Less than four years separate Surfin’ Safari, the Beach Boys’ first studio album, from Pet Sounds, their eleventh. Brian Wilson was 20 years old when the former was released; he was still 23 when the latter, his masterpiece, came out. Even that only hints at the relentlessness, the whirlwind out of which Wilson pulled his songs, single after single, album after album. In that time, the group went from teenaged California nobodies to international superstars to, in much contemporary critical opinion, pigeonholed has-beens. They toured constantly, playing well over a hundred concerts a year, across the United States and as far afield as Europe, Australia, New Zealand, and Japan. In the midst of it all, in 1965, Brian Wilson had a nervous breakdown.
It’s hardly surprising. Wilson had been forced to grow up at supersonic speed. At the Beach Boys’ outset, he was an ungainly combination of ambitious and diffident, a deft but derivative songwriter, a solid but unremarkable guitarist and bassist, a studio client, letting others produce and engineer, letting his abusive father Murry call the shots for the band. By the time of Pet Sounds, Brian had taken the reins. He had fired his father. He had mastered the techniques and potential of the recording studio to an extent unprecedentedly audacious in the pop realm. And the songs: the songs had become like nothing else on the radio, expansive, intricate, ravishingly old-fashioned and bewilderingly avant-garde at the same time. And then, during the making of the follow-up to Pet Sounds, the legendary sunken cathedral that was/is Smile, he had another breakdown.
I have a theory about Smile. The lyrics, by Van Dyke Parks, were really the first time that Wilson was composing to words that fully matched the musical style he had achieved: naive yet elusive, playful yet pensive, familiar yet enigmatic, savvy yet shot through with subconscious impulses that even its creators probably couldn’t quite articulate. Up until that point, Wilson had been working with lyrics almost banal in their straightforwardness. Isn’t my car faster than yours? Remember all those fun things we did last summer? My girl just dumped me, can you make me feel better? Wouldn’t it be nice if we were older? The power of the songs was the way Wilson’s music could supply the very real tangle of emotion that such situations, however modest, could elicit, and how profound and revelatory such emotions might feel to someone in the thick of it, feeling love and lust and heartbreak and jealousy and power for the first time as they fumbled their way toward adulthood. And the more I learned about Wilson himself, the more I thought that he was, in a way, the same: a person who craved emotional simplicity and clarity but, at the same time, was unexcelled at creating pop music of emotional complexity and ambiguity. Maybe, in trying to finish Smile, he realized that he would never square that circle.
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Way, way back in another era of online life, I argued that one of the essential elements of Brian Wilson’s harmony was a gravitational pull toward the plagal—toward subdominant and pre-dominant chords, the harmonies that more conventional progressions pass on the way to a conventional dominant-tonic resolution. I still think that, but it’s really only one aspect of how his music behaves.
The quintessential Brian Wilson move is a sudden, unexpected tonicization, a brief slide into another key. He first experimented with this in the middle of a phrase or section: both “The Warmth of the Sun” and “All Summer Long,” for instance, feature verses that momentarily twirl a flatted third away from the home key. In other songs, Wilson would shift up a half- or whole step when going from verse to chorus, a trick he picked up from Four Freshman arrangements but made his own. “Don’t Worry Baby” does this, as does “Don’t Back Down.” “Girls on the Beach” is a particularly gorgeous example, the E-flat verse swooning into an E-major chorus, then doing the same move in the middle of the verse so the next chorus can land on F.
That all these zigs and zags still sit sonically and solidly within rock-and-roll and doo-wop contexts anchors their fluency. Those styles, designed to establish and reiterate the home key with maximum efficiency, become the master keys with which, Wilson realized, he could unlock any door he wanted. On the 1977 album The Beach Boys Love You—practically a Brian Wilson solo project, and one of the weirdest, wackiest, and most truly wonderful things the man ever did—such shifts have become almost second nature to him, as natural as breathing. The it’s-my-fetish-and-I’ll-sing-if-I-want-to “I Wanna Pick You Up” starts in F, turns that F into the F-minor submediant of A-flat, then takes a detour into a couple of completely unrelated iv-ii progressions before dropping back into F for the chorus, yet the whole thing feels as cozy and lived-in as a favorite sweater. “Solar System” is practically an encyclopedia of how Wilson can pull far-flung keys into a song’s orbit. Stepwise sequences, major-minor substitutions, bass lines that suggest one progression while the chords suggest another: everywhere you listen, there are multitudes, and suddenly Wilson’s almost absurdly childish celestial ruminations are crossing interplanetary distances.
The effect is of there being more there than is actually there, of feelings and implications and realms just out of reach of language, of intellect, of the possibilities of a two- or three-minute pop song. It is intensely romantic, in every sense of the word: emotional, novelistic, philosophical, historic.
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The light bulbs of Wilson’s inspiration were fairly consistent in his telling: the Four Freshman, Johnny Otis playing early R&B on KFOX, The Ronettes singing “Be My Baby.” But the one that I find the most intriguing and revealing is Rhapsody in Blue. Wilson first heard it as a toddler, on a record his mother would play over and over again, and he spoke often of the indelible impression it made. Except it wasn’t actually Rhapsody in Blue. What imprinted itself on Wilson’s psyche wasn’t Gershwin’s original, but Bill Finegan’s arrangement of the Rhapsody, as performed by the Glenn Miller Orchestra.
Listening to it, it all becomes so obvious. How Finegan thickens up Gershwin’s harmony with sweet sixths and ninths; how he massages the opening chord progression closer to a standard blues; the vocal quality of the solos by Bobby Hackett and Tex Beneke. The bulk of the arrangement is given over to the famous Andante theme, and it’s easy to hear just how many principles Wilson absorbed from it. Just like the Andante, Wilson’s melodies alternate between compact, mesmeric grooves and expansive flights into vaulted-ceiling spaces. Just like the Andante, Wilson’s phrases orient themselves not around the final cadence, but around the most charged harmonic fulcrum, the point around which the music can ebb and flow in multiple directions.
But where I hear the arrangement’s most provocative influence is in its abridgment. Finegan and Miller aren’t trying to hide that they’re shrinking fifteen minutes of music down to three. In fact, they’re leveraging it. They’re assuming you’ve heard the whole thing. As the chart flits opportunistically from theme to theme, it’s counting on you remembering the piece and supplying some sense of the original’s breadth and depth.
Wilson’s songs do that, too, except the memories they call forth aren’t musical, but psychological. As the music feints toward simultaneity, as it gives us an aural glimpse of the space between its bright, chiming surface and its intangible emotional underpinning, it prompts us to fill the space with some corresponding moment in our own memory, and, suddenly, it’s all there, in the middle of the experience, a flood of feeling, cushioned by close harmony, buoyed by a soaring falsetto, propelled by an earnest backbeat.
That conjuration was Brian Wilson’s superpower. And, like any superpower, it seems to have been both a gift and a burden. Maybe that’s why in person, in interviews, in his memoirs, Wilson could come across as so disconcertingly naive, so arrestedly childlike, some kind of holy fool. Certainly, the task he set himself, again and again—distilling entire worlds of hurt and joy into three-minute tracks—was a fool’s errand. That he pulled it off so often was the miracle.