Let’s Go Away for Awhile

(Brian Wilson)

Music: Brian Wilson
Arrangement: Brian Wilson, assisted by the studio musicians

Producer: Brian Wilson
Engineers: Chuck Britz, Bowen David

Personnel:
     (basic)
Al De Lory – grand piano [Steinway Model C Art Deco]
Barney Kessel – archtop acoustic guitar [Gibson L-5]
Al Casey – electric 12-string guitar w/slide [Guild]
Carol Kaye – electric bass [Fender Precision]
Lyle Ritz – double bass
Hal Blaine – drums, wood block
Julius Wechter – vibraphone, timpani
Roy Caton – trumpet
Steve Douglas – tenor saxophone
Plas Johnson – tenor saxophone
Jay Migliori – baritone or bass saxophone
Jim Horn – bass or baritone saxophone
     (overdub)
Jules Jacob – oboe
Sid Sharp – violin
Arnold Belnick – violin
James Getzoff – violin
William Kurasch – violin
Leonard Malarsky – violin
Jerome Reisler – violin
Ralph Schaeffer – violin
Tibor Zelig – violin
Joseph DiFiore – viola
Harry Hyams – viola
Joseph Saxon – cello
Justin DiTullio – cello

Working Title: The Old Man and the Baby

Recorded to 1/2″ 4-track:
January 18, 1966 (9:30am-12:30pm) / Western Recorders – Studio 3 (track)
January 19, 1966 (3:00pm-6:00pm) / Western Recorders – Studio 3 (strings, oboe)

Mixed to 1/4″ mono:
February 16, 1966 / Western Recorders – Studio 3

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

 

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Beginnings

The things that motivated Brian Wilson to write music could come from anywhere. Back in fall 1965, he was working out one of his most totally archetypical Brian Wilson Feels, a basic I-I-IV-V progression in a 12/8 groove enforced by a swaying doo-wop bassline. He recorded two four-track demo versions of the vamp at home in October/November. On another reel, on a piece of tape that was largely wiped over later (recycled for the track “Run, James, Run”), Brian can be discerned at the piano playing an expanded version of the same piece of music, into which he inserted a short bridge progression travelling through a far less orthodox series of changes. While the doo-wop vamp he’d started from wasn’t taken any further, that little connecting piece did find its way into becoming part of the fabric of the composition that’s the focus of this essay.

Recreation by John of Brian’s piano demo:

 

The Beatles’ latest LP Rubber Soul hit North American shores on December 6. The album knocked Brian’s socks off, taking him aback with its mature songwriting, coherent sound, and quality control from start to finish. He was already long in the vague planning for the Beach Boys’ next project, which he knew had to be a significant step up from the last — Party! had been conceived and recorded to buy time — but Rubber Soul was that competitive catalyst to really focus Brian’s intentions moving forward. Not into mimicry, but into developing his own artistry. Shortly after, Brian declared to Marilyn that he wanted to make the greatest rock and roll album ever.

“I really wasn’t quite ready for its unity — it felt like it all belonged together,” said Brian. “Rubber Soul was like a folk album by the Beatles that somehow went together like no album ever made before, and I was very impressed. I had to go in there and experiment with sounds. I really felt challenged to do it — and I followed through with it.” Ironically, in the American version Brian heard, Capitol’s culling of some songs and adding of a couple from the UK version of Help! may have contributed to his perception of the album as a unified front, with side openers “I’ve Just Seen a Face” and “It’s Only Love” rounding out the acoustic-led folk sound.

The next move was to finish off “Sloop John B.” for an incoming single before 1966 dawned. Bruce Johnston remembered a listening session late in the year that pointed to Brian’s future steps: “At Christmas time 1965, just before we went to Japan, I was with Terry Melcher and his mother at her house listening to the Beatles’ new album, Rubber Soul. Also at the house with us were Brian, Mike, and John Phillips. Brian said he thought that Rubber Soul was a great thematic pop album and this played a big part in getting his head into creating [insert as yet untitled album here].”

The Beach Boys sans Brian hit the airport on January 5, 1966, set to play an intensive tour across Japan (their first in the country) from the 7th to 22nd. Back in California, Brian began to consolidate his latest musical ideas and start recording an LP in earnest. Although there were a handful of recordings from 1965 in his back pocket that he planned to use (namely “Sloop John B.,” “Run, James, Run,” and possibly “Trombone Dixie”), the new album project properly took flight at Western Recorders on January 18, 1966. This instrumental tracking session would be dedicated to a ballad without a title, for the moment appropriately labelled “Untitled Ballad.”

The composition was quite unlike anything Brian had attempted in past work, the defining feature of its construction being two distinct musical movements with unrelated key and time signatures. Brian had experimented with songs that consisted of opposing feels before — the most obvious example in the Beach Boys catalogue being “Finders Keepers,” which features a verse to chorus recombobulation that has Dennis switching the groove between shuffled/swung and straight eighth notes. But then, those were two pieces which still logically fit together, and cycled back and forth at the same tempo with smooth key transitions. In this 1966 track, Brian gets through a couple of verses of one song before moving into something completely new, and he never returns to the starting material. It could be thought of in terms of verse, verse, bridge, tag — or AABC — but there is a definite hard division between the song’s two halves. We know that they experienced separate upbringings at the Laurel Way piano as at least two embryonic songs that became stuck together.

Each verse of the first movement is 11 bars long, written in two little “feels” of six and five measures in 4/4 time. Brian starts out the first of those sections by focusing on a heavy pedal tone, with major chords rising above it; beginning at C major, these chords travel completely free from the conventions of a key, all held in eerie suspense by an F in the left hand. At the fifth bar, the left hand finally moves as the chords start floating down again for two measures. Throughout this passage, the bass note is always a nonchord tone — most commonly the fourth of the chord it sits below, and at times a second or even a minor third. Weird stuff that breaks the rules but holds to its own kind of internal logic.

From here, the chords begin to change quickly, rising and building in intensity until bar 11, where a root position Abmaj7 beautifully sets up the founding C/F at the top of the second verse. At the end of this second verse, Brian employs a quirky set of dah dah DAHH rising diminished chords, beginning on an off beat and completely interrupting the piece, as if this were score for a sudden scene change in a film. It’s almost cartoonishly dramatic, and yet, by force of will, becomes a perfect way to move into the second movement.

Transported into a new world, the song starts up again in the key of D and in 6/8 time, a feel sort of à la “Surfer Girl.” But we’re not at Paradise Cove anymore. Here, he throws in the bridging passage that formerly belonged to Brian Wilson Doo-Wop Workout #834, extended backwards and taken elsewhere — the section begins with 14 bars of circular chords that wrap around a chromatically descending bass line; at bar 15 we land on G in the bass, and begin a 10-bar figure that will keep repeating as a fadeout. IV and V chords trade back and forth, and the only moment approaching resolution at all is a four-three suspension in the final A7. Consistent with Brian’s heightening use of suspensions and refusal to find a parking space, the new tonic of D is never heard again once the chords dip far enough down.

All this to say, Brian had crafted perhaps his most harmonically complex composition to date, and certainly his most structurally unorthodox yet for a pop song. Where did he get it? “That was something that Burt Bacharach influenced,” Brian offered. “Just little embellishments, little smatterings of Burt Bacharach. It’s hard to explain — I could play it for you, but it’s not all that obvious or defined. Just an overall feeling. I learned a lot from him, too.” As with nearly all of the works he took into the studio, he’d composed at least some of a lead melody too, although it didn’t have any words attached just yet.

Tracking Session

Setup

Back to Tuesday, January 18, 1966. Tracking began bright and early in Studio 3 at 9:30am. Chuck Britz engineered and Steve Douglas rounded up the 12 musicians, including himself, Plas Johnson, Jim Horn and Jay Migliori on saxophones, Roy Caton on trumpet, Al De Lory on piano, Barney Kessel on acoustic guitar, Al Casey on electric 12-string guitar, Carol Kaye on electric bass, Lyle Ritz on upright bass, Hal Blaine on drums, and Julius Wechter on percussion. As revelatory as the music is, the track doesn’t try to add huge, radical new dimensions to the Brian Wilson sonic palette (except for a couple of touches); it’s more a refinement of the sorts of instrumental combinations he was familiar with using throughout Summer Days.

The prominent usage of a lone acoustic rhythm guitar as the primary chordal instrument (not off-mic, nor lumped into a larger guitar section) is a fairly unusual feature for a Beach Boys production. Jazz legend Barney Kessel finally gets to show off his encyclopaedic collection of extended chord voicings as the track takes us through swiftly shifting harmonic patterns, chords that are not unique in Brian’s writing, but do not typically show up in the guitars. Tiptoeing rhythmic strumming glues the feel together and provides cohesion between the two very different portions of the song. Barney brought out his rich-sounding 1931 Gibson L-5 archtop for the job.

Further inverting the typical trends is an actual close-mic’d grand piano — a rare instance in Brian’s work from this time of a piano microphone being loud enough in the mix to read as being featured on purpose. Al De Lory largely uses it as a bass instrument, holding down the steady left-hand anchor in octaves as a unison figure with Lyle and Carol. When the vibraphone drops out for the “B” sections of the first movement and at the 10th bar of the second movement (leading into the fade), De Lory fills in those spaces and plays eighth note chords with his right hand. Not only is the piano mic’d up here, it’s clear that the diaphragm of the mic is inches away from the lowest strings of the instrument; when the right hand joins up in media res, the pounded chords are drowned out by the bass strings. Notable on this piano too is the presence of some light sustain pedal work. Brian didn’t seem to have much use for the sustain pedal in his own playing, and his studio keyboardists mostly followed him there. But on this track, subtle pedalling connects the chords together, a choice that instinctively makes sense in the lushness of the production. De Lory steps on the soft pedal to kill the notes in the tag breaks.

Aforementioned basses are dull and imposing, a glutenous blob as rounded as can be. Although Carol set up in her usual manner, amplified and using a pick, after a couple of takes (we’ll get there) Brian insisted that she relocate to the control room and play the line plugged DI with her thumb to roll off any possibility of an attack on the note, helping to combine the tone with Lyle’s deeply woollen double bass pizz.

In the percussion section, we get an especially beefy bass drum sound — the kick drum being another one of those instruments that often goes under the radar on Brian’s big productions. Here, the floor of Hal’s kit is fairly close-mic’d and given a lot of prominence in the mix. The first movement uses almost exclusively big thumps on the kick pedal, while there’s none of that at all in the second movement; just snare fills employed sparsely during the fade. Brian knew that he’d want Hal to add fills in a couple of other places, but dropping those in was left until the recording process so he could react against the rest of the band.

Julius Wechter pulled double duty at this session. In the opening, the pitting of a relentless pedal tone in the basses against a series of unrelated chords is made legible by bright vibraphone figures, almost used as a lead instrument. Julius’ swirling arpeggios on the vibes add a Martin Denny Exotica sort of flavor where they appear (and Julius was once a member of Denny’s group), played with the vibrato motor on and the sustain pedal held down, initially filling out the first six bars of each verse before the piano chords take over. The vibraphone then makes a spine-chilling return at the beginning of the second movement, right as time slows down and the atmosphere shifts; on the Dmaj7, Julius plays another melodic broken chord figure which dances around the harmonic foundations laid by the acoustic guitar and the basses, revolving in stasis while the rest of the ensemble builds for six rounds until the parts all move down together. This part fills in the upper voices of the chords, focusing on 7ths, 9ths, and 11ths, whereas simple triads were played in the first section. The vibes again drop out after 10 bars and are replaced space-wise by the right hand of the piano in the approach to the tag. The semi-melodic patterns played throughout the song may have come about as a compromise, as Julius preferred to play with two mallets rather than being one of these wunderkinds who can double up in either hand, making it impossible to play triad chords all together.

During the fade round, Julius moves to a timpani tuned to A, and plays thundering fills in a back-and-forth with Hal’s snare. “We used kettle drums toward the end of the song,” said Brian. “We used dynamics like Beethoven. You know, Beethoven, the dynamic music maker.” Yep, that’s his tagline. Discussion on tape indicates that the vibraphone and timpani each had a single directional microphone suspended above them, which enabled Julius’ instruments to be recorded with good isolation on different tracks of the tape.

A nice big five-voice horn section plays gorgeous clusters of sound to pad things out, consisting of a bass and baritone sax (Horn and Migliori, no indication of who used which), two tenors (Douglas and Johnson), and a trumpet (Caton). Nothing flashy, just mellow, low-register block chords. The horn fellas likely would’ve huddled around a couple of ribbon mics to all be picked up, three bells close on one and two on the other.

Lastly, Brian walked through the guitar part he wanted Al Casey to handle (and we can tell it came last, because Al did all of his rehearsing on tape). This was only Casey’s second Beach Boys session gig, the first being the acoustic rhythm guitar on “Sloop.” This time, he was asked to play electric 12-string direct into the board — but not any old style 12-string, slide 12-string.

Slide guitar was a texture Brian had never before utilized in a studio production. The influence seemed to, again, come from some of the instrumental exotica records he was hearing with lap steel, but also Spector’s unreleased “This Could Be the Night,” which had a prominent slide guitar part that Brian attempted to play himself in a late 1965 home demo. Having Al Casey play bottleneck slide using a 12-string was a fairly novel way to introduce the sound to his work. (The way Brian described this instrument in 1966 was “a guitar with a Coke bottle on the strings for a semi-steel-guitar effect,” so we apparently have a culprit for the manufacturer of the bottle Casey fashioned his slide from.) Never one to be overindulgent, its role in the arrangement is sparse: A high four-note lick is played at the fourth bar of the second movement, and a lower non-slide answering figure follows at bar six. In the breaks resetting each tag round, sitar string bends are evoked by Casey rolling up and down over the seventh fret of the B string, and then he simply glides up an octave as the basses (sans piano) play a tasty fill. Brian’s preference for the double-string detuning properties of 12-string guitars is again exhibited here, as the jangly octave strings are only used for a couple of low notes out of necessity.

Inputs coming into the board ultimately included:

1 – drums – kick
2 – drums – overhead (sent to plate)
3 – timpani (sent to plate)
4 – vibraphone (sent to chamber)
5 – baritone & bass saxophones
6 – tenor saxophones, trumpet
7 – grand piano
8 – acoustic guitar
9 – double bass
10 – electric bass – direct
11 – electric 12-string guitar – direct (sent to chamber)

Piano, guitars, basses and percussion were routed by Chuck to track 1, with a light reverb chamber return on the vibraphone and direct 12-string only. Drums went to track 2, with the kick left dry and plate reverb applied to the overhead and timpani mics. Horns as usual went to track 3, without effects. Track 4 was initially a duplicate of track 3, but this was fixed during recording, as Brian needed an open channel for a planned overdub.

Recording

After printing a pair of test tones, Chuck hits record on the four-track machine as one of the horn players can be heard saying “We’re rolling, good heavens!” Take 1 is slated by Brian and Chuck without a title. Hal counts in, literally kicking things off with an eighth note pickup on the bass drum. Vibraphone, acoustic guitar, piano, basses, and drum are present at the beginning — Carol’s Fender bass is amped at this stage, played with a pick. Hal quietly turns on the snares of his snare drum while filling into the ninth measure (where the horns enter), beginning a backbeat played on the snare and floor tom in a typical Hal Blaine groove that usually did the trick for Brian. But Brian immediately presses down the talkback button to interrupt the take: “No drums, Hal. No drums there. Just bass pedal ‘til we get to that other stuff. And then there’s a couple things, you know, that we’ll start putting in, but no ‘two four’ actually at all.”

Hal counts in take 2, but Brian stops it instantly, asking to hear just Carol. Chuck stops rolling the tape while Brian addresses the problem, which appears to have been her picked tone. Hal counts in take 3 as the tape continues, and Carol’s now playing with her thumb, plugged directly into the recording console next to Brian, Chuck, and Al Casey. Drumming in the first movement is restrained to the kick, except for a new fill into the second verse that Hal plays on the snare and toms with a light cymbal crash. As the take moves along, Brian treats it like a practice run as he plays with the board, boosting Carol’s bass on track 1 into audible distortion, then boosting Hal’s drums, then briefly routing Carol’s bass to track 2, then playing with the reverb on Al Casey’s 12-string, riddling the take with clicks and mini reverb explosions as he makes his live mix adjustments. Al misses his parts and hits a few random notes, probably at Brian’s inaudible request in the booth for mixing purposes. Meanwhile, the other musicians make it to the fadeout, and Brian stops what he’s doing when he notices that Hal missed his entrance: “Hal? After two bars of the fade you start your thing.”

Take 4 gets underway — now without any cymbal in Hal’s fill — but Brian stops it in the second verse to say something to Al De Lory, most likely due to the loud signal from his piano creating distortion on the tape. Take 5 gets to the beginning of the 6/8 section, but the other Al misses his 12-string entrance. Brian interrupts the take to keep the momentum going: “Pick it up from the D thing again with the vibes and the bass. One, two, three!” Al Casey finally plays his part in time during this informal pickup take, but not without some intonation problems, and the following melodic part is missed completely. Julius’ timpani is finally heard, initially on track 1 with the rest of the band, but after the first fill Chuck quickly moves it over to track 2 to share space with Hal, who’s also now playing snare fills in the fade. Al Casey’s dreamy, exotica-tinged octave slide is still unrefined and mostly unrehearsed, coming in at all the wrong spots. Before take 6, Brian asks to hear Barney’s acoustic guitar, thinking the microphone could be placed a little better.

Take 6 makes it some way into the second half, with some imperfect rhythms and another sloppy 12-string performance stopping it from being a keeper. Brian interrupts the take to call for another, but his ear pricks up from a particularly warm resonance from the basses and he exclaims in delight, “Oh! Ooh! Groovy!!!”

Tape stops and resumes, with Hal now practicing a new wood block part as Brian talks to the band. The idea was dreamed up between takes, perhaps to get the musicians playing at a steadier tempo at the beginning of the 6/8 section. For the most part, it’s just a simple backbeat, but Hal plays it in a style that one might call “faux tape delay” — by striking the block repeatedly in rhythm and gently decrescendoing over the course of five or six hits, he creates the illusion of a slapback effect by hand. One might ask, why didn’t they just use tape delay? The answer is unknowable, but likely has to do with the fact that patching echo on one thing often meant putting it on a bunch of other stuff, which might not be what they wanted. Plus, it allows for very sensitive adjustments by the player that would be mechanically locked in if using a tape deck for feedback.

As Hal rehearses the block effect, Brian enthuses about the sound of the previous take: “Hey, that was a beautiful bass sound on that, uh, D thing. It was just perfect.” (He always refers to the start of the second section as the “D thing.”) Carol notes that she’s playing it softer now. Brian offers feedback on the vibes in that section: “Uh, Julius, that’s kind of a real tough thing to swing into … Sounds groovy, except once in a while it sounds like you may miss a note, you know?” Chuck can be heard whispering to Brian that when everyone plays soft, they relax, and the sound improves. Brian relays the message: “Hey, it’s a great feel when you play it, you know, a soft touch like that. Everybody. Just a kind of a soft thing.”

All the while, Hal’s been asking for feedback on his wood block sound and growing frustrated: “Brian, how’s the block? How’s the block? How’s the block? Let off of the button! How’s the block?” Brian tells him that it’s great and tries to move the session along, demonstrating the optimal tempo. “You like that reverb effect or not?” Hal asks, playing the manual echo on the block. He groans when Brian ignores him again and the horn players chuckle.

Take 8 ensues, and things are really coming together. Hal has figured out the precise fill he’s going to play to bridge the two verses, and carefully turns the snares on ever so quietly before said fill, otherwise keeping them off to prevent any unwanted rattling. Brian stops things right at the start of the 6/8 change, asking Julius to alter his approach: “Julius? Softer. You can actually play softer all the way through.” Carol begs Brian to conduct the beginning of this section, as she can’t very well see the other musicians she has to time her first note with: “Brian, please do a downbeat!”

After a quick recording break to work on Julius’ volume, Brian offers an intriguing glimpse into his vision for the song as tape rolls again. “Here we go, take nine! It was a little bit slow — let’s take it like this…” He snaps his fingers to reaffirm the tempo and, tantalizingly, sings the wordless lead vocal melody across a whole five beats, beginning on a haunting tritone interval above the bass instruments. A fascinating reveal, never to be heard again.

Recreation by John & Joshilyn of Brian’s unused vocal melody to the track:

(our clip cuts off as abruptly as Brian stops singing!)

After a short false start (deemed too slow for Brian), take 9 makes it to the key/time change before being interrupted for unknown reasons. Hal counts take 10, but Brian stops him: “A little fast.” Hal counts it again, but Brian stops him again: “A little slow.” The next take only gets a few bars in. At this point in the session, Brian is deeply focused on achieving a perfect feel from the musicians and has no trouble killing things immediately if a performance doesn’t gel 100%. Take 11 doesn’t get much further: “Weren’t together. One more time, please!”

Take 12 stops in the second bar when Carol tries a glissando fill that doesn’t quite work. Brian holds up the take: “What’s the matter on the low end?”

Carol: “You know, maybe I’m putting a gliss in there I shouldn’t be doing.”

Brian: “Okay, you’re going with your thumb, I think?”

Carol: “Yeah, I’m playing with my thumb.”

Hal makes a crack before counting in take 13: “If you gotta take a gliss, Carol, don’t do it while we’re in the middle of a thing.” He gets a laugh from Julius.

The next one gets through most of the song, although the transition between sections is sloppy as Carol still comes in late without any conduction from Brian. Another arrangement flourish added between takes appears here for the first time: At the sixth bar of the second movement, Roy Caton plays a short solo melody on trumpet using a Harmon mute — just four notes, intended to be heard in unison with the lower 12-string guitar line. Roy doesn’t employ the mute when playing with the rest of the horn section. Al Casey, however, forgets to play in that spot, prompting Brian to stop the band. “I’m sorry. It wasn’t a good take anyway, believe me. No problem,” he assures.

As Chuck skips 14 and slates take 15, Brian finally addresses the troublesome transition between sections and tells them, “On that thing coming out of that thing, I’m gonna have to just kind of stand up and conduct because Carol’s not quite with Lyle and it doesn’t sound that good.” He also adds, “You don’t have to labor it — it’s a very soft thing.” On the next attempt, the trumpet comes in especially loud at the end of the first verse and Brian quickly troubleshoots the horns’ balance: “Hold it please. Trumpet, Roy? On the last note — ahhh — turn away, you know what I mean?” He also comments on Hal’s fill in that spot, calling for him to hit the very center of each drum and get the “deepest snare sound you can get.” Hal loosens his snares as much as he can while still retaining an identifiably “snare-y” sound from the drum.

Take 16 gets off to a great start, but Brian conducts the second section to be a bit too slow. From there, a few more problems arise, including a sloppy 12-string slide part, a fill from Hal that misses the mark (another new added part to cue to the fade round), and some intonation issues from the horns. “Everything was cool except for that D thing. We’re a little slow, and so forth,” Brian summarizes. Nevertheless, Chuck marked this take “HOLD UP TO END.”

On take 17, the musicians finally nail the entire song, and Chuck noted the take as a master on the track sheet. None of the usual problems arise, as the tempo for both sections, drum fills, and 12-string slides all land perfectly. Brian still isn’t satisfied by the performance of the fadeout, though, and he stops things there: “Let me do one pickup on the ending, huh? A pickup? On the- on the fadeout, okay, pickup on the fadeout, one, two, three, four!”

Steve Douglas gets twisted and begins playing his saxophone part from four bars before the fade. The second pickup take is stopped short too, as Brian asks Julius to move his timpani microphone across, looking for a more direct sound. “I’m really not supposed to!” says Julius. Brian tells him to try it anyway. Pickup take 3 is incomplete, and tape evidently stopped rolling for a moment before pickup take 4. When it resumes, the input for track 2 on the tape is turned way up, with both Hal’s drum kit and Julius’ timpani distorting significantly. Brian stops things and explains the issue: “We had a very hot channel, alright? One of the channels were overridden.”

Instead of going for a fifth pickup take (which Chuck had already noted down on the track sheet), Brian slates take 18 and asks for the ensemble to go again from the top of the song: “Can we do a real good one this time?”

A quick false start ensues, after which Chuck asks Hal to give a demonstration of his tag fills to check the sound. They get that sorted, all the while Brian is heard having a frustrated moment with someone in the control room: “Please, now, come on, we’re cutting; as soon as we’re done I’ll play it, just wait until it’s over, alright? Okay?” Then, for some reason, Brian starts wondering if the timpani and vibraphone mics are coming through. “Wait a minute. The microphone he turned over there, is it on?”

Chuck: “What’s wrong? Whose?”

Brian: “The one over the timp, is that on?”

Chuck: “Yeah!” He sounds flabbergasted that Brian’s asking this far into the session.

Brian: “And over the vibes also?” With that settled, they go for take 18 attempt deux. The band give an even better performance this time, which ultimately makes it through both sections without any need for edits. They have it in the bag, no question. “Okay, that’s cool, I think we got it,” Brian comments as soon as he has enough for a fadeout.

Sweetening Session

Built into the plan for this untitled track was an overdubbing session involving a twelve-large string section and couple of others, booked for 3:00pm the following afternoon at Western. A cohort of Sid Sharp’s regulars included violinists Arnold Belnick, James Getzoff, William Kurasch, Leonard Malarsky, Jerome Reisler, Ralph Schaeffer and Tibor Zelig, violists Joseph DiFiore and Harry Hyams, and cellists Joseph Saxon and Justin DiTullio. Joining them were Jules Jacob on oboe and Steve Douglas, who was paid as session leader and probably did the contracting but did not play an instrument at the session. It could be that Brian wanted Steve there to play a sax or flute but decided the part was superfluous after rehearsing.

We’ve previously discussed the more compact string sections of “Don’t Talk” and “I’m Waiting for the Day,” essentially violin-heavy sextets. Here, Brian drafts a truly proper chamber orchestra, with twelve players contributing. Two musicians to each voice in the arrangement blurs the articulation and allows lines to beat against one another, so the resultant sound is thicker, lusher; a cloud of harmony that feels more embedded in the track. The scope is closer to the string overdub on “Summer Means New Love” than the other intimate cases across Pet Sounds. It’s still violin-heavy — eight of them over two violas and two cellos — but Brian continues to keep the voicings extraordinarily low.

Where it diverts from Brian’s tendency to arrange strings like Four Freshmen harmonies is that he allows the players to make some characteristic flourishes and runs, little melodic figures that he might have had some conception of before entering the studio, but would’ve workshopped with the musicians. In and around Brian’s signature chord voicings are a handful of fast-moving cello and viola lines that feel, for lack of a better word, “string-y,” like ideas that came from the brains of the people playing them. A probable scenario is that Brian knew when he wanted these instances to happen, he sang or explained the sort of thing he was looking for, the musicians demonstrated what they could do within the capability of their instruments, and they went back and forth like that until arriving at the figures written down on music paper. Two pizzicato violin plucks on the off beats just before the rest of the strings come in for the fade feel like another moment that would come from interaction in the studio. During the fadeout, a beautiful melody is played in unison by two of the violinists atop sustained chords from the others, making sense of the shuddering fills from Hal and Julius on the basic track.

Double reedman Jules Jacob got the dream gig this time, hired for $61 in 1966 money to play exactly four unchallenging notes at the 13th bar of the second movement. His blink-and-you’ll-miss-it cameo on the oboe works as a nice little answer to the traveling 12-string guitar, trumpet, and sax lines in that section, carrying along their motion in a chain reaction. Many producers might have been tempted to give Jules more to do, but that wasn’t Brian’s way. He was a devoted believer in the value of having people not play, too. As Tony Asher observed, “If he wanted an instrument to play one note, he’d hire the guy and have him there. And not only that, if he thought he might want the guy to play one note, he’d have him there and he might never play. For example, Brian would never be influenced by the fact that the guy came and brought all of his instruments … I mean, he would never have said, ‘Oh well, he’s here, I might as well use him.’ He just never did that. As I say, he would do really what amounted to very profligate kinds of things. I mean, he’d call people in and have them play one note, or one very small passage, and then say, ‘Thanks, goodbye!’ And the guy would say, ‘That’s it?! That’s all you wanted me to do?’ So he was not the least bit intimidated. If he just had a moment where he wanted something to happen, he would say, ‘Well, that’s what it takes.’”

Being an overdub, channel use was less dear, so it’s highly likely the strings got four to five microphones, and an additional mic on the oboe is almost assured. The violins probably got two or three overhead mics (likely Neumann U47s), the viola section their own overhead, and the cellos probably played on either side of a figure-of-eight pattern RCA ribbon or U47. They were all recorded with a reverb return together on track 4, the only available space on the tape.

Recording began at the top of the song so the musicians could count their entrances, coming in at the beginning of the second verse and reappearing in two other passages (before the fade, and from the second round of the fade to end). After getting a master for the first of those parts down, at least three pickup takes were carried out from the tempo change, indicated by three loud click artefacts on the tape during the quiet transition between sections. The inadvertently musical timing of these clicks makes it sound a bit like a ghost is snapping fingers to cue the band. They played until Brian’s “Okay, it’s cool” from the basic track sounded over their headphones and were done by 6:00pm.

Mixing & Finding a Title

As a new Beach Boys album began to take shape over the following weeks, the track for the untitled ballad cut on January 18 and 19 continued to be left alone. Newly recruited lyricist Tony Asher was asked to put words to a couple of the other tracks Brian recorded in the following days (“Wouldn’t It Be Nice” and “My Childhood”), but when it came to this one, they apparently only talked about working on it and went no further. Having taken the four-track reel to his own amateur playback studio at Laurel Way for review, Brian concluded fairly quickly that something about the incomplete track just worked on its own. He’d composed some or all of a melody that would’ve been performed as a vocal, but the backing arrangement felt satisfying enough that the chord changes and instrumental countermelodies popping up here and there said all that they needed to say. And in the bare first verse, a melodic figure wasn’t necessary at all — the mood of the track became the song. Brian explained later that year, “The track was supposed to be the backing for a vocal but I decided to leave it alone. It stands up well alone.”

That decision was finalized by February 16, when during a session spent compiling mono masters for the album’s completed bounty so far, “Untitled Ballad” received its first and only mixdown. Brian and Chuck kept things simple when combining the four tracks to one, with the only notable volume ride (besides the fadeout) being a subtle fade-in of the horns track when they first enter. The track with the strings was not pulled down during the break between sections, so those punch-in clicks ended up cutting right through mix (and can be heard clearly on any mono release of Pet Sounds). As always with these things, it’s difficult to tell if Brian liked the sonic anomaly or didn’t care.

So, musically, the production was complete, and no further recording or mixing work would be required. However, it still needed a title! “Untitled Ballad” had been printed on both AFM contracts, no title was written down or even slated on the four-track session tape, and Chuck simply wrote “? TITLE OF SONG” on the box with the final mono mix in February. One short-lived idea for a name came about through Brian’s current fixation on a 1961 comedy record by Del Close and John Brent. “There was an album out called How to Speak Hip,” Tony Asher explained, “a lampooning of the language instruction albums. I played it for Brian, and it destroyed him, killed him. Brian picked up a couple of references on the album. One of them was this hip character that said if everyone were ‘laid back and cool, then we’d have world peace.’ So Brian started going around saying, ‘Hey, would somebody get me a candy bar, and then we’ll have world peace.’”

Brian went so far as to take home a dub of the track’s final mix labeled “And Then We’ll Have World Peace.” But he might’ve been joking. Later that week, with an upcoming deadline to get Capitol Records a list of songs that would appear on Pet Sounds, Brian decided that the instrumental piece would be called “The Old Man and the Baby,” and it was listed as such by Karl Engemann on an internal memo dated February 23.

Evocative though that title may be, Brian soon changed his mind again and determined that it wasn’t a good fit for the music. On March 3, Karl sent out a memo to Capitol’s editorial department with a list of changes that Brian had informed him of — among them being a name change for “The Old Man and the Baby.” The new title wasn’t specified at the time, but by March 12, when various mono masters were re-compiled onto a new reel, Brian had finally resolved to call the tune “Let’s Go Away for Awhile.”

The instrumental was placed as the penultimate track on the LP’s first side when assembled on April 4, then mastered on April 5 and re-mastered on April 17. Of all the cuts, Brian was so pleased with the way “Let’s Go Away for Awhile” turned out that in September, he pulled it from Pet Sounds to use as the B-side to the “Good Vibrations” single.

Talking to Derek Taylor for Hit Parader, Brian summed up the piece and how he put it together in a rare contemporary account of his own process: “I think that on Pet Sounds the track ‘Let’s Go Away for Awhile’ is the most satisfying piece of music I’ve ever made. I applied a certain set of dynamics through the arrangement and the mixing and got a full musical extension of what I’d planned during the earliest stages of the theme. I think the chord changes are very special. I’ve used a lot of musicians on the track – twelve violins [sic] (I guess fiddles is the ‘hip’ phrase), piano, four saxes, oboe, vibes, a guitar with a Coke bottle on the strings for a semi-steel-guitar effect. Also, I used two basses and percussion. The total effect is… ‘Let’s go away for a while’. Nice thought. Most of us don’t go away, but it’s still a nice thought.”

 

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Sources

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

Tapes and associated documentation from Brother Records, Capitol Records.

AFM Local 47 Contracts 105823, 245062.

Derek Taylor, “Building the Beach Boy Empire,” Hit Parader Magazine, October 1966.

Brian Wilson interviewed by Mr. Bonzai, Mix Volume 20, Number 3, March 1996.

Brian Wilson – interview conducted by David Leaf, appears in “The Making of Pet Sounds,” Capitol Records, 1997.

Brad Elliott, “Pet Sounds Track Notes,” 1999, beachboysfanclub.com.

Richard Havers, “Bruce Johnston on the Making of Pet Sounds,” udiscovermusic.com, May 16, 2016.

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

Andrew Doe, www.bellagio10452.com.

Ian Rusten, www.beachboysgigs.com.