Brian Wilson Was an Exemplary American
The leader of the Beach Boys is dead, but what he did for his country will resound in our history forever.
Brian Wilson, the main composer and vocal arranger for the Beach Boys, famously known as "America's Band," has died at age 82.
Born in the suburbs of Hawthorne, California, Wilson was a very typical American of the back half of the 20th century—a Hawthorne High quarterback, with a mean mofo of a dad who both abused and inspired him. In his band there were two younger brothers, Dennis and Carl, to cosset and feud with; his snide and slightly bullying first cousin, Mike Love; a high school pal, Al Jardine; plus neighbor David Marks, along for the ride. His gumption and genius, and his associates both in both music and business, created a worldwide never-ending machine of lucrative pop art.
With Wilson's yen for George Gershwin, the Four Freshmen, Phil Spector, and Chuck Berry running through his curious (later declared mentally ill) brain and his ear (he famously was deaf in one of his pair, possibly the result of abuse from his father Murry Wilson), his life story and most importantly the copious flow of hit singles and often equally rewarding album tracks are as Americana as it gets. And they stayed compelling long past the time he was hitting the top 10. (The Beach Boys had 55 singles in the top 100, but—except for the Christmas perennial "Little Saint Nick"—the last top 10 hit Wilson wrote was 1966's "Good Vibrations," probably the most ambitious and gorgeous pop single of all time.)
California's image in worldwide culture of custom cars and the brave and reckless young men who raced them, of lovely lissome lasses and the headstrong surfers who courted them, of "suntanned bodies and waves of sunshine/the California girls and a beautiful coastline" as Mike Love wrote and sang in their 1968 song "Do It Again," was crafted by Wilson and his cohorts, and only their voices could have fully convinced the world it was all true. (Because he did what he did, it was.) Wilson was one of the truest ambassadors of American lifestyle and joy our nation created. With his brainiac onetime pal Van Dyke Parks on lyrics, their first aborted in 1967 then completed in 2004 project Smile attempted to prove, as I wrote on its 2004 release, "that even in the wake of a British invasion, American music and American voices and the spiritual history of America still mattered."
The CD that was in my car player last night after a 10-hour drive through the heartland of the state he enduringly mythologized was by the Beach Boys: disc 3 of their perfectly perfect first box set, Good Vibrations. (The Beach Boys were and are and will continue to be a touring and record-selling machine—Brian had not been a performing member of the band for the past 13 years, and except for a stunning 2012 reunion tour hadn't been for the most part since the mid-'60s—so they have had a few more box sets since.) As I got in my car this morning, it was a few seconds into his charmingly strange "Busy Doin' Nothing," which with its delicate but entrancing bossa nova-esque lightness famously features directions to the house he lived in at the time. It was sad. But even when his music or your head is at its glummest, it's hard to not feel something like a root satisfaction with existence with Brian Wilson's music in your ears.
There is almost nothing original to be said about Brian Wilson, one of the most thought about, gossiped about, fretted over major figures in American music. He famously embodies a capacious range of modes and characteristics—the cornball avant-gardist; the goofy, joking, heartfelt sentimentalist; the musical sophisticate who would have been happy plunking "Shortnin' Bread" on his piano until he passed out. (Also in my house is a complicated musicological exploration of his composing tics and styles called Inside the Mind of Brian Wilson, by Philip Lambert. I've been using it to plunk around through some of his changes in the weeks before his passing. Those of us who lived with the Beach Boys lived with the Beach Boys, man.)
It's also just a fact that there are no words to explain the melting feelings of it's good to be alive that Wilson's music at its jauntiest and most propulsive, and at its most dreamy and melancholy, has been injecting into the brain cells and corpuscles of his millions of devoted fans. There are many tragedies associated with his life, with decades of mental trouble and being alternately helped and overcontrolled by rogue therapist Eugene Landy (Wilson's interactions with psychotherapy are another part of his core emblematic "late 20th century American" nature), his brother Dennis' death by drowning and brother Carl's by cancer long before their times, his long estrangement from the daughters of his first marriage (who were in the pop group Wilson Phillips), the feuds and lawsuits with his family and band.
But his life story has its heroic joy too, like his legendary late-1990s comeback from decades of being written off as a drug-addled vegetable with no more to give. He launched another couple of decades as an often great performer with a perfect band, completing the Smile project whose unfinished task had hung over his reputation for decades, doing another batch of decent-to-great and sometimes even ambitious solo works, and getting to pay tribute in album form to his hero Gershwin. For a notorious burnout, he sure did a lot of interesting work in his last decades; his spirit was never snuffed.
The more you dug into all the books and the online gossip and the private stuff you heard from friends and friends of friends who knew insiders who knew insiders, the more complex the story of Wilson and the Beach Boys seemed to be. Brian Wilson and his family and band were complicated, hard-working Americans ill-served by any easy myths or quick suppositions. As I wrote while reviewing cousin Mike Love's 2017 memoir Good Vibrations, "Love and his cousin Brian Wilson, the Beach Boys' main composer and vocal arranger, are painted in fan history as, respectively, the Antichrist and the man who walks on water. Wilson represents sensitivity and artistic exploration in this saga; Love, brash showmanship and a bourgeois approach to entertainment as a business. It took both men to create and maintain The Beach Boys as America's longest-lasting and still quite successful band….Love admits some of the more far-out music his cousin made didn't necessarily thrill him, a sin to the Wilson fanatics who see him as a Tinker Bell who must be believed in to thrive. But reading the story of Love being cheated over writing credits and suffering bandmates (and cousins) who indulged in debilitating drug abuse and descended into mental illness, an honest reader will see that solid dependability has its own merits, in art and life."
Wilson often seemed guileless, a pure spirit, too delicate for this harsh world, to his fans, who as Reason's Peter Bagge once aptly and hilariously summed it up, related to Wilson as "the white male nerd's Judy Garland." I sat in for a few days on the trial over the lawsuit Mike Love filed against Wilson for denied songwriting credits in the mid-'90s, and on the stand Wilson seemed guileless indeed, saying under oath as a series of song titles in question were thrown at him about at least one of them "I'm not sure [who wrote the lyrics]…maybe Mike did." A few years back I got my own batch of direct background lore from an early Beach Boy, David Marks, when I got to buttonhole him for a couple of hours alone on a TV set, and he told me that Brian Wilson in the mid-'10s seemed to him as quietly happy and satisfied with his life as he'd ever known. I hope it was true.
We fans couldn't help getting deep into trying to know and understand the man. It did seem obvious, and sad, that it never quite sunk into him in a way that filled or fed his often troubled soul how very great he was, and how much joy and insight he brought to the world. But Wilson once said something about Burt Bacharach to interviewer Paul Zollo that I hope he knew applied to him as well, and at least at moments felt: "When they say the name 'Burt Bacharach,' right away [snaps fingers], it triggers off love, melodies and harmonies and beautiful records and incredible songs that he wrote with Hal David. That's a source of love right there, Burt Bacharach. His name is. He might not be in that frame of mind today. But his name is always in that frame of mind, know what I mean?"
Brian Wilson the man couldn't be as exalted, joyful, accomplished, and profoundly human as Brian Wilson's songs and singing and arrangements. But because he was born in the 20th century after the invention of recorded sound, and because he mastered the arts of popular recording, his name, his pain, his joy, his family, his humor, his heart, his goofiness, his tenderness, his soul will never stop vibrating (goodly) through the universe. Brian Wilson loved us, so many of us loved him back, and that will have to do for now.
Like their country, the whole Beach Boys thing could not have worked as enduringly and gloriously as it has without being formed of the full range of human types and emotions. Brian Wilson's ears and musical mind launched a saga that seemed to contain the whole American experience. And even with him gone, he did his work so well, with such truth and such beauty and such discipline, that that saga will never end.
