Brian Wilson and the Myth of the 60s
Brian Wilson and the Myth of the 60s
On June 11th, musical genius Brian Wilson passed. It would be wrong of me, not only as an analyzer of the 1960s but as a human being with a beating heart, not to reflect on his life and work.
Don Draper disdainfully reads Ted Chaough’s “Help me Honda” note, parodying The Beach Boys’ “Help me Rhonda,” and Roger has his first acid trip to “I Just Wasn’t Made For These Times.” Brian Wilson’s group appears in Mad Men first as a lame joke and then as a life-changing experience.
Of all the changes in the 1960s, music was perhaps the most drastic. The Beatles were a shock to the nation when they appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show in 1964, and only four years later, The White Album was released. They were no longer those mop-top, lovable lads from Liverpool. They had become artists who changed what it felt like to be alive after listening to an album (although Don Draper would disagree).
Brian Wilson shared this power. Imagining music without “God Only Knows” is like imagining the sky without blue. His songs created not only a myth of California but of the entire 1960s.
A myth so powerful that we made it into reality.
He may have never hopped on a surfboard, but a beach on a hot summer day conjures his words and compositions. Wilson captured the feeling of an era through sound. We can return to his 1960s just by putting a record on.
Brian’s 1960s were a tortured but beautiful time. For all the torment in both Brian Wilson’s life and the world that led to 1966’s Pet Sounds, now considered one of the greatest albums of all time, listening to that album makes you feel like everything is going to be alright.
No matter what has been or what is to come, something so beautiful that life feels incomplete without it is always possible. That’s no myth.