http://www.smh.com.au/news/music/another-chapter-in-the-life-of-brian/2007/11/26/1196036811220.htmlAnother chapter in the life of Brian
November 27, 2007
Gerard Wright shares a bagel with the former Beach Boy and discovers why he's still picking up good vibrations.
On arrival for this interview at the Glen Deli, a restaurant high in the Hollywood Hills, Brian Wilson notices his publicist Jean Siever's advanced state of pregnancy. Framing her stomach with his hands, he sings Happy Birthday to the unborn child.
Ladies and gentlemen: Brian Wilson! Your in-vivo jukebox!
Later, after ordering, he gives an impromptu demonstration of his vocal lessons. This, after the observation that his voice, on his new single, That Lucky Old Sun, sounds stronger and more certain than it did for the long-postponed released of his masterpiece Smile album, in 2004.
He lets loose in the crowded deli, demonstrating his daily exercise regime: "Bah bah bah bah bah bah bah bah BAAAAAH!"
There is not a hint of self-consciousness, nor even the suggestion of hesitation between thought and action, just the ageing, childlike man-genius, soon to appear on a stage near you, during the Sydney Festival.
Wilson and his band will perform three concerts at the State Theatre, as well as a free opening night show in the Domain.
"I'm doing exercises, different sounds, and different vowels that bring out the different muscles in your throat, y'know? And if you cover enough of the vowels then that will strengthen your voice 50 per cent," he says.
There is something else, too, that says everything about how long it has taken Wilson, 65, to get to this place, still in demand, still loved, with audiences in Britain and Europe applauding the new stuff, and swooning to the old, and to his voice, rising above the lushly orchestrated music, and singing the songs of memory, clear and strong and confident.
"Well," he says, "it's just that I was in a good place, in my mind. I was able to sing a bit louder."
Even through the mid-fidelity of YouTube, what resonates in Wilson's performances at places like London's Royal Festival Hall (see story at right) is the wave of emotion rolling in from the audience, engulfing the stage. There is Wilson with a curiously set, slightly earnest expression as Heroes And Villains is unleashed. Around him is the full catastrophe of upper-level rock god musical backing: alluring backing vocalists, multiple keyboards, cellos, violins, percussion, horns.
The Sydney concerts will feature the same mix of new and old stuff, most notably That Lucky Old Sun, a widely covered African-American spiritual, and an original, Midnight's Another Day. Both are part of an as yet unreleased album but have been posted on Wilson's website. They were written and recorded during a three-month burst of creativity in the American summer of 2006.
"It was quite an experience to sit at my keyboard and write one song [clicking fingers] after another," Wilson recalls.
"Every two or three days, I'd write a song. 'Hey, I'm into a creative explosion here."'
This has been happening for almost half a century now, ever since the Beach Boys emerged from the non-beachside Los Angeles suburb of Hawthorne in 1961. Drugs, lawsuits and Wilson's devotion to the craft of studio, rather than stage performance, all had their way with his psyche and the band's existence.
That may explain the paradox of being able to see the Beach Boys earlier this month, and their co-founder and creative soul in January, as separate entities, bound together only by lawsuits.
Legally Wilson remains part of a larger entity that owns the Beach Boys trademark. That trademark has already prevailed in a lawsuit brought by one of the other co-founders, Al Jardine, which prevented him from using the band's name. That right is still held by Wilson's cousin, Mike Love, who toured Australia and New Zealand with the Beach Boys this month.
Separate to that, Love is suing Wilson for alleged misappropriation of Love's contributions to the resurrected Smile album.
So writing songs and performing them with a band that sounds uncannily like the Beach Boys at times (in places, That Lucky Old Sun echoes the beat from Do It Again) is both an escape and a form of self-expression that Wilson craves as much as ever, mysterious though the process is.
"Well, I can't explain that," Wilson says. "Just something happened to me I can't explain."
Let's just say that exercise and hygiene played their parts. Early last year Wilson began a daily regimen of eight-kilometre walks in the park near his Beverly Hills home.
"And I took a shower, every morning and every night. A shower is very spiritual, and the shower inspired me to write music, too."
He would stand under the spray for 10 minutes at a time, just letting his mind go.
"Yeah, it was some magic."
Even now, after hundreds of songs, the arrival of the spark is still something to be cherished.
"It's an experience to always remember," Wilson says. He eats and drinks quickly, big bites of his bagel, and long draws on the straw in his tomato juice, as though stocking up for a journey.
"I said to myself, 'I wonder if I can?' I don't know. I didn't know until one day I went to the keyboard and said, 'God, please help me write a song'. And I just said a little prayer. And I'll be god-darned - gosh-darned - if he didn't help me write a song, Morning Bee."
He is the strangest combination of utterly businesslike and impersonal, but also unabashedly open. Freckled arms emerge from the sleeves of his lightweight plaid shirt. The skin around his face and neck is loose, as though all that walking has shrunk his body as well as reawakening his mind.
"I feel comfortable in my music room, sitting at my keyboard. When I'm sitting at my keyboard I feel so good. Sitting at a keyboard is the most spiritual experience that I can ever, ever expect to have. I cannot expect to have any spiritual experience that great."
Among the songs recorded last summer was I'm Into Something Good, by Herman's Hermits. Carole King, who co-wrote the song in 1965, sat in on the recording at Wilson's invitation.
"The environment that Brian creates has a lot to do with the fact that he carries with him a childlike innocence and spontaneity," King said in an interview last year, just after that session.
"That is one facet to his brilliance, and yet he is like a savant. You have to care for and nurture that quality because he brings out a protective nature in those around him. Over the years he has revealed that sort of powerful dichotomy of being vulnerable, yet extremely powerful at the same time."
King described the updated treatment of her song as "Brianised". Wilson sounds both flattered and surprised by this. "Brianised? My God! Oh yeah?"
He is asked to define that.
"It kicks off a creative impulse that turns into a little piece of music that everybody would like."
Savant describes an individual brilliantly, even uniquely talented in one area, and generally lacking in most others.
The website that bears his name is a mystery to Wilson - he has not even seen it - as is Bob Dylan's endorsement on it.
"Jesus, that ear," Dylan says of Wilson's musical gift. "He should donate it to the Smithsonian [the national archive of American historic and cultural treasures]."
There is praise also from Leonard Bernstein, Elvis Costello, Stevie Wonder, Paul McCartney, Sheryl Crow, Philip Glass and Burt Bacharach. They provide laurels that Wilson cannot rest on, and not only because he is unaware they even exist.
He listens to a description the Australian author Alan Moorehead once applied to his own writing process on the bad days - "like straining sh*t through a sock" - and nods in agreement.
"Boy, that explains it for me, too: 'What? What is this? I can't do this. I'm not good enough. I'm inadequate. I can't hear out of my right ear - or whatever shortcomings. I don't have a big enough ego; I don't have a big enough desire to write, to write music."'
And yet …
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