I was going to talk to you about summer in England: the bouquets I’ve been putting together with flowers out of our beautiful garden; the lampshade-making class I took deep in the Norfolk countryside; the glorious purple-sprouting broccoli Eric’s managed to grow. I was going to share about my hopefully just-about-finished book (am I on draft five or six and do I even have the heart and nerve to publish this thing?). I was all set to start moaning about the quest to yet again accept and even enjoy my relationship with eyeglasses.
But Brian Wilson died yesterday and it’s hard to think about anything else, even the alarming state of things in the US and the world. Worrying has to take a backseat to thinking about Brian - his music means so much to me—to many of us— that to gloss over his passing just doesn’t feel right.
Everybody has their Beach Boys, some of my friends and peers knew Brian and have personal stories. I hope my reflections are a jumping off point for your own experience of one of the undeniable musical geniuses of our time. (I don’t want to give the impression I didn’t feel great sadness and deep appreciation for Sly Stone’s music after his passing just a few days ago - but for me with Brian it’s personal, though the Shams my female trio did attempt a cover of Sly’s Everybody Is A Star which thankfully never left the kitchen table rehearsal!)
First there was fandom and that started for me as a kid - I’m a fickle appreciator and things tend to ebb and flow, but I loved the Beach Boys hits in the sixties. I feel sure that along with the Mamas and Papas, Cowsills and Peter Paul and Mary they helped create my intense love of harmony singing. Brian, Carl and Dennis were brothers and since I had four of my own, I think that appealed to me too.
While they were reinventing themselves as something much cooler and more cosmic, early Beach Boys had a resurgence in the 70s when their Greatest Hits Endless Summer was released and in my high school they were huge with the jock set or “cakes” a holdover term from an earlier era where kids wore white socks with penny loafers. Every beer bash/keg party seemed to peak with a singalong to one of their hits. This is from an early draft of Girl To City, my first memoir:
“I discovered that alcohol wasn't just for babysitting when I got drunk at a party. After a few Budweisers, I danced like mad to Help Me Ronda and other Beach Boy classics, then staggered outside to throw up behind a bush and was suddenly considered fun and crazy.”
Beach Boys at the Civic Arena 1975 - I wanted to believe Brian was there, hidden behind a grand piano, but I don’t think he would’ve been. Saw them again at Three Rivers Stadium with Gary Wright and Peter Frampton the next summer - it was a party atmosphere with beach balls bouncing around the crowd on the field in front of the stage. They definitely did the business.
The band receded for me during the punk days, but when I got together with Will Rigby, a whole new world opened up. He made me a cassette I keep to this day. This is from Girl To City:
“I was inspired by all the records from his LP collection Will played for me: Gram Parsons and Doug Sahm, Merle Haggard and George Jones, Bill Monroe, The Delmore Brothers. He made me a multi-cassette, pre-Biograph career-spanning collection of Dylan, and did the same with the Beach Boys who were his absolute favorite group. I'd grown up loving their harmonies but had only known the sunny, striped-shirt side of the band. I didn't know about Brian Wilson's tortured soul and the sadness that was behind every shimmering melody, though I'd always gotten a general wistful feeling listening to them. The day he played me a bootleg copy of Smile, I felt like the few times I'd taken LSD, or the first day I'd tasted pastrami back at University Deli my freshman year of college. With one bite - with one listen - the world was suddenly a more complex and interesting place.”
For a few years in the 1980s East Village of Manhattan, I sang Christmas carols with Sue Garner and Amanda Uprichard who were part of the original Last Roundup. Later as a trio we became the Shams. Caroling was a chance to wear festive thrift shop outfits and try out any backup, harmony or cheesy pop arrangement idea we could think of, as long as it was portable, as we traveled around the neighborhood on foot surprising friends in their tenement walk-up apartments. One year, with an old bandmate of Sue’s from Atlanta named Stan Satin, we attempted the Beach Boys’ Little Saint Nick - God it was hard. The chord changes came so fast, and the melody tested even our young twenty-something lungs. But finishing it each time felt like we’d (almost) scaled Mount Olympus.
My first marriage, to fellow musician Will Rigby took place at Old St Patrick’s Cathedral in Manhattan’s Little Italy, 1985. This is from a draft of Girl To City:
“I trusted Will when it came to music. So when he suggested a Beach Boys song to be played on the big Italian pipe organ by New Jersey musician and long-time dB's friend Fran Kowalski, I thought that sounded great. I'd loved the band since childhood and Will had woo'ed me with cassettes that deepened my appreciation.
It made sense on the surface. We were going for a traditional wedding, with traditional vows. "Until death do us part." I was raised Catholic, where marriage was forever. So the title and refrain of the song "Til I Die" seemed beautifully poetic.
But the lyrics were a hymn to loneliness:
I'm a cork on the ocean
Floating over a raging sea
How deep is the ocean
I'm a rock in a landslide
Rolling over the mountainside
How deep is the valley?
It kills my soul, hey hey hey
I'm a leaf on a windy day
Pretty soon I'll be blown away
How long does the wind blow?
These things I'll be until I die
These things I'll be until I die
I was too in love to call into question the basic premise of the lyric, echoed in the poignant melody and chords, that said we are all essentially alone.”
It’s odd, seeing so many people post this track, one of Brian Wilson’s greatest compositions and a rare one where he didn’t collaborate with a lyricist (like Burt Bacharach we often don’t think to credit his co-writers) when I think: “that was my wedding song.”
The Shams learned The Farmers Daughter off of Will’s copy of a Fleetwood Mac 45 - that band covering the Beach Boys during sessions for Tusk. We worked it up to play live, maybe even considered recording it, but Yo La Tengo performed it with us at a Chicago show we opened for them and beat us to it, as an outtake of their May I Sing With Me album.
At Joe McGinty’s Loser’s Lounge tribute to Brian Wilson I gamely attempted This Whole World, finding a way in through the Spring album (Spring was Marilyn Wilson and her sister Diane), the hippie girl group singing more approachable than the Beach Boys unassailable version. Like with Little Saint Nick, probably an instance of my reach exceeding my grasp - or is it the other way around? The subtle chord changes come so fast and the melody scales heights most mortals can only wave at.
Recording Diary Of A Mod Housewife in Los Angeles, 1996 (from Girl To City):
“We'd finished at Messenger's and moved on to Mark Linett's studio in Glendale. Mark had a homey basement studio - if home happened to feature a graceful swimming pool, lush landscaping, a trio of Scottish terriers straight off a forties holiday card and the original recording console from Western Studios. He had recently sat with Brian Wilson at this very desk mixing Pet Sounds in stereo for the first time and still had the master tapes and a note from Brian scrawled on a chalkboard next to the dartboard and studio clock. Mark was a sweet, quiet man with endless patience and focus, and a sly sense of humor that came out around Elliot - they had a brotherly, almost competitive relationship.”
Brian cohort and Love & Mercy producer/co-writer Andy Paley came in to sing on my album opener Time For Me To Come Down. His backing vocals with Elliot were magic and I felt like I’d been dusted with whatever people come to L.A. to partake of—pretty near close to perfect.
I got to see Brian play in 1999 at the Beacon Theatre courtesy of my friend music journalist Scott Schinder. The first-ever solo tour, with the wonderful Wondermints backing and Jeffrey Foskett filling in when Brian’s falsetto faltered - it had the feeling of living history even as it was going on, like “this may not ever happen again and we’re witnessing it.” But it was only the beginning of those Pet Sounds-focused shows. Amazing. I wish Scott were still alive, I know there’s a funny story about when Brian came out after for his birthday cake. It’s been two years since Scott died and any time one of our heroes dies, I think I’ll hear from him and then remember. Brian Wilson maybe more than anyone else. You have these friends that are connected to enjoyment and appreciation of certain artists, Scott holds that place for a lot of greats in my mind.
I also associate Scott with me and my husband Eric getting together, though that’s a story you’ll need to read in my soon to be second memoir Girl To Country. But it leads me to Wreckless Eric & Amy Rigby’s Two Way Family Favourites, the second album Eric and I made as a duo when we were living in the French countryside. In My Room is one of my top five favorite songs of all time (Brian Wilson and Gary Usher) and when Eric and I were choosing the covers for this album, it felt like a huge pressure to tackle it. Again - we could only do our human best and even further appreciate the level of not just genius but exacting standards that created the Beach Boys version. Enough to drive a person mad. I don’t think we ever attempted to play it live, it was just too hard, but I felt like we captured the spirit in this cover.
Like Elton John, I think Brian’s superhuman abilities make it nearly impossible to blithely jump into their shoes, where as Bob Dylan, as peerless as he is, invites you to come on in and slouch or stalk around.
When we moved to upstate New York in 2011 and I started working at The Spotty Dog bookstore/bar, it gave me a great opportunity to not only meet the locals and become part of the Hudson community, which I miss dearly, but also TIME TO LISTEN TO MUSIC while I worked. I brought in many CDs as streaming was new to me (to everyone? We’d kind of fallen behind with things living in France) and nothing felt worse than when the wifi signal crapped out and total silence fell over the bar. CDs were perfect to keep a continuous flow going and I wore out Friends/20/20 as it seemed to fit the bill for just about any time of the day or evening. True I would sometimes dive over a co-worker to fast forward past Cottonfields, but it’s still pretty amazing, just the mid teens I felt more aware of cultural appropriation, and that track felt wrong somehow. When the Friends/20/20 disc started skipping, I moved on to Sunflower. I left a lot of CDs there in the pile at Spotty, and feel sure that in ten or twenty years time, behind a pile of bar rags and craft brewery coasters, they’ll still be there, their plastic cases sticky and scratched, the artwork as nostalgic as tintype photos.
In 2017 I did my first solo touring in over a decade, playing a few gigs down in Texas. Sometimes I wonder if I’ll ever go back to play in Texas again—but when I think about time I’ve spent down there I do have some really happy memories. At the end of this short run, Scott (Schinder again) who’d moved from Queens to Austin some years before, offered to take me to see Brian Wilson at the new ACL venue downtown. It was the Pet Sounds Final Performances tour, the first set a whole array of hits and deep cuts, the second the entire Pet Sounds album. I admit I was worried it wouldn’t equal the Beacon show…had it really been almost twenty years since? There’d been touring and so much love for Pet Sounds since then. But every note felt perfect, Brian sat twenty feet in front of us, facing the audience behind a piano, it didn’t matter he needed help with the words, because the love from the musicians, from the audience and the man who created this world flowed from the stage out and back and lit up Brian’s face, how often do you get to say thank you, thank you for making my life better, for setting a standard, for daring to dream and try and fail and do it all again, whatever the cost? Scott wasn’t the sunniest guy but he was glowing. I can’t not cry when I think about that night. It was perfect.
So back in April I was in Los Angeles, and played a Wild Honey Backyard Concert with the cool sixties painting of Brian Wilson looking out at the audience from the back of the stage. They’d done an Andy Paley tribute the night before and I hadn’t been there but the warmth of Paul Rock and David Jenkins and all the Wild Honey folks recounting what sounded like a beautiful night made me feel like I was part of this whole family and it all swirls around music and LA and the Beach Boys the patron saints and when someone said Brian wasn’t well enough to attend, it made me want to hear Love and Mercy, the song, and I asked Siri to play it in my rental vehicle. You know how it’ll repeat if you don’t tell it to play something else - well Love and Mercy repeated as I left Eagle Rock to drive over to Glendale. It played again and again as I drove back over to Hollywood or wherever I went. I couldn’t turn it off. I wanted it to play forever, it is that flawless a record. I remembered the exact moment Will Rigby brought the album home and dropped the needle on this opener, the title track, back in 1988 before our daughter was born. It was the sound of hope and sunshine. I’m glad she lives in Los Angeles now. Brian’s gone but thank god for him and all he did. We have his music to listen to, but I still feel so sad that he’s not here anymore in this world he elevated.
'It’s been two years since Scott died and any time one of our heroes dies, I think I’ll hear from him and then remember. ' I think this says everything. I loved every word you wrote. Thank you.
I saw a few of Brian's shows once he started touring again in 1999. Pet Sounds at the Hollywood Bowl. Smile at Disney Hall. But the most memorable was the first show we went to from his first tour. The whole audience was one big emotional support group. We couldn't believe what we were seeing and what we were hearing. When it ended, it was like a celebration that he did it and we were there.