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Mar 08, 2025 By Austin Saalman

1964 served as a monumental year for pop music’s burgeoning revolutionary Brian Wilson. The 22-year-old Beach Boy was introduced to cannabis by friend Lorren Daro earlier that year and by December had suffered his notorious stress-induced nervous breakdown on a flight between his hometown of Los Angeles and Houston. Both experiences would undergird his subsequent groundbreaking musical achievements, eventually culminating in his triumphant, era-defining masterpiece Pet Sounds. Along with this near-mythical surge of creativity, these events collectively signaled the end of The Beach Boys’ classic “surfin’” era. Wilson would retire from touring—his spot within the group temporarily filled by Glen Campbell before former Rip Chord Bruce Johnston entered the picture—and hole up in his California studio to wrestle with his youthful demons and, hopefully, write another hit record. His previous image as pop’s clean-cut boy next door would soon be shattered, with the young genius emerging from the ruins as a brilliant, albeit haunted American experimentalist isolated in his studio, analyzing Beatles records, and getting high. “Pot,” Wilson would later remark of his creative transformation, “made the music grow in my head.”

The band’s eighth studio release—a direct result of these events—The Beach Boys Today! was released the following March to lukewarm reviews, though such tracks as the group’s cover of Bobby Freeman’s 1958-released hit “Do You Wanna Dance?,” “When I Grow Up (To Be a Man),” “Dance, Dance, Dance,” and “Help Me, Rhonda” proved successful hits for the group. The album’s first side, on which these cuts are featured, serves only as minimal departure from the band’s previous doo wop-inflected output. Listeners of more “traditional” predispositions can find reassuringly surreal remnants of The Beach Boys’ signature Shangri-La of adolescent romantic intrigue and Pacific breezes throughout Side A. This, doubtless designed to sell visions of an idealized West Coast life to youth stranded amidst the bleak flatlands of flyover country. Many of these tracks are standouts, most notably “Do You Wanna Dance?”—on which drummer and middle Wilson brother Dennis offers a remarkable vocal performance—and the poignant “When I Grow Up (To Be a Man),” which finds the band grappling with the existential anxiety of waxing maturity. The only track seemingly out of place here is the slightly off-putting “Don’t Hurt My Little Sister,” on which Brian effectively reveals his infatuation with his then-teenaged sister-in-law Diane Rovell.

The melancholy enchantment awaiting the listener on Today’s flipside accounts for the entirety of the album’s remarkability. Having eschewed his bandmates for the legendary Wrecking Crew, Wilson was able to use Side B of The Beach Boys Today! as a means of exercising his inimitable skill as an arranger. Here, Wilson’s dazzlingly intricate compositions elevate the music to levels higher than mere pop ballads; perhaps they are hymns, ethereal songs of praise and worship, called across frequencies not to ancient deities, but young people in love and sorrow. This baroque-tinged pop fantasy, clearly indebted to the likes of Phil Spector and Jack Nitzsche, carries its classically influenced heart on its sleeve. It was, after all, Brian’s self-proclaimed desire from the beginning to wed the sounds of Bach with those of The Four Freshmen—swiftly, and sweetly, venturing into the realm of shimmeringly baroque art-pop on such awe-inspiring tracks as “Please Let Me Wonder” and “In the Back of My Mind.”

Purportedly the first song composed by Brian under the influence of pot, with lyrics co-written with bandmate Mike Love, “Please Let Me Wonder” is a sweeping ode to adolescent pining and uncertainty. This pristine pop gem, swept with dusky shadow and bluest desperation, may very well be Today’s finest cut, finding Wilson, in a state of heartrending desperation, pleading, “And please forgive my shaking / Can’t you tell my heart is breaking? / Can’t make myself say what I plan to say.” At 2:25, a dream-hushed Dennis breathes, I love you, as the harmonies fade into a brief instrumental break, concluding what, in its time, surely resembled an impressive new artistic direction for The Beach Boys. Later, the band perfects the art of the cover on its intoxicating rendition of William H. “Prez” Tyus, Jr.’s oft-covered 1958-released hit “I’m So Young,” movingly interpreted as a symphony of tumbling percussion and slick harmonies, its burning sentimentality accentuated by Wilson’s sheer anguish as he declares, “Can’t marry no one.”

There are many words to be spoken of the subsequent “Kiss Me, Baby,” though few can prepare the unfamiliar listener for the track’s penetrating gorgeousness. Instrumentally among The Wrecking Crew’s finest work, “Kiss Me, Baby,” like “Please Let Me Wonder,” finds Wilson rehearsing, at long last, for the transcendent process he would undertake while writing and recording the following year’s Pet Sounds—it is simultaneously heartfelt and complex, saccharine and educated. “And I wondered / As it got light,” sings Wilson in a piercing moment of youthful longing, “Were you still awake like me?” The deceptively upbeat jangle of “She Knows Me Too Well” masks the harrowed confessions of its adolescent narrator, whose admitted mistreatment of his girlfriend has begun plaguing him with feelings of guilt and regret, though by the track’s conclusion he still seems unwilling to make the change. “I treat her so mean / I don’t deserve what I have,” laments Wilson, “And I think that she’ll forget just by making her laugh.” The track’s morbidly confessional nature lays bare its narrator’s sexist transgressions in all their ugliness—a lyrical approach previously unassociated with such groups as The Beach Boys. This is followed by the brief, jazz-tinged clockwork of Today’s closing track, “In the Back of My Mind,” yet another early example of Dennis’ prowess as a vocalist. This delirious ode to romantic paranoia stands as an intricate pocket symphony which, along with several preceding tracks, serve as direct precursors to Pet Sounds and Smile. Listeners need not acknowledge “Bull Session with ‘Big Daddy’,” the album’s actual closing track.

Though yielding far less of impact than such landmark works as Rubber Soul or Highway 61 Revisited, both released later that year, The Beach Boys Today!—specifically Side B—is a unique artistic statement, radical and subversive in its own right. This breakthrough, coming from a band so frequently overlooked by the decade’s counterculture and nascent rock establishment, passed by with less critical recognition than deserved, its otherworldly glow forming a fine blueprint of the cosmic brilliance to come. Listening 60 years on, The Beach Boys Today! still fascinates, its composition and delivery a testament to Wilson’s continued refinement as a sonic craftsman. While certainly not in competition with Pet Sounds for the title “magnum opus,” The Beach Boys Today! serves as a worthy antecedent to its game-changing spiritual bombast, Wilson shining as brightly as ever, ascending to his glorious creative peak.

www.brianwilson.com

www.thebeachboys.com

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