(Traditional, arr. Brian Wilson)
Music & Lyrics: Traditional
Instrumental Arrangement: Brian Wilson, assisted by the studio musicians
Vocal Arrangement: Brian Wilson
Producer: Brian Wilson
Engineers: Chuck Britz, Winston Wong
Personnel:
(voices)
Brian Wilson – lead vocals, harmony & backing vocals
Mike Love – lead vocals, harmony & backing vocals
Carl Wilson – harmony & backing vocals
Dennis Wilson – harmony & backing vocals
Al Jardine – harmony & backing vocals
Bruce Johnston – harmony & backing vocals
(instrumentation – basic)
Al De Lory – grand piano [Steinway Model C Art Deco]
Al Casey – acoustic guitar [Martin]
Billy Strange – electric 12-string guitar [Mosrite Combo XII]
Jerry Cole – electric 12-string guitar
Carol Kaye – electric 6-string bass [Danelectro UB-2]
Lyle Ritz – double bass
Hal Blaine – drums
Steve Douglas – cricket clicker, tambourine
Frank Capp – glockenspiel
Jay Migliori – flute
Jim Horn – flute [Gemeinhardt C Flute]
Jack Nimitz – bass saxophone
(instrumentation – overdubs)
Billy Strange – electric 12-string guitar [Mosrite Combo XII] (x2)
Recorded to 1/2″ 3-track and 1/2″ 4-track (3 to 3 & 3 to 4):
July 13, 1965 (12:00am-3:00am) / Western Recorders – Studio 3 (track, demo vocals)
December 22, 1965 / Western Recorders – Studio 3 (transfer, guitars, vocals)
Mixed to 1/4″ mono:
Circa early January, 1966 / Western Recorders – Studio 3
Initial Release:
1966 Mono Mix – Sloop John B. / You’re So Good to Me 7″ Single (Capitol Records, 1966)
1996 Stereo Mix – The Pet Sounds Sessions (Capitol Records, 1997)
1996 Alternate Stereo Mix – The Pet Sounds Sessions (Capitol Records, 1997)
1996 Alternate Mono Mix – The Pet Sounds Sessions (Capitol Records, 1997)
Vocal Guide
– 1st verse lead: Brian (alt lead: Carl)
– 1st chorus lead: Brian>Mike+Carl / ending ‘duh duh’: Mike+Dennis (alt lead: Brian>Carl)
– 2nd verse lead: Mike / ‘oooh’ backing: Bruce>Carl / choral ‘ahhh’: Brian>Bruce>Al>Carl>Dennis
– 2nd chorus lead: Brian / backing: Brian>Al>Carl>Dennis / bass: Mike
– 3rd verse leads: Brian, Mike / choral ‘ahhhh’: Brian>Bruce>Al>Carl>Dennis
– 3rd chorus lead: Brian / backing: Brian>Al>Carl>Dennis / bass: Mike
Prologue (1903 – 1965)
West Indies folk song “Sloop John B.” can trace its origins to the tumultuous voyage of a real life Captain John Bethel, a Welsh mariner born to the Bahamas whose sloop sailboat was wrecked near Governor’s Harbour off the island of Eleuthera in the late 19th century. In the ensuing years, a tragicomic tune of unknown authorship about the crew’s misadventure grew into a popular local singalong around Nassau and its neighboring ports.
Sheet music for “Hoist the John B. Sails” was first published in the United States on April 25, 1903 – a “two step for piano”’ credited to violinist and orchestra leader Eddy Warren Prouty of Spencer, Massachusetts. Prouty’s band played as entertainment for the Florida East Coast Hotels Company at the Colonial and Royal Victoria establishments in Nassau, where circumstance put him in the right place to encounter the melody from Bahamian singers during a residency and copy it down before sailing home; the publication (which came with an illustration of the titular John B. sailboat) was “dedicated to the citizens of Nassau, N.P., Bahamas.”
English writer Richard Le Gallienne came across the song independently during his own trip to the waters of Nassau, sailing between New Providence and the surrounding islands, where he transcribed lyrics to “The John B. Sails” (with five verses) from the captain of the boat (dubbed only the “Colonel”), then set the words down amidst a rather racist (to be expected, honestly) travelogue in the December 1916 issue of Harper’s Monthly Magazine. Gallienne went on to incorporate an abridged version of the lyrics into the narrative of his novel “Pieces of Eight” the following year.
A 1926 expedition to recover the wreckage of the actual sloop itself brought renewed interest to the tale and the song. American political cartoonist John T. McCutcheon and his wife Evelyn Shaw McCutcheon were taught to sing “The John B. Sails” by locals on their privately owned Salt Cay Island, and they in turn delivered it to poet Carl Sanburg, who included a lead sheet and three verses in his popular 1927 folk song anthology “The American Songbag.” Prefacing the page, the McCutcheons wrote, “Time and usage have given this song almost the dignity of a national anthem around Nassau. The weathered ribs of the historic craft lie imbedded in the sand at Governor’s Harbor, whence an expedition, especially sent up for the purpose in 1926, extracted a knee of horseflesh and a ring-bolt.”
All of these were isolated, written instances of the song leaving the Caribbean, none connected to the other. As for the earliest version on record, that was finally bottled in 1935, when folklorists Alan Lomax and Mary Elizabeth Barnicle set about capturing field recordings of local Bahamian songs for the Library of Congress. On Cat Island, the Cleveland Simmons Group were recorded singing “Histe Up the John B. Sail,” performed in a three-part a cappella vocal arrangement with alternation between solo voice, harmony, and overlapping call-and-response parts.
American folk group The Weavers released an anglicized “(The Wreck of the) John B” in 1950, credited to Carl Sandburg (erroneously) and Lee Hays (of the Weavers), arranged by Leroy Holmes. This was, for all intents and purposes, the ‘original’ noteworthy recording to hit American airwaves and record players which would set the template for all to follow. Their rendition put it to triad chords and straightened out the rhythm to a playful pop swing, embellished by acoustic guitar, banjo, flute, stand-up bass, shaker, claves, and salvos of calypso-flavored brass.
Eight years later, Captain Bethel’s tragedy made its way to noted Weavers fans The Kingston Trio, who recorded a version for their eponymous debut LP on Capitol Records in 1958. The Californian folk group did away with production whimsy in favor of a plaintive, salt-of-the-earth approach to the homesick anthem, sung with gentle harmony over a circular bed of banjo, guitar, bass and congas. The song was titled “Sloop John B” on the album sleeve’s tracklisting and “Wreck of the ‘John B’” on the label of the disc itself. When the Trio’s take on Appalachian murder ballad “Tom Dooley” leapt to the top of the charts that fall, the LP hoisted into popularity with it, and their sound was readily received by the nation as a fresh, mellow alternative to rock ‘n’ roll. The Kingston Trio helped to kick off a huge boom of post-McCarthy commercial folk music that captured the imagination of many a guitar-wielding youth across America, and more importantly to our tale, in the boys’ locker room at Hawthorne High School.
In the first semester of his junior year, late 1958, Al Jardine struck up a friendship with football teammates Gary Winfrey and Bob Barrow over their shared appreciation for the Kingston Trio’s music. They’d sing “Tom Dooley” in the shower after practice, and it was fun. So fun in fact that Jardine, Winfrey and Barrow soon decided to band together and form their own amateur folk trio patterned after Guard, Shane and Reynolds. Al held a special fondness for musical travelogues about adventure in far-off locales, and ‘island’ songs, like the Calypso tunes of Harry Belafonte, which made “Wreck of the John B.” an immediate highlight from the Kingston Trio’s first LP for the friends to study and sing. Somewhat in that general island music vein, the group christened themselves The Tikis.
By that time, Brian Wilson had moved from the Hawthorne Cougars’ B team (in which Al played) up to varsity, so he wasn’t present for the post-football shower singing sessions with the embryonic Tikis and didn’t leap into the folk revival quite so devotedly. He did however like a number of the Kingston Trio’s songs, as did many of his classmates, and “John B.” seemed to flourish into an especially popular cut at Hawthorne despite not being released as a single. There is good reason to believe that it was a personal favorite selection of Brian’s. On March 11, 1960, a vocal group led by Brian consisting of his friends Keith Lent, Bruce Griffin, and Bob Barrow (of Al’s gang) performed “Wreck of the John B.” at a high school assembly, humorously styling themselves The Kingston Quartet for the occasion. Brian chose the song from Keith’s record collection, crafted a four-voice harmony arrangement, taught it to the others, and took on the high leading part himself; Barrow borrowed Carl Wilson’s Kay Swingmaster guitar to accompany their singing.
A little after high school, in late 1960, Brian taped a casual singing session with fellow alumni Keith Lent, Lorraine Churik, and one other girl, recorded on the Wollensak tape recorder in his music room at home. They attempted a ragtag a cappella version of “Sloop John B.” (as it was called on tape by Brian), consisting of Lorraine singing lead, the other girl singing a harmony, and Brian and Keith humming in fifths. When that didn’t work out, they made a pass at Brian’s four-part vocal arrangement of “Good News” from The Kingston Trio At Large, further showcasing his fondness for adapting their records into his own harmony wheelhouse. At another time, Brian recorded himself and friends singing a similarly reconfigured four-voice arrangement of “M.T.A.”
“Sloop” just kept on popping up in their lives. In the summer of 1961, Al’s folk trio The Islanders (a renamed Tikis – minus Bob Barrow, plus Don Winfrey) taped a version on Gary Winfrey’s Wollensak recorder. In the fall, at El Camino Community College, when Brian and Al famously reconnected, broke into the nurses’ room, grabbed Gary and an injured football player, and tried harmonizing to any and all songs they could think of in an unsuccessful attempt to form a group, one of the numbers they sang might have been “Sloop John B.,” by Gary’s recollection. And when Al went to Hite Morgan’s studio with the intent of recording some folk music, that was apparently the song he had his heart set on performing, until various things transpired to create a tune called “Surfin’” by a band called The Pendletones… and then those fellas changed their name, and some other stuff happened.
John Bethel’s ill-fated sailboat trip wasn’t a topic addressed within the first few years of the Beach Boys’ discography. While Brian did arrange a Four Freshman-styled a cappella version of “Tom Dooley” (which never made it to tape), the group’s music otherwise drifted quite far from the Kingston Trio model that Al once envisioned himself following. For all the excitement of playing rockers like “Fun, Fun, Fun” to masses of screaming teenagers, nostalgia for those innocent summer afternoons spent singing folk numbers with the Tikis and Islanders never quite left his consciousness. “I wanted to share my joy of that with the guys,” Al remembered, “and I started messing around with some folk songs again. And by golly, that darn old Kingston Trio stuff started coming back.”
The timeframe of this next chapter in the story gets a little ambiguous. In 1996, Al recalled, “I think we were in the middle of a session at Western, it might have been for ‘Let Him Run Wild,’ and I had some time alone with Brian. I had been studying the song ‘Sloop John B.’ at home, and from my early experiences as a fan of the Kingston Trio, I thought that it would be a great song for us to do.”
In 2002, Al offered another account of when this happened: “We were between sessions in early 1964, I think we were working on ‘Wendy,’ and I thought I had this great idea for a Beach Boys song. The Islanders used to perform ‘Wreck of the John B.’ a lot. I had studied Brian’s chords and pretty much understood his Beach Boy methodology. I thought that if we threw in some more Beach Boys-sounding chords it would be more appropriate than a folk version and it would fit our style of music.” In 1983, he corroborated the same story: “That same day, I think we were gonna do… we had started to do ‘Wendy,’ was it? It was during that period of time.” To put it in context, “Wendy” was recorded over two days in the spring of 1964: a session in April (the track) and another in May (the vocals). The other scenario can probably be discounted, as Al did not participate in any recording of “Let Him Run Wild” at Western (only Columbia).
“Sloop John B.” did, of course, make perfect sense as a candidate for a Beach Boys production for various reasons, not the least of which being that Brian was already extremely familiar with the song and had re-arranged it in various ways during his teenage years. But there was also the nautical theme, the overlapping vocal parts, the humor, and an underlying melancholy to the tale aligning with the heart of the Boys’ best work – it would just need to be molded into the contemporary Brian Wilson style. “It was intimidating, oh God, yeah,” Al remembered. “When I brought ‘Sloop John B.’ to him I was almost trembling. I was thinking, ‘Am I wasting Brian’s time doing this?’”
“Brian was at the piano,” Al continued. “I asked him if I could sit down and show him something. I laid out the chord pattern for ‘Sloop John B.’ I said, ‘Remember this song?’ I played it. He said, ‘I’m not a big fan of the Kingston Trio.’ He wasn’t into folk music. But I didn’t give up on the idea. So what I did was to sit down and play it for him in the Beach Boys idiom. I figured if I gave it to him in the right light, he might end up believing in it. So I modified the chord changes so it would be a little more interesting. The original song is basically a three-chord song, and I knew that wouldn’t fly. So I put some minor changes in there, and it stretched out the possibilities from a vocal point of view.”
What Al did here was to add another chord change at the line “I wanna go home” (and at that same spot in each verse and chorus), moving from the IV chord to the ii chord for a bar before returning to the tonic. “Just bringing the minor into that gave it a different depth,” he surmised, “so I thought that was kinda neat.” This wasn’t actually a new idea; the Weavers version from 1950 used that same I-IV-ii-I turnaround, which the Kingston Trio merely simplified when they adapted it. The Brothers Four had released a version in 1963 titled “The John B. Sails,” which used a iv chord in the place where Al was suggesting a ii (another minor chord, which functions differently in context). Brian probably hadn’t heard those. It’s unclear if Al was aware of the other records or if he landed on the change independently. “I think I played it for him in E,” he did note in 1998, which is the same key as the Weavers and Brothers Four recordings, while the Kingston Trio’s take is in G.
The more important Jardine adaptation then was in translating the groove from a gentle folk lilt to rock ‘n’ roll, demonstrated by playing it with pounding eighth note block chords in Brian’s style on the piano. Al: “I thought if I put it in his language, put it in a way that he’d understand it and give it a little oomph, and a little power, a little change – get off the folk rhythm, get onto the Beach Boy rhythm.”
Reactions from Brian Wilson are famously hard to gauge. As Al remembered, “I played him the chords, showed him the song, and he said, ‘Yeah, that’s pretty good.’ Then we went back to what we were doing.”
“I told him I would adapt the melody and make an arrangement to it,” said Brian. Then nothing happened for a while.
If Al’s recollection of this taking place during a “Wendy” session is accurate, another 14 months passed before Brian did anything with the idea (certainly a lot longer than 24 hours, as Al has also stated). Maybe it came up in conversation in the meantime, maybe it didn’t. Maybe Al pitching Brian on the song happened a year later than he thought it did. In any case, whether truly motivated by a bandmate’s suggestion or by his own teenage affection for the tune, in the summer of 1965, Brian started thinking about “Sloop” again.
Folk rock was the sound of the moment on the heels of the Byrds’ version of Dylan’s “Mr. Tambourine Man,” an enormously influential chart-topping hit produced by Brian’s peer Terry Melcher, and one which happened to borrow a Beach Boys element via Jerry Cole playing David Marks’ stabbing rhythm guitar part from “Don’t Worry, Baby.” Weeks after completing work on the Summer Days (And Summer Nights!!) album at the beginning of June, Brian began to plan out an arrangement of “Sloop John B.” that would be his answering record – a similarly souped-up, powerful rock adaptation of an acoustic folk number fronted by jangling electric 12-string guitar. But Brian Wilson wouldn’t do something so consciously hip as to cover Bob Dylan. If the Beach Boys were going to dip their toes into that latest industry wave, it would have to be a move on their terms, distinctly out-of-step, distinctly Americana, distinctly Hawthorne.
In an effort to sculpt that particular sound, Brian would invite Terry to the Rovell family household on Sierra Bonita Avenue (where Brian and Marilyn spent most of their nights) and have him play the other end of the piano while working on arrangement ideas, sounding out high circular arpeggios to the right against the bass figure and other melodic lines to the left. “I did that with him for weeks,” Terry recalled. “He played the bass parts and I played the (sings) do-do-do-do – you know, it was ‘Tambourine Man,’ for God’s sake! That’s what he wanted to do.” Regrettably, the extent of Terry’s contribution to the arrangement remains unclear – as in, whether he was just used as a sounding board or if he became an active collaborator – because he never spoke about it at any length while he was alive, save for unknowingly surprising Bruce Johnston with this trivia during a 1998 interview.
Tracking Session (July 1965)
Setup
The Beach Boys embarked on a big tour across the country from July 6 to July 24, the first extended haul of its kind with Bruce taking Brian’s place on the road. On the night of Monday, July 12, while the Boys were in North Carolina and “California Girls” (b/w “Let Him Run Wild”) had just released as a single, Brian decided the time was right to record “Sloop John B.,” and called Steve Douglas and Hal Blaine to have them round up musicians for a last-minute session.
Brian, Chuck Britz and the crew were booked into Western 3 for midnight; though the tracksheet and AFM contract both list the date as July 12, Carol Kaye’s personal studio log for 1965 verifies that the session actually began at 0000 hours on July 13. Musicians included Hal Blaine (drums), Carol Kaye and Lyle Ritz (basses), Billy Strange and Jerry Cole (electric 12-string guitars), Al Casey (acoustic guitar), Al De Lory (keyboard), Frank Capp and Steve Douglas (percussion), Jack Nimitz (sax), and Jay Migliori and Jim Horn (flutes).
The first thing to note about Brian’s configuration of “Sloop” is that he put it in A-flat, a semitone higher than the Kingston Trio’s version – all on the black keys, the key of Brian Wilson. And although it would be woven into the arrangement subtly, he did incorporate Al’s minor ii chord. A faithful ABABAB structure was retained from familiar versions consisting of three verses and three choruses, but that would only become apparent once it had singing over the top – since both the verse and chorus of “Sloop” are based on the same chord progression and melody, the track is really more like six rounds of the same 16-bar piece of music, or AAAAAA. During the session, Brian and the musicians speak of each section as a “verse.” The creative challenge Brian set himself then, to keep the song feeling dynamic and fresh, was to develop aspects of the arrangement in each of those stages; some ideas he mapped out definitively, while other variations were put to the test and shuffled around to see what worked during the recording process.
As discussed above, no doubt the biggest inspiration for Brian’s new arrangement of “Sloop” was “Mr. Tambourine Man” by the Byrds, a record characterized above all else by the chiming sound of Jim McGuinn’s Rickenbacker 12-string guitar. Taking inspiration from the riff which opened the song (a riff that McGuinn claimed was inspired by Bach), and by its banjo-like rolling arpeggios under the rhythm section, Brian called upon Terry Melcher’s ears to sculpt a special guitar orchestration of two harmonizing, complementary arpeggio patterns that would carry throughout the track, played on the session by Billy Strange and Jerry Cole. We have to rewind here.
Nearly inconceivable to imagine today, but the electric 12-string guitar was essentially a new instrument in 1965. The acoustic 12 had been around for a good while in the folk paradigm, and various world instruments that work on the principal of double-strings paired in unison or octaves have existed for centuries, but when Vincent Bell developed his “Bellzouki” for Danelectro in 1961, it was the first electric 12-string guitar to hit the mass commercial market, almost as young to the world as the Beach Boys. And even then, the instrument didn’t really take off in popularity until George Harrison’s gorgeous Rickenbacker 360/12 was on the silver screen in A Hard Day’s Night in the summer of 1964. Jim McGuinn quickly took up the call, and so did Carl Wilson.
Carl dug the Rickenbacker look and tone, but in general, the old guard studio folks in Hollywood didn’t like Rickenbacker instruments. So for the first half of the ‘60s, any electric 12-string you heard on a record was typically a Bellzouki from the professionals or a Rickenbacker from the kids. This all changed in 1965, when the Beatle influence on American music was really starting to land. Producers had seen A Hard Day’s Night, perhaps, and wanted that sound. The Beach Boys and nascent Byrds were far from the only groups to cop Harrison’s shiny new toy. The guitar manufacturers responded, but not urgently. Fender produced its commercial Electric XII model by late summer 1965 (with Carl already having used a prototype in January that year), and Mosrite rolled up with a number of competing 12-string options around the same time. Studio guitarist superstars like Billy Strange and Jerry Cole tended to get first dibs on prototypes, thus the presence of 1966 models in the studio by mid-to-late 1965 – in Billy’s case, a Mosrite Combo XII given to him by company founder Semie Moseley.
The charged-up “sting” of an electric 12 wasn’t a sound Brian Wilson often went for. He had his time with that in “Dance, Dance, Dance,” and a softer iteration in “Rhonda.” Where Brian made his real breakthrough with the 12-string sound was in the smooth, glassy tones of “Let Him Run Wild” and “California Girls” in the spring of ‘65, where by plugging a guitar directly into the recording console and sending the clean uncompressed signal to a reverb chamber, the higher register took on an ethereal, orchestral sort of chorused elegance that felt well-suited to melodic lines in his increasingly sophisticated arrangement style. When the Byrds’ debut LP hit, building another radical new dimension into how that instrument could sound, Brian probably felt encouraged to keep expanding his own distinctive approach to guitar usage, to take it someplace uncharted.
The two 12-string guitars on “Sloop” are its most important building block, a cascading ostinato (check out that word) of interlocking figures played in the middle and high end of the neck, which create a swirl of melodic movement in and around the different chord inversions. They by themselves provide a very pleasant base for the track, sounding oddly intrinsically nautical. Or maybe we only think that because we’re so used to this take on “Sloop John B.” Billy and Jerry played these parts in the control room, recorded without amplification in that usual clean style – consequently, the rest of the band couldn’t hear them. Billy Strange had an opportunity to really get into it with the primary, higher arpeggiated chord figure, which may have felt like a satisfying redemption arc to him, because he’d been out with a hand injury for some of 1965; either for that reason, or some other unknown reason, or no reason at all, Billy had a stint as roadie Ron Swallow’s primary competition for lead tambourine player during the Summer Days (And Summer Nights!!) sessions. Jerry Cole was given the lower, supporting role here, playing his own 12-string of unknown make – likely a Fender, Mosrite, or Danelectro Bellzouki.
A third guitar was added into the mix as well, this being a subtle acoustic guitar strumming rhythm chords from the second verse onward. The part was played by Al Casey, roped into the situation in his first ever job as a musician for Brian Wilson. “I had just moved to Hollywood,” Casey remembered, “and Steve Douglas called me at one in the morning and said, ‘Can you get down here right away?’ I rushed over to the studio. It was very different from what I had done before. We would do tracks. We didn’t know what the song was; [Brian] had it in his head. He would either write out something or tell you what to play. I was impressed that he used a lot of jazz and jazz-based musicians. I remember some sessions where he had the horns right there on the date, and he would sing out the horn parts to the players. He seemed to have a great ear for that.” The exact model of Al’s guitar isn’t known, but he suspected it may have been a “little small Martin” that he had in his early Hollywood days, so not one of the archtop designs that Brian usually drafted into his rhythm sections.
For the bass line, Brian wrote out a part that he had meticulously arranged before the session began, the third core component of the equation alongside the 12-string guitars. He created two variations: a main arpeggio-based romp, and a special flipped around line for six bars of the first verse that builds up into the central figure. To reference “Mr. Tambourine Man” again, that track employed a unison line played by Larry Knechtel on Fender bass and Bill Pitman on Danelectro six-string bass, beginning with a slide up the neck. On “Sloop John B.,” the unison players are Lyle Ritz on upright bass and Carol Kaye on Danelectro six-string bass, and they begin with a slide down the neck. The part called for an Eb below the lowest Ab a bass instrument could typically play, requiring both Lyle and Carol to tune their lowest string down a half-step. Carol’s Dano was amplified out on the floor, maximizing its twangy bite, and the combined tone between both instruments may be the most vibrant bass sound to grace any Beach Boys record.
Quite quickly into the recording process, Brian figured out a brilliant way to restructure his ideas. He re-arranged the third verse (or fifth round) of the song into a dramatic drop-down where the dynamics of the intro are reprised, featuring only the basses and electric guitars (with percussion to tick it along), and using the alternate build-up bass figure, into which he then inserted a section with simple quarter note roots to make for an exciting double-time moment with Hal. Once that framework was in place, the first verse no longer needed to be quite so full-on, and could be stripped back into having a more dynamic development – the basses therefore lay out for four bars and enter in the middle of the line on a glissando. This is a model example of the way Brian would arrive at his arrangements in the studio by collecting a bunch of ideas, swapping them around like puzzle pieces, and sifting through them backwards until he had a satisfying internal structure.
Another (final) “Tambourine Man” sonic element was briefly tried out through Al De Lory on a Wurlitzer electric piano, performing the dual role of doubling the bass line in the left hand and playing rhythm chords with the right. That didn’t work to Brian’s liking, so De Lory was moved to Studio 3’s acoustic grand before take 1. He was not initially not given a microphone, and can barely be heard during early takes, only there to pad out the overall room sound with some widely voiced triad chords beginning in the first chorus. By the session’s end, he had a dedicated mic, but was mixed quite low in the final recording. At the dynamic third verse, Al switches to doubling the bass line in octaves, before coming back in with chords at the double time section, and dropping out for the final “this is the worst trip…”
The removal of electric piano from the bass department prompted Brian to find a more robust thing to take its place, and in that he turned to the wind department. An unusual horn section was convened for this track – two flutes and one bass saxophone, played by Jack Nimitz. For a few months, Brian had been incorporating the great big bass sax in a number of productions. How he became aware of it is unclear, but logic suggests he organically came to the realization that in some cases, when he wanted low saxophone notes, a baritone could only reach so far, so he asked his conglomerate of musicians if they had anything deeper, and one procured the monster horn from their car. In any case, for the season of later 1965 into early 1966, the bass sax is all over Brian’s work. But “Sloop” is unique in that the bass sax is used pretty much as a third member of the bass section. Not having any sax friends to play with, Jack Nimitz ends up doubling what Carol and Lyle are doing, adding breadth and bite to the line when he comes in at the second verse. To make up for the part dipping slightly below even the bass saxophone’s range, Jack simply plays any note below the low Ab an octave higher.
Jay Migliori and Jim Horn were on flutes, given a unison descending melody line to play in the first half of the second and third choruses. At some point, Brian decided that the line would make a great two-bar intro, and it does, sounding like a musical representation of some sort of call to adventure. Both flautists play the part in unison into the same microphone. As the session progressed, Brian expanded the line to fit the entirety of the chorus and changed the melody ever so slightly.
Hal’s drums on this production were one of the most difficult components of the arrangement for Brian to get right. As the song is a circular pattern with no melodic variation, dynamics were an important thing to bring to the table, and as Hal’s drums were the most dynamic instrument here, his part was perhaps the most important element to keep interesting. The foundations stay in line with what Hal typically brought to Brian’s arrangements, as in the snare, floor tom, and kick are used to keep time while other parts of the kit are limited to fills and embellishments. His drum set was recorded simply, with one or two dynamic overheads and a kick drum mic. In the booth, Brian and Chuck also sent the overhead signal to an EMT plate for reverb.
Following some different experiments in the early rehearsals, this is what they were working with by take 1: Hal’s part begins with an explosive hit on the first beat of the sixth bar in the first verse, then silence for the rest of the verse. A composed hi-hat fill leads into the chorus, where Hal hits his three core drums on the first beat of each bar, continuing that feel through the second verse. In the second chorus, he introduces a more typical rock feel, hitting the snare and floor tom on beats 2 and 4. In the final verse, he lays out, then builds with hi-hat eighth notes into the ninth bar, where a short double time section is introduced. Everything drops back out again, then comes back in with the second chorus “rock” groove for the final chorus. If this doesn’t all sound right, that’s because adjustments concerning which pattern to play in which section continued to be made up until the final take. On the whole, the part lends to the seafaring vibe, especially with the large emphasis on beat 1 in the first chorus.
Had Hal been drumming for another producer, his hi-hat may have received more action, say, keeping eighth-note time throughout the piece to account for nobody being able to hear the direct 12-string guitars. In its place to hold the band together is a gewgaw from Hal’s famous bag o’ tricks – his collection of random things that one can percuss. This bag contained instruments both professionally manufactured and homemade. Alongside the finely wrought items were dozens of found objects: salt shakers, jangles nailed to a stick, a cigar container filled with beads, and if you dug deep enough, a little clicker. The cricket clicker has its origins on the battlefield. The story goes that paratroopers needed a small device to make a distinct, loud sound upon landing so they could find each other in the dark or in the forest. The little metal device makes a click when you press on a metal tine, and when you release it, it makes another click with a slightly different timbre. Up close, the effect is bracing and sharp, but when deployed by saxophonist Steve Douglas, off-mic, it takes on a somewhat woody character. Steve was relieved of his usual woodwind duty and handed Hal’s special clicker, which he plays with his thumb in one hand during the intro, and first, second, and fifth rounds of the song. In other sections – the ones with the rock beat – Steve injects excitement via shaken tambourine 16th notes with his free hand.
It took some trial and error to determine what Frankie Capp should do on the track. Brian put him on vibraphone at first, where during rehearsals he played loose arpeggio figures, adding a pleasant if subdued glow to the overall sound. After nixing that, Brian moved Frankie over to the much higher and louder glockenspiel, where a far more substantial, cutting role in the arrangement was created for his mallets. Frankie gets to play the opening riff with the flutes, the three of them opening the piece over Steve’s clicker. From there, he joins the guitars and the basses at bar nine of the first verse, playing a pretty chiming part that complements the famed ostinato. At the chorus, the part changes and gets more involved, and it stays that way until the last verse drop-down where Frankie lays out. He adds in his original figure at the double-time section, and then during the two-bar “this is the worst trip…” break plays a descending scale in an isolated moment of just glockenspiel and 12-string guitars. Brian might have drawn inspiration from the many Phil Spector productions he loved which put glockenspiel and electric guitar together, playing countermelodies in unison to form a new supremely jingly instrument. Or, more recently, Sonny & Cher’s smash hit “I Got You, Babe,” Sonny Bono’s attempt to emulate Phil’s sound on his own. But here, the guitars and the glockenspiel bounce off of each other rather than play identical lines, retaining their instrumental identities.
It didn’t necessarily start out with this in mind, but between the flutes, glockenspiel, massive honking sax, and some of the drum patterns, the track takes on elements of a John Phillip Sousa marching band type arrangement, bringing back that other traditional slice of Americana we know Brian was inexorably drawn to – not all that removed from “Be True to Your School.”
He outlined only the six sections to the band, clearly intending to fade somewhere in the middle of the last chorus when all was said and done. All 12 inputs into Western 3’s board were used, in no particular order looking like this:
1 – drums – kick
2 – drums – overhead (sent to plate)
3 – flutes
4 – bass saxophone
5 – clicker & tambourine (sent to chamber)
6 – glockenspiel (sent to chamber)
7 – electric six-string bass amplifier
8 – double bass
9 – acoustic guitar
10 – grand piano
11 – electric 12-string guitar 1 (sent to chamber)
12 – electric 12-string guitar 2 (sent to chamber)
Now preparing to print all that to three-track tape, Brian and Chuck decided to put the dry flutes and saxophone on track 1, Hal’s drums and their reverb return on track 2 (maximizing control and clarity here), and everything else and its reverb on track 3 – guitars, basses, piano, and percussion. The overall jingly shimmer of Brian’s arrangement was emphasized for the mix, with the direct guitars and glockenspiel put up front, swimming in reverb, and the more earthy acoustic guitar and piano kept subtle.
Recording
Following a test tone and some 12-string guitar tuning, tape first rolls on a short early rehearsal captured to check the sound, taking place before many of the arrangement adjustments outlined above were ironed out. Brian is out on the studio floor and counts in the take. In the room, the arrangement at this time only features Steve Douglas’ clicker and a bass line played in unison between Carol Kaye’s Dano, Lyle’s stand-up, and Al De Lory’s electric piano. Clearly, the 12-string guitars would have gone here too, but with Dad Wilson gone from the booth, Jerry and Billy choose to noodle along instead of playing their parts properly. At the ninth bar, Hal Blaine adds downbeats to each bar on the kick, snare, and floor tom, Steve plays along on tambourine with his other hand, Frankie Capp adds in his vibraphone, and De Lory begins playing chords in the right hand. It’s all quite different to what the final verse will very soon become. Brian stops the take as soon as the group reach the chorus, but Hal carries on, revealing that Brian was planning for him to play quarter note downbeats at this stage.
Brian called for another rehearsal, and part of the following chorus was captured on tape, featuring the same arrangement of basses, electric piano, vibraphone, drums, and tambourine, with Billy and Jerry noodling away in the booth, unheard by everyone in the room. “All set!” calls out a musician after they get through the section. It appears that this was the last section of the arrangement that required isolated rehearsal, and that Brian was supposedly ready to start tracking for real – but in fact, he dove right back into the workshop and made several crucial changes before asking Chuck to roll again for take 1.
To refresh on the basics: Al De Lory was moved to the acoustic grand piano, and Frankie Capp was moved to glockenspiel. From here, that whole dynamic reinterpretation of the final verse was created: everyone drops out except for the 12-string guitars, piano, basses, and clicker for eight bars, then Hal fills into four bars of double-time being joined by bass sax and glockenspiel, then everyone cuts out while Frankie plays a descending scale against the guitars, then everyone comes back in two bars before the final chorus. The first verse in turn had most of the bass chart slashed out, and an instrumental intro was added. After these ideas were worked out with the musicians (unfortunately for us, not captured on tape), recording got underway again with producer in booth.
Brian gives the starting slate: “Okay, this is gonna be ‘Sloop John B.’ take one.” Hal counts out the take, but Frankie forgets to play with the flutes (a part he was likely given moments before recording), and Brian doesn’t like Steve’s tempo on the clicker: “Steve, you’re a little slow.”
“Man, I’m following him!” Steve says, probably pointing to Hal, who gave him the tempo. “I can’t hear the guitars!” Indeed, as Billy and Jerry are in the booth, none of the musicians on the floor can hear their parts at all, and it’s up to them to play in time with the rest of the band.
“I didn’t think you were [slow],” Hal argues. “I thought you were right on it.” Brian asks Steve to get closer to the mic, and Hal counts in take 2, at an essentially identical tempo. This time, Brian doesn’t interrupt, and the take is complete, with very few mistakes, albeit kind of sluggish. Basses are smooth, Hal’s drums are powerful, and the guitars, glockenspiel, and clicker make the high end shine. At this stage, Al De Lory’s piano hasn’t yet been given a dedicated microphone, or it’s been excluded from the mix by accident, being a recent addition to the arrangement. Al Casey’s acoustic guitar is buried right down. At the end of the third verse, Frankie gets ambitious and improvises a 16th note run during his solo spot, which gets a little busy. Brian cuts the take off, knowing it couldn’t be used, but compliments the part: “Hold it please. Hey, Frankie, that really was great, what you did there.”
Chuck stops rolling for Brian to give some feedback to the band off-tape. He rolls again and slates take 3, but Brian is still giving out direction after receiving some requests for clarification from the musicians: “Third verse for the guitar, second for the piano, first for the drums.” He asks to hear a “perfect balance” from the flutes (meaning volume, proximity to each other, and proximity to the mic), and Jay and Jim demonstrate their unison part for him. “Right there! Don’t move, don’t MOVE! Alright, let’s make it. Take three, here we go, ‘Sloop John B.’”
Takes 3 and 4 are both false starts, as the flutes are not wholly together, and Steve’s clicking isn’t quite at the tempo that Brian wants. “Flutes, can we do it again please? Steve, you’re a little behind, I think. Hal, direct him, will you?”
Hal insists that Steve’s playing is fine, and counts in take 5. But Brian stops it before it even starts, detecting with his bat senses that a flautist has lost their perfect position: “Wait a second, the flutes aren’t balanced quite again. Move in, Jay.” Jay moves in, they demonstrate their note, and Brian’s happy. But Brian again stops the band before another take can start, asking for Frankie to play in a lower register on his glockenspiel. Frankie reveals that he’s already playing the line as low as he can, and so Brian asks for softer mallets, which Frankie tries, but Chuck tells Brian that it doesn’t sound good and isn’t going to cut through. Brian settles on not changing the glockenspiel sound at all.
All the while, Frankie is joking about the “balls” on the end of his mallets as Brian requests different sounds from him: “I got steel balls!”
“I ain’t got no balls!” jokes Carol, cracking up. Brian tries to get everyone serious, and requests for everyone to “get into this one.”
“Here we go, here we go, please!” Hal concurs. “You gotta let it go.” The next attempt, counted as take 6 (but actually still take 5), is another nearly complete take. It’s a little bit worse than the other nearly complete take 2; Frankie errs in a couple spots, and the 12-string balance isn’t quite what it was before, with Jerry Cole’s lower line coming in more prominent than Billy’s lead part. Frankie again gets tenacious during his spotlight in the last verse, and plays his 16th note run far too fast, getting out of step with Steve’s clicker and the guitars. “Hey Frankie, that got a little bad,” Brian bluntly tells him.
Brian stops take 6 only a few bars in to discuss something with the guitarists sitting next to him. Next, he addresses the band to make sure they all know how the song is to end: “Are you familiar with the fade? You know what’ll happen, don’t ya? You just go sixth verse, you’re at the end of the chorus, ‘I wanna go home,’ and then you keep going, right? You don’t stop, you’re still in A-flat. You don’t ever change chords after that last A-flat.” Hal distractedly starts drumming and singing Jan & Dean’s “Detroit City,” another song with an “I wanna go home” refrain which he had played on. The musicians chat to each other in an attempt to decipher Brian’s very quick and somewhat unclear instructions while Hal grows impatient trying to count in the song. It’s plain to hear that Hal usually had the most amicably rowdy relationship with Brian while they were recording.
The following take 7 (slated as 8) is the first complete performance of the song. Hal tries something daring by playing double-time in the fadeout, and Brian and Chuck experiment by fading everyone out directly on the three-track. The take was marked “H” for “Hold,” and Brian and the musicians listened to see if they thought it could be a master. However, there were problems with the performance – namely bad notes from the flutes, Jerry’s 12-string, and Frankie’s glockenspiel, which simply couldn’t be ignored in that high register.
Chuck starts taping again for take 8, but Brian offers the musicians a couple of minutes’ rest time, and the recording is aborted. Brian evidently used that opportunity to head into the laboratory and make a number of further changes before continuing. He adjusted drum ideas with Hal, Al De Lory’s piano was properly mic’d (or brought into the mix), and Frankie was given an easier scale to play at the end of the third verse (eighth notes instead of 16ths). The flutes were also given new parts to play throughout the verses and choruses where they appear, rather than just in the first eight bars of each. Brian is still revising their lines when Chuck begins to roll again, captured on tape imparting the melody that will introduce the song: “Flutes, the top will be ‘da, da da da da da.’ That’s how you’ll start it.” They play it back perfectly, learning by ear from Brian’s singing. No time to write that down before they’re off and away once again.
Take 8 stumbles on a false start due to issues with the guitars, but the following take 9 is nearly complete, with all of the new parts in place. Vital switch-ups happen in the drum department here – basically, Hal reorders the pattern by introducing the backbeat in the second verse (section three) rather than the second chorus (section four), and then in the second and third choruses, he stomps full-throttle eighths on the kick drum. Some kinks need to be worked out, and that second chorus gets off to a rough start rhythmically, but the change is a successful one for opening up the track’s energy sooner. Everything else is played well until Brian cuts them off near the end of the fade: “Okay, now, could we do, could I have Steve…” The tape stops before he’s finished.
Tape resumes with Brian slating take 10, which is flubbed due to some rhythmic problems that occur right off the bat. Frankie starts having troubles during the first chorus of take 11 and stops the take himself by aggressively sliding his mallet across the glockenspiel to signal a problem. “What happened?” Brian asks.
“I goofed,” Frankie responds. Take 12 is another false start due to Steve’s thumb getting stuck and not getting the clicker to sound in time. “Thanks, Steve,” Brian quips. Hal makes fun of Steve’s “stiff thumb” and accuses him of having a muscle spasm. Both guitarists get a little twisted in the first verse of take 13, and Brian calls for one more.
“Thirteen, here’s the lucky one,” Hal says. Chuck tells him it’s actually fourteen. “Lucky fourteen,” Hal happily tells the room.
Some audible discussion from the booth reveals that Brian may have been singing along the whole time while the takes were going, and that’s what kept throwing off the guitarists. “Don’t do it no more, I’ll kill ya!” Billy says.
“I sang in Billy’s ear, and he got hot,” Brian explains. The following take 14 is a spot-on performance, holding together all the way through the song to collective satisfaction. Although Hal keeps the recent addition of the eighth note bass drum stomping in the fade, he reverts to earlier patterns elsewhere – as in, only hitting the first beat of each measure during the second verse, and bringing in the standard rock backbeat at the following chorus. There’s no discussion on tape to clarify if these changes came from producer instructions or from Hal’s intuition. In any case, Brian’s happy with what he’s getting and interrupts the fadeout after they’ve played enough: “That’s it, thank you very much!”
Edit & Demo Vocals
Chuck immediately marked 14 down as the master and circled it. With that, at three in the morning, the musicians were all free to go, but producer and engineer had more work to do in the studio. They spooled back through the other versions on tape, and upon review, Brian concluded that he actually preferred the way Hal had played the second verse in take 9, the one where he brought the backbeat in sooner. The most straightforward solution to bridge that arrangement compromise was by making an edit between the two performances. Chuck spliced the second verse from take 9 directly into take 14, placed the discarded section of take 14 on the end of the reel, and wrote a note on the box to indicate “8 BARS MUSIC EDIT” (though it was actually 16 bars). The splice is nearly imperceptible unless one listens very closely to the tambourine, owing to the deftness of Chuck’s razor blade and the consistency of these ace musicians.
As soon as they’d finished with the track, Brian wanted to try something he didn’t typically ever bother with, which was overdub a demo vocal for reference. Not an unusual practice for many artists, but Brian and the Beach Boys tended to go straight into adding the master vocals they intended to release. The reasons for adding a rough vocal here, now, on this track, feel obvious; it’s “Sloop John B!” The lyrics were finished off decades before anyone got to the studio! Brian all of a sudden had this wonderful and radical reinvention of a traditional folk song on tape and was curious to hear how it sounded when supporting the melody, and the other singers in his group were in another state. And, while he’d thrown all of his energy into sculpting the instrumental arrangement, Brian didn’t yet have a clear idea of where to go with the vocals – this was an opportunity to lay down a working draft.
The instruments were bounced to track 1 of a second three-track tape while, in the studio, Brian overdubbed a lead vocal fed into the same combined mono signal. He only attempted one take and took it pretty loose, keeping all of the old colloquialisms from popular versions like “I feel so break up” and “this is the worst trip since I have been born.” Chuck put dollops of plate reverb on his voice. Brian then overdubbed a second vocal, which was simultaneously printed in isolation on track 3 and ping-ponged together in mono with the instruments and first voice on track 2; he sang a harmony below the lead in the first chorus (which didn’t quite work), doubled a few lines at random, improvised some bass vocal ideas, and sang a harmony above the lead in the second and third choruses. Chuck spliced this second-generation reference version onto the original three-track reel and labelled it “ROUGH TAKE W/VOCAL.” When heading home in the early hours of the morning, Brian likely took with him dubs of both the backing track and the vocal demo.
[Note: This mono reduction with the track and Brian’s demo vocals was released on The Pet Sounds Sessions (1997) as CD 3 track 28, and on Pet Sounds: 50th Anniversary Edition (2016) as CD 3 track 22, mastered directly from track 2 of the three-track reel.]
Intermission (August – December 1965)
The Beach Boys’ touring entourage touched down on home turn in the last week of July. It can’t have been too long after their return that Brian invited his bandmates to Western to hear the new arrangement of “Sloop John B.,” which customarily knocked them all out. “I got a phone call to come down to the studio,” remembered Al, who’d done his part to turn Brian onto the idea without any clue he’d been receptive to it. “Brian played the song for me, and I was blown away.”
“The way Brian put it together was truly brilliant,” Carl also added. “It was totally unique for that song – ‘cause it was a folk song, acoustic guitars… And then Brian came up with that ostinato, that guitar figure that keeps repeating itself, and there are two of them actually that give it that sound. The bass line … He was really coming into his mastery. I mean that’s when he really was demonstrating that he was a master.”
However, for reasons unbeknownst to anyone trying to make logical sense out of the timeline (but which inevitably had to do with the natural waning of interest and ideas for a creative person), no collective voices from the Boys would hoist up the John B. sails in the summer of 1965. “Around the time we were recording ‘California Girls,’” Bruce said, “I remember Brian playing us the track for ‘Sloop John B.’ I was so in awe; it was so great. A few months went by before we recorded the vocals.” Brian parked the track, moved onto other things. This wasn’t new or unusual behavior; the track for “Don’t Hurt My Little Sister” had sat on a shelf for seven months before the time felt right to finish it with vocals. The closeness of “Sloop” to the Summer Days sessions has understandably tricked some members of the band to believing in retrospect that it was originally worked on for that album.
More touring was to follow, and recording projects: In August and September, the group recorded the “live” Beach Boys’ Party! album. In October, “The Little Girl I Once Knew” became the new single, and Brian cut a couple of orchestral productions for his uncle Carl Korthof. In November, he experimented with two instrumental tracks for undecided purposes – “Trombone Dixie” and “Run, James, Run.” Brian and Marilyn bought their first real home together around July or August, a spacious pad with a view of the city up in the Hollywood hills at 1448 Laurel Way. Various new things were installed into their lives, including the vital insertion of two iconic, loud-as-hell dogs (after a chimpanzee didn’t work out), Banana the Beagle and Louie the Weimaraner. For a housewarming present, Murry gifted his son a beautiful black Chickering 105D 8’7” grand piano built in 1934. A small white-walled room off to the side of the sliding doors that lead to the pool was fitted with good speakers, shelves for tapes, a 1/4” tape machine, and a Scully 280-4 1/2” four-track machine.
That tape deck came to be known as the “Sloop John B. Machine” by friends, because so many of them remembered going up to Brian’s house to hear him blasting that track in his new audiophile power-laboratory. “When we would return from a tour,” said Carl, “usually I would go right from the airport up to his house on Laurel Way. I have a vivid memory of going up to hear ‘Sloop’ on a big Scully four-track tape recorder. He had these 604 studio monitors in this little playback room off the dining area. Because the space was so small, the sound was more enormous than it would normally be.” (Note: It’s possible that at first, Brian was playing the instrumental for guests from a disc or an unknown mono reel, or from another three-track machine that he soon replaced, because “Sloop” was recorded on three-track tape and incompatible with the Scully he most famously used at Laurel Way.)
Who knows what brought “Sloop John B.” back to the forefront of Brian’s mind, but it could’ve had something to do with the Byrds’ smash hit “Turn! Turn! Turn!” and his appraisal of the Beatles’ Rubber Soul once again ricocheting the word ‘FOLK’ all around his frontal cortex. In any case, in December of 1965, he mapped out a vocal arrangement that rebooted his excitement and summoned the Boys back to it.
Overdub Session (December 1965)
Early Vocals
Wednesday, December 22 was the date the Beach Boys returned to Western to record the vocals, a day-long festive session involving all of the group. Chuck Britz ran the board as usual, but photographic evidence reveals that he was assisted on the occasion by another staff engineer/tape operator, Winston Wong. How many other Beach Boys tracks Winston might’ve had an involvement in isn’t known, as Chuck scarcely documented a second engineer on his tape box legers (and often handled the job alone), but handwriting from Mr. Wong on this track sheet appears to be a fairly unique instance. Also documented by photos is that the Boys were chugging a whole lot of eggnog. So much damn nog. A count of six visible cartons and many paper cups littering the recording console next to Brian and Chuck.
First order of business that morning was again dubbing the backing track to mono on a new 1/2” tape, graduating from three-track to four-track. But before any recording could begin, Brian needed to select a lead singer. Al: “He then lined us up one at a time to try out for the lead vocal. I had naturally assumed I would sing the lead, since I had brought in the arrangement. It was like interviewing for a job. Pretty funny. He didn’t like any of us. My vocal had a much more mellow approach because I was bringing it from the folk idiom. For the radio, we needed a more rock approach.”
From the audition process, brother Carl and cousin Mike (with Brian) won out as the lads for the job. They got around a microphone to try out the first section of the song, intending to do the rest a few pieces at a time with punch-ins; Carl sang the first verse, Carl continued singing the first chorus with Brian taking the higher harmony (appearing earlier than in the demo), and Mike took over for the second verse, which they all double-tracked. A blurry photo from the date shows those three in the studio alone around one mic, quite possibly doing this. Carl: “Brian had me do the first verse. He wanted another texture, and so I did it. It sounded okay, but maybe it was a little too soft.”
The attempt was soft as Carl described, his voice taking on its half-whispered sighing quality. Mike delved into full nasality, but he too delivered a relaxed rendition that didn’t quite match the energy in the track. And the track, to Brian’s mind, somehow wasn’t living up to all of its expectations either, five months on from the basic session. Everyone went out for a lunchtime nog break while the producer pondered.
[Note: A 1996 stereo mix including these incomplete vocals combined with others was released as CD 3 track 17 of The Pet Sounds Sessions (1997), and CD 3 track 12 of Pet Sounds: 50th Anniversary Edition (2016).]
“Billy!”
Enter the strange return of Billy Strange, the principal guitarist on the original session back in July. There are a couple of conflicting stories regarding his re-entry into the song’s production, but we’ll go with the reliable information first and address Strange’s alternate telling later. As remembered by Billy’s son Jerry – who was 10 years old at the time – he and his dad were at United-Western Recording Studios that day in late December 1965 while his dad mixed a Nancy Sinatra song he’d arranged, probably a cut for the Boots album. “As we were leaving and walking to the car,” Jerry recalled, “a man screamed ‘Billy.’ It was Brian Wilson from the Beach Boys. My dad had played guitar on their new album and he wanted to know if my dad could play a session while he was there. He wanted dad to try ‘Sloop John B.’ a new way. I carried in dad’s 12-string Mosrite from the car. There I was sitting in on a recording session with the Beach Boys as my dad played guitar on the song ‘Sloop John B.’ This was a great day.”
The coincidental appearance of Papa and Junior Strange at the studio mid-way through proceedings seems to have prompted Brian to junk what they’d started overdubbing and begin again, firstly by remixing the instrumental track with an additional guitar part courtesy of Billy. He pulled them into the control room of Western 3 for a brief sweetening session and had Billy plug his Mosrite Combo XII electric 12-string guitar direct into the console. The idea was simple – Brian asked Billy to double-track his guitar line from the original session, the high arpeggio figures that in a sense serve as the signature hook of the track. He wanted to embolden that part, give it a swimmy glow and inject the production with greater depth.
Chuck and Winston prepared to again feed the three-track instrumental to a mono sum on the four-track reel, but this time adding a live overdub to the same channel. To create the desired magical chorusing swirl, this third 12-string guitar part was dialled to a softer tone and enveloped in a heavenly halo from Western’s reverb facilities. Tape rolled, Chuck gave the “take 1A” slate, and Billy – fresh from a quick listen to remind him of what he’d played months earlier – doubled his basic track part to the best of his recollection, with lots of subtle variation from the original.
Take 1A routed the parts to track 3 and broke down in the first verse where Billy forgot to make a chord change. Chuck afterwards moved everything onto track 4. Take 2A was nearly complete, albeit cut short in the fade (Brian can afterwards be heard remarking “wow, wow, beautiful!” on the talkback mic). Takes 3A and 4A were both stopped in-progress for moments of loose playing. Take 5A made it to the end to everyone’s satisfaction and was circled as the master.
Brian explained what came after: “Oh! Billy Strange! Do you remember ‘Sloop John B?’ Do you wanna hear what happened? I cut the track, right? Billy Strange was playing direct in the booth. Guitar. Direct in the booth. He was not in the studio. And after it was done, I went ‘Well, that’s a wrap, guys! That’s it!’ He goes, ‘Hey, wait a minute. What if I played a third above that (sings) do-do-do-do-doot.’ And we overdubbed that onto it and the whole track started to sparkle! I couldn’t believe it, you know? It was like the difference between night and day. Really something.”
The idea from Billy to overdub a high harmonization of his original line was graciously accepted and overdubbed onto track 1, where it begins in the first chorus and carries on through the rest of the song. “The track turned on right then,” said Brian. “The track was makin’ it all right, you know, but when he overdubbed that second guitar a third above, the whole darn thing started sounding like Sonny and Cher’s records. It really did, and they’re great, too.” These overdubs are the perfect Midas touch, taking an already astonishing production and fitting it with an enchanted turbocharger to set sail to the moon. They’re also played without a whole lot of finesse, tiny mistakes and choked notes abound, which doesn’t really matter. It’s all about the Swirl. Because the double of Billy’s original part differs a little from the basic track, at times, the whole guitar section between himself and Jerry Cole is in some kind of four-part harmony, and it’s a beautiful thing to behold.
Recreation by Joshilyn of the 12-string guitar orchestra:
This had all been handled in such haste that Chuck didn’t submit an AFM contract to pay Billy (and himself) until exactly a week later, dated December 29 – but Billy definitely recorded his parts on December 22, per the tape box notations, on the same day as the dubdown and the Beach Boys’ vocals. The time of his impromptu session was noted as 12:30pm to 1:30pm.
“After the session,” Jerry Strange recalled, “they came out to show my dad and I a couple of their new cars. In the parking lot were three of the coolest cars I’ve ever seen. There was an Aston Martin DB5, a new Corvette, and a red Jaguar XKE roadster. I don’t remember whose car was whose but that was the day I became a car nut.” The Jaguar XKE belonged to Bruce, a recent purchase made with his Beach Boy money. The Aston was Carl’s, and several of the group at one time or another owned a Corvette.
There is another anecdote told by Billy Strange about the “Sloop John B.” guitar overdub sweetening, one of the more famous stories to come from a studio musician involving their work on a Beach Boys track. Repeated far and wide, it is cited as a great example of Brian’s gregarious generosity and insistence on getting the right sound. In brief, the story goes that Brian calls Billy Strange to overdub a 12-string guitar solo onto “Sloop John B.” on a Sunday. But Billy’s not ready! He’s got his son with him, they’re chilling in front of the TV eating cereal for lunch, and Billy somehow has no access to a guitar, let alone an electric 12-string guitar, which he doesn’t own. So Brian calls up the owner of the then-shut Wallichs Music City (which closed at 6pm on a Sunday) to re-open the store, orders delivery of a Fender XII guitar and Fender Twin amplifier directly to Western on the spot, and Billy goes on to lay down the magical overdub, an eight or sixteen bar solo in the middle of the track that he pulls off in one take. After finishing, as Billy tells it, “[Brian] reached into his pocket and pulled out a wad of bills and gave me $500 and said ‘Don’t forget to take your guitar and amplifier.’ That’s the kind of guy he was.”
Generally, we prefer to debunk by presenting a good collection of new information rather than tearing down old legends. Here, however, the story is so ingrained in the lore of this production, it must be addressed directly. We have no doubt that Brian showed Billy much generosity over the years, and we can’t know for sure what happened on every step of that day. But here are the facts:
- Billy did overdub an electric 12-string guitar to “Sloop John B.” and his son Jerry was with him, so that part of the story checks out.
- Jerry remembers the encounter well, and recalls no buying of anything.
- Billy definitely already owned an electric 12-string guitar and had played it on numerous records before this, including Beach Boys dates – not un-notable among them being the original session for “Sloop John B.” earlier that year. There exist photos of his three Mosrite Combo guitars (6, 12, and Bass) that he obtained in 1965, a matched set of new release models sent to him by Semie Moseley. Jerry recalled that his dad did, before that, use another 12-string guitar of uncertain make that was given to him by Brian Wilson.
- An amp was not and was never going to be necessary; Billy’s guitar was recorded direct, as 12-string guitars on Brian’s sessions almost always were.
- This did not happen on a Sunday.
- It took more than one take.
- There are two guitar overdubs and neither are a solo.
More questions than answers remain about what Billy remembered, but those are the facts. Did Billy invent the story out of whole cloth? Probably not! There are too many precise details that he related more than once to just discount the story. But it certainly wasn’t about playing on “Sloop John B.” on a Wednesday in December 1965. The detail from Jerry of his father previously having another 12-string guitar that Brian bought for him lends weight to the notion that actually, this did happen, but for another song – which is a fairly common occurrence in the memory of busy studio musicians. The question is, which song? There is only one earlier Brian Wilson production with an electric 12-string guitar solo that wasn’t played by Carl – “Twelve-O-Four” by Bob and Bobby, recorded in August 1964. There has been no AFM contract located for this tune (only a late submission for its B-side, “Baby What You Want Me to Do,” which doesn’t quite match what’s on the A-side) and the tape’s whereabouts are unknown, so it’s nothing more than a speculative candidate without supporting evidence besides the process of elimination. The truth behind this Strange tale remains unanswered.
Final Vocals
Moving swiftly back to the music the Beach Boys dabbled in to keep them alert during their eggnog chugathon.
With the track shimmering like a brand new sloop ready to be rolled into a Caribbean harbor, the group trooped back into the studio to begin overdubbing the vocals again in earnest. To backpedal – we said something about Brian planning a vocal arrangement, didn’t we? That’s always a half-guess. There’s usually a sense that he’d come in with aspects of a plan, a concept for the parts, the more intricate of them feverishly sketched out at the piano with Marilyn taking singing requests at 3am – but nothing written down, no paper for assistance when he and the boys walked into Western Recorders. Here, it seems pretty likely that the general unfolding structure of the piece and an overlapping six-voice arrangement in the chorus were things figured out in advance. But alongside that, there’d be a freewheeling quality to Brian’s work in these sessions. He wouldn’t know for sure if an idea clicked until everyone sang it. And then there’d be a break, dashing to the piano to figure out some more harmony before getting back to the microphones. That seems to be what happened when they did “Sloop.” More on those instances when they come up.
Some transfigurement went into who was singing what, and what they were singing before having another go at the vocals. First, modernizing the words. From Al: “The song’s original lyrics are unusual. They don’t have meaning in the lyrical sense now – they’re from another era. They’re archaic English, and we had to change one of the words. In one line we sing, ‘I feel so broke up…’ The original translation from Sandburg was, ‘I feel so break up.’ There are some chord progressions in our version that give the song a different expression – a ‘Beach Boys’ expression. It makes the singing a lot more interesting. Overall, it has a John Philip Sousa dimension to it.” Alongside that “I feel so broke up,” someone – quite possibly Mike – modified the last line of the third verse to “this is the worst trip I’ve ever been on,” and changed “the people’s trunk” to “the captain’s trunk.” More subtly than those changes, a quick “yeah, yeah” was added in the first and last chorus and second verse to round out the melody over the minor chord change (which hadn’t been sung in the initial Carl/Brian/Mike attempt).
Also, swapping the lead vocalists. Seeking a rougher projection to cut through on the radio, it was decided that Carl wasn’t the right voice to introduce this production. “Brian sensed he needed a little more edge there,” Carl said, “so he sang the first verse himself.” Brian and Mike took the solo spots, being the classic commercial-friendly duo with the most experience.
This full vocal arrangement would require two different layers of double-tracked voices to cover the parts the way Brian wanted, which meant anticipating another reduction mix later down the line. They started on the take “5A” master with the leads and some of the essential group parts, recorded naked on track 2 and doubled on track 3. Photographs from the session show all six of the group stood at three microphones: To the left, Bruce, Brian, Carl and Al at a Neumann U47 opened all the way around, live mixing themselves by adjusting their distance from the mic. In the middle, Dennis at an RCA Type 77 ribbon mic, there to smoothen his sandy tonality and support essential baritone harmonies when he’s at the bottom of the stack. To the right, Mike on his own Neumann U47, directional, for his lead spots and resonant close-proximity bass vocals. The Beach Boys were all by this time quite used to recording in short, precise segments, trusting Chuck’s attentiveness with the punch-ins and punch-outs to allow them to spool back and forth through different parts of a song. “Sloop” was no exception, and vocals on this second-generation tape were recorded in six sections. EMT plate reverb and gentle limiting were used throughout.
Section #1: First verse. Brian sings an appropriately gritty intro to the tale unaccompanied, his two vocals recorded separately on tracks 2 and 3. For all of the sections following this, when the voices were double-tracked, Chuck patched it so they were simultaneously ping-ponged together with the first overdub in a combined mono signal – so you’d have a single layer of vocals on track 2, and a doubled combination of vocals on track 3. Why do this? It doesn’t really have a clear purpose unless trying to render the first track non-essential for future reuse. Maybe Chuck and/or Brian wanted to leave options open.
Section #2: First chorus. Performed as a straight continuation of the melody harmonized tightly above (which, in the July vocal demo, Brian reserved for the later choruses). To give it more force, Mike and Carl sing the lead here in unison while Brian takes the high harmony – like Byrds harmonies, in which Clark and McGuinn would often sing lead together with Crosby harmonizing overhead. The boys give it all they’ve got, with a thrilling belt on “Call for the captain ASHOOORE…” letting us know we’re in for a powerhouse of an adventure at sea. On the second overdub, Brian accidentally reverts to singing “Well, I feel so break up,” momentarily clashing with the others. And yes, it is Brian who makes that mistake. Fun trivia to point at and tell people about when it happens.
Section #3: Second verse. Mike takes over the lead to sing of drunken first mates and Sheriff John Stone, a masterful application of his nasal punk prowess. Edgy and distinctive while still making you believe in that “I wanna go home” pronouncement. It’s as if the scene’s changed and we’ve been introduced to another disgruntled sailor on the boat. One of those spontaneous Brian vocal arrangement additions is performed alongside him, something that did not exist earlier in the day; Bruce and Carl (former above, latter below) sing a two-part backing harmony, a descending “ooooh” figure in four rounds that glides along prettily behind Mike’s lead. The idea is loosely taken from the third verse of the Kingston Trio’s version, but Beach Boys-ified.
Section #4: Second chorus. This is where the Beach Boys’ adaptation of “Sloop” unveils its full might, coming in at the 1:36 mark of the song. Brian exploded the traditional material outward to a six-part overlapping vocal arrangement; they opted to tackle just the middle four voices here first, with the lead and bass parts to be overdubbed later. In descending order, the vocalists on these layers are Brian, Al, Carl, Dennis. It starts out on a four-part block harmony with Dennis on the tonic (below the melody), Carl on the third (the usual melody), Al on the fifth (the harmonization in the previous chorus), and Brian an octave above Dennis in a forceful nasal head voice. But while the lower three dip down to repeat “hoist up the John B., hoist up the John B.” and “see how the main sail, see how the main sail,” Brian holds out “sailllll” and “seeeet.” All sing “call for the captain ashore, let me go home” together, then Brian, Al and Carl repeat “let me go home” as a three-part harmony, and Carl and Dennis pick up with “wanna go…” as a two-part harmony into the following group “…home, let me go home.” Over the magical minor turnaround, Al and Dennis hold a wide “ohhhh,” Carl takes a solo “hoist up the John B. sail” between them that wraps back into the chord, and Brian echoes his “hoist up the John B.” up high. All of them together take the last “feel so broke up, I wanna go home,” capped off by Al and Carl singing a beautiful, melancholy “let me go home” tag. Not only is it stunningly well-coordinated, it’s emotionally resonant and in service of the song, like all the different voices of the crew are crying out in longing. But this was intended as a backing arrangement, a bed behind other vocals not yet added.
Section #5: Third verse. In the climactic bass and guitar breakdown, the lead reverts to a grizzled Brian to address that bastard of a cook who threw away his grits and ate up his corn. There are no backing vocals here. Following Brian’s swoons of anguish, and the band ramping up into double-time before the final dropout, seaman Love reappears to deliver the closing statement: “This is the worst trip I’ve ever been on.”
Section #6: Third chorus. Mostly the same as the second chorus, but at the IV-ii change the group sing an “ooh, yeah, yeah” harmony all together. It wouldn’t even be heard before the end of the fadeout. Al is the only one who adds a last little “wanna go home” line also after the fade’s end. They burst into another chorus and Al starts laughing. “It’ll be out,” Brian says.
After completing that initial set of vocals, a reduction mix to a third-generation tape was undertaken to free up two more tracks. This only took one attempt, marked take “1B,” which was spliced onto the existing reel. The backing track and guitar overdubs were mixed together on track 1, and the vocals were mixed together on track 2. All the while Brian’s job involved running back and forth from the microphones to the piano to the control room – he had to supervise the dubdown, teach new vocal parts, mix levels, go out to sing with the others after finding a balance, and do most of it all over again for each passage. Some vocals added on the third-generation dub were extraneous touches cooked up in the studio, some were essential. Similar to before, the group overdubbed the first layer of voices on track 3, and the layers were combined while doubling on track 4. Chuck appears to have used one of Western’s chambers for reverb this time rather than a plate.
The full group added vocals to start with – it’s plausible that these sections are what they were doing when photos of all six in the studio were snapped. Right at the last “…home” of the first chorus, Mike and Dennis sing a unison “duh-duh, duh duh-duh” baritone vocal for two bars that’s ripped straight out of Peggy March’s “I Will Follow Him.” Some dialogue is heard on the tape right after.
Bruce: “How’s that?”
Brian: “It’s a gas.”
Bruce: “Are we cutting now?”
The following part was performed in a continuous take, but re-recorded afterwards via another punch-in; at bar nine of the second verse, five of the group (without Mike) sing a massive open-sky “ahhhh” harmony across the turnaround, the crème de la crème of the whole vocal production. According to Bruce, when figuring this section out, “we had a ‘who could sing the highest’ contest on ‘Sloop John B.’ Brian lost and I won, so there’s a stratospheric note that I sing and it’s on the mix today.” His memory of what transpired is slightly off, because Brian certifiably does sing the highest part in the five-part stack, a siren wail that begins at Eb5 and reaches up to F5, while Bruce sings C5 to Db5. It may be that Bruce proved he could sing an even higher note (which he could!), but the contest-winner wasn’t used in the recorded arrangement. The whole harmony from top to bottom is structured Brian, Bruce, Al, Carl, Dennis.
Next, it was up to Brian and Mike to complete the six-part vocal arrangement in the second chorus, filling in above and below the middle four voices that had been established by previous overdubs. Brian delivers the high lead here a whole octave above the traditional melody, leading into it with an exciting, belted “sooo…” and creating some brilliant interplay against the backing vocals. Mike simultaneously complements Brian’s soaring part here by singing some low bass responses, one “see how the main sail sets” and two “hoist up the John B. sail” lines, although he can be heard humming other ideas to himself off-mic in spots. The personnel of the final harmony stack when taking both sets of overdubs into account (in descending order of pitch) is Brian, Brian, Al, Carl, Dennis, then Mike.
Next was another instance of those beautiful five-part “ahhhh” harmonies during the double-time portion of the final verse, sung by that same quintet of Brian, Bruce, Al, Carl, Dennis. Not needing another punch-in, Brian and Mike go right from that into the final chorus, singing nearly the same parts as before. There are a few differences here from the second chorus: Mike’s first “hoist up the John B. sail” is actually another “see how the main sail sets,” and Brian’s “hoist up the John B!” is traded in for a high “yeah, yeah.” Once they reach the point where Brian knows the record will fade, he announces, “Now let’s dual ‘em!”
As noted before, the Boys had been double-tracking each of these sections onto track 4 as they went, just as they had with the parts recorded on the previous tape generation. That last “ahhh” harmony break was doubled as standard, but when it came to the final chorus, Brian made a rare judgement call to leave only one single-tracked layer of the Brian/Mike voices at the high and low ends of the fadeout sextet. The thinking behind it could’ve been to flip the emphasis to the backing voices during the tag.
Within that one overdubbing session on December 22, recording for “Sloop John B.” was all wrapped up in time for Christmas. In many past cases Brian had been wont to mix the latest record to mono at the end of a vocal session, but anecdotal evidence suggests that he chose not to do that here. A little time had been bought, as Capitol pulled “Barbara Ann” from Beach Boys’ Party! for a single release just two days prior, and it was sure to start climbing the charts. Brian and crew called it for the night, enjoying the next week off celebrating the holidays and guzzling nog before more scheduled concert dates began on the 29th, with a tour of Japan to follow.
Dubdown & After (December 1965 – April 1966)
Mixing
What usually happened before leaving the studio is that Brian would have Chuck (or Winston Wong, or Bowen David, or Don Blake, or whoever) go into the mastering room and cut a rough mix of what they’d worked on straight to lacquer disc – sometimes inaccurately called an “acetate,” which wasn’t a word in Brian’s lexicon in the ‘60s. He and most said “dub.” If a proper mono or stereo (ha, who are we kidding?) mixdown to 1/4” tape hadn’t been done, they’d cut those things directly into the grooves from a 1/2” or even 1” reel, balancing the channels to a mono signal that hit the cutting machine which imprinted sound on the 7” or 10” disc. Seeking instant gratification in all things drove much of why and how Brian worked.
In all likelihood Brian would’ve made a rough dub souvenir after finishing “Sloop,” but on that occasion, he also took home the actual four-track reel itself to spin on his new playback equipment, enabling him to show off the Beach Boys’ next single release to friends directly from the multitrack master. That’s Hollywood luxury, baby. One such instance introduced an incredibly significant character into Brian’s life, a young musician from Mississippi named Van Dyke Parks. Much, much more about him to come in another chapter for another album, but as Parks’ wife Durrie related, “Van Dyke and I were at the Troubadour one night. David Crosby was there and said, ‘Come on, man. You gotta come hear something.’ And we got in his black Porsche and drove up to Brian’s house. He was mixing ‘Sloop John B.’ in the living room. Brian was bigger than life, as was what we were hearing … in his huge house, sort of overwhelmed by the whole thing and ‘Sloop John B.’ on those huge speakers … to be in his presence was really exciting.”
“So that was the first time I met Brian,” Van Dyke remembered. “‘Sloop John B.,’ as good as that number could sound. Of course, I’d been introduced to it by the Kingston Trio. He deconstructed the tune; he got into its innards. And it was better than riding the carousel at a county fair. It was better than winding up Grandma’s music boxes. It was every bit as good as all of that at the same time.”
Experimenting with “mixing” at home, Brian realized he could really have fun with the dynamics during the dubdown. He discovered a way to create a moment of jaw-dropping a cappella beauty by completely dipping the track for four bars in the second chorus. Doing so would not only create an exciting listening experience, it would show off just what the Beach Boys were vocally capable of, in a way that wouldn’t necessarily come through with all the instruments playing at full force.
Sometime in early January 1966, Brian brought the four-track reel back to Western Recorders and sat down with Chuck Britz to mix “Sloop John B.” for real. With the backing track on track 1, primary vocals on track 2, and most other vocals doubled on track 4 (with track 3 just needing a boost for Brian and Mike in the final chorus), it was a relatively simple task to balance the recording to mono, with only the second and third choruses needing special attention. Besides, Brian had been practicing the mix at home, in front of live guests!
The first attempt at a mono mix was stopped midway through the third verse. Brian and Chuck liked the beginning just fine, but a pickup was needed for the second chorus and beyond; the instruments had been pulled down a split-second too late in the a cappella break, resulting in a distracting whooshing sound. Two further attempts were made to get the latter half of the song right on its own. Take 3 (the second pickup) was complete to the end and subsequently spliced together with the first mix. Then, listening back, it became apparent that they’d started to pull the master fader down on the last chorus a little too early, so another pickup mix was done and the master was re-spliced together – ultimately an edit of takes 1 and 4, with the splice between them occurring at the top of the second chorus. Dynamic range is really pushed to extremes here, volume of the entire track gradually riding up as the song progresses until Brian and Mike’s voices are practically bursting out of the speakers at the final verse, just as Murry Wilson always envisioned. SURGE!
Brian cut at least a few test pressings of the master mix to take home, and he sent one disc to meet up with the Beach Boys in Tokyo for EMI’s welcome reception and press conference held on January 6. “We cut it just before we went to Japan in January of 1966,” Bruce recalled. “While we were there, Brian sent us an acetate of ‘Sloop John B.’ for ‘our listening pleasure.’ Notice, I didn’t say approval. And it turned out to be ‘listening pleasure.’ It was the final mix where the track drops out, and there are only voices. It was fabulous! When you can do things like that, it really improves the dynamics.”
Release
Despite the record’s imminent readiness, they bode time on “Sloop” for a good while to allow “Barbara Ann” to continue to sell. Brian finally delivered product to Capitol for mastering on February 9, handing in B.B. single “Sloop John B.” alongside Brian Wilson solo single “Caroline, No.” The latter was released on March 7, and “Sloop” was issued as a Beach Boys A-side on March 21, paired with “You’re So Good to Me” from Summer Days (And Summer Nights!!).
There is a pertinacious controversy about whether or not Brian truly, honestly wanted to put “Sloop John B.” on the Pet Sounds album. As bandmate Al Jardine postulated, “I think they forced ‘Sloop’ to be on the album because it was already a hit. They slipped it on there to increase album sales.” Bruce concurred with him in assuming that Capitol insisted on it because they wanted a hit on the LP, and the notion that the old folk song doesn’t belong with the rest was etched into accepted history quite quickly following release. But let’s take a look at the irrefutable facts.
On February 23, 1966, A&R director Karl Engemann circulated a company memo with a list of songs and publishing information headed for the Pet Sounds album, compiled from a list submitted to him by Brian, and “Sloop John B.” was included on the document. On March 3, a follow-up memo was sent out with several amendments to the titles on the list – lo and behold, it made no mention of “Sloop.” This all preceded the single’s release, long before any whiff of chart success. In early April, Brian sequenced Pet Sounds, and “Sloop” was chosen to close out the first side of the LP several weeks before the record entered any charts or demonstrated that it might be a sales pull. And winding back the clock, while the project was in progress, both Tony Asher and Danny Hutton independently recalled Brian playing them the tape among various tracks planned for the album, suggesting that he thought of it as apiece with the original material. In short, there is every reason to believe that the decision to put “Sloop John B.” on Pet Sounds came from Brian Wilson and Brian Wilson alone.
Play us out, Al: “I think arrangement wise, and instrumentally, vocally, and structurally, and lyrically, and conceptually, and everything else wise, it’s definitely the best thing we’ve ever done. In my opinion … on a total energy, mass-media level, that’s gotta be it.”
NOTE: Mark Linett’s 1996 stereo mix was created by synchronising the first, second, and third generation 1/2″ tapes into a more flexible multitrack source. However, because one of Billy Strange’s guitar parts (the double of his original line) was locked to the mono backing track on the second generation tape, it could not be separated for mixing and therefore does not feature in the stereo version of Pet Sounds.
Footnote (August 1966)
Of all the various re-recordings of “Sloop John B.” that individual Beach Boys would make in the decades to follow, one stands out as particularly interesting. On or around August 11, 1966, while the Beach Boys were on a tour of the Midwest, Al Jardine put to tape an informal, incomplete rendition of the song, reverted back into the style of the Kingston Trio version he knew and loved so well. Sitting in a hotel room somewhere with Dennis and a portable 1/4” two-track recorder, Al strummed his acoustic guitar in the key of G and sang the first verse and chorus while Dennis took a harmony below him. Gone is the ii chord that Al so proudly provided to the Beach Boys recording, and the original “break up” lyric is back. They did this on the right channel, and then on the left, Al overdubbed the highest of the three original Kingston Trio harmonies, singing in his gentle folk voice while playing a lead guitar part that mostly replicates Billy Strange’s arpeggio from the Beach Boys record. Dennis gently reprises his “duh-duh” part from the Beach Boys recording here, too. An intriguing fusion recipe. This lovely little experiment didn’t go any further than the opening.
RECORDING BREAKDOWN
Key
- Blue – instrument on tape
- Green – voice on tape
- Red – instrument or voice erased from tape
- [d/t] – double-tracked
- [t/t] – triple-tracked
- [q/t] – quadruple-tracked
- [x] – unused in final master
- [c] – track copied or combined from previous tape generation (relevant in multitrack breakdowns)
Sloop John B.
traditional
instrumentation arranged by Brian Wilson, assisted by the studio musicians
vocals arranged by Brian Wilson
produced by Brian Wilson
1966-07-13
½” 3-TRACK (1ST GEN)
BASIC (master edit: take 14, take 9)
takes 1-14
- grand piano: Al De Lory
- Steinway Model C Art Deco
- acoustic guitar: Al Casey (rhythm)
Martin (unknown model)
- electric 12-string guitar: Barney Kessel (high arpeggios)
- Mosrite Combo XII
- electric 12-string guitar: Jerry Cole (low arpeggios)
- electric 6-string bass: Carol Kaye
- Danelectro UB-2
- double bass: Lyle Ritz
- drums: Hal Blaine
- cricket clicker, tambourine: Steve Douglas
- glockenspiel: Frank Capp
- flute: Jim Horn
Gemeinhardt C Flute
- flute: Jay Migliori
- bass saxophone: Jack Nimitz
½” 3-TRACK (2ND GEN A) (unused)
TRANSFER to 1/2″ 3-track with OD 1 – 3+1 to 1 reduction (master: take 1)
take 1
- lead vocal: Brian Wilson [x]
- (combined with instrumental track)
OD 2
- harmony vocal: Brian Wilson [x]
- (recorded both to dedicated track + combined with first vocal & instrumental track)
1965-12-22
½” 4-TRACK (2ND GEN B) (unused)
TRANSFER (from 1st gen) to ½” 4-track – 3 to 1 reduction
OD 1 / 2
- lead & harmony vocals: Carl Wilson, Brian Wilson, Mike Love [d/t] [x]
- 1st verse lead – Carl
- 1st chorus lead – Brian>Carl
- 2nd verse lead – Mike
½” 4-TRACK (2ND GEN C)
TRANSFER (from 1st gen) to 1/2″ 4-track with OD 1 – 3+1 to 1 reduction (master: take 5A)
takes 1A-5A
- electric 12-string guitar: Billy Strange (high arpeggios double)
- Mosrite Combo XII
- (combined with instrumental track)
- Mosrite Combo XII
OD 2
- electric 12-string guitar: Billy Strange (higher arpeggios)
- Mosrite Combo XII
OD 3 / 4
- group vocals: Brian Wilson, Mike Love, Carl Wilson, Bruce Johnston, Al Jardine, Dennis Wilson [d/t]
- 1st verse lead – Brian
- 1st chorus lead – Brian>Mike+Carl
- 2nd verse lead – Mike / backing – Bruce>Carl
- 2nd chorus backing – Brian>Al>Carl>Dennis
- 3rd verse lead – Brian, Mike
- 3rd chorus backing – Brian>Al>Carl>Dennis
- (combined while doubling following 1st verse)
½” 4-TRACK (3RD GEN C)
TRANSFER (from 2nd gen C) to 1/2″ 4-track (master: take 1B)
take 1B
OD 1 / 2
- additional vocals: Brian Wilson, Bruce Johnston, Al Jardine, Carl Wilson, Dennis Wilson, Mike Love [d/t]
- 1st chorus “duh-duh” ending – Mike+Dennis
- 2nd verse “ahhh” backing – Brian>Bruce>Al>Carl>Dennis
- 2nd chorus lead – Brian / bass – Mike
- 3rd verse “ahhh” backing – Brian>Bruce>Al>Carl>Dennis
- 3rd chorus lead – Brian / bass – Mike
- (combined while doubling, 3rd chorus not doubled)
1966-01
MIXDOWN to ¼” mono – 4 to 1 (master edit: take 1, take 4)
takes 1-4
Tracks – 1st Generation
1 – flutes, bass saxophone
2 – drums
3 – grand piano, acoustic guitar, electric 12-string guitars, electric 6-string bass, double bass, cricket clicker, tambourine, glockenspiel
Tracks – 2nd Generation A
1 – [c] track (from 1 + 2 + 3) + Brian vocal 1
2 – track + Brian vocal 1 + Brian vocal 2
3 – Brian vocal 2
Tracks – 2nd Generation C
1 – electric 12-string guitar 4
2 – 1st layer group vocals 1
3 – 1st layer group vocals 1 + 2
4 – [c] track (from 1 + 2 + 3) + electric 12-string guitar 3
Tracks – 3rd Generation C
1 – [c] track + electric 12-string guitars
2 – [c] 1st layer group vocals 1 + 2
3 – 2nd layer group vocals 1
4 – 2nd layer group vocals 1 + 2
Sessions
Tuesday, July 13, 1965 – 12:00am to 3:00am
Location: Western Recorders – Studio 3
Address: 6000 Sunset Boulevard, Hollywood, California
Producer: Brian Wilson
Engineer: Chuck Britz
AFM personnel: Hal Blaine (contractor), Steve Douglas (leader), Chuck Britz, Frank Capp, Al Casey, Al De Lory, Jim Horn, Carol Kaye, Jerry Cole, Jay Migliori, Jack Nimitz, Lyle Ritz, Billy Strange
Summary: 3trk basic, 3trk to 3trk-2A reduction with o/d (vocal), 3trk-2A o/d (vocal)
Wednesday, December 22, 1965
Location: Western Recorders – Studio 3
Address: 6000 Sunset Boulevard, Hollywood, California
Producer: Brian Wilson
Engineer: Chuck Britz / Assistant Engineer: Winston Wong
AFM personnel: Billy Strange, Chuck Britz (12:30pm to 1:30pm)
Non-AFM personnel: Brian Wilson, Dennis Wilson, Carl Wilson, Mike Love, Al Jardine, Bruce Johnston
Summary: 3trk to 4trk-2B reduction, 4trk-2B o/ds (vocals), 3trk to 4trk-2C reduction with o/d (guitar), o/ds (guitar & vocals), 4trk-2C reduction to 4trk-3C, 4trk-3C o/ds (vocals)
Circa January, 1966
Location: Western Recorders – Studio 3
Address: 6000 Sunset Boulevard, Hollywood, California
Producer: Brian Wilson
Engineer: Chuck Britz
Summary: 4trk-3C to 1trk mixdown
Monday, April 4, 1966
Location: Capitol Records
Address: 1750 North Vine Street, Hollywood, California
Producer: Brian Wilson
Engineer: unknown
Summary: mix spliced to Pet Sounds LP master reel
Sources
Based on original research by John Brode, Will Crerar, Joshilyn Hoisington and Craig Slowinski.
Special thanks to Steve Bonilla, for the connection to “I Will Follow Him.”
Tapes and associated documentation from Brother Records and Capitol Records.
AFM Local 47 Contracts 196222, 195378
Richard Le Gallienne, “Coral Islands and Mangrove-Trees,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine Volume 134, December 1916.
Carl Sandburg, “The American Songbag,” Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1927.
Carol Kaye’s 1965 studio log.
Carl Wilson and Al Jardine talk to a fan, interview tape, April 2, 1975.
Al Jardine on Mixed Bag with Pete Fornatale, WNEW-FM, April 17, 1983.
Carl Wilson & Brian Wilson interview, “Forrest Gump” 2-Disc Video CD, Paramount Pictures, 1995.
Brian Wilson, Carl Wilson, Al Jardine, Bruce Johnston, Al Casey, Billy Strange – interviews conducted by David Leaf, appear in “The Making of Pet Sounds,” The Pet Sounds Sessions, Capitol Records, 1997.
Al Jardine, Terry Melcher – interviews conducted by Alan Boyd for “Endless Harmony: The Beach Boys Story,” 1998.
Al Jardine interviewed by Ken Sharp, “A Beach Boy Still Riding the Waves,” Goldmine, July 2000.
“Al Jardine Rings Out Beach Boys’ Folklore,” Endless Summer Quarterly Issue 60, Fall 2002.
Al Jardine – interview 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.
Jerry Strange on Facebook, 2018.
Classic Albums – The Beach Boys: Pet Sounds, BBC 4, dir. Matthew Longfellow & Martin Smith, 2016.
Bruce Johnston interviewed by Valerie Simadis, “Endless Harmony: An Interview with Bruce Johnston,” 2023. https://valeriesimadis.wordpress.com/2023/11/19/endless-harmony-an-interview-with-bruce-johnston/
David Leaf, “Smile: The Rise, Fall, and Resurrection of Brian Wilson,” Omnibus Press, 2025.
Andrew Doe, www.bellagio10452.com.
Ian Rusten, www.beachboysgigs.com.