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Hey, Bri - surf's up!
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Brian in Paris, back whenever, on the SMiLE tour, and I never felt anything like it, before or since, a wave of love lifting the audience as he came onstage. It was enough he was there, he'd made it, through everything. He needed a mess of help to stand alone, and everyone involved with that tour was there out of love for him, and that love was palpable, physical, real - we were there to thank the guy for making our lives better in a way that nobody else ever did, or could. The Dumb Angel, the corny goofball who touched souls all around the world, millions of us, millions and millions, countless lonely surfers in our rooms, dreaming of the world he dreamed for us. The dream was real, more real than the actuality of California beach culture, which was just as competitive and exclusive and stupid as any other lifestyle. We basked in the warmth of his summer sun, every one of us ...
That's Why God Made The Radio
I was first aware of the Beach Boys hearing I Get Around and California Girls on the radio. Our family didn't have a record player (nor a phone, or a TV with more than one channel) so my soundstage was formed by a certain magic transistor radio, which I can recall in eidetic detail, down to the smell of the plastic and the precious treasure of the gilt grille - god, I loved that radio.
Those two songs sounded like nothing else in my Beatles-dominated head. The harmonies, the arrangements - not that I knew an arrangement from a sack of coal back then - and most of all what they were singing about. The Hit Parade was full of love songs with placeholder lyrics. I Get Around was about freedom, but written in code! I'm a real cool head getting bugged? It was more than a song on the radio - it was a shining signpost to another world out there, far beyond the grey suburban skies of Bakelite Britain. The impact it made was transforming, making me at once hopeful and dissatisfied, a lure and a tease. No California Girls for you, dweeb!
Music could point to somewhere else. Somewhere better. A whole New World. The Beatles never managed that, for all their inspirational energy. But the Beach Boys were already a private pleasure, and when I bought the God Only Knows e.p. they stayed that way. Yikes! The leader looked like a middle-aged gym teacher advertising his baldness with a fishing hat. The rest were fat, homely and wearing cheesy shirts. Not that I knew it, but Brian wasn't even in the picture. I knew none of their names, and didn't particularly care. These kids weren't hip! There was already a big gulf between the music and the look, and it was something they never quite bridged. But that song! It was a love song, sure, but it was beautiful in a way I couldn't begin to define. Something ... holy? Not religious, although God got a namecheck. Spiritual? None of these words got close to how God Only Knows made me feel. It made everyone who heard it feel the same way, unless they were too busy being tough. And it pointed to somewhere else, in its own way. It was a love song about love, the quality of love, universal, undirected love. Music could be gentle and still be overwhelming. Another revelation. Musically, it's deceptively complex, that is to say it sounds simple enough, but the dizzying chord changes leave musicologists uncertain even as to what key the song's in.
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Destabilized tonal centers, yesterday
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There is no other pop composer capable of such subtle complexity, and it is a mark of Brian's genius that it all sounds so natural - like a pop song! He was hearing every note, every harmony, every chord, every sound, in his head and then getting the world's best session musicians to recreate them in the studio, directing with a precise and respectful authority beyond his years - he knew exactly what he wanted. Genius doesn't seem big enough a word.
Can't Judge A Book By Its Cover
Pet Sounds was out of my budget, and the cover showed the same weird disconnection with the music, something that made it look corny and old-fashioned, especially in comparison with the visually suss Beatles, whose zeitgeisty Revolver appeared the same year. My sister's boyfriend played me his copy of Pet Sounds, and I couldn't quite get my teenage head around it. Where were the guitars? It came from a different planet, not just another continent. And where the early hits had (nearly) always carried you outside in the sun, there was an interior quality to this music. It pointed to a different place - inside. And I learned that it was someone called Brian Wilson opening his soul in a way that sounded like nothing else. Orchestrated pop had always been an exercise in adding a bored string section sawing through the changes. The tonal palette (another sack of coal to me at the time) of Pet Sounds owed nothing to anybody, delicious new combinations of sound, "like jewellery", and an overall mood of yearning melancholy that never dipped into self pity and bitterness. This wasn't rock n' roll, you couldn't dance to it, it made no concessions to fashion or form, and it remains a literally peerless artistic achievement. But because pop albums are forever magically linked with their covers, it will be forever tainted by its appearance, much as the group. We listen with our eyes, which were not made for the job.
Teenage Symphony To God
If Pet Sounds was strangely beautiful, the next record lit up everything in an unprecedented super-nova of bliss and joy. Good Vibrations left everything behind in its shining wake. Carl's first breath-of-God sigh, Ah, encapsulates the mood of the entire song; ecstatic wonderment. More has been written about this extraordinary song than perhaps any other pop single, because more went into it, but one central aspect of it doesn't get many column inches; the balanced integration of the sacred and profane, of sex and spirituality. Brian was insistent on it being a rock song, which the beat and Mike Love's lyrics (superb, credit where it's due) emphasise. The good vibrations are very physical - excitations! Why not? And yet they're in the same song as the heavenly chorale, which comes from a higher place. Michelangelo lusted over his godlike David; the division of the erotic and the spiritual is our own schizophrenia. It's doubtful that Brian had any of this in mind, just as he never planned to incorporate destabilised tonal centres in God Only Knows, but that's how genius works, as a mystery. The question where does this music come from leads us up some very interesting paths.
A Poisoned Chalice
It was the first single I bought with my own money, and the clunk of the Dansette autochange and the Van Allen Belt crackle of the vinyl became part of the ritual. Even my toxically critical father (who could flatten a glass of champagne from across the room) grudgingly admitted this was special. Decades later, in my absence, he'd pointedly throw it in the trash, but the Good Vibrations had been indivisibly part of me since that first Ah! The song, its performance and production, remain beyond the reach of criticism, and like any work of genius our response should be gratitude, and maybe a little humility (what have we done in this life?). In going further and delivering more than Pet Sounds, it posed a cursed question - what next? When you've gone further and deeper and higher than most albums, most symphonies, most careers, in one side of a seven inch single, where do you go from here?
The Vultures Gather
Pretty much everyone's reaction to Heroes & Villains was that it simply wasn't as good as Good Vibrations. It had the complexity, including lyrics that needed interpreting, but seemed to lack heart. I didn't care what the song was about, it didn't connect with me, it was just - there. That relentlessly descending verse melody was like clumping down the cellar steps, again and again, where Good Vibrations had soared. The uniquely brilliant harmonies and inventive arrangement were almost enough to make me want to buy it, but not quite. It was, to my ears, a bunch of people showing off - impressive, yup. But the magic touch, Brian as God's radio, was missing in action. Heroes & Villains was a weirdly academic exercise, and his first artistic step sideways, the first time he trod water instead of surfing the crest of the wave.
I knew none of the now canonical back story - the Beach Boys were still the wholesome Californian dreamspinners for everyone outside Brian's circle - but as
Brian's inspiration, instinct, and ear had made musical complexity sound
simple and beautiful, the complexities of his life were spinning out of control. The sucking vampires of L.A. covered him with their shiny wings. Drugs, lawyers, personal relationships, drugs, professional pressure, imagined competition, more drugs, more lawyers, crippling mental and physical health problems, all combined in a thermonuclear shitstorm that would have crushed weaker men. The only shelter he had was the studio, increasingly invaded by people who had no right to be there.
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Think this is the original cover? It ain't. Check it out!
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The punters at the racks knew none of this, but the sense of betrayal I felt on buying Smiley Smile on faith was like a punch in the gut. I paid how much!? for this!? Fool me once, pal ... Sgt. Pepper had been released half a year previously, an eon in pop terms. Smiley Smile, although reassessed since, was a kiss-off, the sound of Brian turning his back on the world, and he never really quite came back.
A Ghost In The Machine, An Angel In The Architecture
My fascination for Brian and the Beach Boys was kickstarted again on the release of Sunflower, where Brian seemed to be recharged and working at close to full capacity. It still didn't make them exactly hip - the cover styling was literally vanilla, and Dennis' rocking out didn't quite convince. Surf's Up would be a leap into credibility, although Brian's presence had faded into a discarded snapshot. The sudden career vault of Endless Summer was the start of endless tours without him, or a propped-up pod-person version. His reappearances since then have verged from the oh-please-no sad to the qualified triumphant, providing us with enough high happinesses to take us through to the unexpectedly fine That's Why God Made The Radio. He has been indulged as much as loved, which is perhaps right, and music which sounded like baffling dreck at the time is now appreciated as wayward sunbursts of his genius. I have an undying affection for 15 Big Ones, others love Love You much more than they would have at the time. It's Okay!
SMiLE, a project agonisingly close to completion and mired in complication, remains the shining Everest of his art. Where Heroes & Villains under-achieved as a single, it makes perfect sense as an album track, and that's what Brian was doing, making an album that was bigger and brighter than Pet Sounds. He got ninety-nine percent there; a little self-editing (the old "kill you babies" trope), a little arrangement - why he never used his beautiful verse to Roll Plymouth Rock, seemingly forgetting all about it for the oddly shallow Brian Wilson Presents SMiLE recording, is head-scratching - and a little studio polish and we'd have had the album in the racks. A weeks work, if they'd let him be. Life is complicated, right? We're beyond lucky to have what we have, we're blessed.
Death never makes me sad, but life often does. Brian effectively left the building decades ago, but you know what they say about art ... he gave the best of himself to us, and that will live forever, or as near as makes no difference. At a particularly low point of my life, I heard his high harmonies in a blue sky dream, a brief phrase, I want to live the life, I want to live my life, a blissful comfort I woke from crying. I'd heard the music in my sleep. No ears, no vocal cords required. This is what Brian heard all the time, and brought down to us as best he could with everything he had. I know where harmony comes from, and I have Brian to thank for that. We all do.
Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack in everything
That's where the light gets in
... and as an extra, here's a gorgeous swansong, a combination of the best of That's Why God Made The Radio and No Pier Pressure. No filler, no whimsy, virtually no Mike Love. Brian went out on a high. Click the pic!
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