Brian Wilson Was an Exemplary American
Brian Wilson, the main composer and vocal arranger for the Beach Boys, famously known as “America’s Band,” has died at age 82.
Born in the suburbs of Hawthorne, California, Wilson was a very typical American of the back half of the 20th century—a Hawthorne High quarterback, with a mean mofo of a dad who both abused and inspired him. In his band there were two younger brothers, Dennis and Carl, to cosset and feud with; his snide and slightly bullying first cousin, Mike Love; a high school pal, Al Jardine; plus neighbor David Marks, along for the ride. His gumption and genius, and his associates both in both music and business, created a worldwide never-ending machine of lucrative pop art.
With Wilson’s yen for George Gershwin, the Four Freshmen, and Chuck Berry running through his curious (later declared mentally ill) brain and his ear (he famously was deaf in one of his pair, possibly the result of abuse from his father Murry Wilson), his life story and most importantly the copious flow of hit singles and often equally rewarding album tracks are as Americana as it gets. And they stayed compelling long past the time he was hitting the top 10. (The Beach Boys had 55 singles in the top 100, but—except for the Christmas perennial “Little Saint Nick“—the last top 10 hit Wilson wrote was 1966’s “Good Vibrations,” probably the most ambitious and gorgeous 10 pop single of all times.)
California’s image in worldwide culture of custom cars and the brave and reckless young men who raced them, of lovely lissome lasses and the headstrong surfers who courted them, of “suntanned bodies and waves of sunshine/the California girls and a beautiful coastline” as Mike Love wrote and sang in their 1968 song “Do It Again,” was crafted by Wilson and his cohorts, and only their voices could have fully convinced the world it was all true. (Because he did what he did, it was.) Wilson was one of the truest ambassadors of American lifestyle and joy our nation created. With his brainiac onetime pal Van Dyke Parks on lyrics, their first aborted in 1967 then completed in 2004 project Smile attempted to prove, as I wrote on its 2004 release, “that even in the wake of a British invasion, American music and American voices and the spiritual history of America still mattered.”
The CD that was in my car player last night after a 10-hour drive through the heartland of the state he enduringly mythologized was by the Beach Boys: disc 3 of their perfectly perfect first box set, Good Vibrations. (The Beach Boys were and are and will continue to be a touring and record-selling machine—Brian had not been a performing member of the band for the past
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