On December 23, 1964, The Beach Boys flew from Los Angeles to Houston. Just minutes into the flight, Brian Wilson suffered a nervous breakdown. His bandmates tried to console him as he began shrieking, crying, screaming into a pillow, and finally lying on the cabin floor. As soon as the plane landed, Wilson wanted to return home. He was convinced to stay in Texas but did not perform with the group that night. Wilson did return to California—beginning a 12-year hiatus from the road—where he concentrated more on studio work.
The Beach Boys’ unique vocal sound was evident from their earliest recordings, but the evolution of their instrumental backing tracks is fun to trace. Their playing on the earliest albums sounds like that of a typical garage band but as the hits rolled in, Brian Wilson was learning his way around the recording studio. By the time they were making their eighth studio album The Beach Boys Today! Wilson was starting to get a handle on the expanding instrumentation he would become so well known for. Following Phil Spector’s Wall of Sound lead, he employed several studio musicians on scattered songs. Still, after he departed from the touring version of the band, he fully embraced the concept of using the recording studio as an instrument. The Beach Boys began recording Today! before Wilson’s breakdown and finished it after. Let’s take a look at the story behind “She Knows Me Too Well” by The Beach Boys.
The Beach Boys were recording their Christmas album in the summer of 1964 when Brian Wilson wrote “She Knows Me Too Well.” He later told Record Collector magazine he was trying to write a tribute to Burt Bacharach. The band attempted the song in June but shelved it until August, when they took another stab at recording it. The band provided the instruments except for one. Brian Wilson played piano, Carl Wilson played guitars, Dennis Wilson played drums, and their friend Russ Titelman, the guitarist in the house band of the TV show Shindig! played percussion on a microphone stand with a screwdriver. The vocals utilized all three of the Wilson brothers, Al Jardine, and Mike Love.
Most of The Beach Boys Today! was recorded after Brian Wilson’s nervous breakdown. The focus on studio musicians intensified, and the arrangements became much more sophisticated. In his 2018 memoir, I Am Brian Wilson, he wrote, “I got on the plane to go to Houston. Houston and everything that came after it was a change, definitely, because after that I started to use the studio differently. I tried to take the things I had learned from Phil Spector and use more instruments whenever I could. I doubled up on basses and tripled up on keyboards. That made everything sound bigger and deeper. I was able to do more ballads and give them their own feel. The Beach Boys Today! which came out in early 1965, was made both before and after Houston. It was the first time I could do songs like ‘Please Let Me Wonder’ that had all this space in them. I was also smoking a little bit of pot then, and that changed the way I heard arrangements.”
Today! was followed up by Summer Days (And Summer Nights!!), and then, as Wilson was working on Pet Sounds, Capitol Records was pressuring him for a new album sooner than it would be ready. The answer was to record a collection of mainly cover songs on acoustic instruments in a hootenanny style. Pet Sounds was then completed and represented Wilson’s high-water mark as a producer. Wilson wrote about Capitol’s imposed pressures: “Chuck Britz was our engineer on those records. He liked the way I worked, to have ideas coming in and then add more ideas and put everything in place right away. He wasn’t the kind of person to linger in the studio and wait for inspiration. I remember him telling Mike that he needed to stay focused. “You can’t screw around because I gotta go in a half hour,” he’d say. And he meant it, too. If Mike didn’t listen, Chuck would just split.
“But that was also the beginning of control issues. Capitol didn’t get the hits they wanted from The Beach Boys Today! The songs were great. Everyone thought so. ‘Do You Wanna Dance?’ and ‘Dance, Dance, Dance’ were successful. But they weren’t successful the way Capitol imagined. They imagined a situation where the tower of hits would just keep going higher and higher. After The Beach Boys Today! they put pressure on us to bring them big sales. If it’s what they wanted, it’s what I wanted to give them.”