The lead track on “Wild Honey,” the Beach Boys’ back-to-our-roots album following the “Smile” disaster, this soul-flavored confection was a throwback even in 1967. The Beach Boys were considered has-beens by that point, so the song barely hit the Top 20, but I’ve always thought it was pretty darn outta sight.
Said Brian Wilson in 2011: “I was writing more in a soul/R&B bag. The horns were conceived as a Phil Spector kind of a horn thing. ‘Darlin’ was for Three Dog Night [known as Redwood at the time, the first band Brian signed to their new Brother Records]. They recorded it and said, ‘No, you can have it’ so I gave it to Carl to sing. That song took about a week to write.”
Sounds impressive, but Wilson wasn’t writing, he was re-writing, or actually editing. The chords and melody are lifted from a longer, more complex song he wrote in 1963, “Thinkin’ ‘Bout You Baby,” that he produced for a singer named Sharon Marie the next year.
