Pismotality: Walking With Wilson

12 June 2025

Walking With Wilson

Hearing of Brian Wilson's death yesterday my immediate thought was of the duophonic - ie fake stereo - cassette of Pet Sounds which had been my regular companion on late-night walks in the early eighties, slotted into one of the bulky Walkmans of the day. Water was an integral part of the scene - no, not a surf-tormented shore but a loch, centrepiece of the local country park, which I would circle.

Without going into details too painful to rehearse, I had blown an earlier educational opportunity and had two rather aimless years before a friend kicked me into applying for something, which is when my life effectively restarted. A few days before the start of that new venture I bought a watch, the first I'd worn for quite a while; time suddenly mattered again.

That's not a figure of speech: before my rebirth, whenever I'd arrange to meet up with a friend in a similar betwixt-and-between state it wasn't uncommon for one of us to be over an hour late, with no recriminations. The most vivid memory of that unhappy no-time is of an overcast Sunday afternoon when the two of us were spinning out cups of tea in some dreary cafe. Its jukebox, not fed by our coins, was playing Paper Lace's The Black-Eyed Boys, so the machine's selection hadn't been changed for quite a while, as I doubt whether that 1974 ditty ranks as an all-time classic even for rabid fans - and to cap it all, the person who had paid to hear this aural assault was happily clinking a rhythmical accompaniment with a teaspoon throughout proceedings.

But my friend and I didn't look at each other and signal that now might be the time to beat a hasty retreat; there was nowhere else to go. And so that afternoon, and many others like it, dragged on: clink clink.

Eventually, however, we would find our respective routes out of the torpor which pervaded those days - which is where, in my case, Brian Wilson comes in.

I had been buying records for quite some time by the 1980s so I'm not sure why I hadn't been aware of Pet Sounds earlier. Maybe the sleeve had been offputting as it gave no hint of what lurked within. Also, money being tight, I tended to go for budget LPs or those on special offer. Around 1970 a local supermarket had a rack stuffed with mono albums for 50p a shot, at a time when the novelty of stereo seemed to have made them redundant; I bought a copy of the Bonzos' Gorilla, which still sounds better than its stereo equivalent. The local Woolworths had the Kinks' Arthur for a similar price in 1972 - though that was stereo, just not the cult item it subsequently became. But that's a couple of other stories ...

When I first borrowed the tape of Pet Sounds from my local library, early on in my new incarnation, it was the confessional tone of songs like That's Not Me which spoke most directly to me. I probably wasn't listening all that closely to the lyrics but the urgency of the "I once had a dream ..." section at the end suggested a moment of insight which I could apply to my situation: I seemed to be on a path to greater self-awareness, walking in step with Brian Wilson; he understood.

Caroline, No was the other standout track for me. I have read that it was, in part, Brian lamenting his own lost innocence as much as that of someone else. In a sense it hardly matters as the meaning seems more in the melody than the lyrics: a substantial part of the track is instrumental.

Don't Talk (Put Your Head On My Shoulder) likewise seemed to conjure a mood more than a story. This was a recording which I was already familiar with, but in the odd setting of a budget LP, a seemingly random arrangement of tracks which also included such unlikely bedfellows as Anna Lee the Healer and Louie Louie. Don't Talk ... didn't have much effect on me back then, sometime in the mid-seventies, but hearing it sequenced on Pet Sounds, directly after That's Not Me (especially when lulled into a semi-somnabulistic state by my pacing) it too seemed to speak of a future which held some possibility of fulfilment.

"Duophonic", for those who don't know, is an ersatz stereo sound predating the sophisitcation of today's AI tools. The latter can isolate individual instruments in a mono mix, making it possible to create a new stereo soundstage but the old-school method is rather simpler: boost different frequencies in two mono channels, creating a more spaced-out effect. I have written in two earlier posts about listening to such cassettes on the move; links are provided at the end but here are excerpts most relevant to my experience of listening to that Beach Boys classic.

For a time, in 2021, I tried buying up music cassettes which I'd either lost or only borrowed from libraries, hoping to be instantly thrust back to the time when I first heard the music in that format. My "cassettofrenzy", as I amusingly dubbed it, didn't actually last for long; I haven't thrown out that year's purchases but they have more power for me now as souvenirs than sound carriers. There's a bit of overlap, in what follows, with the material above but if you have bothered to read as far as this it probably won't matter.

When Pet Sounds first came out on CD it was a mono mix - Brian Wilson's damaged ear means he can't hear in stereo - though a Wilson-approved stereo version is now commercially available. I have listened many times to both of those CD mixes but I suspect that getting hold of a copy of that cr*ppy, compromised cassette would give me something else ... or I'd like to think it would, anyway.

In recent years I sought out a Flanagan and Allen song, familiar to me from an old cassette, online, and found a much cleaner-sounding transfer on a streaming service. But something was missing. Then I had a closer look at the details on the sleeve of the cassette and saw that what I'd been listening to a few decades earlier was actually "reprocessed stereo".
And it struck me that maybe this was why the original experience had stayed with me and had become so associated with the outdoors, like that pre-CD Pet Sounds tape: the sonic equivalent, you might say, of spraying some perfume into the air then walking through the resultant cloud. Instead of the sound staying narrowly between my ears it felt all around me, part of my surroundings, the woodland I was walking through ... alright, I was reading Big Bill Wordsworth's The Prelude around that time, which probably helped.

That brief cassetofrenzy (copyright) did not, however, make me quite so crazed as to lay out the forty-odd quid being asked online for a copy of that budget Pet Sounds cassette in fake stereo. Even if it was the same mix, the experience couldn't be the same: without the setting of a loch to walk around, imagining the sound carrying from some distant vessel - and without my being in that particular set of personal circumstances again - there can only be the echo of an echo. Yet when I first listened to that tape, confessional numbers such as That's Not Me had a profound effect, with lines like:
I once had a dream
So I packed up and split for the city
I soon found out that my lonely life wasn't so pretty

I know Mike Love did most of the singing but it felt like I was Walking With Wilson, confiding in him or vice-versa. Not that the precise meaning of the lyrics (by Tony Asher) really mattered that much; it was the mood, the sense of emotional openness which tied in with the literal openness on those solitary walks, allied to my sense of undergoing a slow reawakening. One of the most interesting chapters in Craig Brown's book on the Beatles is about the lyrics of Hey Jude, and how we absorb them:
Rock works most powerfully when it is like a native chant, or a Latin hymn, its scattered meanings transformed into abstract sound, floating free of specificity.

As for Flanagan and Allen, the song I mentioned, On the Other Side of Town, stays in my head really for a brief moment during the performance. The story is told from the point of view of a former suitor, or would-be suitor, who cannot compete with the attractions of the wealthier area, and relinquishes his claim on his former love, telling a friend simply to "give her every wish from me" for her future happiness. The situation is outlined in Bud Flanagan's warm growl, and there are rather jolly, uptempo sections in the performance, as though none of this means a light, just an excuse for a sedate knees-up, but there is one poignant moment which occurs during Chesney Allen's customary recitatif-type reiteration:
I always knew that she was meant for palaces and kings
No wonder she was discontent with all those shabby things

Halfway through the above Allen shifts from his normal register into something approaching singing, signalling a moment of heightened emotion, of pain clearly audible, even though the mood is still light: a necessary glimpse of subtext.

This reminds me of another song I associate with walking night: Crying My Heart Out for You by Neil Sedaka. I've written a fuller piece about this elsewhere, providing a bit of context, but it's Sedaka's keening, bookending the record, which really stays with me. I can't remember whether the version issuing from my walkman was real, or reprocessed, stereo, and despite a lot of online searching can't even identify with certainty which edition of which cassette might have been whirring around in my machine - Sedaka was well represented in the two local libraries I alternated between - but there was a lot of reverb on the recording anyway, so maybe it matters less in this case. That anguished wail ushering in, and waving away, the narrative felt like it was coming from somewhere far away, not up close, much as I identified with it.