Brian Wilson’s passing earlier this week has left me with an emotional void. It is that loss of an innocent time.  It is like the last of my childhood has left permanently and all that’s left are memories……

In  2012 when he returned to performing.

It’s weird.  Whenever I’ve been asked what my favorite musical groups or musicians are, I’ve never once said “The Beach Boys” or added Brian Wilson to the mix.   The group, along with Wilson were just always….there!  Like a pair of comfortable, broken in Weejun loafers that I have had for decades-both were the “old reliable” of music.

I love this photo by Getty Images.  In Front:  Dennis Wilson, Al Jardine.  In Back: Carl Wilson, Mike Love, Brian Wilson.   They are just so All-American!

During my teen years and my obsession with Jimi Hendrix, The Kinks, Creedence, James Brown, Crosby, Stills Nash, and Young—The Beach Boys were my silent favorites.  Not a guilty pleasure at all—that was ABBA.  However, I never realized that they were a favorite group.  Kind of like The Beatles if you know what I mean.

For critics and fans alike, Pet Sounds is a favorite album!

For me, I remember the first times I heard this completely American group. 1963.  Pre-British Invasion.  Sufrin’ USA.  On the way to Rockaway Beach with my Aunt Terry and her friends.  I was eight years old.  Aunt Terry and her friends were 23—the prime age for listening to pop music on the radio. Surfin’ USA was a fun song.  At eight years old and a New York, East Coast child, I had no idea what surfing was.  I know only that it must have been something only Americans did and the lyrics woke me up to a new way of how Californians dressed—baggy shorts, huarache sandals (which I later wore in my teen years) and a bushy, bushy blonde hairdo—I was fascinated; especially since I was fish -belly pale with pitch black hair!

Who’s that guy nestled between Dennis and Carl Wilson?  It’s David Marks–an early member of the Beach Boys!

The next year, 1964, I heard another song by the Beach Boys.  This time at a family cookout that my mother’s family had.  Her large family’s summer cookouts were the best!  All of us Gorman cousins around the same age, playing, eating, swimming, and listening to the music of both our parents and teenaged cousins.  At nine years old, “Fun, Fun, Fun” gave me the cinematic story in my mind that when I would start to drive, I would be that girl with a T-Bird that my daddy would take away.  Again, it was another fun song of innocence and images of having the very best time in a young life!

That T-Bird is Fun, Fun, Fun but those haircuts are not..

Okay girls.  I believe we all wanted to be Suzanne Sommers driving this T-Bird.  Fun. Fun. Fun!

1965, brought the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, and the invasion of the Brits.  But the Beach Boys still stood strong and Paul McCartney had no qualms pontificating that Brian Wilson’s Beach Boys were the Beatles biggest threat.  The song?  “Help Me Rhonda” and at ten years old, I fully couldn’t quite understand how this girl named Rhonda would help Brian get another girl outta his heart.  But the song was catchy and the lyrics simple, the beat perfect and again, a great summer song.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.  The Brits invaded us with music but to my parents, it was the start of…The Troubles (IYKYK)

“Help Me Rhonda, yeah. GIT ‘her outta my heart”.  Check it out. Written by Brian Wilson.  Produced by Brian Wilson.  At that time, he was an anomaly.  A genious anomaly at that!

And as Brian Wilson’s struggles with mental health commenced and became progressively worse, his music became less about fun per se, and more about emotions.  Still upbeat but not as “fun” or “devil-may-care.”  I remember in 1968 buying the Smiley Smile album.  The album came out in 1967 and I listened to that album non-stop.  The songs were different.  The harmonies more complex but at the same time beautiful.  “Heros and Villains,” one of my favorite Beach Boys songs is on the album.  Sadly, this underappreciated album didn’t do well in sales and I remain defending it as one of their best next to Pet Sounds.

Composing music in his home, in his sandbox. After his breakdown.

Wilson was a genius.  When others were imprisoned by studio executives, Wilson stood strong is his writing, and producing his group’s songs.  He was nobody’s fool.  Due to his mental state, his life wasn’t easy and it is heartbreaking to see how he suffered, yet continued to make beautiful music.

Brian Wilson as producer.  So young and yet his vision WAS the most profound American rock/pop group of all time.

The last Beach Boys album I had was “Surf’s Up” that I received for Christmas when I was 16 years old.  It was quirky but harmonious at the same time. But it was a departure from the Brian Wilson years.  Bruce Johnston’s “Disney Girls” is, in my opinion, the best song on the album—an homage to more innocent times and it is just beautiful—it’s amazing that he wrote in in the late 1950’s but remained current in 1971.
I remember this album cover so well.  There was a darkness to it that foresaw the ending of The Beach Boys as we knew them.

Life has a way of nearly forgetting songs from childhood through teen years, and when my son, Jake, was in kindergarten, his class sang “Kokomo” at the school’s talent show.  The song is cheesy and lame.  Brian Wilson had nothing to do with the song, Mike Love, his cousin wrote it with others.  But—because my son sang it with his class, this ridiculous tune holds great sentimental value and I never fast forward whenever I hear it.

I stopped listening to The Beach Boys when Mike Love took over—especially when he added John Stamos to the mix.  The new Beach Boys politics do not meld with me.   They no longer personify the America I grew up with and loved.

But when I heard of Brian Wilson’s passing, I could not help but head to my Spotify on my iPhone and be brought back to my childhood-into-teen years and listen to his talent of harmonies and the innocence of his early songs.   Listening to them brought tears to my eyes because I miss those times.  I miss the music.  But I am thankful to Brian Wilson for his talent and his gift of beautiful music.

Rest in Peach Brian Wilson, and thank you for your gift of music.

Rest in Peace Brian.  I am sure you and Carl and Dennis are in another place entertaining the universe with your ethereal harmonies.