‘His music documented an America that no longer exists’: Brian Wilson’s brilliance, by key collaborator Van Dyke Parks

Wilson bought Parks a Volvo when he’d barely met him – and together they brought sublime poetry to pop. He remembers the making of Smile, Surf’s Up and moreIt was the Beatles’ publicist Derek Taylor – who I met backstage at their first concert at the Hollywood Bowl – who first declared “Brian Wilson is a genius” as part of a [1966] publicity campaign. I knew that word would come back to haunt Brian and it did: from then on he was competing in a world of heightened expectations, but he did that very bravely all his life. He was basically forever competing against a previous version of himself, but as the great American beat poet Lewis MacAdams said: “If it’s not impossible, I’m not interested.” As for lyrics, you can’t beat “I’m a cork on the ocean” [in Til I Die] for a redux of thought from a Beach Boy. I will call that genius and I think the word does apply to Brian.He had so many gifts. One of them was mutual empowerment. He brought out the best in everyone around him. In the studio, under great tensile strength, the things he could do with a piano, bass, and maybe a couple of guitars were like him entering a dark room and breathing light and life into it. He was a celebratory spirit with a dark coda on his life: the burden of some psychosis. I don’t believe that was caused by drugs. I think it was in his genes, but he had the ability to dig deep. He had a disciplined spiritual force and had sat on church pews and had learned musical lingos, had loved and absorbed everything from barbershop quartets to calypso to composers to Gershwin, was growing up when they coined the expression “Americana” and configured all this into a new kind of pop. Continue reading...

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