Take this pill.’ I just remember that when I started working with him he was dressed great – hip, cool, happening, y’know? Then he went backwards, all the way to wearing his pyjamas.”Īs the Sunflower sessions began, Wilson stopped turning up to studios, so the band relocated to a 16-track facility in his living room in Bel Air, the idea being (as well as saving money) that the studio might be more tempting if it was two floors below his bedroom.Ĭarl Wilson and Mike Love in the studio. They’d go, ‘You don’t need the Beach Boys, man. “So he pushed himself too hard on Smile.” In 1967, Wilson abandoned this projected follow-up, by which time his initially creative use of LSD was damaging his mind. “He makes this gorgeous album and they go ‘Have you got any hits?’” sighs Johnston of an album that contained God Only Knows and Wouldn’t It Be Nice, and is often named the greatest LP of all time. Somehow out of this comes music that sounds like a warm hug Gaz CoombesĬapitol Records didn’t understand Wilson’s melancholy paeans to youthful innocence on Pet Sounds. “Rubber Soul was obviously a leap forward,” he says, “so Brian started to think, ‘Maybe I should make an album of completely connected songs, that’s just scarily incredible’.” They’re no longer teenagers but men who’ve been through a lot. Johnston attended the listening party for the Beatles’ Rubber Soul – along with various other members of the Beach Boys, the Mamas and the Papas and Doris Day – which inspired Pet Sounds. “Thats incredible, isn’t it? It was just: what’s next? We were too young to protest.”

“When I joined the band months, I toured and made three albums,” Johnston observes. Wilson, who had a first nervous breakdown in 1964, had been crushed by the pressure for hit songs. Jardine has similarly happy memories: “We were all friends. “Music was our way of healing,” says Bruce Johnston (keyboards/vocals), a genial 79-year-old, who joined in 1965 and is speaking from Missouri. Somehow out of this comes music that sounds like a warm hug.” “They’re no longer teenagers – they’re men in their late 20s who’ve been through a lot: family stuff, the brush with bankruptcy and Charles Manson. “By Sunflower and Surf’s Up, the other characters in the band are starting to emerge,” says Supergrass frontman Gaz Coombes, one of the many musicians influenced by this stunning pair of albums. Photograph: Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images Sunflower (1970) and Surf’s Up (1971) – which are reissued this week in Feel Flows, a 135-track treasure trove including numerous alternate takes, curiosities and long-lost gems – restored their reputation critically, then commercially. Incredibly, this turbulence produced some of the most beautiful music of the band’s career. To be honest, I don’t know how Dennis got out alive.” I couldn’t wait to get out of there, but for some reason he cast a spell on other people.” There’s a moment’s silence as he reflects on how close they came. He played me a song he’d written and I started getting dizzy. “I met him once and I didn’t want to meet him any more,” Jardine, now 78, shudders.

He played me a song he’d written and I started getting dizzy Al Jardine More darkly, they had been tainted by an association with Charles Manson, who befriended drummer Dennis Wilson in the months before the Manson Family’s 1969 Tate-LaBianca murders. Their previous two albums had tanked in the US, too: 1968’s Friends limped to No 126.

By 1969, the Beach Boys were still huge in Europe but without a label after a costly royalties dispute with Capitol.

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