Pocket Symphonies

“Pet Sounds” at 60

The pure products of America
                   go crazy—
                         —William Carlos Williams

Pocket symphony: a phrase popularized by an ad-man (Derek Taylor)—a press-man, anyway; journalist, publisher, and producer—popularized, that is, by a man who had been press officer for the Fab Four themselves (“The Beatles Are Coming”), and would be again; who through his own public relations company had introduced the Byrds to America and the Beach Boys to England. It was for the Boys’ “Good Vibrations” (1966) that Taylor revivified the phrase, realizing he needed some way to get across what was nestled inside all the whizbang new studio creations coming from the band’s brilliant-but-fragile composer, Brian Wilson—the rest of the group having become more or less a touring appendage of Wilson’s one-man production laboratory. It was the same advertorial insight that yielded another famous tagline, which several generations since have considered de rigueur, but which didn’t seem quite so publicly obvious in 1966 (unless you were Derek Taylor, or the Fab Four themselves): “Brian Wilson is a genius.”

As influential copy goes, “Pocket Symphony” isn’t at all unfair. Eine kleine Nachtmusik is a “pocket symphony.” Many movie scores have been reducible to just the kind of short movements worthy of the name. Gershwin—a composer Wilson adored, admired, and in some ways succeeded—wrote suites fusing jazz with classical, in a way neither field was prepared to accept as its own: what better word, or pair of words, for that? A miniature of orchestral dimension; a Lilliputian Opus. Either way, une symphonie de poche. What Wilson had done with “Good Vibrations” was nothing short of introducing American Pop—the New Pop, that is, which was really rock, which was really rock n’ roll—to its maturity. Youth Music was now Art Music.

“Good Vibrations” was a true pop mutation, one surprise after another. The opening verse (organ, bass counterpoint) intruded on by cello-and-theremin chorus, which changes keys every four bars—Gb to Ab to Bb—the final key the dominant, bringing us right back into the Eb minor verse again. Then it repeats. Only the second chorus, once done, lingers on the Bb, as the song goes into a half-time. This escalates into the bridge, then it ebbs into another bridge (“Gotta keep those lovegood vibrations a-happenin’ with her. . .”) as Hammond and harmonica digress from California beachfront into brief rustic valley; then the chorus, reprised; then the interruption of that chorus (“na-na-na” and “bah bah bah” and “do do do”); then the fade-out, cello and theremin again. All in 3 ½ minutes. “Pocket Symphony” indeed: after 90 hours of tape and tens of thousands of dollars, “Good Vibrations” (the costliest record ever made, at the time) was released on October 10, 1966, going to #1 on the Billboard charts. But then Wilson had a breakdown (another one), delayed, flailed, and all his former plans for an epoch-making “teenage symphony to God” ended up nowhere. The track stood like a lone mountain on the salvage pile of the next year’s Smiley Smile record. But until all pieces of the infamous Smile Sessions were finally brought to the public, decades later, in fragments (the detritus of Wilson’s ambitions), the narrative was sealed.

In 1967, the Sixties were decided. There was the past, which wouldn’t leave anyone alone (race riots; Elvis; Ronald Reagan). The present, which no one could avoid (“If you’re going to San Francisco/Be sure to wear some flowers in your hair. . .”). There was the future, which no one saw coming (The Velvet Underground & Nico). And there was Sgt. Pepper’s, which was all three. But Brian Wilson? A genius, out of time. In the rear view an innocent California, all adolescence and rock n’ roll; also the Great American Songbook, and the kitsch of the Silent Generation; an ache, a vision. All of which—and none of which—Wilson had already summed up, concluded, and transcended, in the middle of 1966. So too, to be sure, had Dylan and The Beatles. But after a Revolver, or a Blonde on Blonde, there were a thousand places to go: bright new lanes, worlds to pursue (60 years later we are still doing this). After Pet Sounds, what was anyone supposed to do?

* * *

Pocket symphony: the term calls to mind, too, a booming sound-world, the world of Wilson’s lifelong musical idol—Phil Spector, genius, pioneer, psychopath. “Little symphonies for the kids” Spector called his productions: 2- and 3-minute diamonds of teen melodramas, all but buried under the studio rubble of that mammoth legendary “Wall of Sound,” perfectly attuned (sonically, commercially, metaphysically) to the outsized yearnings and consumerist desires of the first generation to be saddled with that savviest and cruelest category ever conceived by modern marketing: “The Teenager.” The American Teenager was a painful creature, painful because gleeful, painful because cursed with an endless innocence, which a global empire’s service economies now bent inward to prolong and prolong, forever, into the unknown American future (ours). Spector’s productions were vaulted cathedrals hewn out of this adolescent emotion, temples to the secular love of these children, whose avatars could sing in one moment, “Baby, I love only you,” and in the next, “He hit me/And it felt like a kiss.” Since nothing is more monstrous than naivety, and no naivety more monstrous than the kind thrust on the American Teenager: a lonely figure on a stage, from which everything else—darkness, adulthood, sex—is always held at bay, stalking around the edges of that impossible innocent dream: a tiger, in the form of Phil Spector.

Set this exquisitely masochistic doll-dream next to the headlong rush of “I Want to Hold Your Hand” and suddenly The Beatles appear punk. The old energy of rock n’ roll revived, distilled into pure release. What else could those glorious falsetto “oooohs” mean, except overt sexual ecstasy? What else could, “And when I touch you, I feel happy inside/It’s such a feeling that, my love, I can’t hide/I can’t hide/I can’t hiiiiiide!” (Dylan heard it as “I get high!” and thought the future had finally arrived) mean? The Beatles weren’t coy. By no means were they suggesting a bit of heavy petting at the drive-in. Brian Epstein’s suits were for the adults, after all: a few short years before it had been leather, from head to foot, in Hamburg bordellos. The feral estrogenic screaming that drove them to abandon performing, only three years into their recording career, was all about sex—just as the howls that followed Elvis had been, until The King himself suddenly decided to become a respectable adult (in American terms, that is: first, the Military; then, Hollywood).

But The Beatles flew in on a different kind of sex, too: sex unburdened by Eisenhower mores and the suppressed nightmares of America’s racial castes. For The Beatles, “sex” always meant “love” (and vice-versa), even from the beginning. By the time that “love” changed from the girlfriend-boyfriend kind to the mystical-union kind, the modulation was accomplished smoothly. Certainly both kinds of “love” included (but weren’t limited to) the physical-carnal sort, which so much American pop music had strangled itself trying to deny. Because of this (and the influence of Dylan, who had a beatnik’s sense of sex, more “doomed beauty” than “Free Love”), Lennon and McCartney shifted into more “adult” registers easily. Hence “Yesterday” and “We Can Work it Out” doing in plain language what the Great American Songbook did with elegance and wit—timeless, universal emotions in melancholic colors—all without abandoning their youthful directness. This ability to contain whatever sound, genre, or feeling they could imagine, all within the context of that unparalleled youth-culture upheaval—that was the real alchemy of The Beatles.

But there was one American son who believed that dream of innocence and adolescent clarity. Who, like a boy scout, took those Spector productions at face value, and adored them. So it shouldn’t surprise us that when Brian Wilson first heard The Beatles (in 1964: The Beach Boys had been famous for two years), he reported suffering real panic; was literally, physically overwhelmed—an early version of the schizoaffective tendencies that later had him believing Spector had sent men to kill him while he planned his “teenage symphony to God,” threatening to surpass his idol for good. Brian Wilson was always in earnest: he felt things in bodily waves; heard music from heavenly places; aspired to transform actual human consciousness by delivering the Gospel of Spector to the world. When he said God, Brian Wilson didn’t mean sex, or the Market—he meant God. From Spector’s records, Wilson caught a tincture, a reflected fragment, of sublimity. And as The Beach Boys’ early career went on, Wilson’s evolving creations captured that promise of transcendence—which for Spector had been egoic monuments of pure sound (with a commercial imperative to boot)—expanding it into a vision of Pop Music as a kind of secular redemption.

The story goes that when he first heard The Ronettes’ “Be My Baby”—Spector’s monument of monuments—in 1963, Wilson had to pull over the car he was driving, out late with his girlfriend, to take it all in. It was like hearing testament, or discovering the General Theory of Relativity: that keening voice, Veronica “Ronnie” Bennett striking out from the middle of the Spectorite whirlpool (like “a little bee” inside an “enormous sonic picture,” Brian Eno would later put it). For Wilson, it was enough to found a personal religion. He already loved Spector. The Beach Boys had only just done their second album, Surfin’ U.S.A., and the 20-year-old was already receiving producer credits; his songs were fusing doo-wop, Chuck Berry, the Four Freshman, and the whole motoring world of California into a nation-wide phenomenon. But this was the missing element—this swooning, yearning. The collected sentiments of the youth of America, on the heights, trapped forever in amber (or wax). He wore out the grooves on his 45 record, and insisted until the day he died that it was the greatest song ever written. For those 2 minutes 40 seconds that “Be My Baby” lasts, it’s hard to disagree.

In response, Wilson wrote “Don’t Worry Baby” and offered it to Spector for Ronnie to sing. Spector rejected it—apparently well aware of Wilson’s obsessions (and surely paranoid about future wife Bennett). The song ended up on Shut Down Vol. 2, the Boys’ fifth album, in 1964. It was fortuitous. “Don’t Worry Baby” was the first really immortal Beach Boys song, the one in which Wilson finally captured that lustre, beyond just the joy of good harmonies or good waves, that he was hunting: like a snapshot of the racing scene from Rebel Without a Cause, if the Dean character had been a sweet, vulnerable choir boy from Inglewood. It’s hard to imagine Ronnie singing it: even in mono, the song is wider and warmer than Spector’s recording, which is a blistering, depthless vortex. “Be My Baby,” exists in an unreal space (zone of Plato’s Forms, perhaps): its sound is its argument, and also its central lyrical demand (“Say you’ll be my darling. . .”). It’s a Gesamtkunstwerk. But “Don’t Worry Baby” happens in our world, a world of cars and girlfriends, raised to cinematic heights. Nor is there any calculation: it believes in its yearning. It also changes: keys, themes.

And all this the Endless Summer dream through which Wilson’s best, most adventurous songs would drift over the following two years—“Please Let Me Wonder,” “She Knows Me Too Well,” “Let Him Run Wild,” even the show-off “I Get Around” (see again: “The Beatles are coming”). All of them stations of the cross—the cross being that “teenage symphony to God” now lingering at the edge of Wilson’s vision. In the meantime (1965), Bossa Nova was everywhere, James Brown was turning soul music elastic, Dylan was giving The Beatles marijuana, and Lennon was singing “Nowhere Man” about himself, while the Stones rapped about ad-men selling smokes, and The Byrds’ first record took Dylan electric a month before Dylan himself did. As Wilson sat down to make “California Girls” for Summer Days (And Summer Nights), surely he understood his palette was ready? A hazy prelude, the doubled guitars (doubling creates a chorus effect: what else had Wilson seen on LSD?) with their slight, nostalgic delay. Wilson no longer toured with the rest: in performance he’d been supplanted by Bruce Johnston or the young Glen Campbell. Now he stayed back and directed exhausted session musicians to draw their performances from his scrawled notations and gestures. The hours (and the costs) were piling up. Genius meant money, long hours, and breakdowns.

The studio was home, an instrument. Through it, Wilson was commanding tones, keys, combinations no one had ever really put in a “rock” song—not to mention honing that lush reverb, extracted and diffused from Spector’s. Wilson was painting, with mixing-board dials and faders his paintbrushes, studio players his egg-whites and oils. He was 23 years old. Only the themes—the words themselves—“I wish they all could be California Girls. . .”—these were starting to repeat. The sunshine, the bikinis, the kitsch. Wilson wasn’t quite guileless enough to imagine himself another Lennon, running off to study Dylanite ironies; or a McCartney, aspiring to the likes of Rodgers and Hart. He certainly wasn’t going to attempt lyrics like Dylan’s “You used to ride on a chrome horse with your diplomat/Who carried on his shoulder a Siamese cat,” the kind of impossible line that was already knocking off amateurs left and right (the lesson: only Dylan can really sing Dylan). No, he had to look elsewhere. Had to look inward, find some transcriber for what he found there. A receiver can conduct a signal, relaying it outward: it cannot tell you what the signal said. And God lives not in language—unless you’re a Hebrew (like Bob Dylan).

The transcriber was Tony Asher, copy- and jingle-writer (”You can tell it’s Mattel—it’s swell!”). Before Asher, Wilson’s lyrical collaborators had been band member Mike Love, not a transcriber. Now Wilson was looking elsewhere. He met Asher in an L.A. studio, around the same time Asher was wordsmithing for Barbie. In early 1966 the two sat down together for a marathon sprint through 10 days of material-gathering: they called their lyric sketches “feels.” Something to do with the marijuana they were smoking. Nothing could be more Californian, enlisting the words of an ad-man to finally go autobiographical. But Brian Wilson was not really going autobiographical: there would be no references, no personal details, no private detritus. Like any great copy, Pet Sounds would seem equally autobiographical to everyone who heard it. The young man who once wrote “In My Room”— giving the world that historic image of the sensitive adolescent dreamer, alone in their American bedroom—was now aiming his penchant for the universal, the archetypal, towards the central myth of his generation: the first generation of the American Teenager, first to believe in its own innocence, and to lose it.

* * *

To begin with, let us taxonomize. Playing, for a moment, a bedraggled young studio engineer, confronted with the recording of Pet Sounds. The “Wrecking Crew”—filled with studio hands like Carol Kaye and Hal Blaine (of “By My Baby” backbeat fame)—is convened, meant to transmute this music from the head of Brian Wilson to physical reality in wax. A complete list of instruments used in the subsequent recordings would include the following: electric guitar, piano, harpsichord, Hammond organ, tenor voice, baritone voice, countertenor voice, drumset, banjo, vibraphone, ukulele, violins, cellos, flutes, bass flutes, harmonica, accordion, tambourine, guiro, bongos, clarinets, bass clarinets, glockenspiel, French horns, English horns, oboe, saxophones, baritone saxophones, upright bass, electric bass, sleigh bells, timpani, Coca-Cola cans, the sound of train crossings and barking dogs, water jugs, and of course the Electro-Theremin. It’s pointless for the engineer to linger too long on the harmonies, complex key changes, parallel chords, or rhythms—these things are best left to the scrawl of sheet music, and the brain of Brian Wilson. But suffice to say that nothing in the new pop music had ever been this exquisitely peculiar in its sophistication. Attempting a list of genres on the record would lead us to proliferating, hazy descriptors of styles, all blending easily: bossa, muzak, exotica, R&B, psychedelia, surf rock, rock n’ roll. . .

Later critics would be led by this proliferation into even less sensical categorical monstrosities: progressive pop, psychedelic pop, art rock, chamber pop, baroque pop. Anything to make the idiosyncratic Wilson mélange something more than just “pop.” Though of course this was precisely what Wilson was not doing (and in this he shared the Lennon-McCartney strain of pretension, which only seems like pretension because we live in a post-punk world). Instead, he was absorbing all these things into the spectrum of pop, an evangelist calling all comers under the tent. There was nothing to “elevate” here. For Wilson, pop was already the Sublime. His mind didn’t work on hoary music critic metaphors; “elevation” would have meant California aerospace pioneering, or the trajectory to Heaven. The harmonic sophistication of a George Gerswhin; the close vocal texture of doo-wop and barbershop; commercial jingles; easy listening; Nelson Riddle’s string arrangements; Motown; Johann Sebastian Bach—Pet Sounds was a nexus for these sound-worlds and many others: the only node in the whole long string of American pop music where more than one period could meet and blur like that. Consider your Euclid: for any three non-collinear points there exists a unique circle, passing through those points: pick any three major stylings of the era, and Pet Sounds is probably that circle. And if the points are collinear, as in a timeline (of a relationship, say: from “Wouldn’t it Be Nice” to “God Only Knows” to “Caroline, No”), you still get a circle, only one with an infinite radius. An infinite distance from center to circumference. A teenage symphony to God.

Which perhaps explains why “God Only Knows” sounds as if it’s happening in many overlapping times at once, some as old as The Bible. When they weren’t inventing new ones wholecloth, Lennon and McCartney tended to make a Picaresque of Genre: they were collagists; they did bricolage (anything or anyone could be Beatles). Dylan took everything that sounded even faintly old or anonymous in American music, and made a single genre out of it, which might as well be named after him. But Pet Sounds is Modernist in the correct sense—one genre, one era, sits on top of many others, and all are happening simultaneously. Relativity; the Copenhagen interpretation; James Joyce’s Odyssey is also Homer’s Odyssey, the only difference being a slight slippage of time barely registered on the cosmic scale: so the sounds of Pet Sounds break down barriers between decades, as between worlds. They are timeless, in the exact sense with which we rarely wield that word.

They’re filled with a timeless yearning, too—in language so straightforward it shirks poetry completely for stark melancholia:

I keep looking for a place to fit in
Where I can speak my mind
And I’ve been trying hard to find the people
That I won’t leave behind
They say I got brains
But they ain’t doing me no good
I wish they could
Each time things start to happen again
I think I got something good going for myself
But what goes wrong
Sometimes I feel very sad
Sometimes I feel very sad
(Ain’t found the right thing I can put my heart and soul into)
Sometimes I feel very sad
(Ain’t found the right thing I can put my heart and soul into)
I guess I just wasn’t made for these times

“I just wasn’t made for those times”—a remarkable sentiment in an era that tended to believe it was ushering in A Better Future. Yet here is Brian Wilson, recognizing that the plain statements of youth are poetic enough, since no one is more nostalgic than those born yesterday. The record may bounce from joys to loves to breakups—all seemingly innocent—but underneath it thrums that deep melancholy keynote. Lost worlds; lost innocence.

So Pet Sounds commences with distant plucking—“California Girls” again; only briefer, foggier, somehow—before a drum ushers in a different key, and already the voice of endless summer is longing for the bliss of adult married life (another dream: what world is “the kind of world where we belong”?). But just two songs later, we begin to understand this is a record of departures—an actual Odyssey of the American Youth, trying and failing to shed his age of innocence. “I once had a dream, so I packed up and split for the city/I soon found out that my lonely life wasn’t so pretty.” The Inglewood boy, now in Beverly Hills. “I could try to be big in the eyes of the world/What matters to me is what I could be to just one girl.” After all this, still the same shy boy who lived in his head, and once wrote: “There’s a world where I can go and tell my secrets to/In my room.” And again, visions of domestic bliss, sanctifying romantic union. Far from Free Love in the Park.

And after that? “Don’t talk, take my hand, and listen to my heartbeat/Listen/Listen. . .” as the bass guitar mimics the heartbeat’s beat, and a string quartet swells like something out of Schubert. And this is what we’re supposed to be listening to. No talk, but two silent bodies, and their body-rhythm, and High Romance beamed in from a different century, and all of it run through a tape-echo so electronically complex it was practically science fiction. The Gospel According to Phil Spector no longer seems so far-fetched. We remember that while Wilson was recording Pet Sounds in Los Angeles in early 1966, Bob Taylor was building the basis of the ARPANET just 6 hours away. Charles Manson was moving to Haight-Ashbury, released from prison for the umpteenth time. Across town from Wilson, L. Ron Hubbard was establishing his Guardian’s Office, to handle public relations and legal issues for the Church of Scientology. Strange religions and cults, world-spanning technologies and pop music, would not be such distant constellations for much longer (60 years later, do we even remember the difference?).

But in the meantime, Wilson was working out his Youth Odyssey as only he could—adding in an old Nassau folk number he called “Sloop John B.” (“This is the worst trip I’ve ever been on”); leaving in two instrumentals (“Let’s Go Away For Awhile” and “Pet Sounds”) both worthy of Tom Jobim, or an Italian movie soundtrack; anchoring the record with “God Only Knows.” Or is it that “God Only Knows” anchors the record simply by its own nature? It would almost make sense to call the track gravitational, if it didn’t seem so free from gravity. Few songs are more divine: it’s a tribute to all musicians involved that the recording ended up so sensuous, too. The little clip-clop and sleigh bell auxiliaries; the bouncing bridge; the canon of pre-Raphaelite choir boys in the middle—these funny details simply don’t occur anywhere else in any song of this stature. It is, by some consensus, one of the most beautiful love songs ever written, while for others it’s simply the greatest song of its era, perhaps of its century. It’s certainly one reason why there are now millions more acolytes of the Church of Brian Wilson than there ever were of Phil Spector’s Temple of the Unreal Adolescence. Love songs of this order are beyond commentary, beyond reduction. In its wake, “Be My Baby” could only belong to an older world, however ideal. One wonders whether Spector really did send someone to kill Wilson when he heard the song.

Whoever the Ulysses of Pet Sounds is—whether Brian himself, or some kind of American Everyboy—he is certainly growing up: “They come on like they’re peaceful but inside they’re so uptight/They trip through their day and waste all their thoughts at night/Now how can I come on/And tell them the way that they live could be better?” He has come back from his travels, innocence unraveling (“Sometimes I feel very sad”), but all he knows is he isn’t done searching: “I know there’s an answer/I know now, but I have to find it by myself.” Note the new maturity, though it’s still haunted by the remains of youth (only a 23-year-old knows there’s an answer). He’s still young enough to want to tell everyone what he’s discovered, but old enough to see how pointless that would be. He’s still musing on his old heartbreaks (“Here Today”), and looking forward to future ones (“I’m Waiting for the Day”). He is trying.

So what beautiful obstinancy inspired Wilson to choose “Caroline, No” for the single? To begin with, he loved it. But why? He places it at the end of the album, because the end for him must be an elegy—a love elegy. It’s 1966, and already the youth have received the anthem of their passing (“Where did your long hair go?”). Wilson ends his Odyssey with heartbreak, autumnal and winsome: “How could you lose that happy glow?” “Who took that look away?” No one asks so many questions of a former lover without aiming some of those same questions at himself. On the cusp of manhood, the boy is already tired. And manhood (as the subsequent history tells us) was not something that ever made sense for Brian Wilson, dreamy cherub that he was. It’s hard to hear the long sad sigh of that finale, knowing the difficulties—mental, commercial—that would follow. Harder still to imagine Wilson, after finishing Pet Sounds, believing he had yet to make that “teenage symphony to God” he’d been dreaming of. When he had so clearly done it, so obviously uttered the complete prayer. Again: after Pet Sounds, what was anyone supposed to do?

* * *

Well, it’s been building up inside of me
For, oh, I don’t know how long
I don’t know why, but I keep thinking
Something’s bound to go wrong. . .

It’s my freshman year of high school—spring of 2009—and I’m sitting in my mother’s car, listening to “Don’t Worry Baby” on repeat in my headphones, thinking about a girl I think I love. I don’t yet know Pet Sounds, though I’ll discover it soon, later in the year. The girl feels the same about me, for the first and only time that will ever happen in my life. But I’ll mess it up anyways: too afraid to kiss her, too afraid to be too naive, or too young (“So Young”).

* * *

Right now you think that she’s perfection
This time is really an exception
Well, you know I hate to be a downer
But I’m the guy she left before you found her. . .

It’s two years later—spring of 2011—I’m traveling to St. Louis with the same girl, and her boyfriend, and “Don’t Worry Baby” comes over the speakers in the restaurant we’ve stopped off at. Time slips. Brian Wilson has been the soundtrack to all my high school loneliness, yearning. Nothing else has ever come close to expressing what I’m always wishing for: “the kind of world where we belong.” Pet Sounds has become my version of that world.

* * *

Each time things start to happen again
I think I got somethin’ good goin’ for myself
But what goes wrong. . .

It’s my freshman year of university—spring of 2013—and I’m 18 years old, sitting in a different car, with an older girl I think I love. I play her “I Just Wasn’t Made for These Times,” and I tell her this is the song that really represents me, sums up the way I feel about the world. She looks at me: in her eyes I see something I’ve spent 13 years trying never to see again. Since behind that look she was surely realizing just how foolish and besotted I was, resolving to let me go on with the fantasy as long as she reasonably could, until I finally made too much a fool of myself, and was deemed too naive, too young (“So Young”), within weeks exchanged for the only other freshman classical guitar player at our university.

* * *

I once had a dream, so I packed up and split for the city
I soon found out that my lonely life wasn’t so pretty. . .

It’s 13 years later—spring of 2026—and I live in London, a place I’m still too ill to explore, though I’ve lived here 1 ½ years. I’m listening to Pet Sounds, trying to pretend these old memories don’t affect me anymore. But of course I can’t: Pet Sounds is still here, and for me it holds these old memories—along with many more beautiful and painful ones beside them. Maudlin memories, mostly, but redeemed from complete regret by the presence of this man’s music in them. The music, a repository: in 2009, in 2011, 2013, in 2026, I listen to Brian Wilson’s songs and I see my own innocence, my own loss of innocence, my inability to shake off the weight of the experience that follows.

I don’t exactly encounter these feelings as Brian Wilson’s. Pet Sounds isn’t reportage. It absorbs my feelings, stands for them, measures them, supports and alleviates them. From the earnest testimony of many, many people, it seems to do exactly the same for them, too. We all bring ourselves to Pet Sounds, millions of us, every year, and somehow we all manage to find ourselves in it. Because while we’re in it, we’re still slipping out of time, phasing between worlds old or new or imagined; encountering memories of our own innocence; encountering memories of our own loss of innocence; reckoning with the achievement of one 23-year-old, 60 years ago, and the sense that it really does seem to exist for us—since anyone who has ever been young is always being called under its tent. Pet Sounds necessitates this degree of naked personal response. Nothing less will do. The history of the last 60 years of the record is a history of these personal responses. The next 60 years will be too. So will the next 600. And there are very few pure products of America worth saying that about.