http://www.montgomerynews.com/articles/2009/10/21/entertainment/doc4adf32a808805883377607.txtJeffrey Foskett has been Brian Wilson's bandleader, guitarist and backup singer for many years. He provides some keen insight into the workings of one of musicdom's most accomplished composers.
By Mike Morsch
Executive Editor
When asked for his high school yearbook what he thought he’d be doing in five years, Jeffrey Foskett wrote: “I’ll either be playing in the Beach Boys or the Beatles.”
So on his 20th birthday, two years after his high school graduation, the young musician walked up to the front door of Brian Wilson’s house — that Brian Wilson, the one of Beach Boys fame — knocked on the door and asked to see Brian.
“Since the Beatles had already broken up, that left only one option,” said Foskett.
Not only was he let in to the southern California home, but Foskett and Wilson ended up in the rock ‘n’ roll icon’s music room.
“He was actually very lucid,” said Foskett in a recent telephone interview as he recalled his first meeting in 1976 with the music legend. “He wasn’t in good physical shape. But he wasn’t drugged out, he wasn’t drunk, he wasn’t like any of the stories you may have heard going around at that time. That wasn’t my experience at all.”
Foskett noticed Wilson’s bass guitar up against the wall in a corner of the music room.
“I thought, ‘Well, that has to be the bass that was played on all the [Beach Boys] albums and that he played onstage at the Hollywood Bowl.’
“I asked him if I could play it and he said yes. So I picked it up and played it and he sat down at the piano and we jammed a little bit. It was very fun.”
And that essentially was the beginning of a more than 30-year relationship between Foskett, the Beach Boys and Brian Wilson that exists to this day.
“Back then, I really did think I’d be doing this,” said Foskett.
Brian Wilson fans, especially those who have seen Wilson’s solo shows over the past several years at the Keswick Theatre in Glenside, will recognize Foskett and his work. He serves as Wilson’s musical director, plays guitar and sings —beautifully and just like Brian wants it — all the parts of songs that Brian’s voice can no longer accommodate.
And local fans will get another look at a Foskett-directed show when the 67-year-old Wilson, one of the most celebrated composers of the last century, visits the Keswick for the fourth time in as many years for one show at 7:30 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 29.
Aside from the Beach Boys themselves, Foskett has had a front-row seat for the part of rock ‘n’ roll history that is the Beach Boys and Brian Wilson.
“It’s been an interesting ride,” said Foskett. “People say they’re big Beach Boys fans and I’m sure they are. But I was a huge, huge, huge Beach Boys fan.”
After that initial meeting, Foskett stayed in touch with Wilson. In the late 1970s, some of Foskett’s friends were in the band Papa Doo Run Run, which was then the house band in Disneyland in Anaheim, Calif.
Brian liked Papa Doo Run Run and would occasionally show up at the Disneyland gig and sit in with the band. Foskett’s buddies would give him a heads-up when Brian was going to show up, so the two saw each other periodically.
Then in the early 1980s, Carl Wilson of the Beach Boys decided to try a solo career, and the band was looking for a voice to replace Carl. Beach Boys frontman Mike Love had heard Foskett perform with the band Reverie and Love actually was the one who hired Foskett to join the Beach Boys.
“The reason Carl was so frustrated with the Beach Boys that he left to do a solo career was that he wanted to get things back to a good-sounding touring band that was a great show to go to,” said Foskett. “Over the years they had gone from five or six singers down to maybe four guys who were singing all the time. So they were manipulating the vocal parts to accommodate that. Carl thought they should go back to doing the original parts.”
Carl Wilson came back to the Beach Boys a year later, and Foskett thought his time with the band was over.
“But Carl really liked the way that I sang — it wasn’t so much my guitar playing — and he said, ‘You’re a valuable asset.’”
So Foskett stayed with the Beach Boys touring through 1990 and singing all of Brian’s falsetto parts on all those famous Beach Boys tunes.
Foskett eventually left the Beach Boys to pursue a solo career for several years, where he experienced great overseas success, especially in New Zealand and Japan. To date, Foskett has released more than a dozen solo CDs, including “Through My Window,” which has been called “the best Beach Boys album they never recorded.”
Then in the mid-1990s, Foskett and Brian Wilson’s paths crossed again, this time at the wedding of a mutual friend.
“I was shocked because Brian was sitting there with his wife, Melinda, and everybody was afraid to go up and talk to him,” said Foskett. “It’s pretty intimidating when you think about. It is Brian Wilson. But I wasn’t intimidated because we were friends.
“So I just went up and sat down at the table and said, ‘Hey man, I hear you’re working on a new record and I’d love to be involved. And he said, ‘Hey, I think you’re on to something.’”
The album was Wilson’s fourth solo album, “Imagination,” which was released in 1998. And Foskett has been with Wilson ever since, getting an up-close-and-personal look at the genius that is Brian Wilson.
“Maybe Mozart deserved it and maybe Brian,” said Foskett in reference to Wilson being tagged with the “genius” label. “Honestly, that’s about it. If you want to call these other guys musical geniuses because they write one good song, I don’t think that is appropriate. But in Brian’s case, I think that it’s certainly appropriate.”
To illustrate his point, Foskett tells a story in reference to Wilson’s famous “Pet Sounds” album. When Wilson decided in 2006 to do a tour surrounding the 40th anniversary of the landmark album’s release in 1966, he and Foskett were discussing the song, “I Just Wasn’t Made for These Times.”
“I said, ‘Brian, that’s so far out, those string parts. What did those guys (the musicians) say when you were recording it [the original, in 1966]?’
“He said, ‘I remember it well. I had some guys from the L.A. Philharmonic come in and play. They looked at me, looked at the music, heard the track and said, “What the hell is this? These parts are never going to work.”
“That was a classically trained musician looking at it from his formal music education,” said Foskett. “But it’s what Brian wanted, of course, and it’s brilliant.
“That’s how you get the term ‘genius,’ by having other musicians look at you and say, ‘What the hell is this?’ When they hear the finished product, they say, ‘Oh ya, I guess that does work.’”
Foskett, who has recorded and toured with several other artists in his career, including Paul McCartney, Heart, Roger McGuinn, Roy Orbison, Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck, Jimmy Page, Ringo Starr, Chicago, the Moody Blues, the Everly Brothers and Christopher Cross, said that these days, the myriad of problems that dogged Wilson for years — drug abuse, mental and emotional problems — are behind him.
“I think he’s really healthy, both mentally and physically lately,” said Foskett. “In the 1970s and 1980s, he was riddled with a lot of different troubles in his life. But when you’re drug-free, alcohol-free and nicotine-free, it really frees you from a lot of those burdens.
“He could be dead, literally, by his own hand in the way that he was back then,” said Foskett. “I think that releasing himself from all those things is the main thing that has put him on the track to where he is now.”
And for the past several years, Wilson is enjoying his own music again because it is being played by his touring band — a band that Wilson calls the best he’s ever worked with and a band called “the best touring band in the world” by McCartney — in the way that Wilson originally recorded the songs.
“With real organic instruments rather than synthesized sound,” said Foskett. “And even though it takes a lot of money to put that show on the road with 11 pieces, Brian wanted a real live French horn on ‘God Only Knows’ and he wanted a real saxophone on ‘California Girls.’ If there was three guitar parts, he wanted three guitars. He really prides himself on the fact that we can present the show the way that it is.”
As for returning to the Keswick Theatre, Foskett said it’s become a favorite venue for Wilson and the band members.
“We like that theater. I think our agent’s brother-in-law owns that theater,” deadpanned Foskett. “Really, it’s a great-sounding theater and the audience is always receptive. It always sells out and it’s always a really fun show.
“Quite a few of the band members have a lot of friends that come to that particular show for some reason,” he said. “It’s always a good hang for the band and Brian loves the theater.”
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