The Beach Boys' Brian Wilson recounted the genesis of the title “Good Vibrations” in his 1995 biopic, I Just Wasn’t Made for These Times, and at other times. When he was a child, his mother told him that dogs could pick up “vibrations” from people, so that the dog would bark at “bad vibrations”. Wilson turned this into the general idea of vibrations (and Mike Love putting “good” in front of vibrations), and developed the idea of people being able to do the same with emotions.

This song is revolutionary in a couple of ways. Firstly, the song is a for the time unusual form:
A B A' B C D B E
There is a lot of new material (C, D and E), where most previous songs only had A’s and B’s and sometimes a bridge. Furthermore, these new parts are not in obvious ways musically connected to previous parts.
Second, there is a ton of instruments that were completely new to this type of music, most notably an Electro-Theremin. This song and the album Pet Sounds in general greatly influenced the Beatles, which resulted in Sgt. Pepper.