The Smiley Smile Message Board

    I felt the awesome power of Good Vibrations rip through my soul today. We had sat through endless minutes of Rod Stewart, Aretha, Four Tops, and every other oldies station classic you could think of. My patience paid off as the lovely sounds of Carl's voice hit the speakers. Immediatly I turned the radio full blast and gazed into the sun drenched landscape around me, the song sounded like it had never before to my ears. It's hard to appreciate the strange quality of the track when it's placed after "Little Pad" on the Smiley Smile album, but today I felt it. There's something so spiritual about the song, the sound of gospel singers screaming up to Heaven to make themselves known. I lowered the volume some right before the bridge and told my acquaintence of how special the song is to music. How many advances it had made, ones which have not been lived up to yet in 40 years of trying. I got a typical dead reply, The Beach Boys are a nerdy rock band. They're not cool so therefore I shall never even attempt to acknowledge their greatness.
   There's something strange about all of Brian's music when you hear it through the radio. There's some quality unique to their music, other groups have an array of identical look and sound alikes that plague the airwaves all day long. Brian's offhanded comment, "One day I will write songs that people will pray to." is so appropriate for my feelings of the band. I'm sure many here recognize the spiritual beauty in some of those damn songs. It is my feeling that the Beach Boys should've been unique messangers in pop music. They should've been more vocal about their ideas within music, rather than leaving a confused audience to make their own mind up of the changes. The musical advancements from the 1965 era to the 1968 era, are staggering. Brian Wilson had gone from ballad's like "Please Let Me Wonder", to super nerd cool Bossa Nova feels like "Busy Doin' Nothing". This was a man who could seemingly master any style of song and do it with that unique characteristic that I touched on previously. My intention here is to say that history has treated the group unfairly.
   If the "weird" side of the Beach Boys' music was more promoted and embraced then perhaps we'd hear some truly great music from the big guy. I refuse to believe that the guy who played "feels" for years straight to people, odd little snippets, is comfortable making Christmas albums still of songs he recorded to perfection in 1964. I want to hear the "Time To Get Alone" of Brian's hands now. He must be writing these things still!

I don't think history has treated The Beach Boys unfairly.  Their music is rightly lauded by the people who really know what's what, critics and fellow performers and musicians alike.  The problem I think you are referring to is their image on a wider scale with the general public who tend to think of them as 'fun in the sun' has beens - some nice records perhaps but of a bygone era and not of the status of The Beatles or The Rolling Stones.  IMO it is the group themselves who have been careless with their own legacy - always ready to chase the easiest and fastest buck and acquiesce in the ever diminishing returns of early 60s surf nostalgia (something which actually distorts and diminishes the greatness of those early years).  I'm not surprised your friend regards them as an uncool 'nerdy rock 'n' roll band' - that's the image they've been putting over for years. 

As to where Brian's head is at creatively speaking - I haven't the foggiest and wouldn't like to assume anything.

Amen Steve!

Whoever says history as treated the BB well, you got to be kidding me. Taken from one of my friends the Beatles from the plastic press have been proclaimed God and people believe it. The BB are considered to be second place, competition. No one remembers second place. Desper even one time spoke of it at Susan's convention last year. I don't remember most of it but it had to do with a single person's way of hearing sounds. Some are better then others at getting and others, well... aren't.  But personally Steve I don't think Brian is ever going to reach that peak again. I think he's done making teenage symphonies to God and making the greatest rock and roll albums ever. To like the music of Brian one must be set in realism and part must be dealt in what if's and having hope. Never hurts to dream though  :thewilsons

Brian needs to show us some new songs. Sit him down in front of the Friends album playing, and have him write songs in response to it. And make the recording sound human, not robotic.

Brian has given me more than i could ever have dreamed of.  He doesn't have to give me another jot of anything.

What if someone told Brian those words in 1964 after he had a bad day and felt like quitting?

We'd have never had the pleasure of hearing "Our Prayer".

To me this most recent "Brian is Back!" campaign has confirmed Brian just wants to be left alone. I don't think he's had the interest or desire to make great music since 1971.

Yeah, I know what you're going to say. If Brian didn't want to do it then it wouldn't happen. Well, I still think Brian is a nice person that wants to please people and not let his wife and managers down and that's why there has been output. If he were really hot to make music then how do you explain the 10 year gap between his first solo album and Imagination?

Easy

1988 first solo album
1989-90 Sweet Insanity
1992 he is removed from The Good Doctor's "care" and probably needed a while to readjust
1995 OCA, IJWMFTT documentary and soundtrack, not to mention marrying Melinda
1996 the Nashville disaster and the aborted Final Beach Boys album, Don Was and Andy Paley sessions
1998 Imagination
1999-present tour after tour, three albums, an amazing single, a Grammy, brilliant DVD documentary and performance... need i go on?

The man is taking a well deserved break.  Hopefully he's got at least one more album left in him, but if not I will be eternally grateful for all the great tunes he's given us over the past 45 years or so.

I may have the dates slightly wrong, but you get the point...

Awesome post Steve.

As I've said before (and I'm glad I'm not the only person who thinks like this)
If there is only one artist who is allowed to say "I've given you LOTS, I'm tired,
let me rest a bit..." it's Brian Wilson.He should be able to do what HE wants,
not what WE want...

But it's like that privacy argument with celebrities. Personally, you feel for the emotions of the person, not wanting them disturbed by incessant fans or photographers. But they are high profiled celebrities whose profession, besides whatever their specific talent is, is to maintain a level of high profile which will ultimately keep them in the spot light. Think of all the Britney Spears stuff, even things like photo's of her smoking hurts her financial gain none.

Brian Wilson as a name on a contract is as much as business as is Crest tooth paste. If Crest suddenly said, "Look guys and gals, we've given you a lot of tooth paste, and quite frankly, we're too tired to give out more", we'd all be out of luck. Granted we're dealing with a human and an art form, but i'm sure songwriting will one day be thought of in the same way as construction work. By the way popular music is going, the "real" artists like Brian Wilson may not have room in the professional world to release work.

Dude, in all personal respect, get your hand out of the sand. If it's going to be anything from now it is going to be robotic. I think he was done a long time ago making the mind blowing stuff he did then.


Ok, again you miss the point. Brian became more DETERMINED after the breakdown to make better songs. To spend more time on.  ::)

I don't buy it.

Perhaps musical genius fades away without being put into use, but musical knowledge does not. Brian knows a crap load about the theory behind music, even without his genius present he could compose better things than any of us could ever wish to.

I was always under the impression that Brian didn't know much about theory, thats why everyone was so amazed of his ability to put those melodies and harmonies together.

He knows a TON about it.

Remember,

-Brian was in a music composition course/class in High School. This where he would've learnt at least the basics of written music notation, chords, complex chords, rythms, etc. He would've been at least introduced to concepts which he could later flourish on his own at home.
-He studied Four Freshman records for YEARS. Complex jazz chordings and voices, very lush and educational to Brian.
-I'm sure he read a bunch of books on theory.

The common thing seems to be to say that Brian Wilson did it all without any knowledge of music theory. I say it's impossible to do what he did without knowing it extensively. Perhaps he learned his harmonic talents from the Four Freshman, pulling apart each song, note by note will teach you music theory as well as any book could.

He knows his stuff, plain and simple.

Also you have Murry, a fellow musician too. He hounded on Brian if he made mistakes while playing the piano, Murry probably taught Brian quite well all he knew about music himself. I've never heard Murry's album (Someone please be a kind soul and help us out here) but i've heard it's all jazz oriented stuff.

F#m7/A....G#m7/G#....Fmaj7/G

or

A....B/G#....Am/G

That descending bass thing seems to happen a lot in Brian's songs. It's interesting when it crosses, like that Fmaj7/G.

Ever wish you had a choir that you could just order around all the time?

I often wonder why some of the great artists of the 60s can't seem to produce music to rival their past achievements. I think the great records, blonde on blonde, revolver, pet sounds etc. are ones that capture the zeitgeist, and therefore as they get older it's unlikely that these artists are so in tune with the times.

Also the mid to late 60s were coming on the back of a cultural revolution and so you got this incredible, groundbreaking, fresh music as a result. You can't fake that kind of music - it's intrinsically linked with it's historical context - the more exciting the times, the more exciting the music etc.

There was a programme about the great authors and their best works and fascinatingly (can't remember the examples as I'm not much of a bookworm) all these authors wrote their best books in their 20s/30s but no older. Maybe you're at your creative peak when you're young and this is true for writers, musicians, painters (mmm, maybe not true for painters).

The other problem is that a lot of these artists that were lionised at their creative peak (Paul McCartney for example) find it very difficult to escape their past. Therfore they end up writing music that is a sort of pastiche of their earlier work. Brian as well produces stuff that harks back to 60s California. Friends is a great album because Brian was trying something totally different from Pet Sounds etc. and this honesty and originality has helped the album endure. He'd have to approach a project with the same sense of experimentation now but I think if he just listened to Friends to get his creativity flowing than all you're going to get is a poor imitation of Friends.

Anyway, I very much doubt Brian Wilson is going to produce another Pet Sounds just as Dylan will never produce another Highway 61. Dylan still manages to create great records though, so there's no reason why Brian can't either, if he really wants to. As somebody else said, he's given us enough and surely has earned his retirement now.

Great post!

You have silenced me on the thought.  :)