![\"\"](\"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/09\/brian_wilson_bw.jpg\")
The standard take on Brian Wilson is also the most accurate one. It can be neatly divided into two parts.<\/p>\nThe standard take on Brian Wilson is also the most accurate one. It can be neatly divided into two parts.<\/p>\n
First part: The man is a genius. There\u2019s simply no denying that Wilson is a force of nature; his command of the recording studio-as-instrument is almost beyond compare, which itself is fascinating in light of the fact that he modeled his approach after Phil Spector, a man who knew a thing or two about recording. Wilson\u2019s opus was and remains the album he released under the Beach Boys name, 1966\u2019s Pet Sounds<\/i>. (Arguably, his Beach Boys bandmates were session vocalists on that record, which isn\u2019t to take anything away from their contributions.)<\/p>\n
Wilson\u2019s follow-up was to have been the even more ambitious SMiLE<\/i>, a record that never came out in its original form (re-recorded and reconfigured versions appeared in the 21st<\/sup> century). The difficulties surrounding the making and unmaking of SMiLE<\/i> were harbingers of the second part of the equation.<\/p>\n Second part: Wilson has issues. As the 2015 biopic Love and Mercy<\/i> chronicled, Wilson has long suffered from a number of challenges, variously explained and defined as schizophrenia, stage fright and other more and\/or less serious issues. The various ways in which he has been treated (and, for some years, mistreated) have left their mark on him. So while he still comes up with the occasional flash of brilliance \u2013 that 2010 album of Gershwin standards was pretty nice, for example \u2013 his work over the last few decades can charitably be described as uneven.<\/p>\n But that\u2019s not why people flock to see the man in concert. While today former bandmate Mike Love leads a group calling itself the Beach Boys, that band features no Brian Wilson (the group\u2019s primary composer) and no Carl or Dennis Wilson (both deceased).<\/p>\n Wilson\u2019s group, on the other hand, includes original Beach Boys member Al Jardine as well as late-prime-era Beach Boy Blondie Chaplin (of \u201cSail On Sailor\u201d fame). And Wilson\u2019s band is jaw-droppingly facile at recreating the Beach Boys sound \u2013 even when tackling the densely layered studio work of the Pet Sounds<\/i> and SMiLE<\/i> era \u2013 live onstage.<\/p>\n For his part, Brian Wilson mostly sits at a grand piano, hands at his side or in his lap, looking for all the world like he\u2019d rather be anywhere else in the world than on that stage. At least most nights. And in person \u2013 during meet-and-greets, during interviews \u2013 he\u2019s generally just as ill-at-ease and non-communicative.<\/p>\n When I interviewed Wilson in 2016, I remarked that back in his Beach Boys days, he famously disliked touring. He agreed. So I continued: \u201cWhat’s changed?\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cNothing’s really changed,\u201d he replied. \u201cIt’s still about the same.\u201d <\/p>\n Make of that what you will. <\/p>\n Official reports insist that he\u2019s happy to be performing, and if nothing else, the superb performance of his band combines with an opportunity for fans to pay a kind of tribute to Wilson for the music he\u2019s created out of the ether. Without question \u2013 as long as one isn\u2019t unnerved by the site of a semi-detached namesake \u2013 Brian Wilson in Concert is wonderfully entertaining. And perhaps that\u2019s enough.<\/p>\n This essay appeared previously in NewCity.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The standard take on Brian Wilson is also the most accurate one. It can be neatly divided into two parts. First part: The man is a genius. There\u2019s simply no […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":17609,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[416],"class_list":["post-17608","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-essay","tag-brian-wilson","cat-27-id","has_thumb"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17608","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17608"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17608\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17611,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17608\/revisions\/17611"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/17609"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17608"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17608"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17608"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}