Brian Wilson, June 20, 1942 – June 11, 2025. RIP.
A FreeForAll special. If you’ve never experienced the Beach Boys, I urge you to ckemout. The Beach Boys Today! and Pet Sounds are worth your time. So is the epic greatest hits collection, Endless Summer. Love and mercy to you and your friends tonight.
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We feel the best songs before we hear them. Music has a sixth sense all its own, that uses all the other senses to create a kind of unstoppable magic that moves us, speaks to us and shows us the way to our deepest joys and our most impenetrable sadnesses.
We’ve heard lots of songs in our lives. How many have we felt?
I listen to Jim Croce, I see a man on a stool with a guitar and his words, earnest and sad. As if he knew he wouldn’t be around long enough to describe all the love and wisdom he wanted his life to witness.
Hey, tomorrow. Where are ya goin’? Do ya have some room for me?
I felt Van Morrison before I heard him. In the garden, wet with rain, seeking some impossibly fragile love, hoping it might last.
No guru, no method, no teacher
Just you and I and nature in the garden
And there was Brian Wilson. Music felt like Brian Wilson’s heart. He died Wednesday at 82. It seemed an impossible thing. Because what made the Beach Boy so alive also was destined to keep him that way. That was the hope, anyway. Brian would be eternal, wishing us all love and mercy and sittin’ on top of the world.
I hear Surfer Girl, but not before I see it. It looks like a girl I adored in 6th grade. She wore a soft sweater, her hair had been curled for the moment, she smelled like spring. Do you love me, surfer girl?
We danced our way across the basement of Mark Wooldridge’s house.
That was Brian Wilson.
If everybody had an ocean. . . wouldn’t it be nice?
He wrote an album so great, it inspired Paul McCartney to do one that was better. We could argue for days over which set was more brilliant. Sgt. Pepper was or was not better than Pet Sounds. We could never argue the genius of the two men mostly responsible for each.
(Sgt. Pepper is brilliant. Pet Sounds is timeless. I’ll take Pet Sounds.)
Brian was highly responsible for the mythology that was California. He grew up in post-World War II suburban Los Angeles, when America was a middle-class success, and sunny California its golden poster child. Fun, fun, fun.
We East Coasters shivered through February watching Frankie and Annette play Bingo on the beach. (Lookitup, kids). Brian, Carl, Dennis, Mike and Al provided the soundtrack to our imaginations. We wished all girls could be California girls. It didn’t matter that we couldn’t find California on a map.
Before Brian’s demons found him and held him hostage, before Dr. Eugene Landy messed with his mind — before Brian became part of the turned-on, tuned-out masses — he put a feeling to what every teenager in the history of teenagers would experience at one time or another.
Now it's dark and I'm alone
But I won't be afraid
In my room
Brian was alive in all ways. It makes his physical passing so hard to grasp.
I saw him perform a few years ago in Dayton, at the Rose Music Center. The band, fronted by Al Jardine, did some of the standards. As much as I love Brian, I could live without hearing Little Deuce Coupe again. I didn’t go to the concert for that. I went because the band was going to play Pet Sounds in its entirety. And Brian would be there for all of it, playing piano.
I have no idea what Brian was feeling as the Beach Boys broke into “Wouldn’t It Be Nice’’ the set’s opening tune. Or if it did his heart good to close the album with the wistful ‘‘Caroline, No.’’
Truthfully, Brian seemed only marginally with us, as if what he was feeling and what he was playing were disconnected. And then the band did Caroline, No. Brian seemed to summon something from within.
It's so sad to watch a sweet thing die
Oh, Caroline, why?
Brian hit the high notes like 1964. He thrust back his head. His eyes were closed. It was a moment I’d come to feel and see.
I hope he felt the same.
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Here’s Caroline, and the perfectly mournful train whistle that closes the album. Love and mercy, Brian Wilson.