MORE MISCELLANEY YOU MIGHT HAVE MISSED

 

Sobriety, if I may, is a singular emancipation—an event that arrives not unlike a telegram in the dark hours, bearing tidings, ominous but anticipated. Thirty-eight years prior, the crowning stone was placed atop a life dedicated to spontaneous mischief, and thus commenced an arduous, intricate pilgrimage toward a more measured existence. It was a time of blundering, of tentative exploration—one learned, not by precept, but by doing, by colliding against the furniture, as it were, of one’s own limitations. The classic narrative, as recounted by the devotees of Alcoholics Anonymous, is almost quaint: one pledges, with a grimace of resolution, to remain unsullied by drink, to accept—unflinchingly—the consequences. “No matter what,” they intone, as though the phrase itself were a talisman.

Permit me to observe: the consequences, whether clutched in sobriety or inebriation, are not so much a departure from chaos as a clarifying of its contours. It is as though the fog of dissipation lifted, not to reveal a new Eden, but the same labyrinth, rendered in sharper relief. Providence, in its inscrutable wisdom, kept certain hands from the tiller, for the early years of sobriety—while an improvement over the bibulous epoch—were something akin to a private demolition derby. The world was navigated with a map drafted by a dipsomaniac, the roads serpentine, the landmarks woefully misleading.

The detritus, of course, was self-generated—a concatenation of dilemmas, each demanding redress. The restoration was neither swift nor glamorous: it meant crafting apologies, reconstructing battered relationships, and at long last acknowledging one’s role in the parade of misadventures. The labor was Sisyphean, the pain stubbornly persistent, the repetition dreary. Gradually, the realization dawned: the proper aim was not to force the world’s multifarious phenomena into coherence with obsolete, mangled logic; rather, the challenge was to conjure coherence within oneself, to become someone who might make sense in the world as it stands.

Those old tempests—rages, fits of irritability, the paroxysms of the “dry drunk”—were but variations on a theme, all performed by the same maladroit orchestra. They never succeeded in persuading people, events, or circumstances to conform to parochial expectations. It was a misbegotten amalgam, a cacophony, devoid of melody. Authentic transformation, the kind that allows one to breathe with a briskness unknown to the bemused, is fundamentally a reversal—a relinquishment of the urge to conduct, a willingness instead to find the rhythm, to improvise as befits the evidence at hand. Only then, I submit, does the music begin truly to swing.

________________________

Now, as regards Billy Joel’s “Piano Man”—the archetype of the self-conscious balladeer, casting pearls before a self-conscious audience—it is, in its early measures, almost parodic. The harmonica, wheezing and plaintive, seeks resemblance to Dylan, but achieves something more akin to a department-store simulacrum of “Like a Rolling Stone”—sufficient to lure the casual listener, but never to stir genuine sentiment. The lyricism, striving for Cheever-esque gravitas, is overwrought, mistaking theatricality for insight. Harry Chapin performed similar feats, with perhaps more adroitness, if such is your proclivity. The composition traffics in a kind of pre-packaged melancholy, offering despondency in digestible portions to those who would have their sadness delivered in five-minute increments.

Yet, a salutary transformation occurs. Joel eschews literary excess in favor of conciseness, a fidelity to the architecture of pop. The ear, now privileged over the ego, becomes his guide. The melodies grow nimble, the words—pruned of superfluity—convey emotion with economy. “Uptown Girl” sparkles with retro bravado; “Just the Way You Are”—sentimental though it be—remains a respectable ballad; “Big Shot” delivers its pleasures without apology. Even as he flirts with the ponderous (“You’re Only Human,” the history-light “We Didn’t Start the Fire”), his mastery of tuneful fabrication deepens. This is, after all, the triumph of the craftsman over the would-be artiste—an inversion, rare and blessed, of rock’s penchant for pretension.

 

___________________________________________________

It was at this juncture that my own trajectory bent irreversibly: I procured, with some ceremony, a rapid cable connection to the internet. The ancient ritual of dial-up—those extraterrestrial chirps, the static, the benighted anticipation—engendered a distinct excitement. The slow reveal of a web page, the jerky procession of videos via RealPlayer, were, in their way,
exhilarating.

But the internet then, I hasten to add, was primarily a textual commons—one could read essays, articles, and, in so doing, become edified in realms previously unimagined. High-speed, however, ushered in a new era: articles shrank, graphics proliferated, and the corporate hydra seized dominion over the spaces frequented by users. It became a Babel of advertising, an unremitting parade of commercial enticement. Alas, the technology that once promised deliverance from solitude began, ironically, to entrench it. A tragedy, but one, I suspect, of our own devising.

Ray Stevens * Mr Businessman

 It's a dubious proposition when a compulsive jokester like Ray Stevens --Guitarzan, The Streak, Ahab the Arab--attempts to play catch up with trends and commence writing songs of a critical, scolding nature. Witness here his two-dimensional denunciations against the easiest of straw men targets, the American business executive. You can see that Stevens brainstormed over the wordplay in the lyrics--he was a clever rhymester if nothing else--but his judgment is shallow, let us say..shallow. But it sold, the public was buying, placing the song in the Billboard 100 where it reached number 28. But truthfully, the fad for topical songs passed quickly enough and to be honest no one, virtually no one, mentions this tune when Stevens is brought up in conversation. The song is painful to revisit, basically because it severely reminds me of what a naive and jerky student radical I tried to be in high school. I remember every stupid proclamation I said or printed in the school paper, and Stevens' lyrics echo the cardboard morality. But, to be sure, even pop geniuses make fools of themselves when they attempt to say socially relevant things in their music, an example being the Beatles emulation  of Dylan with their grating put down Nowhere Man. Had the tune been written and performed by a band from the Jersey Shore, critics would have crucified them for their horrible assumption that they had anything worth listening to. But the Beatles were the Beatles, after all, and got a pass and another hit on the radio.

Some words with Kim Simmonds of Savoy Brown, 1978

 

(I had a short but delightful chat with Kim Simmonds, lead guitarist
and leader for the pioneering British blues -rock band Savoy Brown back in 1978. They were touring
as trio supporting their new album Savage Return, and gave a killer set when they
made an appearance at the now gone Roxy Theater. That night Simmonds
did one of the finest, tastiest slow blues guitar solos I've ever heard in my years
of witnessing the best guitarists in the world. Simmonds was a very nice man and accommodating
in answering my questions. He passed away in 2022.
I will always remember how wonderful that guitar solo was.) 

In a small kitchen above the Roxy Theatre a converted neighborhood film house now serving as a concert hall, sandy-haired, fair-skinned Kim Simmonds leans back in a chair and sips from a Styrofoam cup containing Jack Daniels and Perrier. As the lead guitarist of the legendary Savoy Brown and one of the best British blues stylists, Simmonds recounts how he first discovered Black American music.

 "I guess it happened when I was a kid, in my teens," Simmonds says with a relaxed cockney accent, which is unusually mild-mannered for a respected rock star. "I'd been into rock and roll on the guitar, you know, and that later turned into rhythm and blues." He explains how he made the transition from "the Comets to a James Brown thing". "A short time later, I heard some blues records by Otis Rush, Muddy Waters, and other Chicago blues guys, and from there it was all over with."

 Simmonds recalls, "I decided I had to play guitar like Otis Rush or Jimmy Rogers, who played for Muddy Waters, and that the band I was going to be in had to play in the Chicago style". "Luckily for us, the audience seemed ready for something different. We formed the Savoy Brown Blues Band, and soon we had records out and commenced on tours in the States.…. 

Around 1967–1969, at the height of the white blues boom in rock music, Savoy Brown gained American notoriety. The band toured the U.S., playing small clubs, sweaty psychedelic ballrooms, massive indoor auditoriums, and skating rinks, and their audience grew gradually. The band produced a few classic songs that received frequent FM airplay, including "Needle and Spoon," "I'm Tired," and the brilliant "Train to Nowhere." These songs all featured the idiosyncratic vocals of Chris Youldon, who Rolling Stone once called "...The W.C. Fields of the British Blues".

 Savoy Brown did not have a breakthrough hit single, unlike their contemporaries like the Peter Green-based Fleetwood Mac and the originally blues-oriented Jethro Tull. Though the band didn't suffer from a lack of work, Savoy Brown remained on the lower tier, a band with a strong following that lacked the commercial power to push them over the top. However, Simmonds hasn't let the lack of mass recognition affect him. He says, pouring more Perrier into his cup, "I know it'd be very nice to play with very large audiences and get the kind of airplay others get. But I'm happy to play, really. If a song of ours from the new album (Savage Return) becomes a hit single, great, fantastic, but I can't sit down and write a 'hit,' something that deliberate". 

Simmonds explains, "I'd rather write a song just for the feeling and hope others find something they like in it". "I'm not putting down songwriters who do make a living writing very commercial material. It's hard work. How does someone sit down and write something for Sinatra? You must have a feeling for that kind of work; you must be into it. I admire people who can do that". 

He says, "For myself, the way I approach my guitar playing and the way I write songs, it has to be something I feel". "The audience, whether large or small, that my music attracts makes me happy. I guess you could say that I'm happy to play for anyone who wants to listen".  

The latest version of Savoy Brown, featured on Savage Return, is a trio, and the music leans more toward hard rock and less toward blues. During the performance, Simmonds appears less comfortable with the new set than he'd like. He lacks the outright egomania of Ted Nugent, the fluency of Robin Trower, and the bite of Ritchie Blackmore to maintain the spotlight as a constant soloist. Also, most of the new material is undistinguished, resembling any number of heavy metal tunes that people can hum from memory without knowing the title or artist.  

However, Simmonds remains a superlative blues guitarist, and his three traditional solos easily highlight the show. Like other blues greats such as Freddie King, Rush, and Johnny Winter, Simmonds combines speed with taste, flashiness with subtlety, and technique with emotion. These three solos cause one to wonder why Simmonds bothers with hard rock when he excels with more traditional blues. Audiences will be more receptive to what Simmonds does best someday. Meanwhile, Savoy Brown is a band trying its best to make a return onto the scene, and they are doing the best they can.In general, the show was a rousing good time, blessedly free of the obnoxious hype that makes most hard rock concerts endurance contests. Kim Simmonds loathes the idea of giving his audience less than his best, whatever the circumstances he's playing under. 

As the first show wandered out, a long-time Savoy Brown fan clarified the distinction between Simmonds and the other guitar hotshots in the world outside the Roxy Theatre simply but accurately. The fan said unblushingly, "The difference is that Kim Simmonds is a musician, not a rock star".

(Originally published in the UCSD Guardian).

 

THE STUFF FROM THE TOP OF THE CLOSET SHELF

 

Lester Bangs passed away April 30. In 1982, at age 32, a major loss occurred for both rock criticism and American literature.  Like hundreds of others who aspired to be tastemakers in music and add an inflamed commentary on the cultural turns of our time, I loved Bangs and his swagger, the rhythm of his prose, I loved how completely alive and hyperbolic his writing could be. He had the best aspects of Henry Miller and Jack Kerouac, but he also had a heart and a willingness to question his own motives, a recurring theme being when was he (and the rest of us) were going to finally grow up and stop treating musicians as heroes. Rather, Lester came to regard those he admired as flawed as he was, maybe even more so. His deep diving into the psychology of his own obsession with certain musicians -- Lou Reed, most notoriously, convinced me that just because some has a specific skill, even genius, for creating memorable art (whether music, poetry, novels, plays, film making, acting, painting) does not by default make them a saint, nor should an audience expect enlightened attitudes merely  because they do interesting things creatively. He seemed to be getting to the notion that art is not liberation or transcendence of the difficulties of a quirky mind, but rather was a symptom of something more problematic and intransigent.

 

 Bangs was a moralist and a realist  in his own fashion, and felt deeply when regarding his   subject, writing at times so empathetically that you'd think the wound was his own and not a character in a song, as in his splendid masterpiece on Van Morrison's "Madame George" when writing about Astral Weeks in the Marcus collection Stranded. What made Bangs unique was that he didn't project the poetic evocations or dysfunctions of rock music upon the larger culture--he didn't view rock music as a method of social critique--but rather as a means of self-examination. He often wrote badly, but at his best he could not equaled.

 

---------------------------

 

In future years,  the younger folks might be nostalgic as they reminisce about the supposed fun and convenience of Horton Plaza before it eventually became a dead mall now being repurposed. the truth of the matter is that even in its prime, it was an alienated space, full of architectural distractions, detours, and dead ends that seemed designed to magnify your unease and increase your desire to escape your sense of uselessness by exhausting your credit limit and begging creditors for an increase in your credit line. I  worked there for a number of years  as a bookseller and made my number one spot to see new movies, and over time you couldn't help by note the waning numbers of people coming to the Plaza, the number of stores advertising off-Holiday Sales with things up to 70 percent off, the closing of stores and the draping of butcher paper over the display windows with a sad sign promising a new retailer coming in soon, watching the

calendar pages fly away and noting again the stores were still vacant and that more stores had joined them, that Horton Plaza had become an empty series of angular paths, walkways, bridges to more locked up storefronts, a structural case of architectural schizophrenia where all the eaves, overhangs, arches and such unusual twists cast deep and despairing shadows over the dead concrete few have reason to walk.

 

_____________________________________

 

Someone on Quora a short shorty beginning with the sentence

“I am completely disappointed at your behaviour”. This is what I wrote:

“I am completely disappointed in your behavior” said Jen. I had just gotten home , drunk from the whisky I bought at a liquor store with the twenty dollars she gave me earlier to get some hamburger buns and party hats with. I parked the car on top of the mailbox and left the engine running while I staggered into the house, pausing to bend over, stick a finger down my throat and produce a loathing wretch of lumpy stomach content over the unmowed lawn. Now I stood on the porch, not even in the front door, while Jen glared at me.

“We’re going to have to reevaluate the terms of our relationship she said. Her voice was a harsh, trembling whisper, it had the texture of sand paper.

“But babe…” I tried to say something conciliatory, but the words never came when I tried to drop to one knee to beg her to forgive me like so many times before, but I lost my balance and fell down the porch steps, landing on my back. I was looking at the clouds in the sky through bare tree branches and power lines.

 

“I am beyond contempt here” said Jen. She went back into the house and closed the door behind here.

 

_______________________________________

 

There's a difference about caring less about music and no longer loving music that provided the soundtrack of your youth. It may be that you're simply tired of songs and albums that have been overplayed for decades. In that sense, it matters little if I ever hear any Pink Floyd records again, love them thought I do. And half the Led Zeppelin songs can also be consigned to the dustbin. Well, maybe not half, but at least two album sides of tracks I no longer get a thrill from, or songs that were weak to begin with. When you get older, your heroes from yore are no longer bulletproof, considering that by the time I turned 71 I had experienced the situations, loves, traumas , celebrations and catastrophes our friends Dylan, Cohen, Mitchell, Young et al adroitly crystallized in their tune craft. Many of us in the day sat around dark bedrooms and dens with the lights off, stoned or unstoned, listening to the heaviness of the message and thought we were really learning something about life. Aging, though, is the great equalizer , a very efficient means of changing the status and emotional attachments untested youth had on their record collections. Gauged against a few decades of actual lived experience, some songs still resonate , while others pale with revisiting. It helps if you've been a music writer and critic , a habit and occasional part-time job I've indulged myself in over six decades: the unreasonable standards I bring , standards hardly set in stone, has allowed me to have a private canon I can rely on when mood and manners require an unsullied equivalent of the prevailing zeitgeist. Also, it's not necessarily a matter of being uninterested in new music artists as such, as its simply an issue that new music striving for the love of the masses are written for young people and , damn it, I am no longer young. But I do have a considerable record collection. Let it be said that it's a wonderful thing when I can add a new and younger artist to my collection , though the instances are rare.

Lester Bangs passed away April 30. In 1982, at age 32, a major loss occurred for both rock criticism and American literature.  Like hundreds of others who aspired to be tastemakers in music and add an inflamed commentary on the cultural turns of our time, I loved Bangs and his swagger, the rhythm of his prose, I loved how completely alive and hyperbolic his writing could be.

He had the best aspects of Henry Miller and Jack Kerouac, but he also had a heart and a willingness to question his own motives, a recurring theme being when was he (and the rest of us) were going to finally grow up and stop treating musicians as heroes. Rather, Lester came to regard those he admired as flawed as he was, maybe even more so. His deep diving into the psychology of his own obsession with certain musicians -- Lou Reed, most notoriously, convinced me that just because some has a specific skill, even genius, for creating memorable art (whether music, poetry, novels, plays, film making, acting, painting) does not by default make them a saint, nor should an audience expect enlightened attitudes merely because they do interesting things creatively. He seemed to be getting to the notion that art is not liberation or transcendence of the difficulties of a quirky mind, but rather was a symptom of something more problematic and intransigent.

 Bangs was a moralist and a realist  in his own fashion, and felt deeply when regarding his   subject, writing at times so empathetically that you'd think the wound was his own and not a character in a song, as in his splendid masterpiece on Van Morrison's "Madame George" when writing about Astral Weeks in the Marcus collection Stranded. What made Bangs unique was that he didn't project the poetic evocations or dysfunctions of rock music upon the larger culture--he didn't view rock music as a method of social critique--but rather as a means of self-examination. He often wrote badly, but at his best he could not equaled.

---------------------------

In future years,  the younger folks might be nostalgic as they reminisce about the supposed fun and convenience of Horton Plaza before it eventually became a dead mall now being repurposed. the truth of the matter is that even in its prime, it was an alienated space, full of architectural distractions, detours, and dead ends that seemed designed to magnify your unease and increase your desire to escape your sense of uselessness by exhausting your credit limit and begging creditors for an increase in your credit line. I  worked there for a number of years  as a bookseller and made my number one spot to see new movies, and over time you couldn't help by note the waning numbers of people coming to the Plaza, the number of stores advertising off-Holiday Sales with things up to 70 percent off, the closing of stores and the draping of butcher paper over the display dows with a sad sign promising a new retailer coming in soon, watching the calendar pages fly away and noting again the stores were still vacant and that

more stores had joined them, that Horton Plaza had become an empty series of angular paths, walkways, bridges to more locked up storefronts, a structural case of architectural schizophrenia where all the eaves, overhangs, arches and such unusual twists cast deep and despairing shadows over the dead concrete few have reason to walk.

__________________________________

Someone on Quora a short shorty beginning with the sentence “I am completely disappointed at your behaviour”. This is what I wrote:

“I am completely disappointed in your behavior” said Jen. I

had just gotten home , drunk from the whisky I bought at a liquor store with the twenty dollars she gave me earlier to get some hamburger buns and party hats with. I parked the car on top of the mailbox and left the engine running while I staggered into the house, pausing to bend over, stick a finger down my throat and produce a loathing wretch of lumpy stomach content over the unmowed lawn. Now I stood on the porch, not even in the front door, while Jen glared at me.

“We’re going to have to reevaluate the terms of our relationship she said. Her voice was a harsh, trembling whisper, it had the texture of sand paper.

“But babe…” I tried to say something conciliatory, but the words never came when I tried to drop to one knee to beg her to forgive me like so many times before, but I lost my balance and fell down the porch steps, landing on my back. I was looking at the clouds in the sky through bare tree branches and power lines.

“I am beyond contempt here” said Jen. She went back into the

house and closed the door behind here.

_______________________________________

There's a difference about caring less about music and no longer loving music that provided the soundtrack of your youth. It may be that you're simply tired of songs and albums that have been overplayed for decades.

In that sense, it matters little if I ever hear any Pink Floyd records again,

love them thought I do. And half the Led Zeppelin songs can also be consigned to the dustbin. Well, maybe not half, but at least two album sides of tracks I no longer get a thrill from, or songs that were weak to begin with. When you get older, your heroes from yore are no longer bulletproof, considering that by the time I turned 71 I had experienced the situations, loves, traumas , celebrations and catastrophes our friends Dylan, Cohen, Mitchell, Young et al adroitly crystallized in their tune craft. Many of us in the day sat around dark bedrooms and dens with the lights off, stoned or unstoned, listening to the heaviness of the message and thought we were really learning something about life. Aging, though, is the great equalizer , a very efficient means of changing the status and emotional attachments untested youth had on their record collections. Gauged against a few decades of actual lived experience, some songs still resonate , while others pale with revisiting. It helps if you've been a music writer and critic , a habit and occasional part-time job I've indulged myself in over six decades: the unreasonable standards I bring , standards hardly set in stone, has allowed me to have a private canon I can rely on when mood and manners require an unsullied equivalent of the prevailing

zeitgeist. Also, it's not necessarily a matter of being uninterested in new

music artists as such, as its simply an issue that new music striving for the

love of the masses are written for young people and , damn it, I am no longer young. But I do have a considerable record collection. Let it be said that it's a wonderful thing when I can add a new and younger artist to my collection , though the instances are rare.

 

 

 

BRIAN WILSON

Brian Wilson died on June 11. It’s not a bold  to say he was a indisputably great artists of rock ‘n’ roll. Any rock pantheon that lacks his name is no pantheon at all. His work featured the most graceful and intricate melodies wedded with choir-boy vocal harmonies, a worldview that wished everyone could live the particularly American dreamscape of California. He was a man who heard sounds others couldn’t and was able to lay them out, obsessively, for audiences in a collection of brilliant music. He was an artist who changed the way millions—musicians and audiences—thought about popular music. Plainly, he was someone who cracked the code on new ideas of what was considered a good time and literally changed the world in doing so. Wilson changed how a generation heard music, and he was instrumental in changing how others created it. He was a prime mover in the “Youthquake” that would make the world we lived in more exciting, dangerous, experimental, and open-ended. This wasn’t something Brian Wilson set out to do. All he wanted was to follow his bliss and pay attention to the Muse that appeared to direct his best thinking.

What I remember about first hearing the Beach Boys’ anthem “Surfin’ USA” was that it was March 1963, I think. I was a ‘tweenager in Detroit, Michigan, and there was snow on the ground, the streets and sidewalks coated with dirty slush. Icicles still clung to houses and telephone poles. “Surfin’ USA,” a reworking of Chuck Berry’s sock hop classic “Sweet Little Sixteen” by Beach Boy leader Brian Wilson, was blasting out of a small transistor radio sitting on a kitchen lunch counter from top 40 station WJBK. The magic came through the static, I thought; it had great vocals and a killer guitar sound. But there was something more. The lyrics, mostly by Wilson, extolled the glories of catching waves with waterman lingo, with additional credit to the band’s lead singer Mike Love for a chorus amounting to call-outs of the best surf spots. It’s a tempting inventory of where the water hits the shoreline in full glory and power:

…Haggerties and Swamis (onside, outside, U.S.A.)
Pacific Palisades (inside, outside, U.S.A.)
San Onofre and Sunset (inside, outside, U.S.A.)
Redondo Beach, LA (inside, outside, U.S.A.)
All over La Jolla (inside, outside, U.S.A.)
At Waimea Bay (inside, outside)
Everybody’s gone surfin’
Surfin’ U.S.A…

A prophetic verse, in a way. To this day I don’t surf and neither did Brian Wilson. The Beach Boys’ music, specifically that of main songwriter Wilson, mustered fantasies of forever sunshine on golden beaches surrounded by beautiful girls in bikinis and guys and dolls catching a ride on longboards upon high-cresting waves that curled majestically to the sandy beach. That’s what that 11-year-old dreamed of. Wilson was ten years older, age 21, when “Surfin’ USA” was released, and though he didn’t learn to surf himself, the SoCal native learned about the culture from his younger brother Dennis, who became drummer for the sibling-dominated group. Brian Wilson became enthralled with the culture—the style, the lingo, the innocence of the easy-going ethos—and soon enough was composing paeans to the burgeoning sport.

The stories I’ve read indicate that Wilson’s toes rarely, if ever, trod a surfboard’s waxed surface. Being in a geographically critical area when white surfers brought the sport from Hawaii to the mainland, he composed a body of musical brilliance that introduced the rest of America and the world to the mystic wonder of California beach life. “Surfin’ USA” hit the charts in 1963, and nine years later my family drove across the country from Michigan to the West Coast, taking up residence in a town, name-checked in the song’s chorus: La Jolla. The legacy of our parallel paths resulted in two seismic things: the first being Brian Wilson’s avocation to capture the effervescent harmonies and tones he heard in his head onto record and have the magic embedded deeply in the Beach Boys’ singular work. The second was my eventual discovery of a world, soundtracked by the Beatles, the Stones, and Dylan, a world bigger than I imagined as a teen cloistered with a collection of 45s in my room during the harsh Midwest winters and sweltering summers. The second accomplishment was personal, yes, but it was seismic considering that the upgrade to my sense of things greater than myself occurred 62 years ago and that now that I’m edging just days away from turning 73, I remain intrigued, nearly overjoyed when good things occur. Wilson and many others were mentors of a sort, reinventing music forms, sounds, backbeats, and lyric alertness in ways that grasped a generation’s fancy.

The late jazz critic Whitney Balliet used the endearing phrase “the sound of surprise” to describe musical improvisation in its boldest and highest execution, and though Wilson was writing music using a different vocabulary, the three words present us with what the musician and composer’s body of work was: an expression of surprise, finding nuance and quirky-but-alluring side routes in melodies, baffling tone poems of unexcelled vocal harmonies, oddball middle sections, gradually intensifying wells of delicately layered sound shadings. Beyond this was the unshakable feeling of the artist himself being surprised by the music he was putting forth, the bits and pieces given to the famed collection of Los Angeles studio musicians called the Wrecking Crew, woven, stitched, and embroidered into the kind of complexity—subtle but listener-friendly—that widened the soundscape of pop music radio. One proceeds into these descriptions at the risk of reducing a great artist’s work into a slender set of categories, but it’s not presumptuous to say Wilson didn’t wholly abandon the themes that informed the Beach Boys’ initial string of hits, which were innocence, fun, live and let live, good weather, and good vibes. Back to the first verse of “Surfin’ USA,” where the singer speculates what it would be like “If everybody had an ocean”…

If everybody had an ocean (ooh)
Across the U.S.A. (ooh)
Then everybody’d be surfin’ (ooh)
Like Californ-i-a (ooh)
You’d see them wearing their baggies (ooh)
Huarache sandals too (ooh)
A bushy bushy blond hairdo (ooh)
Surfin’ U.S.A. (ooh)

It seems sophomoric, but it’s worth noting that this dreamy hyperbole expressed a practical utopian spirit. It was a naïve but profound worldview the Beach Boys expressed quite a while before a generation told us that “all you need is love” or Scott McKenzie extolling his listeners to “wear flowers in your hair” if one made a pilgrimage to Haight-Ashbury. Wilson and crew hypothesized that if all of us had our very own ocean, the lot of us would focus on what’s important and get busy getting in the water and seeking a wave to become one with. This is a kind of spirituality, I think, where we return to the water from whence we came to experience the unfiltered miracle and thrill of feeling a part of the world as it dynamically moves, returning to one’s life on land again to do good work, only to “get into the water” again, to replenish the spirit and joy of feeling alive. A naïve way of going through one’s life, perhaps, and honestly, not all who surf are saints. The best of us can be reprobates and scallywags, at least briefly. But the surfing epiphanies Wilson felt early on continued through his lifetime as his music continued through different turns and emotional states. Freedom, serenity, peace, the capacity to be surprised and amazed—these were the burning fires in Wilson’s work, musically and thematically. He continued his search for the kind of feeling many might have thought was slipping out of our collective grasps, and it was wondrous for six-plus decades to follow his muse, to gather and record what he heard, adding exquisite and more intricate melodic structures and a near-Zen lyric simplicity that sought a precise and shining expression of the moment he was in. It’s well-known that Wilson had a lot of noise in his head, which crowded out the sublime melodies he heard, diagnosed with a schizophrenic disorder, subject to outbreaks of paranoia, problems made worse with the era’s defining plague of drug abuse.

We can speak at length of financial feuds within the band, bad management, eccentric antics, isolation from the world, incomplete album projects, a protracted period when he was literally taken hostage by controversial therapist Eugene Landy, who muscled his way into the songwriter’s business affairs… we could talk about it all, dissect it, speak of Wilson’s travails in several dozen ways, but doing so would put a cold sheath over this great artist’s music. The music prevailed. Wilson recovered to varying degrees, most notably with Brian Wilson Presents Smile, a 2004 recreation of the legendary Smile album, which Wilson abandoned in 1967 because he thought the project was somehow cursed. The release was a hit with fans old and new, and, buttressed by rave reviews from flabbergasted critics, the project reveals what the intended sequel to The Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds album would have been like: an adventure in new sounds and textures and brilliantly crafted harmonies, ethereally crooning the poetic esoterica of lyricist Van Dyke Parks. It was an art-rock of particularly American designation, a restoration of a masterpiece to the highest ranks of greatest albums ever made.

Zen was mentioned earlier, and it’s appropriate to think briefly on Wilson’s minimalist masterwork, “Good Vibrations.” Broadly, Zen is a school of Buddhism that emphasizes achieving enlightenment through meditation, self-contemplation, and intuition rather than faith and devotion. It focuses on direct experience and perceiving things as they are. Brian Wilson, raised Presbyterian in Hawthorne, California, embraced the counterculture of the mid-’60s. Though not a practicing Buddhist, he felt the vibe of the time and ideas of free love and higher consciousness. He shifted his focus from surfing to seeking a unity of mind and senses, connecting with a greater sense of Totality. He was fascinated with the direct experience of the world, without abstraction or theory, and “Good Vibrations” was a tone poem of gliding grace, an imagist poem of being in what’s routinely called the “aha!” phenomenon, when the world in front of you is revealed as it is, free from menta

Wilson pursued what the American philosopher John Dewey termed “the aesthetic experience,” the state of full engagement with the world and discovering unique ways through an experience. We can be honest here and realize that the composer genius was neither intellectual nor wholly in search of divine knowledge. He was a sensualist creating sound tapestries that would ease a mind rushing with ideas odd and confusing, making an art that would return him again to an elevated tranquility. Superficially, “Good Vibrations” is simply the admission of one man to another that a woman he’s seen but barely knows gives him a positive feeling, a kinship, an attraction he doesn’t quite know what to do with but intends to explore deeper, experience deeper, come to know full well what these new “good vibrations” are. It’s a search for meaning, a meaning found outside his own inventions and in the world with another person who invites him to have a parley that is mysterious and profound. It’s the sweet seduction of the innocent, we might say, and we might think this is a naïve narrative leading to mere sexual awakening. Understandable, but we hear the words—simple, declarative statements of wonder—and we hear the voices that sing them, arranged in delicately contrasted layers, low, middle, and high ends of the vocal range rising, coasting on an ethereal stream. The effect is marvelous, one of a kind, the plain speech of the Beach Boys blended with Brian Wilson’s brilliance for symphonic impressionism on a small scale. This song is literally an orchestration, presented in short but effectively placed sequences that bring their own euphonic nuance to the simple glee of Mike Love’s lyrics. An astonishing effect, an element that makes “Good Vibrations” a masterpiece. The young man describing his need to understand what he’s feeling with no barriers is of itself unmoving, but combined with the music, it enlarges the description, sonically dramatizing what words alone struggle to get across.

Toward the end of the song, the choir-boy harmonies arise as if they were a sudden blast of brilliant sunlight burning through a dark cloud layer, revealing everything, radiating things profound and nearly unspeakable. Those voices, shifting through keys and wordlessly trilling into the fading light of sunset until the song finally, slowly goes quiet, as though to slumber until the next day arrives. This song sees nothing less than a prayer that these moments remain with us and that we might rise to a new day with open hearts and clear minds. Brian Wilson struggled for those moments, to express them in music and share them with generations that still find magic in his transcendental tunes.

(Originally published in the San Diego Troubadour. Used with permission.)