Brian Wilson: King Shit

Picture this: It’s late afternoon on a hot July day in Chicago, and you’re stealing some shade backstage at Pitchfork Fest, when security asks you and your friends to step aside. Incoming VIP. You then see the 6-foot-2, 73-year-old legend Brian Wilson stuffed into the passenger seat of a Zipcar, being driven onstage. He hobbles out of the tiny vehicle and to his right, maybe 10 feet away, are the actors Joan and John Cusack, proud Chicagoans and Beach Boys fans. Wilson sits down at the piano, awkwardly greets the crowd, and proceeds to perform Pet Sounds in its entirety. The once-in-a-lifetime surreality of this sequence of events fully makes up for the fact that Wilson’s singing sounds shaky. You swat away the passing thought that maybe this whole classic album tour craze has tipped towards elder abuse. You just saw Brian Wilson sing “God Only Knows,” nothing else matters.

This is one of my most cherished memories involving a famous person. Sometimes I still can’t believe it happened, though I shouldn’t be so surprised. A few years before this 2016 performance, I got another up-close glimpse at the business of late-era Wilson. With all his mental health struggles over the years, and now the grip of age, it was best to just be grateful for the moments when he did surface. He always seemed happy to be working. To celebrate the Beach Boys’ 50th anniversary in 2012, he reunited with Mike Love and the rest of the surviving members for a new album, That’s Why God Made the Radio, and a big tour. The date I saw, at the Beacon Theatre in New York, was like watching two different legacies merging in real time: Love, Al Jardine, Bruce Johnston, and guest drummer John Stamos working the crowd with the early ’60s surfer hits they’d toured behind for decades, and Wilson on an island out at sea, dissociating behind the piano for heavenly deep cuts and Pet Sounds songs. Same as it ever was.