Most artists are rarely satisfied when they leave the studio. You only have so much time to work on a track before submitting it to a record label. There will always be acclaimed albums that aren’t half as good as they sounded in your head when you first recorded them. Lindsey Buckingham may be all too familiar with the difficulties of achieving perfection in the studio. But The Beach Boys showed him the way forward long before they released Pet Sounds.
Given Buckingham’s background, it seems strange to think of him as a fan of The Beach Boys. Buckingham developed many of the bluegrass techniques rooted in the folk tradition with Fleetwood Mac. During his solo career, he doesn’t always seem to mesh with the songs about fun in the sun and fast cars.
Buckingham had converted by the time he began working with Stevie Nicks, after listening to albums such as The Beach Boys Today. In contrast to the other beach party vibes found on every other Beach Boys project, Brian Wilson cut his heart open on the back half of the album. He produced songs that felt far too earnest for traditional rock and roll.
Buckingham acknowledged Wilson’s previous album’s success. He stated to Rolling Stone that “Pet Sounds is the acknowledged masterpiece. “But even before that, there’s side two of The Beach Boys Today, which is essentially one ballad after another. And in my opinion, it is one of the best sides on a rock album.”
The album was still available on vinyl. But Wilson used the back half of the album to express his feelings. Wilson’s B-sides contained fewer tracks that most fans would skip. It could have been a way for him to mask some of his internal emotions if he hadn’t made music that left people dumbfounded.
Wilson was pushing the boundaries of traditional rock and roll on every track. The days of using Chuck Berry’s typical bluesy progressions were over. It was replaced by melodic beauty that would change the pop landscape and make other acts, such as The Beatles, reconsider what made them so famous in the first place.
The lyrical content is also a bold step forward. For traditional sappy love songs, tracks like ‘She Knows Me Too Well‘ feel like a warm-up for Pet Sounds. Wilson discusses the difficulties of loving someone and uses his songs to discover what pop music’s favorite emotion is.
Buckingham began his creative streak with Fleetwood Mac. He may have taken too many cues from Wilson’s studio management style. Buckingham adopted Wilson’s mannerisms. It was from the emotional honesty in ‘Go Your Own Way‘ to his perfectionist mindset when crafting guitar solos but lacked Wilson’s charm. He often led to shouting matches in between takes and one time where he attempted to strangle an engineer for getting out of line. The Beach Boys Today may have provided Buckingham with a musical education. But when making Rumours, they lost some of that Beach Boys’ innocence along the way.
