I remember when I was in high school The Beach Boys were pretty popular, but I never liked them particularly, never especially liked "surf music," or car music, which is what they mostly did. I was familiar with them, of course, but I never much cared one way or the other about them.
Then when I went to college and met and started dating Bob, I was at his house one night, sitting in his bedroom listening to music, and he played Pet Sounds, and it was like a lightbulb went off over my head, or I gained enlightenment, or something. "God Only Knows," I think it was, that did it. "If you should ever leave me, though life would still go on, believe me, the world would show nothing to me, so what good would living do me?"
Oh man. Such beauty. I immediately went out and bought Pet Sounds, and started this sort of strange relationship with The Beach Boys. Bob had always loved them, and I was only now discovering them.
Some of their stuff I almost actively disliked--most of the car songs really turned me off, I just didn't like them at all. So on the one hand, there was this beautiful, sometimes mournful, almost at times ethereal music, on the other was the poppy, bouncy, "let's go race cars and pick up girls" stuff.
A few years ago I read a book called Glimpses, by Lewis Shiner. It's been awhile since I read it, so I hesitate to describe it in too much detail, but basically it's a time travel novel in which the protagonist, a sort of ordinary "every man" goes back in time (okay, maybe it's only a hallucination) to visit with and encourage several dead rock stars--Jim Morrison, Jimi Hendrix, John Lennon--and one curiously *un*dead rock star--Brian Wilson. And not "undead" as in vampire or anything, just, I don't know, it seemed weird that he was the only one still alive, and I remember trying to make sense of the time travel stuff in that context.
Brian Wilson's unfinished work was, of course, Smiley Smile, the follow-up album to Pet Sounds that was never completed (and he said in the interview last night that despite all the speculation, all the tapes had been destroyed).
In the book, the main character is trying to explain to his wife the importance of The Beach Boys' Pet Sounds. He's describing the "found objects" such a the bicycle bell used in the album, and he's talking about what their music was like before this album, and she says something like, "So you're saying that Mike Love represents everything I hated about The Beach Boys, and Brian Wilson represents everything I liked about them?" And I immediately thought, "Yes!"
That's it exactly.
