Poor Brian Wilson. You read about his life story and it’s really kinda messed up. Abused as a child, forced to become a musical genius, achieved becoming a musical genius, finding solace in drugs, driven mad by all of the above, still loving music and making it and singing for people.
Poor Brian Wilson.
I grew up in Michigan, listening to the occasional Beach Boys song on AM Honey Radio. There were a lot of songs about surfing (something Michigan doesn’t have a whole lot of) and songs about cars (quite a few, but no songs about Buicks). I’d hear stuff like… Surfin’ Safari
And Surfin’ USA
And Fun Fun Fun
And they were all songs that were a million years in the past and, since I was around 8, a million years in the future. When in the world would I go to California and surf? When in the world would I have a T-Bird? This was stuff from years before I was born and years and years away. So I saw them the way I saw shows like “Happy Days”. “This is what the 50s were like.”
I mean, it didn’t matter that it was from the mid-60s. The songs sounded like the 50s to me. There was none of the malaise that kicked off with Kennedy’s assassination and kept through with Vietnam and Jimmy Carter and Reagan killing us all. It was just sunshine songs.
It wasn’t until I watched the movie Roger & Me that I first heard the song “Wouldn’t It Be Nice?” and it hit me with all of the irony and pain and loss instead of hearing it as it was:
I couldn’t imagine hearing it as teenager holding hands with his sweetie. It was a song about an adult in a recession, crying in his car, remembering back when anything was possible before it wasn’t anymore.
So, sadly, The Beach Boys never hit for me until, like, my 40s when I finally listened to Pet Sounds for the whole thing and… holy cow. The whole album is awesome. The whole thing. And it wasn’t full of songs about loss and grief and malaise but songs about sunshine.
I could probably write a half dozen posts about “God Only Knows” and talk about the different cover songs, from the barbershop quartets to the heavy metal covers of it to the country covers of it… it’s the perfect song. A perfect song on a perfect album and it was, somehow, written by someone who had gone mad.
A perfect little song. An impossible, perfect little song.
Smile was an album that I had heard about… yet another dragon that Brian Wilson had been chasing… was finally kind of released in 2004 as the sequel to Pet Sounds as Brian Wilson presents Smile. The song that I keep coming back to is “Wonderful”.
A beautiful little song that you probably shouldn’t listen to twice in a row, lest you start crying.
I think I get the Beach Boys now. I’m finally old enough to listen to them as if I were holding hands with my sweetie.
We’ve got a little less sunshine.
(Featured image is the picture of Brian Wilson from his “At My Piano” album.)
There are also so very many songwriters who talk about Brian Wilson like he was magic.
Bob Dylan pointed out that Brian Wilson made his stuff with four tracks and boggled at that. “You couldn’t make his records if you had a hundred tracks today.”
Elton John said that Wilson had an orchestra in his head.
Everybody knows the Barenaked Ladies song Brian Wilson and Tears for Fears had their great Brian Wilson Said trying to reach for the same stuff that Brian Wilson grasped.
Even if I didn’t get Brian Wilson, the musicians I loved got him.
True story. In the early seventies, a group of us were chilling out in a dorm room with the help of various illegal stimulants. One of us, who had had more such help than the rest of us, announced: “I see God!” One of my roommates asked: “What does He look like?” He answered: “Brian Wilson.”