One late evening two weeks ago, while Alex and I were driving home from the South Bay, I had the urge to put "Surfin' USA" on the car stereo (we'd been talking about San Onofre for some reason—probably power plant related—and I couldn't get the lyric "San Onofre and Sunset, inside, outside, USA" out of my head).
This is one of those associations that's been with me since middle school, or whenever it was I bought that Beach Boys 20 Good Vibrations album at the Wherehouse, one of the first CDs I ever owned. Those songs are so entrenched in my Southern California blood that I can't remember a time I didn't know them, like I can't remember ever not knowing the Pacific Ocean.
When "Surfin' USA" finished, I put on Pet Sounds, jonesing for more stacked vocal harmonies but looking for something a little more grown up (which is wild when you realize the Beach Boys were 20-23 years old when the album was released) to accompany our night drive. And thus the sounds of summer '66 became the soundtrack to our journey: the gentle curves of 280 illuminated by headlights, the hills of Palo Alto dark in comparison, blinking airplanes dotting the sky overhead.
It was weird because I'd never listened to the Beach Boys at night. They are not a night band...they're a solid weekend morning-and-midday band, usually accompanying sun-drenched drives along PCH or summer days lounging in my parents' garage with the turntable. I was thinking the same thing about Sgt. Pepper, which I always pair with Pet Sounds as one of the sunniest, summeriest albums of the 60s. Changing the setting is like listening to a totally new album, of a very different, introspective/philosophical mood.
There's a shift in how I connect The Beach Boys' music to place: their canon up to 1966 is all SoCal music to me, and Pet Sounds and Smile are distinctly NorCal, because that's where I fell in love with them. I was always more of a casual fan, but Smile (which here I must admit was introduced to me by the biopic Love & Mercy starring Paul Dano and John Cusack) gave me enough to obsess over: the perfectionism in the studio, the Wrecking Crew, the family drama, and Brian Wilson's beautiful, complex, tortured mind. It's what a Twitter mutual back in the day called "an American masterwork", an album I relish listening to from beginning to end, in all its weird and wonderful glory.
But at the moment I'm listening to Pet Sounds again, on one of the longest days of the year as twilight darkens into dusk, thinking about how Brian Wilson shepherded the Beach Boys' sound from fun-lovin' surf music to orchestral pop perfection in 3 years, and everything he accomplished as a songwriter after that.
RIP Brian, one of the absolute greats.