SUNDAY, 22 JUNE 2025

The Beach Boys were such an important part of my teenage years that I want to respond to the news of Brian Wilson’s death last week. They were the first band I saw live, when they played Birmingham around the time of the release of Good Vibrations (although they disappointed me, to be honest, because the vocal work was nowhere near as good as on their records, but I guess something as simple as having a cold could wreck the performance of a band whose sound is so dependent on harmonies). A few years later, a cassette of their music formed the musical background to a summer holiday when a friend and I hitched down to North Devon, found a house whose owners were away, and set up our tent on the lawn in their back garden. Nowadays I quake at the thought of doing that – how we escaped the attention of the local police, I have no idea.

Over the past week I’ve read and listened to several tributes to Wilson but a lot of the content went over my head when they started to talk about transposition and intervals and fifths, so let me make clear at once that I have no musical training or ability or knowledge – I can’t play an instrument or even read a musical score.  So my response is simply that of a fan who was listening to California Girls, Surfin’ USA, and God Only Knows when he was in his early teens before moving on to Surf’s Up when he was edging nervously towards adulthood. I’ll talk about some of my favourite songs, but want to stress again that this is just my personal reaction to them.

Many fans feel that God Only Knows is closest to the perfect Wilson song. The lyrics are unexceptional, even bordering on the banal, and might cloy in a mediocre piece of music, but this lyrical simplicity is exactly what is required because Wilson’s music can then add depths of feeling and lift the predictable lyrics way beyond cliché: the verbal pyrotechnics which Van Dyke Park penned for later stuff like Surf’s Up would have been totally inappropriate and distracting. Perhaps Wilson’s key gift as a composer, musician and arranger was his emotional openness which he seemed able to access at will and directly express, cutting through thought and going straight to the heart: this made him a sensitive and unstable human being but lay at the root of his greatness as an artist. No matter how complex his music became, there was always an emotional honesty and transparency at its core.

This ability to express raw emotion runs all the way through the album on which God Only Knows appeared, Pet Sounds. This opens with the teenage romanticising of Wouldn’t It Be Nice (‘We could be married/And then we’d be happy/Oh, wouldn’t it be nice?’). How can anyone get away with such outrageous naivety? But through the beauty of the music, and especially the harmonies, Wilson does: there is an incredible freshness about this song which instantly dissolves any cynicism and sets the tone for the emotional directness of the whole album. The same openness of feeling laid bare and freely expressed appears throughout the album, including the songs which are darker in tone, such as I Just Wasn’t Made For These Times and Caroline, No. This immediacy of feeling which underlies every song arguably makes Pet Sounds the first ever ‘concept album’, achieving a rare aesthetic unity (compare the Surf’s Up album, which has some wonderful songs but is much more disjointed and fragmentary as a whole, probably because Wilson, beset by mental problems, played a much less central role in its making).

Good Vibrations  has become a kind of musical symbol of the ‘Summer of Love’, although it was actually released in the October of the year before, so I would have been thirteen at the time. Listening this week to the analyses of the song by critics and musicians made me realise something which it somehow makes us forget: how daring its structure is. This is no ‘verse chorus verse chorus middle eight verse chorus’: every time you think you have pinned the song down, it spins off in a different direction. Yet somehow it carried a mass audience along with all its twists and turns and became a worldwide hit, probably because the vocal work softened and disguised its experimentation. The only feature that might be labelled ‘weird’ or ‘psychedelic’ is the use of the theremin to create the sci-fi sound that is repeated during the song and dominates the outro. Yet somehow even this fits in and never becomes disruptive.

One of my favourite rock stories is about a night when several rock luminaries ended up for some reason at Wilson’s home. In my memory of reading about this impromptu gathering, Iggy Pop was telling the tale, although I have seen other accounts with various famous musicians as narrator. Apparently, Wilson had a group of these musical legends working on a folk song, Shortnin’ Bread, giving each of them vocal roles as he played the piano and pieced together a sort of barbershop rendition of the song (a version of Shortenin’ Bread (sic) eventually appeared on the unreleased 1969 album, Adult/Child). This brush with Wilson’s mad genius seemed almost to freak out Iggy, who, let’s face it, doesn’t seem like the kind of guy who would freak out easily. But I got the feeling that he recognised and respected Wilson’s authenticity as an artist in this odd episode. The point is that your music doesn’t have to be as obviously off the wall as that of Beefheart or Sun Ra or Tom Zé to make you a musical revolutionary: Wilson had moved way beyond his early influences such as barbershop and doo-wop and Phil Spector, and yet we can still hear those influences in all of his work, and they ground it in an overall sound which never seems wilfully way-out.

Heroes and Villains was released as a follow-up single but didn’t meet with the widespread praise and affection of Good Vibrations. I personally love the track and rate it just as highly, but I feel I understand why it didn’t achieve the same success. Unlike Good Vibrations, where the challenges of the song’s structure are smoothed over, and partly hidden beneath, the lyrical images of sunlight on a woman’s hair and perfume on the breeze, Heroes and Villains, despite being rooted in real Californian history, has a more abstract feel and doesn’t offer us such obvious hooks. There is a sense that the artist is making this song purely for himself in a search for a kind of musical perfection and is no longer concerned about carrying his audience with him. If Good Vibrations is like a Matisse or a Monet in which the colours partly break free of their usual representational function but still contribute to a picture of real objects in the world, Heroes and Villains is more like a Kandinsky or Klee in which the colours and shapes become abstract forms that leave representation behind. Or, to use the simpler language of Mike Love, a member of the group who repeatedly crossed swords with Wilson: ‘avant-garde shit’.

The cover art for the album Surf’s Up is the polar opposite of many of their early record covers. Instead of bronzed young men grinning and carrying surfboards against a background of blue sky and sunlit ocean, or pop-art images of cars, the cover is a painting based on an early-20th century sculpture, End of the Trail, of what looks like a broken knight on an exhausted horse against a dark background colour which might still suggest the sea, but certainly not the sea on a bright Californian day. This is the surfing dream shattered.

The song itself has a modular structure that deviates even further from the basic  verse-chorus-verse of so much pop. It can be split into three parts: the first sounds like the beginning of a fairly traditional piece, maybe some kind of rock ballad, except for its extravagant and rather surreal lyrics, and we hear what sound like the first two verses, expecting a chorus to follow, but it doesn’t; in the second part, everything slows down and becomes monochrome and plodding, a dour trudge through the sand in a passage dominated by repeated chords on a piano and a lack of vocal harmonies; the third is a coda in which layers of beautiful voices soar above the bedrock of a bluesy piano before the song fades out.

The middle part of the song feels like the musical equivalent of the painting on the album cover. There is an exhaustion to the music, an obsessional quality to the chords of the piano as they repeat and lumber on but don’t seem to move us a single step forward. The lyrics describe, ‘A choke of grief/Heart hardened beyond belief/A  broken man/ Too tough to cry’. This is followed by a moment which, for me at least, is one of the most melancholy moments I have ever heard in a song. The vocalist sings ‘Surf’s up, mm-mm, mm-mm’, but the tone of voice in which these words are sung and hummed, words which should bring joy to a surfer, suggest someone who can no longer get joy from surfing or even from life itself: a ‘broken man’. Emotionally this is the low point of the song, and yet there is something in the undertones of the final hum which signals that this is the moment at which recovery begins, its winter solstice.

For the song has a final twist, and it is a glorious one. The middle section closes as a floating, high-pitched voice sings with a gentle freshness: ‘I heard the word/Wonderful thing/A children’s song’. And at once an explosion of typical Beach Boys harmonies bursts forth in a kaleidoscope of sound, and instantly all the monotony, the sterility, the desiccation of the middle section of the song is transcended. I must have heard this coda at least five hundred times in my life, perhaps a thousand, and my eyes still tear up when I listen to it. It is as beautiful as anything in the Beach Boys’ songbook, all the more beautiful because the rest of the song has earned it and we feel desperate for the splash of joy and colour that it brings. California dreaming is over, but will be reborn one day in the simple beauty of a children’s song.

I remember a conversation with one of my work colleagues many years ago which turned to the subject of the Beatles and the Beach Boys. I told him how highly I regarded the latter, that I found their work much richer and more textured than that of the Beatles, and I could see that he was shocked. He knew I was into Beefheart and Zappa and the Velvet Underground, and I was familiar with a lot of relatively obscure 60s bands that he was just discovering, such as Moby Grape, the Electric Prunes and the Electric Flag, and he seemed completely flummoxed that the same person could admire and love the Beach Boys. Perhaps he knew only their early work, or more likely his taste was for music that was closer to classic rock, something that was never the Beach Boys’ forte (Student Demonstration Time must be one of the most embarrassing wannabe rock songs ever recorded). In any case, we agreed to disagree and moved on.

I didn’t push the point but nothing has changed for me since. I still think the Beach Boys, or at least Brian Wilson, created music with much deeper feeling at its roots, and that the Beatles would simply not have been capable of making something with the emotional and artistic complexity of Surf’s Up. But I know others vehemently disagree with me. In many of the YouTube tribute videos I watched this week, arguments around this comparison of the two bands raged in the comments below, often quite bitter and personal in tone, which seemed disrespectful to both. I’m still undecided about whether beauty is in the eye of the beholder or whether there is a Kantian absolute in aesthetics, but at the highest level it becomes a talking point only, a matter of personality and taste which artist you prefer, and there’s no point getting worked up about it. It all comes down to vibrations and whether a particular artist resonates with us. And whether it is their earliest songs expressing the simple joys of the ocean and beach and youth, or the blend of idealism and melancholy of Pet Sounds, or the death and rebirth of the hippie dream in Surf’s Up, Brian Wilson’s music will stay with me ’til I die.