Pet Sounds: A Tribute To The Late Great Brian Wilson

“Have you ever done a Beach Boys deep dive?” That’s the question that launches this episode of The Ben and Skin Show into a whirlwind of music history, absurd comedy, and a sneak peek into one of the most anticipated sports documentaries of the year.Ben Rogers, Jeff “Skin” Wade, Kevin “KT” Turner, and Krystina Ray kick things off with a heartfelt and hilarious tribute to the late Brian Wilson of The Beach Boys. From there, Skin takes listeners on a fascinating journey through the evolution of multitrack recording, the psychedelic studio experiments of the '60s, and how Pet Sounds inspired The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. It’s a crash course in music history—with plenty of laughs and tangents along the way.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Coming up in the next segment, We've got exciting news
about the Cowboys documentary. Stick around for that. Also got
a ticket giveaway Rangers Royals. But right now it's time
for this.

Speaker 2 (00:11):
Skin Track, another edition of things Skin is Tracking.

Speaker 1 (00:17):
All right, So yesterday we had a pretty lengthy conversation
about the passing of Sly Stone, Sylvester Stone of sly
and the Family Stone, and then woke up today and
you see the news that Brian Wilson of the Beach
Boys is pasted at the age of eighty five. Now
everybody knows who the Beach Boys are. Have any of

(00:39):
you ever done the Beach Boys deep dive? No?

Speaker 3 (00:43):
I mean I listened to a few of them that
were on the Rolling Stone Top five hundred Albums of
All Time list, including one of the great albums on
there is Pet Sounds. My favorite track from Pet Sounds.

Speaker 1 (00:54):
Is Christina, what can you do something about this? We
are two segments into the show and he's just making
animal noise.

Speaker 2 (01:02):
Actually, I don't know what happened to him this morning
or not.

Speaker 1 (01:04):
Have a tribute to Brian Wilson.

Speaker 2 (01:06):
Some people grieve in different ways.

Speaker 1 (01:07):
Okay, that's there.

Speaker 4 (01:08):
This is very similar to when on MAVs TV you
have to go on the MAVs broadcast and do things.
Somebody has dared him to make a bunch of different animals,
and apparently it was an animal that dared him to
do it.

Speaker 3 (01:19):
Yeah, I am paying tribute to Pet Sounds on this
day or.

Speaker 1 (01:24):
Did you like? Okay Otter, did you like Pet Sounds?
I loved it. It's an amazing record, so weird. It's
the record that I mean, if these stories go, everybody
knows Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club band. That's when the
Beatles are like, Man, I'm never going to tour again
because I just want to be in the studio experimenting
with multi track recording. This is amazing. Yeah. And so

(01:47):
back then too, you had you know, you'll see studio footage.
You know, there will be an engineer there and he's
a guy with a giant beard, and he's high and
he's wearing flannel. Back in the sixties, the engineers wore coats.
Well they were they were genuinely engineers. Like the drug
counterculture hadn't happened yet, and so it's you know, you're

(02:09):
talking about something mechanical when you're recording to tape, and
so they were just like mechanical engineers, but they also
had you know, they were had a good understanding of
sound and tubes and all these different things that now
everything's done digitally. But so in the sixties when recordings
started changing and you could start like multi tracking, and

(02:32):
what I mean by that is that early on you
would stick a microphone in the middle. Like if you
listen to a recording from the forties, there's a microphone
just in the middle of the room and it's recording
the whole band live, and then you put the drums
further away so they don't over drown out everything else,
and the horns. So when you have multi track recording,
I can record the bass and the drums and the

(02:52):
guitar and then bring the horns in and record that
on top of that. And so if you're a very smart,
forward thinking music person, it just opens up all these
possibilities of things sounding better. And yesterday we're talking about
slices stone, like putting drums all the way over on
the left channel and separating things. Well, Brian Wilson of
the Beach Boys was the genius. He's also for a

(03:16):
while he got really weirded out and became a recluse
and disappeared. And you know when he it was a
lot like Slices Stone. It happens, man, Yeah, like those
guys went through the drug culture and the counter culture
and there was no roadmap for this, So there was
giant periods of time where Brian Wilson disappeared. But when
he did Pet Sounds for the Beach Boys, and it's

(03:36):
not the biggest song on that is probably Heaven only knows.
And at the name of it from the Big Love.
You guys saw the TV show Big Love, right, Yeah,
it's the theme song from Big Love, Wouldn't It Be Nice?

Speaker 2 (03:48):
As that's the first one that came to mind, Wouldn't.

Speaker 1 (03:50):
It Be Nice? And you're right, that's their most popular song.
That was a bigger hit. You're right, You're absolutely right.
But the ones you think of that are like the
Good Vibrations and all the surf stuff California Girls. That
was the earlier stuff, and then Pet Sounds is where
it like old pivots.

Speaker 3 (04:05):
The beach was reminded me of old like Sonic commercials. Yeah,
they used to play a ton of Beach Boys and
Sonic commercials. Growing up during Ranger games.

Speaker 1 (04:11):
Because it's a slice of Americana. You kind of know,
like a lot of their songs, you have to and
and you guys know the real high pitch sounding, good vibrations.
That's a theremon. Oh it's not a guy singing it.

Speaker 3 (04:25):
Around.

Speaker 2 (04:25):
I get around and everyone knows that.

Speaker 1 (04:28):
Yeah, that song is about a male prostitute. But anyways,
Brian Wilson, huh did they do Barbara And Uh? No,
that's is that the Beach Boys? I thought that was
that's the Forest Valley? Yeah, I think that's somebody else. Anyways,
do a deep dive on at least, you know, the

(04:50):
old stuff. Maybe do the This is Beach Boys on Spotify,
but at least check out pet sounds that inspired the
Beatles to do Sergeant Pepper so that they could keep
up with what the Beach Boys were doing. Bad ass
all right?

Speaker 4 (05:02):
Coming up next, we now have the release date of
the Dallas Cowboys documentary.

Speaker 1 (05:06):
Is this going to change everything?

Speaker 4 (05:08):
How deep are they going to dive into some of
the darkest, shadiest aspects of Dallas Cowboys life.

Speaker 1 (05:14):
We'll talk about that next