2 days ago
How good was Brian Wilson?
I recently did an online quiz to name the 100 biggest selling pop and rock acts in the USA. The Beatles came top – the Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, Queen and so on, along with the homegrown stuff: Elvis, the Eagles and Chicago. Noticeable by their complete absence were the Beach Boys. In the late sixties and early seventies they were often considered superior artists to the Beatles by American critics. I don't think many would have that view now. It is not so much that their stock has fallen, simply that they now seem a rather lovely idiosyncrasy rather than at the very top of the division.
Wilson was, famously, plagued by mental illness
That Brian Wilson was a very good songwriter is beyond all question. He was also an imaginative stylist. Nobody else sounded like the Beach Boys, unless they were deliberately copying the Beach Boys (such as Paul McCartney's sweet attempt at Cold War rapprochement, Back in the USSR).
The songs, described by Wilson as 'teenage symphonies to God', were drawn from pre-rock origins – George Gershwin rather than Little Richard. The melodies veered from the sublime (God Only Knows, Don't Worry Baby) through the pleasantly disposable (Help Me Rhonda, Surfin' USA) to the hugely irritating (Barbara Ann, Sloop John B). And then there was Good Vibrations, Wilson's stab at psychedelia.
In truth, it was hard to listen to even their best albums (Pet Sounds, Smiley Smile) all the way through without feeling, at the end, a little bit icky, as if you had been immersed in corn syrup for half an hour. But there was a beauty there, in the harmonies and in the construction of some of those songs; a delicacy largely absent from the charts at that febrile time. And at a time when the USA was being taken over by British acts, they could hardly have been more all-American.
Brian died yesterday and we are right to mourn his passing. He was, famously, plagued by mental illness. But it is also likely that his slightly unhinged mentality was partly responsible for some very pretty pop music. Where does he rank? Not quite in the same league as Bacharach, Webb, McCartney, Lennon perhaps. But that is hardly a disgrace.
