Yesterday the world learned that Brian Wilson, the man behind the music of the Beach Boys, had passed away. It is sad news, of course, but then ‘sad’ is the correct word for everything about the Beach Boys…indeed, for me, sometimes, hearing the Beach Boys music can be as sad as watching Brian’s Song or reading the Ginger chapters in Black Beauty.
I know that sad isn’t really the word most people use to describe it, but I think their body of work IS sad, for it is all about this imagined community – “California” – which not only never existed, but which we, the listeners, know doesn’t exist, even as we listen to it. We just wish it did. All together, we wish: we wish it unconsciously, even as we listen, an action that makes the hearing of it so much heavier. At certain junctures of my life, like when my girlfriends and I sat in the back of our parents’ station wagon screaming it out on the way to a swim meet in Stockton, California, or years later, when it comes on the loudspeaker between acts at a stadium, hearing the Beach Boys has been like simultaneously blowing out a birthday candle, along with 40 million other people.
It's always been like that, but hearing it now, today, in the thousands of mourning playlists appearing all over the socials, is especially sad for reasons that should be obvious. Besides the current plight of California, their signature sound – Brian Wilson’s signature sound, I should say - is closely tied to the psyche of an entire country. The Beach Boys music is about the hopes and dreams and aspirations of a generation, rendered in the smallest, tiniest, detail, without irony, without cliché, without any of the protecting layers of image or humor or brains or sex, in songs that exude innocence and purity despite the surrounding impurity of the world.
Surely those types of dreams should seem so incredibly little when seen in song-form. And yet, underneath the surface of the dumb, dreamy fantasy scenarios of the Beach Boys – the girl in the T-bird, the boy in the soda shop, and beyond them both the beauteous beach – their music is so patently about pain. And pain is pain, whether it occurs in the suburbs or the city, in the 50s or the 90s, or the 2025s, to children or to adults. All pain is equal to those who are suffering from loneliness and a lack of friendship, is the Beach Boys music’s stock in trade, and that’s why it will never, ever date.
The Beach Boys performed at the first concert I ever went to alone without my parents or siblings. Our then-lodger, a pro-tennis player, took me to see them at the Oakland Coliseum with him when I was 13 and then left me on my own while he made his way to the front of the crowd. For most of the day, I lay on the grass on a blanket and watched people unspooling toilet paper rolls from the top of the stadium so they made crisscrosses in the azure sky and I thought how beautiful it all was: I was overcome with the sensation that I was joining up with some giant parade that was going to march down the years to this music, with me at its head. Eventually the Boys came on, and I remember that too, and how the chords chimed into my ecstatic mood, and how it hurt my heart how much I loved the experience. I saw them again at the Concord Pavilion in 1994, and as the opening notes of “California Girls” rang out into the still blue atmosphere, I felt exactly the same. There was no revisionist point of view inherent in my attitude, no hindsight, no nostalgic twinge of reminiscence. Those chords cut through layers of years and cynicism and hit me in the gut as purely as they were meant. They were a living thing to me.
At that show, they played a long string of hits and still left out some of my favorites. I know this, because I wrote about it in the East Bay Express, and this is (partially) what I said:
“The show began with a seamless eight-song opening which left the audience rapt: “California Girls,” “Do It Again,” “Catch a Wave,” “Hawaii,” “Be True to Your School,” “Little Surfer,” “Don’t Worry Baby,” “Darlin.” Then Love interrupted with a long rambling monologue about the ‘automotive’ portion of the set, which included “Little Deuce Coup,” “409,” “Little Old Lady from Pasadena,” (Originally recorded by Jan and Dean but written by Brian Wilson)’Shut Down,” “Little GTO” and “I Get Around.”
Following that, the band did its covers, including “Hot Fun In The Summertime” by Sly Stone, “Dancing in the Streets” by Martha and the Vandellas; “Rock ‘n’ Roll Music” and “Dance, Dance, Dance” and “Do You Wanna Dance,” before bursting gloriously into the “Pet Sounds” portion of the program: “In My Room,” “God Only Knows,” “Sloop John B,” “Wouldn’t It Be Nice,” and “Good Vibrations,” a set of songs so lovely that I decided this must be how religious people feel about hymns. Even if they hear them sung by a tone-deaf chorus of backwoods crackers, the hymn imbues some meaning into their morning; they’re even more touching somehow, more filled with grace, when sung by the people. Likewise the Beach Boys. An eleven-piece band blaring “Wouldn’t It Be Nice” into the deep May night can do nothing to harm it. “Maybe if we think and wish and hope and pray it might come true…?”
It’s inviolable. Indeed, the Beach Boys remind me of a passage in a book by Rebecca West called “The Fountain Overflows,” in which an evil man who torments his family horribly is able to play the flute very beautifully, and when his wife asks him why he’s so mean to them when he can play music so beautifully, he says, “What’s the good of music when there’s all this cancer in the world?” When the Beach Boys, led by the unspeakable Mike Love, sang “God Only Knows,” I thought of that passage, and its protagonists’ rejoinder, which is, “What’s the harm in cancer when there’s music in the world?”
By the time the band wound it all up with songs like “Surfin’” “Surfing USA” and “Kokomo,” we’d already had our spirits both lifted, and saddened by a glimpse of heaven’s glory, so my brother and I decided to leave. And as we walked up the steps of the Concord Pavilion and they burst into “Help Me Rhonda,” I felt like I was turning my back on the ocean, something my mother told me never to do, because she said it might sneak up on you. But the Beach Boys had already done that – like they did before, like they would again, forever and ever, amen.
(East Bay Express, May 1994)
There's always a gap between songs and the songwriter (probably true of most artists)--Keith Richard isn't really a street fighting man, Merle Haggard didn't actually embody the workingman's blues, and so on. But the gap between the cheerful promise of the Beach Boys music and Brian Wilson's actual life was particularly stark.
The Beach Boys were my first concert too, a continent away in Jersey City and I'm sure quite a few years apart, and yet it was the same songs and the same voices and, I suspect, the same emotions. Which is one other magical thing that music can do.