Thursday, August 31, 2006

The Beach Boys' Pet Sounds turns 40 - check out the podcast


One of the great albums of all time that didn't make the top ten list from Britain is the Beach Boys' masterpiece, Pet Sounds. I was only about 12 years old when Pet Sounds came out and so I missed it at that time. My Beach Boys knowledge was mostly restricted to the few car songs that ended up on a multi-artist compilation called Shut Down. (Curiously, Shut Down, Vol 2 was, I believe, a Beach Boys album without other artists.) That was a fun album and I had friends who were heavily into cars and they convinced me to buy the album and listen to a lot of these car songs. The two Beach Boys songs, if I remember correctly, were "Shut Down" and "409" - which referred to the size of the engine, not a household cleaning product.

Anyway, Pet Sounds had few radio hits and didn't sell real well so it went completely under my Middle School radar at the time but many years later I finally got on the bus and figured out how cool it was. This is the 40th anniversary of the release of Pet Sounds and there is a podcast here with commentary on the making of the album. The first few episodes are already up and it's been fun so far. Check it out here.

3 comments:

Rev. Ronald J. Hatton said...

Thanks for pointing this out, Bob. I am downloading the 'casts now!

Anonymous said...

I've "never learn(ed)not to love" Pet Sounds! god only knows how much this album inspired the silver beatles with that 'pocket symphony' known as Sgt.Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band!

best,
John Stamos (drummer for the beach boys:>

Ron Rienstra said...

Bob,

I hope that you heard the Sgt. Pepper's/Pet Sounds Mashup when it was on the internet a couple days ago. The story is here.

The guy who put it up is being seriously sued.

But I thought it was pretty cool. If you keep looking around you might still find a mirror site somewhere that has it.