The Beach Boys

The Beach Boys began as a surf music and hot rod act from Hawthorne, California — brothers Brian, Dennis and Carl Wilson with cousin Mike Love and friend Al Jardine — whose four-part harmonies and Chuck Berry-derived guitar work produced a string of early 1960s hits that defined California as a pop mythology. “Surfin’ U.S.A.,” “Fun, Fun, Fun,” “I Get Around”: the package was sunlit and commercially irresistible.

Then Brian Wilson stopped touring, stayed home, and began making records. Pet Sounds (1966) — constructed from orchestral arrangements, bicycle bells, barking dogs and complex harmonies in response to the Beatles’ Rubber Soul — is one of the turning points of studio-based pop. Paul McCartney called “God Only Knows” the greatest song ever written.

“Good Vibrations” (1966) went further still: a six-minute “pocket symphony” assembled from sections recorded across seventeen studios over six months, pioneering the use of the theremin in pop and the concept of the modular single constructed in the studio rather than performed as a song. It remains one of the most complex and expensive singles ever produced in its time.

Wilson’s mental health deteriorated under the weight of his ambitions; Smile, the intended follow-up to Pet Sounds, was abandoned in 1967 and not completed until 2004. But the band continued, with later hits including “Kokomo” (1988). For this graph they are the vector through which surf rock’s California energy passed into studio experimentalism.