Brian Wilson, the guy behind some of the happiest sad songs in pop history, is dead.
Take "Wouldn't It Be Nice," which I'd say is my favorite Beach Boys tune if you asked me right now, the day after Wilson died at 82 years old. The song, the first track from Pet Sounds, the band's peerless 1966 album which Wilson produced, arranged, and wrote most of, finds a young man wanting more out of life and love than he's getting, and hoping a day comes when he gets it. Wouldn't it be nice to be happy?
Like most folks born in the 1960s who owned a radio, I've known the lyrics to "Wouldn't It Be Nice" and all Beach Boys hits since I was a little kid. And I sang along and smiled whenever I heard "Wouldn't It Be Nice" back then. With that melody from the gods and wall-of-sound production from Wilson, how can you not?
I was in eighth grade the first time I saw the Beach Boys, who were formed in Hawthorne, Calif., in 1961 by teenage Wilson and his brothers Dennis Wilson and Carl Wilson, plus a cousin, Mike Love, and a friend, Al Jardine. A really nice superfan who lived in the house behind mine took me and some of my neighborhood buddies to a show at the Capital Centre, one of five consecutive sellout concerts the Beach Boys had at the D.C.-area arena in June 1975, and on the drive over counseled us kids on why his favorite band was better than the Beatles. I definitely wasn't buying our chaperone's argument going in. But after spending a couple hours singing along with about 19,000 other folks to one perfect pop song after another, I realized the pointlessness of keeping score. The Beach Boys really were perfect.
A portion of the setlist of the show which I looked up after news of Wilson's death broke: "In My Room," "Sail On, Sailor," "God Only Knows," "Good Vibrations," "Don't Worry Baby," and, yeah, "Wouldn't It Be Nice."
I found a review of that 1975 show in the Washington Post archives. That critique, matching my memory, rated "Wouldn't It Be Nice" as the high point. "As [Mike] Love sang the words of what may well be the most idealistic adolescent rock love song of all time," reads the review, "there was an outpouring of emotion from the audience that surprised even the most regular attendees of Capital Centre concerts. There was a feeling in the air—pure, innocent, and without the false hipness that is standard at most rock shows—and even the Beach Boys themselves were amazed."
Brian Wilson, who wrote the song that triggered that ecstasy and all the other aforementioned classics on the setlist, was not on the stage that night. He'd all but stopped touring even before his mid-1960s writing and recording heyday ended because of his personal demons, and it became more obvious each subsequent year that Wilson's real life had been less "Fun, Fun, Fun" and more "I Just Wasn't Made For These Times." Profiles of Wilson began having fewer words devoted to his music than to the severe mental illness and related substance-abuse issues that rendered him barely able to leave his house, let alone hit the road or go into a studio. (I did get to see a rare Wilson performance with the Beach Boys in 1980, when the band did a free Fourth of July show in D.C. that drew several hundred thousand revelers to the National Mall. Being in his presence means more to me now than it did then.)
Wilson had lengthy tabloid-worthy legal fights with family members. He turned his life over to a controversial psychologist, Eugene Landy, who according to the New York Times "was variously called a savior and a snake oil salesman" because of his methods to get Wilson back to work in the early 1980s. Landy and his staff embedded with Wilson in his home and charged a reported $35,000 a month for around-the-clock treatment. He was apparently not content with merely being Wilson's therapist and guru: Landy, who was not a medical doctor, got caught illegally prescribing Wilson drugs and lost his therapy license, so he made himself Wilson's business manager, record producer, and songwriting partner before a California court order in 1992 called for him to stop having any contact with Wilson.
While I was aware of his tragic story, I'd never mulled the melancholia behind the music that had made me happy my whole life until I saw Roger & Me, Michael Moore's 1989 documentary on how General Motors destroyed Flint, Mich. Of all the film's devastating scenes, the one I found most brutal had an ex-autoworker recalling driving away from the factory after losing his job, when "Wouldn't It Be Nice" comes on his car radio. The song used to cheer him up, he told Moore, but in a state of panic and with his life falling apart, the words hit differently. "So I'm trying to sing the lyrics," he says. "I've got like an apple in my throat, singing, you know, 'Maybe if we think and wish and hope and pray it might come true,' trying to rationalize those lyrics, thinking, Wouldn't it be nice…? And it just wasn't working."
I'd never hear "Wouldn't It Be Nice" the same way again. I'm more likely to cry than smile as I sing along now. But I still seek it out. "Wouldn't It Be Nice" is as good as a song can be.
