A few words on the passing of Brian Wilson
If you should ever leave me...
You don’t need me to tell you that Beach Boy Brian Wilson was great. Beyond great. Like way, way, way past it. A musical genius. You know it. They1 know it. What can I possibly add to the ocean of well-earned (and often still understated) praise? It’s not like I have some insider stories or got some elusive 1-on-1 never-released interview with the guy. I’m just a fan.
But here I go anyway. Writing’s one way I reckon with loss, process things.
Here are a three semi-connected things I’ve been thinking about since I learned Wilson had passed yesterday:
THING ONE: Like almost any artist, Brian Wilson was a thief first.
Thief, borrower, renter, co-opter, whatever you want to call it…early artists imitate their influences. One of the Beach Boys’s biggest early hits, “Surfin’ U.S.A.” (1963) was practically a note-for-note Xerox of Chuck Berry’s “Sweet Little Sixteen” (1958) The core melody, structure, and progression are twins (even if Wilson’s version is more tuneful). Berry and his publisher noticed, reached out, and—voila!—suddenly Berry had solo songwriting credit for “Surfin’ U.S.A.”
Lest you think this is criticism or me trying to diminish the guy, let me tell you that EVERY ARTIST (at least at the beginning) IS STEALING. Just ask Austin Kleon. It’s the way of creativity, the circle of life2. A musician who’s often considered one of the most original artists once said, “The only art I’ll ever study is stuff that I can steal from.” Who said that? David Bowie, a man whose name might as well be perm-appended with “a true original.”
The two questions that determine artistic arc, then, are:
-do you stay in that place—copying—forever? (if so, you’re not going to make much interesting or noteworthy art, in my experience/opinion)
-we know where you’re taking from, where are you taking it to?
Brian Wilson started like many aspiring songwriters, by seeing a trend, hearing a sound, and capitalizing on it. In his case, it was Berry’s style of rock n’ roll and surfing/cars. Those early songs—I Get Around, Surfin’ Safari, Fun Fun Fun, Little Deuce Coupe, California Girls, Catch A Wave, 409—fit right in with Berry’s guitar-driven rock. You can hear it as Wilson gets the hang of the early rock ‘n roll formula and starts to get really good at it.
What’s really beautiful, though, is watching how Wilson went from aping “Sweet Little Sixteen” to incorporating other influences, and then to tweaking and experimenting with the form. It’s my feeling that no other early rock group incorporated the sound of the girl groups—The Ronettes, The Supremes, The Crystals—like Wilson did in his songs and arrangements for The Beach Boys3. In fact, Wilson mentioned in interviews that he felt like all the Beach Boys besides Mike Love4 were “more feminine singers.” Between his love of (and knack for) harmonies and intricate counterpoint background vocals, and his love for Phil Spector’s Wall of Sound production, you can really hear the influence of those seminal girl groups on Wilson5.
And then he made a quantum leap with Pet Sounds and Smile, but we’ll get to that in a minute. First, a brief detour for a word about “Good Vibrations.”
THING TWO: Good Vibrations is in my unofficial hall of fame category… Insanely Ambitious Pop Songs That Pull It Off.
I’m talking about sprawling songs that are almost inconceivable, that leave you thinking, “how did they think of THAT?” or “I wasn’t expecting that (and I love it)!” and then they somehow pull it off. It’s rare air up there. Any old song isn’t gonna cut it. You’re gonna have to really GO FOR IT. Get truly epic, maybe even complex (not to be confused with indulgent or wanky; it’s a fine line). Shoot for the stars…AND HIT THEM. Think Bohemian Rhapsody—an utterly singable song, with more or less classical movements and no chorus to speak of, that you know NOTE FOR NOTE—and Paranoid Android, less singable but epic on a crazy scale. These aren’t your verse/chorus/verse songs (though Wilson mastered those too); these have movements and shifts and full-on zags and feel, as a songwriter, larger than life. So my list goes:
THE UNDISPUTED CHAMPIONS OF EPICTUDE
Good Vibrations / Beach Boys
Bohemian Rhapsody / Queen
Paranoid Android / Radiohead
A Day In The Life / The Beatles
The Rain Song / Led Zeppelin
Suite: Judy Blue Eyes / Crosby, Stills, & Nash
HONORABLE MENTIONS:
Stairway to Heaven / Led Zeppelin
The Song Remains The Same / Led Zeppelin
Tom Sawyer / Rush
Baba O’Riley / The Who
Space Oddity / David Bowie
Comfortably Numb / Pink Floyd
Mr. Blue Sky6 / Electric Light Orchestra
LESS HONORABLE BUT STILL HONORABLE MENTIONS
Bluebird / Buffalo Springfield (Stephen Stills’s early stab at an epic has its moments; he nailed it with Suite: Judy Blue Eyes above)
Broken Arrow / Buffalo Springfield (Neil Young’s competing epic, on the same album too!)
Grace / Jeff Buckley
Surf’s Up / Beach Boys
Familiarity / Punch Brothers
The Shrine/An Argument / Fleet Foxes7
What did I miss8?
THING THREE: If you listened to just the first few years of The Beach Boys catalog, you would walk away justifiably thinking “this is beach party music.”
Call up Annette Funicello, start up the bonfire, bring your Hawaiian shirts and bikinis, and get ready for a beachin’ good time, California-style.
You might even call it “sunny.”
Until you get to “In My Room”9, that is, with all its harmony-laced loneliness and worry and private crying and the cocoon-like, womb-like safety of his room. That’s when the melancholy—gorgeous as all get out—finally seeps through the sun-kissed veneer. Send Annette Funicello home; things are getting real.
Wilson falls into the category of artists who inwardly grappled with mental illness while outwardly providing the world with undeniable light. Think Robin Williams and his nonstop brilliant, bright, energetic, neuron-firing comedy, while inside he was crippled by depression and addiction. Gilda Radner. Chris Farley. The list isn’t short. By Wilson’s own admission, he lived a “difficult, haunted life”, one that was weighed down by terrible abuse10 in his formative years, then later drugs that wrecked him, corrupt management that wrecked him even more, and his underlying/overbearing mental illness has been well-covered. When you know his history with abuse, this quote really pierces: “It was a childhood dream of mine to make music that made people feel loved.”
Artists like Wilson and Williams and Radner and Farley are often operating from a gaping hole in themselves, from an emptiness that can’t, that won’t be filled.
“In My Room” opened the door. To loneliness, to vulnerability, to growing pains, to true expression beyond girls and cars and surfboards11. And Wilson’s masterwork, 1966’s Pet Sounds blew that door off its hinges. All the chest-pounding, overcompensating self-confidence of “I Get Around” and “I got a letterman’s sweater” and “take a lesson from a top-notch surfer boy” was in the rearview mirror. Now Wilson was reckoning with insecurity and worry and sadness in “I Just Wasn’t Made For These Times” and “I went through all kinds of changes, took a look a myself and said that’s not me” and “it’s so sad to watch a sweet thing die.” Wilson was no longer burying the hard stuff. As Carrie Fisher (if the internet is to be believed) said, “Take our broken heart and make it into art.”
And, still, to the very end, he stuck to his childhood dream “to music that made people feel loved.” Just listen to his masterpiece, God Only Knows.
In the late 80s, when he finally emerged from decades of seclusion and withdrawal, dented and damaged and broken, what return-to-form song did he hit us with? “I Hate My Psychotic Manager”? “Careful With Drugs, Kids”? No, he came back with a chorus reflecting his childhood mission statement: “love and mercy to you and your friends tonight12.”
Just writing this, I tear up, thinking about the courage and determination it takes to push through everything he die and put love13 out into the world.
I want to write about “God Only Knows” or how my 17-year old opened my ears to just how unreal “Don’t Worry Baby” is. About the merits of the underloved Sunflower. About the Beatles’s respect for Wilson. About how “Heroes And Villains” is such a weird and amazing song. About seeing Wilson twice at the Bridge School and crying during “Good Vibrations” and then seeing him do all of Pet Sounds at Abravanel Hall and all the billions of tangled emotions that that squeezed out. About the pure, childlike way he carried himself in his latter years, that was both touching and tragic. But I’ll let Brian have the last word:
Love and mercy to you and your friends tonight.
Any musician that matters. Go to that link! Tear up as you read legends like Paul Simon and Leonard Bernstein and John Lennon and Quincy Jones wax poetic about the man.
Elvis Costello, when he heard that Olivia Rodrigo's "Brutal" bore some similarity to his song "Pump It Up", put it this way, "This is fine by me. It's how rock and roll works. You take the broken pieces of another thrill and make a brand new toy. That's what I did."
I will field arguments for The Beatles but nobody else came close.
Don’t get me started on Mike Love.
I mean they gender swapped “Then He Kissed Me” to “Then I Kissed Her” and Wilson did his best Spector impression on the production.
Mr Blue Sky would be Tier 1 except for the unnecessary ending tag thing that never sits right with me. Jeff Lynne couldn’t resist, but should’ve.
2011’s Helplessness Blues has several songs, following in the multi-section steps of CSNY’s “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes” and not just because of the gorgeously rich harmonies.
November Rain / Guns n’ Roses is out because it’s just not that interesting. “Hocus Pocus” by Focus could get in and is really fun in spots, but some of it is pretty forgettable.
The Chain / Fleetwood Mac?
I could hear arguments for Tears For Fears / Everybody Wants To Rule The World and Sowing The Seeds of Love, though both have sections that I think don’t live up to the rest (he says while admitting he would give a limb to write a song half as good as either).
The Who’s “A Quick One While He’s Away” has a soft spot for me, due to its inclusion in the movie Rushmore, but it’s not all that accessible. Same goes for Bowie’s benedictory “Blackstar.”
I disqualify most prog rock and jamband songs, as a dyed in the wool prog fan and lapsed jamband fan, because the songs simply aren’t as universally beloved or… quotable, for lack of better word. I would love to throw “Roundabout” or “You Enjoy Myself” by Phish on the list, but those qualify as personal epic choices, not universal ones.
Sigur Ros is disqualified because every song is epic.
And I’m not a Tool or Muse fan, so those guys are out, no matter how many time signatures, key changes, or breathtaking cape swaps they breeze through.
Knowing what we know about Wilson’s later life, it’s easy to project all of that on “In My Room” and call it prophetic for how reclusive and withdrawn he would eventually become (pouring a ton of sand beneath his piano in his living room so he could feel like he was on the beach without ever leaving his home). Whether or not it’s accurate, I don’t know. But it sure would seem like foreshadowing in a work of fiction.
Not dissimilar to Michael Jackson’s early upbringing.
It’s not a little ironic that only one of The Beach Boys actually surfed (and it wasn’t Brian).
I adore this simple piano version. It’s so…pure. The live version too, it gives me the chills.
Another underrated, late-era Wilson gem is “One Kind of Love”, another testament of his belief in the power of love.
Epictude: Kashmir by Led Zeppelin