Song Lyric of the Day (The Beach Boys, With “Good Vibrations”)

“I’m picking up good vibrations
She’s giving me excitations.”—“Good Vibrations” (1966), written by Brian Wilson and Mike Love, performed by the Beach Boys

Perhaps no other cultural realm supports Robert Frost’s contention that “Nothing gold can stay” as much as the music industry--and few bands have done so as powerfully as The Beach Boys.

The best of the Beach Boys comes from the poignant sense of a passage in time. Summer doesn’t last forever; the “Surfer Girl” can’t stay young eternally; the Pet Sounds song cycle that started with “Wouldn’t It Be Nice?” ends with “Caroline, No.” Is it any wonder, then, that the group’s production masterpiece “Good Vibrations” reigned atop the Billboard pop charts for only one week, reaching it on this date 45 years ago today?

“We were setting out to create a record that everybody would spook out to,” Brian Wilson told Paul Zollo in 1988. “It would scare people and that would be a really heavy record. And what we did was, we got so into it that the more we created, the more we wanted to create. You know what I mean?”

No, not really. But Wilson, his brains undoubtedly scrambled after years of mental anguish and drug use, did make a kind of sense almost immediately afterward in the same interview collected for Zollo’s Songwriters on Songwriting: “That record came together like nobody’s business. That really was a good record.”

Years ago, I remember, the baseball reliever Mike Marshall tried to analyze strikeout king Nolan Ryan’s success from the point of view of kinesiology. I remember thinking how beside the point it was to deconstruct what really was a phenomenon, maybe even a gift of the gods.

And that is how I feel about Wilson and the creation of “Good Vibrations.” You can talk all you want about the four different studios employed and the textures each created; the double- and even triple-tracking of voices to make them sound like 20 altogether; the use of unusual instruments such as a cello and a theremin; and the care lavished throughout six months of production and $10,000 in expenses—an unheard-of cost at the time.

What remains true, in the end, is that Wilson—in the precious moment before his psyche fractured amid record-company pressures, battles with cousin and group lead singer Mike Love, drug use and residual damage from abuse by his father—seized a creative bolt of lightning and produced textures of voice and instruments that nobody—not even himself—had ever achieved before on the pop-music scene. From what I have seen on You Tube, even his band (and despite Love’s recalcitrance and Brian's absence from the stage, they remained Brian’s) never came close to capturing in concert the same kind of excitement that exploded across the airwaves in late 1966.

The paradox of the Beach Boys and the youth culture they epitomized is that, even as their moment as leaders of pop music passed, they managed to create what Wilson correctly told Zollo two decades later was “an eternal record. Something that will recur in eternity.”