Few songs have changed pop music, production styles, linguistics, or history in general quite like the song The Beach Boys released on October 10, 1966. Decades later, these notions might sound hyperbolic. But that’s only because the influence this song had on the rest of the world has become so ubiquitous that it’s easy to forget it all started with a song that Brian Wilson originally wanted to have on Pet Sounds but ended up being a standalone single instead.
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“Good Vibrations” is more than a best-of hit from the 1960s. It marked a pivotal moment in musical history in which the studio became just as important an instrument as the musicians inside of it. Pop music no longer had to follow a radio-friendly formula with a verse, chorus, and bridge. Nor did it have to be a one-day endeavor. Wilson and over 30 session musicians recorded over 90 hours of tape for a song that ended up being 3:35. The sheer size of the production value made “Good Vibrations” one of the costliest records to make, both in terms of money and hours spent inside the studio.
Two months after The Beach Boys released “Good Vibrations”, the song peaked at No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100. It was the West Coast pop group’s first million-selling single and continues to be one of their most well-known songs. Even the slang in the song’s title, “good vibrations” or “good vibes,” which Wilson catapulted into the mainstream in the late 1960s, remains a common part of our vernacular today.
The Beach Boys Had the Wilsons’ Mom to Thank for “Good Vibrations”
The influential scope of The Beach Boys’ “Good Vibrations” is so vast and all-encompassing that it’s almost hard to quantify in direct terms. It’s impossible to say just how many artists, producers, and engineers were influenced by Brian Wilson’s songwriting and production style, both in the late 1960s when the song came out and in the decades that followed. Although The Beach Boys’ career would falter in the next decade, their 1966 single (and the preceding album, Pet Sounds) marked the group’s second and final career high after their initial success singing surfy pop tunes in the years prior.
Interestingly, The Beach Boys had a mom to thank for the concept of “Good Vibrations”. Brian, Dennis, and Carl’s mother used to tell her boys about the concept of “vibrations,” or waves of energy people emitted that animals could sense. “I didn’t really understand too much of what it meant when I was just a boy,” Wilson later said. “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.”
Wilson’s mental health began to decline in the final years of the 1960s. Even with the monumental success of “Good Vibrations” and Pet Sounds, The Beach Boys struggled to catch another helpful gust of wind in their sails. Still, the song—and all of their best work from the 1960s—remains some of the finest examples of songwriting, innovation, and musical genius the pop world has ever seen.
Photo by Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images
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