Part I

Wouldn’t It Be Nice

The eulogies for Brian Wilson continue to roll in like the surf break at Huntington Beach. Testimonials to Wilson’s musical talent and the Beach Boys’ influence came from the California coast and the Jersey Shore, from the two living Beatles and John Lennon’s sons and widow and from former bandmates, fans, even people too young to have ever seen the band in its heyday.

Mike Wilson, a Beach Boys lead singer – and the cousin of Brian, Carl, and Dennis Wilson – put it this way: “Brian, you once asked, ‘Wouldn’t it be nice if we were older?’ Now you are timeless.”

Paul McCartney has long been on record as saying that “Pet Sounds,” the Beach Boys’ 1966 album, “blew me out of the water” the moment he heard it.

“Brian had that mysterious sense of musical genius that made his songs so achingly special,” Paul said this week. “The notes he heard in his head and passed to us were simple and brilliant at the same time. I loved him, and was privileged to be around his bright shining light for a little while. How we will continue without Brian Wilson, ‘God Only Knows.’” 

“Anyone who really knows me knows how heartbroken I am about Brian Wilson passing,” Sean Ono Lennon posted. “Not many people influenced me as much as he did. I feel very lucky that I was able to meet him and spend some time with him. He was always very kind and generous. He was our American Mozart. A one-of-a-kind genius from another world.”

Bruce Springsteen, who has been in the news recently – for his politics as much as his music – weighed in as well.

“Brian Wilson was the most musically inventive voice in all of pop, with an otherworldly ear for harmony,” Springsteen wrote. “He was also the visionary leader of America's greatest band, The Beach Boys. If there’d been no Beach Boys, there would have been no ‘Racing In The Street.’ Listen to ‘Summer’s Gone’ from the Beach Boys’ last album ‘That’s Why God Made The Radio’ and weep. Farewell, Maestro. Nothing but love and a lovely lasting debt from all of us over here on E Street.”

The Beach Boys were normally above partisanship – or maybe aside it. This is difficult to do today, but it wasn’t easy in the Sixties. They didn’t sing much about social issues or race or war and peace. It was about the music and nearly everyone loved their songs, or at least while growing up in California everyone I knew did.

If you were a young person back then, the tunes stuck in your head forever, as John McCain revealed while running for president in 2007 and being asked whether it was time to send a message to the murderous mullahs in Tehran.

“It’s like that old Beach Boys song, ‘Bomb Iran,’” McCain quipped, referring to “Barbara Ann.” As the audience laughed, McCain softly ad-libbed to the melody: “Bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb.” With the Israeli Defense Forces fighter plans desperately trying to prevent Iran from developing a nuclear weapon today, McCain’s joke might seem less innocent.

Nearly two and a half decades earlier, in April 1983, Secretary of the Interior James Watt announced that no rock bands would be playing at the July 4th concert on the Washington Mall. This was news to the Beach Boys who were booked to play the concert, as they had in 1980 and 1981, but Watt, a hapless, straightlaced Reagan administration official – without mentioning the Beach Boys by name – said rock bands attracted “the wrong element.”

“We’re not going to encourage drug abuse and alcoholism,” Watt said, “as was done in the past.”

This was a mistake. President Ronald Reagan, first lady Nancy Reagan, and the Reagan’s top advisers were from California. They liked the Beach Boys, who had played at one of the Reagans’ inaugural balls in 1981 – and didn’t appreciate a tin-eared member of the Cabinet making them sound like stuffy rubes.

“I think for a lot of people the Beach Boys are an American institution,” California-born Deputy White House Chief of Staff Michael Deaver told a reporter. “Anyone who thinks they are hard rock would think Mantovani plays jazz.”

The upshot of Jim Watt’s misguided prudery was a vice-presidential rebuke (“They're my friends and I like their music,” said George Bush), followed by a White House photo op featuring the Beach Boys and both Reagans, an invitation to appear the following year, and a resurgence of interest in the band, which had recently been rejoined by Brian Wilson after a long hiatus.

The following year, the Beach Boys returned for a triumphant Independence Day concert on the National Mall. It was spiced by an appearance from a surprise guest, Beatles drummer Ringo Starr.

This week, Ringo posted on Instagram an arresting photo of himself and Brian, along with a warm farewell and his trademark “peace and love” sign-off.

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Part II

Good Vibrations

You’ll notice similar threads running through the tributes this week: One is simply Brian’s otherworldly individual talent; another is the outsized influence the Beach Boys had on their contemporaries – and how freely their fellow musicians shared the credit. This is the opposite impulse of those who practice contemporary American politics, but it’s why most people love music and look on politicians with misgivings.

But just as the Beach Boys influenced so many, they in turn had influences. Bruce Springsteen’s E Street Band has been called the quintessential American rock band, and it was generous of The Boss to deflect that compliment onto the Beach Boys. But the Beach Boys great songs didn’t spring full-blown from the brow of Brian Wilson, no matter how much of a prodigy he was.

I’m making two points here: The first is that Brian Wilson, like Bruce Springsteen, Paul McCartney, John Lennon, Lady Gaga, and nearly all other great musicians worked very hard at their craft. The second is that they all have influences and people who came before them who dreamed the melodies, carved out the notes, played the chords, and sang the verses while inspiring their rivals and contemporaries to keep reaching deeper.

* * *

On Feb. 17, 1904, “Madama Butterfly,” a new opera by composer Giacomo Puccini, opened at La Scala in Milan. It was taken from a popular London play, which itself had been adapted from a short story by a Philadelphia lawyer named John Luther Long.

It’s about doomed love, as well as honor and a mother’s love –although modern operagoers might see it as a morality play about sexism, white supremacy, and colonialism. The tragic tale concerns a United States Navy lieutenant named B.F. Pinkerton, who is stationed in Nagasaki Harbor in the early 20th century.

This was decades before Nagasaki and Pearl Harbor were place names bookmarking the end and beginning of U.S. involvement in World War II. Anyway, the heedless American officer marries – and then abandons – a Japanese geisha named Cio-Cio-San. The result is heartbreak and tragedy.

It’s a haunting story, with soaring music – but the La Scala audience didn’t much like Puccini’s first version of it. The composer had been inspired by Verdi’s masterpiece “Aida” as a young man and had already produced two works destined to become classics of their own, “La Boheme” and “Tosca.” But the original score in “Butterfly” was too similar to Puccini’s earlier works. Some in the crowd hissed, while others yelled at the stage or left the theater early.

Horrified, Puccini pulled the opera and went back to work on it, retooling the staging, breaking one long act into two, improving the music. His work paid off. Three months later, he re-released it – to thunderous acclaim. In 1907, it opened at the New York Metropolitan Opera and has been a fan favorite ever since.

Six decades later to the very day, an American composer rolled the first tape for a song also destined to become a classic of its genre. The year was 1966 and Brian Wilson was beginning work on “Good Vibrations.” In those days, the iconic California band had a mutually respectful rivalry with the Beatles. Only a small number of pioneering rock’n’roll insiders would have considered it much of a competition. But John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr all knew what they were up against in Brian Wilson.

For one, Wilson was a perfectionist. His new song was supposed to round out, and in some ways define, their cutting edge new album, “Pet Sounds.” But Wilson couldn’t get the new tune done to his satisfaction. Small wonder: No song had ever been recorded that was quite like it. He employed dozens of instruments, ranging from the cello and harpsichord to the electric theremin (an early synthesizer that had been used mainly to convey futuristic sounds in science fiction movies).

Puccini had nothing on this man, as “Echo in the Canyon,” Jakob Dylan’s documentary about the evolution of the “California sound,” makes clear. Brian Wilson had such a good ear, and was such a perfectionist, that he knew which recording studios in the Los Angeles area could best mix guitar, or bass, or drums – or drums of a specific type – and he recorded parts of his album at each of them.

Finally, after six months and 90 hours of tape, Wilson had the sound he wanted. The track itself is a veritable symphony in 3 minutes and 37 seconds. But if “Good Vibrations” was a new sound, it was about timeless themes: Love. Family. Home. Nostalgia.

Brian’s mother, Audree Wilson (also the mom of Beach Boys Carl and Dennis Wilson), had told her boys that people gave off invisible “vibrations” – good or bad – which is why dogs bark at some people but not others.

As a boy, Brian found this idea frightening. As a man, he turned the concept into an upbeat song about the possibilities of hidden connections between people. In 2004, Rolling Stone magazine issued its list of the top 500 rock hits of all time. “Good Vibrations” came in at No. 6, two spots ahead of the highest-ranking Beatles song, and only three spots behind John Lennon’s “Imagine.”

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Part III

Surf’s Up

It’s a sign of the times that discussions about early rock music devolve into discussions of race and even “cultural appropriation,” a term that I believe is an oxymoron – and which in any event has little place in music. Borrowing music from other countries and other disciplines isn’t cultural appropriation, it’s culture itself.

Paul McCartney, a British knight, loves “God Only Knows,” the most romantic song on “Pet Sounds,” but the one that may best stand the test of time is “Sloop John B” and there’s a reason for that: It’s a Caribbean folk song more than a century old. It was transcribed by Carl Sandburg in his 1927 “The American Songbag” and recorded by the Kingston Trio in the late 1950s. The Beach Boys not only put the classic song to a more contemporary rock beat and added their signature harmonies, but in their 1966 video they gently trolled the Beatles by mimicking a dance routine the Fab Four had once used.

It is said that the Beach Boys invented California surf music. I’ve probably written that myself. But they had help – from other musicians, and other traditions.

The most influential pioneer in developing the surf sound was a young guitarist who went by the name of Dick Dale. He began playing dance music at a Southern California seaside venue near Newport Beach called Balboa Rendezvous Ballroom. Dale's real name was Richard Anthony Monsour, and he and his family moved from New England to California after World War II. Dick graduated from Washington High School in Inglewood in 1954, moved to Orange County, learned to surf, and took up the guitar.

His influences included a new form of music that was being pioneered by an array of players ranging from Chuck Berry to Elvis Presley. Dale played Arabic scales he learned from his Lebanese American father, adopted a rapid-fire picking style he thought captured the rhythms of the Pacific Ocean waves, and used amplifier technology he developed with Leo Fender as a way to be heard over the crowds that packed the Balboa.

Among those who came to hear Dick Dale perform were Jimi Hendrix, who, like Dale, was left-handed (and sometimes played his guitar upside down), and three brothers – Brian, Dennis, and Carl Wilson – and their cousin Mike Love, all of whom hailed from nearby Hawthorne.

Although Dennis was the only one of the Wilson boys who actually surfed, they named their new group the Beach Boys, and later, after they hit the big time, the band played homage to Dick Dale by covering his legendary 1958 tune, “Let’s Go Trippin’.”

The first, and last, thing to keep in mind about surfing is how dangerous it is and how overmatched a human being on a lightweight board is against the vast strength of an ocean wave. The Beach Boys captured this dynamic in their lyrics (“When a 20-footer sneaks up like a ton of lead  they said) – while Dick Dale sought to do it with his guitar.

“Surfing music is a sound that is copied from the power you get by surfing in the ocean,” Dale once said. “It’s a machine-gun staccato sound that doesn’t break rhythm. Surf music is actually just the sound of the waves played on a guitar.”

Years ago, legendary San Diego surfer Skip Frye returned the compliment. “Surfing to me is like playing music,” he said. “You play different melodies with different boards.”

Frye’s passion eventually took a political twist. Bothered by the frequency with which her husband and his fellow surfers got sick from the sewage and pollutants in the Pacific Ocean, Skip’s wife helped launch STOP (Surfers Tired of Pollution). Donna Frye, herself a surfer, also got involved in local politics. Running as a reform candidate interested in open government and environmental protection, she served on the San Diego City Council and was nearly elected mayor.

In my view, we could use more surfers in politics. They are iconoclastic, to be sure; mavericks by temperament instead of given to political posturing; and unpredictable. But they are also egalitarian to the core.

The great Laird Hamilton put it this way: “We’re all equal before a wave.”

But I’ll end where I began, with Brian Wilson and his brothers and bandmates. If Dick Dale was the “king of surf guitar,” as he was called, the Beach Boys became the new genre’s face, and its voice. The sound they created would be drowned out for a while by the British Invasion, but it never really disappeared. Brian Wilson played to sold-out houses in 2018 on a tour called “Pet Sounds, the Final Performances,” with loyal friend (and original Beach Boy) Al Jardine by his side.

It’s an impressive run of longevity, due in part to the timeless nature of surf music’s inspiration: the sea itself.

Carl M. Cannon is the Washington bureau chief for RealClearPolitics and executive editor of RealClearMedia Group. Reach him on X @CarlCannon.

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