THE INDEFINITE ARTICLE/John Kelly: The once reclusive Brian Wilson (mastermind of the Beach Boys) may not be very keen to talk to me - but he is ready to rock again
Picture the scene: a dark January night in Dublin, so cold outside that the keyhole has become a wicked wind tunnel from the Arctic Circle. As everyone around me slumbers in a stupor of mulled wine and chocolate oranges, I'm listening to the Beach Boys at low volume and waiting for a 10 p.m. call from sunny California.
Instructions have already been deposited all around the house: "If that phone rings, don't answer it, it might be Brian Wilson." And while nobody seems to believe me, I can hardly blame them. Any thought of the genius Beach Boy phoning foundered Ireland on a night like this seems like some deranged post-Christmas invention - too many long sleeps, too much heavy food.
But I really am expecting a call from Brian Wilson - at least, half-expecting one - and sure enough, at the appointed time, surf's up. The phone rings and suddenly I'm talking to pop's Beethoven on a clear line from a distant warm land of sparkling water and actual oranges. I think immediately of the Pacific at Santa Monica, the pelicans at Malibu, the volleyball at Venice Beach and just how wonderful a song like Good Vibrations really is. I plug one finger in the howling keyhole and, more than a little wary, I try to compose myself.
Knowing the shape in which Brian Wilson once found himself, I wonder what can he possibly be like these days. Will he talk? Can he talk? Does he remember things? I also wonder just how many similar interviews he may have already endured today and, more importantly, what effect the last few may have had on him. I would find out pretty quickly. Two words - blood and stone.
Saying a simple "how are you?" to Brian Wilson would once have been one of the most loaded questions in popular culture. Maybe it still is, but it is hard to tell on the phone.
"I'm fine. How are you?" he answers politely, before signalling his readiness to get on with things with a business-like: "OK, what's up?"
And so I begin to fire off question after question in rapid succession - all of them answered with polite but microscopic replies. It seems he really has been interviewed just one time too many .
Within about three minutes, all my questions gone for little return, I am adrift without my surfboard and just thankful it isn't television. In fairness to Wilson, however, he was not being unco-operative, merely minimalist. He was altogether pleasant, in fact, and we had the odd laugh, but suffice to say that any blocks of speech here attributed to the Beach Boy are, in reality, a medley of his flickering responses compressed together for easier reading.
I had begun with early musical memories - usually the best and most comfortable place to encourage a relaxed and expansive reply.
"Gershwin."
"Really?"
"I think so."
"That was a good start in life", I say, realising there is nothing else coming.
"I was about two or three years old, so I was exposed to very good music, very nice music."
"Was there anything else? Maybe when you were a little older?" I ask, hoping he'll tell me about the Four Freshmen.
"There was the Four Freshmen," he says. "And Rosemary Clooney."
He had forgotten Chuck Berry, but in those trim replies we have the origins of Brian Wilson's extraordinary - truly extraordinary - achievement. From 1962 to 1966, he produced nearly two dozen Top 40 Beach Boys singles and 10 Top 10 albums, among them Pet Sounds, reckoned by many to be the greatest pop album of all time. For Brian Wilson too, Pet Sounds represents the Beach Boys' finest hour, with Love and Mercy being his greatest solo moment. No fu rther explanation offered or required.
It all began in back in 1961 when Wilson, his brothers Dennis and Carl, cousin Mike Love and friend Al Jardine recorded a song called Surfin'. And although Wilson himself was never a surfer (afraid of the water, apparently) he did manage to catch the popular wave of the times by combining the rock 'n' roll drive of Chuck Berry with those sophisticated harmonies of his favourite group, the Four Freshmen. Soon the Beach Boys were the irresistible sound of young, innocent and hopeful America.
"I think it was unconscious," he says. "Rock 'n' roll music really got to my soul. And Chuck Berry was just a great songwriter and performer. But I learned how to make harmony from the Four Freshmen. I loved the doo-wop groups and I listened to a lot of rhythm and blues music when I was a young kid. I liked all of them - every single doo-wop group. But I worked very hard trying to imitate the Four Freshmen."
Wilson continued to work at it - experimenting with harmonies, messing with tapes and overlapping his unique voice to create a full and new sound. By the release of the third Beach Boys album he was in total control of the production. Yes, the music was all still about girls, sun, surf and sand, but the music was getting more and more special as Wilson became more and more of a maverick.
By 1964, he had decided he could no longer tour with the band, opting instead to continue as the group's writer and producer. Hits like Help Me Rhonda, California Girls and Dance, Dance, Dance kept on coming, but by 1966, with the Beatles getting into Rubber Soul territory, Wilson felt the time was now right to take pop into the deeper waters of Pet Sounds, a sonic ma sterpi ece which would change popular music forever. He was only 24 years old and songs like God Only Knows were going around in his head. Whatever the aural equivalent of visionary is, Wilson was it.
"But I couldn't hear it in my head," he says. "I had to go into the studio to hear it. I just can't hear it in my head. I can hear melody and music, but I can't hear a record. So I just have to go into the studio after I write a song and just hear it from there. And I learned how to do that from Phil Spector. It was enlightenment, and after that I was totally turned on to music and records.
"So I was about 21 years old when I started to think about the whole thing - the song and the production - and that was down to hearing Spector. It was the wall of sound and the way his drums and guitars could echo. I had a whole education."
But whatever about the surefire writing, the unique sound and the spectacular instrumentation, the most immediate feature of the Beach Boys was in their delivery of the songs. Close harmony was hardly new to pop, but that of the Beach Boys, and Wilson's falsetto in particular, was a bizarre phenomenon, supernatural even.
Pet Sounds was followed by Smile, a collaboration with Van Dyke Parks which was never actually completed because of Wilson's growing personal problems. Typically, these well-documented difficulties made him even more of a legend, with both his absences and his sightings discussed in hushed and appropriately reverential tones.
Although Wilson was without question in physical and mental trouble, he survived. In the mid-1990s he contributed to Van Dyke Parks's Orange Crate Art, the documentary film I Just Wasn't Made For These Times appeared and things were looking good again. In 1998 he released Imagination and it was clear that the last surviving Wilson brother was back in serious creative business. It is probably reasonable to suggest that it really was music which, eventually, saved his life.
"It's true. I couldn't live without music. I couldn't. I wouldn't be able to. I'd miss the spirituality and the love. Music has love in it," he says.
"And I love the love. The purpose of music is to make people feel good or make people feel love. And music will las t. I guess people like the Beatles and the Beach Boys have helped out. I believe it all comes from God, and I have responsibility to share that with people. I need to share my gift with people. It's a tough responsibility, sure it is, but Ilove it. I love being who I am."
And after half an hour on the phone with Brian Wilson I'm kind of fond of him myself. We say our polite goodbyes and I wonder if there is anything much on the tape. But as I unplug my finger from the keyhole and the cold north wind shoots back into the room, I decide that it was probably the interview which was difficult and not Brian Wilson. Van Dyke Parks puts it very well: "Given Brian's vulnerable, exclusive nature, it's only natural that it [the music] is the central fact and concern in his life. He may forget a name or a contact, but he never forgets the music. It's a consequence of devotional thinking, and geniuses are prone to it."
Its not every day a genius phones your house. Or, for that matter, comes to The Point
"My wife and my manager talked me into it," he says. "But I get off on it. Performing on stage, it's a good feeling."
•Brian Wilson plays the Point Theatre, Dublin, on February 1st