1.
I rarely remember my dreams, but the music of Brian Wilson figured in one of the few I retained.
By the mid-1980s my Beach Boys fandom had reached a peak. I had embraced early deep tracks like “The Lonely Sea” and “Kiss Me, Baby.” I fully bought into the strange glories of 1977’s Love You (which, as the great Andrew Hickey says, would be the most creative riposte to punk by a major musical figure of the previous generation if there were any chance—slim—Brian was aware of punk at all). I shook my head at track after track on the woebegone MIU Album and thought, This is so wrong, but it actually sort of works. And I had tracked down all of the officially released snatches of that Moby-Dick of pop music, Smile.
Sightings of that white whale—“Surf’s Up,” “Heroes and Villains,” “Our Prayer,” especially “Cabinessence”—were as tantalizing to me as they were to legions of other fans. Like them, I yearned to know what the rest of it was like. And one night, I thought I had found the answer.
The psychic and physical displacement of European travel had somehow jostled my psyche and opened a channel to my subconscious. I dreamt that I was in a record shop where a Smile bootleg was playing, and I heard the most miraculous music. I thought: It is even better, more elusive and subtle than the songs I’ve heard. Then I woke up.
I never heard that music again. Never had a dream remotely like it despite a lifetime of musical obsessions. And in truth, all the best songs on Smile had already been released by that point, if not always the best versions. The completion of Smile by Brian in 2004 was a clever closing of the loop, a happy ending, more a relief than a revelation.
But what did I hear? Where did it come from? Had a door opened in dark matter that allowed me to hear a snippet of the music Brian Wilson claimed he had dreamed?
2.
The story at my tiny college was that an older classmate had been in a church youth group with the Wilson brothers. He even claimed Dennis threw a hotdog at him at a cookout on the beach, a detail that is almost too perfect to be true. Hawthorne Covenant Church belonged to same Swedish immigrant denomination I was raised in and in which my college was rooted—another detail that tracks given the Scandinavian background of the Wilson and Love families as traced in Timothy White’s The Nearest Faraway Place. What influence might the church have had on Brian Wilson? Had he heard and somehow been touched by its rich tradition of hymnody? Is that where the brothers began praying together? Is that where the germ of the idea of “teenage symphonies to God” sprouted?
3.
Brian’s voice was gone, either as the result of a cold or for good. As he struggled, his crack band picked up the slack and then some. The stalwart Al Jardine was on that tour, as was Blondie Chaplin, who injected some rock-star energy into the proceedings. All those voices and harmonies carried things until it came time to perform Pet Sounds, where so many songs placed a spotlight on a single voice: Brian’s. How was this going to go down?
Pretty rough, at first. But soon members of the audience started singing, and before long all 2,000 of us in the cavernous auditorium were serenading the composer with his songs. It was the most beautiful performance of Pet Sounds I ever heard.
4.
“I saw in the future a vision of music in a dream I had one night—I foresaw the future—and it was way, way, way farther than now even. I heard all kinds of celestial heavenly sounds. You know it just blew my mind. I think eventually we’re headed for Heaven.” —Brian Wilson
