A Tribute To Brian Wilson
The Gift of Good Vibrations
Brian Douglas Wilson
20 June 1942 - 11 June 2025
By Jay Luster
When I asked to write a farewell to Brian Wilson, the visionary of The Beach Boys, I knew immediately I had bitten off more than I could chew. How do you encapsulate a story as rich in personal and cultural relevance, but is also as well known as Brian's in a couple of thousand words or less? The answer is that you simply can't. What I can do is tell you what Brian and his music meant to me, and how much he will be missed. Although the band had been around since November of 1961. I didn't learn of The Beach Boys until the spring of 1975. When I was 13, my big sister Sue plopped me down on the floor in front of her Technics stereo, slapped her headphones over my ears and blasted The Best Of The Beach Boys at a decibel level roughly the equivalent of Apollo 11 taking off. Up to that point, my taste in music was more like my parents as teenagers. Growing up in the 60's and 70's,during the summer months my parents would play 8 tracks of Glenn Miller, The Andrews Sisters, Benny Goodman, and the Borscht Belt comedian Allan Sherman. During the school year my exposure to music was dished out by Carl DeSuze, the morning drive DJ on WBZ AM radio out of Boston playing on my moms dirty white Zenith clock radio. As far as I know the clock never worked, but the radio worked just fine. My only reason to listen was for school closing during snow storms, but between those listings, they would play a dizzying array of music ranging from Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra and Tony Bennett to Elvis, The Beatles, and The Ventures. Even at a very young age I noticed that some songs seemed to reach out of the radio, grab you by the ears and pull you in. For example, the irresistible nervous energy dripping from Elvis's Hound Dog, to the insistent groove of the Hawaii 5-0 theme song, I was aware that music was important, but the snow closing was what really counted.
Into this wide world of 60's and early 70's music, Sue had thrust me, and I've never looked back. Eventually she gave me that record, plus Summer Days, Pet Sounds and Beach Boys Concert from 1963. Later, I spent my paper route earnings on the albums Spirit of America, and Endless Summer Compilations, and saw of the album jackets, and sometimes of the record itself, most of the songs were written by the duo Wilson/Love. I obsessively looked for any information I could about these guys, and eventually found a book about the band. Again, I was blown away. From learning that Brian was almost completely deaf in one ear, and had a serious mental illness, their close call with Charles Manson, and the dysfunctional push and pull within the band over the type of music to make, as well as a host of other issues that crop up in families. Instead of recoiling from the horrors of the disgraced former doctor, Eugene Landy unethically isolating and dominating Brian, to the obnoxious and occasionally violent Murray Wilson, Brian's dad. Fortunately, I had no Landy doppelganger in my life, but my dad was loud and threatening, While it was occasionally terrifying, violence was "minimal," However, it was all too easy to believe Brian had written the escapist In My Room just for me. Nonetheless, the first line of the second verse, "In this world I lock out all my worries and my fears," is unflinchingly ironic. Try as you might as a child, you can't run far enough or fast enough to escape your worries and fears. Brian voiced that sad discovery in the song Until I Die. When death is impossible, and life is interminable, it's easy to muse about an autumn leaf being blown away.
The Beach Boys became popular for some of the most joyous and innovative music ever written or recorded. With their deep love, and focus on the California of their childhood, it's little wonder Ronald Reagan, America's only president from Cali, dubbed them "America's band." When they played on the 4th of July on the Mall in Washington DC, in '80, '81, '82 & '84 on the 4th of July they routinely drew an audience of 500,000+, and yet, after 1966, other than the odd greatest hits collections, the band all but disappeared from the zeitgeist of the late 60's and early 70's. Their music hadn't kept up with the times, but It was those greatest hits records, Endless Summer, and Spirit of America that pulled kids like me, by the millions, into arenas and stadiums. I remember me and my friends dancing on our seats in the old Boston Garden screaming our lungs out and pouring our hearts into every single word of every single song. None of us surfed, nor were we old enough to drive, yet the myth of an endless and joyous summer lit up Boston Garden that sleety November as if we were all roller skating on the Venice Beach Boardwalk.
As a grownup with a life, like everyone else, I had a career. First with the navy, and then eventually with the railroads. When I was injured and forced into an early retirement, I began a third career as a writer. Over the decades, I studied everything I could get my hands on about the rock and roll of my childhood, and decided to share that knowledge with the world. I began a blog that barely lasted three months before a publisher of a small magazine contacted me and asked me to join her staff. The word small is probably too big to describe exactly just how small the publication was. When I joined, the circulation was literally 6 subscribers.
After a year of toiling away for free, the magazine reached a peak of 35 subscribers. While this does seem, and actually is kind of pathetic, it gave me the freedom to get behind the velvet rope, with press passes and one on one phonetime interviewing genuine celebrities. At first I was clumsy and awkward, but eventually I was able to move on to bigger and more serious publications. It was then I realized I might be able to use my position to actually interview Brian. I did, twice. What I learned was what almost every other journalist before me had learned, Brian was kind of a lousy interview. His answers to questions were essentially monosyllabic, and it was nearly impossible to get him to open up, or even elaborate on the answers he was giving.
Brian had a childlike, whimsical sense of humor that showed itself in his music. Songs like Take Good Care Of Your Feet off of the Holland album, and I'd Love To Just Once See You from their Wild Honey record. When I had him on the phone, I sensed there was a jokester hiding under the quiet uncommunicative man. It turned out that I was right. My first chance to speak with him was when he was doing press ahead of his solo album No Pier Pressure. I asked him how he chose Zooey Deschenel to sing the song On The Island? His answer was, "we liked her voice so we invited her down to sing it."
Obviously that's not much of an answer, so I turned my attention from him directly to the music itself. I asked him if that song was based on Astrud Gilburto's song, The Girl From Ipanema? In a surprised voice, he said, "yeah." I waited a moment to see if he would elaborate, but he didn't. After a short pause, I said that this was the second bossa nova that he wrote that I was aware of, the first being Busy Doing Nothing from the 1968 Friends album. Again he seemed surprised and pleased that I had noticed, but he still wasn't really opening up. Finally, as I became desperate to get a usable quote from the man who was, without any doubt, my favorite musician, and the secret reason I became a journalist to begin with, I asked him if anyone had ever sent in a letter to tell him what their favorite vegetable was? At that point he laughed out loud and I think I had broken through, but unfortunately my 20 minutes were up and he had to move on to the next interview.
The whimsy I am talking about can be heard in dozens of his songs from both the Beach Boys and his solo career. The song Vegetables was originally released on an album called Smiley Smile which took the place of the stillborn SMiLE record. SMiLE was, in its day, probably the most anticipated record in music history. Pet Sounds, though misunderstood by the fans of the surf and car songs, it was recognized as a masterpiece within the music industry. On the heels of that, the band released Good Vibrations, which Brian called both a pocket symphony, and a teenage symphony to God. Whatever else it was, it propelled the band to Beatlesque heights of expectations that were soon dashed by Wilsons emerging battle with mental illness. He would eventually release SMiLE in 2003 as a solo record, which is where the song Vegetables took its rightful place on an album. I can't say for sure if SMiLE was the masterpiece Leonard Bernstien imagined it was going to be, but to his fans it was like welcoming your most eccentric, and favorite relative home after a long absence.
I had a second chance to interview Brian upon the eve of his Pet Sounds tour. He was equally as incommunicative as he was the first time, except this time he simply wouldn't open up. I asked him how he came up with the idea of using unconventional instruments and techniques in the studio, I knew, for example, there were no guitars in the opening song on Pet Sounds, Wouldn't It Be Nice, and that is what I was thinking about when I asked him how he intended to play the song on stage. His answer was, "exactly like it was on the record." I followed up, "Oh cool,with accordians?" and he said, "what?" as if he was surprised that the song actually used accordions instead of guitars. I don't know if he was pulling my leg, or didn't actually remember but it wasn't easy interviewing Brian. He was, after all, my musical hero and his music was in many ways my emotional support group. I told him that I had read in his autobiography and I wondered what it meant that he "played the studio?' His answer? "I don't know, what do you think it means? Of course I admitted right away that I didn't know what it meant, and though I can't be sure, I think he was disappointed that I didn't have an answer. We went on like that for another five minutes or so before he had to move on to talk to the next journalist. I did see him and his band three more times, and it was fantastic. The Pet Sounds concert, despite the lack of accordions, couldn't have been better. In order to reproduce the stunning Beach Boys harmonies he had 14 musicians with him, and they treated his music with the kind of respect you'd expect the London Philharmonic would pay to Mozart.`Later I saw him paired with Jeff Beck, and never in the annals of music has there been a more awkward pairing of eccentric superstars.
This is the first time I've ever written an article, any article, from a personal perspective, but as I said at the outset, Brian Wilson's music is personal to me, and I suspect it is to most everyone who's followed his career as closely as I have. The man reached heights of stardom seldom seen by anyone except the brightest and the best. He shockingly imploded on the threshold of his most anticipated triumph, and then slowly but surely put his life back together again. He is in the Rock and Roll Hall Of Fame as a Beach Boy, and he's in the songwriter's Hall Of fame, and he has won a couple of Grammy's, but I believe it is the personal depths of pain, and bubbles of laughter, as well as the exuberance and joy his music has invoked in me that makes losing Brian as difficult as losing a loved one. In fact, the last time I saw my sister Sue alive was when I visited her in Winnipeg shortly before she herself passed away. During that visit she had bought tickets to see the Beach Boys, who just happened to be in town during the couple of weeks I would be there. It was the MIke Love version of the band, which didn't include Brian, but there was this moment towards the end of the show when everyone was standing and some people rushed to the front of the stage because the music was drawing us in. I turned to Sue, who in that moment ceased to be my big sister, and became the young teenage girl who blasted Surfin USA into my brain. I grabbed her by the arm and asked if she wanted to get closer, she nodded her head yes, and I pushed our way through the crowd right up to the stage apron, where Mike Love, the Beach Boys lead singer, and the other half of the Wilson/Love writing team, reached down and shook her hand. The next day I got on a plane and returned to Richmond, Virginia and Sue passed away shortly after that. When she introduced me to the music of Brian Wilson and The Beach Boys, that day she gave me the gift of good vibrations.
Love and Mercy,
Jay Luster