RIP Brian Wilson

Usually I'm a little quicker at getting these obituary posts up, but a number of things got in the way, and I also found myself having to consider what I could say about Brian Wilson or about The Beach Boys in general. I'm not that big of a fan: my direct experience is with Pet Sounds, as well as some of the songs that have filtered through into the wider culture, like the early surf-rock songs or Kokomo. 

I'm also aware of Brian Wilson's influence on other artists, REM being a prime example. In their singles collection, In Time, several members of REM talk about how their love for Pet Sounds and later Brian Wilson work influenced songs like At My Most Beautiful.

I'll also be blunt: for the longest time I associated liking The Beach Boys with a certain type of middle-of-the-road white dude. I then met a super-racist white dude in college who was into them, which colored my opinion of the band. It wasn't until I got into the Beatles that I learned about how influential Pet Sounds and other Brian Wilson works were on them. And it helped that a friend of mine, who was also into the Beatles, could paint a better picture of The Beach Boys (hi, Matt!).

So a couple of years later, spurred by those experiences and by reading panegyrics about it on Pitchfork, I picked up Pet Sounds. I'll say that it's not my favorite album of all time, but it's a good listen - my favorite is Sloop John B, but there's a certain spirit pervading the entire album, from the first note of Wouldn't It Be Nice to the sonic landscape at the end of Caroline, No.

From there I heard about the lost album, Smile, but I never got as far as that, even when Brian Wilson came out of seclusion in 2004 to release something approximating what he'd envisaged the original album to be. I got more traction with Surf's Up, which is another step in that darker, more mature direction that Wilson dreamed of when he came up with Pet Sounds.

Reading this piece in the Guardian, it's easy to see why Wilson gets name-checked by so many other artists. In collaboration with Van Dyke Parks and others, he went deeper than the surf-rock style that the band was famous for and pulled in influences from all over American music. Indeed, listening to Parks's album Song Cycle feels like the bits of Surf's Up and Smile that I have heard, while also reflecting folk and classical idioms. BTW I should point out that Van Dyke Parks remains the only artist I've ever met after a gig, and the only one I've ever high-fived, after having asked him whether Aaron Copland really smacked him on the ass. Nice guy.

Anyway, I don't know as much about Brian Wilson's work as I ought to, but I greatly appreciate what I do know. And I think I'll take a break from my British music project to listen to Smile and Surf's Up, because I should know more about them in general.