Brian Wilson - Beach Boys

I finally understood,

that in the depths of winter

there lay within me

an invincible summer

(Albert Camus, 1954)

At twenty-two, Brian Wilson began hearing voices in his head. A few weeks earlier, in 1964, he had tried Lsd for the first time, drawn in by what he'd heard from those in the know - that the stuff helped expand the mind, and that was something he was genuinely fascinated by, since it might allow him to push the horizons of his music toward something practically limitless. And yet, as he himself has told us, what that experience left him with in its immediate aftermath were precisely those voices - or rather, "the voice of a real person, a person other than me that I couldn't control, but inside my head". Fear took hold of him. But that didn't stop him from acting. On the contrary, he tried to "make music that could capture all those voices", well aware that art can bring order, or at least attempt to, to the complexity each of us represents. After all, "I is someone else", as Arthur Rimbaud had already written well over a hundred and fifty years earlier.

With hindsight, and especially now that Brian is no longer with us, it's striking to remember that this gentle, troubled soul first got acquainted with music, back in Inglewood, Southern California, through vocal harmonies - so much so that by the end of the Fifties he was already able to arrange them for four or five voices. The culprits were the Four Freshmen, a vocal quartet from Indianapolis. Typically, after putting one of their records on the turntable, Brian would sit in reverent silence and listen, then try to reproduce at the piano the essence of what Don Barbour, Bob Flanigan, Ken Errair and Ross Barbour had created using nothing but the most primal instrument of all. By singing along to their records, Brian also developed his signature falsetto, which would one day play such a crucial role in the sonic makeup of the Beach Boys. The eldest of the Wilson brothers then took it upon himself to teach his two younger siblings (Carl and Dennis) the techniques he had so patiently learned.

It was the start of everything. 

Over time, the Wilson trio was joined by talented cousin Mike Love and family friend Al Jardine: thus were born the Pendletones. The only genuine surfer among them was Dennis, who used all his powers of persuasion to get the others to devote themselves to the music Dick Dale had invented to celebrate the magic of that sport. Gigs at local venues followed, then a deal with Candix Records. Next came their first single. And the choice of a new name, Beach Boys, since the label's Los Angeles bosses had long had in mind something clearer, more direct and sun-drenched. And so came hit singles and albums, all in the name of a surf music that was, however, slowly morphing into something more complex, into an increasingly refined pop machine, shaped both by Phil Spector's "wall of sound" and by what, across the ocean, the Beatles of Lennon & McCartney were doing. The dream was to write the perfect pop song, to condense an entire universe of feelings and emotions into just a few minutes, to divert, even just briefly, ever so briefly, the river of endless change into a pool of creativity where the river's own inhuman power could shine forth each time the needle, doing its job, turned the grooves of the vinyl into notes, words, rhythms.

If there's one record with which Brian bid farewell, at least in spirit, to California's surf culture, it's undoubtedly “All Summer Long” (July 1964), opened by one of the most celebrated and important tracks in the Beach Boys catalogue, namely “I Get Around”, a small, sophisticated pop contraption that, besides showing just how far the band's command of vocal harmonies had grown - here built around the hyperbolic soaring of Brian's falsetto - and highlighting his skill at using the recording studio as a genuine instrument in its own right, also reflects on the band's sudden fame, quietly wondering whether that's really what matters most.

After “All Summer Long”, things changed. Life in the spotlight and the relentless drive toward an ever more sophisticated sound had already left several scars on Brian's psyche.

Then came December 23, 1964: the band was on tour and flying from Los Angeles to Houston when, suddenly, Brian was struck by a violent panic attack. It was the final straw. The chief songwriter and maximo leader of the Beach Boys (who had also, in the meantime, discovered he was partially deaf in his right ear—who knows whether from a congenital defect or from a blow dealt to him by his overbearing father Murray) decided to abandon the tour, and the band, in order to honor its existing commitments, was forced to replace him temporarily with Glen Campbell. A few days later, Brian summoned the other members of the group and informed them that, from that moment on, his only concern would be to focus on songwriting and studio work. The band tried to resist, but was then forced to hire Bruce Johnston on a permanent basis to replace him for live performances.

Trying to relieve his stress, but also to court his muse, Brian started smoking marijuana. He then set to work feverishly on "The Beach Boys Today!", which would see the light of day in March 1965. Having abandoned the themes tied to the world of surfing, teenage love and fast cars, the new record showed a further maturation in its arrangements, which required, during recording, the involvement of some thirty session musicians (!), many of whom belonged to the so-called Wrecking Crew, employed for his productions by Brian's beloved Phil Spector. Moreover, for the first time in the production process, Brian focused his attention on the sound of each individual instrument, only to then build the "wall of sound" like a genuine mosaic. Lyrically, too, the change of course was striking: in them, Brian focused on the wonder that only adolescent love can make us feel, in turn exposing many of his own anxieties and fragilities. First-person writing is the clearest sign of this shift: what he now wrote was, no more and no less, the poetic transfiguration of that magma of sensations and emotions stirring at the bottom of his soul.

The first half of "The Beach Boys Today!" is made up of highly catchy, rhythmic tracks, naturally seasoned with those vocal harmonies which, growing ever more complex, were by now one of the most distinctive traits of their music. "Do You Wanna Dance" (a Bobby Freeman song from 1958, here treated according to the dictates of the Spectorian wall of sound), "Good To My Baby" (the title echoes, certainly not by chance, the Ronettes' hit), "Don't Hurt My Little Sister", "When I Grow Up (To Be A Man)" (another example of an uptempo track with melancholy overtones), "Dance, Dance, Dance" and the first version—with a volume swell in the finale—of "Help Me, Ronda" (heavily influenced by that "Fanny Mae" by bluesman Buster Brown, which Dick Dale too had reinterpreted) capture, in short, the Beach Boys grappling with the breeziest sound of their origins, but by now transformed by Brian into something entirely new, in which the shadings, the layering and the choice of instrumentation carry a precise meaning: pushing pop toward ever more ambitious dimensions.

On the vinyl, side B (whose songs were written and arranged entirely by Brian under the influence of LSD) opened with "Please Let Me Wonder", continuing then in the vein of atmospheric ballads with more pronounced doo-wop overtones ("I'm So Young", from a 1958 single by the Students) or in which the romantic impulse is, more or less, underscored by an ecstatic tension ("Kiss Me Baby", "She Knows Me Too Well"). The tiptoeing orchestration (with a vaguely psychedelic use of strings) of "In The Back Of My Mind" is instead perfect for guiding us into Brian's most intimate rooms. The weakest track (utterly pointless, to be honest) is "Bull Session With 'Big Daddy'", nothing more than a snippet of an interview the band members had recently given to journalist Earl Leaf.

Sales of "The Beach Boys Today!" did not satisfy Capitol, which pressured Brian to make a more commercial record, ideally with a higher hit count. Reluctantly, Brian agreed, and the result was "Summer Days (And Summer Nights!!)" (July 1965), a work that, artistically speaking, marked at least a step backward from its predecessor, even if the instrumentation deployed was still remarkable.

Still bowing to pressure from Capitol, which this time demanded a record ready for the market in time for Christmas, the band put together "Beach Boys' Party!" (November 1965), one of the lowest points in their discography. However, just a few days after the release of "Beach Boys' Party!", the standalone single "The Little Girl I Once Knew" was released: it marked a return to top form, proof that the "party album" had been nothing but a bump in the road, because by now Brian saw no limit ahead of him: "For that whole year after the flight to Houston, I kept thinking about what kind of songs I should be making and whether there were limits to how a pop song could sound. I couldn't think of any limits. I knew I had to explore that sound further. I had to go further in that direction, add more orchestration and different kinds of arrangements to our music."

By that point (November 1965), Brian was already at work on "Pet Sounds", a record which, in his intentions, was meant to represent the culmination of the sonic exploration begun with "The Beach Boys Today!". Pushing him toward ever bolder solutions was his listening to "Rubber Soul", released by the Beatles on December 3 of that same year. The sixth album by the Liverpool foursome cornered him, because in it Brian saw not a mere collection of songs, but an artistically coherent work, free of filler. It was thus that Brian announced to everyone that he would make the "greatest record ever made", because only in that way could he surpass "Rubber Soul", which from his very first listen had struck him as "the greatest record of all time".

To achieve this goal, he would obviously keep following the path laid out for him by Phil Spector, the wizard of the wall of sound, a technique he had also learned by hanging around the studios where the New York producer went about recording, one by one, the tracks of his proteges, and which closely mirrored what Brian himself perceived with his one fully functioning ear, in which, as he would later put it, "all the sounds flattened out onto a single layer." Brian became such a devoted disciple of the brilliant and controversial New York producer that, as he would state some years later, in his eyes the Beach Boys had by then turned into Spector's "messengers."

For months, then, Brian worked like a madman in the recording studio, writing, arranging and producing the material destined for the new album, which was in practice more a solo work of his than yet another Beach Boys record. The other band members, in fact, limited themselves to supplying their vocal recordings, so that Brian could work on them, layer them and then blend them, as though they were a genuine instrument, into the rest of the wall of sound, in which, with meticulous patience and precision, he was also arranging percussion of every kind, accordions, basses, guitars, pianos, strings, brass, bicycle bells and even a Tannerin, an instrument built in the late Fifties by trombonist Paul Tanner and inventor Bob Whitsell to reproduce the sound of the theremin.

Released in May 1966, "Pet Sounds" (a title Brian chose after hearing a negative comment from Mike Love about his new songs, something along the lines of: "Who's gonna listen to this shit? Dogs' ears?") is a concept album centered on the passage from adolescence to adulthood, a theme spread across thirteen tracks whose lyrics Brian entrusted to lyricist Tony Asher, who helped him translate into more polished, poetic language those confused feelings that had been haunting him for some time.

"It's hard to say exactly when the sound of 'Pet Sounds' was born. It was something that had been taking shape for a while. Maybe it started when I first heard 'Be My Baby' [by the Ronettes] on the radio and began to understand how you could create emotions through sound. Maybe it started when I came to better understand soul singers like Dionne Warwick and Aretha Franklin and how they could make you feel incredible emotions through tiny vocal gestures. Or maybe it all started with the second side of 'The Beach Boys Today!', when I began writing softer, slower songs that weren't exactly love ballads, but rather snapshots of how I felt while growing up. It was probably all of that together, but it changed what I was doing."

Introduced by a brief guitar figure that sounds like harps, the album's opening track, "Wouldn't It Be Nice", "a song about someone who doesn't have something they want", establishes itself as a hinge between the carefree early days and the complexity of the new direction, moving with symphonic drive between boisterous sarabands and oases of nostalgic wonder. Everything, on the whole, sounds charged with jubilant optimism, as befits the start of any journey worth taking. "You Still Believe In Me", by contrast, resembles a Renaissance lullaby, while "That's Not Me" carries a devotional quality and bears the doubts and pains that accompany both the discovery of one's own identity and the search for independence. The love ballad "Don't Talk (Put Your Head On My Shoulder)" takes on, instead, an austere tone, advancing with regal solemnity between a voice reflected in its own echo and a string quartet that carries the mystery of a love that needs no words.

I can feel so much in your sighs

And I can see so much in your eyes

There are words that we both could say

But don't speak, put your head on my shoulder

Come closer, close your eyes and stay still

Don't speak, take my hand and let me feel your heartbeat

Being here with you feels so right

We could live forever tonight

We're not thinking about tomorrow

For its part, “I’m Waiting For The Day” alternates brief moments of reflective introspection with others dominated by the vigor of percussion. Preceded by the meditative tones of the instrumental “Let’s Go Away For Awhile” (in which strings and saxophones seem to follow the irregular flow of an intimate swell of the sea, while, as Brian would recall in his memoir, “a guitar we'd tied a Coke bottle to the strings” sounds “like a Hawaiian steel guitar”), the whirl of celestial guitars (almost in Byrds' orbit) and the marching-band gait of “Sloop John B” (an old traditional Bahamian song that Carl Sandburg had first put on record in 1927 under the title “The John B. Sails”) carry us toward the end of side A with a mix of joyful grace and stifled unease. The journey toward maturity is at a turning point, but the refrain “let me go home, I wanna go home” shows that doubts and fears still survive in the shadows, because here, ultimately, “home” is nothing more than the symbol of a youth now lost forever.

So we start again with one of the most beautiful songs Brian ever wrote: “God Only Knows”, led by French horns and embellished by a refrain that resembles a prayer entrusted to the angels. Brian is unable to explain his love for his beloved: only God knows what he would be without her, a God who embodies “whatever force helps a person control their hopes and doubts”.

If you should ever leave me

My life, believe me, would go on somehow

The world would show me nothing

So what good would living do me?

God only knows what I'd be without you

The writing of "I Know There's An Answer" dated back to a period before the album was even conceived. Brian wrote it after yet another experience with LSD. "People were taking acid to get away from themselves, but that wasn't the right way to take it. It was supposed to take you deeper into yourself. I wanted to remind people that they could better survive anything if they remembered who they were." Musically, "I Know There's An Answer" still features a highly distinctive arrangement, built by blending saxophones, flutes, an organ, a banjo, a harmonica (whose sound, during the solo, closely resembles a kazoo) and even a prepared piano. In the journey everyone makes from adolescence to adulthood, the answer to be sought lies within oneself: that's the song's message.

"Here Today", on the other hand, revolves around the theme of love put to the test by time, steeped in pessimism and disillusionment (feelings effectively evoked by the trombone's gruff mutter). Brian's disenchantment is even more evident in "I Just Wasn't Made For These Times", a song in which he declares, right from the title, that he feels out of step with his era. It's a condition that saddens him greatly, especially because, every time he feels the spark of inspiration to change things, the people around him are unable to help him.

The album's other instrumental moment is the title track, whose exotic, tribal feel is bolstered by the sound of bongos and Coca-Cola cans struck by drummer Ritchie Frost at Brian's explicit request. The completion of the journey is perfectly exemplified by the melancholy ballad "Caroline No", closed out by the barking of Wilson's own dogs and the sound of a train passing near a level crossing. Youth has passed, and with it the woman he loved. There's no way to bring them back to life. At most, they can be held onto on the shoreline of memory.

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For American pop music (and beyond), "Pet Sounds" was a pivotal moment, a turning point toward consciously experimental and elegantly cultured sonorities. For many in the industry, the album not only earned pop music a place among the ranks of the most significant creative outlets to which humankind can entrust its ideas and emotions, but also helped spread the gospel of psychedelic music (which, in that very year of 1966, was just beginning to take its first conscious steps) and to anticipate the "baroque" tendency of that "progressive" strand (it's no coincidence that, when launched in England, the album was billed as "the most progressive pop album ever!").

The "rival" Beatles took note and listened to the album while putting the finishing touches on "Revolver", due out in early August of that same year, not even two months after the release of "Pet Sounds". The long-distance duel in the shadow of pop's Holy Grail carried on, and Brian, once he'd heard the Fab Four's new album, immediately wanted to respond, determined to show he was still one step ahead. That October, the Beach Boys duly released "Good Vibrations" (lyrics by Mike Love; over a million copies sold), destined to become one of the greatest and most revolutionary singles in the history of the music we love so much. Piecing together various musical fragments born in different situations, Brian (who worked on the song for months on end, recording a total of over ninety hours of tape - for twenty different versions of the song! - and costing Capitol the, for the time, exorbitant sum of $75,000!) crafted a gem of psychedelic pop inspired both by his LSD use and by an urgent need to write "spiritual music" - all of which makes sense in light of the fact that Brian had described his first experience with LSD as a "religious event", complete with a perceived sense of the divine...

The Beatles felt the blow and began thinking about "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band". Brian, however, had no intention of sitting on his hands. Quite the opposite: by that point, a series of songs was already taking shape in his mind, songs in which the baroque pop of "Pet Sounds" would give way to something even more futuristic.

The triumph of the Spectorian wall of sound running through the grooves of "Pet Sounds", and the "collage-like" triumph of the single "Good Vibrations", had catapulted him into the pantheon of pop music. Even before "Pet Sounds" was finished, Brian already had the next step in mind. His idea was to write a "teenage symphony to God", as he himself put it at the time, likely drawing inspiration from the concept of the "pocket symphony" theorized by writers and producers Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller - under whom, of all people, Phil Spector had served his own apprenticeship.

With "Good Vibrations", Brian had been able to experiment with new recording techniques, splicing together an array of sounds and thus creating a genuine symphonic collage. It was from there that he wanted to start afresh, envisioning his new endeavor as a suite in which the songs would be joined together through a shared musical and thematic identity. The decisive encounter that got this new project off the ground was with composer and arranger Van Dyke Parks, who had refused to revise the lyrics to "Good Vibrations" written by Mike Love, but was ultimately delighted to collaborate with the Beach Boys' leader on the lyrics of what was, at the time, still called "Dumb Angel" - a title pointing to that conflict between spirituality and worldliness which would become one of the new project's central themes. The two began meeting at Brian's house almost every day, where he'd had a tent set up for smoking marijuana together, and a piano placed inside a sandbox, so he could dip his feet in to spur his inspiration. Geniuses, as we know, tend to be eccentric people too...

The first fruit of the collaboration with Parks was "Heroes And Villains". As the project took shape through the writing of further songs ("Surf's Up", "Wonderful", "Cabin Essence" and "Wind Chimes"), the two also clarified its underlying thematic idea: to produce an album that would represent a kind of lyrical-musical journey through the culture and society of the United States, from the East Coast all the way to the Hawaiian islands. In the meantime, the album's definitive title had also been settled on: "SMiLE", spelled exactly that way, symbolizing the annihilation of the Self. The nod to "smile" was the clearest sign of a music in which spirituality and the desire to spread happiness and good cheer went hand in hand.

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In August 1966, recording sessions began. As the days went by, experimenting with unusual sonic combinations and devising elaborate harmonic sequences, Brian was gripped by an all-consuming excitement. As had already happened with "Good Vibrations", he adopted a collage-like (or "modular") approach: rather than thinking of songs as fully formed structures from the start, he broke them down into sections, which were then recorded at different speeds or with different arrangements and, moreover, in different studios, so as to exploit the particular effects and acoustics of each. Afterwards, the various sections of the songs were selected and stitched together through a process that could be likened to film editing, thereby forming an actual finished track.

Meanwhile, the other members, along with friends and closest collaborators, had developed a genuine reverence for "SMiLE". Among themselves, they spoke of it enthusiastically, referring to it as a "monument". One day, when journalists and fans tried to find out how things were going, Dennis Wilson said: "As far as I'm concerned, ['SMiLE'] makes 'Pet Sounds' stink... That's how big it is. You just have to wait until it comes out and you'll see for yourselves".

True, but in the meantime the release date kept getting pushed back, and up in Capitol's executive offices blood was starting to boil. Pressure mounted for the album to come out as soon as possible (December 1966 would have been perfect!), which sat badly with Brian's psyche, growing ever more fragile, not least because of his use of drugs, both psychedelic and otherwise. His anxiety spiked seriously when, in December of that same year, the Beatles entered Abbey Road Studios to record the follow-up to "Revolver". In short, the race to see who would release their new creation first was well and truly on. Then, in February 1967, the Liverpool lads released the single "Strawberry Fields Forever" and everything went to hell. Brian heard it for the first time while driving and was left stunned. He realised that, in the race towards pop's Holy Grail, the Beatles had made an almost decisive leap forward, and this sat poorly with the performance anxiety and insecurity he carried with him every time he felt he had to give his best. Before long, tensions within the band grew sharper, not only because drug use had made Brian practically unmanageable, but also because Mike Love and the others struggled to digest Van Dyke Parks's poetic and, in some cases, nonsensical lyrics. Parks, tired of feeling attacked, eventually walked away from the recording sessions, which had by then become increasingly fragmented, to the point that by May of that same year the "SMiLE" adventure had petered out entirely. As if it were some sign of fate, in early June the Beatles released "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band", an album born, as George Martin would later recall, as an "attempt to equal 'Pet Sounds'"...

Brian hadn't managed to scale the mountain of his own enormous ambition. Still, there was a contract to honour, and he knew he couldn't leave his band at the mercy of Capitol. After all, he'd already forced them to cancel their appearance at the Monterey Pop Festival (16-18 June). So, as a kind of compromise, September 1967 saw the release of "Smiley Smile", an album featuring songs written from scratch in a rush (to meet the deadlines), plus much simplified versions of tracks intended for "SMiLE", with the exception of the note-for-note reprises of "Heroes And Villains" and "Wind Chimes".

The echo of the Four Freshmen resurfaces forcefully in the minimalist "With Me Tonight", but also in "Vegetables", a surreal excursion into a sonic world where the voices ham it up or surrender to ecstasy, while the bass lays down the rhythmic backbone and someone (Paul McCartney, according to those in the know) can be heard happily munching on celery and carrots...

The instrumental "Fall Breaks And Back To Winter (W. Woodpecker Symphony)" reprises, slows down and warps the original "The Elements: Fire" (one of the most adventurous pieces from the "SMiLE" sessions), knotting itself around the grumbling drone of the voices (I get the impression the Residents listened to this track obsessively) while also evoking the theme of the "Woody Woodpecker" cartoon. Among the more bizarre moments are, instead, "She's Goin' Bald" (with comically stretched-out voices) and a "Little Pad" that shakes together moaning, Hawaiian echoes and giggling. After the recovery of the superb "Good Vibrations", the tracklist is rounded off by the spiralling refrain of "Getting Hungry", encircled by blues deviations and paranoid nightmares, the doo-wop that creeps through a hall of mirrors in "Wonderful" and, finally, "Whistle", a little over a minute of melodic march. All things considered, and despite its troubled premise, "Smiley Smile" stands out as one of the Beach Boys' finest works.

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Over the years, the aborted "SMiLE" would become one of the most famous lost albums in rock history (for many, the "lost album" par excellence). Many fans, drawing on the various session recordings dating from a period between April 1966 and May 1967, would go so far as to piece together their own personalised versions of that legendary work.

In 2004, Brian Wilson attempted to bring the project to completion by re-recording that material with new musicians and releasing the result under the title "Brian Wilson Presents Smile". Then, in 2011, fifty years after the Beach Boys' formation, "The Smile Sessions" unearthed the original recordings intact, effectively drawing a line under the long-running dispute surrounding the lost album and confirming that "SMiLE" was indeed another fascinating adventure (even more fascinating than "Pet Sounds", I'd venture to suggest) through the labyrinths of a psychedelic, experimental and intelligently "progressive" pop. Had it been released at the time, Brian Wilson and the Beach Boys would have proven themselves without rivals in the realm of evolved pop, and who knows, they might even have pushed "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" into the background (I'd drop the "might", I'll venture to suggest again). Things turned out differently, but "The Smile Sessions" shows just how profoundly those tracks, so mythologised and shared among fans via bootlegs and pirate recordings over the years, had influenced the more oblique paths of pop music.

The "standard" tracklist of "The Smile Sessions", approved by Brian Wilson himself, consists of 19 tracks, although in a note of his from December 1966, Brian himself had sketched out an admittedly provisional tracklist of just 12 tracks*, to which others would in any case need to be added (including "Our Prayer"), based on an analysis of the various recording sessions from the period. That is, if one wants to be pedantic about it.

As for the music on these legendary recordings, after the a cappella overture of "Our Prayer" (inspired by sacred music) and the brief cover of "Gee" (a song by the Crows), we arrive at "Heroes And Villains", the pivotal track of the whole "SMiLE" enterprise, with its captivating mix of chanting revelry, vaudeville-style doo-wop sequences and celestial interludes. What follows, from "Do You Like Worms (Roll Plymouth Rock)" through to "Cabin Essence" - which closes the first movement of the suite (remember the album's original concept?) with a "rock and roll waltz" - is a schizophrenic and gripping succession of rhythmic layering, oblique chamber-music incursions, flashes of vaudeville, forays into psych-pop and deconstructed surf-rock, mists of lysergic melancholy, ecstatic minimalism and hallucinations of "good vibrations".

Opened by the baroque textures of "Wonderful", the second movement then continues with a "Look (Song For Children)" that delights with its childlike marching-band feel, before crossing paths with "Child Is Father Of The Man", in which the vocal harmonies seem to drift on the wind like yellowed leaves. "'Child Is Father To The Man' was based on something written by Karl Menninger, a psychiatrist who had interesting theories about mental health and mental illness, about how people develop, and about when doctors should try to help and when they should keep their distance. He was one of the founders of the Menninger Clinic in Kansas. Someone, maybe Van Dyke, also told me there was a similar idea in a poem by Wordsworth".

In the following "Surf's Up", this pop sound born at the crossroads of the Four Freshmen, the wall of sound and the surrender of body and mind before the simulacrum of the endless summer reaches an absolute peak, helped in no small part by one of the most poetic (and cryptic) lyrics ever penned by Van Dyke Parks:

The hanging velvet has overtaken me

A dim chandelier woke me up

To a song dissolved in the dawn

(…)

The glass was raised, the rose dried out

The fullness of the wine, the last, resigned toast

While you're in the harbor or you die

A breath of sorrow hardened, I

Beyond faith, a broken man too hard to mourn

Brian explained that the song reflected the vision of a man who, once reality had vanished before his eyes, tried to rebuild it as if in a dream. "‘Surf's Up’ is really a rhapsody, with all the key changes and tempo shifts. Sometimes it seems to just wander off, but it wanders in an extraordinary way." As for the meaning of the lyrics written by Asher: "People say they're too complicated or that they don't mean anything, but that's exactly the beauty of poetry. They're ideas, and they give you ideas when you listen to them. I never asked Van Dyke what they meant. I sang their meaning the way I felt it."

"I Wanna Be Around / Workshop" opens the third and final movement with a free scattering of instruments and voices. "Vega-Tables", meanwhile, is the "Vegetables" from "Smiley Smile" traced back to its source. The vaudeville-like march of "Holidays" is thus followed by "Wind Chimes", a free-form choral piece with a coda of vocal improvisations.

The opening of "The Elements: Fire (Mrs. O'Leary's Cow)" is marked by what sounds like a comic version of a fire alarm, a prelude to an obsessive drumming beneath which the voices are sucked into a vortex that, toward the end of the track, still lets through sinister premonitions of the Residents. The track is one of those that made Brian himself realize he was really pushing things too far: "We were trying so many things. With hindsight, you could say it was too many, but that wasn't my concern at the time. I just wanted to reach the highest peaks, and sometimes it was beyond everyone's grasp, including my own." And again: “For the recording session (of 'The Elements: Fire', ed.), I asked people to come into the studio wearing firemen's helmets. I had a bucket with burning wood in it so that the studio would smell of smoke. What I really wanted was to record the crackling and popping of the wood as it burned. Ma, a quanto pare, quella canzone non è mai stata registrata. A few days after the recording session, a building near the studio burned down. Due giorni dopo, un altro edificio è bruciato. I don't know if there were other fires or if I just suddenly noticed them, but it unsettled me. Ho messo via i master. The story goes that I even tried to burn the tapes, but either it's not true or I just don't remember it. Non credo che l’avrei fatto. A volte avevo delle superstizioni. A few years later (…) I started worrying that the pollution in Los Angeles was ruining my lungs, so I had an oxygen tank brought into the studio. Ma bruciare le cose sarebbe stato troppo. The way 'The Elements: Fire' fell apart… that's how everything fell apart. In un verso alla fine di ‘Cabinessence’, Van Dyke scrisse: ‘Ancora e ancora/ Il corvo grida, svela il campo di grano/ Ancora e ancora/ La trebbiatrice e il piviere, il campo di grano’. Mike (Love, ed.) kept singing it over and over, but he had no idea what it meant, and he figured not even Van Dyke could explain it. Io non sapevo cosa significasse, ma sapevo che significava qualcosa. Maybe it was just me, but I found it hard to explain anything to Mike, and anyway, I wasn't sure who was supposed to explain what to whom.”

The stretched-out sonorities of "Love Say Dada" evoke the expansion of consciousness brought on by taking LSD which, not by chance, could be an acronym of the title, and they set the stage for the masterpiece "Good Vibrations", already discussed above.

Having left behind the experimental bender of 1966-1967, Brian Wilson, and with him the Beach Boys, would steer toward relatively more "down to earth" territory, rarely again touching the heights reached by "Pet Sounds" and by what "SMiLe" should have been, had Brian - already torn apart by the fight against his own demons - not collapsed under the weight of an unbridled ambition and his own anxieties. His has been a long and difficult battle, one that found its voice above all in the music of the endless summer, a place of the soul where the purity and magic of youth are preserved and warmed by a light that resists every darkness, like the "invincible summer" Albert Camus wrote of in verse. In that "endless summer", where he loved to take refuge, Brian at some point crossed paths with his own demons, at first recoiling from them, then glimpsing in them the negative image of that dazzling, warmth-filled light that floods body and soul when some madeleine or other triggers the spark of memory, announcing the realm of time regained, where past and present echo each other with one and the same voice, in perfect, eternal harmony with itself.

Note

* Here is the tracklist: 

Do You Like Worms?

Wind Chimes

Heroes & Villains

Surf’s Up

Good Vibrations

Cabinessence

Wonderful

I’m In Great Shape

Child is the Father of the Man

The Elements

Vega-Tables

The Old Master Painter/ Sunshine

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