Recent posts have spent time on the Beach Boys’ single of August 1964, “When I Grow Up (To Be a Man)”—a relatively overlooked song in the Beach Boys’ 1960s discography, but a very important one in the story of Brian Wilson.
Part 23 looked at the uniqueness of the song itself—as judged by the standards of early ‘60s teenage-pop, and in comparison to what was typically expected from the Beach Boys in those days. Part 24 noted how Brian would have wanted to “grow up” in both life and music, and then suggested that a song on this theme would have been especially relevant for him in the months after he fired his abusive and controlling father as Beach Boys manager.
The post below continues with still more commentary on “When I Grow Up (To Be a Man),” focusing more closely on Brian’s subjective state of mind at the time of its release, and the creative constraints he faced as a songwriter working in the demographically segregated (but lucrative) field of teenage-pop.
The post concludes with a look at the B-side of the “When I Grow Up” single: the song “She Knows Me Too Well.”
Part 25:
In July 1964, the Beach Boys triumphed with “I Get Around”—the culmination of the car-song concept that dated all the way back to 1962 and “409.” For Brian Wilson, success on this level may have justified a move toward newer and fresher ideas. By mid-August he was quoted in a music trade publication called Music Business, stating that Beach Boys songs shouldn’t, and wouldn’t, be restricted to cars and beaches.
Yet at the same time, Brian continued to accept the unshakable premise that underlay all Beach Boys music to date: the songs would continue to be tailored for the teenage sensibility. “As far as the Beach Boys are concerned,” he said, “we just want to keep on identifying with what the young people like to do and like to think about.” Brian then asserted that the band’s new single, “When I Grow Up (To Be a Man),” “certainly touches what every guy is thinking about.”
These comments provide a window into Brian’s thoughts at the time: since “every guy” thinks about what his future will bring, “When I Grow Up (To Be a Man)” was sufficiently teenage. It was therefore acceptable for the marketplace. In other words, Brian was justifying the new single not on its artistic merit or substantive content alone, but on commercial grounds—as viable product consistent with “Fun, Fun, Fun,” “I Get Around,” “Surfin’ U.S.A.” and all the rest.
As previously suggested (in this post), Brian was probably overselling the universality of “When I Grow Up (To Be a Man).” It isn’t really true that all teenage boys (or even most of them) think about whether they’ll want to marry early or play the field (“travel the world”), or be able to stay in love forever with their future wives. Nor is the average kid very apprehensive about the rushing onset of adulthood and the quick passing of years. It seems more probable that “When I Grow Up (To Be a Man),” gave voice to the inner thoughts and anxieties of Brian himself, more than the typical teenager.
As it so often does, the question turns to Brian’s internal state of mind. In private, how confident was he that the average American teen would relate to “When I Grow Up (To Be a Man)?” Was he aware of just how solitary, intellectual, and inward-looking the song really was? How it differed from just about everything else in the field of teenage pop music? And while he certainly wanted to produce this record, and wanted to put it out as a single, could he fully appreciate how its subject matter related to his own personal background and the challenges he faced in becoming an adult? Did he know he was writing about himself?
It’s hard to say; over the years, Brian has given little indication of what he was thinking at that moment in the late summer of 1964. As critic Paul Williams wrote with respect to the naive brilliance of “I Get Around,” it’s possible Brian wasn’t thinking so deliberately at the time, working instead with a degree of “unselfconsciousness.” It is possible, in other words, that Brian wanted to write and record “When I Grow Up (To Be a Man)” but didn’t think too much about why he wanted to do it.
If, on the other hand, Brian knew that he had purposefully conceived the tune as an expression of his own thoughts and anxieties, he would have kept it to himself. He wouldn’t have told anyone. Not in 1964.
This was a business of course, and in these days, the pop songwriter or producer—Phil Spector, Bob Crewe, Brian Wilson—made records for a large but still very circumscribed teenage audience. The records were made for kids as kids (teenagers or “teeners”), not adults or even young adults. There was scarcely any “adult” audience for the Beach Boys or their genre of popular music. Most people Brian’s age—the youngest members of the “Silent Generation” now in their late teens or early twenties—were not fans of the Beach Boys, or Phil Spector’s records, or even the Beatles.1 This was before the changes of the mid- and late-1960s; before Bob Dylan transferred his lyrical sensibility from “folk” to the genre of post-Beatles rock ‘n’ roll; before the Beatles themselves began to mature in their music; before the audience grew up and started to experience life. Properly understood, in 1964 the job was simply to treat the young audience as customers, and give them what (was assumed) they wanted.
Brian was very good at this. For people in the business, his “genius” in the early 1960s was his ability to read the teenage mind, not his compositional skills, and certainly not his lyrical content. Brian Wilson was known to have the magic touch—he somehow knew what the kids wanted to hear in terms of sound and theme and had given it to them. And in the process, he and the Beach Boys generated a lot of money—for themselves, and a lot of other people.2 The reward was financial, and for somebody like Brian, also to be found in the satisfaction of chart success and the sense of purpose gained from the music-making process itself. Thinly-disguised personal self-expression rarely, if ever, had anything to do with it.
Accordingly, in the Music Business article in August, Brian left the impression of a pragmatic songwriter-producer working in alignment with commercial expectations, fully aware that his audience was teenage, and that he was not. He was an adult. And because he was an adult (albeit still quite young), it was his job to first “identify” with the less-mature record-buying public (whom he referred to as “the young people”) and then express their interests and concerns on hit records. Not his own.
And so he refrained from doing that. Or so it seemed. At the time, it’s doubtful anyone heard “When I Grow Up (To Be a Man)” as having anything to do with Brian’s own life. And even if someone was to confront Brian with the accusation that he had made a weird record about his weird anxieties instead of a fun, relatable song for America’s teenagers, Brian could have easily deflected it with the commercial rationale he outlined in Music Business: the song isn’t about me, it’s about them.3
With the passage of time, “When I Grow Up (To Be a Man)” shows itself to have been honest, creative, “alternative” to commercial expectations, and written with a dash of naiveté, or unintentionality. Brian created a musical feeling of adolescent uncertainty for a song that is lyrically about adolescent uncertainty. Although it wasn’t the best record the Beach Boys had put out, it may have been their most artful up to that point.
Still, it was an artfulness that was less-than-mature; not fully realized. There is an awkward incongruity between music and lyrics in “When I Grow Up” that Brian may not have intended: the music is fun and light, while the lyric is uncertain. The underlying message is foreboding. This was unavoidable though, for when Brian decided to write and produce the song sometime in the middle of 1964, he gave himself the task of making sincerity, introspection, uncertainty, and the inexorable slippage of time sound “fun” and “teenage,” suitable to be presented in concert for a howling mob of pubescent Baby Boomers. No matter how good the song might be, Brian was working at cross-purposes with himself.
Just as Brian himself originally intended, “When I Grow Up (To Be a Man)” can be grouped among all the other teenage Beach Boys songs. It remained consistent with earlier Beach Boys material—“Surfer Girl,” “Don’t Worry Baby,” “In My Room”—that delivered a heavier payload only when accompanied by references to the beach, cars, and teen scenes. But if Brian was to “grow up” for real, his music would have to do the same. (And vice-versa.) Therefore, he would have to strip away the formulaic teenage and fad elements and let the songs stand on their own.
And as it so happens, this is what Brian did on the B-side of “When I Grow Up (To Be a Man).”
When the kids flipped the single over, they got another new song, the ballad “She Knows Me Too Well.” This was an advancement of a different sort. It was recorded at the same sessions as “When I Grow Up,” and can likewise be assumed to have been conceived and written during the period shortly following the firing of Murry Wilson. Like “When I Grow Up,” it was internal—dealing with a girl’s ability to read a guy’s thoughts and feelings without his being able to properly express them—but since it involved the romantic relationship between two young people, it could never be as solitary or purely thought-driven. Nevertheless, it had something that “When I Grow Up” lacked: an adult, or young adult quality.
In hindsight, the significance of “She Knows Me Too Well” is how it dispensed with the faddish tropes that had always been present in even the best Beach Boys songs. There was no explicit reference to the age of the subjects, no indication they were in high school or, “going together.” It wasn’t summer vacation. There was no reference to living at home (in a kid’s “room,” or under parental restriction). There was no explicit reference to the ocean or beach as in “Surfer Girl” (or the more obscure “Lonely Sea”), nor even an implicit allusion to the beach, as in “The Warmth of the Sun.” While “She Knows Me Too Well” bore a general musical similarity to the ballad “Don’t Worry Baby,” the drag-race setting was absent.
“She Knows Me Too Well” could very well be the Beach Boys’ first non-teenage song because it isn’t, by its own terms, “teenage,” or associated with a fad. The listener may choose to hear it as a high school or teenage love song, but isn’t required to. It doesn’t sound like it’s about “boys” and “girls” at all, but young men and women of non-specific age, arguably at least 18 if not older, like the Beach Boys themselves. (If there is a younger sensibility in the song, it’s attributable to the character of Brian’s vocals.) The urgent sexuality that informs a number of early Beach Boys songs is gone—there’s no leering or teasing between girls and boys, and no need to hook up “in the parkin’ lot” or at the drive-in movie theater.
The singer is instead thinking about the relationship with his girl in terms that are emotional and psychological—though thankfully not in such a way that the song becomes tangled, wordy, and abstract. Thoughts and feelings are communicated to the listener with an intimacy and depth of feeling that is largely absent from other, more well-known pop hits of the same vintage—Temptations, Four Tops, Four Seasons, even the Beatles’ lovely ballads of mid-1964, “And I Love Her” and “If I Fell.”
With those records, the listener is first and foremost hearing a piece of pop music—a song—that then reveals itself to be about male-female relationships. On “She Knows Me Too Well,” it’s as if the singer is first telling you something very specific about himself and his life—as if he’s talking, thoughtfully—and only after are those preexisting thoughts and emotions set to music. “She Knows Me Too Well” isn’t better than “My Girl” or “If I Fell,” but it does sound more specific, closer to an actual human situation or emotional reality. For that reason the song might be a bit more serious too.
How Brian did this is a bit of a mystery, but it was not on purpose. It probably just happened naturally, the outcome of his personality and his internal approach to songwriting, where the listener is often drawn inside an enclosed musical space and made to feel what the song is really about. As time passed and he attempted to pull the Beach Boys away from the teenage model, Brian would lean further toward this type of songwriting, with the Pet Sounds album becoming its most famous and well-regarded expression.
Indeed, when everything is viewed historically, the point at which Brian produces “She Knows Me Too Well” in the middle of 1964 is when the landmark accomplishment of Pet Sounds begins to assume form somewhere on the distant horizon: it’s well-understood that the quality of Pet Sounds is attributable to its themes, production, arrangements, lyrical honesty, vocal quality, and professional studio musicianship. Written and recorded in the first half of 1966 (placing it far into the future from August 1964, if viewed through the lens of the ‘60s music scene), Pet Sounds is now recognized as major step forward—or sideways—for the music Brian Wilson was then creating for the Beach Boys. Yet as music fans have long recognized, Brian had already demonstrated the Pet Sounds style in a small set of four songs on Side Two of the Beach Boys Today album from March 1965. “She Knows Me Too Well” was one of the four.
“She Knows Me Too Well” may not be as pristine or fully-realized (arranged) as the later Pet Sounds tracks, but it’s not hard to imagine an updated version sitting alongside “You Still Believe in Me,” “Don’t Talk,” and “I Just Wasn’t Made for These Times.” In some sense, therefore, Brian first adopted his Pet Sounds stance not in 1966 nor even 1965 at the time of Beach Boys Today, but earlier still, in the middle of 1964, during the height of Beatlemania.
The next post, Part 26 of A History of Brian Wilson, will look beyond “When I Grow Up” and “She Knows Me Too Well” to a third song of mid-1964—”Little Honda”—which the Beach Boys notably did not release as a high-profile 45-rpm single.
Go to Part 26 (“Groovy Little Motorbike”)
Selected References for Part 25
Carlin, Peter Ames. Catch a Wave: The Rise, Fall, and Redemption of the Beach Boys' Brian Wilson. Emmaus, PA: Rodale, 2006.
Grevatt, Ren. “The Beach Boys Ride the Trends.” Music Business, August 15, 1964.
Leaf, David. The Beach Boys and the California Myth. New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1978.
Sharp, Ken. “Love Among the Ruins: The Controversial Beach Boy Speaks His Mind.” Goldmine, September 18, 1992.
__________ . Mike Love of the Beach Boys: One-On-One.” Rock Cellar, September 9, 2015. At: https://web.archive.org/web/20180612170213/https://www.rockcellarmagazine.com/2015/09/09/mike-love-of-the-beach-boys-one-on-one-the-interview-part-1/2/ (last accessed May 24, 2024)
Wilson, Brian, and Ben Greenman. I Am Brian Wilson. Boston: Da Capo Press, 2016.
Some of these older folks liked rock ‘n’ roll, but that was precisely why they kept their distance from the likes of the Beatles, the girl-groups, and the Beach Boys as of 1964. Rock ‘n’ roll was Elvis, Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis, Fats Domino, etc. Whatever this new stuff was, it wasn’t rock ‘n’ roll because it wasn’t real or dangerous enough; it seemed cynically and safely targeted toward adolescents—especially girls. How else to explain the girl-hordes who bought all those 45’s and went raving mad at the concerts? The 1973 movie American Graffiti captures the musical divide between the 18 to 20-year-olds and the 14-year-old members of the new “Baby Boom” generation, with an exchange in which one of the older characters rejects the Beach Boys as purveyors of “surfing shit” that is inconsistent with the spirit of real rock ‘n’ roll. Although the movie takes place in the summer of 1962 (the era of the Beach Boys’ boogie-woogie influenced breakthrough hit “Surfin’ Safari”) instead of ‘64, this sort of person wouldn’t have gone for Beatlemania, and would have continued to disregard the Beach Boys in 1964.
Over the years, whenever a music-business veteran has been quoted saying something like, “Brian Wilson built this business,” this could be what they mean—Brian as songwriter and record-producer in the early 1960s demonstrating that fresh, exciting records could be conceived and in a sense, manufactured, in the studio for the mass youth market. Brian himself would surely say that Phil Spector did it first. However, there is some distinction, in that Brian took the Spector model and, with the Beach Boys, fused it with the “band” image. This had never been done before in the U.S. In any case, whatever it was seems a bit different from something like the Elvis Presley phenomenon or Beatlemania, both of which traded on the talent and personal charisma (including physical attractiveness) of the performers themselves. In a situation like that, studio-craft mattered less than it did with the Beach Boys. The job was instead to find (or stumble upon) the talent, clean them up a little, and get them out on stage and in front of a microphone (and Elvis’s case, on movie screens). It was only after becoming a sensation that the Beatles began to develop a studio-shaped personality (having to some extent viewed Brian Wilson as a model of studio-based musicianship).
As noted in Part 23 (“What Will I Be. . . “), there’s little indication that anybody called Brian out for wanting to do “When I Grow Up (To Be a Man).” (Though it’s mildly interesting how, 50 years later, mention of the song prompted Mike Love’s uncomplimentary remark about Brian’s habit of writing “through desperation.”) Brian would begin to receive heavier criticism no later than the recording of Pet Sounds (1966), when his songs had become more openly autobiographical—on those songs it was obvious he was writing about himself. For now, it’s worth noting here that Brian’s famously controversial approach to theme and lyric on Pet Sounds is already present (though sufficiently obscured) on “When I Grow Up (To Be a Man)” in 1964.