More of your favorite artists die as you get older. These days we usually get the news via social media, which still makes for a nice, democratic forum for public mourning. Sometimes the news gets me emotional; often it doesn’t. Many of my fallen heroes led long lives, and they accomplished a lot during their time on the planet. They shuffled off this mortal coil with heads held high. My reaction is often fond reminiscence more than grief.
But every once in a while, a high-profile departure hits me in the gut. I was sitting in the back of a Lyft on Wednesday, my car undergoing expensive repairs, when my Facebook feed started filling up with appreciations of Brian Wilson. Before I knew it, I was fighting back tears. Instead of reaching into my quickie analytical/critical/historical bag of tricks, I thought of only nine words, which I posted with a photo of the twenty-something Wilson, looking dreamy and a little vexed.
I guess I just wasn’t made for these times.
The words are from a song, of course, off Pet Sounds, the 1966 Beach Boys album rightfully regarded as a watershed for pop music with artistic ambitions. They signal a sort of impassioned resignation to being alive at the wrong time, and they capture the emotions of outcasts and misfits everywhere. As sung by Wilson, not long before his psychosis reached debilitating depths, the words resonate with aching, defiant beauty–the sad beauty of loneliness, and of living out of time and place.
I came to Pet Sounds in my twenties–if memory serves, it was the first CD I ever bought, in the early nineties–at a time when I felt alone in every crowded room I inhabited. I was angry–at my family, at my finances, at life–but also vulnerable, and hesitantly open to what inner riches music and cinema and literature might bring me. “I know perfectly well I’m not where I should be,” Wilson sings angelically on the album’s second cut, “You Still Believe in Me.” Yes. I recognized that. (So did any woman I dated during this period. My condolences to them all).
I was still too green to fully appreciate what was going on there musically, the intricate harmonies and orchestration and mix of instruments that you don’t find on many rock albums–timpani, sleigh bells, Electro-Theremin, harpsichord, barking dog, train horn, etc. I hadn’t yet read about Wilson’s burning desire to match the sonic innovations of Phil Spector and The Beatles, and I didn’t realize that Wilson’s primary collaborators on the album weren’t his fellow Beach Boys but the ace session musicians of the Wrecking Crew, and a lyricist named Tony Asher, who began his career writing advertising jingles.
What I heard at the time was a transcendent collection of secular humanist hymns that seemed to be speaking directly to me. These were, in the words of William Blake, Songs of Experience and of Innocence. I was an English major at Berkeley, high on the Romantics, and somewhere in my mind, or my spirit, I connected Wilson to the likes of Keats and Wordsworth, poets yearning to express their deepest desires and passionate individualism. To me, Pet Sounds cut to the quick of this sensibility, often with bracing directness. Again, from “I Just Wasn’t Made for These Times,” repeated in the style of a mantra: “Sometimes, I feel very sad.”
In the following years I learned more of Wilson’s story, including his life-long struggle with mental illness, his abuse at the hands of a hyper-controlling doctor, Eugene Landy, and his loving marriage to Melinda Ledbetter, who died just last year. I got to speak with him briefly when the biopic “Love & Mercy” came out in 2015. I was moved by how the film’s director, Bill Pohlad, and one of the stars, John Cusack, seemed eager to protect him. He still had an unmistakable air of vulnerability.
Wilson was 82 when he died. That’s a nice, long life, a triumph. And yet his death pulled at something in me. I didn’t realize it at the time, but as I choked back tears in a stranger’s car I think I was mourning the person I was when I encountered Pet Sounds, the awkward, sad but somehow hopeful guy moved by music that felt spiritual in a way that I still have trouble fully articulating. Brian Wilson sang for all of us who just weren’t made for these times.
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