#154

[No online link available.]

I’m awaiting with some anticipation the movie soon to be released this weekend, Love and Mercy, a biopic about The Beach Boys’ Brian Wilson. I’ve been a fan of The Beach Boys since high school, when I had a good group of close guy friends I could count on, but I was still terribly lonely, wondering where all the girls were and what they were doing. That was a complete, total mystery for a smart, awkward, nerdy teenager with no sisters to learn from. From my position in my 50s, when all that hormonal/emotional angst has for the most part subsided (replaced by other angsts, but that’s another story), it seems trivial now. But it wasn’t then, and I understand still that it wasn’t trivial. Songs like “In My Room,” “The Girls on the Beach,” “Let Him Run Wild” (one of the greatest songs by anybody, ever), “Don’t Worry, Baby,” and “Wendy,” with their plaintive harmonies and uncanny ability to characterize an emotion and give it form, really got to me, and because I was young and unguarded I took them straight, unfiltered, and they struck deep. When I got older, I stayed with The Beach Boys, working my way into their later work, which is uneven, but with sophisticated gems that in my opinion are just about as good as music gets. “Surf’s Up” is another of the greatest songs ever written by anybody, and I’ll fight anyone who says otherwise. I worked my way into Pet Sounds, feeling it, but also studying how it was done. I never get tired of it, and it remains more influential to me than most people who know me realize. I absolutely get this cartoon: https://gerryco23.files.wordpress.com/2010/10/doonesbury-andy-may-1990-5.jpg. It’s well known that Wilson’s magnum opus, Smile, which was never completed, would have competed with or quite possibly eclipsed Sgt. Pepper as one of the key musical icons of the 60s. It very likely would have had enormous influence and affected the whole tone of the years that followed, slipping as they did from peace and love into darker, more violent, territory, Altamont and Kent State. Smile would have lent incredible cultural support to peace and love, in a way that wouldn’t have been sentimental or dopey. I had serious trouble with the fact that Smile never got out (it’s out now, 40 years too late), and I’ve actually had moments nearly overcome with grief that Wilson came apart before he finished it. So, I consider Brian Wilson a kindred spirit. Musically, Joni Mitchell, and Walter Becker and Donald Fagan, of Steely Dan, have been other critical music guides in my personal and artistic development, but they’re not exactly spiritual kin. Brian Wilson is. Whatever talents I have flow in directions other than pop music, but I know I still vibrate in sync with the art he put out. Why didn’t Smile come to fruition in 1967, after all that work? Because the project’s, and the band’s, guiding light, Brian, succumbed to mental illness and substance abuse. Together they tore him apart. He had a shy, fragile sensitivity as a person, but as an artist he was strong and commanding in the studio and while writing at the piano. He once described that the music flowed out of him like butter, and he had confidence in it, driving the band members and crowds of studio extras as closely as possible toward perfection, until he was satisfied. But LSD and cocaine made him come apart, he lost the music, he lost the command, and fragility was all that remained. I’m fragile too. Luckily for me, even though drugs were everywhere in my world in my twenties, common as sparrows, I never explored past the most cursory introductions. I became familiar with what pot does, and while it does enhance some perception, it was also paranoid-inducing usually, and fostered a dullness in the long run, and I knew it would hurt my body. Cocaine, just once: “Where can I get more of this?” is fundamentally part of that experience. I saw what lay down that road and had absolutely no desire to travel it. Other drugs were like, Huh. How about that. Now I know what that’s about. Even with drinking, while a good whiskey, or a complex glass of wine, or a cold beer are all terrific, I can’t stand alcohol in my body or in my brain. In the end, for me, nothing has ever been higher than clarity, and every drug that reached me muddled clarity in one way or another. I moved on. For Brian Wilson, LSD, as he once said, “Took the top of my head off.” Emily Dickinson once said the same thing about poetry. Wilson may have been quoting her, but I doubt it. He thought it enhanced clarity, same with cocaine, and he got hooked. He was wrong, and he suffered terribly for it, in fact it destroyed him, and I would go so far as to say that millions of people were deprived of the art and music they needed because of the mistakes of the man. We think of genius as personal, a private gift bestowed on an individual by his or her genes, or by God, that has such l value because of its rarity. It’s that, obviously. But its substance is public too. The context for its expression is public and cultural, genius is a rightful part of a community, and the spiritual integrity of the community depends on its cropping up from time to time, to teach and to lead. Abuse the body and brain of the gifted individual and you then also abuse the gift, and you rob the community of something it needs to remain viable.

When Brian Wilson dies, if I’m still around I will grieve over it. I know I will. He was a kindred spirit and he taught me something of great value through the marvelous expression of his sensibilities, in league with his bandmates. But my grief will subside and I’ll move on. I’ll also know that while my life has veered into the ditch often enough, and banged through some axle-cracking potholes, I have avoided the big ones that swallowed Brian Wilson. I don’t have half his talent, but my judgement has turned out to be clearer, and that has made a difference. When B. watched Schwartz die, he saw himself, because he made the very same mistakes and is suffering the same consequences. That’s why he’s grieving so: He grieves for himself.