Three years ago, I paid the most money I've ever spent on a single gig ticket - £50, give or take - to see an insecure sixty-something with a history of mental illness play a ninety minute set of his decades-old back-catalogue, backed by a shiny young group trying to replicate exactly the sound he created almost half a century previous with his long-departed cohorts. Against all odds, it remains one of the most life-affirming nights I've ever had; probably because the insecure sixty-something with a history of mental illness was Brian Wilson, the decades-old back-catalogue was The Beach Boys' greatest hits, the shiny young group were the same musicians he'd used to finally complete his long-abandoned masterpiece SMiLE to stunning effect, the long-departed cohorts were either dead (his brothers Dennis and Carl) or such insufferable pricks that I'd gladly have paid another £50 to keep them away for the night (Al Jardine and, particularly, the reprehensible Mike Love) and, above all else, because Brian Wilson is now and ever will be an indisputable fucking genius.
Wilson is often compared to the towering figures of classical music; the closest twentieth-century pop music ever came to a Mozart. On the evidence of that night, the comparison is not a word of hyperbole. His songs are conceived and written so exquisitely, so immaculately, the individual parts combining so intricately, that all it takes to make them sound good is a sensitive performer capable of performing at the level desired of them by the composer - as is the case with classical music. Nobody in their right mind would go to see a performance of Eine Kleine Nachtmusik and complain that it wasn't performed by Mozart himself, or the members of the first orchestra to play it in public. Similarly, Wilson's songs are such that it didn't matter that he was the only Beach Boy on stage, or that he spent much of his time slouched behind his keyboard, making himself as inconspicuous as his centre-stage position allowed, occasionally contributing a few plunked notes or a vocal lost in the wash. What mattered was that these songs were being performed live, with the vigour, warmth and virtuosic musicianship that made them classics to begin with, and that we were losing ourselves in a joyous communal experience.
In his brilliant book The Dark Stuff, legendary music writer Nick Kent collects twenty-seven of his finest profiles and interviews, including accounts of the time he slapped Keith Richards out of a heroin overdose, meeting Miles Davis as he was hitting sixty and looking like 'some hack SF movie-maker's vision of a species of ebony mutant lizard', touring with Shane McGowan and The Pogues at the height of their mid-eighties mania and a piece called 'Sid Vicious: The Exploding Dim-Wit'. Yet out of all these tales of spectacular falls from grace and the need to live up to the live fast, die young credo of rock'n'roll, Kent spends a higher number of pages on Wilson than any other figure; close to a fifth of the book, in fact, is taken up by 'The Last Beach Movie Revisited: The Life of Brian Wilson'. As a tragic figure, Wilson's only rival in the book is that other cracked genius gone to seed after years of unfettered psychotropic experimentation, Syd Barrett. The exquisite sadness of Wilson's situation is best captured in this spellbinding passage about the genesis of Pet Sounds, as Kent outlines the heavenly goals that would eventually undo the Beach Boys' leader:
Brian knew the score, see. The beach wasn't where it was at anymore. It wasn't even as though he'd actually been into surfing. That was all Dennis's scene. He'd just interpreted his brother's enthusiasm, blending his own fantasies in to add a little extra flavouring. But this new music had a spiritual thing going for it. This was his music, the sound of his soul rising up, and as he leaned forward to embrace it Brian suddenly sensed that getting as close to the voice of God as possible was going to be truly happening for him, in the immediate future. At this point, he was out to move the very soul of teenage America, to create music so passionate, so majestic that when you turned on your radio - shazam - Instant Epiphany. And inspiration was everywhere.
So taken was I with this passage in particular that I used it as the title and theme of a mix CD I gave my mate Malcolm for his birthday last year, almost immediately after reading it. This notion of 'Instant Epiphany' just seemed to encapsulate in two words everything I felt I knew and loved about music. And Kent was right, of course; listening to The Beach Boys at their best is a wholly religious experience. Thus inspired, I soon bought the re-issues of a couple of Beach Boys albums made in the years immediately following the first SMiLE debacle, Sunflower and Surf's Up, purely to hear the handful of Brian Wilson-penned tracks Kent had claimed as being so transcendently beautiful, even though they were missives from the mouth of madness. Initially, I disregarded pretty much everything else on the discs; obviously Carl Wilson's 'Feel Flows' was a classic, maybe the all-time best Beach Boys track not so much as co-written by Brian, but reading Kent's article had so turned me against Love and Jardine that I couldn't ever bring myself to want to enjoy anything they wrote themselves - which, unfortunately, was the majority of the two albums.
Revisiting the discs a few months later, though - I think one of them came up on album shuffle on my iPod or something - I found myself really getting into Sunflower in particular. It never quite hits the heights of their 60s work, but at its best, it reveals a new side to The Beach Boys, similarly sun-flecked but earthier, less ethereal, songs that may have sacrificed some of the musical complexity of Brian Wilson's best work but brought in a hugely affecting, endearing emotional candour. Checking the credits, I found that the best examples of this new kind of Beach Boys song were invariably the work of Brian's brother, Dennis Wilson - the band's drummer.
In the muso clamour to canonise Brian Wilson - and let the record show, the man is a saint of pop music, and nothing that follows is meant to detract from that in any way - and to demonise Mike Love, it's too easy to undervalue the achievements of the group's other members, who all began to pitch in with songwriting following the decline of Brian's ability to cope with reality. Dennis Wilson's solo album Pacific Ocean Blue, for instance: the first solo album released by a Beach Boys member, in 1977, and a month ago I wasn't even aware it existed. That's because it hasn't been available (legally) since 1991, an oversight now thankfully rectified by a glorious two-disc re-issue that forces a serious re-evaluation of Dennis Wilson's place in the Beach Boys hierarchy.
Put simply, Pacific Ocean Blue is a masterpiece, a more cohesive, human, just plain better piece of work than any Beach Boys-affiliated album put out since Pet Sounds, including SMiLE (which, frequently gorgeous though it is, can also be terrifying at times, especially if you prowl around some of the abandoned late-60s session archives. It's a harmonically-perfect stare into the abyss, a lush symphony that, as a record of a disintegrating mind, can seem as unsettling as the most desolate of Joy Division tracks, and - like some Joy Division - is the kind of thing you really have to brace yourself to listen to). Gone is the young, dumb etc. pretty-boy surfer who battered out basic rock riffs behind 'Surfin' USA' and 'Fun Fun Fun'; in his place is a bruised, battered soul still unwilling to give up hope that something better is around the corner.
From the mid-60s on, Dennis was always the edgiest Beach Boy, whether hanging out with a pre-murder Charlie Manson or starring with James Taylor in Monte Hellman's epochal existential road movie Two-Lane Blacktop. But nobody could have guessed he had this in him. Intentions are signalled from the cover photo on - the face is just about recognisable as the most handsome Wilson, but it's obscured by hair - on head, face and chest - that makes Wilson look less surfer dude and more just... The Dude.
So it is with the music: obviously there's a strong Beach Boys influence - how could there not be? - but equal inspiration seems to have been drawn from country, Americana, R&B; Van Morrison, Bill Withers, Al Green, The Band, Neil Young and the California scene. In places, it sounds like a precursor to Wilco, Sparklehorse and, with Wilson's husky, frequently-cracking voice playing off those lush instrumentations, even Spiritualized. Had it gotten more attention first time round, it's hard to conceive the fervour with which the alt-country and indie set might have seized upon it and mined it for inspiration of their own.
Wilson's songs reach a level of emotional directness that his brother's compositions were too delicate, too precious (in a good way) to ever fully sell. Where Brian aimed for the skies, Dennis is rooted to the earth, pining for escape against band-anchored grooves. That's not to say that it's an album without its own spine-tingling moments; it's worth buying just to hear the monumental opener, 'River Song', a gorgeous, woozy, choir-augmented thing of beauty that would have been on that 'Instant Epiphanies' mix like a shot had I heard it this time last year. Brian Wilson's best songs show us at our most divine, reaching the kinds of artistic heights we would all like to hit someday; Dennis Wilson's, in all their naked emotion and unceasing humanism, show us how we are. Luckily, there's room in our record collections for both.
Dennis Wilson's Pacific Ocean Blue is available now on Caribou/Epic/Legacy Records.
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