Brian Wilson
I Just Wasn't Made for These Times

* 11 songs

Brian Wilson, Carnie and Wendy Wilson, and others
Produced by Brian Wilson and Don Was
MCA MCAD-11270

Summary for the Busy Executive: Bitchin'.

Brian Wilson has suffered so many personal crises, I can't really think of
a time he was made for.  He was, of course, the guiding intelligence of the
Beach Boys, probably the most interesting American rock group after Zappa's
various bands and Van Dyke Parks's solo outings.  Because these pages are
devoted to classical music, does it make any sense at all to discuss odes
to surfing, drag racing, and bunnies on the beach?

Obviously, I believe it does, for the following reasons.  For one
thing, I'm convinced most people would not consider Wilson a classical
composer for reasons that have nothing to do with the nature of the music
itself.  First, Wilson never formally studied composition.  Of course,
many composers never formally studied and, of those who did, some at
least didn't get much out of it.  Instead, they made themselves through
self-study.  One thinks of Bach's arrangements of Corelli and Vivaldi and
his examination of the composers of the north German school of organists
like Buxtehude.  Wagner learned by doing and by appropriating techniques
from people like Liszt and Meyerbeer.  Martinu flunked out of the Prague
Conservatory, not once, but twice.  Second, some people believe that no
classical music can contain an electric guitar.  Honest, I've heard this,
and I pray it's a prejudice by no means general to the population.  More
insidious because less obvious is the fact that many people look down on
the environment and hype in which rock or pop is produced.  We have all
heard the word "genius" applied all too easily as well as variations on "My
three-year-old could do as well as that," as if someone like George Martin
or Zappa were musical ignorami, letting the dots fall on the staff where
they may.  What, then, do we make of Brahms, Schubert, and Satie, who
played in dives and brothels? We also distrust the amount of money made by
any musician, not just those in pop.  People sneer at Strauss and Korngold,
because they made more money than is seemly.  I advise such folk to get
over that as soon as possible.  After all, one reason for the split between
many contemporary composers and the larger public is that the chances of
earning a living from writing classical music - even Lovely Tonal Classical
Music - hover a bit lower than winning the Powerball lottery.  In the
absence of earning a living, a composer should at least have fun.  My
favorite line comes from Dave Barry who wrote something along the lines of:
"There are two kinds of music:  classical and popular.  Classical music is
by definition not popular." Again, none of this really deals with the music
itself - rather, more likely with social attitudes toward kinds of music
and musical environments.

If you asked me to list musical differences between classical and
popular music, I would point out the following.  First, classical music
ideally puts composer over performer; pop does the reverse.  In classical,
the score is primary.  For example, many get their noses out of joint
when Baroque music is performed on modern instruments (or Romantic on
contemporary instruments).  This reflects the belief that the composer
always knows best, even when the composer can't know everything.  I
actually consider it a good rule of thumb, but, again, I want to consider
the specific performance in itself, with as few a priori bromides as
possible.  On the other hand, we value pop performers for, among other
things, how well they make a work their own.  Billy Holiday's "Our Love
is Here to Stay" differs significantly not only from the sheet music, but
from Tony Bennett's, Bud Powell's, Sarah Vaughan's, and Ella Fitzgerald's
as well.  Devo's "Satisfaction" differs from The Rolling Stones'.  Yet it's
still "Our Love is Here to Stay" or "Satisfaction" in every case.  The
liberties allowed a classical performer are fewer.  A pop songwriter - for
that's what most pop composers are - gives an idea of a tune to a text,
with a general outline of the harmony.  A classical songwriter specifies
every single note, and usually the instrumentation.  "Our Love is Here to
Stay" may be a great pop song, but "My Man's Gone Now" is a classical aria.
Even so, we don't seem to mind if a singer slightly transposes a classical
song to a more comfortable key.  However, we do restrict classical
performers' liberty to change rhythms and notes.  The classical score
functions more like an architect's blueprint - that level of detail -
whereas the pop tune is a vaguer sort of gesture.

 From the above, I think it should be clear that Wilson lies closer to
classical music than to pop, even though the idiom is essentially Chuck
Berry Meets the Lettermen.  For one thing, there have been few "covers"
of Beach Boy songs, mostly unsuccessful, and less successful the further
away from the original arrangement.  There seems very little "play" in a
Brian Wilson song.  The breaks - often the most interesting parts - are
usually intricately wrought, rather than improvised, with off-beat, complex
counterpoint among the voices and the instruments.  Wilson doesn't really
write the chameleon-like pop song, but a total composition.  He scores
with breathtaking imagination and a detailed knowledge of the instruments
he uses.  Tom Petty, a player himself, wondered for years how Wilson got
a certain sound from the electric bass.  He finally met one of Wilson's
studio musicians who let him in on the secret:  Wilson didn't use one bass.
He used eight, specifying different brands and settings.  This, of course,
was before the days of the sampler-synthesizer keyboard, so if you hear an
instrument on those early albums, it's the real instrument, not somebody
pushing a bunch of patches and keys.  Furthermore, Wilson's scoring varies
from track to track.  True surfer music, like Dick Dale, uses the same
instruments over and over and in the same relation, usually rhythm track
accompanying lead guitar which does all the variation.  It wears on me to
listen to a whole surfer album, and the Beach Boys without Wilson become
more surferesque.  With Wilson producing, the Beach Boys become an entirely
different group, with an amazing variety of sound, emotion, and song
structure from cut to cut.

Despite his breathtaking sonic imagination, Wilson does remain essentially
a "naive" artist, both in Schiller's and in the everyday sense.  That is,
he expresses his inner life directly into music, without filter, and he
doesn't really know much about other composers' output.  His toolkit is
comparatively small and home-made.  If he still smokes, he'd compose
something about smoking a cigarette.  Yet his unconscious bubbles up into
daylight unlike just about any composer I know.  On the album Love You, for
example, he writes an ode to Johnny Carson.  The lyrics aren't particularly
deep:

   He sits beside the microphone (John ... ny Car ... son).
   He speaks in such a manly tone (John ... ny Car ... son).
   Ed McMahon comes on and says, "Here's Johnny!"
   Every night at eleven-thirty he's so funny.
   He looks to me just like a natural guy.
   I caught his act in Vegas - outtasight!

There's no irony here.  Wilson really means exactly what he says.  The
music, however, puts a whole 'nother spin on this.  It seems to come from
a rest room of the most decadent dive in the Weimar Republic - languorous,
seductive, and sour at the same time, like the Weill-Brecht "Alabama-Song."
The lyrics tell one story, the music another.  That Wilson has no idea of
the conflict between the two in itself fascinates and attests to the
absence of a psychic filter on his material.

The songs that comprise the program, as far as I know, appear on other
albums:  eg, "Do It Again," "Love and Mercy," "The Warmth of the Sun," and
so on.  The new settings differ in that they depend less on multi-track
technology and snippets of tape.  Just about every number can be managed by
a small live group.  The sound, in general, is cleaner than on the original
versions, in large part because the scoring is thinner.  Still, the miracle
is that it's nevertheless the Brian Wilson sound.  A couple of numbers
approach the Phil Spector "Wall of Sound" aesthetic that Wilson so admired,
but it's mainly a matter of increased bass, rather than more tracks.

Each song contains some surprise.  "This Old World" slides through
startling enharmonic modulations.  In "Do It Again," off-the-wall vocal
counterpoint flowers off cliches of boogie-woogie bass.  His well-known
"Caroline, No" opens with some nifty unsettled harmonic progressions and
makes much of disjunctions between lyric and musical phrases.  Perhaps the
most interesting part of that song for me is where the lyric asks whether
speaker and former beloved can ever get back together.  Wilson inserts an
extra measure or so of vamp, leaving the question hanging, so to speak,
before he comes in with the phrase the listener has been waiting for - "Oh,
Caroline, no." "Let the Wind Blow" continues the same lyrical theme, with
highly unstable harmonies.  Indeed, so many of Wilson's songs talk about
love lost, fled, or withered.  Lost love is, of course, a staple of the pop
market.  But it's the oddness of Wilson's observations that convince me of
their authenticity.  "Caroline" bobs her long hair and this turns into an
emblem of her lost innocence.  "Let the Wind Blow" sounds like "who cares?"
but Wilson immediately follows this with a cry of pain.  On an album
of curiosities, the most curious has to be "Still I Dream of It." It's
a beautiful song, quirky both lyrically and musically in ways that
immediately brand it as a Brian Wilson work, but the track happens to be
Wilson's home demo tape of 1976.  So it's just Wilson and his piano, and
we get a look at what he brings to the studio.  To put it charitably, many
play piano better than Wilson; his instrument is really the studio mixing
board and multi-track tape machine.  Nevertheless, the musical skeleton can
support the efflorescence of lines Wilson makes it take on, as he moves
from song to composition.

Wilson's voice is, as always, nothing to write home about but it's
instantly recognizable.  The arrangements show him at the top of his game,
and the musicians are the cream of the Los Angeles studios.  If nothing
else, it shows not that pop can be raised to art, as if it needed to be
de-loused and taught manners first, but that the best of pop is indeed
art.  Wonderful album.

Steve Schwartz