One of my favourite pastimes as a boy was going into our local sweet shop with a fistful of small change and picking out a selection of penny chews. There was always jar after jar to choose from - blackjacks, fruit salads, flying saucers etc, each costing a single penny. Yet though the mix and match possibilities were endless, I was always able to home in on exactly what I wanted without too much dithering and then I was on my way. Not so my mate though who, although generally having half as much money as me, tended to always take twice as long in picking out what he wanted. He'd send the poor shopkeeper mad with his constant chopping and changing until the man would snap and decide for him, usually throwing him out of the shop the same time. There's a fine line between knowing what you want and being overwhelmed into paralysis by unlimited choice (or how far you can push a shopkeeper).Whenever I hear 'Good Vibrations' I hear the sound of a man walking the wire that divides those two young boys lost in time. Previous releases from the Beach Boys had been glass sharp shards of sunshine on vinyl with head boy Brian Wilson in control of the beach buggy, knowing exactly what went where and which jar to open next to unlock the music in his head. Post 'Good Vibrations', Wilson inhabited the crazed world of the laboured 'SMiLE' project, a that presented so many possibilities of how its undefined scope could be presented that he wasn't able to throw a mental lasso around them all and bring them to heel. And so the shopkeeper in the form of Capitol and the rest of the band did it for him by throwing him out of the studio and releasing the lesser 'Smiley Smile' album instead. It's fair to say that Wilson was never the same man again.
'Good Vibrations' is one of those 'classic' songs I talked about earlier, a monolith of inherent self importance born of fame and familiarity that, from the title in has passed into the national consciousness and which both dares and invites criticism. Not content with defining an idealised image of California with a success that their own official tourist board could only dream of, the Beach Boys were now laying down their own code as to how its inhabitants should behave in a song that bursts with more shapes and colour than a row of jarred sweets on a shelf. So where to start?
Well for me the key to the song is the scene setting, dream-like opening of the girl who catches the eye as she walks by - "I love the colourful clothes she wears, and the way the sunlight plays upon her hair". This unnamed girl is an impressionist painting made flesh; the focus is not her eyes or her legs or her (gulp!) tits and ass so beloved of latter day rap from that same West coast, but a serendipitous arrangement of colour, shape, sound and scent ("I hear the sound of a gentle word, on the wind that lifts her perfume through the air") that come together at one fleeting yet precise point in time.
It's the same love preceding sensory overload that XTC went for in 'Senses Working Overtime' and which left Andy Partridge gobsmacked - "I can see, hear, smell, touch, taste, I've got one, two, three, four, five senses working overtime". And like Partridge's struggle "to take this all in", the observer in 'Good Vibrations' changes perception into a personal physical reality as the song grows a backbone with the "I'm pickin' up good vibrations, she's giving me excitations" chorus that builds to an orgasm of excitement ("Good good good good vibrations") until it all gets too much and has to be blotted out ("Close my eyes, she's somehow closer now") before the cycle begins again.
Nothing on 'Good Vibrations' sounds forced, overcooked or clever for the sake of being clever - despite the sum of it's innumerable parts, everything has its place the end result is a self contained work that floats on air in the same way that a theremin floats over the song's conclusion to express joy when mere words run out. For a single of it's length and complexity, 'Good Vibrations' is also as delicate and inconsequential as the wings of a butterfly. The lyrics and tune couldn't stand up by themselves - without the music (and more importantly, the moods it generates), 'Good Vibrations' would crumble like a vampire in sunlight (if you don't believe me, check out the 'rock' version cut by The Troggs in 1975; the aural equivalent of recalling a recent dream to a mate only to find it loses all its charm, logic or personality in the telling and instead becomes something faintly ludicrous and downright embarrassing).
And it's success is all down to Brian; those Impressionist artists were wont to throw paint around with abandon to capture a mood or moment, but Wilson's 'teenage symphony' was spliced together from hours of session tapes with a razor blade, cutting block and the single minded vision of a genius. Bootleg label 'Sea Of Tunes' have released hours of music from the sessions which offers a glimpse of the sheer volume of material that was recorded, sifted and discarded in the pursuit of perfection.
Brian would have doubtless reduced my shopkeeper to tears, but at this point in time and left to his own devices then he would have got there in the end and selected the perfect mix of sweets for his money. The tragedy is that this crystal clarity of vision would soon cloud, the choices would become less easy to make, work on his masterpiece 'SMiLE' would be abandoned and the shopkeepers in their various guises would keep him out of the store for pretty much the rest of his career, save for the occasional glimpse of the counter. Which is why I always hear an element of tragedy amongst the sheer joy of 'Good Vibrations' - a last perfect slam out of the park before the ball became too hard to see and an incongruous mix of emotions that always stops me in dead my tracks in the same way a pretty girl once stopped Brian in his.
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