“Good Vibrations” was composed by Brian Wilson with words by Mike Love. Characterized by its complex soundscapes, its episodic structure, and its subversions of pop music formula, it was the most costly single ever recorded at the time of its release. “Good Vibrations” later became widely acclaimed as one of the greatest masterpieces of rock music. Most of the song was developed as it was recorded. Its title derived from Wilson’s fascination with cosmic vibrations, after his mother once told him as a child that dogs sometimes bark at people in response to their “bad vibrations”. He used the concept to suggest extrasensory perception, while Love’s lyrics were inspired by the Flower Power movement that was then burgeoning in Southern California.
The making of “Good Vibrations” was unprecedented for any kind of recording, with a total production cost estimated between $50,000 and $75,000 (equivalent to $370,000 and $550,000 in 2016). Building upon the multi-layered approach he had formulated with the “Pet Sounds” album, Wilson recorded the song in different sections at four Hollywood studios from February to September 1966, resulting in a cut-up mosaic of several musical episodes marked by disjunctive key and modal shifts. Band publicist Derek Taylor dubbed the unusual work a “pocket symphony”. It contained previously untried mixes of instruments, including jaw harp and Electro-Theremin, and it was the first pop hit to have a cello playing juddering rhythms.
Virtually every pop music critic recognizes “Good Vibrations” as one of the most important compositions and recordings of the entire rock era, and it is regularly hailed as one of the finest pop productions of all time. For the song, Wilson is credited with further developing the use of the recording studio as an instrument, as Phil Spector had pioneered. Both were advocates of recording in mono instead of stereo. The single revolutionized rock music from live concert performances to studio productions which could only exist on record, heralding a wave of pop experimentation and the onset of psychedelic and progressive rock. Although it does not technically feature a theremin, it is frequently cited for having one, which led to the instrument’s revival and to an increased interest in analog synthesizers.
The Beach Boys leader, Brian Wilson, was responsible for the musical composition and virtually all of the arrangement for “Good Vibrations”. His cousin and bandmate Mike Love contributed the song’s lyrics and its bass vocalization in the chorus. During the recording sessions for the 1966 album “Pet Sounds”, Wilson began changing his writing process. Rather than going to the studio with a completed song, he would record a track containing a series of chord changes he liked, take an acetate disc home, and then compose the song’s melody and write its lyrics. For “Good Vibrations”, Wilson said
I had a lot of unfinished ideas, fragments of music I called ‘feels.’ Each feel represented a mood or an emotion I’d felt, and I planned to fit them together like a mosaic.
Most of the song’s structure and arrangement was written as it was recorded. Engineer Chuck Britz is quoted saying that Wilson considered the song to be “his whole life performance in one track”. Wilson stated:
I was an energetic 23-year-old. … I said: ‘This is going to be better than [the Phil Spector production] “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin'”.
Brian said that the song was inspired by his mother:
[She] used to tell me about vibrations. I didn’t really understand too much of what it meant when I was just a boy. It scared me, the word ‘vibrations.’ She told me about dogs that would bark at people and then not bark at others, that a dog would pick up vibrations from these people that you can’t see, but you can feel.
Brian first enlisted Pet Sounds lyricist Tony Asher for help in putting words to the idea. When Brian presented the song on piano, Asher thought that it had an interesting premise with the potential for hit status, but could not fathom the end result due to Brian’s primitive piano playing style. Asher remembers:
Brian was playing what amounts to the hook of the song: ‘Good, good, good, good vibrations.’ He started telling me the story about his mother. … He said he’d always thought that it would be fun to write a song about vibes and picking them up from other people. … So as we started to work, he played this little rhythmic pattern—a riff on the piano, the thing that goes under the chorus.
Brian wanted to call the song “Good Vibes”, but Asher advised that it was “lightweight use of the language”, suggesting that “Good Vibrations” would sound less “trendy”. The two proceeded to write a lyric for the verses, later to be discarded, in what was then the most basic section of the song.
Wilson thought of the theremin as “a woman’s voice or a violin bow on a carpenter’s saw”. From the start, Wilson envisioned a theremin for the track. AllMusic reviewer John Bush pointed out: “Radio listeners could easily pick up the link between the title and the obviously electronic riffs sounding in the background of the chorus, but Wilson’s use of the theremin added another delicious parallel—between the single’s theme and its use of an instrument the player never even touched.” “Good Vibrations” does not technically feature a theremin, but rather an Electro-Theremin, which is physically controlled by a knob on the side of the instrument. It was dubbed a “theremin” simply for convenience. Britz speculates: “He just walked in and said, ‘I have this new sound for you.’ I think he must have heard the sound somewhere and loved it, and built a song around it.” Brian has credited his brother and bandmate Carl for suggesting the cello as an instrument to use. He also stated that its triplet beat on the chorus was his own idea.
Mike Love submitted the final lyrics for “Good Vibrations”, claiming to have written them on the drive to the studio. Love reacted upon hearing the unfinished backing track:
[It] was already so avant-garde, especially with the theremin, I wondered how our fans were going to relate to it. How’s this going to go over in the Midwest or Birmingham? It was such a departure from ‘Surfin’ U.S.A.’ or “Help Me, Rhonda”.
Feeling that the song could be “the Beach Boys’ psychedelic anthem or flower power offering”, he based the lyrics on the burgeoning psychedelic music and Flower Power movements occurring in San Francisco and some parts of the Los Angeles area. He described the lyrics as “just a flowery poem. Kind of almost like ‘If you’re going to San Francisco be sure to wear flowers in your hair.'”
Capitol Records executives were worried that the lyrics contained psychedelic overtones, and Brian was accused of having based the song’s production on his LSD experiences. Brian clarified that the song was written under the influence of marijuana, not LSD. He explained:
I made ‘Good Vibrations’ on drugs; I used drugs to make that. … I learned how to function behind drugs, and it improved my brain … it made me more rooted in my sanity.
In Steven Gaines’s 1986 biography, Wilson is quoted on the lyrics: “We talked about good vibrations with the song and the idea, and we decided on one hand that you could say … those are sensual things. And then you’d say, ‘I’m picking up good vibrations,’ which is a contrast against the sensual, the extrasensory perception that we have. That’s what we’re really talking about.”
“Good Vibrations” was voted number one in the Mojo’s “Top 100 Records of All Time” and number six on Rolling Stone’s “500 Greatest Songs of All Time”, and it was included in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame’s “500 Songs that Shaped Rock and Roll”.
Here’s a behind-the-scenes look at the recording the song.
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