The Fortunate Old Son

 

Brian Wilson doesn't like being seen much. On-stage exposure has been a problem all his life, and album covers tell the same story. His first solo album had him anxiously edging out of shot. On the second his profile is reduced to a two-dimensional rubber stamp, much like the music. Excluding the scrap-album cutouts on the crap-album Gettin' In Over My Head, he doesn't appear at all on the covers of his next nine albums.

Unlike book jacket design, getting your mug on the cover of an album is the accepted way to go, and for good reasons. The alternatives are harder to pull off. Cover art should reflect the album in a memorable and striking way and albums, unlike books, don't always contain work that is unified in theme or tone. Brian got lucky with Orange Crate Art, but his other albums come dressed in motley.

The gig for packaging That Lucky Old Sun went to one Martin Venezky (me neither), who'd done a handful of hack-work classical albums. Maybe he was hanging in the lobby, or walked into the wrong room at the right time. Whatever, he turned in a marmalade label and they went with that. Wilson already had one citrus-adjacent album, so maybe they thought - nah. Nobody was doing much thinking. The result was yet another forgettable-at-best sleeve at a time when he could have got himself back in the public eye by showing up for the cover. It's not like he was anything but one handsome dude at the time, with a patrician head adorned by an enviable thick wave of hair. The photograph I've used [above - Ed.] is contemporary with the album, and look how he looks. Better than ever, you ax me. Great shirt, too. He's on top of the Capitol Tower, L.A. in the background, and the album's about L.A. and ... oh well.

That Lucky Old Sun (which I re-yclept Lucky Old Sun because there's a kind of play on spoken words there that Van Dyke might appreciate) is his finest solo album. It's almost unreasonably fantastic, high in Vitamin Bri and arrangements that evoke Smile without ever falling into pastiche [type of nut - Ed.]. Of course, some critics clutched their pearls in shock that he didn't sing like a teenager anymore, as if there's something wrong in singing like who you are (and he still sings prettier than most).

It's an album that gets better and richer and deeper over time, like the best of Wilson's work, bursting with energy and creativity and melodic/harmonic bliss. He had help from Scott Bennett, the Wondermints crew, and Van Dyke Parks, who wrote the evocative spoken interludes that tie the whole album together like an aural Lebowski rug. It's too easy to think of Wilson as something of a shadow-puppet - he was focused and authoritative in the studio, his natural home, and although he's a team player it's a work that could only have sprung from the heart of this fortunate son of L.A.

There are some who don't like this album because of its L.A.-centricity, because they don't like L.A. and what it represents. But Wilson is inseparable from his City of Angels, almost its personification. I spent a while there, when I had nowhere else to live, and I got to know it just a little, as deep as I wanted to get. It's a strange, haunted place, brittle, un-centered, and the sense of artificiality standing in for reality, of image being substance, can be overpowering. I stood in an empty Hollywood Bowl under that translucent blue sky, and knew that the emptiness was all there was, that the city was a crust of concrete at the ocean's edge, and this is what dreams are made on. The dreams will last longer, and Brian's will never die.

 

I've blister-packed Path Of Life, the "hidden album" added as extry trx to one edition of That Lucky Old Sun; ten tracks thematically bookended, including the Great Lost Single, What Love Can Do.