Brian Wilson

Brian Wilson, the central figure of the band the Beach Boys, has died at the age of 82.

In the 1960s, the Beach Boys were one of the most critical factors in creating what could be called The Idea of California. They started out as just one of several surfer bands that were hitting the charts in the early years of the decade, but by the time Wilson produced Pet Sounds in 1966 they were a lot more than that. The group pretty much fell apart in the late 1960s, and in the mid-1970s they went on to become the first and most successful 1960s oldies act, although by the early 1980s Wilson was basically estranged from the group.

I suggested on the 50th anniversary of the release of Pet Sounds that it would be difficult to find more perfect pop songs than God Only Knows (described by Paul McCartney as the one song he would most like to have written) and Caroline No.

Brian Wilson was a weird intensely socially awkward teenager, who eventually channeled his desires, dreams, and frustrations into some amazing music. If he had been born in 2000 he might well have ended up on 8chan and/or an incel message board, but luckily he came from a different time and place.

Here’s a little passage from A Fan’s Life about how the Idea of California worked in one Michigan household in the 1970s:

It’s difficult to convey now what watching the Rose Bowl was like back then.  For one thing, imagine Michigan in winter – and not the comparatively mild winters that have visited the state subsequently because of the effects of climate change, but the brutal, unending winters of the 1970s. These consisted of five straight months of bone chilling cold, underneath a monotonous slate gray sky that allowed the sun to appear for perhaps half an hour twice per month.  The landscape itself was dominated by enormous drifts of slushy snow, that on a typical day were fed by an almost constant depressive staccato of tiny snowflakes, buffeted here and there by a wheedling, coat-piercing wind – the harbingers of the inevitable next big storm.

For another, keep in mind that the Rose Bowl was, as it were, It: You would not see another college football game until September.  And by “not see” I mean not see in a quite literal way, that is hard now to even imagine, as we loll in the decadent luxury of our present media-saturated age.  At that time there were not yet even any VCR tapes, let alone ESPN Classic replays, DVR recordings, or YouTube videos available to break our annual eight-month fast.

Most of all, the telecast of the Rose Bowl unveiled to us, as we huddled in practically Siberian if not Neolithic conditions, what appeared to be an almost mythical world, bathed in a warm golden light, where it was perpetually 77 degrees, and the girls from Beach Boy songs walked along a seashore that could easily be mistaken for paradise itself.

And here I encounter a question that occurs to me now, yet literally never arose for me – or as far as I know anyone else in my family – at the time: Why didn’t we go there, instead of staying here?  I suspect that our collective failure to even consider this possibility reflected a kind of inherited Latin fatalism, combined perhaps with the sort of environmentally-inculcated Midwestern stoicism captured well by Grant Wood’s “American Gothic.”  (Even more puzzling is the fact that I distinctly remember wondering at the time, when UCLA won a recruiting battle with Michigan for a running back from the Detroit area, how schools like Michigan and Ohio State, shivering in the increasingly depressed rust belt, ever won such battles against the sun-kissed glamor offered by the likes of USC and UCLA.  Somehow this same puzzlement never extended to my own mindset).

Yet it was that very failure to even contemplate the quintessentially American option of hitting the road, and abandoning quasi-Siberia for the television’s carefully curated vision of happiness, California-style, that gave the experience of watching the Rose Bowl on TV its peculiar melancholic power.  There it was before us: the golden country, utterly unlike our own world, and yet still connected to us by the temporary presence of those winged helmets that remained among the most recognizable symbols of our own miserable home, to which, like our football team – which always lost in the Rose Bowl whenever it made it that far – we remained so mysteriously loyal.

RIP