BACKGROUND: From 1962 to 1965, the Beach Boys combined sophisticated vocal harmonies with simple teenage ideas. “Summer Means Fun”. “The girls on the beach are all within reach”. “I got the fastest set of wheels in town”. The result: They became one of the world’s most popular groups, earning a fortune for Capitol Records (and themselves) with ten Top10 singles and an equal number of gold albums. They also created a “sound.” Whenever a new Beach Boys record was released, millions of people headed for the stores to get their fix of California fun/sun music.
     But in 1966, the Beach Boys surprised their fans with Pet Sounds,  an LP that didn’t sound like anything they’d done before. It was introspective and gentle, complex to the point of inaccessibility for most teenagers. Brian Wilson, the architect of the Beach Boys’ music, had grown up, but American kids were still out hunting for the surf. Critics hailed Pet Sounds as the ultimate rock masterpiece; other musicians (prominently included: Lennon and McCartney) were awed by it; record buyers avoided it.
     Brian was proud of his artistic achievement, but he was also upset that the public didn’t appreciate his efforts. So was Capitol Records, which wanted more of the bankable “old” Beach Boys. That group was gone though. Brian Wilson was about to take his experimentation one step further--put all the energy and creativity he had channeled into the Pet Sounds album into one song.  A “little pocket symphony” called “Good Vibrations.”
     THE ORIGIN: “My mother used to tell me about vibrations,” Brian Wilson explained in Rolling Stone. “I really didn’t understand too much what that meant when I was a boy. It scared me, the word ‘vibrations.’ To think that invisible feelings, invisible vibrations existed, scared me to death. But she talked about how dogs could pick up vibrations from people; they would bark at some people and not bark at others. And so it came to pass that we talked about good vibrations.”
     IN THE STUDIO: “Good Vibrations” was a milestone in studio work. Wilson took six months, used ninety hours of recording tape, worked in four different studios, and did somewhere between fifteen and twenty different versions of the song before he was satisfied. The production cost $50,000--which, at the time, made it the most expensive single ever made.
     The original, “live” version of the song (produced at Western Studios in Los Angeles), was an R&B number that many of the session musicians thought was as good as the final record. Wilson wasn’t satisfied, however. He had a complex vision which included using cellos and a theremin (an instrument whose eerie, wavering sound had been used primarily in soundtracks of horror movies). Eventually this meant moving from studio to studio in Los Angeles. Wilson: “I wanted to experiment with combining studio sounds. Every studio has its own marked sound.”
     Meanwhile, everyone’s patience--including the rest of the Beach Boys’--began wearing thin. Wilson’s quest for the perfect sound had taken him from Western to RCA studios, then to Goldstar, to Columbia, and finally back to Western. Practically every studio musician in L.A. had played on the song, and still there was no finished master. Pressures mounted. Capitol demanded that the song be completed. Wilson--who believed that time wasn’t a concern, since he was creating “art’‘--started to lose his cool. At one point, he threatened to give up and sell the song to Warner Brothers for one of their R&B acts.
     Finally, half a year after production was begun, “Good Vibrations” was done. Wilson describes the last  moments of recording: “It was a feeling of power, it was a rush. A feeling of exaltation.  I remember saying ‘Oh,  my God, sit back and listen to this!’ ” Unlike Pet Sounds, this work was instantly commercial. Released in October of 1966, it sold 400,000 copies in four days. Capitol stopped complaining about the “new” Beach Boys.
     FOR THE RECORD: Believe it or not, the song is in mono! Where’d they find a theremin player? From the UCLA music program. He was an avante-garde musician who had never heard of the Beach Boys. He kept asking Steve Douglas, the contractor for the session, if he was going to get paid.