The World After Brian Wilson
It was exactly nine years ago this week that I took what was left of my modest savings and headed to Porto, overcome with love, before it was too late – no, not the kind of love with romantic or sexual connotations that we usually attribute to the term; I didn’t go after some tripeira who refused to give in to my charms. Instead, I went to see the man whose music I loved the most and to say thank you to him before it was too late: Brian Wilson, the eternal leader of the Beach Boys, was playing at Primavera Sound and something told me that this would be the last opportunity to see him.
Most people I know describe the concert as an epiphany – and I regret it, even more so at the time of the death of Brian Wilson, perhaps the only pop genius of the second half of the 20th century – but I didn't share the sentiment: I thought the sound that the band that accompanied him produced was miles away from what I knew from records, while Brian's voice was barely audible, so fragile was he, that is, when he didn't come in at the wrong moment or forget to sing.
I don't want to replace anyone, but I don't think there was a soul there who heard the concert from the stage – they heard the songs immaculate as on the records or they heard them with the filter of gratitude; and that was what moved me the most: I came to thank the man who taught me to love the fragile little boy that I had been and that life had forced me to put away in a forgotten corner of my mind – and suddenly I came across a hill of devotees waiting for a mass where the word of the Lord was irrelevant: it was enough for him to be there for us to feel that one day, for a few hours, we shared the same latitude and longitude.
Age is terrible – these days I barely remember what I had for lunch yesterday and I have to write everything down so as not to make a mistake; maybe the band was great and Wilson was just perfect, but I don’t remember that very precisely. But I know exactly when I became a devotee of his. I had just read a text by Fernando Magalhães about the reissue of Pet Sounds , I went to a record store as if I were walking on clouds of sugar, such was the love that Fernando had expressed for the work in his text, I bought the reissue, got home, put the first CD in the stereo and, good God, there are no words to describe the emotional upheaval and the sea of tears that I shed in the following hours, in the following months, in the following years.
My love for the Beach Boys is so great that I started to badmouth the Beatles simply because no one ever shuts up about the Beatles and no one ever talks about the Beach Boys, much less in the terms that people talk about the Beatles: innovative, sophisticated, creators of the music of the future. For my generation, the Beach Boys were Barbara Ann and Surfin' USA , old guys who once made music about surfing and girls. There was nothing sophisticated about them – they didn't show the future, they were a vaguely (as we say today) cringe-y past.
But that wasn’t what came out of my stereo speakers: what reached my ears were the most chilling melodies, surrounded by the most extraordinary and complex harmonies, voices so pure that they seemed like angels coming to take us by the hand and lead us to a place we didn’t know: a place where sadness, the sense of inferiority, unrequited love, the search for innocence, vulnerability were possible but strangely the pain they caused, the tears they provoked, brought a strange comfort. As if that music were a kind of amniotic fluid in which we could let our guard down and simply feel.
Other obituaries will give you more details and facts, but I prefer to get straight to the point: Brian Wilson was a kid who was abused (violently and emotionally) by his father and, by chance, he had a talent for music. The Beach Boys initially capitalized on this talent through surf songs that were, above all, imitations of other songs (or a sweetened plagiarism almost verbatim of Chuck Berry), but that wasn't enough for Brian, for whom the corset of surf music and the obligation to create hits were obstacles to his quest: the obsessive search to give vent to the music he heard inside his head.
One day Brian was driving and heard something coming out of the car radio that forced him to stop the vehicle and cry with joy and confusion: it was Be My Baby by the Ronettes, the second best song ever, produced by Phil Spector. What left him stunned was the grandeur of the sound, the detail, the way the castanets could be heard with the strength and precision of a tom-tom, how beneath that sonic blast the purest voices emerged, leading a desperate melody to the place of the highest beauty.
If you’ve ever seen a documentary about Pet Sounds or listened to the reissues that bring together the countless takes it took to create the album, you know that this is what Brian Wilson did: Pet Sounds isn’t the sound of a teenage band making hits – it’s the sound of an orchestra of 40 or so musicians trying to achieve, through obsessive repetition, the sound in Wilson’s head – a sound in which extraordinary melodies combined with vocal harmonies and complex orchestration to create the most painful of pop works about the most painful of pop themes: we’re growing up, we’re losing our innocence, we didn’t get the love we needed, we don’t know how to give it, and all of this comes from way back, from a place where it’s so hard to reach and where, instead of a slap, there should be a father’s hug.
What appears to be a work of beautiful melodies becomes almost maddening when we realize Brian's desperation: in Caroline, No he sings explicitly about the end of innocence, in Wouldn't it be nice he talks about love for a woman in a way that is no longer possible, almost childish, almost only tenderness turned into music – and tenderness would be the right word to describe Don't Talk (Put Your Head on My Shoulder) if the word didn't seem scarce. I know there's an answer reveals his search for ways out of his emotional labyrinth, and God only knows is the most perfect song ever written, because it says in a simple way what he feels in a complex way.
It's so immaculate that I feel like repeating every line. It opens like this:
“I may not always love you But long as there are stars above you You never need to doubt it I'll make you so sure about it
God only knows what I'd be without you”
It's amazing what happens here: a love song that opens with a declaration of failure ("I can't always love you") and ends with a kind of promise that can't be more than a manifestation of impotence: "Only God knows what would become of me without you."
And it continues in the same vein:
“If you should ever leave me Though life would still go on, believe me The world could show nothing to me So what good would live from me God only knows what I'd be without you”
And again it's amazing how sophisticated this all is: here we have a man who knows that the world would go on if she left him, it is what it is, that's life - but if that's the case, what's the point in continuing to live?
Wilson found in music the pure love that never gives up, that believes in itself and that perhaps love can save everything. Wilson put into his music all the love, all the beauty that was stolen from him at the age when love is never denied: childhood. And what he creates with these soaring melodies, with these complex harmonies, is a beauty so suffocating that it seems as if we have left this world and returned to the most benign of wombs.
Pet Sounds did poorly in terms of sales, and between pressure from the record company (and from the band itself), too many drugs and his already fragile mental health, combined with his obsession with taking pop music where it had never been, he broke down – Smile , the next album, was only finished decades later (and by collaborators, not by him); in its place came Smiley Smile , which retains some of Smile 's early recordings and includes songs by the rest of the band. It's a beautiful album – as are all of them until Surf's Up (from 1971, a great album).
But the world changed, the summer of love ended in war and death, the Beach Boys came to be seen as an anachronism even though their records were great, and Brian's mental health deteriorated to the point where for decades his life was dominated by a psychiatrist who almost stole the clothes off his back.
There were semi-recoveries, occasional solo albums, that tour that passed through Porto, but it doesn't matter: what Wilson had to do was done, starting with Pet Sounds , from 1966, and ending with Surf's Up . Brian Wilson, a guy who grew up taking a beating from his bully father, tried, through music, to create beauty that would overcome the pain he grew up with, he tried to create music that would replace the love he didn't receive.
It may not have worked for him, as he has lived a life of suffering – but it was the exact salve that millions of us, all over the world, for decades now, have needed to be able to live with our own pain. So many years later, Pet Sounds is still a mystery, it still brings me to tears, it still makes me step out of my body and believe that something more beautiful is possible.
Brian Wilson, an absolute genius, perhaps the only one of the second half of the 20th century, was given deuces at birth and gave us aces: love him as you love your greatest loves, don't let this music die, teach your children not to be afraid of vulnerability because it was vulnerability that gave us God only knows . Only God knows what we would be without Brian Wilson.
observador
