Glimpses of Brian Wilson

Photo by Michael Ochs

Genius is next to sadness, and sadness fits me like a cloak when I think of Brian Wilson. I used to see him here and there, across the world, as musicians do. I doubt he saw me, one occasion aside, although you never knew exactly what Brian was taking in. He once, apparently, recalled a phone number verbatim that somebody had read out to a third party in front of him.

In my youth, I was never much of a Beach Boys fan. Their sound was a tad preppy and airtight for me: slick music for jocks, I thought. When I was at school it was the meatheads, the sporty guys who were into them. Yet the Beach Boys’ filigree harmonies were sophisticated beyond anything the Beatles and the Byrds came up with. Then again, it was perhaps that sophistication which made them sound airtight - they left me gasping for a window to breathe through.

But every so often an eruption would pierce that sheen. Their single “I Get Around” in the summer of 1964 was very exciting, and excited. To me it had the same momentum as “A Hard Day’s Night.” My 11-year-old antennae were activated.

Two years later, “Good Vibrations” appeared in the wake of Bob Dylan’s Blonde on Blonde. Holy fuck! What was this wafting euphoria? It was acceleration AND lift-off. When it got to “I don’t know where, but she sends me there…” I was levitating (always the goal in those days) and I still achieve levitation whenever I hear that line. This, even though the lyrics are by Mike Love, Brian’s nemesis in the Beach Boys clan. My prejudices began to crumble.

Alerted to the range and power of Brian’s music, I grew into being a musician and songwriter over the next few decades. In 1976, I had the good fortune to form the Soft Boys (we lacked a beach) with Morris Windsor, who, as well as being an ace drummer, was a massive fan of Brian and all his creations.

This led to my next Brian epiphany, “Surf’s Up”. In October 1993, Tony Berg, a legendary LA record producer and musician, made me a cassette tape of that song. I must have listened to it 400 times. Did it influence me, musically? I wish. It’s an abstract song, apparently about everything and nothing. In this, it joins my favourite trifecta: John Lennon’s “I Am The Walrus”, Dylan’s “Visions of Johanna” and Syd Barrett’s “Octopus”. “Surf’s Up” leads the mind’s eye up many winding stairways and out of many top-floor windows, to float across a dusky seascape or plummet onto the rocks below, as the mind chooses. But then the final chorus appears (a fairly obvious edit, as Morris pointed out) and the goose-bumps appear on my spine in a strangely re-assuring way. “Surf’s up, mmm mmm, mmm mmm, aboard a tidal wave…” Van Dyke Parks’ lyrics are more my jam than Mike Love’s, for sure. It’s not often I feel excited and reassured at the same time: maybe religious people feel this way. The coda of “Surf’s Up” is uplifting like nothing else I’ve heard.

And after that came the sightings. As we struggled into the 21st Century, Brian - like Arthur Lee - began to perform at The Festival Hall on the south bank of the Thames in London. Both men had survived a fair amount of damage, and been reconditioned to be able to perform their official masterpieces. Arthur did Forever Changes while Brian unleashed Pet Sounds and a completed version of Smile the album he was working on but couldn’t finish back in 1967. I saw several of his shows: he sat in a piano nest in the middle of the stage, singing what appeared to be the lead vocal into a microphone suspended before him. But there were quite a few other voices onstage there shadowing him, ready to catch his if it faltered.

As the house lights went down on the second occasion, I saw the silhouette of Paul McCartney in a well-cut overcoat slip in through a side door and take a seat next to George Martin. Everyone was there to pay homage.

Brian introduced some of the songs, probably from an autocue. He seemed to be a little removed from everything. Good for him! If I’d known where he was, I’d have joined him… except that I knew he didn’t crave strangers.

A few years after that, the artist Peter Blake was hosting a book launch in a London nightclub for a book that he’d illustrated. There were a lot of people drinking and talking. Smoke still drifted in the air back then. Suddenly up on the stage were five musicians. One of them was Brian. Gasps, hollers, whoops, shrieks of appreciation followed, but the talking continued, second-bottle-of-wine style. Out came the hits: “Fun Fun Fun”, “In My Room” (another fave) and “Love And Mercy” and on went the chatter. Sacrilege? But, darling, it’s an art opening party…

After the event, somebody asked me if I’d like to meet Brian. Putting myself in his shoes, I doubted he’d want to meet me. How often does any performer, let alone this sensitive genius, want to come off-stage to be greeted by an unknown random? So I stuck my head around the hospitality room door, waved hello to a puzzled-looking Brian as he focused on his fruit platter, and ducked out again.

Still, he kept crossing my path: in a hotel lobby in Oslo; on a flight from Austin, Texas; wandering through a festival crowd. Tall, bewildered, staring into the invisible, he was a regular apparition. He didn’t look crazy, just somewhere apart. I was reminded of seeing my father across the road on Winchester High Street once, looking like a large, lost bird.

The last time I saw Brian was onstage at an afternoon show in January at an open-air festival in Florida. It was just before the pandemic. He was surrounded by his band, including his old Beach Boys cohort Al Jardine and his son. Brian was nestled in the middle as usual, behind a white piano. I like to think that he was absorbing the love that was beaming back to him from his output over the last 60 years:

“I Get Around”
“Heroes and Villains”
“Good Vibrations”

And even “Surf’s Up” were sung by his ensemble to the swaddled crowd. The magic was undiluted by time; if anything, it was magnified. Oh God, these songs actually happened! And here they are, intact, sung by a couple of their originators.

But it was “Love And Mercy” from his 1989 comeback record that actually brought tears to my eyes. The tenderness in Brian’s being seemed to flow out in waves through the chilly winter air. I took a couple of photos - oddly, in one of them he appears to be staring straight at me.

And what am I? A free-range mind circling a frightened world, waiting to be blown off it by biology or fate. I still can’t quite believe that I sat on a plane behind Brian Wilson…