The Beach Boys started rehearsing and recording “Good Vibrations” the week of February 17, 1966, but the inspiration for the song came to Brian Wilson years earlier while growing up in Hawthorne, California. At first glance, the song seems to be a typical feel-good love song. However, Wilson’s inspiration came from a darker, more dangerous mindset.
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It just goes to show that if anyone in the world can scare you simply by giving you advice, it’s your mom.
How Brian Wilson Came Up With “Good Vibrations”
When the Beach Boys first settled into Western Recorders studio in Hollywood, the “pocket symphony” composition Brian Wilson had to share with the band still had the title “#1 Untitled.” Eventually, he settled on “Good Vibrations” after thinking about something his mother used to tell him as a child. “My mother used to tell me about vibrations,” Wilson once said, per Keith Badman’s The Beach Boys.
“I didn’t really understand too much of what it meant when I was just a boy. It scared me, the word ‘vibrations.’ She told me about dogs that would bark at people and then not bark at others, that a dog would pick up vibrations from these people that you can’t see but you can feel.”
The song itself served as a sort of paradox between experiences of the five senses and experiences of a sixth, metaphysical sense (in this case, the good vibrations). Wilson and his co-writer, Mike Love, highlighted this contrast with the verses describing colorful clothes, the sound of a gentle word, and the wind that lifts her perfume through the air. Although Capitol Records executives worried the song was a direct reference to LSD, Wilson refuted the idea, saying that he wrote the song on marijuana, not psychedelics.
Turning Childhood Advice Into Musical History
“Good Vibrations” is one of the Beach Boys’ most iconic tracks, breaking records while also breaking away from the typical pop song format. The recording process was incredibly expensive, both financially and in the time it took to complete the track. The Beach Boys recorded their hit song over six months, 17 sessions, and 90 hours of tape, all totaling a staggering $50,000 bill. That translates to almost half a million dollars today.
In the end, all that hard work would pay off. “Good Vibrations” garnered the West Coast pop group a Grammy nomination for Best Vocal Group performance, their first U.K. hit, and their first gold record certification. Outside of their own success, the Beach Boys’ hit single helped inspire countless musicians, both contemporary artists and artists who came after them.
Wilson’s use of a recording studio as an instrument in its own right changed album production forever, introducing a new, more experimental approach to pop and beyond. (The song also gets to boast being one of the few hit records that employs the otherworldly warble of the Electro-Theremin.)
Photo by Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images
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