Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys in 1990 (Ithaka Darin Pappas/Wikimedia Commons)
It’s true: Brian Wilson, the cofounder and creative soul of the Beach Boys who died last week at the age of 82, didn’t surf. And for someone who cowrote a song called "I Get Around," he didn’t really get around much: He stopped touring with the Beach Boys in 1964, after a nervous breakdown on a plane. The only Beach Boy who actually liked the beach was Brian’s youngest brother, Dennis, and he drowned in 1983.
People like to make fun of the Beach Boys for those ironies, but those facts point to an important element of the band’s success. They were so popular, and the music that Brian Wilson wrote and arranged lives on, because you didn’t need to know anything about driving or surfing to enjoy them, to be seduced by their harmonies or their blend of Chuck Berry (thanks to Brian's other brother, Carl) and doo-wop, to be entertained by their lyrics.
I’m not going to be one of those hyper-contrarians who claim the Beach Boys were better than the Beatles, but I will point out one way the early success of the Beach Boys is more impressive. Almost all of the Beatles’ first hits were about love. Can you get more obvious than that? Who doesn’t love love? Singing about love is a sure-fire way to get a teenager invested in your song.
The Beach Boys, on the other hand, had early hits about niche activities limited to Southern California. Brian and his cousin Mike Love wrote about surfing. Racing. Cars. Motorcycles. Girls on the beach. Girls in California. But it didn’t matter! The complexity of the harmonies combined with the simplicity of the early structures made the songs irresistible even if you’d never caught a wave. Their debut single, "Surfin’ Safari," climbed the top of the charts in—where else?—Sweden. More than 20 years later, when I was a pre-teen who couldn’t drive and only occasionally boogie-boarded on tame Atlantic waves, these were my favorite songs.
It’s not that the lyrics didn’t matter—they did. When Wilson and Love wrote sneering songs about teenage competition, like "Be True to Your School" or "I Get Around" or "Shut Down," they managed to sound tough even with those high harmonies. Much tougher than any college a capella band. Yet Brian's falsetto was perfect for more tender subject matters, too.
Like all of the great Boomer bands, the Beach Boys’ sound changed quickly. Wilson took the band into more sophisticated sonic territory after he heard Phil Spector’s production of the Ronettes' "Be My Baby" in 1963. The bigger, baroque sound comes through in songs like "Don’t Worry Baby," "When I Grow Up to Be a Man," and "Help Me, Rhonda." He also hired the same band as Spector, the legendary group of session musicians called the Wrecking Crew. The boy who’d spent hours at his home picking apart the harmonies of his favorite band—the long-forgotten Four Freshmen—was now directing a studio full of pros.
Wilson saw his sonic ambitions most fully realized in the 1966 album Pet Sounds. Inspired by the Beatles’ ground-breaking Rubber Soul, the album picked up on the more mature themes hinted at in "When I Grow Up to Be a Man" from the previous year. That spooked Columbia, which assumed the band’s fans wanted more songs about surfing and driving instead of unfamiliar, though obviously perfect, cuts like "Wouldn’t It Be Nice" and "God Only Knows."
Wilson wanted to do more for the follow-up album. He described his vision as "a teenage symphony to God" and it was going to be called SMiLE. But he couldn’t do it. Maybe it was the pressure, or the LSD, or the voices in his head. He explained later that it wasn’t "appropriate" for his fans, meaning he didn’t think they’d like it. His label and bandmates agreed. They released a watered-down version of Wilson’s planned album called Smiley Smile, which includes the perfect pop achievements "Good Vibrations" and "Heroes and Villains" plus a bunch of duds. Paul McCartney provides rhythmic celery crunches in a song about vegetables.
For most casual fans, this is more or less where the story of the Beach Boys ends. Wilson withdrew from the band and never had the same influence on its sound again. They still released some good music, but not consistently. When a collection of their early hits topped the charts in 1974 (Endless Summer, which would be my own introduction to the band when I found my sister’s old copy), Wilson was too wasted to join the rejuvenated tours. Fourteen years later, he wasn’t there to record "Kokomo," their final #1 hit. When he first heard it on the radio, he didn’t even realize it was a Beach Boys song. But at least he participated when the band teamed up with the Fat Boys to cover "Wipe Out."
In a story where Brian Wilson is the hero, who are the villains? The band could not have succeed without Brian's father, Murry Wilson. He got them a contract with Capitol. He promoted them. He convinced the label to let Brian produce the records. But he was a bully. His three sons recall him hitting them. And he was jealous of Brian. The band fired him as manager fairly early on, but he retained the band’s publishing rights—and he sold those for $700,000 in 1969, thinking the Beach Boys were washed up. He died in 1973, just before the band’s first big comeback.
Two years after Murry’s death, Brian met the second tyrant of his life, the psychotherapist Eugene Landy. "Dr. Landy was a tyrant who controlled one person," Brian wrote in his 2016 memoir, "and that was me." Landy worked with Wilson briefly in the 1970s and then more extensively from 1982 until 1991. He controlled every element of Wilson’s life, convinced that was the only way to get his patient healthy. He determined what Wilson could eat, where he could go, who he could see. When Brian released his first solo album in 1988, Landy received cowriting and co-production credits. The similarities between Landy and Murry were not lost on Brian.
The great success of the last 30 years of Wilson’s life is not that he returned to making great music, he didn’t. Some of the albums have moments that remind you of previous greatness but never come close to matching it. Sometimes he sounds like Rick Moranis’s character from Ghostbusters. When the remaining members of the Beach Boys reunited for their final album in 2012, 50 years after their debut, it was a nice story about mending fences, remembering old times, and rehearing beautiful harmonies. But summer isn’t endless after all.
No, the success of his final decades was that he experienced them at all. Guided by his second wife, Melinda, he enjoyed some measure of redemption and fulfillment, unlike too many of his pop-pioneering peers.
Christopher J. Scalia is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and author, most recently, of 13 Novels Conservatives Will Love (but Probably Haven’t Read).
Source link