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 six-foot-two, 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. 

Around that same time I got the chance to interview Wilson, who produced That’s Why God Made the Radio. I was allotted 15 minutes over the phone, and the publicist suggested I prep at least 20 questions. How is this possible, I thought, to ask and answer more than one question per minute? Reader, the phone call lasted nine minutes. I went looking for the interview audio this week, and on the third and final analog recorder I checked, there it was: 23-year-old me, trying to pluck fresh answers out of a legend who’d memorized the script decades ago. His lingo was charmingly stuck in the mid-to-late 1960s: “tunes for the concert,” “the girls and boys go crazy for us.” I asked how it felt to debut at No. 3 on the album chart with the new record, and his response was one of pure and total excitement. “Are you kidding? When we heard that we flipped! We flipped outta our goddamn heads! I couldn’t believe it, No. 3 outta nowhere—out of 200?! I said, ‘Guys, we lucked out with a No. 3 album,’ and they flipped.” 

As the conversation went on, Wilson’s responses grew shorter, or he’d ask me to repeat the question; he wasn’t annoyed, just running out of steam. Looking back, some of his brief, canned answers capture his appeal as an artist. Recalling one of his favorite memories, he said, “I first heard ‘Be My Baby’ on the radio, back in the ’60s, and I’ve never, ever gotten over it yet.” Speaking of touring rituals: “When I feel lonesome, I just talk to someone, and I don’t feel lonesome anymore.” There was talk of the Beach Boys—really, Love and Wilson—making another album together, and its directive would be to “capture that Phil Spector beat, and get that rock’n’roll going.” I wondered if anyone had told him that Spector was a convicted killer, but nonetheless Wilson’s positivity was astounding. At the same time, he could be brutally honest. Any favorite summer songs not written by the Beach Boys? “Nah, not really.” Any interest in playing the Grammys again next year? “Nah, not really.”

It initially bothered me that I’d gotten almost no quotes longer than a sentence, that I’d essentially failed, but over time I came to think of it as some king shit. If Wilson was stuck in time within his own mind, and “California Girls” is the Song of the Summer every summer, then that’s the reality we were living in for the purposes of our conversation. Hadn’t he given us enough? 

Wilson passed away this week, just shy of his 83rd birthday. In the days since, social media has been filled with tearful tributes; the most irreverent among them is the legion of fans commemorating Wilson on the Letterboxd listing for Norbit, the legendarily dumb comedy from 2007 where Eddie Murphy plays almost all the roles, including his butt-of-the-joke fat wife. This is because Wilson once said in a 2009 interview that Norbit was his favorite movie. It’s not clear if it was actually his favorite movie, or if he just repeated the movie he and a reporter were talking about immediately before he was asked, “What’s your favorite movie?” But again: If Brian Wilson said Norbit is a wonderful film, I’m not arguing with him. I’ll stream it this weekend, in fact. It’s just funny to imagine a man as extraordinarily sensitive as Wilson enjoying the crass stupidity of Norbit. 

Why do we love Wilson’s naiveté? I think it’s because it makes his all-consuming quest to actualize the vast, beautiful music in his head seem even purer, closer to a religion than a major-label recording career. Many popular musicians heralded as geniuses are pricks or assholes with egos—Dylan, Lennon, Kanye—but Wilson always maintained the role of the innocent. He’s the overgrown kid who put his piano in a sandbox and spent years trying to make a “teenage symphony to God” with SMiLE, one of the greatest “lost” albums ever (which he eventually revisited and released in 2004). 

Even the studio musicians who were at the mercy of his perfectionism for months—doing upwards of 25 takes per song—during the Pet Sounds sessions had nice things to say about him. In the 2015 documentary on the Wrecking Crew, those musicians made clear just how many uncredited parts they wrote for major pop songs in the 1960s; by contrast, they noted, Wilson would go around the room and either play or sing out every individual part to each of the 20 to 30 musicians. Sometimes, he’d be wearing a red plastic fireman’s hat.

I want to leave you with a quote from Wilson’s 2016 memoir, that I sometimes think of in my most anxious moments. He’s speaking about the disturbing voices in his head that emerged about a week after he first took LSD, the catalyst for a mental breakdown and subsequent musical breakthrough. “Listening to what’s in your head, especially when you’re a person with anxiety, leads to negative emotions. But they’re also a form of imagination. If you can worry about problems when there aren’t problems around, then you can also think of stories and songs when there aren’t songs or stories around. You can make things go from existing to not existing.” RIP, sweet king.