Brian Wilson was more than a genius. His sound epitomized the lore of SoCal
Brian Wilson didn't create the sun or the ocean or the sea-sprayed landmass we call Southern California. He didn't invent the car or the surfboard. He wasn't the first person to experience the cold pang of isolation or to fall in love with somebody so deeply that the only thing to do is regret it.
Listen to a song by the Beach Boys, though — to one of the tortured and euphoric classics that made them the most important American pop group of the 1960s — and I bet you'd be willing to believe otherwise. I bet you'd insist on it.
Wilson, who died Wednesday at 82, was one of music's true visionaries, if that's the right word for a guy who dealt in the endless possibility of sound. As a composer of melodies, a constructor of textures, an arranger of vocal harmonies — as someone who knew how to pull complicated elements together into songs that somehow felt inevitable — he was up there with Phil Spector, George Martin and the Motown team of Holland-Dozier-Holland.
The Beach Boys' hits are so embedded into American culture at this point that you don't really need me to provide examples. But let's do that for second — let's savor the beginning of 'Wouldn't It Be Nice,' where an eerily out-of-tune electric guitar conjures a dreamlike atmosphere until the hard thwack of a snare drum breaks the spell. Let's think about the terrifying theremin line that snakes through 'Good Vibrations' like it's tugging a flying saucer down onto Dockweiler Beach.
What we should really do is go over to YouTube and pull up the isolated vocals from 'God Only Knows,' which allow you to luxuriate in Wilson's obsession with the human voice. The song is a cathedral of sound that you could walk into 500 times without fully grasping how he built it.
For all his architectural craft, Wilson's essential genius was his control of emotion — his ability to articulate the feeling of being overwhelmed by affection or fear or disappointment. 'Pet Sounds,' the Beach Boys' 1966 masterpiece, represents the apotheosis of Wilson's expressive powers: the trembling anticipation he layers into 'Wouldn't It Be Nice,' the sting of betrayal in his singing in 'Caroline, No,' the certainty beneath those celestial harmonies in 'God Only Knows' that anything precious is destined to die.
To my ears, even the group's earlier stuff about surfing and cars is laced with the melancholy of an outsider looking in. I tried out that idea last year on Wilson's cousin and bandmate Mike Love, who wasn't buying it: 'If you're talking about 'Fun, Fun, Fun' or 'I Get Around' or 'Surfin' U.S.A.,'' he told me in an interview, 'there ain't no melancholy in them.' That Love identified no sadness in the songs only makes it easier to understand why Wilson the lonely young pop star was writing tunes as openly forlorn as 'In My Room.'
Wilson formed the Beach Boys in Hawthorne in 1961 with Love, his brothers Dennis and Carl and the Wilsons' neighbor Al Jardine; the band rode quickly to success as avatars of a kind of postwar suburban prosperity. In 1964, after suffering a panic attack on an airplane, Wilson decided to quit touring and focus his efforts in the recording studio, where he made so many advances that soon he was holding his own in a creative rivalry with the Beatles. (As the story goes, the Beatles' 'Rubber Soul' inspired Wilson to make 'Pet Sounds,' which in turn drove the Beatles toward 'Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.')
Yet Wilson's panic attack can also be seen as the start of a lifelong struggle with mental illness that threatened to derail his career in the wake of 'Pet Sounds.' Indeed, not unlike that of Sly Stone, who also died this week, the Beach Boys' peak hit-making era looks relatively brief in retrospect: After 'Good Vibrations' in 1966, the band didn't score another No. 1 single until 1988 with 'Kokomo,' which Wilson wasn't involved in.
Even so, the late '60s and the 1970s remained a fertile period for Wilson — not just with 'Smile,' the infamously ambitious LP he'd finally complete and release in 2004, but with quirky and soulful albums like 'Friends' and 'Sunflower'; 'Surf's Up,' from 1971, features one of Wilson's most stirring songs in the wistful title track, whose extravagantly wordy lyric by Wilson's pal Van Dyke Parks is almost impossible to parse in anything but a pure-emotion sense.
The '80s were darker — you can watch the 2014 movie 'Love & Mercy' for a look at Wilson's experiences with the therapist Eugene Landy, whom the record exec Seymour Stein once described to me as 'the most evil person that I ever met' — and yet no Wilson fan ever wanted to stop believing that Brian would come back, a hope he kept alive through decades of intermittently brilliant work on his own, with Parks and even sometimes with the Beach Boys. (Dig out Wilson and Parks' 1995 'Orange Crate Art,' if you haven't in a while, for a powerful dose of bittersweet California whimsy.)
I interviewed Wilson once, at his home in Beverly Hills in 2010. He was preparing to release a gorgeous album of Gershwin interpretations that was twice as good as it needed to be — and probably three times better than most anybody expected. Years of life and everything else had taken much of his conversational ease from him, at least when he was talking to journalists. But I can still see him lighting up as he explained how he learned to play 'Rhapsody in Blue,' which he said he'd loved since his mother played it for him when he was 2.
'It took us about two weeks,' he said of himself and a friend who helped him learn the song. 'I'd play a little bit from the Leonard Bernstein recording, then I'd go to my piano, then back to Bernstein, then back to my piano, until I got the whole thing down.'
A technical wizard with his arms open wide to a cruel and beautiful world, Brian Wilson always got the whole thing down.
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