More On Brian

 

The following is the unedited version of my friend Jeff K's comment from yesterday's Brian Wilson post. It is far better than anything I could have come up with, even if I had the heart and head to try. 

 

Brian Wilson created songs about surfing, cars and girls. Three subjects I knew hardly anything or nothing about, yet his music provided the soundtrack of my life.

 

Ok, I knew a touch about cars. If you bring me one made before 2000, I can fix your brakes and do a tune-up. But I didn't attempt to get on a surfboard until I was nearly 60 and girls, well, they're women now, and I'm still trying to figure them out.

 

Brian knew hardly anything about them either. Dennis was the surfer in the family, and while I hate to say it, let's give credit where it's due and acknowledge Mike Love's genuine interest in cars, even though as "Surf City" indicated he and I had different ways of defining a "woody."

 

Out of that limited knowledge Brian wrote what I think he once called "little symphonies to God." When I think about it though, while the music was miraculous, and it became even more so as he grew older and wrote from his own heart and experiences, the real miracle was that it was made at all.

 

Wilson was an outwardly tough kid who played football in school and kept his younger brothers in line, but pretty much as soon as he "hit the ground" to borrow a phrase from Bruce, he became almost literally a punching bag for his father Murry and it only got worse when at an early age, he easily surpassed his father as a musician and writer.

 

Then came Mike Love who tried and nearly succeeded to destroy Brian and exploit him both at the same time. The guy sued Brian so many times I'm surprised he hasn't yet filed a suit against his estate for Brian's dying too soon. 

Later on came a psychiatrist name Eugene Landy who got Brian out of the sandbox and off LSD and out of the fridge and got him writing again. But Landy also took production credit on Brian's brilliant solo record even though he did no production at all. He also put a clamp on Brian's access to the world until a lawsuit got him out of there.

 

The sandbox in Brian's living room was his way of creating an idyllic youth; I imagine the colors of LSD were similar. And how many of us overeat when we are troubled and for good reason Brian was troubled. But out of that came some of his truest and best songs, for example "In My Room" his haven from everything wrong in his life (I'm writing this from mine), "The Warmth of the Sun," about the devastation of the Kennedy assassination and of course an entire album of sheer brilliance and delight, "Pet Sounds," which Mike Love hated but to my mind is about a half step behind "Sgt. Pepper" as the greatest album ever created. One should note that "Pepper" was the product of four brilliant musicians plus George Martin who Brian wanted to top while "Pet Sounds" was the creation of one, with only negative voices (some imagined by then) screaming his ear.

 

After that was the disappointment of "Smile," which only saw its release in the form Brian imagined it originally decades later. Some of it is bizarre, some brilliant, some brilliantly bizarre but typically of his music extremely listenable and very much of its time. Almost as important, it was an example of Brian, who looked soft and befuddled on the outside, having this ironclad, indomitable will to still make music under the worst of circumstances. By then he worked with a variety of musicians who he was open to trusting with the hope that they wouldn't exploit him as the others did. While the music wasn't consistently brilliant, I could easily put together a greatest hits list that would rival anyone's.

 

But what a human being. Who among us would have the heart to still work after enduring what he did? True, some of his best songs were sad and openly imagined better times but he still offered up that enormous talent which gave and cost him so much. And he did so by marching to his own drummer when all the pressure on his was to confirm and just produce another hit.

 

But there's one more thing that comes to mind. I'm sitting here, a day after cancer surgery, where the aftermath is a lot worse than the math, knowing I'll be fine and feeling better in a few short weeks but I'm not feeling a hundredth of the pain he lived with every day and there's no way I could produce anything worthwhile at this point, even in my own limited context. I have no idea how he did it. Opposite of his looks, he was one of the strongest human beings you could imagine and I'm just so filled with admiration, overwhelmed as always by his music but even more by his life.