You Need a Mess of Help to Stand Alone

Too saddened by the news of Brian Wilson’s death today to come up with any words. Maybe the chapter about him from A Mess of Help has something in it:

A study of The Beach Boys is a study in contradictions. Some of these contradictions are well-known, others less so: the band that sung so famously about surfing couldn’t ‘catch a wave’ themselves (with one exception). The quintessentially clean-cut American group, for the majority of their career, sported the thickest, most impressive beards the pop world has ever seen. The fun-in-the-sun optimism which belied deep wells of melancholy, the supremely wholesome public image that contrasted with a lengthy history of all manner of substance abuse, the assumed solidarity of family ties undermined by decades of lawsuits and ill feeling. The list goes on.

These contradictions — you might call them ironies — are one of the many reasons The Beach Boys remain endlessly fascinating more than fifty years after their first single hit the airwaves. What you see is not what you get. Except for when it is. In fact, the contrasting dynamic goes deeper than the facts of their career. Contradiction was embedded in the songs themselves from the very beginning.

Perhaps ‘contradiction’ is too weak a word. There may be something genuinely cruciform at work.

Religious terminology may seem out of place in describing something so commercial, so pop. And yet Brian Wilson has never shied away from expressing his music-making in spiritual terms. He once went so far as to claim that “Music is God’s voice. I’ve often felt that I was on some musical mission to spread the gospel of love through records” (SMiLE liner notes, Capital Records, 2011). Careful observers know that Brian has not always proven to be the most reliable interpreter of his own work, happy to contradict himself in print and elsewhere. Nonetheless, his words may give us some clue as to how to make sense of the enduring power of the band’s oeuvre — and hopefully allow us to appreciate the songs and their creator(s) afresh. To that end, this essay adopts a lens found toward the end of the Apostle Paul’s second letter to the Corinthians:

But he said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” Therefore I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ’s power may rest on me. That is why, for Christ’s sake, I delight in weaknesses, in insults, in hardships, in persecutions, in difficulties. For when I am weak, then I am strong.

A Lonely Sea (Full of Tears): Strength in Weakness

“Don’t Worry Baby” might be an ideal starting point for such a study, not only because many fans consider it to be the definition of a perfect record (certainly a perfect Beach Boys record), but also because it was originally released as the B-side of “I Get Around”, in a sense hidden behind the other song. Brian was only 21 when it was recorded in early 1964, and yet the promotional strategy resonated with the compromised self-confidence of the lyric, which was written by Roger Christian. This is the song, after all, which opens with the memorable couplet, “Well it’s been building up inside of me for, oh, I don’t know how long / I don’t know why but I keep thinking something’s bound to go wrong.”

We are getting ahead of ourselves, though. Based on the title alone, and given the Mad Men-like context of its composition, one might have safely presumed that “Don’t Worry Baby” was written from the perspective of a confident man comforting a hysterical woman. But Brian and Roger flipped that convention on its head, producing a tune about an insecure man recalling all the times his uncommonly demonstrative girlfriend had reassured him.

In what feels like a transparent nod to the powers that be, they frame the next two verses in drag-racing terms (“I guess I should’ve kept my mouth shut when I started to brag about my car”), but it’s a testament to the beauty of the opening line and chorus that almost no one remembers it as such. Most cover versions even use an alternate set of words for verses two and three.

The song subverts — probably unconsciously — the rock n’ roll archetypes of the time. Up until that point, it could be argued that rock n’ roll was mainly a tough-man’s game, pre-army Elvis Presley being the most iconic case in point. Early rock was full of chest-beating, focused on generating adolescent male anger, which then was channeled into these great songs. Just listen to The Kinks’ first five singles.

Brian, in contrast, opens an emotional floodgate. He was the original heart-on-your-sleeve auteur. Young men had been vulnerable on record before, but usually in the service of garnering swoons rather than expressing actual warts-and-all weakness. Brian’s was not the attractive kind of vulnerability; it was the awkward kind. In the song, his girl’s devotion even makes him “want to cry.” The Beach Boys sang about teenage male tears more than anyone before or since, which may not have scored Brian many dates — but it certainly allowed him to connect with an audience. Rhonda needed to help him, not vice versa.

Yet we would be doing both Brian and ourselves a disservice to reduce his innovation merely to the realm of pop fashion and gender norms. The human aversion to vulnerability is not contextual — some would say it goes back to the Garden of Eden, where the shame of exposure caused Adam and Eve to don fig leaves to cover themselves. Their concealment would be the first act of independence from God via hiding weakness, the first in a long line of controlled obstacles to intimacy with our creator, a relationship originally characterized by dependence and receptivity. That Brian would refuse to veil his neediness or manage his appearance — out of ineptitude or because it simply didn’t occur to him to do so — runs counter to the self-justifying impulse that dominates human history, to say nothing of popular music.

His relative nakedness likely accounts for what would be his greatest theme: the longing for — and astonishment at — love in the midst of weakness that is so beautifully expressed in “Don’t Worry Baby”. This lack of bluster would make him a hero for those who felt similarly but were afraid to admit it, many of whom would be more than willing to overlook whatever culpability Brian shared in the trials he and his band would face over the years. Underground comic artist and writer Peter Bagge described Brian’s appeal in somewhat cynical terms:

It’s Brian’s story that so many poor, misunderstood, hyper-sensitive idealists can’t get enough of. Not only was Brian the main musical genius behind all those great records, but he’s also that most romantic type of Genius: the Idiot Savant, the Tortured Soul. He’s become the straight male nerd’s Judy Garland.[1]

Thanks to YouTube, performances of “Don’t Worry Baby” at the time of its release are readily available for viewing. Gangly and pudgy and balding and clearly nervous, none of the guys — with the possible exception of Dennis — looked remotely like drag racers. Yet from such strange vessels issued such sublime music!

The melody is pure prettiness, and the arrangement full of warmth and ingenuity. Not even the economical echo-heavy “guitar solo” has dated. The back-up vocals would launch a thousand pop groups. And for a guy who preferred not to use drums in his productions, Brian created one of the most iconic opening drum phrases of all time (by aping, to glorious effect, his beloved “Be My Baby”).

Strange vessels would become, in a few short years, broken ones. When Brian quit touring in 1964, bandmate Al Jardine took over lead-vocal duties on “Don’t Worry Baby”. It wasn’t until Brian hesitantly rejoined the touring group fifteen years (and several nervous breakdowns) later that he sang the tune in front of people again. In 1981, he took to the mic again, and the results, documented on a well-circulated bootleg and video, are so raw as to be almost unlistenable. The prettiness is gone, and so, for the most part, is the lush backing.

And yet, the juxtaposition of such an immaculate musical creation with its composer’s ravaged voice is incredibly moving. There is strength in the weakness, or you might say, the weakness here is the strength. The uncalculated vulnerability is what allows the performance to speak on such a visceral level. Furthermore, if we had been taken in by the lyrics back in ’64, the 1981 performance reveals them to be what they really are: a heartfelt fantasy bordering on prayer, words of reassurance and unconditional encouragement (maybe even absolution) that Brian is dying to hear but cannot convey to himself.

Here, as elsewhere, the song is uncomfortably out of proportion with its vessel, so much so that the presence of God seems like the only possible explanation. But not just any God — this God is one of grace who bestows his blessing not on the upright, but on the undeserving. “I came not to call the righteous, but sinners” (Mk 2:17).

Lest we romanticize the ‘wilderness period’ Brian experienced from 1967-1980 (give or take), the same glaring discrepancy between the man and his gifts was present during the recording of what many consider Brian’s crowning achievement, 1966’s Pet Sounds. In classic Beach Boys fashion, Brian hired a complete stranger to pen the lyrics for that record, having heard a jingle on the radio that caught his ear. Interviewed years later, the lyricist in question, Tony Asher, captured the simultaneous inanity and brilliance that makes Brian Wilson such a rare bird:

For every four hours we spent writing songs, there would be 48 hours of these dopey conversation about the dumb book he’d just read. Or else he’d go on and on about girls. His feeling about this girl or that girl. It was just embarrassing that he was exhibiting this awful, awful taste. His choice of movies was invariably terrible. TV programs, everything. He had a parrot statue when you walked into his house, which was the ugliest thing I have ever seen. I do believe Brian is a musical genius. Absolutely. Whatever I thought about him personally was always overridden by my feelings of awe at what he was creating. I mean he was able to create such extraordinary melodies.[2]

Again, what impressed Asher is how much Brian’s art outsized his learning and taste. Some might say the distance represents something of an affront to natural presuppositions about hard work and earning. No doubt contemporary songwriters and producers, those who had sweated for their prowess and experience, harbored some resentment against the teenage autodidact. But such is the nature of grace. It is unfair. It defies the quid-pro-quo of effort and deservedness.[3] Not surprisingly, Brian himself has never come close to explaining his talent (or creative process) without resorting to spiritual language.

Naturally, it is tempting to psychoanalyze Brian, and a great many writers have attempted to do so. What was it about him and his background that gave him the “courage” to be so vulnerable on record? Was it the abuse he suffered from his father? Was it the drugs he took? Was it simply a matter of mental illness? These are impossible questions to answer — all we can safely say is that from very early in his career, even before the drug use, his capacity for self-censorship was limited. He seemed to lack the inner editor that most of us possess, the voice that actively omits our failures, embarrassments, and flaws, insisting that we put our best foot forward whenever others are looking.

During this period, Brian was the opposite of ‘best foot forward’. Indeed, album after album testifies to a diminished mental filter. Brian left in the things most of us would leave out. Who else would have thought it a good idea to include “I’m Bugged at My Old Man” on the otherwise immaculate Summer Days (and Summer Nights!!)? Who else would include detailed directions to his house like Brian did in “Busy Doin’ Nothin”? Who else would openly try to score drugs from a journalist while being recorded for interview? This isn’t to suggest there was anything strategic about his candor; Brian’s vulnerability never feels remotely self-conscious. Child-like is how it is often described, and for good reason.

A more mystical writer might theorize that Brian’s mental unguardedness contributes directly to his musical inspiration. His internal resistance to the kind of shame and self-criticism that stunts much of our own creativity, for whatever reason, was minimal.

From a 2 Corinthians point of view (God’s “power made perfect in weakness”), Brian’s story and music place us in the realm of Martin Luther’s “theology of the cross”. In his Heidelberg Disputation of 1517, Luther maintained that the image of Jesus’ death on the cross did not merely reveal the mechanism of salvation but also a fundamental principle about God’s presence in the world. He came to believe that God works under the form of opposites, or sub contrario:

God receives none but those who are forsaken, restores health to none but those who are sick, gives sight to none but the blind, and life to none but the dead … He has mercy on none but the wretched and gives grace to none but those who are in disgrace.[4]

A “theology of the cross” (theologia crucis) in this sense contradicts many of our assumptions about life. According to this scheme, God is not most reliably present in our strengths or successes or the things we like best about ourselves. Rather, God is at work in the world in the place where a person is falling apart, where they are discovering the limits of their power instead of exercising it.

Luther contrasted the theology of the cross with a “theology of glory”, which would seek to locate God chiefly in strength and victory. He wisely maintained that the theology of glory tends to be the default of a species bent on mastery, advancement, and the avoidance of suffering. In Beach Boys terms, we are talking about the difference between “Don’t Back Down” (on which Brian sounds exactly like the kind of guy who would back down) and “Til I Die” (on which confusion and despair serve as the conduits for otherworldly beauty). Lutheran theologian Gerhard Forde phrased the distinction this way:

The foolishness of God in the cross is wiser than the wisdom of the world … It is not like accomplishing something but like dying and coming to life. It is not like earning something but more like falling in love … The theologian of the cross knows that the love of God creates precisely out of nothing.[5]

The advantage of Brian’s willingness to be seen as weak (or his glaring inability to ‘front’ with any conviction) is that he could express gratitude and joy to a similar extent. Some might say that he penned the greatest song about gratitude that’s ever been written in the American pop idiom, “God Only Knows” — which also happened to be the first time that the word “God” was used in the title of a song that charted on top 40 radio. And Brian & co. were very nervous about that.

In 2012, Brian elaborated on what was going on when he was writing and recording the song:

Carl and I kept praying for the highest love to bring to people. We all in the band believe in Jesus and we believe in God and we believe that we were his messengers. So we followed through with our career as his messengers in the world. And that’s how we did it. Spirituality is love, right? Love and spirituality are kind of like the same. But spirituality is like ever-lasting love.[6]

The truism that vulnerability is the birthplace of connection echoes the theology of the cross. It contradicts the human intuition that our most impressive accomplishments and proudest attributes are what will win us the admiration of others (and of God). It affirms the reality that to love someone truly is to love them at their worst, not merely at their best. As columnist Tim Kreider once memorably observed in the New York Times, “if we want the rewards of being loved we have to submit to the mortifying ordeal of being known”.[7] Meaning, we can know someone and not love them, but we cannot love someone if we do not know them: to know someone fully is to know them in their weakness and shame.

Perhaps it was Brian’s preternatural vulnerability that situated him, then, to appreciate the experience of grace in such transcendent and enduring terms, as songs like “She Knows Me Too Well” and, much later, “Love and Mercy” attest. Or take Pet Sounds’s stunning hymn to ‘love to the loveless shown’, “You Still Believe in Me”. The grace of Asher’s lyric is underlined by the abundant giftedness of its damaged producer: “I know perfectly well I’m not where I should be … And after all I’ve done to you, how can it be, You still believe in me”. The lover meeting the beloved at his point of (persistent) failure and weakness — his lack of deserving — is enough to remind the listener of another supremely cracked vessel named Peter, talking to his risen lord over breakfast on, you guessed it, the beach. [8]

Heroes and Villains and the Cost of Weakness

If vulnerability is the birthplace of connection, and love inextricably entangled with weakness, then why do we find it so seldom? That is, why does Brian remain such an exception?

In theological terms, at least Pauline ones, the answer has to do with the Law. To reiterate, the Law is a shorthand for the divine standard of righteousness we find articulated throughout the Bible, most notably in the Ten Commandments and Christ’s Sermon on the Mount. Formally, the Law refers to the various Thou Shalts and Thou Shalt Nots — commands attached to conditions (“do this and you shall live”) — which, taken together, form the shape of divinely mandated holiness.

Martin Luther, taking after the Apostle Paul, understood the Law to be one of the two principal ways God speaks to human beings, the other being the Gospel. If the Law is imperative by nature, the Gospel is indicative (“good news”); if the Law commands, the Gospel promises. And yet the Law is not merely a matter of what is said or written; it is a matter of what is heard. As such, it cannot be reduced to a moral code or grammatical pattern. This is why Luther characterized the Law as “a voice that man can never stop in this life”, one found in equal measure in the deserts of Israel and the manicured lawns of Southern California.[9]

Paul goes so far as to claim that the Law is written on the hearts of all men and women, inborn and part of our DNA, as it were, not terribly dissimilar from what Sigmund Freud would later dub the “super-ego.” The entire world exists under its sway. Which may sound overly comprehensive, but even a cursory observation of human nature confirms that regardless of whether or not a person recognizes the existence God, familiarity with some form of internalized “ought” is unavoidable. In modern parlance, feelings of “not enoughness” inevitably belie some perceived standard of goodness or wholeness at work, some unimpeachable voice of accusation that not even the bestselling American pop group of all time could silence. To paraphrase one of Brian’s most vulnerable creations, despite being “blessed with everything”, the fears “in the back of my mind” remain.

To be clear, the arbitrary (and often cruel) ‘oughts’ that occupy our inner life are not identical in stature or content to the ones handed down on Mount Sinai. But the two are related and similar in impact. Theologian Paul Zahl describes it this way:

In practice, the requirement of perfect submission to the commandments of God is exactly the same as the requirement of perfect submission to the innumerable drives for perfection that drive everyday people’s crippled and crippling lives. The commandment of God that we honor our father and mother is no different in impact, for example, than the commandment of fashion that a woman be beautiful or the commandment of culture that a man be boldly decisive and at the same time utterly tender.[10]

All this to say, much of the fearful striving that occupies daily life can be traced back to our thorny relationship with the Law, and the judgment it represents. Again, even those who dismiss the existence of the Judge, to saying nothing of those of us who outwardly embrace the existence of a God “whose property is always to have mercy” (T. Cranmer), fear judgment. Irrationally or not, being “frightened of a verdict”, as the poet Czeslaw Milosz describes in his poem “A Many-Tiered Man”, provides a universal touchstone for humanity. We would rather hide than relinquish our defenses; we restlessly maneuver away from what we are confident will be the ensuing condemnation. To the fallen human ear, the tempting response to the Law is redoubled self-assertion, but the only honest one is humility.

Of course, just because Brian couldn’t help but allow himself to be seen as weak does not mean he did not struggle with the Law. In fact, the dynamic of Law and Gospel can be glimpsed behind both his greatest triumph, Pet Sounds, and his most scarring defeat, SMiLE.

Pet Sounds catalogs a number of the ways we defend against nakedness, the emotional fig leaves we all sport from time to time. If earlier releases had found Brian trying, unconvincingly, to appease the standards of Adolescent Cool with glory-rife displays of bravado (e.g., “I Get Around” “Good to My Baby”, etc.), Pet Sounds adopts a more affecting but no less popular approach, namely, flight. Perhaps it is no coincidence that one of the instrumentals on the record is titled “Let’s Go Away For A While”, and the final cut, “Caroline No”, ends with the sound of a train leaving the station.

Of course, flight can be mental as well as physical. If our reality is deemed unacceptable according to whatever standards of ‘happiness’ we’ve embraced, we may seek to avoid it through fantasy and wishful thinking, à la “Wouldn’t It Be Nice”. ‘If only _____’ is an alluring means of psychological evasion, often masking ongoing resentment, self-directed or otherwise.

An equally potent form of denial can be heard in the victimized self-pity of “I Just Wasn’t Made For These Times”: “Every time I get the inspiration / to go change things around / no one wants to help me look for places / where new things might be found”. On that remarkable song Brian, via Asher, even attempts to renegotiate the terms of his ‘acceptance’—“these times” are the problem, not me. Anything but own up to a less than ideal here-and-now!

This is not to suggest that any of this material is one-dimensional, only that, in a certain light, it testifies to an internal agitation in regard to who Brian felt he ‘ought’ to be. The straight male nerd’s Judy Garland, indeed.

It may be easier to express gratitude without psychic protection, as “God Only Knows” attests, but rejection hits harder, as would be made painfully clear during the recording and eventual shelving of the follow-up to Pet Sounds, the legendary SMiLE record. Without the walls we build up to protect ourselves, the voice of the law is quicker to pulverize its hearer. In fact, the entire project would prove to be an object lesson in the fruits of the law, paralysis and retreat.

The setting in which Brian attempted to record his “teenage symphony to God”, as he referred to SMiLE, was rife with conflict and pressure. His group had been on the forefront of the American pop landscape for a full four years at that point. Despite the success of “Sloop John B”, Pet Sounds did not sell as well as the group anticipated. Perhaps the subject matter was too far afield from beaches and cars, the atmosphere too melancholy, the arrangements too baroque for burgeoning ‘hippie’ sensibilities, who knows. Critics may have hailed it as a masterpiece, but the charts have always been The Beach Boys’ priority, and by that measure, the record underperformed. The commercial verdict was fairly condemnatory, which understandably ratcheted up expectations for its successor.

But the pressure was more than commercial. It was artistic, too. Brian has gone on record many times about the competition he felt with The Beatles during those years, whom he viewed not only as an overseas counterpart to the Beach Boys but as the gold standard of pop music, period. Their Revolver album was part of the inspiration for the envelope-pushing of Pet Sounds. Likewise, Paul McCartney famously confessed that Pet Sounds, as well as the sonic vanguard it represented, was in the back of his mind while working on Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. He wanted to beat it.

Brian and Paul and their respective groups were operating in an environment of creative escalation. Of course, unlike the partnership at the core of the Fab Four, Brian was only one person — with an admittedly fragile psychological makeup — whom the press had not been shy about dubbing a “genius”. It’s no stretch to say that in the face of surpassing Sgt. Pepper, that label began to feel less like a compliment and more like a burden. Anything less than a work of ‘genius’ would be unacceptable.

So despite the stop-gap success of “Good Vibrations”, Brian internalized the success of Sgt. Pepper as anticipated condemnation, a new standard for him to reach. In other words, the record codified into Law for him. Thou Shalt Be A Genius, And Be One By Outdoing The Beatles. It would turn out to be a bridge too far.

These commercial and artistic pressures were likely compounded by the lack of support Brian received from the band when they returned from touring and heard the initial tapes. Bandmate Mike Love notoriously went on record with his distaste for the avant-garde leanings contained therein. A classic bootlegged recording even finds the singer publicly mocking the words to “Heroes and Villains”. Of course, these weren’t just bandmates that were rejecting the work; they were family members. One can only assume that the rejection cut deep.

Suffice it to say, these various factors did not foster the atmosphere of creativity and playfulness that the project — indeed, Brian himself — required to persevere.

Those familiar with St. Paul’s epistles will not find this sad eventuality surprising. The Law may mandate love, but it has a very hard time inspiring it — at least in the long term. Instead, ironclad expectation tends to stifle self-expression and stimulate second-guessing. As a motivating agent, the law is not just impotent, but counterproductive. In Romans we read that “the law brings wrath”, and that “the law was added so that the trespass might increase” (Rom 4:15, 5:20). Meaning, the law was not intended to deliver what it demands. As St. Augustine once wrote, “The law … contributes nothing to God’s saving act: through it he does but show man his weakness, that by faith he may take refuge in the divine mercy and be healed.”[11]

In any case, when combined with Brian’s inner brittleness and the various substances he was abusing at the time, the law of SMiLE triggered a nervous breakdown in its would-be author. In 1967, Brian Wilson retreated to his room for essentially fifteen years. He could not wall himself off emotionally, so he walled himself off physically. Of course, since his talent was so much larger than he was — even at his heaviest (350 lbs)! — it would irrepressibly seep through whatever barriers he tried to erect against it, even during the years he spent “lyin’ in bed” (Barenaked Ladies). His brothers were wise, if a tad optimistic, to build a studio in his house — and ferreting out Brian’s passing influence on their largely wonderful 70s records remains a rewarding hobby.[12]

Still, SMiLE would carry painful associations. When asked about the record in subsequent interviews, Brian would avoid the subject and, if pressed, would write it off as “inappropriate music” that nearly killed him. Bad vibrations, in other words, and the beginning of a long period of darkness. One might even conjecture that SMiLE came to embody a new kind of Law to Brian, its incompletion casting a shoulda-woulda-coulda shadow over the rest of his career, an indelible testament to failure and weakness, the moment when his vulnerability was met with condemnation and his spirit broken.

Midnight’s Another Day: Concluding (Highly) Unscientific Postscript

Nevertheless, a study of the Beach Boys is a study of contradictions, not all of them discouraging. For many pop music fans, SMiLE ironically came to serve as shorthand for a different kind of Law: the standard by which all other avant-pop records would be measured, pop music’s ultimate “lost masterpiece”, its beauty made all the more exquisite by virtue of its intangibility. After all, there’s no better song than the one we’ve never heard. And the bits that leaked out on Beach Boys albums and boxed sets over the years provided more than enough evidence to justify the hype. “It was like hearing a tape of Mozart”, Elvis Costello remarked after hearing a bootleg of the tapes.

Then, the unthinkable happened. In 2004, Brian surprised everyone by resurrecting the project and putting together a completed version of the record, sans Boys. And while perhaps not the Earth-shattering opus of imagination, the final product was far from embarrassing. His voice had seen better days, but the self-assurance was palpable, and the release garnered fantastic reviews. On a personal level, it is hard not to view SMiLE 2004 as something of an Easter Sunday, one that came long after, but no less unexpectedly, its Good Friday.

Next, in 2011, The Beach Boys stopped suing each other long enough to put out the tapes of the original sessions. Even in its final incomplete form, SMiLE is a stunning piece of music. Despite the generations of imitators, it still sounds like nothing else: longtime obsessions with Gershwin and Disney were very much germinating; mix in some LSD and Surfin’ Safari, a dash of Mozart, a pinch of Roy Rogers, some Spectorized sea shanty, a hint of Liverpool, even Gregorian chant, and you’re almost there. But no description can really do SMiLE justice — this was Brian’s vision, not someone else’s. The best songs on it (“Cabinessence”, “Heroes and Villains”, “Surf’s Up”) outstrip the best songs on Sgt. Pepper’s, its most obvious reference point, by a significant margin. What’s more, the production is a genuine step forward, tempering the Pet Sounds melancholy with whimsical left-turns galore (and thankfully little psychedelic noodling).

Despite a few overly flowery passages, Van Dyke Parks’s lyrics are, by and large, distinguished by their wordplay rather than their trippiness. The themes and content are exactly what they had long been rumored to be: the American frontier, the natural world, childhood, physical fitness, humor — one would be hard pressed to find another record (of the era) with similar thematic breadth. Yet somehow it works, and the feeling, which Brian focused on above all else, is indeed a smiling one. Had he been able, in the summer of love, to stare down the Law of the Beatles and put the record out — and he was closer to the finish line than most had assumed — Brian would have indeed set a new bar, and kept the sonic arms race escalating.

But beyond its sheer beauty (and incompleteness), a casual listener could not be faulted for wondering why Brian or anyone would describe the record as a “symphony to God”, teenage or otherwise. The Lord gets a mention in “Wonderful”, but mainly as a device to deal with adolescent sexuality. Then there’s the vaguely Trinitarian Wordsworth quote about the child being the father of the man, which pops up numerous times and dovetails nicely with the inner child theme.

An answer, it turns out, can be found in album centerpiece “Surf’s Up”. Those who have heard the original version know that Brian Wilson never sounded more angelic or reverent than he does on that song. In fact, the inspiration is so pronounced that the recording takes on an almost Galilean aspect when you consider the lack of support it garnered at the time.

The liner notes to the 2012 release of SMiLE reproduce an explanation Brian gave in 1967 of “Surf’s Up”, shedding new and hopeful light on the song, the project, and even its composer. The words, it turns out, are far more than phonetic window dressing. They point heavenward, beyond the voice of the law and all its ornate finery, to the song beneath every other, that of God’s “love and mercy” for his cloudy-eyed children:

“It’s a man at a concert,” [Brian] said. “All around him there’s the audience, playing their roles, dressed up in fancy clothes, looking through opera glasses, but so far away from the drama, from life. Back through the opera glass you see the pit and the pendulum drawn. The music begins to take over. Columnated ruins domino. Empires, ideas, lives, institutions; everything has to fall, tumbling like dominoes. He begins to awaken to the music; sees the pretentiousness of everything. The music hall a costly bow. Then even the music is gone, turned into a trumpeter swan, into what the music really is.

“‘I heard the word of God; Wonderful thing; the joy of enlightenment, of seeing God. And what is it? A children’s song! And then there’s the song itself; the song of children; the song of the universe rising and falling in wave after wave, the song of God, hiding the love from us, but always letting us find it again, like a mother singing to her children.”

The record was over. Wilson went into the kitchen and squirted Reddi-Whip direct from the can into his mouth; made himself a chocolate Great Shake, and ate a couple of candy bars.

True to form, that final image poses a contradiction that is as amusing as it is poetic. As if to ensure we do not mistake the gift for the Giver, our beloved prodigy, after offering a startlingly articulate and prophetic explanation of his art, goes back to swilling junk food. It is enough to make the most jaded listener smile.

[1] Hate, Annual Number 2, Fantagraphics Books, 2002.

[2] Tony Asher, interview in Nick Kent, “The Last Beach Movie Revisited”, collected in The Dark Stuff, Da Capo, 2002.

[3] See Matthew 20:1-16, the parable of the workers in the vineyard.

[4] Martin Luther, “The Seven Penitential Psalms” (1517), quoted in Day be Day We Manify Thee: Daily Readings for the Entire Year (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1982), p. 321.

[5] Gerhard Forde, On Being a Theologian of the Cross (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1997), p. 105.

[6] Brian Wilson, quoted in John Fischer, “In Brian Wilson’s Room”, Breakpoint, January 26, 2007.

[7] Tim Kreider, “I Know What You Think of Me”, The New York Times, June 15, 2014.

[8] In 1976, at what may have been the lowest ebb of Brian’s mental health, The Boys recorded a track that sums up the quirky charm of their music, as well as inadvertently soundtracking the recidivistic St. Peter. Like much of their best latter-day work, it is simultaneously laughable (opening lines: “Back in time before rhythm and rhyme / Gregorian chants were a real big thing!”) and profound. In fact, part of the inspiration behind the name Mockingbird (publisher of this book) comes from the peculiar behavior of the mimus polyglottos itself, which gets its name from its ability to mimic the calls of other birds, i.e., to repeat what it has heard. In a similar though hopefully (much) less annoying way, Mockingbird seeks to “keep singing that same song” of God’s grace. All this is grounded in the belief that, like Peter and Brian Wilson, people never move beyond their need for absolution and love.

[9] Martin Luther, quoted in Gerhard O. Forde, Where God Meets Man: A Down-to-Earth Approach to the Gospel (Minneapolis: Augsburg, 1977), p. 15.

[10] Paul Zahl, Grace in Practice (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2007), p. 29.

[11] Augustine of Hippo, “The Spirit and the Letter”, collected in Later Works (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1955), p. 205.

[12] Contrary to popular belief, the 70s were nowhere near the end of the road for The Beach Boys. The well has never completely run dry with these guys, often despite their best efforts to drain it. It’s almost comical. Even during the 80s and 90s, widely considered their creative nadir, quality songs kept trickling out. If I were to make a “Beach Boys Past Their Prime” playlist of tracks recorded, though not necessarily released, between 1980 and 1999, the top ten would be: “Love and Mercy” (B. Wilson solo), “Lahaina Aloha”, “Pisces Brothers” (M. Love solo), “The First Time” (B. Wilson solo), “Where I Belong”, “Somewhere Near Japan”, “You’re Still a Mystery”, “Like a Brother” (C. Wilson solo), “Lay Down Burden” (B. Wilson solo), “It’s Not Easy Being Me” (B. Wilson solo). There are too many bonus tracks to mention, especially if we ventured into the 2000s, but Dennis Wilson’s “Holy Man” deserves a mention. One of his best late-period Jesus tributes (or songs, period).