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Forever No. 1: The Beach Boys, ‘Good Vibrations’

The Beach Boys' scored their third No. 1 hit with "Good Vibrations," a "truly radical" track that rewrote the rules for a pop single

That level of commercial success is perhaps surprising for a song that Beach Boy Mike Love once described as “truly radical.” The track’s opening is keening and drum-less, with a swooning lead vocal from Carl Wilson, who sings with earnest devotion about a whiff of woman’s perfume. Then “Good Vibrations” bounds forward — a hard-driving bass line collides with the Beach Boys’ jubilant harmonies, while what sounds like a whistling teakettle, a noise created by an instrument called an Electro-Theremin, shrieks through the background. “Instead of creating a single instrumental backing track at one session, [Brian] produced short, seemingly unrelated snatches of music and then pieced them together,” Love explained in his autobiography, Good Vibrations: My Life as a Beach Boy, written with James Hirsch.

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