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“When I was around 10 or 12 years old,” Brian Wilson said, “my mom and I were walking to the market one day and a dog started barking at us. When I asked my mom, ‘Why is that dog barking at us?’ she said, ‘Son, some dogs pick up vibrations from some people, and when they pick up bad vibrations, they bark.’ And I said, ‘What about good vibrations?’”
Years later, in 1966, Wilson—whose death, at the age of 82, was announced yesterday—remembered the experience and, after smoking marijuana, added the concept to a melody he’d been working on with the band he created with his brothers, his cousin, and a neighbor. The resulting Beach Boys song—assembled from 90 hours of recorded music performed by 30 session musicians doing endless takes over a period of eight months, making it the most elaborate, intensive, and expensive recording ever made—redefined music. It incorporated the kind of structures and development normally reserved for classical compositions; it introduced instruments like the cello and the theramin to popular music; it expanded by leaps and bounds the concept—already pioneered by Wilson—of “playing the studio” and wildly expanded the sonic possiblities of studio recordings (play the track as loud as you can comfortably take it from just after the two-minute mark and listen to the crescendo followed by the change in movements for a minute or so; you’ll hear things that will blow your mind); it invented the genre of progressive pop and paved the way for both psychedelic music and prog rock; and, yeah, the wild success of the single once it was released made a niche expression then limited to druggy subculture—“good vibes”—mainstream.
And that’s just one record. If you’ve heard of any Beach Boys album—as opposed to their many hit singles—it’s likely 1966’s Pet Sounds, and what “Good Vibrations” did as a single, Pet Sounds did as an album, setting a new high-water mark for songwriting, composition, and production, and setting off a kind of creative arms race with the Beatles. It’s worth noting that the latter band’s legendary producer George Martin, so instrumental in shaping their sound, said that “If there is one person that I have to select as a living genius of pop music, I would choose Brian Wilson,” and Paul McCartney famously called the first track on side two of Pet Sounds, “God Only Knows,” “the greatest song ever written.” (Bob Dylan, meanwhile, is on record as saying, about Wilson’s studio prowess, that while he “made all his records with four tracks, you couldn’t make his records if you had a hundred tracks today.”)
But while the handfuls of albums they released from 1962 to 1966 made the Beach Boys famous (and, along the way, sold the mythical view of California as a paradise of surfing, hot rods, cute girls, and, yes, good vibes to the world at large) and Wilson the first artist who wrote, arranged, produced, and performed his own songs in the studio—bringing in armadas of the best session musicians and painstakingly instructing them not only in the exact manner in which he wanted their parts to be played, but also in (sorry) what kind of vibes he wanted them to channel—that very exactitude, aided by an increasingly dangerous pharmaceutical intake, essentially caused the group’s creative immolation. (It probably needs to be said that the old bugaboo of intra-band “creative differences” was brought to new and volatile heights within the Beach Boys, the majority of whom wanted to keep mining their trademark sun-fun-girls sound all the way to the bank.)
Reading the blue-chip obituaries and the tributes from so many musicians (Questlove writing that “if there was a human being who made art out of inexpressible sadness... damn it was Brian Wilson” certainly got to the heart of the matter), it can be hard to remember that there was a time when Brian Wilson and the Beach Boys were essentially forgotten by most of the people whose opinions mattered. After Pet Sounds, a string of vastly less popular albums—some of them containing breathtaking songs, with many of them favorably reappraised in later years—followed in the 1970s. But in the ’80s and ’90s, Wilson was essentially a hermit, beset by drug and psychological problems (and later living under the care of a psychologist who was eventually stripped of his license and issued a restraining order) and bitter feuds with band members (mainly his cousin, Mike Love, now MAGA-affiliated) who essentially ran the Beach Boys name—long the source of swoons, screams, and slack-jawed wonder—into the ground.
I’m a lifer with the band—the first concert I ever saw, as a young child, was the Beach Boys at the North Dakota State Fair, some time in the late ’70s or early ’80s. But by the ’90s, seeing the Beach Boys, who toured the country incessently (without Wilson), perform anywhere near New York was like seeing Johnny Cash before his comeback album with Rick Rubin: the audience seemed entirely comprised of middle-aged people who’d driven in from the hinterlands to relive their lost youth. After Cash’s Rick Rubin album, the audience—in New York, at least—was magically transformed into leather jacketed hipster boys working on starter mutton chops and Sarah Lawrence girls wearing gingham skirts and Frye boots, all of them claiming to have grown up on the stuff. And these same people were soon swooning over the genius of Brian Wilson again.
What changed? Two things: the 1995 Don Was-directed documentary, I Just Wasn’t Made for These Times, which featured fans from John Cale and Thurston Moore to Linda Ronstadt and Tom Petty explaining the genius of Wilson and the Beach Boys to a generation who hadn’t lived through it (“I don’t think you’d be out of line comparing him to Beethoven,” Petty said); and Wilson’s well-received solo albums—one of which was the soundtrack to the documentary, which showed him writing, recording, and performing again. In 2004, in one of the great Houdini acts in pop music history, Wilson even managed to complete a version of Smile, the 1966 Beach Boys project (conceived by Wilson as “a teenage symphony to God,” natch) abandoned amidst his mental and physical instability.
If you never saw Brian Wilson play live, that’s a shame—but it’s nowhere near necessary to appreciate his heart, his spark, and his genius. (After their initial fame as a surf-pop outfit, Wilson largely lost interest in touring, preferring instead to focus his vast energies in the studio, and while it was remarkable simply to see him still creating in the wake of his decades-long troubles, his voice and stage presence were sometimes halting.) What you need to do instead is to simply listen to his music.
Yes, start with Pet Sounds, the Rosetta Stone of modern pop and an album still capable of new revelations. (Paul McCartney, again: “No one is educated musically ‘til they’ve heard Pet Sounds.”) Listen to it with the best headphones you can find, or on the greatest stereo system you have access to. Go deep: Follow what one single instrument is doing—or listen to this mind-blowing archaeological dig of outtakes from the “Good Vibrations” sessions. From there, I’d go backward, not forward, to the Beach Boys’ supposedly simpler earlier work—listen to 1964’s “Don’t Worry Baby,” which you’ve probably heard before, but then listen to the lyrics and realize that while it’s nominally the silly tale of a drag-race challenge gone wrong, it’s also one of the most carefully constructed, yearning, and transportive songs ever written, one that showcased the kind of haunting melancholy also heard in “In My Room,” from the year before, a song some have credited as a kind of ur-precursor to emo.
Along with watching I Just Wasn’t Made for These Times, you’d do well to see Paul Dano playing the young Wilson in the 2014 feature film Love Mercy, which does a righteous (and unbelievably accurate—yes, I fact-checked the movie against studio outtakes I’ve listened to and biographies I’ve read) justice to Brian’s revolutionary studio work, and touches on his troubled childhood. (Wilson suffered regular beatings and humiliation at the hands of his father, who also sold the Beach Boys’ studio master tapes behind his son’s back for a pittance of what they were worth.) And for later-years Brian, the go-to documentary is Jason Fine’s 2021 Brian Wilson: Long Promised Road, which features Fine—who knew Brian well—driving around LA with Wilson as the legend reflects on various landmarks and talks about his life and career.
If there’s a simple and concise way to get at what Wilson wrote about, obsessed about, yearned for, and wished for the world, it was in the title of a powerfully moving 1988 solo song that he released as part of the I Just Wasn’t Made For These Times soundtrack. It’s called “Love and Mercy,” and it’s almost terrifyingly apropos for our current moment. Here’s hoping that, with his passing, he’s finally found some. Consider the rest of us lucky to have the gifts of what he created while he spent his life looking.
