Pet Sounds: Most Overrated Album of All Time?

What an interesting thread.  Amazing how different people's perspectives are.  Funny enough, I was never interested in Pet Sounds when it came out, I was in love with the Beatles.  I was young so there was a bit "are you a Beach Boys or Beatles Fan?"  At the time many of us were picking one or the other- kinds of silly now.

Im in the miusic business now and I  get to go in the room Pet Sounds was recorded in (now known as East West Studios in LA).  What is most amazing about this record (and has been said in this thread) was Brian thought of his pop music like a orchestra with a zillion parts and layers. No one else was doing anything close to that.  All the other records of the day where built with a band playing/singing at the same time, like a concert.  No one was multitracking because none of the studios had the multitrack recorder system (developed by Les Paul BTW). 

Another amzing thing about the record is Brain figured out how to get all those layers and parts, created and recorded one part at a time, all put together and mixed properly in time and a the right level.  No easy feat a the time.  It was a ridiculous amount of work and no one but a madman/genius would go through that much work over music "he heard in his head". 

Another intersting fact about the album was the Wrecking Crew,.  The played on the entire record and the Wrecking crew was an extremely professional set of stuido musicians.   I was just at an event where they finally gave Carol Kaye a lifetime achievement award.  A female bass player was behind the wrecking crew almost all the entire time, while guitartists like Glenn Campell and and Tommy Tedesco played on some records and not others. 

Funny, the list of top records in that year, Wrecking Crew played on 75% of them (Association, 5th Dimension, Mamas and Pappas, Herb Albert/Tijuana Brass, on and on).  They were incredible musicians and could play any song perfect, in any style,  by the second run through with little or no sheet music.

IM not sure if any of you ever heard a Beach Boys album that is now out of print called SURF'S UP.  It was a next step after Pet Sounds and is absolutely amazing.  There were songs like "Feel Flows" on that record that used backwards tape mixed in and all kinds of production tricks to get the coolest sound- SO FAR AHEAD of the industry at the time.   

I see that many judge Pet Sounds on the strength of the songs alone- which is only part of the story.  At the time, I did too.  Now, I understand it and the tech behind it and it WAS as a technological leap.  If anyone watched that Hulu show with Rick Rubin and Paul McCartney were Paul explains the whole story from the beginning, they were dumbfounded by Pet Sounds.  It was WAY beyond anything being done in the UK and it took George Martin and Brain Epstien months to figure out how to do to it.   

Sgt Pepper was a brilliant album but keep in mind it wasnt Paul John Ringo and George that figured out parts and multitracks and layers and overlays, it was their engineer/producers (Epstien Martin).  So Paul said on that intereview they would come in with a a song, a guitar part and a maybe the vocals and lyrics and that was it!  The rest was those producers.   In the case of the Beach Boys, it was ALL BRIAN- engineering, writing the music, figuring out voicings, conducting the sessions- completely insane.  He was doing things no one had ever done before so there was no template, no experience to draw on, no one to ask.   That's why we consider Brian a genius and why the record is so special.   

Imagine if Frank Sinatra did all that, or Elvis or any other artist of the day.  The clsoest we have to that is Les Paul who developed multitracking.  After Pet Sounds, the recording industry began adopting it as the musicians all wanted to sound liek that too.

Brad    

Good post @lonemountain. I was a huge Beach Boys fan through the All Summer Long album (1964), and they were the first group I saw live (that summer). I had a ticket to see The Beatles on their ’64 tour, but decided to pass. I wasn’t yet sold on them, but did see them the following summer.

The next BB album was The Beach Boys Today in March of ’65, and by the time it came out Pop music had changed dramatically, the harder sound of the British Invasion bands making the BB’s sound passe’, far too gentle and "white". I never even heard the next album Summer Days, and The Beach Boys were effectively dead to me.

No one I knew bought Pet Sounds when it was released in ’66, and I heard it only after accidentally getting a copy of Smiley Smile in early ’68. In the midst of the Blues revival and psychedelic madness of 1968, here comes the strangest music I had ever heard. I became obsessed with SS, and Brian Wilson in general. So I then bought all the albums I had missed after All Summer Long, including of course Pet Sounds.

The album is rather poorly recorded, making it hard to hear all the marvelous voicings in Brian’s piano playing, or to fully appreciate the sublime chord progressions (I consider "God Only Knows" a masterpiece of a song, one of the best written in the 20th century) and orchestration he wrote for The Wrecking Crew musicians to play. You have to work to hear through the "fog" (lack of transparency and inner detail) of the recording, but it’s worth it.

As far as I know Epstein never had anything to do with recording the Beatles other than managing and helping them secure a recording contract. He was never an engineer or producer. George Martin produced and Geoff Emerick engineered. The Beatles were also very involved by asking the pair to produce certain sounds for them to create the record the way they heard it in their head.

@johnto - indeed, Brian Epstein was the manager and had nothing to do with the recordings. Martin and Emerick it was! 

I agree with you. I also have tried to listen to PS but don't hear what the hoopla is about. Sir George is wrong, pepper is by far superior.