Brian

There's a world where I can go / and tell my secrets to

Brian Wilson has just passed away. I’m not as broken by the news as I thought I would be. Over the past few years, I’ve occasionally woken and opened The Guardian or New York Times website out of habit, half-expecting to see Brian’s death notice. This mild dread has been heightened in recent years by the reports of dementia, which only have one inevitable outcome.

Then, shortly before I turned the light out last night, I looked at Facebook and there it was. Two minutes earlier, his family had posted a simple notice that said:

We are heartbroken to announce that our beloved father Brian Wilson has passed away.

I posted a few words on Facebook and a link to this fantastic few minutes I’d found on YouTube a couple of weeks earlier:

And then I went to sleep.

This morning, I awoke to feeds filled with posts and love for Brian, much as I had the day before when another Californian cultural giant had passed. Both Sly and Brian were – and this is an awful statement – celebrated as damaged goods by the media, which generated acres of print, endless video, and web space for stories about the emotional and physical downfall of both musicians. The stories, of course, had some substance. In Brian’s case, his mental collapse in the mid-1960s and beyond was arguably brought on or at least accentuated by the bullying and relentless criticism from Mike Love of his move away from ‘the sound’ with Pet Sounds and Smile; he’d experienced breakdowns earlier and was obviously emotionally vulnerable.

The significant difference between the Sly Stone and Brian Wilson tales was the return. As Ted Gioia reposted on Monday, for all Sly’s genius, he was a spent force by 30, never to return artistically (although he lived to the same age as Brian, 82).

Brian Wilson returned. He came back. His later years were filled with new music and revisits to his past that we had no reasonable expectation of in the Landy years. His 1988 *comeback* album was, generously, very patchy, saved only by two tracks, the solo-career-defining ‘Love And Mercy’, plus ‘Melt Away’. The studio sequel to that was Imagination in 1998, which suffered from dreadfully wooden, over-glossed production (by Joe Thomas) but, now Landy-free, again gave us a trio of fabulous tunes, the wistful ‘Cry’, ‘Lay Down Burden and ‘She Says She Needs Me’.

Then came SMiLE, or at least the Brian Wilson remake of the songs originally composed for what was touted as a Beach Boys album in 1967 (but we now know was always intended as a Wilson solo album) and all was well.

The lost ‘Beach Boys’ album has been compiled by bootleggers and pirates countless times over the years, never satisfactorily, and, indeed, when Capitol finally issued their box set The Smile Sessions in 2011, it was intriguing but ultimately unsatisfying. Brian had already, from the sublime first notes of ‘Our Prayer’ on his 2004 album, fully realised his original vision. I play his record often, and Brian’s live show performing it at Auckland’s Aotea Centre is a thrilling lifetime highlight, albeit one that I had to insist that my better half accompany me to. She was ‘Fun, Fun, Fun’ and ‘California Girls’ shy, but it only took 15 minutes, and by ‘Cabin Essence’ she was swooning with every other ecstatic soul in the room. The perfect segue from ‘You Are My Sunshine’ into ‘Cabin Essence’ is one of my favourite musical moments ever.

But not as favourite-moment as the opening bars to ‘Don’t Worry Baby’, which I accidentally discovered at the age of nine when Dad bought the single for me in one of our ex-jukebox purchases. Imagine being a pop-obsessed kid, living in a somewhat pop-barren zone (outside Palmerston North) and hearing THAT for the first time. And then that voice arrives: Brian Wilson’s vocal reach to the stars. It’s still the song I turn to in sad times, the song I play when I need a lift, or the tune I reach for because I just feel an unexplainable need to do so. And I still have that copy.

One more time:

As you do when an idol (and, yes, I unashamedly idolised Brian Wilson after that record arrived in our house, and never really let go) passes, you reach for music. ‘Don’t Worry Baby’, of course, and I’ll play side two of The Beach Boys Today later, but I also reached for some of the redemption era music. I’ve been playing his Smile, and I played the tracks on his underrated Gershwin tribute album that I dig, especially the lovely California-tinged remake ‘I’ve Got A Crush On You’ and ‘Someone To Watch Over Me’.

But oddly, what I’ve played on loop are the last three tracks on the final Beach Boys album, songs that we, as a friend said, had no right to expect, given the stolid solo albums that mostly followed Smile.

But there they were, on 2012’s That’s Why God Made The Radio, an otherwise ok record (I do like the title track): ‘From There To Back Again’, ‘Pacific Coast Highway’ and ‘Summer’s Gone’.

As melodically inspiring as anything the great man has ever melded together in his epic studio explorations of sound and song, and lyrically reflective and affecting. Andrew Male, in The Guardian today, put it well: the suite is as warm, poignant and wistful as a summer sunset, a quiet acceptance of beauty in its final dying moments.

So sad, a goodbye…

Sometimes I realise my days are getting on
Sometimes I realise it's time to move along
And I wanna go home
Sunlight's fading and there's not much left to say
My life, I'm better off alone
My life, I'm better on my own
Driving down Pacific Coast, out on Highway One
The setting sun
Goodbye

Goodbye, Brian Wilson.

Me in Western Recorders, where much of The Beach Boys’ music was recorded. September 2024.

Brian with Hal Blaine in the same space.