Brian Wilson’s good vibrations
The whole world sees the California Dream to the soundtrack of Beach Boys songs.
“If everybody had an ocean / Across the U.S.A. / Then everybody’d be surfin’ / Like Californ-i-a.” That’s from “Surfin’ USA.”
The genius behind it and other Beach Boys songs, Brian Wilson, died on June 11 at age 82.
Wilson later explained how he started the band in Hawthorne in 1961 with his brothers Carl and Dennis and friends Mike Love and Al Jardine. Before leaving on a trip to Mexico, the Wilsons’ parents left the boys $200. “So instead of buying food, we rented a stand-up bass, a set of drums and a guitar,” Brian said. “And we learned real quick how to play.” When their parents got home, “We played ‘Surfin” for them, and they loved it.”
How typical of California, where a garage and a little money is all you need to start a band, or a computer company.
Despite later legal disputes over song credits, the other band members acknowledged Brian’s centrality. The early teen-dream songs, such as “California Girls” and “Fun Fun Fun,” soon developed into the complex tonalities of “Pet Sounds” in 1966 and “Smiley Smile” in 1967, especially the hit single “Good Vibrations.”
“I’ve often played ‘Pet Sounds’ and cried,” said the Beatles’ Paul McCartney. “It’s that kind of an album for me.” Beatles vs. Beach Boys: the ultimate Battle of the Bands, each trying to surpass the other. “Without ‘Pet Sounds,’ ‘Sgt. Pepper’ wouldn’t have happened,” McCartney said of his band’s masterpiece, “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.”
After hitting the top, Wilson suffered a psychological breakdown, partly due to drug use. He later explained, “I was run down mentally and emotionally because I was running around, jumping on jets from one city to another on one-night stands, also producing, writing, arranging, singing, planning, teaching.”
After that, he worked sporadically with the Boys, still with flashes of genius. As Reason Magazine’s Brian Doherty put it, “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.”
His sounds will always be with us: “And wouldn’t it be nice to live together / In the kind of world where we belong?”