Sunday Music: Brian Wilson Received Music

We all hear music. Brian Wilson received it. On some kind of a hive mind with the muses level.

The news of his death, so close to Sly Stone’s, is messing with me. Not just because a ton of Ben Greenman books are staring at me from my shelf (has anybody checked on George Clinton?!), but because Wilson, like Sly, got closer to the creative gods than any reasonable person would believe to be possible.

The “Be My Baby” story alone…

I’ll get into it, all of it, and why I’m feeling this loss extra. But first, a picture:

This is in my house. It’s the last thing I see every day before I take the stairs (and the dogs) upstairs to meet my wife in bed. I think of Brian Wilson a lot, even if it’s not in a super-specific way, as a reminder of what we’re all here for and why. And, maybe most importantly, as a reminder of what really matters.

So, the “Be My Baby” story, it relates to our framed record there, and here’s how the story goes.

Brian Wilson and his girlfriend are driving down a California highway in 1963. “Be My Baby” comes on the radio, and he has to pull the car over. He’s crying. The song, the structure, the production - it goes straight into his soul. He’s overtaken by it.

That’s not what happens when you or I hear a song.

And after, I mean, he writes “Don’t Worry Baby” as an homage to it. He builds on brilliance, tapping into all of those emotions he experienced to re-translate them.

Brian Wilson didn’t just hear “Be My Baby” - he received it like some kind of communion. What happened next wasn’t inspiration, it was transmutation. He took that roadside revelation and alchemized it into “Don’t Worry Baby,” transforming his tears into someone else’s transcendence.

This is transmutation in the scientific sense - when matter changes into something entirely new. But it’s also transubstantiation in the religious sense - the mystery of one sacred thing becoming another.

All that gets us to this point. Leap with me. Faith optional.

Brian Wilson was able to transmute and transubstantiate “Be My Baby” into “Don’t Worry Baby” because he transcended studio science and the human condition. When we talk about art, when we talk about inspiration, and when we map it back to him - it’s not enough. We have to get to the root of this. There’s a possession element, if not an outright prophetic one.

There’s another story (actually, stories - plural, h/t to my buddy Scott for tossing me all the way down this rabbithole after the news of his passing broke, yeesh), about Wilson’s obsession with the song “Shortnin’ Bread.” If you don’t get the possession/obsession point, this will make it clear.

Wilson couldn’t stop thinking about what he regarded as the genius of “Shortnin’ Bread.” You probably haven’t ever thought of that as the greatest song ever written, for it’s self contained rhythm, for it’s bounce, or for its sing-a-longyness. But, you’re not Brian Wilson, so why would you?

He wanted to record it for years. He’d play it for people. He’d bring it up in interviews. From the late 1970s and into the 1980s he recorded multiple versions of it. He’d call up friends in the middle of the night and ask them to come sing it with him. He tried to convince Paul McCartney to record it with him (they sang it together!), and Al Jardine, one of his band mates, started to refer to it as “the song that would not die.”

If you believe that Wilson was closer to the muses than most of us can even imagine, as I do, you see this fascination with a song as part of a ritual. In the spiritual language that spoke the loudest to him, that song tapped into a part of his psyche, and for most of us, and for him, in a way, it’s just too much.

But ritual and repetition are what beliefs are made of. You don’t start a religion without those ingredients. Only a prophet can take a thing everybody else already knows, like a simple message or simple song, and divine out some greater purpose.

The problem with ritual and repetition on this level though, is that it also means you’re crazy. I’m not using it in a pejorative way, I’m just saying, there’s a madness aspect to it. You don’t wish to have that experience, but you do have to have some awe for what can be done with it, because you know what can’t be done without it.

There’s a cost to feeling everything so deeply. There’s a cost to having a song on the radio break you down into tears. There’s a cost to finding a nursery rhyme of a song to be an example of perfection.

Wilson's obsessions weren't just personal quirks - they were prophetic acts. As John Vervaeke defines it, “A prophet is not somebody who tells the future... The job of the prophet is to wake you up right now to how you are off course.” Wilson's relentless pursuit of perfection in simple songs was his way of telling us we weren't listening deeply enough. (h/t to Tom Morgan who introduced me to Vervaeke’s work and that quote).

Now, I’m not saying Wilson was telling us we or music or whatever was off course as some grand statement, but I am saying if you look at his body of work, you kind of feel that gap to how far away from most of the rest of us he was operating. There’s a thread here, where to create transcendent beauty, in any format, you also have to transcend sanity. It’s a threshold you have to cross, whether by choice or without consent, because the muse just calls you there.

Wilson wasn’t devoted to the popularity of pop music. Wilson was devoted to the soul of music as it relates back to the humans who make it. The repetitions in a song and the repetitions of singing, they were one in the same to him.

It’s ok, and probably good, to not be Brian Wilson. But inevitably there’s an itch you’re probably feeling right now too, and it’s that awareness of the stuff you feel more deeply than others around you. We don’t talk about those itches enough because they’re uncomfortable. We don’t talk about them because they feel and sound a little crazy. That’s because they are crazy.

Life has a funny way of coming up with stuff that will stop us dead in our tracks. We might not make the most profound art out of it, but that doesn’t mean we don’t have “Be My Baby” or “Shortenin’ Bread” moments of our own.

The question is - what would happen if you turned more of those hypersensitivities into ritual? What if you felt the hit and didn’t just move on to the next thing in life? What if you sat with it? What if you repeated it? What if you built ceremonies around the things that move you most?

Well now I sound crazy. Good. That's exactly where we need to be. Because I think we’re all carrying something heavier than others see. We all have our forms of it.

Before my wife was my wife, when we were both going through some pretty rough and deeply personal stuff, we’d always tell each other, “Don’t worry baby.” It was a reference to the song. We both loved it and it forever occupies a special place in our lives.

For me, I had a Best of the Beach Boys tape that I would play to death in my walkman as a kid. I can't tell you how many car rides and vacations that tape soundtracked, how many afternoons I daydreamed away, all while wearing headphones with Wilson's voice in my ears.

A few years ago, I bought my wife a 45/single of “Don’t Worry Baby” and framed it. That’s it in the picture, hanging above the entry to our staircase in our kitchen. I look at it every night before I walk upstairs to bed. It’s a reminder of the language my wife and I share. It’s a reminder that great art turns weights into wings.

I do believe Brian Wilson is a type of modern prophet. I think it came at the cost of hypersensitivity. But, if ritual is greater than reach, because through ritual you bind the feelings and the people who “get it” closest to you, it’s hard for me to imagine a higher purpose in life.

RIP Brian Wilson.

Here’s Wilson, in an interview, where I don’t think he’s trolling at all - but you can see the crazy and genius mixed together and, it just gives me goosebumps. The song “Ding Dang” that he plays here was his attempt for the Beach Boys to come up with their own “Shortenin’ Bread” (you should read the Wikipedia page on “Ding Dang” too, and then you should send it to a friend, because if you made it this far into this essay, what are friends for but pushing each other down rabbitholes like this anyway?)

Last but certainly not least, whether or not Tom Morgan or Scott Bradlee decide to take up my Brian Wilson as prophet cause (I won’t venture to put a woo score on this, but Tom, you know where to find me)…

I do need to highlight these “if Richard Feynman was your school’s music teacher” style collaborative “MusicX” lectures Scott Bradlee is giving on Sundays. Is this church now? Maybe. I’ve been loving them, not to mention, you can play them back which is part of the history of use cases from back when records were first invented, but I digress.

I have to highlight this one, about remarkably complex pop songs that are hits, because it is very relevant to this post. This is transcendence, explored. Musical cathedrals. Listen and enjoy: