Life lessons from 1966: Pet Sounds
Ryan Tubbs
Note: This was expanded from a personal essay done for my senior-year feature writing class at CSU. All illustrations are done by myself.
Anyone who knows me well knows how much I make music a part of my life; the Spotify app stays put in one of the exalted and limited spaces along the bottom row of my phone screen, nestled between my email and web browser. And every Thursday, I pack up my trusty white notebook and a flash drive full of songs and take it to the lonely basement of the LSC to the radio station, KCSU. The heavy soundproof door seals shut behind me, the soundboard lights up, and for two hours I get complete control over the 90.5 FM frequency. It’s the best part of my week. No one my age really listens; it’s mostly my family members and the old people that still actually own and use a physical radio, but I don’t care. It’s a time where I can escape the droning, anxious tones of everyday life into my own chamber of reflection.
Throughout the pandemic, I hosted a weekly show as DJ Hot Tubbs that I called “Hot Tubbs Time Machine.” Every Tuesday afternoon, I’d pick a year in modern history — as far back as the 40s to as recent as 2019 — and challenge myself to play 2 hours of songs only from that year. As a project, the Hot Tubbs Time Machine really helped expand my knowledge of and appreciation for music of all kinds from all sorts of genres. Sure, I probably stuck to the standard pop hits on a few shows, but I really enjoyed the process of diving into a new year every week and pulling out a few shiny gems to add to the collection. And it led to little periods of obsession for many an artist — upon doing my 1995 show, I became an Oasis devotee (also fueled in part by the great documentary Oasis: Supersonic).
As a DJ, I constantly think about the power of music as an art form, and over the years I’ve been profoundly affected by a number of different artists’ work. My favorite topic of conversation is to dive into another person’s music preferences and understand our similarities and differences. You can paint a vivid picture of a person’s life just by dissecting their music tastes, and that’s exactly what I’m about to do to myself through the lens of one of my all-time favorite albums, Pet Sounds by American band The Beach Boys. I never actually did a 1966 episode of the Time Machine, but I probably wouldn’t have been able to resist playing every song off of it. I love this album.
Thanks to my parents, the numerous car rides of my youth were always soundtracked by the sounds of the 1960s, 70s and 80s, so The Beach Boys and other bands of the era formed the cement foundation of my mind. One of my earliest capital-F Favorite Songs, right up there with Pink Floyd’s “Money” and Coldplay’s “Speed of Sound,” was The Beach Boys’ “Surfin’ USA” off the 1963 album of the same name. But it really wasn’t until this year that I fully sat down to listen to their 1966 masterpiece Pet Sounds, and it seemed to have come at just the right time in my life. At the time of writing this, I’m newly 21, in my final year of university, just at the brink of the roaring waterfall of adult life.
Pet Sounds, to me, is an album about growing up. It covers themes like young love and anxiety about leaving home, and delivers them with gorgeous vocal arrangements and instrumentals, with a whimsical production style that sounds like memories feel. “Wouldn’t It Be Nice” starts the album with what sounds like a reverberated toy piano and takes us immediately into the happy-go-lucky first verse, “Wouldn’t it be nice if we were older?/Then we wouldn’t have to wait so long.” This song, along with nearly every other one on the 13-track record, describes a moment or feeling in my life with such great precision; in this case, my long-distance relationship with my girlfriend Ally, of three and a half years. We got together right at the end of high school, spent one summer together, and parted ways to colleges on opposite sides of the country: she to Ames, Iowa, and I, to Eugene, Oregon. We kept talking, and neither of us had any desire to end things, so we waited.
And waited.
And we’re still waiting. Reuniting over holidays, taking whirlwind long-weekend trips that pass in a flash and, inevitably, returning to our designated spaces… alone. After the first year we both transferred back to schools in Colorado. Different ones, unfortunately. Oregon was expensive, Iowa was boring, and we were both sick of the time difference. Wouldn’t it be nice if we were older? Then we wouldn’t have to wait so long.
Track 3, “That’s Not Me” is about being sure of who you are, and perhaps more importantly, who you’re not. It’s also about my time in Oregon. It starts, “I had to prove that I could make it alone now/But that’s not me.” One reason I left the state I had grown up in since kindergarten to go to one hundreds of miles away after high school (culturally similar as the states may be) is to go and find the proverbial green grass on the other side. Some part of me needed to prove — to whom I’m not sure — that I could be independent and make a life for myself without anyone’s help. And just as the song says, “I went through all kinds of changes, took a look at myself/And said that’s not me.” I needed to be closer to home. That’s where the majority of my friends and family lived. I underestimated the stark difference between human interaction over the phone or Internet and actual, physical closeness to a person. The song treats this realization as a victory. There’s no glamour in leaving everything you know behind. It was an exciting dream, but ultimately, to quote the final line, “I soon found out that my lonely life wasn’t so pretty.”
Later, after the slow build and infectious, passionate crescendo of “I’m Waiting for the Day” and the heavenly, pure statement of love that is “God Only Knows,” we come to “I Know There’s an Answer.” To me, this one is about looking at the state of the world and feeling unable to change it or make a positive impact. I think about politics and the state of the world all the time, and it’s possibly the most frustrating topic to consider. No matter where you stand on the political spectrum, the world that you hope for is not likely to ever exist because every other human on the planet is pulling in different directions. The song conveys a level of frustration with this reality, but lets you come to the conclusion that ultimately, we’re all on our own journey through life, and the “right way” to live is only something that you can find on your own.
Pet Sounds has helped me in so many ways. I think it’s brilliant that it’s both an album about the struggles of becoming an adult and a sort of toolbox of lessons that will help the listener actually overcome these problems. It ends with the subdued ballad to a former lover “Caroline, No,” in which the singer bemoans the certain end of a relationship. Now, I sincerely hope this is not how my story ends, but it’s a final warning from the album: things just don’t always work out. Pet Sounds is simple in its messages, but the surrounding music and immaculate voice work from all the Beach Boys is what gives every song its formidable emotional heft. I’m thankful to have found it at this point in my life, and I look forward to the next time an album captures my attention and sweeps me away on another emotional journey.
