(Credit: Far Away / YouTube Anyway)
For all the great music Brian Wilson had in his head, he was never the best musician in the world.
His strong suit was capturing the kind of emotions that no one realized they could feel when listening to music, and all he needed was someone who could bring the right words to the table whenever he spoke about other aspects of life. He didn’t want to write the same cars and surfing songs for the rest of his life, and if you look at the other people who have done the band’s work, there’s going to be a lot of ground for them to cover once the Summer of Love starts.
Of course, there were always many people to whom Wilson had to answer before writing his reports. ‘God Only Knows’ may have been one of the most beautiful love songs anyone has ever sung, but the fact that people caught him daring to use the word ‘God’ in one of the song titles is still one of the most unintentional pieces of music. Religious people may have made it up, but how can you hate a song that was so pure and honest in love?
Then you have to deal with whatever Mike Love thought was appropriate for The Beach Boys again. Although Lerato has been the main spirit of the group for the past few decades, the fact that she has insisted on not moving too far outside of their comfort zone still makes her look like a goody two shoes. And if you need proof, just listen to some of the outtakes from Pet sounds where he can be heard mocking some of the lyrics that Tony Asher had written on songs like ‘I Know There’s An Answer’.
Sure, Asher may not have had music as his main job when he was writing commercial jingles, but he was definitely the right man for the job when it came to putting the lyrics to songs like ‘I Can’t Be Nice’. But if you look at Asher’s lyrics compared to what Van Dyke Parks was doing, Parks wanted to go in a more psychedelic way than everyone was ready for.
And the work that the team did Smile he would spend a few decades on the shelf before being released, it’s not like Parks didn’t have a good head on his shoulders. Some of his best lines had a lot of catchy imagery, but looking back on some of those shows, Wilson recalled that it was very difficult trying to find the right melodies around those words.
Parks was certainly an artist himself, but Wilson needed something more solid if he wanted to get the right sound from his songs, saying, “Working with him is not easy at all because he’s a perfectionist. He wants it his way and the right way. I always liked what he came up with. when he heard what Parks was doing with his words.
As if he would no longer be considered a troublemaker, Love was known to take apart many of Parks’ lyrics and discard a few of them when he felt he was under the influence of drugs. Then again, if you look at the rest of the world, avoiding psychedelic sounds in the late 1960s would be like trying to hit disco without any drums; you can try, but don’t be surprised if it ends up sounding corny.
But even if Wilson struggled to work with Parks every time he worked on his vocals, it was never at the expense of having fun in the studio. For someone as gifted as his, sometimes it’s good to be challenged every now and then, and if the fruits of their labor were songs like ‘Surf’s Up’, they would probably have collaborated more often than they did in the old days.
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