God Only Knows

(Brian Wilson – Tony Asher)

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

Producer: Brian Wilson
Engineers: Chuck Britz, Bill Brittan, Ralph Valentin, Pete Romano

Personnel:
     (voices)
Carl Wilson – lead vocals, bridge scat vocals
Bruce Johnston – bridge scat vocals, tag round vocals
Brian Wilson – bridge scat vocals, tag round vocals
Terry Melcher – tag backing vocals (unused)
Marilyn Wilson – tag backing vocals (unused)
Diane Rovell – tag backing vocals (unused)
     (instrumentation – basic)
Don Randi – grand piano (w/taped strings) [Steinway Model C Art Deco]
Larry Knechtel – harpsichord
Carol Kaye – electric 12-string guitar [Guild CE-100D custom]
Ray Pohlman – electric 6-string bass [Fender VI]
Lyle Ritz – double bass
Hal Blaine – drums [Ludwig Mahogany Super Classic bass & two toms, Ludwig Supra 400 COB snare], tambourine [Ching-a-Ring], jingle bells
Jim Gordon – waxed paper orange juice cups
Carl Fortina – accordion
Frank Marocco – accordion
Jay Migliori – alto flute, flute
Jim Horn – alto flute, flute [Gemeinhardt C Flute]
Bill Green – clarinet
Leonard Hartman – bass clarinet
Alan Robinson – French horn
Sid Sharp – violin
Leonard Malarsky – violin
Darrel Terwilliger – viola
Jesse Ehrlich – cello
     (instrumentation – overdubs)
Steve Douglas or Jay Migliori – tenor saxophone (x2) (erased)
Carl Wilson – electric guitar [Guild Starfire VI] (erased)

Recorded to 1/2″ 4-track and 1″ 8-track (4 to 8):
March 10, 1966 (12:30am-4:15am) / Western Recorders – Studio 3 (track)
March 10, 1966 / Columbia Recording Studios – Studio A (transfer, vocals)
March 12, 1966 / Columbia Recording Studios – Studio A (sax solo)
Circa March 13 to 19, 1966 / Columbia Recording Studios – Studio A (vocals)
Circa March 25 to 30 (likely 27), 1966 / Columbia Recording Studios – Studio A (vocals)
April 11, 1966 / Columbia Recording Studios – Studio A (vocals)

Mixed to 1/4″ mono:
March 10, 1966 / Columbia Recording Studios – Studio A (Mix 1)
March 12, 1966 / Columbia Recording Studios – Studio A (Mix 2)
Circa March 13 to 19, 1966 / Columbia Recording Studios – Studio A (Mix 3 – Master Tag)
Circa March 25 to 30 (likely 27), 1966 / Columbia Recording Studios – Studio A (Mix 4)
April 11, 1966 / Columbia Recording Studios – Studio A (Mix 5 – Master Main Body)

Initial Release:
1966 Mono Mix 5 & 3 Edit – Pet Sounds LP (Capitol Records, 1966)
1996 Stereo Mix – The Pet Sounds Sessions (Capitol Records, 1997)
1966 Mono Mix 2 & 4 Edit – The Pet Sounds Sessions (Capitol Records, 1997)
1966 Mono Mix 3 & 4 Edit – The Pet Sounds Sessions (Capitol Records, 1997)

Vocal Guide
– verse lead: Carl
– bridge ‘ahhh’: Bruce / ‘do do do’: Carl / ‘ba ba ba’: Brian
– tag lead: Brian (Carl in stereo mix) / repeat response: Bruce / countermelody: Brian
– unused tag high ‘oooh’: Marilyn+Diane / ‘bop bop bop’: Bruce>Carl>Terry

 

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Songwriting

“God Only Knows” is a special song. You know that. We know that. Let’s not waste time being reverent and get straight to the cold, unfeeling information.

The hot and heavy halcyon days of a writing collaboration between Brian Wilson and Tony Asher lasted just two or three weeks in early 1966, eight timeless tunes drummed up over a loose collection of visits to Casa de Wilson sometime in late January to early February while Tony took a break from his job. In no time, they’d written and had tracks in the can for “You Still Believe in Me,” “Wouldn’t It Be Nice,” “Caroline No,” “Don’t Talk,” “I Just Wasn’t Made for These Times,” “That’s Not Me,” and “Good Vibrations.” Another song drafted early into the partnership, “Here Today,” felt difficult to untangle and remained unfinished (and untitled). Pooled together with the other songs and instrumentals in Brian’s back pocket, that body of material almost added up to enough to fill an album, and by February 23, he’d delivered to Capitol’s Karl Engemann a near-complete list of titles going on the Pet Sounds LP. 

An internal memo Engemann passed to the distribution team that day listed ten songs (seven of them Wilson-Asher joints), with a note below reading: “There will be two more selections to be added to the album. One will be an instrumental written by Brian Wilson, the title yet undecided, and then one other tune for the whole group to work on which also hasn’t been named yet.” We can make a fairly safe calculated assumption that the unnamed instrumental was “Pet, James, Sounds” (or whatever it was called) and the song was “Here Today.” 

But what nobody appears to remember, least of all the collaborators who lived it, is that Brian and Tony then got together to write one more new song from scratch, several weeks after all the others (excepting a rendezvous for lyrical work on “Here Today,” and maybe “Times” and “Don’t Talk”). The plan changed – “Good Vibrations” was out, so Brian needed another number to take its place on the LP. Discussion caught on tape tells us that on the morning of Thursday, March 3, Brian summoned Tony to Laurel Way (assuming on his day off) to get something rolling. 

In the mood-setting, pre-songwriting conversation that always occurred before anybody touched a piano, Tony brought up “Stella by Starlight,” a crooner standard he’d turned Brian onto recently which Brian – Brianly – pretended to be caught totally off guard by, feigning that he’d never encountered the song at all before hearing it from Tony, for no reason, despite having produced his uncle Carl singing an expensively orchestrated cover version mere months earlier in October 1965! (Read more about that whole episode here.) To this day, Tony Asher probably doesn’t realize he was being put on, such is the meek earnestness of Brian Wilson’s poker face. Anyhow, the enthusiasm was shared, and “Stella by Starlight” established an aspiration – to write a standard like that of their own, a timeless love song to outlast the ephemerality of either’s name. 

“I had never written that kind of song,” Brian considered. “And I remember [Tony] talking about ‘Stella by Starlight,’ and he had a certain love for classic songs. I think he saw something – like being blind, then in your head you see a place or a song – I think we saw that song together. I was, like, how do you explain it? It’s a place.” The chord sequence that flowed from Brian’s fingertips came as easily as anything he’d ever written. Quickly, like the music was already waiting to be found. “He and I just sat down one night and said, ‘Let’s write a classic love song that’ll live on and on,’ and it just happened.” 

“God Only Knows” is often looked upon as a mindbogglingly intricate composition, one which could only have been passed down from the divine above, and which therefore defies any mortal attempt at understanding its construction. Even Brian admitted that he felt as if the song came to him from God, and he merely had to translate what was already running through him. Although it may be tempting to leave things there, a closer look reveals that the music was very deliberately pieced together, almost mathematically, and only acquired some of its defining attributes later during the recording process. 

The framework of the song is an eleven-bar verse sequence, or chorus, if we think of this like the old standards which inspired it. Brian played one of his “happy shuffles” in swung quarter notes. The key is A, not that that’s especially clear or that anybody can agree about it after 60 years. Things begin on a second inversion IV chord (D/A in this case) before moving up to a Bm6, appropriately uncertain harmonic ground to suit the uncertain opening lyric Tony concocted. 

I may not always love you 

The line wavers and descends, delicately, outlining a shape that drew influence from a tune heard at the movies a year earlier. “Tony Asher and I tried to write something very spiritual,” Brian said. “It’s got a melody similar to the song, (sings) ‘I hear the sound of music’ … ‘I may not always love you’ … It was similar to it.” Of course, the lyric he’s thinking of from “The Sound of Music” is the opening “The hills are alive with the sound of music” – truncate that, shuffle some notes around, and you’re not a long way from the start of “God Only Knows.” 

On the journey through the opening eight bars, four broken-apart melodic phrases flutter up and down like a feather over pairs of chords, each line shifting the mood in an unforeseen direction from the last. Wilson and Asher edge the listener along here both musically and lyrically, and bit-by-bit the emotional throughline seems to unwrap itself. The composition owes a lot to Brian’s “geometric” chord philosophy, in which big, sweeping changes are created by moving his webbed hands as little as possible. Those alien, scarily-named chords are usually just four notes – one from his left appendage and three from his right, placed comfortably! For all the song is constantly wandering from a clear tonal centre, rarely does Brian ever move more than two fingers on his right hand at a time, so he’s always threading a needle the listener can feel and follow from moment to moment. His left hand is unmelodic, metronomic, restless: the steady magic elevator ride that makes sense out of what’s happening above. The incessant bass rhythm played throughout the verse contains three notes per measure: beat 1, and the ‘and’ of beats 2 and 4. This would become a ubiquitous Brian Wilson piano tentpole in much of the music he got into composing for the rest of 1966. 

                But long as there are stars above you 

The left hand here makes a long vertical leap to put the pillow under an F#m7 (by way of a passing regular F#m), and by the fourth measure, a B7 with an A in the bass (the seventh!) seemingly moves the key up to E. Note that the word “stars” is placed on an F#, the highest note in the phrase; music and lyrics are in such natural simpatico here it’s hard to believe one came before the other.  

                You’ll never need to doubt it 

From here, the bass falls back to B (under an inverted E chord) to become cramped and obsessive, tiptoeing chromatically up and then down and down and down and down while somehow all making sense under Brian’s luxuriously gooey harmony conserve. The words “need to doubt it” push tensely against that same F# melodic peak and are underscored by a C fully diminished 7 chord, a real hands off the rails moment, the only change in the progression where Brian moves every note at the same time. Another perfect match between music and words. But the doubt is fleeing, and we’re pulled back to E/B, followed by the most magical shift in the whole sequence. 

                I’ll make you so sure about it 

The left hand moves down chromatically to Bb as the right thumb changes the triad above to a C#m, a mathematical middle between E/B and the A major that will follow; this is the chord sometimes dauntingly referred to as a Bb minor 7 flat 5, but Brian wouldn’t have thought of it in that way. Again, the change is slightly unexpected, pulling us downward even as the word “sure” rises to a G# over it (the emotional and literal climactic highpoint of the melody), but the minimal movement of the fingers and overall trajectory make this potentially dissonant moment feel right, like a warm hug, a signpost to home in the gloom. And within what only amounts to a few seconds of music, we’ve witnessed a complete storytelling arc to unlock the intent behind that intro. 

“This is the one that I thought would be a hit record, because it was so incredibly beautiful,” Tony said. “I was concerned that maybe the lyrics weren’t up to the same level as the music: how many love songs start off with the line, ‘I may not always love you’? I liked that twist, and fought to start the song that way. Working with Brian, I didn’t have a whole lot of fighting to do, but I was certainly willing to fight to the end for that. I was probably saying to myself, ‘God, I hope I’m right about this,’ because you’re never quite sure. But I knew that it would work, because by the second part the real meaning of the song has come out: ‘I’ll love you till the sun burns out, then I’m gone,’ ergo ‘I’m gonna love you forever.’” 

Bar nine finally introduces the tonic chord of A major; here’s where we go into a three-bar refrain that continues the downward motion to E/G# and to F#m7, with a melody that echoes and lovingly expands the beginning of the verse while its words crystallize what the song’s all about.

                God only knows what I’d be without you 

It was an equal parts daring and square move to put that on a record, in 1966. Maybe extra daring for its squareness. Brian got nervous. As Tony remembered, “We were just trying to think of the first lyrics and I said something like ‘God only know what I’d do without you,’ and he just immediately made a joke out of it, meaning, ‘You can’t do that.’ I think at the time it was a reasonable objection. He was saying, ‘We can’t get any airplay if we do that.’ I just said, ‘I think it’s a legitimately beautiful love song and it’s clear that you’re not saying disparaging or blasphemous things about God.’ It took a while to talk him into it. I said, ‘What are we gonna say, ‘Heck Only Knows?’ ‘Gosh Only Knows?’” 

Though the refrain came from his collaborator, it bore an uncanny resemblance to that of a cosmic poem Brian drafted all the way back in October 1961 titled “Only God Could Ever Know.” Both writers recalled spending more time debating the merits of using the word ‘God’ than they did actually writing this song. “Tony came up with the title ‘God Only Knows,’” affirmed Brian of Hawthorne, who tended to shy from challenging those taboos. “I was scared they’d ban playing it on the radio because of the title but they didn’t.” 

At the twelfth bar, it might have felt natural to implement a V chord, which would continue the left hand’s downward walk and set up a second verse. This may have even been how Brian initially sketched the piece while crafting the words and melody. Instead, the more punctuating, ear-catching turnaround he threw in is a walk up of the left hand, harmonized optionally (more on that when we get to the arrangement) with a sequence of rising major chords. This duh – duh DUH DUH phrase is a harmonization of the melody in “sure about it” – Brian right away affixed the riff onto the front of the song, so when the corresponding line appears, it feels all the more comfortingly familiar. 

Being the last of the Wilson/Asher compositions in 1966, this opening verse may be their finest pairing of words and music. The wandering, conflicted chord changes are a lucid musical expression of the narrator’s voice, beginning with apprehension and fear, and arriving at absolute devotion in just a few lines, a real stream of consciousness that both writers seemed to experience together. 

The second verse is musically identical to the first, lyrically continuing to extrapolate on the idea provoked by the refrain: What would I be without you? Not much – probably not worth living if you go. Wouldn’t be a romance for the ages without a tasteful sprinkle of suicidal pondering. 

If you should ever leave me
Though life would still go on, believe me
The world could show nothing to me
So what good would living do me?
God only knows what I’d be without you

“I think ‘God Only Knows’ explains a lot about me,” Brian said, “in that I believe in God and I am humble enough to say, ‘God knows what I would be without somebody.’ Whoever I was talking about. Or, say I was talking about an imaginary person, which I was at that time.” 

The man could be coy about revealing his songwriting muse in public. Brian and Marilyn’s daughter Wendy once shared, “My dad always said that he wrote that song for my mom.” 

And there, we have almost all of the musical information that’s in the song. Those two verses of five lines each were all that Brian felt to be necessary, feeling they’d struck gold and would do well to leave it alone. Sometimes the most lasting classics are extraordinarily simple, you know? “I always felt like we barely got started,” reflected Tony. “I felt like saying, ‘Wait a second, can’t we put another section in this song?’ Because there was not very much to it.” 

The rest of the composition grew around that stem; a bridge would simply be the verse progression without lyrics, played a fourth higher, voicings adjusted accordingly to the minimal finger movements. Following on from its ending refrain sung in that raised register, a natural chord change could then smoothly usher in the third verse, lyrically identical to the second! For the fadeout, another verse might do, performed instrumentally… maybe. At this stage, Brian did not yet know how to end the song, or how he might fill in the bridge. 

He trusted that the rest would arrive to him in time. But before taking “God Only Knows” to the studio, Brian added two important connecting sections: an introduction, and something to tie the second verse to the bridge. 

A simple eight bars were sketched out for the intro, essentially a four-bar version of the refrain repeated twice, without the refrain’s melody – a soaring instrumental line accompanied it instead, eventually to be performed on a horn in the final production. While this part could’ve been thought up on the fly during the tracking session, it’s just as easy to imagine Brian singing or humming the tune in a high voice at home. 

Then, to get from the second verse to the bridge, Brian composed perhaps the most bonkers moment on all of Pet Sounds, an album with a lot of bonkers moments going for it. Ignoring the swung rhythm of the rest of the song, he switched to a straight, angular rhythm across four bars, and in place of a singular melody line, Brian put to this rhythm a series of falling triad chords in his right hand, paying absolutely no mind to the confines of any one major (or minor!) key. In his left hand, he augmented the chords below with seemingly unrelated bass notes, extending them even further away from the rest of the song. This startlingly quick flurry of ten chord changes is packed into two bars and repeated. 

There’s an old school big band sensibility to the passage, a ‘50s modern harmony razzle dazzle to the notion of shaking up the listener mid-song with a juxtaposition so bombastic and choppy. Brian’s formative influences are in play – one can imagine the Four Freshmen singing “Bow bow! Ba ba bow!” with some exciting brass stuff in the background. The interlude serves to reset the listener’s expectations, and as a result, the bridge that follows feels less like a modulated repeat of the earlier verses and more like an unexplored place. Brian didn’t know what to call this section and would only ever refer to it as “that one spot” when talking to the musicians. 

When Brian eventually taught this song to the Beach Boys to perform live, they settled on a much more straightforward modulation by way of a bass walk-up. We refer to this version as the Coward’s Bridge, but it is entirely understandable that a band would use this simplification for ease of mind – it’s also the way Brian preferred to play “God Only Knows” in casual settings. 

As they sat at the piano and absorbed the near-complete work, both writers recognized that what they’d created here felt special, and it had all happened in such a natural flow. Tony recalled, “It’s a short song, and I think Brian spent more time tweaking the instrumental part than we did writing the words. None of the others came that easily.” 

“‘God Only Knows’ took me and Tony about an hour to write,” Brian said once. “It came very fast, just like that. And he and I were both astonished with it; we said, ‘We have a classic song on our hands here!’ I almost got tears. I mean, it was a beautiful tune that we had written together, you know.” 

An important aside here: Brian spent the rest of his life coming up with randomized figures off the top of his head to answer the question of how long it took him to write “God Only Knows,” sometimes unprompted. Carl and Dennis would tell interviewers different numbers in awestruck wonder, probably not totally sure they remembered it right either. Seven minutes. Ten minutes. Twenty minutes. Half an hour. An hour. You never knew what Brian was going to fling out there. The disparity of his recollections is best summed up by the one he gave during a live appearance in 1996: “Not very long at all. About five minutes. (audience laughter) Oh! The actual time it was written you mean? Oh God, at least… Probably a couple hours. Yeah. About two hours.” 

Another unique aspect of the songwriting session was an expression of who would wind up singing the vocal, something Brian usually wouldn’t discuss with a writing collaborator. 

Tony: “I never gave any thought to who would actually sing the lead on what song. The only exception to that I recall is that when we were writing ‘God Only Knows,’ I can remember Brian at some point saying, ‘Carl is gonna sing this and it’s gonna be fantastic.’” 

Brian: “I said, ‘You know, this would be really good for Carl.’ And he goes, ‘You’re right, it would be good for Carl.’ I said, ‘No maybe I should do it.’ He goes, ‘No, Carl!’” 

Now, on the face of it, this doesn’t sound like an unusual idea. But let’s put ourselves back in 1966: What type of singer was Carl Wilson? What did he have on his lead vocal resume, and what does it tell us? 

In 1962, Carl got his first shot at fronting a record on “Summertime Blues” (in a duet with staff producer Nick Venet), sounding every bit the awkward 15-year-old kid that he was. Some amount of puberty later, 17-year-old Carl took decent leads on “Pom-Pom Playgirl” (to his lasting embarrassment) and “Louie, Louie,” and would tear up a frenetic version of Ray Charles’ “What’d I Say” in the Boys’ live sets. The best of his early vocals was probably “All Dressed Up for School,” where young Carl proved he could drive that raspy punk energy into the studio too – but the song didn’t come out. Then, that most cherublike of Wilsons finally got a big break on “Girl, Don’t Tell Me,” a number moulded to his Beatles fanhood and proximity to high schooler age (since it would probably be taking a lend for Mike to sing about staying with his gran). Brian noted in his sleeve message for the Summer Days album, “I’m glad I finally wrote a song Carl dug singin’.” 

Afterwards Carl got “Tell Me Why” on the Party! album, prominent solo lines in “The Little Girl I Once Knew,” and an unused crack at the start of “Sloop John B.” Appearances were beginning to ramp up as his sound matured. So who was Carl? A Freshmen-schooled harmony singer first, a guitarist second, a rock ‘n’ roll lead vocalist with some annunciation troubles a distant third. He was the youngest and least tempered of the band’s five (or now six) frontmen, and little in his recording history at 19 years old suggested he had the most ideal voice to carry one of the delicate ballads that were always Brian’s domain. Yet, relaxed and away from the red light, his older brother heard another quality to Carl’s private singing that he knew had to be coaxed out on record. 

Also, if you write a song with “God” in the title, who do you give that responsibility to? “The most truly religious person I know,” was Brian’s description of Carl in 1966. “He’s completely at peace with himself and the world and he radiates this.” So there lay the thought process.

“Brian says he wrote this specially for me. He says it fits my ‘beautiful spirit’,” Carl blushingly told Derek Taylor that year. “I know I shouldn’t be embarrassed by a compliment, but for so many years there was little communication between us three brothers, because we were brothers all near the same age and we were thrown into an adult world rather suddenly. Just recently we’ve been able to really talk to each other and appreciate the virtues rather than just complain about the faults.”  

“I thought I was gonna do it,” Brian said. “As the song progressed, I said, ‘Hey, I feel kind of natural doing this.’ But when we completed creating the song, I said my brother Carl will probably be able to impart the message better than I could, so I sacrificed that one.” 

Hours later on the same day, Brian and the boys convened at Western 3 to work on “Wouldn’t It Be Nice” and “Hang on to Your Ego” (about to be transformed on the spot into “I Know There’s an Answer”). A lengthy session of mixing and rewriting and singing ensued, and they were just about wrapping up vocal overdubs for the night when a secondary 7.5ips reel that Chuck had on the go caught a fascinating conversation out on the studio floor. 

Brian: “I’m cutting Sunday, cutting right here Sunday.” 

Carl: “Sunday?” 

Brian: “In this room. Cutting a track on the thing I wrote today.” 

Carl: “Slow track? Yeah, it’s great.” 

Brian: “Uh, ‘God Only Knows.’” 

Al: “How’d it go?” 

Brian: “Huh? ‘God only knows what I’d be without you.’” 

Carl: “That’s good. It’s a good title!” 

Bruce annoyingly speed-rapped over the whole exchange, and soon enough they were all back to trying not to sing “hang on” instead of “I know.” But it’s clear enough from the brief talk that Brian had already taken Carl aside during the session to show him “God Only Knows,” the brand new composition earmarked for his voice (an intention Brian might not have yet verbalized). General Secretary Wilson was raring to go, and had already booked studio time to cut a track for the song in three days. 

That Sunday, March 6, came and went without any work on “God Only Knows.” Brian instead used the session to record “I’m Waiting for the Day,” an oldie revival from 1963, the latest and greatest sudden idea that probably overtook his enthusiasm. Or the moment just didn’t feel right for his newest tune, because he knew it to be a rarity. In any case, he made another booking that slipped a little beyond the following Wednesday to begin uncharacteristically late at half-past-midnight, in the small hours of Thursday, March 10. For all Brian’s reputation as a pasty, nocturnal, raccoon-like creature, he didn’t usually share in the night shift marathons of many of his peers – keeping Chuck up to the crack of dawn only happened under exceptional circumstances. And indeed, there was something exceptional in the air the night they recorded “God Only Knows.”

Tracking Session

Intro

Mong Kok, in Hong Kong, is widely regarded as being one of the most densely packed neighbourhoods anywhere on earth. Excluding prisons, slums, and other extreme situations, Mong Kok is as crowded-in as you can get. It even holds a Guinness Book record for being the busiest neighbourhood in the world. 

In any given 15ft by 31ft rectangle in Mong Kok, there are five people. So picture this – Western Studio 3’s population density in its own little 15ft by 31ft rectangle on this night is a whopping 17 person snuggle-fest. The class register (of 18, with one placed outside the main room): Hal Blaine, Don Randi, Larry Knechtel, Carol Kaye, Ray Pohlman, Lyle Ritz, Jim Gordon, Carl Fortina, Frank Marocco, Jim Horn, Leonard Hartman, Jay Migliori, Bill Green, Alan Robinson, Sid Sharp, Leonard Malarsky, Darrel Terwilliger, Jesse Ehrlich. Not to forget Chuck Britz and Brian Wilson, observing their human battery farm from behind the glass. Phew! 

That’s not to say that other Beach Boys sessions haven’t had a lot of folks involved, but the really unusual thing about this night is that Brian elected to invite Sid Sharp’s little band of Sharp Shooters to play with the rest of the musicians, rather than come in later to overdub their part. The addition of a live string quartet really reduces the floor space for the ensemble, which does not skimp for the sake of accommodating the strings. Despite some of the reedmen in the end being left with little to play, the wind section is expanded to five players up from the usual three to four. Two large-scale keyboard instruments, two accordion players, and then the usual two percussionists and two bassists fight it out for the rest of the oxygen. Add in acoustic baffles, chairs, cases, music stands, microphones, amplifiers, alternative instruments… The place was rammed. Thankfully, Brian was able to tuck Carol Kaye into the booth! 

And hey, let’s not forget the booth. Often a place for then-wives, girlfriends, hangers-on, wannabes, true friends, parents, and, yes, even randos off the street, the booth too was packed with folks on this night. Besides Brian and Chuck and Carol, Marilyn probably came along as she always did. Assistant engineer Bowen David might’ve been around. Bruce Johnston dropped in with a girl (some date, that), and so did Brian’s brand new pal Danny Hutton with girlfriend June Fairchild, invited to observe their first Beach Boys session after knowing the big guy for hardly a couple of weeks. Both Bruce and Danny have mentioned Carl playing 12-string guitar direct from the booth – he definitely wasn’t on the recording, but that’s not to say Carl couldn’t have plugged in and unplugged his Rickenbacker at some point in the hours before Chuck started rolling tape. This misremembering can be forgiven in the haze of Brian’s 4:00am budget airline simulation. But if Carl was there, in all likelihood the newlywed Annie Wilson was as well. Studio 3’s control room is a snug space. Now imagine the cigarettes and warm chocolate milkshake fumes clouding up what little air they had available in there, and Lyle Ritz cutting farts all night in the main studio. Sometimes it has to smell crazy to create great art. 

A squandered opportunity of the 2015 Love and Mercy film is that they attempted to recreate this session with about two thirds the actual number of players. They had the original room, but missed the chance to show just how uncomfortable it would start to be with 17 people elbow to elbow. Ah, well. 

The way that Western 3 would have been stuffed to the gills is not the important thing here – what’s important is that we can immediately sense that this session is special in some way, because of the extra instrumentation options that Brian desired from the very get-go. “That’s a very spiritual, religious song,” opined Brian. “You know, with the word ‘GOD’ in it, so we had to take it real careful when we made the music.” So he did. 

One thing to get straight first: Brian “he had it all in his head” Wilson did not have it all in his head. The recordings for “God Only Knows” more than most productions lay out the extent to which Brian developed arrangements with the studio musicians, collaboratively, like a mortal man, but a mortal man at his craft’s apex filtering a rushing river of judgement calls with impressive panache. Much of it he had to hear first to know which way to toss an idea – into the scrap pile or into the record, or maybe into the workshop if something’s halfway there but needs a guiding hand? And always, soaking in the music, solving problems, thinking up new alternatives on the fly. Sure, Brian came in fairly well prepared; he had a general sonic palette, the chords, the bassline, and specific lines for the orchestral players. But the interactive fabric between them, the finer décor – that stuff didn’t exist until he got through the door and rolled up his sleeves and bounced thoughts around with his crew. Daringly, even after several hours on the clock and numerous takes, he still hadn’t made up his mind about how to end the song. 

When asked by producer George Martin if he had a blueprint for “God Only Knows” in advance of the tracking session, Brian put it best: “Arrangement-wise. Not sound-wise. I couldn’t think in my head before I got in the studio what it would sound like until I got there.” 

The session ran from 12:30am to 4:15am, taking the players 45 minutes into overtime. There are Beach Boys dates that have run far longer. Jay Migliori became Brian’s Steve Douglas for the night and handled contracting for the musicians. Most of them (save Jay and leader Hal) were paid a premium overtime scale wage of $142.33 for their participation, initially tallied up to more by mistake and amended. Reedmen Jim Horn and Leonard Hartman were paid $163.68, an instrument switching double each, and Bill Green received $187.08, one double without the deduction everybody else took for unknown reasons; some of that is borne out by what’s heard on tape, some can only be explained by trying different winds before recording began.

Bruce Johnston sets the scene: “One day, I brought a girl I was dating to the tracking date for ‘God Only Knows.’ And when I heard that, I realized that this wasn’t just another Beach Boys album … I thought to myself: ‘Hold it. Wait a moment. We’re doing something really special.’ And that’s when I started paying attention. Brian had a great rhythm section, accordions, a French horn and a small string section stuffed into a tiny studio. It sounded great, and I got it. That was my big wake-up call. I wasn’t thinking commercially. My music soul kicked into high gear. That night, I really knew something special was going on. There was something in the air.” 

Setup

Guests settled in for a memorable night, most arriving without any prior conception of the song or how these noises would all come together. Meanwhile, the producer’s one-by-one approach to talking each musician through his or her part afforded Chuck at least a couple of hours to place baffles, put microphones on the ensemble, figure out the patching, and come up with sounds that Brian could quickly choose from once he’d gotten an arrangement rolling. So let’s get into the recording process: What did the room look like? To what purpose did they squeeze all those people in, and how were 18 instrumentalists recorded by a console with 12 inputs? 

The carousel likely began with Don Randi, who was seated in the middle of the room at Western 3’s Steinway semi-concert grand piano. Brian himself stuck strips of tape on the piano’s strings to mute it with a plucky, staccato attack that’d sound great ricocheting through a tape delay, an effect he’d discovered a few days earlier on the date for “I’m Waiting for the Day.” Don’s role was the most steady in the band: quarter note right-hand chords (mostly triads) throughout the entire piece, excepting the fill between verses, and the four-bar “that one spot” where he plays chords to the melodic rhythm. As his instrument is the rhythmic and harmonic rock of the arrangement, he sort of became the de facto musical leader of the session, at least among the players in the room. 

A very similar part was given to second keyboardist Larry Knechtel on harpsichord. The chords are voiced an octave up, expanding upon the piano’s texture with light, tinkly high frequencies, not unlike the tack piano’s role in “Wouldn’t It Be Nice,” baroque edition. The harpsichord is awash in reverb, enough that it becomes a transformative effect to the instrument’s timbre – when Larry plays in its higher range, the effect is almost that of an organ stop. 

Because of the piano’s importance, there’s no chance that these two keyboard instruments could’ve been picked up by one microphone to save inputs. It’s possible that, like some other productions, the harpsichord had a mic floated within the soundbox to be entombed in there with the lid closed and a packing blanket on top of the whole sundae. In dense productions, the harpsichord’s delicate timbre cedes a lot of sonic space to incursion from the leaking of other instruments; closing the lid and covering it all up allows much better control of the level of the harpsichord itself. 

Carol Kaye’s customized Guild 12-string guitar was taken direct from the booth, alone separated from the congestion. The first verse would be a sparse, intimate affair, so her part (staccato quarter note chords) begins in the second verse to comp the rhythm as the overall ensemble inflates. Ongoing reverb and level adjustments can be audibly discerned during the entire session, suggesting some indecision about just how much Brian wanted the strumming guitar chords to stand out against the keyboards. 

The basses: Lyle Ritz and Ray Pohlman are in their rightful places here holding down the low end. Oddly enough, Lyle’s upright bass actually gets its own track in a costly four-channel world (where only three would contain different elements), so Brian must’ve deemed him a totally critical lynchpin to the whole production. Chuck’s standard choice for string bass was the venerable Shure 545, and the dry signal is subject to heavy limiting in an effort to ensure it never loses prominence in a sardine-tin room full of competing noises. 

Ray’s six-string bass timbre is in some ways a signature contribution to this production. One of the very few almost literal octave doubled Beach Boys bass lines happens here, with Lyle’s low line exactly followed by Ray an octave above without variation, on his Fender VI, heavily palm muted and dialled-in through his Fender Bassman amp for a bright, classically tic-tac tone sent to the tape slap chain. Likely a Shure 545 on his amp, too. 

Very strangely, Lyle did not seem to get the memo that most of the low Gs he plays are supposed to be G#s. By this time, he was used to Brian’s bass notes not necessarily matching expectations based on the chord everyone else is playing, but that desensitization meant that he didn’t consult with Ray on what they are actually meant to do in those places. Like so many little mistakes in these Beach Boys sessions, rather than distract, it gives layered character to the production. 

So Chuck and Brian had already used five microphone inputs for the primary chordal/bass instruments. On the 12-input console, that leaves just seven to accommodate 13 other people before they’d have to get creative. Usually the percussion would be dealt with here, but… Brian had very little idea what he wanted to do with that, so we’ll come back later. 

In the spirit of “Wouldn’t It Be Nice,” Brian recalled Carl Fortina and Frank Marocco for another double accordion special. This time, however, they wouldn’t be chugging along in rhythm, or sweating out a triple-bellow shake. Their main gig is to play suspended chords in the intro, together producing a sound that’s not far off a large, swelling pump organ, and in the four-bar “one spot” they reinforce the bass line in octaves. An easy day for these guys! It’s likely a bi-directional RCA 77 picking up Carl and Frank, allowing them to stand facing each other to save space. 

Let’s take a deep dive into the brass and woodwinds. Brian called a horn player, three general reedmen, and one fellow who tended to focus on double reeds but was pressed into single-reed service, maybe after some vision of having a cor anglais or oboe fell by the wayside. The unfamiliar face among them was 36-year-old French horn player Alan Robinson, an orchestral freelancer recruited because A) he was available at zero notice and B) he didn’t mind working without sheet music. “I got the call one evening last minute,” Alan remembered, “I guess when they started the date, literally, or maybe a half hour before the date. I was called because I knew some of the girls on the call service. Maybe they made a few calls before me, but they got right to me and they said, ‘Can you be over at Western Recorders right now?’ That’s how quick it was! So I packed up my horn and off I went.” 

Brian had only used the French horn in his own arrangements a few times before, first on “Kiss Me, Baby” and then on “Summer Means New Love,” as well as some unobtrusive trios of them appearing in the Beach Boys tracks scored by Dick Reynolds. In his limited experience fashioning something for a solo horn to do, Brian tended to feature them playing sweeping counterpoint lines of the sort you’d hear in movie scores. Coincidentally, Robinson had played on the motion picture soundtrack for “The Sound of Music,” a songwriting inspiration behind the very thing being tracked tonight, one of those loose small world connections he and Brian would’ve been none the wiser to.  

Alan’s horn provides the important opening melodic theme – as per, Brian dished out the line by walking over to him and singing it, a move which stuck in the musician’s memory for its atypically intimate and direct way of communicating. “The reason I was on the date is that I was one of the few French horn players who could play without music,” said Alan. “I have always preferred unstructured sessions. Brian came up to me and sang me the line. He seemed to come up with it on the spot; whatever came into his brain was great. Absolutely a wonderful line, and I played it. Then, he suggested that I play it glissando. Otherwise I could have made it a clean slur.” Earlier Beach Boys horn moments demonstrate Brian’s understanding of the way they could gliss the notes, and that’s usually what he wanted. That intro horn line would be reprised in later refrains, with Alan instructed to lean way off-mic to let it blend into the background. He also (at first) became a voice in the instrumental choir during “that one spot,” playing a series of choppy eighth notes in harmony with the woodwinds and accordions. 

“I can close my eyes and I can see the inside of the recording studio,” Robinson recalled many years later. “I was sitting by myself with a baffle to my right. To my left side there was the string section, and behind the string section was Hal Blaine and the percussion section. And to his right, there were other instruments there that were percussion instruments, and the guitars were to the left. When I was looking straight ahead, I would kind of see the end of the percussion section, but at 11 o’clock, there was the control booth. I’m visualizing it – and I don’t remember all of them. You know, I played thousands of sessions, but I don’t know why I remember this so well! Maybe I thought it was so unusual that anybody would sing something to me and I would have to play it.” 

For his woodwinds, rather than a uniform quartet, Brian put two of the players on clarinets and two on flutes with some live double-duty variant switching actually happening during the takes (to be fair, it isn’t too complicated to swap over and blow into a different thing). The winds come together as a unit in a handful of moments and go their individual ways in others, amounting to one flute lightly doubling the horn in the intro, all four reeds providing harmonized chords in the riff before the first verse (in lieu of a keyboard), a flute and a clarinet participating in “that one spot,” and a sparkly three-part triplet fanfare during the last verse played by two flutes and a clarinet. There are indications that these ideas got pared down over the course of the session, ultimately leaving a few of the guys very little to do.

As noted, Lenny Hartman (who’d worked with Brian once before on “I’m Waiting for the Day”) made his day to day living as a double-reed player, typically hired for oboe, but here he’s manhandled into playing a bass clarinet. Or is he!?!?! Hilariously, and Brian Wilsonly, by the final takes, Hartman plays exactly four notes on the track, at the end of the intro, near inaudible. The rest of the time, he’s just sitting there getting paid! 

An octave above him, Bill Green, owner of the deepest voice in California, plays those same notes on a standard Bb clarinet. Bill’s liquorice stick elsewhere appears in “that one spot” (the highest part in the overall harmony) and the aforementioned fanfare (the lowest rung of the triad).

That leaves the heavy lifting, if it could be called that, to the flutes. Versatile woodwindists Jay Migliori and Jim Horn primarily use alto flutes, switching to C flutes for the high fanfare sparkle. One doubles the French horn’s figure in the second round of the intro, sprinkling in an ethereal waver to the line when it comes back around. Both altos play in the pre-verse turnaround, and again only one of them (apparently Jay, indicated by dialogue on tape) appears in “that one spot.” As Don Randi seemed to be quite familiar with the voicings in this section, he may have helped Brian to communicate the parts through his piano. Both flautists appear in the climactic triplet run, and the middle harmony lands on a perfect note to then double the French horn riff by an octave when it resurfaces.

Top flute line of the fanfare:

Middle flute:

Low clarinet:

And all together:

Recreations by Joshilyn

The flutes are on their own separate microphone swimming in anglerfish-deep reverb that essentially turns them into a synth patch. They appear to have been baffled off in their own little nook, too, because while Bill’s clarinet leaks extensively into the string bass mic, the flutes don’t! It’s likely then that Bill and Lenny got their own mic, and that Alan’s horn had its own microphone based on his memory of being baffled alone. That’s a very “expensive” setup when microphone inputs are dear, and especially costly because of the clarinet section’s extremely limited action. 

Yow, we’ve gone through nine theoretical inputs and are down to three. And we still have to get all the strings and percussion instruments into the board, somehow… or… wait – phew! Bill Putnam did have the sense to anticipate oversized sessions in all his control rooms. Most Putnam boards actually came with two to four auxiliary inputs accessible by patch bay. When balancing a large ensemble that scraped against the technical limit, Chuck knew to be prepared and could rig things up to work. It’d still take some engineering; the aux inputs did not have amplifiers or level adjustment, so it’s likely there were small outboard rigs with standalone amps with attenuator knobs that could then be patched into the mix. A real operation in any case! 

The string quartet wedged at the back of the room consisted of leader and first violinist Sid Sharp, second violinist Leonard Malarsky, violist Darrel Terwilliger, and cellist Jesse Ehrlich. To save inputs, they were probably recorded with just two mics and sent to one of those aux bays. The Sharp players would’ve been uncomfortably baffled off as tightly as possible, and one overhead likely caught the violins and the viola while another mic picked up the cello, which is especially prominent in the strings submix. That Jesse’s cello was afforded extra isolation from the others and recorded separately lines up with a memory from Danny Hutton: “It was on that date that [Brian] had a cello player way in the corner, with baffles around him, cut off from the rest of the band. And he was having a hard time figuring out how his lick would fit in everything. And he said to Brian, ‘Are you sure you want to put me in this corner? I do a lot of string dates, and it would be a lot better if…’ And he described the way a typical session went in those days. And Brian said, ‘Please, go in there.’ Afterwards, the musician came back out and had a big smile on his face. ‘My god that was great, I don’t think my axe has ever sounded that good.’” 

The string arrangement is simple and understated: just tight, Wilsonishly low, four-part chords played together in the second verse, bridge, and final verse, the sort of thing that an organ might handle in other circumstances, but there’s a beautiful old world depth and texture to the bowstrings that’s essential to the overall feel of the track. They’re recorded dry, and Brian instructed the violins to play with a fair amount of vibrato. The viola alone performs some elegant little walks between certain chord changes. 

So, the percussion. Hal Blaine set up his drum kit in full in front of the control room glass where he always sat. Brian also had him bring, as usual, his “bag of tricks” with various percussion instruments to test out throughout the session (more on that later). Jim Gordon sat nearby handling things from the bag of tricks. The drum and percussion parts were developed take-by-take, so it’s likely that very minimal (or no) instruction was given at first to Jimmy and Hal other than where to sit and what to hold. By the earliest takes they’d arrived at Jimmy on bongos and Hal basically just using his kick pedal alongside a tambourine. 

Assuming the aux inputs were in play, that allowed Chuck the liberty to mic the drums with the usual kick + overhead configuration, despite the relatively spare use of the kit, with Hal’s top mic capturing any handheld percussion. Jim’s percussion was likely covered by one mic suspended over his work area. 

Because of this song’s extra-revered status, perhaps more folks have peered under the hood of some excerpt of the session tape than for any other Beach Boys production. And it’s a very rich document. Recording starts unusually early in the tracking process and exposes a lot of its inner workings – even moments where Chuck and Brian are still setting basic levels and doing gross adjustments to reverb sends and returns. In a 30-second recording check following the test tones, we hear a bracingly dry harpsichord and horn ever-so-briefly before they are plunged into the foamy reverberation of Western’s effects units. And that’s the hallmark of this production: unhinged globs of reverb on most of it! 

“While Brian was working out on the studio floor,” Bruce Johnston explained, “it gave Chuck Britz the time and the freedom to give Brian several choices of echo, tape delay and equalization. So when Brian came back in the booth, Chuck would say, ‘What do you think of this sound?’ And Brian would say, ‘Great.’ Or not. He had a lot of people on this fabulous recording team who were there regularly and they knew what to do. He had the comfort of his brothers, and the expertise of Chuck Britz combined with the simplicity of four-track.” 

So the choices generally weren’t laboured; Chuck was tuned into Brian’s preferences and prepared options he knew would probably go down well. Brian made his changes fast and the two of them got into creating a live mix. Taking an educated guess about which parts took advantage of the auxiliary inputs, this is an approximation of what came through the board: 

1 – grand piano (to tape delay, to plate)
2 – harpsichord (to tape delay, to plate)
3 – double bass (to limiter)
4 – electric 6-string bass amplifier (to tape delay, to plate)
5 – electric 12-string guitar – direct (to tape delay, to plate)
6 – percussion (to tape delay, to plate)
7 – accordions
8 – flutes (to chamber)
9 – clarinets (to chamber)
`10 – horn (to chamber)
11 – aux input – kick drum + drum & percussion overhead (to tape delay, to plate)
12 – aux input – cello + violins, viola 

Patching echo/reverb sends and returns is often bundled with the track alignments on tape, and in this production different elements are augmented by either the cavernous acoustic chamber or a metallic EMT plate reverb unit. A lot of signals go into a tape slap and then all into the same reverb send. 

The track layout: 

Track 1 – accordions, flutes, clarinets, horns, strings + chamber reverb
Track 2 – Lyle’s bass
Track 3 – piano, harpsichord, guitar, Ray’s bass, Hal’s percussion, Jim’s percussion + tape delay + plate reverb
Track 4 – everything in mono 

Alternatively, as Chuck wrote it for his own reference: 

1   H-V ACC
2   BASS
3   D-HARP-P-G-PERC
4   MONO 

Not a lot ever budged, balance-wise. The only indecision centred around Carol’s guitar, which started on track 1 and eventually moved over to track 3 with different effects. This was the first four-track session in which Chuck also recorded a mono combination of everything on track 4 since that’s usually all Brian wanted to hear. “I tricked him one time,” said Chuck. “I had a four-track, and I recorded two tracks [sic] with instruments and mono on one of the other tracks, but I didn’t trick him good enough because he wouldn’t accept the stereo. He only wanted to do the mono. So that took care of that.” It’s possible Brian requested they record this session all on one track and Chuck compromised, doing them both a favour in the long term. The close proximity between everything in the room does lend itself to a rich 3D stereo image. 

Recording

It would’ve been ticking by 3:00am when the tape got running and 3:00am giggly delirium inundates the air the longer the band play. Or maybe that’s just Lyle’s wind. The 42-minute-long reel captures a lot of rehearsing before Brian even starts making takes, and Chuck basically just lets it roll, so we hear nearly all of the important developments that happen in the last hour. You can feel the momentum gather from a shambolic falling-over-each-other free-for-all to everything finally slotting into place in a perfect way. Let’s hear from the observers. 

Danny Hutton: “We got to be friends, and as a guy who was making records, it was so great to go to his sessions. I’ll never forget the tracking date for ‘God Only Knows.’ It is one of those sessions where I sat there and watched, and he was absolutely, completely in control. Of everything. Totally on top of it. He would hear something wrong, and bam – ‘One more time.’ I just sat there and didn’t say a word. I had been in sessions where I thought to myself, they should do this and that. Not this time. I just shut up. What could I add? When you’re sitting in the room with Mozart, I think it’s a foolish thing to make suggestions or second guess what he’s doing. It was so incredibly beautiful; the track was amazing.” 

June Fairchild: “He would stop everything and go in and show the flute player to hold his lip a little bit lower. That impressed me – a professional flute player!” 

Bruce Johnston: “Brian spent a lot of time in the studio, and drummer Hal Blaine would kind of be the foreman. Listen to the session outtakes, and you can hear how Hal would assist the development of the track, working almost as Brian’s interpreter, helping to gently crack the whip.” 

The 1/2” four-track reel began rolling to capture 1k and 10k tones for future alignment. Tantalizingly, it rolled for a second time to record a brief rehearsal of the song from the top, before most of the mixing decisions were made. Brian and/or Chuck likely called for this take just to make sure everything was being patched correctly, before any of the reverb had been added to the mix. 

Hal counts in the song as Don Randi voices confusion: “What happened? Top?” Harpsichord and French horn are the first things we hear, with harpsichord on track 3 and everything else on track 1 for now. “Nice, Don,” someone teases after Don misses his entrance at the top of the song. Lyle’s bass enters completely overmodulated and we hear Chuck turn him down live on the tape. A flautist plays a nice harmony to Alan’s second statement of the horn melody, never to be heard again. All four woodwinds play the harmonized turnaround in measure eight, and Hal and Don enter in the verse. Off-mic, Hal is discernible playing a basic beat on the snare and hi-hat cymbal, unlike anything he’d usually pull out on a Beach Boys session, indicating that this test recording may have happened before Brian really gave him any instruction. A few measures in, the recording was stopped, and Brian went out into the room to continue teaching the song to the musicians. 

The next recording was a short test of Lyle and Ray playing the bass line in unison, now with the mix floating in effects and fed to the proper channels – Lyle’s bass is alone on track 2, Ray’s is on track 3 with the other rhythm instruments, and a mono sum of everything is on track 4. Here Ray actually plays in the lower octave with Lyle, and Lyle is properly playing a G# in his line, a part of the key signature he’ll soon forget! Only a few seconds of this bass test were recorded. Right after, Brian asked Ray to play his notes an octave up. 

Tape rolled for a fourth time when Brian was finally ready to ask the musicians for a run-through together. By this point, he’s figured out what he wants from his percussionists, at least until he’ll inevitably change his mind. Jim was given a pair of bongos to play with sticks, Brian calling for flams played during the verses; a “bonk BONK” rhythm into the start of each measure. From Hal, he asked for the kick pedal to reinforce certain moments (such as the intro turnaround), and a tambourine back beat, played here by hand – no other drums, for now. 

When tape rolls, Alan Robinson’s practicing his horn melody, while Don and Larry rehearse their descending chords just before the bridge, and Ray sings his bass line to Lyle. “Let’s go. Somebody count it!” Brian says from the booth. Hal counts it out, but the accordions aren’t ready to play, Larry thunks an E7 chord by accident, and Lyle comes in a measure early. “No, we didn’t start right,” Brian scolds. “Someone count it again.” 

Hal counts it again, and now Lyle and the accordions are ready. Other musicians who don’t have to play yet chat casually during the take, indicating that this was all still considered rehearsal. Hal stops his kick pedal during the verse and Jim varies his bongo rhythm, switching between an eighth note and a quarter note pickup into each bar. Brian doesn’t like it: “No, just play ‘bonk BONK’ both times. Second time, play it all the way through.” 

Hal asks for clarity on the overall rhythm: “Straight eighth or dotted eighth?” Brian either ignores or doesn’t hear and asks for more bass drum: “Hal, let me hear the foot pedal going through, huh? Okay here we go, top.” Hal counts in rehearsal take 3, and after a very timid start (evidently no one was ready), the take gets underway with the musicians holding it together through most of the song for the first time. Hal at first plays a ba-bom kick drum pickup into each bar, but at measure five of the verse, he begins playing quarter note downbeats, giving the song a heavier backbeat. Larry lays out of the first verse, making it the sparsest moment in the song, with just piano, two basses, bongos, and kick drum. The turnaround into verse two is just Ray, Lyle, and Hal on kick drum, a nice thick slab of low end, echoing menacingly without the pretty woodwind chords from its earlier incarnation. 

At the second verse, Hal introduces his shaken tambourine on beat four of each bar while Carol enters on 12-string, as do the strings. Amazingly, there is essentially no trace of the string section on track 3 – Chuck’s baffling stratagem came off!! Alan’s horn melody is reprised in this second refrain, while the musicians prepare for the upcoming “hard part” of the song. “Get ready!” Someone yells. “Here we go!” says Don. 

The section is a bit of a mess in this first attempt. Carol continues to strum into it by accident, Larry misses most of his chords on the harpsichord, accordions and Lyle both have (different) wrong rhythms written down, and Don gets twisted by the end of it. At this time, the horn and woodwinds are keeping out of it. Things pick back up in time for the bridge, but some more mistakes occur: Ray gets twisted in the connection between bridge and verse, Sid Sharp plays up instead of down on his violin (then tries to play it off), and Hal starts moving around, looking in his bag for another instrument to play in place of the tambourine, resulting in the tambo being shaken in random spots, quite unmusically. Brian stops the take: “Tambourine was out of sight, why don’t you use it?” 

“I was gonna try a different effect!” is Hal’s excuse. 

“Okay, can we go to the spot where the uh, ba-da-don-duhhh-da-da-da, that spot?” Brian stumbles, meaning the four-bar interlude with the tricky rhythm. “I want the three, uh–” he starts to say, before Chuck stops the tape. In the resulting recording break, plans were slightly reshuffled off the record as a new instrument was introduced into the arrangement. 

The instrument added here has given this poor research team a very massive and ongoing collective migraine. Let’s go back to what Hal was trying to pull out of his bag of tricks in the middle of the previous take: Two containers of some kind, pitched differently and hit interchangeably, giving a ping pong effect. The sound is not unlike mouth percussion noises, but with more body. Hal Blaine recalled the alleged instrument quite well: “There were the ‘famous’ orange bottles. We used to drink orange juice out of the vending machines. I took three of these small six or eight ounce plastic orange drink bottles, and I cut them down to three different sizes in length. And I taped ‘em together, and I used a little vibraphone mallet. Brian loved that kind of stuff. Just different sounds.” He was even spotted holding such an instrument once in a 2005 video interview, looking exactly like his description. 

From the booth, June Fairchild recalled the same, although she misremembered who played it: “There was a moment I couldn’t believe. Brian was adding on a percussion part that sounded like a ping pong ball bouncing off a table in a snappy little repetition. I looked in when they were doing this, and it was Brian himself using an empty small plastic orange juice bottle and a small wooden mallet he had picked up around him and turned into an instrument!” 

Danny Hutton gave a near-identical description to the two above, too: “So then Hal got out this little box of stuff, got out an orange juice, plastic orange juice bottle. Empty, obviously. I think it had a little tape on it. Not a drum stick, but almost like a big chopstick, and he said ‘How do you like this on the record?’ And he started playing this rhythmic thing. You listen to ‘God Only Knows.’ It’s a plastic orange juice bottle.” Before his incarceration, Jim Gordon allegedly called the percussion he ultimately played on “God Only Knows” the “orange juice bottles” as well. Both Danny and Jim specified that these were “bottles” and not “cans.” 

So… it seems quite sound to conclude that these plastic orange juice bottles existed and were played at the session, as they were independently recalled by several of the session’s participants, including its inventor and its eventual player, right? 

However, in the effort to verify this, our team unexpectedly has found ourselves in a murky, underwater labyrinth comprised of a morass at the intersection of the plastics industry and the beverage industry. For most of us alive now, it is difficult to imagine a world without plastic drinking bottles. But until the very late 1960s, plastic was generally not considered suitable for potable liquids. The difficulty for this team has been to confirm when exactly commercially available plastic juice cups might have been on the market. All evidence points to this tremendous historical moment hitting not far off the time of the recording of Pet Sounds. Some sources trace the first uses of commercially available plastic beverage containers to 1968 or so, but collectors sometimes claim to have plastic containers from as early as 1966 or before. However, going by all available evidence, a vending machine containing plastic drinking receptacles for orange juice in Southern California in early 1966 would’ve been a freak fluke, at best a C.I.A. trial implanted in the hallway of Western Recorders to check if anybody developed a third eyeball. The hard fact is that the PET bottle was invented by DuPont’s Nathaniel Wyeth in 1973, and before that momentous day, plastic bottles were seen as a bit iffy for drinking out of. Heck – they still are!

Or, playing devil’s advocate, maybe there were already plastic containers that were bottle-like in L.A. by then and Hal’s story is right. We welcome contact from beverage and plastics historians to continue to explore this. In any case, if they were plastic containers, they were not quite like a modern plastic beverage container, and they weren’t the reconstructed contraption Hal was spotted with in 2005, which he must’ve cooked up at some point in the decades after. The plastic would have been somewhat softer, heavier, and more moulded, very impractical to cut with scissors, and the dimensions and shape of bottles then were notably squat. The truth is out there. 

What are we to conclude? 

The contentious sound doesn’t actually debut here – it first appears on “I Just Wasn’t Made for These Times.” There are different tuned pitches on both recordings, so we can retcon those descriptions of one bottle from Danny and June. Later, the very same instruments are used on sessions for “Good Vibrations” and “Vegetables,” where Brian on tape refers to them as “cups” more than once. Tests prove that the sound achieved on “God Only Knows” is obtainable using waxed paper cups, something like what we’d perhaps call Dixie Cups now. The cups can be cut down to different sizes the way Hal remembered and, close mic’d and reverbed and delayed, sound close to dead-on. Click below for an example. In a shiny orange coating and trimmed down, they might be mistaken to the eye for plastic, or the remnants of bottles. So, ignoring the words of anybody speaking after the fact, considering only what’s documented on tape, the paper cups do appear to be the answer.

Dixie cups through tape delay and reverb:

Recreation by Joshilyn

So, okay, let’s just call them the cups and roll with that. 

Hal set up his percussion at the kit and devised a complicated rhythm that combined the cups with the tambourine and kick pedal. Brian loved the pattern, and had Jim reshape his bongo digs to match so that their rhythms bounced off each other, all floating together in dreamy echo. 

Tape resumes on this reformed ensemble practicing the interlude, beginning a few bars prior in the second verse, where Hal and Jim’s new parts are heard for the first time. The interlude itself is still a little sloppy, with accordions still playing a rhythm ever so slightly at odds with the basses. At least one clarinet (Bill) and flute (Jay) had been prepped to play melodies set to one each of Don’s fingers on the piano. It’s likely that Alan Robinson by then knew the third part to play on horn, although he misses his entrance here. So does the flute, and the clarinet gets there halfway through. Lots of work still to be done. 

Ray plays the bass part softly with his thumb, prompting Brian to stop the band: “Ray, uh, we wanna have a good… hey, Ray? I want the pick thing on that, okay, ‘cause it’s reverb and it sounds wild.” Ray demonstrates it back with a pick, missing a note. “…Almost!” Brian says. “Let’s try it again please, from the top, okay? Are we gonna be straight here, so we can go? Alright.” Ray tries the part again, correctly now. “Alright Hal, let’s get it kicked off, okay?” 

Rehearsal take 5 ends as quickly as it starts as nearly no one starts playing. “Will you sober up?” Hal asks, seemingly of Don. The next take gets off the ground slowly, with people coming in one-by-one, stumbling over each other, missing notes. Lyle’s part now is tacet throughout the first verse, where he can be heard laughing hysterically at nothing in particular. Maybe at the fact that he’s still playing G naturals, and no one’s caught on! After the slow, casual start filled with talking and Hal experimenting with different rhythms in the second verse, the interlude miraculously comes off without mistakes. Lyle, Ray, and the two accordions are all in sync, as are the keyboards, and the clarinet/flute/horn combo. At the bridge that follows, everyone has trouble getting back into the original groove. Brian feels it and cuts them off. 

“It’s starting to lose it, really, it really is. That ‘dit, dit, di-do-do,’ that whole thing didn’t make it that time. It’s got to be that happy shuffle thing, you know. Ray, maybe you weren’t hearing enough that time. Were you hearing everybody else?” Too many people in the room are talking and Brian gets frustrated. “I can’t hear anybody, you know.” 

“Hold it!” Hal yells. 

“No, I could hear everybody,” confirms Ray. “Did I sound right?” Brian goes to call for another take, but de facto leader Don speaks up with an idea that he thinks may get everyone playing right and falling back into the rhythm correctly: “Why don’t we do it short, like this?” he suggests, playing the interlude staccato to demonstrate. 

“What do you mean by that?” asks Brian. Lyle cracks up. 

“Well, instead of making it drag out like that…” Don starts to say. 

“Well, try it! Let’s get to that part. Second time through ‘A,’ right?” 

Don gets everyone’s eyes and ears facing the grand piano while he explains his idea to the room. “Hold it down one time, please. Let’s try when we get to that part, instead of playing, like, the quarter note full, make it like a staccato note.” 

“Short, everything short,” Bill Green relays to the other horns. “Would you like to hear that harmony?” he asks of Don, seemingly suggesting Lenny Hartman try out another clarinet part to match his piano voicings, an octave lower than Bill, putting him in between the flute and French horn.

“We didn’t even– the flutes weren’t even on that time,” says Brian over the talkback. Lots of commotion ensues, which it tends to do whenever there’s a break in playing of any kind.

“Does this still have to be over there?” Hal asks.

“Something’s burning up here, I smell something. Oh, Lyle, what are you doing?” remarks another. 

Ignoring the gas incursion, Hal counts in a quick rehearsal of “that one spot,” now with Lenny’s extra clarinet harmony. Brian doesn’t like it, or at least doesn’t like the intonation issues between the clarinets, and a disastrously out of tune note from the flute: “Watch your notes, horns, it’s really starting to get a little stale. Sour.” He calls for the horns to play on their own. 

Bill asks for a demonstration once again from Don, and realizes they’re all ending on a D major chord. “That’s right. That’s our B natural,” Bill says, meaning that he and Lenny will be ending on a concert A natural. Alan confers with Don on his own part. Next, just the horns and accordions try it out on their own.

“It’s nice, let’s make it,” Brian says. 

Don asks Jay if he’s playing the middle part (he is, but not in the way that Don’s meaning) and corrects a clarinet mistake he heard in which a concert G was played as G#. When Brian hears Bill and Lenny play their clarinets together, he’s unhappy with their ending note and sings a new idea for them, ending on a concert B. Don seeks to correct Brian, telling him, “No, he can’t, because it’s a D chord. He has to go to the A.” 

“Okay though, it would sound alright, wouldn’t it?” Brian asks, to some laughter.

“Alright, try,” Don shrugs.

“Let’s make it, that one spot!” says Brian. They practice it with clarinets playing Brian’s new line, and Brian confirms he likes it better. (Lenny mysteriously gives up here and doesn’t try his part again; nobody even comments on it. Alan also soon stops playing in the One Spot. Ultimately of the wind section only Jay and Bill carry on to the finish.) 

“Groovy, you were right!” he gets from Hal. 

“It works great, let’s go. Let’s go from the top,” Brian says, impatient to get going, but the band set out to rehearse the section some more. After a slightly sluggish run through, Brian interjects, “No, it’s just not makin’ it, somebody’s lagging, the whole thing isn’t tight enough.” 

“Sustaining notes, too!” Don says.

“It should be more staccato,” Hal agrees. 

“Hey I know, but they’re still behind, that’s regardless,” Brian says. Alan Robinson suggests the accordions lay out, as they may be the culprits. On the next run, Hal experiments with a little snare fill in the open spot, and Brian likes it, but doesn’t like the overall tempo: “Oh, it was too fast anyways!” 

Hal works to more properly incorporate his snare fill on the next attempt, and it works to great effect, setting up the hits like a big band fill. “Go to the top,” Brian says, finally satisfied. “This will be take one. Take one, ‘God Only Knows.’” And when the band don’t immediately begin the take, Brian barks, “Start it!” 

Hal counts out the first official take, but it begins sluggishly, with accordions lagging slightly behind each chord. “One more take please,” says Brian. Take 2 doesn’t get any further, as the horn didn’t play legato enough for Brian’s satisfaction: “Hey, uh, the uh, French horn didn’t ‘wi-doo,’ there was too much pause between ‘da, da.’ And the accordions – can you blend those notes into the changes, sort of? Okay, here we go!” Chuck slates take 3. 

Things get as far as the middle of the second verse this time. In the first verse, Hal plays the kick drum into each bar, matches Jim’s bongo pattern with his cups with his right hand, and hits another stick against his tambourine on beat 4 with his left. In the second verse, the tambourine moves to beats 2 and 4 as the energy ramps up. Brian interrupts the take with a new idea, meaning to address Hal: “Ray? I mean… Ray… ‘Hey, say, Ray, hey, could you, uh…?’ Your name is Hal. Could you play the tom like his bongo and then use that–?” Hal tries it out, and Brian likes the effect, the two of them forgoing the cups for now. Chuck asks Hal to swing the overhead microphone closer to the toms to better pick it up, and Hal counts in the take. 

Take 4 begins a little rushed, but everyone falls in together by the end of the intro. Hal holds out on the idea of doubling Jim on his tom drums, leaving the first verse as only piano, electric bass, kick drum, tambourine, and bongos. After the second verse and interlude (which goes decently, besides Hal’s fill dragging the tempo down a little), Hal remembers to lightly double the bongos on his own drums, which he does with his right hand while hitting the tambourine with his left. Even without the cups, the “ping-pong” sound is still quite strong, percussion all hitting the slap tape quite hard, attack of the sounds bouncing back and forth on its way back to our session tape. As this take nears its end, we finally hear the way Brian initially structured the song’s ending: at the end of the final verse, the last four bars of “God only knows what I’d be without you” are repeated exactly once, going back into the turnaround riff from the start of the song, which itself is repeated across two bars. From there, the band start to play a fourth verse, which would’ve served as a fadeout. “Okay let’s hold it for one second,” Brian interrupts them. Chuck stopped the tape here, possibly for a playback review. 

When the tape resumes, Brian can be heard addressing the woodwinds, “…bass clarinet when that part comes, okay?” He’s likely asking Lenny Hartman to not be asleep by the time his bass clarinet reappears for the turnaround reprise at the end. “Let’s go Hal, we gotta hit it!” Take 5 is a false start. “One more.”

Take 6 is stopped by Hal in the first verse after a strange noise was detected in the room. “What was that noise?” Don demands. “Who farted!?”

Lyle (obviously the culprit, again) cracks up especially hard, but Brian’s too shielded from the fumes to care and gives Jimmy Gordon some new direction over the talkback: “Play ‘em backwards, will ya, for a minute, Jimmy?” Jim plays the opposite pattern on the bongos, which Brian likes: “Hey, let’s go. Try that. Seven, please!” 

The intro of take 7 is rough, down to Larry playing where he shouldn’t, but Brian lets the take carry on. Levels of Jim and Hal’s bongo and tom beat, now played “backwards”, are adjusted by Brian and/or Chuck during the take. Hal starts to play the interlude on his snare and floor tom, hitting every beat with the rest of the ensemble. “Hey, wow, just that one spot, right Dad?” Brian tells him. “No! Just the one spot! D-ddddoo! In that spot, just the pickup thing, right? That’s cleaner and nicer. And it’s a groove, too, Hal.” 

“On the snare?” Hal clarifies, giving Brian the option to hear that fill on the tom.

“Try tom-tom once, let me hear it right now,” Brian responds. Hal demonstrates it, then demonstrates the snare, which Brian prefers. “That’s it. Okay, let’s go, okay.” Another idea takes over: “Don and Larry, play the ‘ba-ba-ba-ba’ in all the places, okay?” meaning the turnaround walk-up that leads into each verse. They try chords at first, confused, before Brian sings the part and tells them the notes to play explicitly. “E, F-sharp, G. Octave lower, Don, please. Let me hear it with the harpsichord.” They play the part and then carry on into the riff of the Rolling Stones’ “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction,” which Carol also starts singing in the booth, revealing what may have been an influence for Brian here. 

Chuck slates take 8, which becomes unusable when Alan botches his horn line. But otherwise, Brian loves how it’s coming together: “Oh, the feel is just out of sight. The feel was just great. Let’s do take nine, please!” But by the end of the first verse of take 9, Brian has fallen out of love with Jim’s bongos, even with the pattern reversed. “Okay, let’s switch Jimmy to the– can you put the kettle right there?” After a recording break to move a single timpani over to Jim Gordon’s zone, tape resumes on a quick test, now with Jim playing timpani rather than bongos. Hilariously, only a few seconds in, Brian changes his mind: “Forget it. Forget the kettle.” 

After the tape was stopped for another recording break, Hal once again suggested his homemade cup trio instrument to be played by Jimmy Gordon, to the same pattern as the bongos/timpani, while Hal returned to the drums and tambourine. Jimmy took the contraption and placed the microphone right in front of it, creating a perfect, subtle little clip-clop effect to move the song along. Brian is audibly enthused when the tape resumes. “Let’s go! That’ll be it! That’s the sound!” Hal would now have relatively little to do in the first verse, only thumping the kick drum every now and then. It’s now down to just piano, electric bass, kick drum, and cups – gloriously sparse. Carol’s guitar has been moved to track 3 with its accompanying effects chain.

Along with implementing the cups as the song’s main percussion, Brian had another epiphany during this break, suddenly realizing how he wanted the song to end. Or maybe the idea had been fermenting in his mind throughout the session. Instead of the turnaround repeating into a fourth verse, the “God only knows what I’d be without you” refrain would simply repeat forever as a round, à la “Row, Row, Row Your Boat,” turning this very intimate love song into an almost spiritual chant by song’s end. So yes, maybe the most memorable passage of “God Only Knows” came about off the cuff, at the last possible minute!

Brian slates another take 9, which runs nice and smooth. Things are really coming along now. Avoiding mistakes for the longest time, this take could have almost passed as a master, but Brian must have forgotten to tell anybody besides the string section about his new fade! The strings play their four bars in a loop, but everybody else (keyboards, guitars, basses, drums, percussion, winds) play the old ending, with a double turnaround going into a fourth verse. The strings stop playing, confused. “No, no, no, there was a fade there! Remember?” says Brian. No one does. “We were right,” says one of the string players. During another recording break, Brian went back out and taught everyone their new fade parts. 

Tape resumes as Lyle noodles with a bow. Brian, back in the booth, calls out “Take ten, please. We’ve gotta go.” He also requests that everyone pay extra attention to their playing in the straight-eighth interlude. “Somebody lags or screws up in the first half of that thing all the time. Let’s go.” Take 10 is started, but Brian doesn’t like Alan’s performance in the intro: “Nuh-uh, it was too jerky. Make it more ‘woo-ooh.’” 

He doesn’t like take 11 either. “No, we didn’t have it. Let’s do it again, please.” The horn is still the problem. “It’s too jerky!” 

“He wants it slurred,” Don says, translating Brian’s vague direction into proper musician-speak. “Slur the top note.” 

“I did slur it,” Alan excuses, “but it’s a harmonic, you know.”

“Oh, I dig,” says Don. This cracks everyone up, especially Lyle. Chuck and Brian both try to control Lyle, but he’s too far gone, keeling over with delirious early morning laughter. Hal starts to count in take 12, but Brian stops him: “Wait a minute, Lyle’s completely destroyed.” This only makes it worse. “That’s it for Lyle!” Hal tries to count it again, but Brian stops him again: “Wait a second, man, he’s not gonna be playing much bass like that.” 

“He’s got laughing gas,” Hal says. “BOY, has he got laughing GAS.” Lyle’s truly down for the count now. 

“Come on, please,” begs Brian, now blaming Hal for Lyle’s state. “What are you doing Hal, for Christ’s sake?” The gang finally get it together for a moment. 

During take 12, Hal, who now has very little to do with his hands, reaches into his bag of tricks for something extra that may serve the song; nobody asks first, he’s just good like that. The take stops in the first verse when Don lags a measure behind on the piano chords. In the silent aftermath, Hal demonstrates a shaker for Brian. “Good, that’s perfect!” says Brian, who also asks Jimmy to hit his “things” a little harder. “Come on, let’s move. Let’s do a real good take.” 

Take 13 introduces Hal playing a thin little shaker beginning at bar 5 in the intro. Brian likes it, but wants a better feel. Hal, unprompted again (clearly given carte blanche to some extent on this song), trades the shaker for some sleigh bells, which he wordlessly demonstrates for Brian. “That’s a good sound. Alright, let’s go,” is Brian’s reaction, as simple as that. 

Take 14 is a false start, but with the bells and cups in place, and the accordions resonating like a big church organ, the production has finally landed upon the sound.

Take 15 breaks down in “that one spot” when Hal isn’t able to put the bells down in time and has to play his drum fill one-handed, settling for triplets instead of sixteenth notes. “Forget it, Hal!” Brian tells him. “‘Doodle-ooh,’ you know what I mean? Do it with two hands!” Hal expresses that he may not be able to set the jingles aside quickly enough. “Well drop out like a bar before,” Brian reasons. “It’s alright. It’ll be alright! You’ll be able to put it down. Okay, let’s go, one more. Take sixteen, please. It’s still not– it was sloppy, you know what I mean? That part. Let’s go.” 

Brian stops take 16 the end of the second verse, though it seems to be going well. “One more! Okay, take seventeen. This is it; we’re very close, alright, let’s go. Hal! Look, at the fadeout, watch me, okay?” Brian starts giving specific instruction to Hal about his fill in the fade, but Chuck stops the tape.

The fadeout fill he gave Hal was an angular “di-di-di-di!” set of triplets on the snare, followed by a low rumble on the floor tom, which would bounce off the eventual round melody that Brian would have the Beach Boys singing there. For friend Danny Hutton, who didn’t really know the melody, this was an impressive turn to witness, yet confusing: “At that point, all I had heard was him kind of humming the melody. And on the end of the track for ‘God Only Knows,’ the drums still made no sense. I didn’t know what he was doing. I thought, ‘What is the two-four?’ It was so off the wall. Obviously, he already knew the vocal parts and what he was gonna add there. But just hearing one of his tracks, and especially from scratch, trying to figure it out, was impossible. Every time you would kinda think ‘I got it now,’ there would be more.” 

Tape resumes to Hal practicing his new part and Brian confusingly warning the room, “Oh Christ, there’s a f– there’s a bomb alert, I think!” People ignore him. Chuck slates take 18, getting back on track with the take numbers. “Let’s make it a real good happy feeling, and we’ll have it, alright?” suggests Brian. “A real good feel all the way through.” 

Take 18 sounds good at first, until you remember that the first verse is only supposed to feature Ray’s electric bass, and not Lyle’s upright, which was playing along an octave lower. “I don’t think you’re supposed to be there, are you Lyle, in the first verse?” Lyle realizes his mistake, and audibly smacks his instrument, hanging his head in shame. Brian laughs.

“You’re not supposed to hit your axe,” someone cracks. Brian asks for one more, and for the accordions to “hit” extra hard. 

The following take is the first complete one with the new fade in place. In the second verse, Hal introduces a tambourine backbeat, played via left foot as an attachment to his hi-hat stand (Hal called this 1959 invention of his a “Ching-a-Ring”). The interlude is tight, and everyone settles back into the “happy” swung feel in the immediately following bridge, just as Brian wanted. In verse three, Hal switches to a snare and floor tom backbeat, along with the tambourine, rather than picking the sleigh bells back up (so they don’t reappear for the rest of the song). The only problem here is the fade. Most of the musicians hit the fade right on, except for Hal and a couple woodwinds, who play the old turnaround by accident. Hal tries to play it off by turning his hits into a repeating fill, but Brian catches on: “Okay, okay, we blew that.” But Chuck marked this take as “HOLD,” opening up the possibility for the band to just re-record the fade section, using the main body of this take as a master. But upon review, Brian decided to keep rolling for another full take of the song. 

When the tape resumes, Brian is schooling Hal about his part: “Don’t play too many drums.” He sings his line back to him. “Don’t start going all over the place. Take twenty. Let’s go. One good strong take and we’ve got it, so let’s put out!” Brian asks flutes, viola, and bass clarinet to move in at the fadeout (Lenny says “right”), although it’s not too clear what the bass clarinet would have been doing there. 

Hal counts in take 20, which is near perfect, and the best performance of the track so far – except, again, the fade section. Perhaps Brian realized that the song’s transformation from something so direct into something so grand shouldn’t come so suddenly. More dynamics were needed; the song needed to come back down to an absolute minimum before building back up to its second climax. Chuck preemptively noted a take 21 on the track sheet, but Brian had him cross it out, deciding that take 20 would be the master, but the fade required some more takes. 

Communicating the new parts to the crew, Brian laid out the arrangement as such: The first four bars of the fade would be just string quartet, cups, kick drum, and electric bass, allowing the strings some time in the spotlight. At bar 5, Hal’s jarring fills would come in, their rhythm doubled by Don Randi’s piano. Four bars later, everyone else would enter: Accordions holding chords, Larry’s harpsichord playing a new broken rhythm slightly laid back, Carol’s staccato guitar chords, Lyle’s bass, and the French horn trading off its opening melody with the two flutes – Jay Migliori and Jim Horn playing the line in unison. Bill Green and Lenny Hartman relaxed, bass clarinet no longer needed here, if it ever was. 

Unfortunately, any outtakes from the re-recording of this tag section were tossed in the trash, instead of being preserved as they were on “I’m Waiting for the Day.” Darn you, Chuck. But the final take sounds pretty good. Thank you, Chuck. But darn you. From the documentation on the tape box, we can tell that only two attempts were needed to capture this master, even if we can’t hear the original ending of take 20, pickup take 1, or any of Brian’s instruction that was once taped in between attempts. After getting enough tag material, Brian pressed down the talkback button to send the musicians home, the clock now reading close to 4:15am: “We got it, thank you very much. If you wanna hear it, come on in.” 

Chuck spliced the body of take 20 into pickup take 2, creating the edited master, and signing “EDIT MADE 3/10/66 CB.” It was now the tenth, and Brian had much to do. 

Overdub Sessions

Columbia I

By the time the musicians and friends had cleared away, and an excited Brian wandered out of the studio doors with a dub and the four-track reel in hand, the sky above Sunset Boulevard was already lightening to pinkish-blue ahead of a cool March sunrise. The attending Beach Boys headed home to catch whatever sleep they could before reconvening across the street at Columbia Square in the afternoon or early evening, trooping into Studio A for, as far as we can tell, a long vocal session. 

This session in the latter part of March 10 was the Beach Boys’ first professional trip to the CBS facilities since Summer Days. Photos taken on the date reveal senior staff engineer Bill Brittan running the board; Tony Asher and Terry Melcher were among guests in attendance. Brian started out by transferring four ongoing productions onto an eight-track master reel, those in order being “God Only Knows,” “I Just Wasn’t Made for These Times,” “I’m Waiting for the Day,” and “Wouldn’t It Be Nice.” All involved copying or mixing the mono backing “orchestra” (as it’s noted on the Tape Identification Data sheets) to track 4 of the new tape. Though Chuck had already printed a mono version of all of the parts to track 4 on the original “God Only Knows” reel, here Brian opted to newly combine tracks 1, 2 and 3 during the transfer, EQ’d to bring out more highs and lows. 

First (if a switchover from blue to black pen is an accurate indicator of chronology), all six of the group slaved away at “Wouldn’t It Be Nice,” followed by Mike and Brian going at “I’m Waiting for the Day.” “God Only Knows” was the last song cued up that night for overdubs, probably after some of the others had retired – rare among Beach Boys songs, the only voices on call here were Carl, Bruce and Brian. 

More photos from the session show Carl, wearing headphones under dimmed lights, singing into an AKG C12 microphone with a “God Only Knows” lyric sheet on the music stand in front of him. “I was honored to be able to sing that one,” he said. “It is so beautifully written, it sings itself. Brian said something like, ‘Don’t do anything with it. Just sing it real straight. No effort. Take in a breath. Let it go real easy.’ I was really grateful to be the one to sing that song. I felt extremely lucky.” 

Carl overdubbed a first lead vocal on track 5 (noted “Vocal Carl #1”), and overdubbed a double on track 2 (“Vocal Carl #2”) – all through the verses, the end of the bridge, and a cyclical “And God only knows what I’d be without you” in the fade. His performance was… pretty good. It was decent. It was not bad. He gave it a fair shake.

In Carl’s initial attempt, it sounds like he took Brian’s “sing it real straight” advice to heart, prompting him to project his delivery in a relatively stiff, forceful reading for the song’s sensitive tenor. Like Al doing his best Brian Wilson croon back on “Christmas Day,” it comes across as Carl navigating an unfamiliar challenge by imitating his mentor’s phrasing – maybe losing some expression in the mimic on this one. Red light syndrome. If the melody would take a reconsideration to absolutely nail, it’s still hard not to be bowled over by Carl’s strong high part at the end of the bridge, or his growing urgency in the last verse, and this vocal was considered good enough to be the usable master at the time. “Don’t oversing it, toots,” Brian can be heard saying over the talkback in a Phil Spector imitation before one of the vocal tracks.

“Anyway,” recalled Bruce, “the really cute thing is that at the end of the session, Carl was really tired, and he went home. So Brian… remember, this was eight-track, so he now has these extra tracks at his disposal. But there were just the two of us.”

So, just the two of them, Brian and Bruce, stepped up to a mic together, and on tracks 8 (notated “Vocal Bryan + Bruce J. #3”) and 3 (“Vocal B + J #4”) overdubbed the overlapping coda round that had been dreamed up on the fly in the past 24 hours.

Very early into Bruce’s Beach Boy experience, Brian carved out a mysteriously specific niche for the new voice in the band by assigning him bright, bell-like response lines in the refrains of big productions. It’s how he most prominently featured in “California Girls” and “The Little Girl I Once Knew,” and “God Only Knows” added a third of that certain type of thing to the roster. So where Carl sings “And God only knows what I’d be without you-oo” repeatedly from the A chord in the refrain, Bruce sings the same “God only knows what I’d be without you” melody (without the rising last note) from the F#m7, and the two crisscross over each other in a never-ending game of tag.  

Following Bruce’s entrance, Brian comes in with an elongated low-to-high countermelody that begins “What would I be without you?” and becomes “God only knows what I’d be without you” every time after – singing the same notes as the French horn line! As Carl and Bruce continue to circle, Brian’s part draws the ear and becomes the heavenly central hook. Only three voices, doubled, sounding like many more. 

The bridge, aside from its ending refrain, remained barren at this juncture while Brian mulled over what to do in those eight bars. At the close of the session he mixed “God Only Knows” from eight-track to mono for the first time with dollops of celestial echo on Carl’s voice, the trio singing the coda, and nothing happening in the middle just yet. Brian gave a dub of this unfinished mix to Murry, who probably fell apart like the Cowardly Lion when he heard his sons’ work. 

Columbia II

The next “God Only Knows” session at Columbia took place in the daytime on either March 11 or 12, and wasn’t documented by a known AFM sheet. After giving it some careful thought, Brian deigned to solve his bridge conundrum by filling the space with… a tenor saxophone solo. Hold on, are you kidding? 

The timeless squeal of a “Shutdown Steve” sax solo hadn’t graced any Brian Wilson production since “He’s a Doll” and “All Summer Long,” a whole two years ago. Two long, long, long years ago. It sort of went out of vogue. Not to dunk on the bronze beast, but it is difficult to work out what led Brian to doing one of those here, now, on “God Only Knows,” other than a mad whim in the absence of other ideas. But more power to him. That takes courage. 

To his credit, it was handled with restraint: a straightforward restatement of the melody played a fourth higher in the bridge’s key, double-tracked. Since the saxophonist in question wasn’t paid through the union (unless there’s a missing contract), Steve Douglas seems the most likely horn blower to have been called to CBS. Steve shared a uniquely close working relationship with Brian through his A&R job at Capitol; he’d always been Brian’s soloist in the past, and he quite often forgot to write up paperwork to cover himself for solo joints. The second possibility is Jay Migliori, Brian’s other longtime saxman favourite, who contracted the musicians for the “God Only Knows” and “Here Today” tracking sessions on March 10 and 11. So maybe Steve wasn’t around, and Jay wrote off the overdubs under his additional contractor fees. We can’t know. To cover all bases, the soloist will have to be referred to as Stay Dougliori. 

Dougliori overdubbed the part on tracks 1 and 6, marked “Sax #1” and “Sax 2” in red pen by engineer Bill; very little deviation from the lead vocal’s phrasing (aside from some triplet-y fills), smoothly doubled, probably as tasteful as a sax solo in the middle of “God Only Knows” can try to sound. 

Brian’s second mono mix dipped the vocals a little further into the track, upped the reverb, and, of course, featured a doubled saxophone in the bridge. On March 12, Chuck Britz spliced the Columbia mix onto a compilation reel of “final” masters at Western. 

Columbia III

As discussed in other pages, we know that sometime in the region of March 13 to 19 during a Beach Boys tour, Brian booked a solo session at Columbia that involved taping messages for Marilyn’s parents, reverb-laden lewd jokes (hopefully Mae and Irving didn’t get the wrong dub), a cappella experiments, and lead vocal work on “Wouldn’t It Be Nice” and “God Only Knows.” Those two were shaping up to be the album’s most finely-tuned eight-track productions, and its top candidates for new singles. Ralph Valentin and Bill Brittan engineered. 

On “God Only Knows,” Brian wanted to replace Carl’s vocal in the coda. Maybe he judged it weak and pitchy, maybe he just wanted a featured moment in his own song. An understandable thing to want. Punching in on tracks 2 and 5, Brian took over from Carl at the quiet refrain that begins the tag, approached in his uniquely rounded vocal styling, and carried on singing lead through the rest of the fade; the trio now consisted of two Brian Wilsons and one Bruce Johnston. This is the only recording from 1966 with Brian singing any portion of a lead vocal on “God Only Knows.” 

The third mono mix created at this session was drier than the others, placing the overdubs right up front. For those keeping score, it consisted of Carl’s lead attempt #1 in the verses, a sax solo in the bridge, and Brian singing lead in the tag supported by Bruce and another Brian. This was the latest version designated “FINAL MASTER” for at least a week or two. 

Important to note, because it will become confusing later: The tag section of THIS version (mix #3) featuring Brian, Bruce and Brian singing the ending round is the one used in the final edited master on the mono Pet Sounds album. 

Further housekeeping: On March 22, mix #1 (the attempt with an empty bridge) was tagged onto a compilation reel at Western for preservation, noted by Chuck: “THESE TUNES ARE NO GOOD.” 

Columbia IV

Hmm, starting to feel a little like “Wouldn’t It Be Nice” now. Some amount of time passed and the inevitable dissatisfaction sunk in – neither vocals nor sax were doing it for Brian. Reviewing options, he got the notion to wipe off ALL of the overdubs on “God Only Knows” thus far and start over. 

We don’t know for sure when this session took place as, again, nobody wrote down a date, but there are convincing reasons to think it happened after March 24, and it certainly took place before March 31. A recollection from Carl of a “God Only Knows” session on a Sunday afternoon may pigeonhole it to March 27, which does fit the bill. Engineer Ralph Valentin is heard on the talkback, but it isn’t his handwriting on the relevant track sheet notes – those look like Brittan’s. Audio from that previous session confirms Ralph and Bill would co-engineer in some situations, however it isn’t clear who had the “console engineer” designation and who had the less prestigious “recording engineer” job in this dynamic, since both were veterans in the field – or maybe both ran the board with a third person operating the tape machines. If only they thought to write any of it down. 

First, some experimenting went on. At the end of the 1” reel containing all of the eight-track material for Pet Sounds (after the 3/24/66 K.O.M.A. radio spot) is a 55-second-long guitar piece that, at first blush, appears to be a rehearsal/sound try-out for a line that would’ve been overdubbed to the song’s tag. Unaccompanied on track 1 of an otherwise empty strip of tape, Carl plays a plucky baritone overlay to the bassline on his Guild Starfire electric, recorded direct and uber compressed. No explanation is given, but there the plot thickens. 

On the data sheet for “God Only Knows” itself, the engineer (presumably Mr. Brittan) noted “Guitar” on track 3, and later crossed it out. Now, this definitely wasn’t a recording of the tag idea, because the earlier 3/10/66 tag vocals from Bruce and Brian still exist on track 3. A plausible explanation here is that Carl played a completely different guitar idea in the song’s bridge that was soon erased. The plot thickens further, because it is accompanied in the vault by an empty box that once held a 15ips mono reel, marked: 

THE BEACH BOYS –
GUITAR EFFECTS
for “GOD ONLY KNOW” 

This missing 1/4″ appears to be a slap reel that was used to create a tape echo effect for the guitar. The rehearsal at the end of the eight-track reel has no effects, ergo it may have been for a wiped overdub as noted on track 3, or simply sound tests that weren’t recorded.

While it’s impossible to wind back tape erasure and speculate about a guitar line once played in the bridge, the intended placement for the unused fade idea is readily apparent. Using that rehearsal as a reference, we’ve reconstructed what it could have sounded like if integrated into the tag of the song. Click below to hear a demonstration of how Carl’s guitar (plus tape slap) would’ve sounded in the context of the overall production:

Recreation by Joshilyn

Trying to workshop a new instrumental component didn’t last long. Brian instead went back to the piano and mapped a three-part scat vocal interlude to adorn the bridge, all jazzy counterpoint, quite unlike anything he’d arranged before. He already felt comfortable with a certain vocal ‘imprint’ for the song, so once more decided the only voices should be Bruce, Carl and himself. 

Bruce starts it out on the highest part, a sighing, syllable-less falsetto that tilts up and down like a seesaw. Carl follows in the middle with a pretty “do-do-do-do-do-do-do” line, and Brian comes in below singing a nasal “ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba” reminiscent of his part at the end of “Wouldn’t It Be Nice.” The three melodies develop in tandem until a horn-like glissando up unites them in harmony, unfurling prettily to pave the way for the refrain. The trio overdubbed their parts on track 3 (where Bill crossed out “Guitar” and wrote “Group”), and doubled them on track 1. 

Having finally solved that section’s blank space, Carl took another shot at the lead vocal. “It was on a Sunday afternoon,” he remembered, “at Columbia Records studio… Sunset and Gower … the big studio where the Byrds and Paul Revere and the Raiders recorded.” Since his other lead vocals weren’t recorded on Sundays, Carl’s memory presents a case for March 27 as the date for the second try. His new doubled lead was again recorded on tracks 2 and 5, this time with some live tape echo, and again included the whole fade, wiping out Brian’s ending vocal in the process. If anything, this version came out slightly weaker than the first, pitchier and sort of flippant in the way he sang it. This is the “Let it go real easy” attempt. Carl does do a particularly good “So what good would living do me?” and brings appropriate gravitas to the finale, where he falls quiet and then belts out the title in a throaty voice. 

Afterwards Bruce and Brian recorded a revised performance of their ending round parts on tracks 7 and 8 (therefore leaving behind one layer of the old attempt on track 3, not to be used); these overdubs also employed live tape echo. Bruce turned in a stronger, warmer vocal than his last, and added the rising “you-oo” note on the end of each line to match Carl. The appeal of the harmony won out over creating space, in the end. Where Brian had performed his old high part softly, almost falling off of his notes at times, here he went for a powerful “GAHD only knows” and a more cutting “without you” that hit them dead on – definitely the more striking interpretation of the line. In a remnant from an earlier take, Bruce can be heard talking to Ralph at the end. 

Bruce: “How was that, was that cool?” 

Ralph: “That’s beautiful!” 

It is pretty cool and beautiful. 

“God Only Knows” might’ve been considered done (again) here, yet not content to leave the tag at a straight vocal re-record, Brian pulled in the guests! Continuing the Sunday memory, Carl related, “It might have been that same night when we did the tag of ‘God Only Knows’ and everybody got in on it. It was like, ‘Come on out here into the studio.’ Brian would make up a little part. That was fun; we listened to it endlessly.” 

“Brian really worked a lot on ‘God Only Knows,’” Bruce said, “and at one point, he had all the Beach Boys, Terry Melcher and two of the Rovell sisters on it. It just got so overloaded; it was nuts.” 

The “everybody” and “all the Beach Boys” are slightly overstating it. Brian dashed around assigning five of his gang four new ending parts to turn the thing into a huge, bombastic exultation, coming in at the third round of the refrain: Bruce, Carl and Terry Melcher (in descending order) sang three-part “bap-bap-bap-bap” chords in quarter notes, and Marilyn and Diane Rovell sang a high unison “ooooh”  that harmonizes a third above Brian’s “without you,” nearly surfer-swoop-esque. Like every other time he opened his mouth, Terry’s voice can be spotted a mile off. It marked Marilyn and Di’s third time singing together on a Beach Boys record after “Be True to Your School” and “I’m Bugged at My Ol’ Man.” Brian produced these group overdubs from the booth, recorded on tracks 1 and 6 (ironically noted “Chorus (Boys)”). 

“God Only Knows” mix #4 was then dubbed to mono, lasting 2:28. It contained Carl’s lead attempt #2, the Bruce/Carl/Brian bridge attempt #1, and the Carl/Bruce/Brian tag attempt #2, backed by a Marilyn/Diane/Bruce/Carl/Terry group round. On the box, the engineer left a curious note. 

Bryan Wilson
final forever 

Foreboding. Or the vibe of a guy typing out New New Final Draft Revised Version Mk4. Anyway, it wasn’t final forever. 

In the Edit

The new big ending certainly sounded like an incredible piece of music; only a lunatic could disagree. But it became a dense, less intimate piece of music than once intended, expressing quite different emotions, and had drifted from the original vision. Most creatives have probably experienced a project where they work on something, get tunnel vision, pile stuff on it in an effort to improve the unimprovable, take a breather, and ultimately realize that less may be more. Brian was incredibly good at judging those situations. Time and time again in the studio, he exhibited a smart, oft ruthless intuition about not using what wasn’t needed, even when the extra baggage sounded cool. He was willing to try, he was willing to destroy. A powerful force best harnessed carefully when you have Brian Wilson’s imagination. 

So Brian not only decided to cull the expansive group ending, he wanted to revert to elements from an earlier mix, including Carl’s original lead vocal in the first two verses and his own lead vocal in the tag, alongside the softer accompaniment of his and Bruce’s original fade round. To accomplish this without further recording, Brian rolled up to the splicing station with two mono mixes and prepped the patient for surgery. 

This edit job could’ve taken place at Columbia, Western or Capitol, at any time between the latest mixdown and the album’s initial assembly on April 4 (potentially on that date itself). Onto the mixdown box from late March, Brian wrote down “(A) Try For Right Fade,” and on the mixdown box from mid March he wrote “(B) Try For Right Fade,” telegraphing his intention to swap around the ending variations. But the verses were shuffled too; he essentially inserted the bridge (preceded by the second verse’s “God only knows what I’d be without you”) and last verse from mix #4 into mix #3, constructing a hybrid that consisted of the following joins: 

– Mix#3 from intro to 2nd verse refrain (Carl verse lead v1)
– Mix#4 from 2nd verse refrain to tag (Carl verse lead v2, trio bridge v1)
– Mix#3 from tag (Brian tag lead, Bruce & Brian tag round v1) 

The swapping left behind an alternate edit on the other reel, consisting of a mirrored assembly: 

– Mix #4 from intro to 2nd verse refrain (Carl verse lead v2)
– Mix #3 from 2nd verse refrain to tag (Carl verse lead v1, sax solo)
– Mix #4 from tag (Carl tag lead v2, Brian & Bruce tag round v2, group tag backing)

The humbler, sax-less and chorale-less edit was placed as side 2, track 1 on the Pet Sounds LP master reel, compiled Monday, April 4 at Capitol Records. “So he was smart enough to peel it all back,” Bruce summarized, “and he held voices back to the bridge, me at the top end, Carl in the middle and Brian on the bottom. At that point, Brian’s right move was to get subtler. He had a very tender track here. ‘God Only Knows’ is a very small masterpiece with a major heartbeat, and he was right to peel everybody back and wind up with the three parts. In fact, it’s probably the only well-known Beach Boys track that has just three voices on it … in the fade, he’s singing two of the three parts. He sang the top and the bottom part and I sang the middle.” 

Columbia V

Of course, the story doesn’t end there. The edit described above isn’t the “God Only Knows” that everybody knows. In short, as related in other song essays: Brian turned in Pet Sounds, lacquers were cut, Steve Douglas and the A&R lads felt that it sounded rushed, Brian took their point, he withdrew the master and decreed that six songs warranted further attention. He waited until the other Beach Boys returned from a tour and got back to work. 

On Monday, April 11, the Wilson brothers and Johnston came to Columbia for a re-record of numerous “Wouldn’t It Be Nice” elements. Engineer initials noted down were RV and PR, indicating Ralph Valentin and tape operator Pete Romano. After finishing up that song, Dennis went home, and the other three returned to “God Only Knows.” 

“I don’t blame Brian for wanting to start over the vocals and scrape off the vocal cholesterol from earlier,” Bruce explained. “Brian, Carl and I were still in the studio and Brian wanted just the three of us to take another shot at singing a trimmed-down version of ‘God Only Knows.’ Carl sang lead on the song and then the three of us sang the short choral section in the middle.” 

What happened next is difficult to comprehend: in the space of a few weeks, the absolute transformation of Carl Wilson from a gawky kid to a singer capable of delivering one of the finest vocal performances in all of popular music. 

“No effort. Take in a breath. Let it go real easy.” This time, he did. The hidden version of Carl that Brian must’ve heard in private finally came out to play in a recording studio. Maybe a prayer session got him there. He relaxed, stopped trying to imitate anybody else, and let it go. The sound came out of Carl’s throat in a half-whispered, weary, angelic sigh, using lots of carefully controlled terminal vibrato and shining glides above his chest register, but more importantly broadcasting a lot of heart; a miracle voice. He elevates the song to the heavens. And once Carl unlocked that approach to singing on a random evening in April 1966, it was there to stay for good. The Beach Boys found a new ace. 

“When we first started,” remembered Chuck Britz, “Carl was not really what I’d call a matured voice. As we got along into three or four years afterwards, his voice became very, very strong, and it became more of a Brian sound … Carl came in and it sounded like a young, real young Brian Wilson all over again.” 

Carl’s vocal was first overdubbed onto track 2, this time totally dry without any limiting. Fascinatingly, one of Brian’s dogs barks in the studio exactly 2.5 seconds before Carl has to start singing. He gives a pretty great performance there, and an outstanding performance doubling it on track 5 – the double has the magic, and it’s the track Brian favoured in the mix. A reverb surge is pushed up at the end of the bridge. 

On track 2, Brian punches out the recording after Carl sings the first line of the tag, and on track 5, he punches out in the middle of Carl’s first line of the tag (rendering that part unusable). The old coda vocals from late March are thereafter all left intact; following the whole mixdown tape splicing ordeal, Brian probably already knew he’d retain using the mix #3 tag (with his own lead) in the edit, and consequently just didn’t need Carl to continue singing. Bruce has given a conflicting account in which Carl is tired, asks to re-sing the ending another day, leaves, and Brian sings the tag in his place, but that doesn’t quite jive with what’s on tape. The memory scans as a conflation of several sessions, which is understandable given that, you know, it all happened with the same guys in the same room. 

Finally, Brian wanted himself, Carl and Bruce to re-record the vocal interlude in the bridge. Bruce had come in a little harsh, Carl’s voice was a little scratchy, and Brian’s ba-ba-ba’s weren’t so definite, so they sought to amend all of that. On tracks 1 and 6 (leaving behind one layer of the old performance on track 3), the trio overdubbed a very similar new version in which Bruce glides along more serenely, Carl eases up (and sings fewer syllables), and Brian puts greater gusto into his ba-ba-ba’s. The nasal harshness of that part may at first seem counterintuitive, but it’s a noteworthy production philosophy of Brian’s that something roughly textured and angular may enhance rather than detract from beauty. The honking bass in “Please Let Me Wonder,” for example. Numerous elements of “God Only Knows” work to add bite and keep it a long way from becoming sappy. 

Then it was done. “God Only Knows” mono mix #5 was an uncomplicated dubdown, balancing Carl’s new lead and the new bridge vocals against the track with moderate reverb, all afforded wider dynamic range than the compressed preceding mixes. Brian stopped rolling tape a few seconds into the fade round since he didn’t need it. He mounted up the assembled album master reel and spliced the older fade onto the end of the new mix, creating a final edit with one join:

– Mix #5 from intro to tag (Carl verse lead v3, trio bridge v2)
– Mix #3 from tag (Brian tag lead, Bruce & Brian tag round v1)

The new incomplete fade was tagged onto the end of the old edit before being filed away. 

 

Release History

Pet Sounds was reassembled and mastered at Capitol on Sunday, April 17. After the LP’s initial release in May 1966, a decision was made to put out “God Only Knows” as the A-side of a third Pet Sounds 45, to be backed by a medley of other songs from the album compiled at Capitol on June 29. “Originally Brian wanted to release it as a single under my name,” said Carl at the time, alluding to a possible “Caroline, No” solo artist sort of situation. “Then ‘Good Vibrations’ which should have been our next single didn’t turn out the way Brian wanted. We had to have another release and so…” 

Ultimately, “Wouldn’t It Be Nice” was chosen instead for stateside audiences, and “God Only Knows” became the B-side to the single released in America on July 18.  But when released in the UK on July 22, it was the A-side, and flew to number 2! 

In 1996, Mark Linett created the first ever true stereo mix of “God Only Knows” by syncing together the four-track and eight-track tapes into an expanded multitrack, first released on the Pet Sounds Sessions box set in 1997. Due to Brian using the tag section from an earlier mix for his master mono edit, the stereo edition of “God Only Knows” features an entirely different set of vocals from the mono at the end. Brian and Bruce’s later attempts at their round vocal responses are featured here (their first and earliest attempt is on the mono), and the lead voice is Carl’s. The first line comes from his final attempt at the main lead vocal (single-tracked), but since Brian punched him out, the rest of the vocal here comes from Carl’s earlier attempt, which is why the singing approach suddenly transforms between rounds. 

Also released on the 1997 box set were three alternate mixes of “God Only Knows,” showing off some of the later-erased or otherwise unused overdubs. In past essays, we have incorporated explanations of which of Brian’s mixes were released on this box set and elsewhere, but “God Only Knows” presents a unique challenge: On top of all the edit swapping Brian did in 1966, set compiler Mark Linett made additional edits between Brian’s mixes and some new stereo mixes to create three different idealized outtakes, each showing off something different about the song’s long production. So, we’ll lay it all out here: 

Labelled “Alternate Mix with Sax Solo,” disc 3, track 18 of The Pet Sounds Sessions (1997, Capitol Records) is Brian’s first “edit leftover.” What does this mean? Well, as stated above, when Brian first assembled Pet Sounds at Capitol Records on April 4, he settled on a hybrid edit between his two most recent mixes (#3 and #4), jumping back and forth with two internal splices. Thankfully, he saved all the pieces he didn’t use, in order, on an outtake reel. This is that “leftovers” edit. It begins as mix #4 which features Carl’s second vocal take, but at bar nine of the second verse (just before the second “God only knows…”), there’s an edit back into mix #3, with Carl’s first lead attempt, and the saxophone solo in the bridge. Another edit at the start of the fadeout brings back mix #4, featuring Carl’s second lead, the revised Brian/Bruce responses heard in the stereo mix, and the full set of “bop-bops” and “ooohs” from the group. This was re-released as track 13 on the third CD from the Pet Sounds: 50th Anniversary Edition box set (2016, Capitol Records). 

Track 26 on CD3 of the 1997 box set is a version of “God Only Knows” subtitled “Alternate Mix with A Cappella Tag.” This is, for the most part, Brian’s second edit leftover. When he revised and remixed most of “God Only Knows,” he took everything but the tag off the master album assembly, and preserved it on an outtake reel. So this is, up until the fadeout, what would have been on the earliest draft of Pet Sounds that Brian first mastered at Capitol: Mix #3 with Carl Wilson lead vocal #1, up until that same edit point as earlier (the second refrain), when we move back to mix #4 with Carl’s newer vocal and the first attempt at the bridge scat vocals. Since this edit on tape doesn’t really feature a tag (just the false start Brian created while mixing #5), the box producers used the opportunity to show off a new stereo a cappella mix of the tag, featuring the unused group vocals. On the 2016 box, this is CD3 track 20. 

Disc 3, track 29 of The Pet Sounds Sessions (1997) is a thing rather infamously subtitled “Brian Sings Lead”, in which Carl sings lead. This is essentially a ’90s Frankenstein version of Brian’s second mono mix of “God Only Knows,” which featured the first attempts at lead and tag vocals and a saxophone solo in the bridge. However, the bridge of the previously mentioned edit (from mix #4) was inserted in place of the sax solo here, replacing it with the first attempt at the overlapping scat vocals. Maybe the sax didn’t feel prestigious enough for the Brian Wilson lead vocal showcase that isn’t Brian Wilson. This was reissued on the 2016 box set as disc 3, track 23, and erroneously subtitled “Brian Sings Lead” again, despite featuring the same Carl Wilson vocal as heard in different sections of the other two “alternate” tracks. 

Brian’s first mono mix from March 10 (featuring Carl’s first lead vocal, the first attempt at the tag round, and an empty bridge section) has not been released as of writing, nor has the bridge of mix #2 (simply an alternate mono mix of the saxophone solo section), or the six-second tag false start from the final mix. 

 

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Sources

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

Tapes and documentation from Capitol Records and Brother Records. 

AFM Local 47 Contract 247425. 

Derek Taylor, “God Only Knows where they’d stand without Carl!”  Disc and Music Echo, July 30, 1966.

Tracy Thomas, “Brian Wilson Tells Why He Likes the Beach Boys,”  NME, August 26, 1966.

Brian Wilson interview with Pete Fornatale, WNEW-FM, November 24, 1976.   

Brian Wilson interview with K-100, 1977. 

Chuck Britz interview, July 23, 1983. 

Chuck Britz interview, 1993. 

Brian Wilson live appearance, June 8, 1996, Will Geer Theater, Topagna Canyon, CA. 

Brian Wilson, Carl Wilson, Bruce Johnston, Danny Hutton, Hal Blaine, Alan Robinson – interviews conducted by David Leaf, appear in “The Making of Pet Sounds,” The Pet Sounds Sessions, Capitol Records, 1997. 

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

Alan Robinson interviewed by Charles L. Granata, 2003.

Tony Asher interviewed by Ken Sharp, Rock Cellar Magazine, 2013. 

June Fairchild, Catch a Fallen Star (unpublished memoir). 

Brian Wilson, The Pet Sounds Podcast, Episode 9, “God Only Knows.” 

The Rhythm of Life: Episode 2 (Melody), December 29, 1997. 

The Kelly Clarkson Show, June 24, 2021. 

Bruce Johnston, The Beach Boys by The Beach Boys, Genesis Publications, 2024.

Danny Hutton on Inside of You with Michael Rosenbaum, March 10, 2026.

Andrew Doe, www.bellagio10452.com. 

Ian Rusten, www.beachboysgigs.com.

Special thank you to Dae Lims for providing helpful archival materials, and to David Sherr for information about his reed-playing colleagues of the 1960s.