‘Still, I have the warmth of the sun’ – RIP to Brian Wilson

Brian Wilson’s music felt like the sound of America – beautiful, optimistic, full of big dreams and more than a little sad sometimes.

Beach Boys founder and principal songwriter Wilson died today at 82, after a career that changed American pop music and the world.

I was very glad to see Brian Wilson perform his classic album Pet Sounds in Auckland at the Civic in 2016 in what turned out to be his final show in Aotearoa. Then in his early 70s, he was fragile and seemed a bit off in his own reality, but he played those songs and gamely sang along the best he could (of course, the younger band members took those high falsetto notes).

We loved Brian, that night, simply for showing up and for all that his music represents. Backed by a crack band, he sat at the piano for most of the show and the audience banter was mostly left to fellow ex-Beach Boy Al Jardine. But for anyone who made it there that night, it was a rare glimpse at genius. A nod and a smile from Brian Wilson felt like the sun breaking through clouds.

I admit, I took a while to warm up to the Beach Boys, who seemed inescapably cheesy when I was growing up in the 1980s, when their only songs you heard were the incredibly catchy and annoying ‘Kokomo’ from Tom Cruise’s movie Cocktail and a painful duet of ‘Wipe Out’ with novelty rap trio The Fat Boys.

But then, something clicked after I listened to The Beach Boys’ landmark 1966 album Pet Sounds several times. Brian Wilson led the group’s transformation from singing about sand, girls and cars to the existential yearning of ‘God Only Knows.’

The charming harmonies of their earlier frothier work were still there, but instead of surfin’ and chicks, Wilson’s gorgeous tunes like ‘Wouldn’t It Be Nice,’ ‘Caroline, No’ and ‘I Just Wasn’t Made For These Times’ tapped into some more elemental form of longing. The glossy surface of the best Beach Boys songs hid a world of emotion beneath. Why isn’t life as perfect as we dream it should be, and how do we survive it all?

After Pet Sounds, Wilson became lost in a fog of drug use, collapsing mental health and creative frustration. The Beach Boys long-delayed album Smile became his waterloo, “lost” and never officially released until it finally came out in several versions years later.

Wilson battled mental health problems and the trauma from an abusive childhood in an era where help wasn’t easy to get, where you were just told to toughen up and stop your moaning.

Still, Wilson came back from some incredible lows to perform and write again. He got back up, made it here to Auckland in his 70s and still was able to sing those songs about surf, girls and the inner workings of the heart.

The early Beach Boys song ‘In My Room’ is a gorgeous melody, but in those lyrics – “In this world I lock out / All my worries and my fears / In my room” – they summed up how all of us feel on our bad days, and our hopes for a better tomorrow.

The Beach Boys weren’t quite as godlike as the Beatles, as dangerous as the Rolling Stones or as groovy as Sly and the Family Stone. Yet their music changed the world by selling that quintessential California optimism worldwide – surf culture everywhere, including New Zealand, would never quite be the same. But it was also selling Wilson’s more subtle messages, of working with your mental health and of finding peace in a complicated life.

The 1960s saw American optimism start to crack for the first time, in ways we’re still seeing echoes of today. The Beach Boys were never revolutionary, but the best of their songs told us it was OK to sing about your feelings, to admit you were scared and to look for the beauty where you could find it. “Still, I have the warmth of the sun,” Wilson sang in another one of those songs about a girl who left him. There’s always sunshine somewhere.

It’s been a bad week for music, with the death of Wilson and Sly Stone, two troubled twin dreamers who spun timeless songs out of the chaotic 1960s. Both men dazzled with their talent but spent years isolated and dealing with their own demons.

I’m an agnostic, but I still like to think that somewhere out there in the cosmos right now Brian Wilson and Sly Stone are sitting there hanging out together writing the best song of all time, and maybe, just maybe, it’s the one we’ll all get to hear one day at the moment our own time comes.

Wouldn’t it be nice?