Love ‘Pet Sounds,’ But Don’t Forget BrianWilson’s Simple Early Stuff
In the spring of 1990, several years into the AIDS epidemic, the marvelous Doonesbury cartoonist Garry Trudeau broke comic-strip ground by having an endearing gay character, Andy Lippincott, discover he was dying from the virus.
One of the storyline’s many challenges, all of which Trudeau aced, was how to illustrate the final moment. His solution: Andy passed away peacefully on a note of bittersweet pleasure, listening to the long-awaited CD release of the Beach Boys’s Pet Sounds.
Life mirrored art this week, albeit in a different context, with the death of Beach Boys and Pet Sounds mastermind Brian Wilson. He was 82 and there were probably times along the way when he felt like he was eight hundred and two.
There’s no “probably” about Wilson’s place in early rock ’n’ roll. He’s embedded in the pantheon, alongside Chuck Berry, Elvis, the Beatles, Bob Dylan, the Temptations, Little Richard, the Stones, Jerry Lee Lewis, Aretha Franklin, James Brown and, well, you get the idea.
There’s also no “probably” that the many hundred eulogies about Wilson will all include the phrase “troubled genius,” or some close synonym, because he was both.
In the mid-1960s, by which time his and the Beach Boys’s legacy was firmly established, his already fragile mental health cracked under the twin hammers of fame, with its resultant expectations, and drugs. Over the following decades, while he still made music, he also spent months in bed, ballooning to 300 pounds. He spent years as either the patient or the prisoner of 24/7 caretaker Dr. Eugene Landy, who arguably both saved him and exploited him. He had verbal and legal battles with Mike Love, the bandmate who helped write and sang many of Wilson’s songs. There were stretches when Wilson forgot many of those songs.
In conversation during those years, Wilson was cordial, fragile and distractable. Passionately as he could still rhapsodize over the music of Phil Spector, there were holes in his memory. He needed help to get through life and to his credit he accepted that. After Landy, whom he liked until he didn’t, his shepherd became his wife Melinda. They were married for about 20 years until she died in 2024 and it wouldn’t be surprising if her death hastened his own decline. Less than three years ago he was still doing live shows, albeit with help from his friends.
Rubbernecking Brian Wilson’s chaotic life, with its tangled mix of epic Shakespearian tragedy and mundane arguments over royalties, has been a running pop music pastime for the last half century. His death has already triggered a collective recap, reinforcing the fact that in the end all of that mostly just feels sad.
Fortunately, there are also the songs. That’s not sad at all.
To many critics and fans, the surfing songs and car songs that enriched top-40 radio from 1962 to 1966 were opening acts to Pet Sounds, which triggered only a mild ripple when it was released in 1966 before later being coronated as Wilson’s masterpiece.
People who know music well have said that. Paul McCartney, for instance, has said it. They love its pristine production, the seamless flow. The months Wilson spent in the studio, hearing every note of every harmony and driving singers and musicians to match the sound in his head, were one of the reasons Bob Dylan suggested Brian should donate his ear to the Smithsonian.
It’s a mistake, however, to dismiss what came before Pet Sounds as warmup pitches, an exercise that loosened up Wilson’s ear before the real game started.
“Fun, Fun, Fun” lacks the sophistication of “God Only Knows.” That doesn’t make it a lesser record. Measured against its expectation — to sound great on a car radio — it is arguably even more effective.
Wilson didn’t come out of a classic composition background, and by his own account, he didn’t write a song until he was 19 and trying to impress a girl. Much as he loved vintage music like Gershwin’s “Rhapsody In Blue,” his main credential was that he understood how so much of music intertwines. He created “California Girls,” he said, partly from blending the Drifters’s “On Broadway” with Bach’s “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring.” When he wrote “Fun, Fun, Fun,” he was thinking of Chuck Berry’s “Nadine.” With “I Get Around,” it was the Regents’s “Barbara Ann.” He traced “In My Room” back to “Ivory Tower.”
For “Surfin’ U.S.A.,” he reached into the 1950s rock ’n’ roll on which he had grown up and reworked Chuck Berry’s “Sweet Little Sixteen.” In that case, he perhaps overborrowed, which is why Berry sued and got a co-writing credit on “Surfin’ Safari.” Oops. But Wilson had turned a great record into another great record, and purely as an artistic achievement, that’s impressive.
Most famously, of course, Wilson loved vocal harmony. Some of it echoed rhythm and blues vocal groups, like the Mystics doing “Hushabye.” More of it harked back to the Everly Brothers, the Four Freshmen and the Hi-Los. If you want to hear Beach Boys harmony a decade before the Beach Boys, check out the Hi-Los.
Wilson also famously admired Spector, though he never built a wall of sound for the Beach Boys. Wilson went to school more on Spector’s propulsive rhythms and signature production touches like the drums that kick off the Ronettes’s “Be My Baby.”
Wilson was so enchanted by “Be My Baby” that he wrote a song he thought would make a great sequel for the Ronettes, “Don’t Worry Baby.” Spector hated to record anything for which he couldn’t take a writing credit, so Wilson recorded it with the Beach Boys. Although it was relegated to the flip side of “I Get Around,” a high school swagger song that became a №1 hit, I would personally argue that “Don’t Worry Baby” is the Beach Boys’s best record. Among those who have agreed with me on that point is Wilson himself, although at different times he may have said the same thing about other Beach Boys records. His thoughts roamed.
“Don’t Worry Baby,” with lyrics by Roger Christian, turns a drag race drama into a metaphor for everything that makes teenage relationships — or maybe any relationship — the most important thing in your life.
Literary merit aside, it’s just a lovely record. After opening with the same drums as “Be My Baby,” “Don’t Worry Baby” slides into typically superb Beach Boys harmony behind Brian’s ethereal lead vocal.
Favorite records are, of course, an individual call, and while we’re talking Beach Boys singles, I’d argue that the most underrated is “Surfer Girl,” a 1963 ballad that also features Brian. He wrote both the music and the lyrics for “Surfer Girl,” inspired by the sound of Dion and the Belmonts’s “When You Wish Upon a Star,” and while “Surfer Girl” isn’t “Stardust,” it’s engagingly evocative, a wistful reverie about a girl who’s just out or reach. Also in play: the brevity of our time against the eternal ebb and flow of the ocean.
That may be just me. But maybe the real point here is that Brian Wilson’s all along has worked on multiple levels. While musicians might have gasped in awe at the production details on “Wouldn’t It Be Nice,” the casual AM radio listener could have been just enjoying a catchy tune.
And then there was Andy Lippincott:
