So the other day, Ron and I were talking about death.
I know, right? Two carefree middle-aged dudes just talking about the thing no one likes to talk about.
Ron said he finds himself looking at the obituaries half expecting to find the parents of friends and classmates. Being almost a decade older, I tend to look for friends, not their parents.
It has been a rough 12 months. My dad, my sister and a couple of really close friends all died in the past year (in fact, I’m writing this on the one-year anniversary of my dad’s passing). It’s just part of the reality of getting older. The other one is that, in addition to friends and family, we start seeing our heroes drop off one by one in a stream whose flow seems to just increase by the year.
And so it was last week. Two of my musical heroes in the space of just a few days.
First it was Sly Stone, whose records taught me what funk is all about. “Thank You Falletinme Be Mice Elf Agin,” “Hot Fun in the Summertime,” “Everyday People.” My early bands tried mightily (and mostly failed) to do justice to “Dance To the Music” as the required band intro song for years.
And then on Wednesday, Brian Wilson, which really stung. Both Sly and Brian had scary demons, which were, undoubtedly, made more intense by serious drug abuse. It was, honestly, shocking they both made it into their 80s but it stung just the same.
I was never a huge fan of the early Beach Boys hits, to be honest and did not even come to a complete appreciation for Pet Sounds until I was in my mid-40s. I’m technically a Boomer by one year, but I grew up in much more of a SoCal Gen X template. My high school experience was way more “Fast Times at Ridgemont High” than it was “American Graffiti.” And those songs just felt lame for a guitar kid who was deep into KISS and Thin Lizzy and Bowie and Zep and Deep Purple and Queen.
However, those songs did teach me a lot about singing harmonies. Coming up as a young band guy playing Mormon stake dances in the mid ’70s, a Beach Boys medley was practically d’rigour. And those of us still learning marveled at the bands (Krupka siblings and Mark Lewis, I’m looking at you) who could actually pull off the later and much more complex stuff.
It was that post-1965 stuff that I turned to and went down a very deep rabbit hole later on in my life as I really started to hone in on songwriting and arranging. And I revisited that rabbit hole last week.
If you are a serious music fan, you have probably heard of the album called Smile, that nearly mythical and never-finished Beach Boys record that was supposed be the followup to Pet Sounds and the epic single “Good Vibrations.” But for everyone else…
The song “Good Vibrations” was like nothing anyone had heard when it hit in 1966 and it was written and recorded like nothing else up to that point. Brian, the oldest (and last living, ironically) of the Wilson brothers that were the core of the Beach Boys had written it for the seminal album Pet Sounds, an album that massively influenced (and likely drove) the Beatles when they were creating Sgt. Pepper.
But Brian wasn’t happy with it when the rest of the album was done so it came out later the same year as a standalone single. It was not approached like a typical song, in a linear manner. Wilson was in the most fruitful part of an insanely creative period and “Good Vibrations” was done in a whole new way. He wrote little partial bits of the song that he called “modules” and his idea was that they could later be assembled in different orders via splicing tape. (Some years later, that would be the same way the instrumental hit “Frankenstein” by the Edgar Winter Band was assembled, which is what gave the song its name. There is some deep trivia for ya.)
In an era where pop songs were recorded in just a few hours and often two or three in a single session, “Good Vibrations” took more than six months and was recorded in at least four major L.A. studios with a “cast of thousands” at a cost estimated at between $25K and $50K. To put it into perspective, that would be as much as $500,000 in 2025 money. It was unheard of.
Like, literally unheard of.
It hit the radio like nothing anyone at the time had ever heard. And it remains a classic that sounds as fresh today —almost 60 years later —as it did in 1966. And it was the steep slope of Brian Wilson’s undoing.
He’d had a nervous breakdown a few years earlier and stopped touring, which left him at home and in the studio all the time, which probably accelerated his mental decline. The drugs didn’t help. He was deep enough into weed and hash that he built a hotbox tent in his dining room that cost nearly as much as it did to make that record. (For those not steeped in drug culture, a hotbox is a sealed room or tent that was used for smoking, which made it impossible to not breath in more smoke with every breath.) But the real culprit was likely a potent mix of methamphetamine and a barbiturate called desbutal.
The drive to constantly top yourself as a creative person is powerful and can be destructive. There is a famous picture of Brian in the studio in this period and I totally recognize the intense look on his face because I have had the same look when I am deep into arranging and recording. Been there, done that, got the T-shirt. Wilson felt he was in constant competition with the Beatles and Phil Spector, which caused him a ton of stress. (Side note: One of Phil’s adopted kids was a roommate to me and my wife in the late ’80s. A fascinating Story For Another Day.)
He wasn’t the only one. Pete Townsend of the Who had a nervous breakdown trying to top Tommy with a never-finished rock opera called Lifehouse at about the same time Brian was trying to finish Smile.
I knew there were incomplete and “theoretical” fan-generated versions of that album around and I turned to those for musical solace after I heard about Wilson’s death. But then I discovered that he actually had, finally, finished it more than 20 years ago without the Beach Boys, or what was left of them. Both of his brothers were long dead by the time his touring band the Wondermints talked him into revisiting that material.
In 2004, he got back together with Van Dyke Parks, who had been the lyricist on the original sessions and they completed things. Released under the name Brian Wilson Presents Smile, it is glorious. If you can hear the vocal harmonies (which were always mostly Brian anyway) of the opening song “Our Prayer” or the stunning orchestrations of “Surf’s Up” without being moved then it is time to check in on the status of your own soul. In fact, when Brian was asked about Smile back then, he said we was writing a “teenage symphony to God.”
There is even a new version of “Good Vibrations” with alternate lyrics by Brian (versus the original recording ones by Mike Love) that comes in a minute longer than the old single version.
Somewhere out there a kid in a garage studio is hard at work becoming the Brian Wilson for his or her generation. Maybe it’s Chappell or Billie or St. Vincent or someone else we have already heard from, but it is more likely someone no one has heard of quite yet. For today, there is no one to replace Brian Wilson and the world is a poorer place for his passing.
Now, go listen to Smile and do just that while appreciating the work of a true, if troubled, genius.