I’ll never forget the first time Brian Wilson made me see God. It was 1973, and I was sitting in the mostly empty balcony of a second-run movie theater finally watching “American Graffiti,” the movie everyone in my high school was talking about. I liked the film okay, but it didn’t make that much of an impression on me. I couldn’t have been less interested in what I derisively thought of, at the time, as “the ’50s.” (To me, songs like “At the Hop” and “That’ll Be the Day” were corny and dull.) But at the end of the movie, as the now-famous what-happened-to-them-after-graduation epilogue came on, a song started to play that had a whole different flavor. It woke me right up. If I’m honest about it, what hooked me — the first thing in my life that made me a Brian Wilson believer — was a single chord change, the one that happened on the word “house.” As in, “Sittin’ in my car outside your HOUSE…”
As the Beach Boys sang “house,” the song, “All Summer Long,” didn’t just change chords — in a luscious instant, it ascended to a higher place. Another wave of voices flooded in, but it was the revelation of that chord that was the hook, the spice, the thing that made me melt.
It’s hard to talk about music, about the flow of chords and melodies and arrangements, when you’re talking about a pop song, because it can all sound a little technical and abstract. But these mystic combinations of notes are the true heart of what we respond to in music. And Brian Wilson was the transcendent maestro of sonic magic. The title of the Beach Boys’ greatest album is “Pet Sounds,” and pet sounds is what Brian built into just about every song he ever wrote. It was those sounds that lifted you into the light.
To me, it’s far from incidental that Brian Wilson was the first pop musician of the ’60s to bring the word “God” into the equation. It was the first word of the title of “God Only Knows,” which I would argue is his greatest song, though that title wasn’t just an expression that Brian was using. The song’s implicit statement was, “God only knows what I’d be without you…because it’s God who knows what I am when I’m with you.” This was not just a love song. It was a prayer.
In the last few days, as so many eloquent words have been written about Brian Wilson, I was struck by a line in Chris Willman’s beautiful tribute to Brian’s 20 greatest songs. Chris wrote, “Even his most sorrowful songs — and there were plenty of those, for those days when even California couldn’t feel the warmth of the sun — had a way of hitting the joy-spot in the brain.” The joy-spot in the brain is a perfect description of the place inside you that receives music. But when music hits that spot and gives you that ping, is joy the essence of it? The totality of it? Harmony creates ecstasy, but I think there’s another feeling that’s connected to joy, and the word I’d use for that is faith. Brian Wilson created sounds sublime enough to hold onto and believe in.
It’s not like that’s a radical idea. It may sound goofy to say that when I was a teenager watching “American Graffiti,” I heard God in a chord change, but the truth is that people have always heard God in chord changes.
As a composer, Brian drew inspiration from two different traditions. The Beach Boys started out as all-American rock ‘n’ rollers, and rock ‘n’ roll came of age of in the Black church. It was a fusion of the blues and gospel, and you’d better believe that that music was designed to stoke your spirit and lift you higher.
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But Brian also drew from the tradition of Western classical music, which he fused with rock ‘n’ roll. Classical music reaches back many centuries, but the giant figure who did more than anyone to launch what we think of as the classical canon was Johann Sebastian Bach. Brian wrote a number of songs that were Bach-like, in particular a song that’s one of my very favorites: “Wonderful,” which comes at you (on the harpsichord!) with such a strange twisty winding chromatic melody that it’s like the sound of Brian losing his mind and finding his belief at the same time.
But my point isn’t just that “Wonderful” sounds like Bach on acid. It’s that most of J.S. Bach’s music was written to God. For hundreds of years (I would argue for most of civilization), music has been used, quite explicitly, as the bridge to God, the conduit to religious feeling, the majestic tool designed to give us access to those higher feelings. You went to church and heard a Bach chorale, and that was presented as the sound of God (or, at least, as close as you were going to come to hearing it). This is no conceit; this is how it worked. (It worked that way in the gospel church as well.)
Pop music is all of that with the religious trappings stripped away. Most of us don’t listen to pop music in a church or synagogue or mosque. We don’t hold open hymn books as we sing along with it. We don’t call pop music religious. But that’s the spiritual root of great pop. It’s the sound that hits your joy-spot and, in doing so, hits your faith-spot, revealing the hidden majesty of what life is.
In college, when I discovered “Pet Sounds,” I would get stoned and listen to it, and as those extraordinary melodies and arrangements washed over me, I felt like I was being baptized in those songs. They were so beautiful that I could feel them rewiring my inner chemistry. In a world where this kind of beauty existed, how could one not believe? How could one not believe in the wistful dream of “Wouldn’t It be Nice”? In the devotion expressed in the lyrics and harmonies of “You Still Believe in Me” or “Don’t Talk (Put Your Head on My Shoulder)”? Or in the romantic enchantment of “God Only Knows”?
Anyone who doesn’t think that pop music is religious should consider the following five songs, which in my book are the greatest five pop songs of the 20th century: “God Only Knows,” “Penny Lane,” “Climb Every Mountain,” “I Say a Little Prayer,” and “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough.” These are songs that would humble Johann Sebastian Bach. They’re about the glory of love, about the transcendence of everyday life, about hope and devotion and perseverance. In a word, they’re about faith. And let’s be clear: This impulse isn’t limited to artists like Brian Wilson and Paul McCartney and Richard Rodgers and Burt Bacharach and Nickolas Ashford and Valerie Simpson. As I’m writing this column, I’m sitting in a coffee shop listening to “Pink Pony Club” by Chappell Roan, and that, too, is a song about faith. (There are so many thousands of others.)
But Brian Wilson was the high priest of pop music as the incarnation of religious feeling. We all have our favorite Brian Wilson songs, the ones that produce a particular swoon. Apart from every last track on “Pet Sounds,” along with the early classics (my favorite: “Don’t Worry Baby”), there is, for me, the bracing bliss of “Darlin’,” the lush incandescence of “‘Til I Die,” the momentous sunset melancholy of “Sail On, Sailor.” But the Brian Wilson song that may mean the most to me is one that showed me faith when I needed it most.
I was at a crossroads, a rip in my soul, over the question of whether I wanted to have children. I did not know; I was on the fence. And I acted this out in a private lost weekend that took place on Thanksgiving Day, which I was celebrating all by myself. I bought two bottles of wine, which I began to consume in the middle of the afternoon. I had gotten the stuff to make Thanksgiving dinner. I had also bought a CD of an album that had been recently released, though it was one I’d been dreaming of hearing for 30 years: “Brian Wilson Presents Smile.” I was, at long last, going to hear it that day.
I put on the CD, and was possessed from the opening moments. It was everything I’d wanted it to be, a kind of grand outpouring of songcraft and emotion. About 15 minutes in, the song “Wonderful” came on (which I knew from “Smiley Smile”), and it sounded more strangely splendid than ever. But it was followed by something I’d never heard before. A song that consisted of gorgeous percussive chords, with a rapturous contrapuntal overlay of voices, and it was so haunting that it stopped me in my tracks. I thought it was the most beautiful thing I’d ever heard. And right then, listening to it, I began to cry. The song lasted for maybe two minutes. And when it was over, I was changed. Something had shifted within me. I knew that I wanted to have children. I picked up the CD to look at the title of the song.
It was called “Song for Children.”
It wasn’t the first time, and wouldn’t be the last, that Brian Wilson showed me the light.
From Variety US