Beautiful Bummer

 

"I'm a leaf on a windy day...pretty soon I'll be blown away."

Nobody has ever been able to express sadness quite as beautifully as Brian Wilson.  There are a handful of songs in the world that can grab my heart and move me to tears almost every time I hear them.  90% of those were written by Wilson.

In the world of Brian Wilson, life is a long, drawn out series of reflections on past glories and the knowledge that one only grows older, eventually to come to the end of the road.  One gets the feeling Wilson has been resigned to his end of the road for decades, and the fact that he's still around probably comes as a shock to him as much as anyone else.

His best work - the work that resonates most deeply with me - is the work in which one can feel the lid being lifted off the great, deep well of his mind and heart, and the darkness inside being given room to breathe.  Early Beach Boys tunes like "In My Room," "The Lonely Sea," and "The Warmth of the Sun" hint at this melancholy beautifully, while retaining the mask of candy corn artifice that made the group such a smash in the Kennedy era.

Brian was young when he wrote those songs.  Really young.  One gets the feeling that he was born sad.  As he matured, the themes only got darker.  "'Til I Die" is perhaps the quintessential Brian Wilson bummer song - dark, sad, and yet somehow tremendously uplifting in its sheer beauty.  Something about the sad message coupled with the beautiful delivery, fueled by the fathomless genius of the man, is positively harrowing.  Any message, powerfully told, becomes more effective.

Brian's bio - the drugs, the mental illness, the long stretch of isolation and obesity - destroys me when I think that all it could have taken would have been a little more patience, a little more understanding, at very formative years in his life, to keep him on the right track.  That's another part of his genius - he makes me feel like I could have had something to offer him were I to have been that one to reach out in the darkness.  It's the same way I feel about Michael Jackson, who once said he would walk around his neighborhood at night so lonely, hoping to run into someone he could talk to.  That person totally could have been me!  I could have saved him!

And yet, in the end, I suppose nobody can really save us from ourselves.

I love that Brian's bio took a turn for the brighter as time went on.  As he exorcised ghosts from his past - "Pet Sounds" performed live, finishing and performing "SMiLE" (one of my top 5 albums of all time), one can feel the weight slipping off of him, even if the darkness stayed firmly in place.

His new works - that is, his works created exclusively after the catharsis of the SMiLE resurrection, are vibrant, playful, and full of that same sweet melancholy.  Whether original material or covers of Gershwin and Disney tunes, Brian's beautiful sound - the sound of a thousand voices joined in harmony; the sound of an eternal "teenage symphony to God" - is alive and well, and beautiful to behold.

The Beach Boys reunited for their 50th anniversary, and convened to record and release an album.  Against the weight of tremendous potential for failure, the album fits perfectly within the oeuvre, the world, of Brian Wilson.  The last half of the album is where he gets personal, culminating in the beautiful bummer "Summer's Gone."

Another summer gone...

Summer's gone
It's finally sinking in
One day begins
Another ends
I live them all and back again

Summer's gone
I'm gonna sit and watch the waves
We laugh, we cry
We live then die
And dream about our yesterday

The track begins and ends with piano (eerily reflective of "Wouldn't It Be Nice") that drifts in and out as if on a dream.  The past is not the worst place to live, and even present events quickly become burnished with the golden sheen of memory.  It's easy to wander around in a romantic haze, forever mythologizing our own pasts.  Nothing is as great, or clean, as we remember it, and that's why memory can be so comforting.

It seems like every artistic statement Brian Wilson has made has been devised in such a way that, were it to be the last thing he ever did, it would serve as a suitable epitaph to a tortured career.  He is still waiting for the end of the road; still resigned to it.  But in the meantime, he may as well keep working - keep creating - keep exorcising his beautiful demons. 

Thank you, Brian, for your beautiful yesterdays, and the promise of an equally beautiful tomorrow.  The world is a better place for your having been in it.