Last month when Al Jardine was telling some Las Vegas paper the Beach Boys were reforming for their 40th anniversary in 2011 and, yes, Brian Wilson would be with them, some of us only heard that and only wanted to here that. Brian back. And if what we’ve been hearing since then, he probably won’t be back.
The Beach Boys are the Beatles of the US -nobody else is really in the running. A surf rock pop band with a taste for Phil Spector who ingested plenty of 1960s, made some very weird and very killer albums, blew into a million tiny pieces, and ended up a nostalgia act.
Now, we might be forgiven for thinking that the Beach Boys were just an outlet for Brian’s “sweet insanity” but that isn’t quite true. The Beach Boys were a band, even if, in effect, they were one John Lennon and four Ringos.
Yes, they did need Al and they did need Mike Love and, more importantly, Dennis Wilson, the only real surfer, and Carl Wilson, the man with the best voice of the lot.
From 1962 to 1979 they were a band. And if Brian wrote and produced, while the rest of the band spread the word, well, we call that delegation of duty.
But once Dennis died in 1983 the game was up. Yeah, that’s how important the drummer brother was.
And Brian went his own way and all the way to the brink and he didn’t come all the way back. He hasn’t done anything except for the first solo album and Smile worth mentioning. I once stood in line two hours for his autograph but I didn’t really meet him. He wasn’t there. On stage he is simply creepy, sitting behind his keyboards but not actually doing anything.
The rest of the Beach Boys are creepier still -your Grandparents singing about how they’re bummed at their old men.
And so even if they stuck an IV of Ambient in his arm and trotted brian out and they all wore candy cane stripped shirts and sung about endless summers one more time it wouldn’t be the Beach Boys.
The past is another country.
Still, I’d kill to hear em play “Mona” live.