I wasn’t going to write anything about Brian Wilson, who died last month at the age of 82, because what could I possibly say that hasn’t already been said? Nevertheless, his music has meant so much to me through the years that I felt obligated to say something. For the longest time, I, like a lot of people, thought of the Beach Boys as five cheesy white dudes who sang sophomoric songs about chasing girls and surfing, even though Wilson himself claimed that the one time he tried to surf, the board smacked him in the head, and that was the end of that. In my defense, some of their early songs are insufferably teenage and, frankly, bad, a misgiving I’m willing to forgive them for, considering Wilson was only 20-years-old when the band’s first album was recorded, and also because Capitol Records pressured them to release so much material in such a short amount of time (10 albums from 1962-1965!) that a lot of those early records had a bunch of filler on them, which is how you end up with something as offensive to the ears as “I’m Bugged at My Old Man.”
My perspective on the Beach Boys started to shift when I took the time to listen, I mean really listen, to Pet Sounds in my mid-20s. I’m aware that this isn’t a novel experience, considering Pet Sounds is widely regarded as one of the greatest albums of all time, despite having perhaps one of the worst covers in pop music history. To be frank, I was underwhelmed the first few times I listened to it: some of the songs seemed too short, almost unfinished, and the lyrics, although an improvement from the rah-rah-rah, let’s go surfing and objectify the tan girls in bikinis stuff from their early albums, still seemed somewhat adolescent, which I guess makes sense, considering Wilson was only 23 at the time. I was working at a coffee shop during my deep dive into Pet Sounds, and I came to understand its majesty by blaring it over the speakers after we’d closed for the day. My epiphany finally occurred when I had a mild out-of-body experience while listening to the layered vocals on the outro of “God Only Knows” while cleaning the deli counter. Paul McCartney has called “God Only Knows” the greatest song ever written, and from that moment forward, I’ve mostly agreed with him. I felt like Frank Reynolds after watching Mac’s interpretive dance in that episode of It’s Always Sunny. Standing betwixt the shaved turkey and ciabatta, I finally got it.
Unfortunately, as we all know, Pet Sounds was essentially the peak for Wilson and the Beach Boys. His mental health would deteriorate in the intervening years, his drug use and eating habits would spiral out of control, and the band would fade from cultural relevancy as their relationships devolved into acrimony. The media campaign led by Derek Taylor (the Beatles’ former press officer) touting Wilson as a pop music genius didn’t help matters, either: sure, it garnered Wilson respect as a serious artist, but it also put immense pressure on him to continue producing savant-level albums. This set the stage for the Smile sessions, which were by all accounts chaotic and emotionally draining, and they ultimately disintegrated due to Wilson’s increasingly erratic, borderline abusive behavior, and a reported rift between certain band members on whether to move in an artsier direction or to stick with the simpler tunes that had gained them popularity to begin with. The sessions were ultimately abandoned, resulting in the release of the comparatively underwhelming Smiley Smile, which was mostly recorded at a makeshift studio in Wilson’s home. That record did feature “Good Vibrations,” one of Wilson’s greatest works, but it was mostly considered a disappointment, a “bunt instead of a grand slam,” as Carl Wilson famously put it, and it spelled the beginning of the end for the Beach Boys as a cultural force, and Wilson as one of pop music’s greatest composers.
Maybe it didn’t have to be this way. The original Smile Sessions, when they were finally given a proper release in 2011, were startlingly brilliant, in a stitched-together, ADD sort of way: a labyrinthian tapestry of complex compositions and crystalline harmonies about vegetables, Plymouth Rock, barnyard animals, sunny down snuff, wheat, bicyclists, tidal waves, and everything else under the sun. Disjointed, yes, and thoroughly weird, but perhaps befitting of the “genius” label that Taylor had engineered for Wilson.
Maybe it didn’t have to be this way. The original Smile Sessions, when they were finally given a proper release in 2011, were startlingly brilliant, in a stitched-together, ADD sort of way: a labyrinthian tapestry of complex compositions and crystalline harmonies about vegetables, Plymouth Rock, barnyard animals, sunny down snuff, wheat, bicyclists, tidal waves, and everything else under the sun. Disjointed, yes, and thoroughly weird (this is, after all, an album that apparently features McCartney chomping on celery), but perhaps befitting of the “genius” label that Taylor had engineered for Wilson, and many light years better than the aforementioned Smiley Smile. One can only wonder how Smile would’ve been received had it been properly finished and released in ‘67 or ‘68, or even if it was released in the fragmentary form it ultimately took on the Smile Sessions. Would its weirdness have made it a critical and commercial bust? Or would it have been regarded as the scatter-brained, avant-garde masterpiece that contemporary critics believe it to be?
In retrospect, Smile perhaps could’ve beaten the Beatles’ White Album to the punch in terms of musical experimentation, in the sense that it could’ve loosened the constraints of pop music, and broadened the definition of what a pop album could be. Until someone invents a time machine, we’ll never know what could’ve been, but what’s undeniable is that the album features the best versions of at least two of the greatest songs Wilson ever composed: “Good Vibrations” and “Surf’s Up.” The latter piece is flat-out remarkable: a morose, piano-led ballad delivered in multiple movements that sounds like a eulogy for all the fun, summery things the Beach Boys represented during their early years. Wilson, it seemed, was ready to move into darker, more introspective territory, but as the Smile sessions dissolved like sugar in water, so did Wilson’s mental health, and the world would never get another savant-level record from the Beach Boys, which is a shame.
The three albums that ultimately followed Pet Sounds – Smiley Smile, Wild Honey, and Friends – aren’t bad by any means, they just sound so pedestrian in the wake of the three genuinely classic records that preceded it (Today!, Pet Sounds, and the Smile Sessions). There’s a notable drop-off in almost every measurable way a person can judge an album, and it was a precipitous fall the Beach Boys would never recover from. The decline in quality is so jarring that, for many years, I had a hard time listening to those immediate post-Smile albums. Recently, though, I’ve learned to enjoy them on their own terms. The trick is not to let your opinion of them be shaded by what they could have been: that is, the masterpieces Wilson never created. The only one of the three records that comes even remotely close to peak Beach Boys is Friends, but at 25 minutes long, it’s flimsy as gossamer, and the songs fail to grab your heart and force you to feel something like, say, “I Just Wasn’t Made for These Times” or “Please Let Me Wonder.” The harmonies don’t prick the skin or thrust your soul into the atmosphere. Maybe we were simply asking too much of Brian Wilson.
What makes the best Beach Boys songs so unimpeachably good? I think Bob Dylan, another aging musician I’ll mourn immensely, got it right when he said Wilson’s ear should be donated to the Smithsonian. Dylan’s quote drives to the heart of what makes those top-tier Beach Boys albums so timeless: Wilson’s instinct for the perfect sound was so finely tuned that he’d demand take after take after take until the music he was hearing in the studio matched the Platonic ideal in his mind. The Beach Boys biopic Love and Mercy does a beautiful job of capturing this dynamic, specifically in a scene where Wilson forces the session cello players to perform the same damn part over and over and over again, until Mike Love finally snaps because, to him, it all sounds the same, and he can’t comprehend why Wilson is being such a pain in the ass. Perhaps Wilson was like a dog (bear with me) in the sense that he could hear nuance in certain sounds that were imperceivable to the average person. I’m not trying to put him on too much of a pedestal here, by calling him a dog, of all things, because he was only human (as evidenced by the ho-hum post-Smile albums), but I do think that, for a few years there in the ‘60s, before his mental health really took a dive, he was working on a heightened plane few musicians ever ascend to. For a brief and beautiful spell, he was one of one.
Peak Wilson’s draconian commitment to musical perfection, while often exhausting to people in his immediate orbit, resulted in pitch-perfect harmonies that feel like salves for troubled souls. Wilson called “California Girls,” which he wrote after his first acid trip, a “hymn to youth.” That’s a perfect way to describe so many of those mid-60s Beach Boys songs: music as complex and solemn as a hymn coupled with lyrics about hooking up and wanting to get married and pining for the moment when you finally enter the world of adulthood. The harmonies are so stunning that it almost doesn’t matter what the lyrics are about, and nowhere is this more apparent than on the album Today!, which might be their best record; not their greatest artistic achievement, but perhaps their best in terms of harmony, song structure, and pure catchiness. The first half of the album is status quo early-era Beach Boys stuff, lyrically-speaking, but even these tunes about arrested development, as it were, feature a wall-of-sound approach that gives them a depth that’s absent in their earlier hits. A song like “Surfin’ Safari,” for instance, sounds paper-thin compared to “When I Grow Up to Be a Man.” The second half of the album, as many critics have pointed out, is essentially Pet Sounds-lite, and at least one song from that side, “She Knows Me Too Well,” is so good that it could’ve been plugged into Pet Sounds without anyone batting an eye. In short, Today!, combines the infectious energy of their early songs with Wilson’s increasingly sophisticated compositions and studio experimentation. Maybe it’s their best album, maybe it’s not, but I don’t think it’s crazy to suggest that it’s pretty close to perfect.
It’s a drag to think about how it all turned out for Wilson and the Beach Boys, especially in comparison to the Beatles, their benevolent music rivals in the ‘60s. The Beatles had their own highly-publicized internal riffs that ultimately resulted in the dissolution of the band and some lingering bad blood, but in terms of their discography, they played the thing perfectly: in a five-album run starting with Help in 1965 and ending with their final record, Let it Be, in 1970, the Beatles were essentially flawless, despite the interpersonal discord, presenting a progression of albums that encapsulated their evolution from teeny boppers to genuine recording artists. The Beach Boys never got to enjoy such a run; their discography is much more scattershot. Today!, as I’ve posited, is a near-perfect album, and Summer Days (And Summer Nights!!), while painfully uneven, features the remarkable “California Girls.” Then there’s Pet Sounds, which you don’t need me to heap any more praise upon, and the Smile Sessions, which could’ve been a late ‘60s masterpiece but ultimately spelled the end of the band as a top-tier act. It pains me to think that Wilson and the Beach Boys could’ve had a final run like the Beatles, that they could’ve stitched together a string of classic albums before riding off into the sunset, instead of thrashing around for years in mediocrity, attempting to recapture a magic that no longer existed.
I’ve heard it said that Brian Wilson ruined the Beach Boys, and it’s generally accepted that his mental health struggles did throw the band into turmoil, but also, quite obviously, there are no Beach Boys without Brian Wilson, not as we’ve come to know them, at least. There is no “California Girls.” There is no “God Only Knows.” There is no “Surf’s Up.” I think it’s more accurate to say something like: as Brian Wilson went, so went the Beach Boys.
I’ve heard it said that Brian Wilson ruined the Beach Boys, and it’s generally accepted that his mental health struggles did throw the band into turmoil, but also, quite obviously, there are no Beach Boys without Brian Wilson, not as we’ve come to know them, at least. There is no “California Girls.” There is no “God Only Knows.” There is no “Surf’s Up.” I think it’s more accurate to say something like: as Brian Wilson went, so went the Beach Boys. His unparalleled creative intuition lifted them to glorious heights, but when that intuition sputtered, and his mental health spiraled, no one around him was able to pick up the slack.
I’m doing my part to pass along a love of the Beach Boys to the next generation. Since Wilson died on June 11, I’ve been playing his music virtually non-stop, for myself, yes, but also for my four-year-old son, Conley, who’s grown into quite the music lover. The other day, he asked me: who sings for the Beach Boys? I explained to him, well, there’s usually one guy singing the main lines, but also four other dudes singing in the background to create harmony. As an example, I played “California Girls,” a perfect specimen of that Wilsonian combination of teenage lyrics and complex composition, and pointed out how, starting in the second verse, a collage of voices blend together to sing “ew waaaah, ew waaaaah” in the background as the lead singer, the much-maligned Mike Love, explains how he likes to ogle Hawaiian girls wearing bikinis. This kind of blew his mind, I think, and every time we listen to that song in the car now, I look in the rear view mirror and see him mouthing “ewwww waaaah” when the second verse comes around.
A couple of days after Conley’s Beach Boys revelation, we were getting ready to leave the pool because a late-afternoon thunderstorm was rolling in. We were saying goodbye to the mother of a girl he goes to school with when, apropos of nothing, he started shouting the lyrics to “California Girls,” including the aforementioned “ewwww waaaaah,” twirling around on the wet cement and grinning like he was center-stage at the Ryman. “We’re on a Beach Boys kick right now,” I explained, while the storm clouds thickened overhead. It was summer, it was hot, and we were next to a clear body of water, so in short, it was the kind of day the Beach Boys were made for.
Rest in peace, Brian, and thanks for the music.
All images created using Google Gemini.
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