the musicians he’s satisfied: “Thanks, I think we got it.”

The session had officially gone over the three-hour mark, so everyone got paid for a little overtime. Brian and Bruce edited pickup take 20 onto the master take 11 and leadered it, thankfully preserving all the various outtakes on the reel by simply swapping one piece of tape for another, rather than throwing anything away.

Curiously, Brian crossed out the handwritten “I DON’T HAVE A TITLE” notation on the AFM contract and wrote in a new title he must have dreamed up toward the end of the session: “Pet Sounds.” This was obviously the album’s title, something that had been conceived of over a month prior. But with two currently untitled tracks (this song and the instrumental previously titled “Run, James, Run”), it had yet to be applied to one of the album’s songs. The plan couldn’t have lasted very long, as the following day at Western Recorders, “Pet Sounds” was written down as the title of the aforementioned instrumental piece instead.

Western

Not long after the tracking session, Brian found himself at Western Recorders with the untitled tape in hand. We can probably rule this out happening on the same night, because trouble getting into Western in the first place is what prompted the whole Sunset Sound resettlement. Brian and Tony Asher did however drop into Chuck’s abode the following evening, Sunday, March 12, for a few hours of housekeeping that involved fixing up “You Still Believe in Me” and compiling master mixes; a multitude of factors point to this being the date of some additional work on “Here Today” too.

First, wishing to beef up the sound of the chorus, Brian added an overdub onto the open track 4 using Western’s tacked and non-detuned (or… tuned) Wegman upright piano. This tack piano also appears to have been dampened via tape on the strings – definitely on the lower end, and to some lesser degree the higher register is affected. The great thing about tape muting a piano is that you have total control over which notes you want to clam up, and by how much. A total staccato job like “God Only Knows” would call for a few strips of making tape to clip off the sustain to such a degree, so in this instance, it may be that Brian went all the way on the bass strings but only taped the top end once. It’s a more fluid effect than on or off!

The desired part consisted of rhythm chords to the right and a reinforcement to Don Randi’s moving bass part to the left, doubling his low octave and introducing an even lower one beneath. That’s a tricky line with a lot of motion and long physical jumps, hard to play in two octaves at once even if you have Brian Wilson’s ginormous digits. So, like Don, he played it with two hands, turning this into a three-handed operation and necessitating that Tony play the right hand chords. It’s a subtle addition, something that can just barely be made out on its own in the final mix, but it does wonders to fill out the sound and make this production even bigger. Tony forgets to play or starts late a few times in the fade, but it isn’t noticeable at all under the other parts.

Next, Brian and Chuck reduced the four tracks to mono for further overdubbing (in this case, by temporarily splicing the master take onto another reel, making a bounce back onto the original tape, then placing everything on the same reel again). “No title as of yet, one-A,” Chuck slates. Only one reduction take was needed, balance having been locked in by producer and engineer before tape rolled. Unfortunately, this reduction mix did tape over some of the “letter C” outtakes from the original session, which is why our write-up of that portion has such a hole in it.

Laurel Way

Brian would, of course, need to wait a little bit  before continuing to record the song properly, as he was going to be the only Beach Boy in Los Angeles for the rest of the week. During that break, eager to hear what his new track would sound like with some singing on it, he rigged up his equipment to lay down a guide vocal at home one day. The exact date is lost to time, but this must have occurred after the Western session on the 12th, and before the Beach Boys finally added their vocals on the 23rd.

In 1448 Laurel Way’s maiden’s-quarters-turned-home-studio, Brian stationed an unidentified friend at the Scully four-track and gave him the simple job of arming track 2 and pressing “record” for a first vocal pass. With the basic setup of a dynamic microphone running through a McIntosh 240 pre-amplifier, Brian put down a casual performance the song as written so far, up to the instrumental break. “Here we go,” the friend calls out.

“Okay,” Brian replies just before the opening line. The room ambiance, the rando running the tape machine in the background, and the loose sound (E.G. huge volume spikes when Brian barks the higher parts) are solid provenance of a session at home rather than a professional overdub. It’s a laid back reading of a song that really requires much more gusto and emotional turmoil, but that will come later in the studio.

Brian’s still working things out and plays around with the melody here: in the first chorus, he ends with “tomorrow it’s gone, gone, gone,” and in the second, “here” and “gone” ascend up an octave. The line “a brand new love affair is such a beautiful thing”  similarly trails away into an extended high melisma, like he’s sketching backing vocal ideas on the fly.  The second verse simply repeats the words of the first (indicating the unfinished lyric), and the singing stops after the second chorus. On track 3, Brian doubled his vocal, letting out a horrible, horrible belch and “excuse me” in the middle of a verse.

One thing is clear from the test: the “A” and “B” sections of the verse cannot be suitably sung straight through by one singer in one performance, as one phrase begins immediately after another, with no room for a breath between “know her” and “a brand new…”  Either the tune would have to be a duet, or a single lead vocalist would require extra tracks to cover the overlap.

Before the Beach Boys swung into town and reported for overdub duty, Brian and Tony finally sat down and got the words in order by writing that long overdue second verse. Brian’s continual dissatisfaction with earlier drafts kicked Tony into high gear, prompting him to turn in an electric spin on the song concept. In a thrillingly gossipy turn, the second verse flips the previously objective narrator into an active character of the song itself, and introduces an element Beach Boys songs don’t usually try: a plot twist!

Right now you think that she’s perfection
This time is really an exception
Well, you know, I hate to be a downer
But I’m the guy she left before you found her

Just like that, the bitter warnings are revealed to have a backstory, and the pre-chorus’ change in perspective from “it makes you…” to “she made me…” grounds the lecture in tactile feeling. As well as adding a verse, Brian and Tony patched up the chorus lyrically and melodically by changing the last line to “tomorrow it’s here – and gone so fast.”

Columbia I

Ideas for the vocal production came to Brian in pieces. He must have realized in planning that this was another one bound for eight-track. On Wednesday, March 23, the boys set about putting proper vocals on “Here Today” (which… STILL didn’t have a title, despite the full set of words) at Columbia Studios. The first order of business would be to transfer the instrumental from four-track to eight-track. Ignoring the bounce he made with Chuck Britz at Western, Brian and a CBS engineer re-balanced the first-generation recording, mixing everything to mono on track 4 the project’s 1″ comp reel, which by then already contained four other Pet Sounds songs in progress, “Row, Row, Row Your Boat” by the Honeys, and Brian’s “Don’t Talk” vocal experiment. A member of the engineering crew wrote down “I DON’T HAVE A TITLE YET” in the track sheet’s title field. Once again, we see two distinctive sets of handwriting theorized (but unconfirmed) to be that of Bill Brittan and Pete Romano, Columbia staff who can be identified at other March-April 1966 sessions.

A notorious slice of chatter caught on tape evidences a Capitol photographer’s presence at this session, and since photos from only two CBS Pet Sounds sessions are known to exist (the other being March 10), this was probably the origin of some monochrome shots in Studio A depicting the Wilsons, Al, and Bruce at work, learning parts from Brian’s hands at the Steinway and singing around an AKG C12. By elimination of which other vocal tracks feature certain combinations of Beach Boys, Dennis’ appearance in the photos may indicate that they also worked on backgrounds for “I Just Wasn’t Made for These Times” that day. There’s no sign that Mike was at the session in audible or visible combos.

Overdubbing on “Here Today” started with four-part oooh backing vocals in the verses from four Beach Boys, our high voice gang: Brian, Carl, Al, and Bruce. Their parts were recorded around a single microphone on track 2 and doubled on track 1, both passes vacuum-packed to the limit by luxurious Columbia compressors and treated with a repeating tape delay effect, giving these vocals a thick punch to hold definition against the band. Starting on the fourth bar of “A,” the descending quartet of Brian>Bruce>Al>Carl sing block harmonies that lift and fall with an eerie glissando between the chords. Next, Bruce and Carl take a rising two-part oooh over the first line of “B”; Brian and Al join unison for the following line before weaving into an expanded harmony, ultimately stacked Bruce>Carl>Brian>Al, making for a dynamic yet subtle and out-of-the-way build. This is one of those cases where every voice just sounds like The Beach Boy, all uncannily matched in tone.

Due to an inattentive recording engineer who probably expected the quartet to be singing over the whole song, plenty of dialogue and noise is captured between takes on track 2, especially after the second verse. A loud “sh!” appears in the first chorus, and a few yells of “top!” and “top, please!” come from Brian during the instrumental break (efforts to get the engineer to rewind the tape for another attempt). Meanwhile, Bruce has a conversation with the photographer.

Bruce: “Do you have that attached to the flash? Do you have [it] rigged up?”
Photographer: “Yeah, I do.”
Bruce: “Oh, you’re good.”

After the backing vocals in both verses were recorded and doubled, it was onto the lead. Here’s where we have to reconstruct history from fragments.

Brian had evidently settled on making the song a duet in order to cover the overlapping lyrics between the “A” and “B” verse sections. Based on scraps of evidence that remain on tape, and a crossed-out “Carl Bryan” designation on track 5 of the tape log, we know this was first attempted as a trade-off between Wilson brothers. Carl apparently sang the start of each verse and the pre-chorus, while Brian sang the “a brand new love affair…” and “I’m not saying…” parts of the verse. What they did in the chorus isn’t clear. Microscopic remnants still exist: Brian singing “if you’re not…” in the first verse (approached in a soft head voice), and a moment from Carl rehearsing during the final pre-chorus. The idea didn’t pan out, and there’s no indication that they got as far as double-tracking. Maybe a duet diluted the POV too much (as it did in “I’m Waiting for the Day”). Maybe sweet cherub Carl just didn’t carry enough darkness in his soul. The next option in Brian’s head would be ol’ reliable Mike, but with him absent from the studio that day, the group parked the tune until Dr. Love could schedule in an appointment.

Columbia II

A follow-up studio booking on March 24 was probably already in the calendar. Instead of furthering work on Pet Sounds at the next session, Brian and Bruce put that time to use by whipping up a multitracked a cappella ident for KOMA radio, revisiting a vocal arrangement in Brian’s back pocket from the yonder days of 1963. Read all about that here.

So the cohort returned to Columbia on Friday, March 25 for another round of “I Don’t Have a Title Yet,” aiming to get the lead situation sorted out, add remaining harmonies, and wrap that thing up – and maybe even choose a song title!

Worldly twice-married adult man Michael Edward Love (who turned 25 a week earlier) was the ideal candidate in the group to impart this lyric’s lived experience. Brian has commented that he wanted the track to sound “masculine” – hence the ‘bones – and he professed to Mike’s voice sounding so masculine that it scared him. A match made in heaven, then. Mike responded to the challengingly aerobic melody with one of the great vocal performances of his career.

“It’s high – it’s in a high vocal range for me,” he commented, “but, although it gave me a hernia, I had a good time singing it. It’s really a neat song. It’s kinda warning people to be careful when you go out on an emotional limb.” The melodic peaks are F#4s at “a BRAND new love affair IS such” and “KEEP in mind”, right at the point where most male voices have to get softer or more forceful to keep climbing. The pre-chorus also features a tricky ascension with boatloads of words that Mike opted to cover all in one breath on most of his vocal tracks, something not even Brian pulled off in the demo.

To allow Mike to sing the whole melody across the overlapping syllables, much eight-track hopping took place in the control room as he put down a performance in stages. Mike sang the “A” section of the verse on track 5 and doubled it on track 8, overdubbed the “B” section of the verse on track 3 and doubled that on track 6, returned to tracks 5 and 8 for the pre-chorus/chorus, then repeated the whole process for the next round. His voice was pumped up with compression and treated with tape echo, just as the backing vocals had been two days prior, though the echo is at random switched off in two places: “A brand new love affair is such a beautiful thing” on track 3 (but not its double on track 6), and the entire first pre-chorus and chorus on track 5 (but not its double on track 8). Throughout the takes, Brian divided his time between the control room and murmuring instructions at Mike’s side. At the end of his performance on track 5, Mike ad libs by singing the bass part to the Marcels’ version of “Blue Moon.” Anomaly to spot: in the second verse, Mike throws in an accidental early “She made me feel so- what, wait a second.”

After Mike’s lead was plugged into all the necessary places, it must have been clear to Brian that the chorus called for group backing vocals. In the guide vocal, he’d been probing different ideas to fill empty air around the lead – a part which, on its own, doesn’t occupy a lot of melodic information – but the eventual “think smarter, not harder” solution was to leave well enough alone and put block harmonies in those spaces. Hard, explosive harmonies punched at full throttle. So Brian arranged a four-part set of ahhhs and handed each line to the harmonically descending quartet of himself, Bruce, Carl, and Dennis. The second part here (given to Bruce) is the hardest to sing, with its quick chromatic movement and generally uncomfortable range between E4 and A4; Bruce sings it more like an oooh than an ahhh. The other three parts are as simple as it gets, and Brian’s timbre rings out especially well here, his nasal whine really shining at the high peak of D5. He and Dennis are like the thick bread of a sandwich with Carl and Bruce glooping within. The parts were recorded and doubled (with very light tape echo this time) on tracks 3 and 6, sharing space with Mike’s “B” verse section vocals.

“Another ‘ooh’ and ‘ahh’ thing from the band that was actually right for it,” commented Bruce. “There’s not a lot of room for the band to do anything other than be quickly orchestral. Brian was smart enough to not overwrite the vocals. He correctly used the vocals as another pad. If he had made the mistake of overwriting the background parts, you would never pay attention to the leads, and we would have gotten in the way.”

Finally, it was time to dub the song to mono, and bequeath a title! With a little reverb applied to the vocals, Brian and the unknown engineer balanced all of the tracks down and skillfully chopped off part of the lyric at the end of the instrumental break by muting “you’ve got to” on tracks 5 and 8. “Here Today, Gone Tomorrow” was written on the box containing that initial mixdown master, but in the coming days, Brian would shorten it to just “Here Today.” On April 4, the song was spliced over to the Pet Sounds master reel as track 10, and was mastered in the initial mastering session for the LP. [This mix has not been released as of writing].

Columbia III

Enter Steve Douglas: “I remember when Brian first turned in Pet Sounds… it was full of noise. You could hear him talking in the background. It was real sloppy. He had spent all this time making this album and zip, dubbed it down in one day or something like that.”

“Here Today” was likely the song that stood out to Steve as the worst of the bunch. Mixing from eight-track was a new part of the creative process for Brian, and not one that he desired to spend any significant amount of time on. Since the vocal overdubbing work on Pet Sounds was as efficient as it was convoluted, lots of unnecessary dialogue ended up being captured on the eight-track work reel, which Brian evidently didn’t care to erase before mixing, or make notes on how to mute during mixing. Ironically, Brian hadn’t rushed the mixing for the album in one day like Steve believed; he just didn’t care!

As a result, the first mix of “Here Today” features Brian loudly instructing Mike on where to sing, then loudly hitting a music stand, all during the quietest part of the track. Mike’s accidental early entry into the second pre-chorus is also kept clear and present, sounding very much like a mistake. On top of the sloppy muting (or lack thereof), the master fader is punishing the needles to such an extent that the whole song crunches like it’s coated in old leaves. These are such egregious artifacts that it’s a bit of a wonder why Brian didn’t ensure the dubdown was more polished before submitting it to Capitol, especially given his perfectionist tendencies when it came to the instrumental and vocal performances.

Being asked to go back to the mixing board for the LP didn’t exactly inspire Brian to refine those skills, but it did give him an excuse to continue tinkering with various vocal overdubs. “Here Today,” the most obvious target of the partial remixing project, was worked on just a few days before the album’s second and final mastering session, sometime in the window of April 14, 15 or 16.

Only a short portion of Mike’s lead vocals were re-recorded, dry and using minimal compression in accordance with the other April sweetening sessions. On tracks 3 and 6, he re-attempted the second “B” section, adding a “well” at the beginning of the lyric, and changing his rhythmic phrasing of the words “things like they were,” making it swing a little looser and more naturally. On track 5, he re-sang the following pre-chorus and chorus, changing the melody on “today” and “tomorrow” –  note the way both words rise at the second syllable, rather than being sung from that higher note from the start. When Mike doubled that chorus, the signal was combined live with his first performance onto track 8. A little distortion is evident in the chain here, a technical anomaly that suggests this took place alongside final work on “Wouldn’t It Be Nice” (which was remixed onto the same 1/4″ reel).

With that done, Brian gave “Here Today” its second and final mono mix. Ironically, this one came out nearly as ramshackle as the rejected dubdown! The talking just before the second verse is muted, but there’s a trade-off in that Bruce’s conversation with the photographer and various shots of “top!” are now audible during the instrumental break. Mike’s early entrance on track 8 is still kept up, but just barely, sounding more like a faint backing vocal than a mistake. The entire mix is again quite hot; both Mike’s vocal and the instrumental track tend to distort as they get higher in volume. This is especially notable in the second verse/chorus, where Brian evened out the dynamic peaks in Mike’s quieter, uncompressed new vocal by just… pushing the faders until they got crunchy. Surge! Just the way Murry taught him. This is the mix featured on any mono version of Pet Sounds.

19 months after it appeared on Pet Sounds, “Here Today” was featured as the B-side to the Beach Boys’ single “Darlin’.”

NOTE: The piano overdub added at Western Recorders is not included in Mark Linett’s 1996 stereo mix. This changes the personnel of that version ever so slightly, as Brian and Tony Asher are not featured instrumentally.

 

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Sources

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

Tapes and documentation from Capitol Records and Brother Records. 

AFM Local 47 Contract 247440.

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

Beach Boys’ Party / Stack-o-Tracks CD reissue liner notes, Capitol Records, 1990

Bruce Johnston, Tony Asher, Steve Douglas, Bruce Botnick – interviews conducted by David Leaf, appear in “The Making of Pet Sounds,” The Pet Sounds Sessions, Capitol Records, 1997.

Mike Love interviewed in “Pet Sounds 40th Anniversary Podcast Series,” 2006

Brian Wilson interviewed by Ken Sharp, “The Warmth of the Sun,” Record Collector, August 2008

Bruce Botnick interviewed by Larry Crane, “Bruce Botnick: The Doors, MC5, Love, Pet Sounds,” Tape Op, November 2009