I heard about the death of Brian Wilson late yesterday evening. I was about to go to bed but instead I went back into the living room and pulled out Pet Sounds from my CD collection. I ejected a CD that was in the player and it was Copland Orchestral Works Volume 3 with John Wilson and the BBC Philharmonic.
I thought it quite ironic. How it summed up the passing of time in my musical tastes and how there are always coincidences, relationships and connections – some find you and some you just need to look for.
I always listen to Pet Sounds end to end, but on this occasion I didn’t start the CD with track 1 Wouldn’t it be nice but skipped straight to track 11 I just wasn’t made for these times. I always thought of this song as perhaps the perfect distillation of Brian Wilson’s amazing creativity whilst also providing a ring side seat to his fragile mental state.
They say I got brains
But they ain’t doin’ me no good
I wish they could
Each time things start to happen again
I think I got somethin’ good goin’ for myself
But what goes wrong?
Back in the 1990s when I was a young man (of a similar age to Brian when he co-wrote the album with Tony Asher in 1966), this song and countless others spoke to me. I became a huge Beach Boys fan. Apart from Copland it’s hard to think of any other musical artist who has impacted my life so significantly.
Anyone who like me has ever related to Charlie Brown or George Bailey (James Stewart’s character in It’s a Wonderful Life) will find a kindred spirit in Brian Wilson’s songs. So many of them have that feeling of what could be considered as Positive Vulnerability – an outward air of confidence that provides the merest thin veneer to a china heart.
I saw Brian play twice both at the former Coston Hall. The first time in around 2009 he was bouyed up by a young band. He was still reaping the accolades from the release of the long awaited Smile album and he looked to be enjoying himself. The second time, in 2014 (or therabouts) he was with an older band featuring Al Jardine and Blondie Chaplin playing Pet Sounds in full. Brian was on the stage but not really there. He looked sick, sad, startled and alone. It was hard to watch.
The Mozart of pop music is dead but his songs will endure – many are timeless and peerless. They will live on bringing joy and solace for generations to come.
ooOOoo
So, what are these connections between Brian Wilson and Aaron Copland apart from both being right at the forefront of 20th century American music?
OK here are a few.
At the zenith of their creativity both Copland and Wilson embraced folk and Americana. In the middle of Appalachian Spring lies Simple Gifts and the central track of Pet Sounds is Sloop John B. The Beach Boys recorded traditional songs like Cottonfields, Old Folks at Home, Old Man River and Smile has numerous musical references to a bygone era. Try listening to this album and then to Copland’s Old American Songs sets 1 and 2 – start off by comparing Vege-tables and I bought me a Cat. Both Copland and Wilson had a soft spot for Western themes and Latin American music and produced some great picture postcards – Copland with Billy the Kid, El Salon Mexico and Three Latin American Sketches and Wilson with Heroes and Villains and Rio Grande. Personally, I think it’s almost impossible not to see a common musical lineage.
Not convinced?
OK, how about this. Compare the first few notes of Fanfare for the Common Man and Caroline No. Both start with unusual percussive notes. Off the top of my head I can’t think of any other music that starts in such a fashion. In both cases, if you hear the first couple of beats, you know the music you are listening to. That’s incredible. Two icons creating very different music nearly 25 years apart but prodicing two of the most definitively distinct openings in music history!
Both Copland and Wilson wrote music involving the sirens of fire brigades! How weird is that? It never occurred to me until last night. Copland in 1939 as part of The City soundtrack Fire Engines at Lunch Hour and Wilson in the song Mrs O’Leary’s Cow from Smile. You can also hear similarities between the latter and Copland’s playful banana skin type endings.
You don’t normally find the theremin in classical music or pop music either. But Copland used it as part of the scoring in his play opera The Second Hurricane whilst Wilson brought the instrument to worldwide recognition in his smash hit Good Vibrations.
No doubt I’ll find more similarities – like tens of thousands if not millions of people worldwide, I’ll be celebrating the genius of Brian Wilson over the coming days. For me it will be a private wake as I revisit his amazing body of work which was a major ingredient in my personal primordial soup of musical influence.
Afterthoughts – Great Minds!
Having written this blog I noticed that the obituary in the Guardian compares Brian Wilson with Aaron Copland, Charles Ives, George Gershwin and Duke Ellington as “geniuses of American musical composition”!
Also, the Los Angeles Times picks out 13 of the late Brian Wilson’s songs to revisit. In the description about Cabin Essence from Smile it says:
It’s packed with ideas from all over the American songbook — Aaron Copland and western folk, run through with Wilson’s own cracked impressionist view of life on the rails.
Leave a Comment