Look, reader, we both know that I'm out of my ultimate depth here. This is not my musical form, and even by talking about this I'm talking out of turn.
But I have so many memories of my twenties associated with the Beach Boys. Dancing and singing along to Sloop John B in the room of my post-college apartment with at least a dozen friends on the Saturday night before I moved to Israel. Late night drink soaked cigarettes while my roommate made sure I had a review course in the basic rock canon while I introduced him to Mahler, Bartok and Stravinsky. Friends jamming on their guitars while I noodled my fiddle around them. Missed romantic opportunities. And of course, beach trips. Basically, a normal American experience of the Beach Boys in a life story with very few normal experiences.
At their peak, the Beach Boys, really just Wilson, spoke to a basic human need that only a very few musicians arrive at: the ability to smile through tears. It's the greatest achievement of Mozart and Beethoven and Schubert and Brahms, it's the greatest achievement of Scott Joplin, Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington, it's the greatest achievement of Ray Charles, Otis Redding and Aretha Franklin, and it's the greatest achievement of the Beatles, Bruce Springsteen and Brian Wilson.
The best thing art can do for us is remind ourselves in those dark moments that life is always worth living, always worth persisting for, that there are experiences, places, living beings, to whom we feel connected enough to mean something to us. It's art's most basic, deepest function: it puts is in touch with the essential need to keep embracing life, and it recharges us for whatever comes next.
Whenever Bob Dylan dies, it will be momentous, but it will feel like the passing of a god. Dylan does not feel like he belongs to us. He spent his life covered by a suit of armor, and perhaps he was able to stay prolific by giving nothing of himself. Brian Wilson shared so much humanity in Pet Sounds that the album will always feel like it belongs to us all as much as anything by The Beatles. It's like you can hear the moral character of the people who made the music by whether the music gives something to us or takes something of us. Wilson and the Beatles give, Dylan takes.
But Wilson was so vulnerable in Pet Sounds that the experience damn near killed him. The Beatles broke up, but they were all commited to creating something meaningful, and when they disbanded, they could all pursue their separate lives; but the Beach Boys were family, family that actively betrayed each other. Wilson had Mike Love breathing down his neck, his own cousin terrorizing him, rooting against him and plotting his failure so he could turn the Beach Boys into a the perfect band pfor t-shirt sales. Then he had to bury both his brothers. Wilson wasn't even able to finish his followup album for nearly forty years.
Why were so many rock gods British? It's an American artform, but at least half its biggest stars were from across the pond. The reason, I think, is that there's something about the American experience that demands so much compromise from its artists that it's nearly impossible to create great stuff for the entire length of a career. There is so much pressure to make money, so many moneymen telling you to water down your ideas, so many collaborators who demand their own input, so many demanding fans costing you every time you step out, so much invasion of private life from the press, it's impossible to live with any normality in the life of American celebrity, and eventually every American celebrity becomes just another American celebrity who has the exact same jet set life as other celebrities, and after a while, they have nothing original to contribute.
But Wilson was too distinct, maybe too crazy, to be funneled into the standard process. He had the added pressure of a wife who controlled him, perhaps forced him to perform and compose for decades past when he wanted to retire. Nobody really knows what was going on in his final decades. It's entirely possible that Wilsoj lived his entire life under the control of exploiters.
What we do know is that the ear for emotional ambiguity was not gone. These albums were no Pet Sounds, for example the spoken word stuff in That Lucky Old Sun is painfully awkward, and then there's that 'reimagines Gershwin' album: the less said the better. So often, the old poignance was entirely there, but Wilson, like so many artists, didn't evolve. The music was still good by the standards of nearly anybody, but a lot of the late songs couldn't help but be a faded copy of the original.
Wilson had a hard life, and I don't doubt part of what took its toll on him was sticking to music that was superficially so happy, but when you listen just beneath the surface, there is an ocean of hurt. But there is no joy without melancholy, there is no deeper, lasting happiness without the experience of pain. Brian Wilson's music knew both enjoyment and pain, and that is why millions now mourn the joy which he created.
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