One of my favorite things about Pet Sounds is how the album ends: with the far-away sound of a train running down the tracks, a dog barking in response. Brilliant! So evocative, so nostalgic, so sentimental. The album’s theme is all about becoming an adult, looking back at childish innocence, with a feeling of loss, of longing and yearning.
From the time I was a few months old until seven, we lived in a house a few blocks south of San Fernando Blvd. in Pacoima, California (SoCal residents will know the street), on the other side of which are a set of railroad tracks. I awoke early every morning to that exact sound, and hearing it as side two of Pet Sounds fades to silence takes me back to my early childhood, exactly as Brian intended.
Pet Sounds is to my way of thinking the first Pop/Rock, if not concept album, at least theme album. Brian’s next project---the eventually-scrapped Smile---was an ambitious one: Manifest Destiny set to music, lyrics courtesy of Brian’s new collaborator, the genius Van Dyke Parks. I acquired the Smiley Smile album (an abbreviated version of Smile) in early 1968, and had my little teenage mind blown. If you don’t know the Smile saga, you can read all about it in the book Outlaw Blues, written by Paul Williams (not the song writer). The chapters covering Smile were originally published in three issues of Crawdaddy Magazine as the album was being recorded, and are a rivetting account of the evolving and eventually abandoned masterwork.
Around the same time, Leonard Berstein was taping his television special on the new "Artistic" movement in Rock ’n’ Roll. In the show Brian sings and performs "Surf’s Up" on the grand piano in his Bel-Air mansion living room (on Belagio Drive, one block above Sunset. I and a songwriter I was recording with made a pilgrimage to the house in ’75, to see about Brian producing us). Berstein is very effusive in his praise of the song. So much for all Rock music being "garbage", a sentiment one particularly smug and snobby Audiogon member has been spewing.
