"The best": The album that dragged Brian Wilson back into music
From Randy Newman to Paul McCartney and Bob Dylan, every songwriter under the sun has expressed a level of adoration for Brian Wilson and The Beach Boys.
(Credits: Far Out / Alamy)
Music Ā» From The Vault
Fri 31 January 2025 16:30, UK
The sun beats down on Brian Wilson as he lounges in his garden in Laurel Canyon. Up on the hill, he surveys the land around him in search of inspiration, but it remains annoyingly elusive. This is not a problem that he often has to contend with, and he is puzzled by it. Why canāt he think of the next Beach Boys song? His solution is as radical as it is simple: heāll bring the beach to Laurel Canyon. He floods his living room with sand, plonks his piano in the middle, and begins writing Pet Sounds.
It is popās finest masterpiece. There is music before Pet Sounds, and there is music after Pet Sounds. Every musician youāll ever meet is likely to tell you the same. As Paul McCartney put it, āI figure no one is educated musically until theyāve heard Pet Sounds.ā Even those who required no musical education, who were raised scribbling birdsong down as sheet music and rattling off hits on Tin Pan Alley before their lunch break, were moved by its mastery.
Take Randy Newman, for instance. Speaking about Wilsonās work, the first-rate composer exclaimed, āBrian Wilson is one of the greatest creative artists in the history of popular music. Pet Sounds is a remarkable achievement.ā While there is a marked difference between the pair ā Newman being the Dean of Satire who writes with wry wit and postmodern collisions of music and words in mind, and Wilson being a sincere Baroque pop writer and golden-voiced singer ā the admiration was mutual.
When celebrating Newmanās 1971 classic Sail Away and hailing its involvement amid his five favourites, Wilson went one step further and crowned it āthe best.ā The praise might be lofty but it is also perhaps unsurprising given how closely Wilson has actually studied all of the starās work. āI love Randy,ā he says, āhis music means a lot to me.ā
At a dark period in his life, the album served as salvation. āIt served as inspiration,ā he said in a 1976 Old Grey Whistle Test interview. āI played that album over and over.ā After a bout of depression, Wilson was trying to find his groove and write some new material. Thankfully, he was pulling away from the darkness in which he had been slumped, and songs were starting to write themselves again, but he admits of Sail Away, āI had to have that album playing for some reason.ā
Itās a record that holds profound sway over musicians in general. Bob Dylan himself said, āIt doesnāt get any better than that.ā The original vagabond commented, āRandy might not go out on stage and knock you out, or knock your socks off. And heās not going to get people thrilled in the front row. He aināt gonna do that. But heās gonna write a better song than most people who can do it. You know, heās got that down to an art. Now Randy knows music. He knows music.ā
Thereās a kinship between Newman and Wilson in that regard. They both seem to grasp the foundations of pop so seamlessly that they can simply play around with it. However, Newman would also admit that he hasnāt been able to wrestle with the masses in the manner of The Beach Boys. Not that it bothers him much.
Ever since he leapt out of a window on Tin Pan Alley in 1968, Randy Newman has outsmarted the world to such an extent that he has inadvertently imposed his own obscurity. His anthem on the insanity of prejudice ended up enraging people so much that he received extremely prejudiced death threats. Tom Jones scored a huge hit covering his floundering track on meek sexual ineptitude by making it about macho sexual prowess, and he cataclysmically claimed that all his fans are āuglyā in the disastrous antithesis of Richard Ashcroftās successful marketing quip that heās ānever had a bad review off a good-looking person.ā
Indeed, Newman has, almost by design, made himself hard to market. How can someone be the Dean of Satire and the Master of Childrenās Music? Itās a confusing dichotomy, one of many in the stumpy six-foot maestro and master of simplicityās existence that continues to beguile. It has ensured that over the years, he has garnered a consistent fanbase of 200,000 globally. It might not be a lot, but itās a figure that certainly contains a couple of thousand expert musicians in their own right, Wilson pretty much leading the fan clubāwhich is one hell of a calling card.
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