What the driving creative force behind the Beach Boys gave to the world, and to me.
What the driving creative force behind the Beach Boys gave to the world, and to me.
I srael is currently striking military and nuclear facilities in Iran. The Marines are deployed to Los Angeles. Protesters were out on the streets in a “No Kings” demonstration this afternoon over Donald Trump’s immigration policies, as well as various and sundry other outrages. In the northwest suburbs of Minneapolis, a man dressed as a cop shot two Democratic lawmakers and their spouses, killing the DFL speaker of the House and her husband in a barbarous (and politically motivated) atrocity.
It feels like the world is a much more dangerous place this weekend than it has been in the past, both domestically and globally. Scarier, at the very least. So for a moment I want to set all of those troubles aside and write about a man whose own troubled genius swept all other considerations and fears away in a torrent of beauty. I want to talk about what Brian Wilson and the Beach Boys gave to the world, and to me.
Wilson passed away earlier this week at the age of 82, after a long struggle with dementia. (Given his many personal struggles, it is actually hugely impressive he made it this long.) You of course know him from his work with the Beach Boys, the most quintessentially “Californian” band of the 1960s. You may reflexively associate the Beach Boys with all those legendary songs about cars, surfing, fun in the sun, and girls, girls, girls. That was certainly my early experience with the work of Brian Wilson: bopping along as a pre-adolescent to songs like “Fun, Fun, Fun” and “Surfin’ U.S.A.”
I heard those songs on the radio (at least whenever my mom was driving and had the “oldies” station on). I saw them on TV — PBS must have had some kind of arrangement with their publishers, because those songs seemed to pop up all over kids’ shows back then. It was enjoyable enough, but when I finally discovered the Beatles in middle school and started becoming a music fanatic, I felt like it was just a bit too simplistic for me (and what did I care about California, anyway?), so I left it all aside.
It was only around the time I was finishing high school that I began to realize what it is I had missed — everything that wasn’t being played on the radio, either now or then. And from that point onwards I developed an active chip on my shoulder about this band, an evangelizing streak. The Beach Boys were insanely great, for years and years into the Seventies, and why didn’t anybody seem to know or care? Times have of course changed since the late ’90s, as a slew of boxed sets, studio sessions, and reissues has brought the critical world (including younger generations) around. But for awhile there, it felt like I was floating on my own lonely sea by speaking up so vociferously on their behalf.
What had I been missing until that point? This isn’t the place for a walkthrough of the Beach Boys’ career, but suffice it to say they put out their first album, Surfin’ Safari, in the pre-Beatles era of late 1962. By 1964’s All Summer Long, with hits like “I Get Around” and “Wendy,” and album tracks like “Little Honda” and “Don’t Back Down,” they were full-fledged titans of the rock scene, all guided by Brian Wilson’s lushly arranged vocal harmony stacks and his increasingly ambitious musical ideas and productions.
If the members of the Beach Boys themselves weren’t up to hacking it on their instruments, Brian had no problem ruthlessly swapping them out for studio pros. (The “Wrecking Crew” of Los Angeles studio fame first came together as a brand name around the work it did on Beach Boys sessions in the mid-Sixties.) The pace of Wilson’s growth over these early years is staggering; there is as much a relationship between Surfin’ Safari and All Summer Long — only two years apart creatively — as between an amoeba and an eagle.
Immediately afterwards, Wilson quit touring with the group — he had the first of many nervous breakdowns while flying from gig to gig, crushed by the collective weight of writing, producing, and touring responsibilities. So the band hired Glen Campbell to fill his shoes on the road, and let Brian stay home to compose his increasingly ornate mini-symphonies. Brian turned to writing — and, in an ominous precedent, to an increasing regimen of recreational drugs as well.
The result, though, was a golden era: The Beach Boys Today!, Summer Days (And Summer Nights), and most especially Pet Sounds — these are albums stocked with radio hits, yes, but with so much more than that, besides: from being catchy albums stacked with tuneful hits they had evolved into a series of musical statements of shocking chordal, melodic, and harmonic complexity. “Let Him Run Wild,” off Summer Days, may well be the single finest recording of the Beach Boys’ entire career — and its working title in the studio was “I Hate Rock and Roll,” which tells you everything you need to know about where Wilson was heading creatively.
This of course caused tensions within the band — who were now excluded from any role in the studio except singing, and were being handed music absolutely impossible to recreate out on the road. It also ratcheted up the tension in Brian’s own psyche, as he saw himself locked in competition with the Beatles (then coming off the shocking diversity and self-sufficiency of Rubber Soul). Pet Sounds took four months to record — so long that the band went out on tour and returned only at the end to record their vocals — and received only middling commercial success. Nerves were only fraying further within the band and within Brian’s mind. (This dynamic is movingly and accurately documented in the film Love and Mercy, which focuses on this brief window of the Beach Boys’ career as well as the aftermath for Brian decades later.)
In retrospect, we can see how and why the record-buying public missed on Pet Sounds: It is largely ruminative and often outright gloomy, with a few upbeat moments sprinkled in. “Don’t Talk (Put Your Head on My Shoulder)” is a nominal love song that sounds like a funeral procession. Even one of the album’s most famous moments, the Caribbean folk tune “Sloop John B,” was subtly rewritten by Brian Wilson to reflect his newest problem: terrifyingly harrowing acid trips. (“This is the worst trip I’ve ever been on.”)
Pet Sounds is also, of course, one of the most achingly beautiful albums ever recorded, the ideal demonstration of Brian’s fully realized rock-orchestral and vocal harmony arrangements. These songs have chord progressions that simultaneously sound thrillingly new — because they are; nobody composed chords quite like Wilson — and yet natural and unforced. The album inevitably plays as personal, Wilson revealing his truest heart — even though he was working with lyricist Tony Asher. On “I Just Wasn’t Made For These Times,” Brian indulges in his bathos openly: “They say I’ve got brains, but they ain’t doing me no good/I wish they could.” Elsewhere: “I had to prove that I could make it alone now, but that’s not me.” “Where did your long hair go? Where is the girl I used to know?”
Pet Sounds has always felt acutely personal for me as well, often for many of the same reasons as it was for Brian. The simplicity of the lyrical sentiments in these songs is so moving precisely because it sits along the elegant complexity of the music. “I may not always love you — but long as there are stars above you, you never need to doubt it.” Twenty years after I first heard the miraculous purity of “God Only Knows” — which changes keys four times and carries you harmonically around the world without making you feel like you’ve ever left home — I walked down the aisle to it. It was the most perfect moment of my life.
What followed was Wilson’s massive and famous mental collapse amidst the chaos of his next, most ambitious project: the 1966 “lost” album Smile. The record has now been both re-recorded (by Wilson himself, in a surprisingly triumphant 2004 effort) as well as reconstructed from the original session tapes. And while it could never have been released at the time in the form we now know commercially — too much material for one album, too little for two — I consider it to be a masterpiece nonetheless.
A completely different beast from Pet Sounds, Smile was intended to be Wilson’s tribute to all that inspired him in Americana, with other thematic layers intertwined, a “teenage symphony to God.” Written with a young Van Dyke Parks as his collaborator, the album had lyrical and musical conceits that proved to be too much for Wilson’s increasingly fragile mind to sort through. Often, Brian was no longer writing full-fledged songs so much as modular melodic “feels” he could rearrange or vary at will — the process that led to the band’s great hit of the era, “Good Vibrations.” But over the span of an album meant to convey so many different musical and lyrical conceits, the final plotting of its conclusion became hopelessly entangled. (On the lyrical front, Parks’s confidence collapsed after one too many “what the heck does this even mean?” fights with Mike Love.)
The Beach Boys’ career doesn’t end here, with the collapse of Smile, even though their chart success largely did. (In fact, the music they made between 1967’s Smiley Smile and 1971’s Surf’s Up is every bit as fascinating and successful as the best of their heyday, albeit with scaled-down ambitions.) But I promised not to walk through the band’s entire career, even if I think you should take the time to do so yourself.
Brian Wilson was impossible not to root for: A shy musical genius and profound eccentric, Brian and his brothers had spent their childhood being viciously bullied and abused by their ogre of a father, Murry. (Popular belief holds it that Wilson was almost completely deaf in his right ear because Murry hit him so hard he blew out his eardrum. Whether true or not — Wilson refused to ever comment on it in public — given Murry’s history of child and spousal abuse it is at least ben trovato.) Brian often got the worst of it merely because he was so obviously talented that his father poured all his own frustrated ambitions into his son, and only became more enraged when Wilson didn’t need or want his interference. Although Brian was ultimately responsible for his own decisions — something his cousin and sometime rival Mike Love often pointed out with justified frustration — the psychological fragility that led to his various mental breakdowns and self-abnegating drug use feels like it was inflicted upon him at a young and impressionable age.
Six years ago, before I joined National Review as a writer, I did something on my music podcast Political Beats that I’m as proud of as anything I’ve ever published here: Over the course of two episodes and six hours, my co-host Scot Bertram and I sat down with our friend Matt Welch (of Reason as well as his podcast The Fifth Column) and rhapsodized about the full glory and import of the Beach Boys’ career. Although the story is one largely dominated by Brian — certainly in Part 1, which carries the story all the way up through Pet Sounds — Part 2, which picks up with “Good Vibrations” and Smile, is an equally if not more entertaining journey into the less discussed backwaters of the great second half of their Sixties. One reason it’s hard for me to write about Brian Wilson right now is because I feel like I said it all once before on those shows — and I won’t be able to do better. If you feel like celebrating some of the finest, most inspiring music of its era or any other, I invite you to click and celebrate the life of a sweet, sad, soulful genius.
Rest in peace, Brian. You will be dearly missed.