The album that truly awakened me to the Beach Boys was ‘Surf’s Up’. Released in 1971, rock’s finest year, it was not regarded as one of their great works. Brian Wilson, the genius behind the band, was largely out of the picture, suffering from from drug and mental health issues. But that sound. I had never heard anything like it.
Still in my early years of senior school, I was still discovering the music that would soundtrack my life. I was into a weird mixture of T. Rex, Simon and Garfunkel and Neil Diamond when I came across Surf’s Up. It blew my mind.
I didn’t think Beach Boys and Brian Wilson. I just thought Beach Boys. I had obviously heard, and liked, their work in the 1960s, at least the music that followed Pet Sounds. But liking turned to obsession when I heard this album.
The albums followed. Holland was a favourite, but mostly they were patchy affairs. What I didn’t know was that Brian Wilson’s powers were diminishing and for the most part the remaining members couldn’t fill in the gaps he was leaving.
If 1971 was rock’s greatest year, the 1980’s was unquestionably its worst. And I discovered things like girls and beer anyway. For years, I became prematurely old, believing that music was crap these days, not like when I was a kid.
The 1990s saw a renaissance in interest and I started buying music again. Then, in 1998 Brian Wilson released a solo album: Imagination.
The album itself wasn’t a classic but it had a few high class songs including one great one, Your Imagination. It was like he had never been away. Brian had reactivated my interest in music and sent it into the stratosphere. I was desperate to listen to as much music as possible, I dived into Brian’s back catalogue and bought the lot.
Around the millennium, incredibly Brian Wilson started to tour again. He stopped touring in the 1960s because a) he hated it and b) wanted to stay in the studio. In 2002, he played the Royal Festival Hall in London. Alongside Ray Davies and James Dean Bradfield, we were there.
With his stellar band, he performed Pet Sounds in its entirety. There was not a dry eye in the house. Sure, he spent the evening reading the lyrics from a screen, his vocals weren’t what they were, but it didn’t matter. It was one of the greatest nights of my life.
I saw him on three further occasions, all in Bristol, and met him twice. He had no idea where he was, but he came alive when the music played. And he signed my copy of Pet Sounds.
Brian Wilson’s great genius was best illustrated by Pet Sounds, a record he mainly wrote and produced at the age of 22, working with the legendary Wrecking Crew studio musicians. His health imploded during the aborted follow-up Smile, which was finally released many years later, and his output became sparse and erratic. But some of it was still fantastic, like Your Imagination and finally Midnight’s Another Day.
I am sad he has gone but I am not sad that he no longer suffers from terrible mental illness nor, more recently, dementia.
If you haven’t heard Pet Sounds, then listen. And listen to the album in one go. Then, when everything is quiet, be grateful that you were alive when Brian Wilson was.
