Pet Sounds

Sly Stone and Brian Wilson died within 72 hours of each other this week, both aged 82. They weren't young, nor were they acquaintances of mine. It still sucks. Both revolutionized popular music as we know it; both were as essential to the 1960s overhaul as anyone not named Miles, Jimi, Nina, or Beatle. Both followed era-defining works of genius with either sporadic (in Wilson's case) or blanketed (in Stone's case) AWOL periods, and their careers hit hard stops by the end of the '70s. Wilson was able to come back for a hard-earned victory lap. Stone wasn't.

The reason their deaths sadden me isn't because they were "cut down in their primes," but because this definitively slams the door on the long-dead hopes that Wilson and Stone could pick up where their respective trajectories left off in the '70s. It's more likely that, had they continued making music at the same rate they had in the '60s, both would've delivered increasingly diminishing returns before they finally gave up and focused on cash-grab reunion and anniversary tours. But we fantasize about Wilson releasing a completed version of Smile in 1967 or Stone keeping The Family together after There's A Riot Goin' On just as we fantasize about what Hendrix or Cobain could've cooked up had they not died young.

~~

My cat died just over a month ago. It sucked. The pain has mostly subsided. It still sucks.

My parents have had between one and five cats and/or dogs since I was a baby, so I'm no stranger to pet mortality. Seeing the first one die when I was eight was traumatic, but all the ensuing losses of my childhood/adolescent pets have been decreasingly brutal for me.

But this was my cat, or more accurately, my wife's cat and my cat. We adopted Desmond in January 2013, when we were both 21-year-old college seniors. He felt like our first foray into serious coupledom, and he accompanied us for two cross-country moves and 12 years of gradual maturation. Des was there when I couldn't grow facial hair, didn't have a legitimate byline, and couldn't cook anything but pasta. I look at where I am now—less in a "glow up" and more in a "washed" way—and recognize this cat as my sidekick on the journey to adulthood. That's why this hurt so much.

We also adopted a dog in 2017—thankfully she's still as hearty as ever, and her presence has made the apartment feel less empty. But there's now an empty space that was occupied for the past 12 years of my life.

I've lost grandparents, aunts, uncles, but never any humans with whom I've been extremely close. That's such a privilege at age 34—at any age, really—and thinking about that has made my sorrow over a pea-brained housepet seem trivial. I don't think I've overreacted or conflated it with the loss of a friend or family member, but it made me consider the weird, unique sensation of losing a pet. Death always confounds those in its wake.

I also feel a bit silly "mourning" my favorite artists when they die, although the most it has ever amounted to is me getting drunk and blasting their music on repeat for four hours straight (that was when Young Dolph was murdered in 2021). Honestly, though, blasting music is also the main way I've personally mourned family members and pets.

My Uncle Johnny was the biggest Deadhead in my life—he left me framed prints of an early Warlocks portrait and the Blues For Allah artwork—so when he died I put on the beat-to-shit vinyl copy of American Beauty that my dad probably bought after Johnny recommended it to him. My Grandpa wasn't a huge music guy, but his ears always perked up when we put on a collaborative Frank Sinatra/Bing Crosby Christmas CD, so when I got home the night he died, you know I threw on In The Wee Small Hours. When we got home from the vet ER where Desmond died, I struggled to find something appropriate, and so reflexively just put on the one song by an artist named "Desmond" that I had on vinyl: a completely thematically inappropriate Desmond Dekker song from the Harder They Come soundtrack.

~~

Ever since Des (the cat, not the '60s ska singer) died, I've been spitballing an essay on songs about dead pets. I thought it would be hard to write because of grief, but it ended up being impossible because of how small and weird the pantheon of dead pet music is.

The first dead pet song I remember hearing is "Death of a Martian," the 28th and final track on The Red Hot Chili Peppers' 2006 double album, Stadium Arcadium. It sucks, as most of the last quarter of the album does. The band wrote a heartfelt song about Flea's recently deceased dog, Martian, and then Anthony Kiedes found a poem in his notebook that he felt matched the vibe, and he tacked it onto the end. The third-to-last line of it is "Your ilk is funny to the turnstile touch bunny." This poem is the exact sort of thing that blows your mind at 15 and comes off as hilariously misguided at 34. Kiedes was 43 when "Death of a Martian" came out.

On the other end of the spectrum, you have something like Neil Young's "Old King." I found it within seconds of Googling "songs about dead pets," and based on my research, it's par for the course as far as "classic rock guys' deep cuts about dead pets" go. Whereas Kiedes lapses into abstraction, Young gives us a folksy children's picture book about a dog that hunts and rides in trucks.

This dichotomy—one overly spiritual, the other overly utilitarian—perfectly illustrates why it's hard to mourn a pet. Some people are under the illusion that their pet matters more than any human life (perhaps even their own); some view their animal companions as nothing more than expendable laborers. When talking about Desmond's death with friends, I say "It's okay, he didn't suffer much" to some people and "Yeah, it really sucks" to others.

In researching songs about dead pets, the most abundant resource I found was a thread on the r/poppunkers Subreddit. Apparently, pop-punk guys write way more songs about deceased dogs and cats than artists in any other genre. This is news to me as someone who probably listens to eight pop-punk bands per calendar year, but it's not necessarily surprising news. You're telling me the band PUP has a song about the death of a band member's dog??

I'm not sure why three separate Redditors singled out a song by the metalcore band Counterparts in that thread. Maybe I'm unclear on the modern definition of pop-punk? I was familiar with Counterparts' mid-late 2010s output, but I'd never heard 2022's "Whispers of Your Death," which vocalist Brendan Murphy wrote while his cat was dying of cancer. It whips, and I'm incapable of hearing the line "It's hard to breathe without you sleeping on my chest" without tearing up.

Three other dead pet pieces of music I'd like to shout out:

This Is Lorelei's "Bring Back My Dog" - Maybe only 10% of the lyrics relate to the titular dog, but the mood is pervasive.

Lorde's "Big Star" - She wrote this when her dog Pearl died in 2019.

Miley Cyrus' Miley Cyrus & Her Dead Petz - This came out amid Miley's buckwild period in 2015, but also after her dog was killed by coyotes. It was made with Wayne Coyne and the contemporary reviews were scathing. I pressed play on it for the first time this week expecting to hate it, and I kind of don't.

~~

After David Bowie and Prince both died in early 2016, I made a concerted effort to go see more concerts by my aging heroes. I never saw either of them, and I never saw Sly Stone or Brian Wilson (though I would've caught the latter were it not for a Texas monsoon). This did, however, inspire me to see Randy Newman, Black Sabbath, Iron Maiden, Dr. John, Steely Dan, The Zombies, Metallica, David Byrne, Bryan Ferry, Candlemass, Jackson Browne, Bruce Springsteen, Dead & Company, Taj Mahal, John Cale, Neil Young, and yes, even The Red Hot Chili Peppers.

I don't think I'm taking any similar lessons this time. Bowie and Prince were a shock to everyone; I'd put good money on at least 20% of the reactions to Stone and Wilson's deaths being 'They weren't already dead?' It has been fun to revisit my favorite Sly & The Family Stone and Beach Boys albums, as well as delve into deep cuts I'd never heard before. But I'm trying to shape more of a realistic view of each man than I did with Bowie and Prince, both of whom were exalted as singular geniuses despite being constantly surrounded by equally or (in Bowie's case) more talented collaborators.

I was recently listening to a podcast about the Flying Burrito Brothers, and learned that while Gram Parsons is commonly cited as the group's "genius," Chris Hillman was responsible for at least as much (if not more) songwriting on their first album. Parsons had the combination of good looks, a big mouth, and a premature death working in his favor, all things that make "auteur theory" easier to apply to an artist.

Sly Stone was the predominant creative force behind his band. He was a prodigy as a musician and songwriter long before he formed The Family Stone, writing and producing hits for other Bay Area acts, and while he recruited top-notch musicians for the band, he largely retained the same role. The group's best-regarded album, 1971's There's a Riot Goin' On..., is in fact the one where his cocaine-inspired seclusion yielded the most insular, overdub-heavy work. He was a monster that alienated the rest of his band and destroyed his own career, but for better or worse, he was always in the driver's seat.

The Beach Boys were a far different enterprise. Brian Wilson is remembered as the genius because of the studio experimentation he pioneered on Pet Sounds and the Smile sessions—which is completely deserving, don't get me wrong—but it diminishes the other members' contributions. His cousin Mike Love is by all accounts a vile human being, but it's a little rich to cast the aloof, troubled Wilson as the hero and the more calculating Love as the villain of this story. For years, one of my favorite Beach Boys songs has been 1970's "All I Wanna Do," mostly because it perfectly predicts circa-2009 chillwave to a startling degree. Love and Wilson co-wrote it, with Love on lead vocals, but Wilson always hated it, even going as far to call it a "boring song."

Based on the way that The Beach Boys were presented to me from a young age, I pictured them starting as a collaborative group, but Brian largely taking over once Pet Sounds became a global success. Looking at the album credits reveals that the collaborative spirit never really went away—even on Pet Sounds, Wilson had a co-writer on most songs, and he doesn't even sing lead on the whole album. A lot of people were posting "God Only Knows" after Brian Wilson died, but as Ryley Walker pointed out, Carl Wilson sings lead on that one. It's clear that Brian's studio advancements are some of the most important musical achievements of the 20th Century, but similarly to the Parsons/Hillman thing, we've let that eclipse everything his bandmates did that was crucial to making The Beach Boys great.

Desmond was a good cat and I loved him dearly, but he was also kind of an asshole. He had years-long vendettas against several of my friends, never warmed up to our dog, scavenged out of the garbage can, chewed up any houseplant he could reach, and is survived by a handful of scars on my body. But it's just as hard to call him a Mike Love as it is to call him a Brian Wilson. He didn't leave me any music to remember him by, but I do have countless pictures, videos and memories. Not to get too "Death of a Martian" on you, but the day of Wilson's death, I saw a quote by the author Hanif Abdurraqib about Wilson's choice to end “God Only Knows” on a fade out loop of the chorus, and it made me think about Desmond:

... It creates a sort of infinity spiral. A world where the song is still going on, always, somewhere. And you, the listener, are still in it, as you were at the time of listening. A dream with no exit. There is a universe, always, where you are joyfully encased in the endless return of chorus, and you might age there, but let’s say you don’t. Let’s say you and the chorus both lock into a type of eternity, a forever of wondering 'God only knows what I’d be without you,' an eternity of praising the fact that you’ll never have to find out.

I want to go and cry
It's so sad to watch a sweet thing die

-Brian Wilson, "Caroline, No"

The world can still be beautiful
That part's up to you

-Miley Cyrus, "Karen Don't Be Sad"