Still Doing It Again
As it does with many things musical, the world of global popular music tends to divide into those that believe in the Beach Boys – or rather, perhaps poignantly, Brian Wilson – and those that do not. I have no need here to declare that I am a worshipper at the Brian Wilson shrine because regular readers will know this already.
The man’s place in pop music history is secure. The early 1960s were a time when the pop (youth section) music industry in both the UK and the USA was stereotypically run by Svengali-like managers who controlled their young teenage heart-throbs (average career expectancy roughly 14 months) with gang-master-type contracts and ruthlessness.
The tale of how – against all the odds – the 19 year old, angst-ridden, Brian not only threw off the malevolent smothering influence of his father but convinced both record company owners and gnarled veteran session musicians to let him ‘do it his way’ at all via the sheer force of his fledgling talent was remarkable in itself.
That he then blossomed into the originator of tens of one-off hit records and masterpieces such as Pet Sounds whilst suffering from a succession of nervous breakdowns and/or drug-induced mental issues was extraordinary.
I’m not going to detail here some two and a half subsequent decades of ‘burned out retirement’ here, nor the fact that – whilst personally marvelling at the four, maybe five, concerts in the UK that I attended between about 2002 and 2009 at which Brian and his backing band the Wondermints performed brilliant versions of Beach Boys music – it was obvious that Brian was not quite ‘himself’ (however that might be described in clinical terms).
Nevertheless, I took the view at the time (whilst acknowledging that I was attending for my own benefit too anyway) that by being in an audience that was full of goodwill and adoring of his music, Brian – surrounded by supportive musicians who lovingly took up the strain whenever he couldn’t quite reach his own heights in performance – was not only gaining something but somehow we were all contributing to his therapy.
By the same token, even then I did feel a little uneasy at the spectacle of this hesitant figure who was sometimes led on and off stage and – in his between-song patter and even his behaviour whilst singing at a keyboard centre stage – was clearly not quite ‘normal’ as you or I might understand it.
Currently Brian Wilson is on the UK leg of another of what these days seems to be an endless round of world tours.
Sadly, things don’t seem to be improving as time goes on. It’s difficult to avoid the conclusion that, for whatever benefit Brian Wilson gets from these outings, there’s always an element of the 19th Century ‘freak show’ fascination involved for the audience.
See here for a link to the review by Alexis Petridis, as appears today upon the website of – THE GUARDIAN
[If readers wish to delve further into the ‘troubling’ side of Brian Wilson as he is today, you need only click upon the link just after half way down the piece on the left to ‘Are We There Yet’ – an interview with Wilson conducted by Tom Lamont at some point in 2016 …]
