The passing of Brian Wilson made me pause and cast my mind back 60 years. The Beach Boys were just there for us when I was little, they were pop music, like the Beatles. As kids we didn’t realise how unique and revolutionary this music was. Good Vibrations was a nice tune, we didn’t understand it was a sonic masterpiece. Amazing to think that I was listening to his music aged 4 and that he has only just passed.
Maybe as a result of Brian's mental breakdown, the music was the sound of a dissolving brain, something I would later come to understand as my mother similarly suffered. Today, I wonder if people realise how profound that mid-60s period Beach Boys music is. They, as much as the Beatles and perhaps more than the Stones, created a landscape on which future music was built, so it’s now part of all our DNA. Whenever you hear close harmonies, their legacy is in the room.
We had Pet Sounds as a kid, I don’t know why, I suspect my parents thought it was just full of great tunes, which it was, not realising the effect it had on the world or the genius who created it.
And though those early to mid 60s years were my first introduction to them, it was far from the end of the story. The Smile album, which was unreleased until a version in 2004, whose songs dripped out on other records, such as Smiley Smile was astonishing in its depth and ambition. Heroes and Villains was supposed to be the lead single and that is an astonishing sonic mix that sounds beamed in from another dimension.
Surf’s Up from Smile, finally appeared on the album of the same name in 1971 and has an end of a summer's day feel about it as the last track on the album. In fact, by the time I was a teenager they seemed almost impossibly old and from another era, in retrospect much of the music of that time was delightful.
Incidentally, In 1977, one of my favourite records which got to #16 in the UK was Pacific Ocean Blue by Dennis Wilson from the Beach Boys, which they all played on but not Brian, who wasn’t really capable at the time. If you’ve not heard it for a while or at all, do dig it out.
Considering everything, and that mental illness was not really understood until recent decades, as I learned to my chagrin, in the 1970s and early 80s when they fried my mother’s brain with electricity, Brian did well making it to 82.
His legacy will be as one of music’s true innovators and creative geniuses.
The passing of Brian Wilson - A creative genius...
