The Rolling Stone interviews - Jann Wenner [58]
This difficulty in writing songs—would you describe it as a writing block?
Well, I have a writing block right now. Even today I started to sit down to write a song, and there was a block there. God knows what that is. Unless it’s supposed to be there. I mean, it’s not something you just kick away and say, “Come on, let’s go, let’s get a song writ.” If the block is there, it’s there.
Another thing, too, is that I used to write on pills. I used to take uppers and write, and I used to like that effect. In fact, I’d like to take uppers now and write because they give me, you know, a certain lift and a certain outlook. And it’s not an unnatural thing. I mean the pill might be unnatural and the energy, but the song itself doesn’t turn out unnatural on the uppers. The creativity flows through.
Well, why don’t you do that?
I’m thinking of asking the doctor if I can go back to those, yeah.
But you believe writers really do run out of material.
I believe that writers run out of material, I really do. I believe very strongly in the fact that when the natural time is up, writers actually do run out of material [yawn]. To me it’s black and white. When there’s a song there’s a song, when there’s not there’s not. Of course you run out, maybe not indefinitely, but everybody runs out of some material that writes for a while. And it’s a very frightening experience. It’s an awesome thing to think, “Oh my God, the only thing that’s ever supplied me with any success or made us money, I’m running out of.” So right there there’s an insecurity that sets in. This is why I’m going through these different experiments, sexually and all, to see what can happen, to see if there’s anything waiting in there that I haven’t found.
Is there much else you could do if you didn’t write songs?
No, not really. I’m not cut out to do very much at all.
Why don’t we talk a bit about “Good Vibrations”?
That would be a good place to begin. “Good Vibrations” took six months to make. We recorded the very first part of it at Gold Star Recording Studio, then we took it to a place called Western, then we went to Sunset Sound, then we went to Columbia.
So it took quite a while. There’s a story behind this record that I tell everybody. My mother used to tell me about vibrations. I didn’t really understand too much of what that meant when I was just a boy. It scared me, the word “vibrations.” To think that invisible feelings, invisible vibrations existed, scared me to death. But she told about dogs that would bark at people and then not bark at others, that a dog would pick up vibrations from these people that you can’t see, but you can feel. And the same existed with people.
And so it came to pass that we talked about good vibrations. We went ahead and experimented with the song and the idea, and we decided that on the one hand you could say, “I love the colorful clothes she wears and the way the sunlight plays upon her hair. I hear the sound of a gentle word on the wind that lifts her perfume through the air.” Those are sensual things. And then you go, “I’m pickin’ up good vibrations,” which is a contrast against all the sensual—there’s what you call the extrasensory perception which we have. And this is what we’re really talking about.
But you also set out to do something new musically. Why this particular song?
Because we wanted to explain that concept, plus we wanted to do something that was R&B but had a taste of modern, avant-garde R&B to it. “Good Vibrations” was advanced rhythm & blues music.
You took a risk.
Oh yeah, we took a great risk. As a matter of fact, I didn’t think it was going to make it because of its complexity, but apparently people accepted it very well. They felt that it had a naturalness to it, it flowed. It was a little pocket symphony.
How come you used four different studios?
Because we wanted to experiment with combining studio sounds. Every