User:ILIL/sandbox/Good Vibrations
1966 single by the Beach Boys / From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
"Good Vibrations" is a song by the American rock band the Beach Boys that was produced and composed by Brian Wilson with lyrics by Mike Love. It was released as a single on October 10, 1966 and was an immediate critical and commercial hit, topping the charts in many countries including the United States and the United Kingdom. Promoted as a "pocket symphony" for its complex soundscapes and episodic structure, "Good Vibrations" blurred the distinctions between pop and art to mass audiences and became widely acclaimed as one of the finest and most important works of psychedelia, rock, and popular music.
"Good Vibrations" | ||||
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Single by the Beach Boys | ||||
B-side | "Let's Go Away for Awhile" | |||
Released | October 10, 1966 (1966-10-10) | |||
Recorded | February 17 (17-02) – September 21, 1966 (1966-09-21) | |||
Studio | Western, Columbia, and Gold Star, Hollywood | |||
Genre | ||||
Length | 3:35 | |||
Label | Capitol | |||
Songwriter(s) | ||||
Producer(s) | Brian Wilson | |||
The Beach Boys singles chronology | ||||
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Music video | ||||
"Good Vibrations" on YouTube | ||||
The R&B-influenced song derived from Wilson's fascination with extrasensory perception, cosmic vibrations, and recreational drugs such as LSD. Its making was unprecedented for any kind of recording. Wilson produced dozens of music fragments with his bandmates and a host of session musicians at four different Hollywood studios from February to September 1966, a process reflected in the song's abrupt shifts in key, instrumentation, textures, and mood. With these fragments, he then assembled many different edits of the song before settling on a final composite take. Over 90 hours of tape was consumed in the sessions, with the total cost of production estimated to be in the tens of thousands of dollars, making it the costliest and longest-to-record pop single ever. It was to be included on the band's aborted Smile album, but instead, to Wilson's displeasure, appeared on the September 1967 release Smiley Smile.
One of the most influential recordings in popular music history, "Good Vibrations" effectively launched the progressive pop genre and further developed the use of the studio as an instrument, heralding both a wave of pop experimentation and the onset of psychedelic and progressive rock. With its flower power-inspired lyrics, the song reinforced the Beach Boys as avatars for the contemporary counterculture, while the phrase "good vibes", which had originated as local drug slang, spread into mainstream lexicon. The track featured a novel mix of instruments, including cello (a first in rock music) and Electro-Theremin, and although the latter is not a true theremin, the song's success led to a renewed interest and sales of theremins and synthesizers.
"Good Vibrations" has received numerous industry awards and accolades, and is included on many "greatest of all time" polls and rankings. A 1976 cover version by Todd Rundgren peaked at number 34 on the Billboard Hot 100. The Beach Boys followed up "Good Vibrations" with another single pieced from sections, "Heroes and Villains" (1967), but it was less successful.