You Still Believe in Me

(Brian Wilson – Tony Asher)

(Full score coming soon.)

Personnel

Intro:
Brian Wilson – grand piano strings, unison vocal
Tony Asher – grand piano foot pedals, harmony vocal
Marilyn Wilson – unison vocal

Main:
Brian Wilson – lead & harmony vocals
Mike Love – bass & harmony vocals
Carl Wilson – harmony vocals
Al Jardine – harmony vocals
Bruce Johnston – harmony vocals
Al De Lory – harpsichords
Steve Douglas – grand piano
Barney Kessel – electric 12-string guitars
Glen Campbell – electric 12-string guitars
Carol Kaye – electric bass
Lyle Ritz – double bass
Julius Wechter – finger cymbals, timpani
Hal Blaine – bicycle bell, bicycle horn
Jim Horn – clarinet
Plas Johnson – clarinet
Jay Migliori – clarinet
Bill Green – bass clarinet

Chuck Britz – engineer
Bowen David – assistant engineer

 

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The Tracking Session

Setup

“My Childhood” was the tentative title of a song that Brian brought to Western Recorders on a Monday afternoon in late January 1966. Curiosities about the formative stages of life, becoming a man, the innocence in a child’s worldview, relationship dynamics between mother and father and offspring, and nostalgia for his own youth were all subjects pressing on Brian’s mind as he dived deeper into his new “spiritual” direction in music, and titles dealing with those themes in some fashion would become a reoccurring trend in his work for the next year and a half. Clearly, these were ideas that Brian was very interested in exploring through song, but how exactly to express and articulate his feelings about such matters seemed to elude him. With material for a new album formulating at the piano, “My Childhood” would be the first in Brian’s oeuvre of attempted children’s songs.

This was a mid-tempo ballad with a tender melody in the key of B major, written with Brian’s own wide vocal range in mind. Two consecutive verses are based around a cyclical little I-ii-V groove, starting out in musical innocence before winding its way through increasingly uncertain changes as the melody climbs, as if a succinct reflection of growing up; this melody pits a series of quarter note triplets against a straight-eighth backing, which was a frequent feature of Brian’s writing in early 1966. The refrain is a four-bar descent that seems to teeter between comfort and menace, thanks to some unusual harmonies in the bass, culminating in a rather unsettling iv chord (E minor over G in this context). Following the two verses, a “theme” of sorts is stated over the basic progression, and then restated in various ways for the remainder of the song: a beautiful gliding melody which immediately rises an octave to a B4, and floats back down in a melisma across four bars.

Since the days of “Surfin’ Safari” and “409,” Studio 3 at Western Recorders on 6000 Sunset Boulevard had remained the Beach Boys’ ever-reliable home base among the various Hollywood studios where they liked to record. Beyond desires for four-track recording and some specific effects or instruments, Brian operated both tracking and vocal sessions at Western by default, with favored engineer (and pseudo father figure) Chuck Britz running the board whenever he was available. Just two days after tracking “Wouldn’t It Be Nice,” Brian booked a session for “My Childhood” at 2:00pm on January 24, with Chuck doing the contracting, and a band of 12 musicians. Barney Kessel and Glen Campbell were in the booth playing 12-string guitars direct, while the others were arranged in a semi-circle in Studio 3: Al De Lory on harpsichord, session leader Steve Douglas on grand piano, Carol Kaye on Fender bass, Lyle Ritz on upright bass, Hal Blaine and Julius Wechter each on a set of percussion, and a four-piece horn section of Jim Horn, Plas Johnson, Jay Migliori, and Bill Green.

In light of Brian’s desire to move outside the confines of typical rock ‘n’ roll instrumentation with this album, “My Childhood” might have been his furthest departure to date from the original Beach Boys sonic palette. A harpsichord of unknown make or model serves as the leading instrument in the arrangement, both harmonically and rhythmically. Brian had experimented with one of these keyboards at Western several times in 1964, first using a harpsichord on both sides of Gary Usher’s “Sacramento” b/w “That’s Just the Way I Feel” tracked in March of that year; “I Get Around” brought the baroque keyboard into a Beach Boys production for the first time, embedded subtly into the rhythm track, and follow-up single “When I Grow Up (To Be a Man)” expanded on the sound, featuring it up-front in a countermelody. But Brian soon dipped away from his flirtation with the harpsichord, preferring to keep developing what he could do with acoustic and electric pianos, organs, and mallet instruments.

Now recalling his interest in the sound, Brian likely rented a harpsichord for the session from Studio Instrument Rentals, as it wasn’t a mainstay of Studio 3, or of any room at Western. Later in the later 20th century than this, instrument manufacturers would take steps to faithfully revive the art of classic harpsichord making, and most harpsichords nowadays are built to replicate the best surviving historical instruments from the 17th and 18th centuries. But in the 1960s, the Early Music Movement had not quite reached maturity, and although there were some elegant period models still knocking around, most utilized in recording studios were heavy, modern adaptations — louder, brighter things built for practical use, lacking some of the nuanced design philosophy of their ancestors. These could be single or double manual instruments, some (although not this one) using a double-octave mechanism of eight-foot and four-foot strings that could be engaged together, like the octave spread of a 12-string guitar.

The harpsichords (or maybe one harpsichord) rented for Brian’s sessions in the 1966 to 1967 era appeared to be single-manual instruments, with two eight-foot “choirs” of strings in the same octave. The stop controls (like those of an organ) allowed the user to customize the tone by selecting either string choir or both. And there was often a “buff stop,” which muted the sustain of the strings with a strip of buff leather; this wasn’t used on “My Childhood,” but it will come up in an important future session. We don’t know exactly what kind of microphone Chuck liked to use on a harpsichord, but it inevitably would’ve been treated in a similar way to a piano with the mic stuck under the lid. There is also film evidence that they liked to throw a blanket over the harpsichord to capture a better direct sound. It was placed at the back of the room near the percussion area.

De Lory’s harpsichord part went through some adjustment as the session progressed. After trying various ideas, Brian settled on having him play what he calls a “rolling” right hand figure, meaning the upper voicings of the chord are played by the fingers on the downbeats and the lower voice is played by the thumb on the upbeats. The left hand outlines a simple, consistent bass part all through the song. Something to note about the harpsichord that also applies to the entire ensemble: at the end of the third “theme” phrase, a slight ritardando is performed by the whole band to create the effect of a semi-false ending. A two-bar bass soli leads into the repeating fadeout, where the keyboard and other pieces again return to their original rhythm.

The left hand line is joined by three other bass instruments in unison: Carol Kaye’s Fender bass (played with her thumb) dominates the low end, and Lyle Ritz doubles every note on upright bass played arco (a technique seldom used by Brian before this session), lending a rounded, gliding texture to the piece. Both would’ve been captured with Shure 545 dynamic mics, pointing at the F-hole of Lyle’s bass and up close to the speaker of Carol’s Fender Super Reverb amp respectively.

Western’s battered Steinway Model C grand piano of the specialized Art Deco design range (taking up much of the middle of the room) functions as the third “bass” on the song, with Steve Douglas using just his left hand to thicken the unison figure, only occasionally veering away from what Carol and Lyle are playing. Steve was drifting away from regular session work at the time to prioritise his A&R role at Capitol Records, but thanks to a good working relationship with Brian he would almost invariably attend Beach Boys sessions in the first half of 1966, quite often taking on easy keyboard or percussion jobs instead of his usual sax or flute calling. Though Steve was an able piano player, little skill is required to play the part he was given. Piano as a bass instrument was an arranging tool that Brian had become especially fond of using in the past year, beginning with “Help Me, Rhonda” and continuing through “California Girls” and “You’re So Good to Me.” In the penultimate two bars before the fade, the piano cuts out, leaving space for Carol and Lyle’s short two-bar soli.

One advantage of Studio 3’s relatively snug 34’ by 15’ dimensions was that the room could sometimes allow an ensemble to mix itself. With a lot of musicians all situated in close proximity, Brian and Chuck often judged the bleed from certain instruments into other nearby microphones to be all of the noise that they needed, especially when dealing with a minor part included to pad out the timbre of other instruments. Such is the case for Steve Douglas’ piano on this song, which did at first have its own dedicated microphone, but that was turned off once the balance started to come together; it’s mostly just registered through the horn section’s microphone and pumped up in the blend via a compressor. There are only momentary fragments on tape where the piano’s own mic is faded up by mistake before being muted again.

For the first time on any major Beach Boys production involving a band (not counting a cappella or piano-only numbers), the traditional drum set was excluded from this arrangement entirely. Audio evidence confirms that Hal’s drums were brought to the studio and set up for the session, but when Brian made his way over to Hal to offer instructions, the conversation went something like, no thank you, you’re using THESE today — and he was handed the responsibility of jingling a bicycle bell, and honking a bicycle horn, serving as musical foliage reminders of the song’s childhood theme. Presumably, and hopefully, these came from Hal’s “bag of tricks,” and weren’t nabbed from an unsuspecting courier parked outside the studio lot. Hal was asked to ring the bike bell three times in the second refrain and squeeze the horn at set intervals in the fade round. He sat at his drum stool while playing both of these “instruments” (and can be heard thumping on the kick pedal for attention between takes), allowing them to be picked up by one of the usual Sennheiser MKH 405 overhead mics.

Julius Wechter had the more substantial percussion role, ringing out a consistent finger cymbal hit on beat two of every bar, except for the two which precede the fade. He also plays key timpani downbeats on a pair tuned to B and E, mostly in the second verse and fade. A 545 hanging over the percussion area would’ve been enough to capture both; the finger cymbal is audibly dinged right up next to the mic, while the timpani are set back at a distance and relying on bleed around the room to make their impact felt.

In another first for a Brian Wilson arrangement, the typical saxophone and trumpet horn section was swapped out for a mellower quartet of clarinets: Jim Horn, Plas Johnson, and Jay Migliori play standard B-flat soprano clarinets here, while Bill Green plays the larger B-flat bass clarinet, all finding room around one RCA 77 ribbon mic. The three higher woodwinds take a unison line under the refrain, and the four of them with Green enter together at the second statement of the “theme” that follows the second verse, holding soft block chords for the remainder of the piece. At the false ending two bars before the fade, Bill Green sustains a low B alone under Carol and Lyle’s bass riff before the rest of the quartet come back in. Their role would be expanded as the session unfolded.

Brian’s studio adventures were slowly exposing him to more and more musical instruments in a way that inspired his toolbox to grow. Obviously, he knew what a clarinet was, and had used limited double reeds before, like the oboe. Increasing comfort and familiarity with his musicians after working with them for years probably helped him to make some of the leaps he did during the Pet Sounds sessions. At some point, it clicked with Brian that the people he’d been hiring to play sax could also play flute, and clarinet, and other things. This allowed him the safety of the known quality and the opportunity to experiment without possibility of disastrous consequences. If he’d tried a clarinet quartet here, and didn’t like it, it would be easy enough to have the players switch back to a more familiar lineup. As Jim Horn remembered it, “When we played for Brian, we would be sure we brought all these different instruments to the session because we didn’t know what he would ask for next. He might say, ‘Does anybody have a real low-sounding sax or a high-sounding flute?’ If you did, he would sit you down and tell you to play this line. We would learn it, write it down.”

Clearly, Brian did like the clarinets, and continued on to try similar things in the forthcoming months: a flute quartet, flutes and clarinets and saxophones in varying combinations, and even wedging a harmonica into the middle of woodwind harmonies. He would never fully leave behind the idiom of the rock ‘n’ roll sax, but during this explorative period in his career, any reed was on the table if it sounded right for the song.

The signal from the clarinet microphone was audibly sent to a limiter (almost certainly an in-house Universal Audio 176 unit), probably to ensure that the soft wind instruments weren’t getting overpowered in the mix by the rest of the band. Because of this, in the sections where the clarinets don’t play, the bleed from other close proximity instruments surges in volume to where a few are basically as prominent as they are on their own designated channel — particularly the timpani and Carol’s bass amp (and Steve’s un-mic’d piano, as mentioned).

Back in the control room, Barney Kessel and Glen Campbell were playing their 12-string guitars direct into the board (Danelectro Bellzouki and Mosrite Mark XII respectively), inaudible to the musicians on the floor. From “Sloop John B.” to “The Little Girl I Once Knew” to “Trombone Dixie” to “Wouldn’t It Be Nice” to several others on Pet Sounds, two interlocking 12-string guitars playing melody lines were a consistent reoccurrence in Brian’s productions at the time. They’re among the most identifiable sonic signatures linking this body of work together.

From the top of the verse, with the “ring-a-ding” tone that Brian loved so much a couple of days earlier, Barney plays a rising arpeggio lead figure and Glen plays the lower supporting harmony, a circular merry-go-round duet so evocative of the whole childhood concept. Starting at the G# chord, both guitarists stop playing for the remainder of each verse. One notable aspect of the arrangement is that the 12-string guitars and clarinets are used exclusively to each other, taking turns between sections to provide a distinct harmonic pad reflecting the mood of the changes. At the climax of the song (the third theme just before the false ending), the guitars and woodwinds finally come together in the same passage, creating a rich swirl of color that Brian envisioned as a bed for vocal harmonies.

With the arrangement taught, Chuck and Brian made various mixing decisions before it hit the tape. Beyond sending the clarinets to a limiter, some reverb from Western’s chamber was used on the harpsichord and 12-string guitars. Only nine microphones and direct inputs were set up to capture the 12 musicians, and not all were in play:

1 – Hal’s sound effects (eventually unused)
2 – Lyle’s bass
3 – Carol’s bass amplifier
4 – grand piano (unused)
5 – harpsichord (sent to chamber)
6 – clarinets (sent to a limiter)
7 – Julius’ percussion
8 – Barney’s electric 12-string guitar – direct (sent to chamber)
9 – Glen’s electric 12-string guitar – direct (sent to chamber)

Chuck made the call on how to group everything into four tracks before it hit the tape: the harpsichord, two guitars, and two basses along with the reverb send were all on track 1, Hal and Julius’ dry microphone signals were grouped together on track 2, and the clarinets (with the prominent room bleed from piano, bass, and various other things) were simultaneously sent to tracks 3 & 4 — perhaps an error, and one which was eventually rectified during the session.

Recording

Reflecting the gentle movement of the track, this was a relaxed session relative to the physically exerting “Wouldn’t It Be Nice.” The basic track was arranged and recorded within the standard 2:00pm to 5:00pm booking, with tape probably starting to roll a little after 4:00pm.

A note on the tape: Because Brian reused this reel for other purposes at a later date, a large portion of the session outtakes (including the first six takes) were erased. However, much of the audio is actually still quite discernible on the adjacent tracks — all of the important dialogue, the length of each take, key musical moments, basically everything needed to glean a complete understanding of how that part of the session unfolded. It’s partially from this salvaged audio that we’re able to put together a description of everything recorded once Chuck started rolling, even though it shouldn’t exist, but for the Scully’s erase head not quite doing what it was supposed to do.

“Okay, I’d like to have everybody take it from the top, please,” Brian announces at the start of the tape, while Carol and other musicians in the room are heard talking amongst themselves. “Hal, there’s a place where that one note came in perfect, that second horn.”

“Cue me” is Hal’s response, as Jay Migliori asks him to direct the ritard near the end. Hal counts in take 1, which is immediately stopped by Brian after a mistake by one of the guitarists in the booth: “Hold it please! We have some trouble in here. Okay, here we go, let’s make take two of ‘My Childhood.’” The ensuing take is nearly a complete performance, but there’s confusion among the musicians relating to how many bars to play just before the fade, and Hal doesn’t quite get his bicycle attachments to sound in rhythm.

Take 3 is also nearly complete, but the musicians play too many rounds of the chord progression before the ritardando, which Carol alone notices and attempts to rectify. But Brian’s focused more on Hal’s horn, and sings the exact rhythm he wants to hear from it: “BA ba BA!” He rehearses the band from the fade so that Hal can practice until it’s right. Carol and the clarinet players meanwhile confer about the extra bars that everyone seems to be accidentally playing, all throughout Hal and Brian’s workshopping of this all-important honk maneuver. Tape stops as the band work out the kinks under Brian’s direction, and during this recording break, Brian calls for four bars of block chords to be played by all four clarinets beginning at the G# in each verse (not something they’d done in prior takes).

When tape resumes, Brian asks Carol to count in take 4, which he soon stops to make a comment to Hal. Hal counts in the following take (still considered take 4), and it’s nearly complete, but Brian holds it up in the fade because it’s too slow. Take 5 makes it halfway through the second verse before Brian declares it too fast. He demonstrates his perfect middle ground for Hal, who counts in take 6. In the fadeout, Brian stops the take to ask Julius to simplify his timpani hits — one tap, rather than a rolling pickup into each beat, which he only wants to occur a single time into the finale. “Julius, I’d just like a one thing. For the one pickup, DOODLLOO, you know when it picks up? And then just a single thing, okay?” Marilyn can be heard right next to Brian in the booth suggesting that he tell Hal (apparently gesturing for guidance) where to honk.

“That’s what I did, Brian,” claims Julius.

“Okay, groovy,” Brian acknowledges, then moves back to his honkmaster. “Hal, I’ll show you where it comes in. It goes, bom, ba ba, DO DE DO, bom, ba ba, DO DE DO…” Hal sounds the horn in sync, demonstrating that he’s got it. Brian’s next step is simplifying Al De Lory’s harpsichord part, asking to drop the “rolling” pattern for a “straight” eighth note rhythm throughout the entire verse, which he says he misses from earlier tryouts in the session. The rolling rhythm is kept for the quiet four bars under the second “theme” statement in the finale.

Take 7 is interrupted in the second verse when Brian decides he wants timpani to appear earlier in the arrangement: “Julius, start the uh, start the tom boom thing on the first beat in the second verse. Can you go ‘boom ding’? (laughing) You know what I mean! Everybody boom dings once in a while.” He’s making sure that Julius is going to be able to hit the timpani and finger cymbal separately, only one quarter note apart. The percussionist confirms that he can indeed “boom ding,” and Brian jokes about some of the whackier instructions that he wrote on Julius’ music paper in other sessions. “Remember when I wrote out on your sheet, a-chinka chinka ba-chink?” Barney cracks up. “It’s like, I write out on the paper, bajinga-jooka ba-WAKA-WAKA! Can you do that?”

“Chinka chinka waka waka?” Carol asks.

“Waka waka is a real good beat,” Brian assures her, and reminds Hal not to forget the bicycle horn, “‘Cause that reminds us that it’s a childhood song.” They go back and forth again between Hal playing and Brian singing the phrase. “Not quite so loud, though.”

Marilyn can be heard giving input from the booth: “I think just the one sounds better.”

Brian takes her advice. “Just the one. Take eight, please!” After a false start, Brian stops the take in the fade, still mostly hyper focused on exactly where he wants the bicycle horn. “Take nine, please. I’ll show you where; I’ll go like that!” Hal counts in somewhat quietly, so Brian stops that too. “Hold it, please. This is a vocal from the top, so we’ll have to hear a one, two, three pretty loud,” meaning the count will need to be heard clearly while overdubbing.

Take 10 breaks down after the first verse and Brian slates take 11, while Chuck figures out his patching to stop duplicating the clarinets onto track 4 of the tape. “Wait a second, we heard some kind of noise there,” Brian says immediately. “Take twelve, please.” Takes 12 and 13 are both held up before they can get moving, as Brian and Chuck are working on their mix. Some revealing dialogue can be heard while Brian’s finger rests on the talkback button.

Chuck: “Well, the only thing you’ll get is percussion, when Julius is doing it, too.”

Brian: “You really don’t need that separate, do you? Let’s leave a couple open. Where’s he now?”

They’re reconfiguring the mix to record the ensemble onto only two of the four tracks — clarinets on track 3, and everyone else on track 1. Julius’ signal was reconfigured to track 1, locking in with the keyboards, basses, and guitars, while Hal’s microphone was turned off altogether, as the loud bicycle parts could be heard well enough through the limited clarinet signal on 3 and various other microphones which were routed to track 1. This now left tracks 2 and 4 open, allowing Brian the option of overdubbing additional parts at the end of the session if he so wanted (it hadn’t yet been decided). An unnumbered test take is made once they continue rolling tape, with Hal basically just honking his horn and ringing his bell all over the ensemble for Brian and Chuck to decide whether or not it’s prominent enough in the mix without a dedicated microphone. “Okay, I like it,” Brian decides. “Let’s make fourteen, please.”

From here on, it’s all about getting the groove right. Take 14 is too slow, and take 15 doesn’t get off the ground either. “I think we can have a better feel,” Brian decides. Takes 16 and 17 are short false starts that Brian interrupts right away. “We’re starting to lose our feeling of gliding along the keys … I think it should be a little bit faster, just a teeny bit.”

Following take 18 (up to the second refrain), Brian makes another change to the harpsichord part at the end of each verse: “Al, those four bars — can you play it ‘rolling?’ Mark it as ‘rolling,’ and then we’ll go. Okay, we’ll go from the top.” Marilyn warns Brian that “Nick” can’t make it to the studio without a car; it’s unclear who Nick is here, and why he was needed at the studio, but no one by that name plays on the track. Take 19 is too slow for Brian, and take 20 is stopped because “we’re starting to really sound derelict.”

After a pause, Barney Kessel can be heard explaining his Bellzouki’s unusual guitar tone to Brian while strumming some notes high on the neck for demonstration: “Brian, up here, it’s gonna sound choked, and it doesn’t speak as well.”

Brian: “I know. It’s cool. I like that kind of funky thing anyway.”

Barney: “Alright. I guess I’ll do what I can for you!”

The feel of take 21 is perfect, but a mistake made by Barney prompts Brian to stop everyone. Not privy to the error made behind the glass, Carol comments, “Oh, that was beautiful!”

Brian explains, “We had a little problem in here. Let’s make twenty-two. Al, you gotta be right in that thing, all the way, you know. Take twenty-two, alright?” One false start later, the take breaks down when Bill Green makes a mistake on bass clarinet, which Brian doesn’t quite catch: “One more, I heard a bad bass note, or something. Piano or bass. Let’s go, twenty-three.” Steve arrives slightly behind the first beat, so without slating take 24, Hal counts in a second take 23, which is complete and free of errors from the musicians. “Great! Hold it for a second,” Brian comments as soon as he has enough of the fadeout to work with.

Listening to a playback of the final take, Brian decided that the chordal stringed instruments (harpsichord and the two electric 12-string guitars) weren’t quite as strong in the mix as he would have liked them. Wanting to inject more of that sparkly high-end into the recording, Brian asked Al De Lory, Barney Kessel, and Glen Campbell to stay behind another half hour, while he sent the other musicians home by 5:00pm and thanked them for their work. Steve Douglas was also paid extra to remain, being the anointed session leader, although his musical work on the song was complete.

All simultaneously overdubbed onto the open track 2, Al played a “rolling” double of the right hand harpsichord for the full length of the song, voiced an octave higher and using a different configuration of stops; Barney and Glen simply doubled their original 12-string guitar parts from the booth. The trio’s instruments were bathed in the same reverb as before. It didn’t take long at all to crack this, and Brian sent the remaining musicians on their way by 5:30pm.

Since he was anticipating adding vocal overdubs in the near future, Brian moved straight along to the preparation and dubbed the three tracks to mono before the end of the session, bouncing everything from the original tape onto track 1 of a second-generation four-track reel. Chuck put leader in front of the master take 23 for reference, and in two attempts, created a satisfactory reduction mix with three tracks open for vocals, now called take “2A.” These second-generation takes were spliced onto the tail of the first reel, and after a quick trip to the cutting room, Brian left the Western Recorders complex with a mono reference dub of the track and the half-inch reel itself in hand.

A New Direction

Within only a matter of days after recording the track, Brian fell out of love with his original concept for “My Childhood” — not the music, but the whole theme of the song, and whatever partial lyrics he may or may not have written for it. He got together with potential collaborator Tony Asher for the first time later in that week at the Laurel Way house, and Brian aired out several works in progress on his playback room’s Scully four-track machine. “We didn’t write anything that first day,” Tony remembered. “Brian just played some stuff for me and said, ‘I’ve got a couple of tunes, but I don’t know if I want to put them on the album or not.’ One of them was ‘In My Childhood.’”

As an exercise to test the waters of this working relationship, rewriting “My Childhood” with a new identity became Tony’s first assignment. “Brian never played me the existing lyric,” he recalled. “He played the instrumental track and said, ‘I don’t even want you to hear the lyric that’s been written.’ He gave me a tape of the track — a cassette — and then went to the piano and made a second tape, with him playing the melody and singing dummy lyrics. I took the two cassettes from that first day home, and wrote the lyric to what became known as ‘You Still Believe in Me’ apart from Brian. He liked the lyric I came up with, and though we may have tinkered with a few lines here or there, it’s the song you hear on the album.”

Tony’s new version, titled “You Still Believe in Me,” seemed to fit right at home with the themes tackled in relationship songs of Brian’s past, like a matured spiritual sequel to “She Knows Me Too Well.” The narrator is a man painfully aware of his own shortcomings, in awe that his romantic partner can continue to forgive and have faith in him after everything he’s done. Brian loved the lyrics, it probably not being lost on him that they resonated with feelings about his own marriage, and asked Tony what kind of schedule he’d like to work on to write some more. As simple as that, they began a fertile creative partnership that produced eight other Wilson-Asher songs in little over a month.

The nature of four-track recording meant that ever since Brian and Chuck made their on-the-fly mic placement and input bus decisions during the tracking session, “You Still Believe in Me” was forever destined to inherit the quirky honking and jingling textures of Hal’s bicycle attachments. They were locked to the track and couldn’t be removed — a small component of “My Childhood” was forced to live on. But wouldn’t it lose a special something if they could be taken out? That’s just part of the magic of live analog recording.

The Vocal Sessions

February

Evidence suggests that “You Still Believe in Me” may have been the first song on Pet Sounds the Beach Boys recorded vocals for in early 1966; a documented date is missing, but process of elimination puts it in the span of February 11 to 13. (Feb 14 being a vocal session for “Hang on to Your Ego,” Feb 15 being “That’s Not Me,” and Feb 16 most likely being “Wouldn’t It Be Nice,” with mono mixes for all four songs place on the same reel on that last date.) Chuck engineered every session for this tune, assisted by Bowen David on the vocal overdubs. Whether lead or backing vocals would be tackled first was a draw of the hat in those days, depending on Brian’s level of preparedness and how important they’d be to the song’s overall construction. He’d worked out a dynamic four-part harmony arrangement in certain sections that stood independent of a lead vocal, so it made sense to start by overdubbing the group.

With Mike on a U47 and the rest on another U47, five Beach Boys (missing Dennis) were positioned around the microphones covering four arranged vocal parts. “[Brian] found a part for each of us in the room,” Bruce explained, “which was really great, because if you think of it, he really only needed four parts. He didn’t have to be that kind to me, but while he was training me, he allowed the spotlight to shine on me at the same time.” They were all accommodated by simply swapping out who sang in different passages — something Brian had actually already done to get six Beach Boys on “California Girls.”

They started with the first “still believe in me” refrain, a celestial descending block harmony sung softly by Brian at the top, then Al below, then Carl, then Mike; at the last word, all of the singers come together on a rather menacing unison G note over the Em chord (with Mike an octave below the rest). Bruce is heard talking with the others while waiting for their entrance, though he wasn’t needed to sing just yet.

The five of them then handled the second “still believe in me” refrain through to the end of the fade in a continuous pass. After leaving space for the future placement of Brian’s “I wanna cry” line, Mike restates the winding melody of “cry” an octave down, ghosted lightly on both tracks by an off-mic Brian. Brian made this decision to quietly sing behind Mike only two seconds before it happened, whispering his idea as Mike took in a breath: “I’ll sing with you.”

In the next round, and through the fade, the group burst into an ecstatic whirlwind of multicolored harmony to bring the song home — this time structured Brian, then Bruce, then Al, then Mike. The overlapping parts can sound dizzying to the ear, but an easy way to understand their movements is that Bruce and Al are singing a version of the harmonized 12-string guitar lines that arpeggiate throughout the verses; Brian repeats the “cry” melody up top, and Mike sings a new baritone underpinning. Because Brian’s part covers such a tall high-to-low stairway of notes, and the middle movements derive from the guitars, this is a fairly rare instance in a Beach Boys vocal arrangement of the singers crossing over each other’s ranges rather than staying parallel. Nobody has an easy task here, but Bruce and Al face the most difficult coordination challenge to hang onto their melody lines. All parts were performed together on track 3, then doubled on track 4. Chuck may have been adjusting various things between the basic attempt and the double, because there’s a murkier tonality present on track 4. The performance is looser as well, with Al singing a slightly different rhythm, and Bruce not quite finding his part in the round before the fadeout.

Chuck attempted a ping-pong, combining the group’s vocals from tracks 3 and 4 together onto track 2, which would clear room on the tape for a doubled lead vocal, but for whatever reason, Brian chose not to take advantage of this. He instead also overdubbed his vocal onto track 2, erasing the combined bounce of the group in the process. Brian’s voice here is strong and assured, if not quite as sensitive as the song called for him to be; he belts out most of the melody in a full chest voice, even as he reaches up to the high A4 at the peak of each verse.

With all tracks on the tape filled, Brian doubled his lead vocal all the way through while Chuck mixed the song to mono, combining the existing four tracks (mono instrumental track, two tracks of backing vocals, and Brian’s first lead) with the live additional voice. On February 16, Chuck spliced the master take onto a mono compilation reel and, in a moment of confusion (probably caused by glancing at the half-inch reel’s tracksheet), wrote down the title “My Childhood” again. [Where to hear: The Pet Sounds Sessions (1997, Capitol Records) CD 3 track 14, Pet Sounds: 50th Anniversary Edition (2016, Capitol Records) CD 3 track 10.]

A February 23 Capitol internal memo by Karl Engemann detailed a prospective tracklist and publishing info for the Pet Sounds album, “MY CHILDHOOD” with the credit Wilson-Asher being erroneously typed as one of the titles (corrected by hand to “YOU STILL BELIEVE IN ME” later).  A follow-up memo with amendments dated March 3 included the note: “The title ‘MY CHILDHOOD’ has been changed to ‘YOU STILL BELIEVE IN ME’.”

March

Time passed, and Brian came to feel that the master could be bettered. As well as wanting to improve upon his perhaps overly-strident lead vocal (a repeating theme in Brian’s singing as the Pet Sounds sessions progressed), he came up with the idea to add a four-bar intro section to the song, an unaccompanied statement of the “cry” melody played instrumentally.

Brian and Tony checked into Western Studio 3 on the evening of Saturday, March 12, shortly before 7:00pm. Nobody else was in the studio with them that night, besides Chuck Britz and Marilyn sitting in the control room. “We were trying to do something that would sound sort of, I guess, like a harpsichord but a little more ethereal than that,” Tony remembered. He also seemed to recall that they were both a little stoned. They sure sound it on tape. But just a little.

The otherworldly sound they landed upon for this intro passage was a part played by plucking the open strings of a grand piano, by hand: a two-man operation that required one of them to lean under the open lid to do the plucking, while the other sat at the bench and kept their foot on the sustain pedal to make the notes ring out.

Tony picks up the story. “I said to Brian, ‘You sit at the keyboard and push down the notes and hold down the pedals, and I’ll pluck the strings because I know I can do that.’ But of course when you look inside the piano, it’s much more difficult than you think because there are three strings for every note. So of course I didn’t get it right, and then he finally lost patience and said, ‘YOU sit at the piano, I’ll pluck the strings.’ Of course, he wasn’t any better at it than I was! And it took us the longest time to get that — just that simple little phrase. It really took like 45 minutes or something.”

Different objects were auditioned to get unique sounds out of the piano, either using things TO pluck the strings or resting them ON the strings to create a rattling effect. “I tried everything,” Tony said. “Hairpins, bobby pins, paper clips, and my fingers.”

Most of the experimenting happened before any tape started rolling, by which time Brian had taken over as the one playing the strings. Chuck simply recycled the four-track session reel for “You Still Believe in Me” to tape this, since it had a good half hour of outtake material that they weren’t precious about keeping; the piano went to track 1, with blank signals recorded on tracks 2-4 to erase the other music. From the moment Chuck hit the record button, it took about 14 minutes to get a usable take.

“Okay, let’s take it from the top, Tony,” Brian says. “Go! Just play, huh? If it’s on — there are the bobby pins, you’ve set it up real good. You gonna give me a cartage bill in there? Carrying, what, clips? Paper clips? A string of paper clips?” The next couple of minutes are spent riffing with each other and giggling. How to Speak Hip is referenced, the comedy album they were both fixated on at the time. “Let’s try for sounds,” Brian eventually decides. “Is this mic’d, Chuck, real good?”

“Is he definitely gonna use that mic, or are you just joking?” Chuck asks, and tells Tony to turn it away from the piano a little bit. Brian then explains that he’s “looking for the barko bow,” his version of arco, meaning a bow for a stringed instrument. He finds it and tries dragging it over the piano strings one at a time. “Here’s the one run that I wanna run over one more time,” Brian says, and plays and sings the chorus of “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feeling,” with the paper clips he mentioned resting on the strings to make them jingle.

They afterwards resolve to start tracking the “You Still Believe in Me” intro, starting by getting the thread of paper clips out of the piano so they don’t break anything. Brian settles on using his fingernail to do the plucking. “Does this help if I play them? No — I don’t mean play them, but just show you where they are by pushing them in?” Tony asks, offering to push the keys down gently so Brian can see which strings he’s supposed to hit.

“Oh, forget it, I can do it by myself, I really can,” Brian insists. The first take is a false start. He goes all through the second, but hits several of the wrong notes. It quickly becomes clear that remembering which of the strings correspond to which notes is a challenge when you’re staring into the lid of a grand piano. “I may have to mark ‘em. I MAY have to mark ‘em.” Several attempts go by before Brian gets on Tony’s case about trying to incorporate the soft pedal to control the length of the notes. “You can’t push the soft pedal, Tony, it’ll ruin the sound! Really. Now, either get your foot off that soft pedal, or I’m gonna take that barko bow and I’m gonna…”

Chuck gives Tony the “Don’t call us, we’ll call you,” but Brian ribs him about joining in: “Chuck always manages to slip in a bomb to ruin the whole riff. It’s okay, Chuck.” Poor Chuck. The next attempt goes wrong again. “I keep looking at that silver thing… If we can manage to get one of these in the next four hours, Chuck… How late can we go tonight? It’s seven o’clock, Tony, how late do you think it’ll take to get this?” Tony half-seriously suggests that they might stay until twelve.

More takes ensue, and Brian decides to grab some red and blue marker pens from the control room to spotlight the notes he needs to play on pieces of masking tape. While Tony’s marking the keys, Brian presses him for some validation.

Brian: “You have to admit it’s a great sound.”
Tony: “Alright, now wait —”
Brian: “Don’t you?”
Tony: “Yes, but wait, what other ones do you want-”
Brian: “Come on, admit it!”
Tony: “I admit it.”
Brian: “Alright. The ego game’s all over. Let’s get down to brass tacks.”

Following much back and forth about which ones should be marked, more of Brian hitting bum notes, and Tony repeatedly being told to get his foot off the soft pedal, Chuck is apparently exasperated and sitting with his head in his hands. It’s a scene he must’ve witnessed a hundred times before.

“I have seen that head in those hands,” Brian laughs, “and every time he does it, every time we have a session, his hair recedes a little more. Pretty soon I’ll see a bald head in hands going like that. I remember when your hairline used to be down by your bro! Your bro or brow? Here we go!”

The next takes (we’re up to 15) continue with steady improvement, though certain notes still keep tripping him up. Tony helps mark pieces of tape in a couple of other places, but Brian’s getting tunnel vision. “It’s getting so that I’m so involved in that, that all these strings merge into each one, it doesn’t even…”

On take 22, Brian at last plays all of the melody in the correct order for the first time. He’s concerned about the notes dissonantly overlapping due to the sustain, and asks if Tony can do some selective muting with the pedals, but Tony reassures that it sounds fine.

Brian: “They’re gonna all go into each other, right?”
Tony: “Well, that’s okay.”
Brian: “In other words, does it sound weird that way? Doesn’t it?”
Tony: “Sure! What’s wrong with that? It’s very cathedral sounding, which is what the thing sounds like anyway.”
Brian: “I mean, all kind of like in one big sound? Sounds pretty… Is it okay?”
Chuck: “A big chime, or church thing.”
Tony: “Yeah, it sounds very church-y, doesn’t it?”
Brian: “Wow, I’m starting to get flipped. Alright, here we go. Are you sure we’re in the same key? That would be great, if I finally got it and it was in B-flat.”
Tony: “Hey, ‘cause that tape recorder at Columbia was different. Hey Chuck, are we in the same key?”
Brian: “Hey, we didn’t do that, we’re talking about ‘You Still Believe in Me,’ you know?”

What Tony appears to be referring to here is that the four-track machine at Columbia (where they’d likely visited together earlier in the day for some mixdowns) had a tendency to run at a slightly different speed when making transfers, but that wasn’t an issue concerning this intro section’s need to match “You Still Believe in Me” as the tape never left Western. And regardless, Brian’s worry was about playing in an entirely different key to the song. On the next attempt, take 23, they finally lay down a usable master.

It was then decided to double and triple the piano part on tracks 2 and 3, moving the microphone further away for the second layer and closer for the third layer to capture a different tonality and ambiance with each pass. Because Brian didn’t provide a count-in when playing the basic track, these overdubs both start from the second note in the melody.

To track 4, simple vocals were overdubbed: Brian pulled in Marilyn to hum the melody with him (they would’ve had to make a rough guess as to when to start singing), up high in unison, tracing the same line as the piano strings, swathed in ethereal, cathedral-like reverb. Around the same microphone, Tony Asher hums a lower harmony to the couple on the last five notes, invoking Mike’s line in the fade.

With all tracks of the intro filled, Chuck spliced the master take (cutting out the long reverb tail from the prepared pianos) to right before the main body of “You Still Believe in Me,” so it would be easier to find when mixing— not a direct edit, which would come later, but just a relocation on the reel. Then, onto track 2 of the song itself, Brian re-recorded his lead vocal in the same heavenly dollops of reverb. A vast improvement over his performance heard in the February 16 mono mix, this one captured all of the sweetness and vulnerability that the song longed for.

Brian elaborated, Brian-ly, on his psychological attitude. “‘You Still Believe in Me’ was more of what I would call a man who would not be afraid to take all of his clothes off and sing like a girl because he had feelings from that perspective. I was able to close my eyes and go into a world and sing a little more effeminately and more sweet — which allows a lot more love to come down through me, you know what I mean?”

He took a more considered approach to the melody’s snaking range in this version, blending seamlessly to and from his head voice register to glide through the higher notes instead of belting them out. If certain parts of the vocal were a little pitchy, that mattered less than the emotion carried across by Brian’s one-of-a-kind phrasing. And besides, the double-tracking would make those notes ring in tune like a 12-string guitar.

As before, Brian doubled his lead vocal while Chuck dubbed everything from four-track to mono. The intro was mixed to mono as a separate fragment, which was spliced onto the front of the song at the quarter-inch tape stage. [This second mix of the song is the final version heard on any mono edition of Pet Sounds.]

The session on March 12 was closed out by Chuck splicing together a new compilation reel of the album’s mono masters-in-progress. In order, the comp contained:

1. That’s Not Me (2/16 mix)
2. Pet Sounds (2/16 mix)
3. Let’s Go Away for Awhile (2/16 mix)
4. I’m Waiting for the Day (3/10 or 3/12 mix)
5. You Still Believe in Me (3/12 mix)
6. God Only Knows (3/12 mix)
7. Wouldn’t It Be Nice (3/10 or 3/12 mix)
8. I Know There’s an Answer (3/3 mix)

“You Still Believe in Me” was removed at a later date (leaving behind count-off fragments) and added to the album’s sequenced assembly as track two of side one. Along with the rest of the lineup, it was mastered to lacquer on April 5, and re-mastered on April 19 after changes had been made to six of the album’s songs (“You Still Believe in Me” not included).

Because the second component of Brian’s double-tracked lead vocal was not preserved to multi-track tape, Mark Linett’s 1996 stereo mix of “You Still Believe in Me” features a single-tracked presentation of Brian’s vocal. A second stereo mix was prepared in 2012 using an artificial double-tracking effect to simulate two voices. This version has appeared on all stereo versions of Pet Sounds since.

 

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Sources

Tapes and associated documentation from Brother Records and Capitol Records.

AFM Local 47 Contract 105840.

Carol Kaye’s studio log.

Brian Wilson, Tony Asher, Bruce Johnston, Jim Horn – interviews conducted by David Leaf, appear in “The Making of Pet Sounds,” The Pet Sounds Sessions, Capitol Records, 1997.

Tony Asher – interview conducted by Charles L. Granata, appears in “Wouldn’t It Be Nice: Brian Wilson and the Making of the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds,” Chicago Review Press, 2003.

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

Andrew Doe, www.bellagio10452.com.

Ian Rusten, www.beachboysgigs.com.