Brian Wilson: 'I Wanted to Touch People's Hearts'

'I think that's why I was brought into this world, so I could spread some love.'

It’s a difficult week that begins with the death of Sly Stone and two days later, Brian Wilson. Both 82. Each singular in the innovation they brought to popular music, the influence they gave subsequent generations and in the sheer joy they regularly brought audiences, despite long absences from the stage or recording studio.

Wilson’s late life comeback was especially welcome after years of silence, confusion and mishandling of him by those around him. Surrounded by musicians who loved his music, it was allowed to live again — or be performed live for the first time in some cases, as was the case with Pet Sounds, the classic given a full reading with a large band — and then a backing orchestra — in treasured shows from a quarter century back.

When I spoke with Wilson in 2000, he was in the midst of such an acclaimed tour.

“We’re getting a lot of standing ovations; people come back stage; we have autograph parties and just fool around, you know,” he told me over the phone from California. “It feels good after the show to sit down and sign autographs. It’s a pretty cool trip.”

It was a smoother tour than the year before. I shook hands with him after a show in Northampton, Mass., and had him sign an autograph on the program. He wasn’t quite used to performing on the first tour since 1966, and he wasn’t quite comfortable being around people, frankly.

When he played a Connecticut casino a couple of days later, he seemed confused when someone rolled out a birthday cake to mark his 57th birthday. It kind of threw the show off.

But a year later, things were going smoothly and Wilson seemed buoyed by the ovations and opportunity it gave fans to express just how much his music had meant to them.

“People do say that to me all the time. And I appreciate it very much,” he said.

But it was clear that had connection had been his intent from the start.

“I wanted to touch people’s hearts. I think that’s why I was brought into this world. So I could spread some love.”

And so it has been, since the fresh strains of the early Beach Boys, melding Four Freshman harmonies with Chuck Berry licks, and conjuring a world of carefree beach living with surf and sand and fun, fun, fun. Yet the music he wrote and began producing for the band became more ambitious quite quickly, reaching the celestial heights of Pet Sounds, which while not a bestseller in its day (reaching only No. 10) remained a touchstone in pop, inspiring the Beatles for one, to create their own step beyond, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.

Even then, Wilson’s outing was one of three different touring outfits playing some of the same songs, featuring original members of Beach Boys — one led by Mike Love, another under Al Jardine’s name.

“It is confusing,” Wilson said of the competing acts. “They can take their pick, right? And see the one they want. I’m happy where I am with my solo career. I don’t miss working with The Beach Boys at all.”

He did go back to perform with them from time to time over the years this century, but back then he said, “nothing’s been etched in stone yet with The Beach Boys — because after Carl died, we all ind of went on a trip.”

Carl Wilson’s death of cancer in 1998 meant there was for the first time no Wilson left in the official touring Beach Boys. Dennis Wilson drowned in a swimming accident in 1983.

Still, among the three touring acts that year, it was Brian Wilson who played the more obscure Beach Boys songs in concert that his fans appreciated.

“Things like ‘God Only Knows’ and ‘Darlin’,’ I’ve come to like those songs a lot more since we’ve been doing them,” Wilson said. “Also, I like that song ‘Add Some Music to Your Day,’ I never knew that I loved it so much until we started playing it on tours.”

Alongside “Add Some Music” on that tour were other such nuggets as “Till I Die” from 1971’s Surf’s Up, and “Back Home” from 15 Big Ones.

Both those albums were being reissued with new liner notes that year, though it seemed news to Wilson. “They don’t ask me for my opinion.”

Nor did the producers of a TV Beach Boys miniseries that aired that year.

“It wasn’t true to life,” he said of the ABC project. “The characters were way out of character. It was really a very poorly done job. We trusted the executive producer, we thought he would give us a good movie. But he let us down.”

When I asked what contemporary music he liked to listen to, he picked someone from from the past:

“Only Phil Spector,” he said. “His records are the ones I play.”

At the time the prolific producer hadn’t been convicted for a murder. He just remembered how many times he listened to the Ronettes’ “Be My Baby” during a darker period of his own musical inactivity in the 1970s. He played it so much, he put it in his live show.

“In the key of C!” he exclaimed, as if on cue.

“Be My Baby” had been more than a favorite song, or one that inspired his own answer track, “Don’t Worry Baby.”

“Throughout my life, it’s been the most recurring theme song of my life,” he said, though it was easier for him to simply appreciate than fully analyze it.

“It’s just got a great melody, but it’s got a rock ’n’ roll track,” he began. “The track is rock ’n’ roll, but the melody is love. It’s just a love melody over a rock and roll track. It just blew my mind.”

Wilson went so far as to record The Beach Boys in the same L.A. studio as Spector, and to use many of the same studio musicians.

“I leaned how to make rock ’n’ roll from Phil Spector and harmonies from the Four Freshmen,” Wilson said.

That vocal group “taught me how to make harmony. And from there, if you can analyze the Four Freshman records, you can do any kind of harmonies in the world.”

To that mix, Wilson added a vulnerability to his songs, and more ambitious arrangements, such that they could coalesce into a single statement, as Pet Sounds so memorably did — though he said that wasn’t his intent at the time.

“It happened little by little in the studio,” he said. “I didn’t have that in mind at all, to have them all belong together.”

And along the way he changed some of the songs, such that one formerly titled “Hang on to Your Ego” was changed to “I Know There’s an Answer.”

“I thought it was too much of a heavy statement to talk about ego,” Wilson said. “Ego is something I don’t discuss with anyone.”

After Pet Sounds, Wilson tried something more ambitious — a 1967 project called Smile intended to be no less than a “teenage symphony to God.”

Wilson would eventually join with lyricist Van Dyke Parks to finish Smile as a solo project in 2004. But in 2000, he said he hoped it never came out. And where the tapes had gone? “I don’t even care,” he said. “It’s not appropriate music.

“After I stopped taking drugs, I realized what I was doing: I was making music on drugs, and it was getting nowhere. Basically that’s the reason I didn’t want to release the tapes, because I didn’t like what I did with drugs.”

Wilson’s achievement was in overcoming those dark periods involving drugs, control of managers or depression to continue to write songs of uplift like “Love and Mercy.”

And though his fans love the early Beach Boys or the potential of Smile, he became forward looking when it came to creation. “Listen,” he said. “Turn the page.”

Do you know there’s a site that lists what’s on television every day? It’s TV and it’s at rogercatlin.com.