Brian Wilson & the Beach Boys’ ‘Don’t Worry Baby’: Instant Inspiration

The love song is the staple of staples of all popular songwriting. The idea of love, union, romance, is often beside the point, which is instead is a matter of melody or lyrics that instantly become a part of our memories such that we take them forward with us out into the world.

Love songs became so much the norm over the first decade of rock and roll that come 1964 it was as if no one was expecting anything new from them, and certainly not the plumbing of depths. But if there was a memo that love itself had become ancillary and definitely not the point of writing, recording and desiring to get a song to people, then it never found its way to Brian Wilson when he got to making “Don’t Worry Baby.”

Few people have ever loved a record—and were as in love with a record—as Brian Wilson loved the Ronettes’ 1963 single, “Be My Baby.” He took it to his heart as John Peel would later embrace the Undertones’ “Teenage Kicks” or Orson Welles did the sonorous works of Shakespeare, which is to say, in a manner of unconditional openness and appreciation for that which had been added to a life and would always be important to that life.

The Beach Boys perform onstage circa 1964 in California. (L-R) Dennis Wilson, Al Jardine, Carl Wilson, Brian Wilson, Mike Love. (Photo by Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images; used with permission)

Sometimes there is nothing we can love better than a work of art we believe amplifies the essence of who we are and who we discover, as a result, we may become and are in part already becoming on account of what we have read, seen, heard. Wilson thrilled to producer Phil Spector’s tsunami of sound that defined the Ronettes’ disc, with Ronnie Spector’s lead vocal cutting through the exhilarating, rolling Wagnerian thunder like a beacon lighting the path to where one’s heart has resolved they must go. It’s a song that instantly inspires whoever hears it, which for Wilson meant an upsurge in creative energy regarding what he could do with a love song, but minus Spector’s Wall of Sound.

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