The Most Overrated Album Ever

Ever since I was a little boy, I’ve loved the Beach Boys. They were sort of ever present on the radio in New York in the late 70’s, especially on AM radio. I remember on the van ride to school I was in the third and fourth grade, WNBC 660 AM used to play them probably once every morning. And being a little boy who dreaded arriving at school each morning, the chorus of “Sloop John B” (“I wanna go home/why won’t they let me go home) got me; I'd sing it to myself under my breath, thinking that there was someone else out there in the world who knew how I felt.

I didn’t have any Beach Boys albums until I was about 12 and taped my brother’s copy of “Endless Summer.” To me, then and now, it’s pretty much a perfect album and perhaps the best of all greatest hits albums. When the Beach Boys started, singles were the medium of rock n’ roll, and albums were designed to be the singles plus filler to get you to spend more money (actually, that kind of sounds like today). “Endless Summer” is one perfect single after another – “Surfin’ U.S.A.,” “Help Me Rhonda,” “I Get Around,” the sublime “California Girls,” “Good Vibrations,” and in my opinion, the greatest of all Beach Boys’ songs, “Don’t Worry Baby.” If Brian Wilson is a genius (and I believe that he is), it’s not because of his production skills; it’s because he created a beautiful myth about Southern California life that resonated around the globe while being a total outsider from that culture. Chubby, insular, painfully shy, unathletic, physically and emotionally abused by his father and scarred beyond belief, the world that he wrote about must have been one he must have known he would never belong to, except in his fantasies. And he couldn't surf, either. (None of the Beach Boys could surf, with the exception of drummer Dennis Wilson.)

In the 80’s, when I was in my teens, I didn’t really know from Pet Sounds. I think I first got the record when I was 19. Whenever I saw a “Greatest Rock Albums Of All Time List,” Pet Sounds was never too high on the list. Sometime in the early 90’s, that all changed. Nowadays, if you look album lists, Pet Sounds will be either near or at the top. It’s absurd. Pet Sounds is perhaps the most overrated album ever. It’s a good album, with three incredible songs that are among their best; “God Only Knows,” “Wouldn’t It Be Nice” and “Sloop John B.” “I Know There’s An Answer” almost reaches that level, as does “You Still Believe In Me.” But that’s it. It’s not that the remainder of the songs are poor, it’s just that they’re not all that incredible. Combining that with the somewhat baroque production, you’ve got a very good but very flawed album.

What accounts for the lionization of Pet Sounds? For starters, there’s the story of Brian Wilson, the tortured artiste who battled his own demons and his own band (Mike Love fought him all the way on it) in making the record. Then, after producing Pet Sounds, he finally cracked up, a victim of too many drugs and trying to top Sgt. Pepper. It’s the kind of stuff that myths are made of, and it’s an irresistible story line. Secondly, there are Wilson’s production skills – which have been blown all out of proportion. (Wilson’s true production moment of genius was “Good Vibrations.”) Brian Wilson was a great producer, but listening to Pet Sounds you hear the heavy influence of the true master producer of the era – Phil Spector. Wilson literally worshipped Spector and learned everything from him. Reading lots of the over the top rubbish about the production on Pet Sounds, where Spector’s name is barely ever mentioned, you come to realize that there are a lot of people in the world who no clue as to Spector’s influence on Wilson. (The Wrecking Crew, Spector’s house band, played on many Beach Boys’ songs). And finally, the record was a (relative) commercial failure at upon release. So then the narrative becomes the misunderstood genius that is underappreciated after he becomes a “serious artist.” If you were going to write a indie rock biblical fable, it doesn’t get any better than that.

I can rattle off about 30 albums from the 60’s alone that are superior to Pet Sounds – every Beatles album with the exception of Yellow Submarine and Please Please Me, most 60’s Dylan releases, about four Rolling Stones albums, classics by Creedence, the Band, the entire Otis Redding catalog, Aretha’s first four Atlantic full lengths, etc. (The absence of most soul records from the top echelon of the lists is endemic of the near-sightedness of most rock critics.)

I know lots of smart people that disagree with me on this one – vehemently. So you take your cred and Pet Sounds; I'm much happier with "California Girls" and "I Get Around."