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I had the privilege last Friday night of seeing a true living legend perform. Brian Wilson was one of the (arguably the only) creative geniuses behind the Beach Boys. He’s been compared to George Gershwin and called a one-man Beatles. He spent close to thirty years plagued by emotional problems compounded by drug abuse and has finally in the past few years been able to present himself to the public again. His return has been glorious and I got to partake of just a bit of that with my wife the other night.

I’ve always been a fan of the music of the 60s, and particularly of the Beach Boys. My mom started me on the journey when I was only a couple years old. I grew up hearing all of the surfing, cars and girls hits from the early years. When I was in early teenage, though, a tape showed up from my mother’s sister in England. She said she had been going through some old boxes and found a few Beach Boys records so she copied them to tape in case we wanted them. One of the records was Pet Sounds. I’m fairly certain I had heard a song or two from the album before that point, but I had never heard it all the way through, and those first few listenings will stick in my mind forever. People have called Pet Sounds the best pop album ever, and they have good reason. It’s difficult to look back almost 40 years ago without a jaded eye, especially since the music is now so well known, but I can recall 17 years ago the time when I first experienced its magic. I think I got a little taste then of what it must have been like to hear Pet Sounds when it was first released. It’s been almost 40 years and there is still nothing quite like it. Every song is magic.

After Pet Sounds, Brian Wilson embarked on an even more ambitious album. It began life with the title Dumb Angel, but soon became Smile, because they thought people would want to buy an album with a name like that. The story of the project is well documented on the internet, so I won’t go into it here, especially since I am by no means an expert on the history. The album was not released, and so became the stuff of legend. It was supposed to be better than Pet Sounds, aside from being just more ambitious. In the words of it’s creator it was a “teenage symphony to God” and a musical voyage across America. After the collapse of the project a few pieces from the album made their way onto studio albums, live shows and various bootlegs. The legend grew over the years as Brian’s sickness deepened.

After I got married I sort of lost touch with that part of my life. I am embarrassed to say that I had no idea Brian Wilson had put his personal and professional life back together during the latter half of the 90s and was even touring again. He brought Pet Sounds out of the closet and toured the complete album as part of a live show. Then evidently he announced that he would be finishing Smile and premiering it at a concert in London. I discovered all of this after seeing the SMiLE DVD at Costco in the beginning of July. Needless to say I was a bit surprised.

I bought the album and I have probably listened to it on average 2 or 3 times a week for almost two months now. It’s difficult to say whether it is better than Pet Sounds because of the time separation and the fact that it is so different. It’s a much more conceptual album than Pet Sounds. There is no doubt in my mind or anyone else’s, according to what I’ve read on the net, that SMiLE is a true masterpiece. I experienced the same elation on hearing it the first few times that I did with Pet Sounds. It’s a sonic journey unlike anything else I know of. It’s pop music, certainly, but also extremely symphonic. The lyrics, by Van Dyke Parks, are poetic and in many cases completely abstract. The music is daring and different, but reminiscent of previous Brian Wilson work. He incorporates a few snippets of past popular songs and little themes from well known American music to help give the work the feel of a truly American journey. And it does work as real musical Americana.

Anyway, gushing aside, the reason for this post is to report on the concert we saw Friday night. I’ve taken a few days to collect my thoughts. After having read many many glowing reviews of previous shows on this leg of the tour, I was duly excited as we packed the car for the drive to Denver. We left at 6:30 Friday morning, stopping at Daylight Donuts in Pleasant Grove to grab some morning sustenance. We drove north to Salt Lake, then west through Wyoming to Cheyenne, then south to Denver, arriving around 4:00pm. We took a short nap in our hotel then it was time to get to the Universal Lending Pavilion for the show. The venue was pretty good, especially considering that it is essentially a tent that they set up during the summer for shows like this, then take down for the winter to provide more parking space for the nearby sports venues. It reminded me a lot of the old amphitheater at Park West/Wold Mountain, where I saw numerous acts growing up and whose absence is in my mind a terrible loss. There were approximately 3000 seats, and I would estimate about 3/4 of them had been sold, so definitely not a full house. The band hit the stage about 10 minutes after the posted start time due to a bit of begging from local celebrities on behalf of the athletic department of a community college. The first set included a string of Beach Boys songs, including many huge hits from the early period of their music, a couple of later songs and even a Christmas song (Little St Nick), which though out of place in the 85 degree heat was lots of fun. As the first set wound down with Sail On Sailor and Marcella I found myself wanting them to go back to the beginning and start over again. It’s amazing how good those old sun and sand songs make you feel. Brian himself was a bit sullen during the first set. He didn’t smile at the audience till about halfway through California Girls as I recall. This is kinda par for the course for him, though, so I wasn’t terribly concerned. The music sounded great, though the mix seemed a bit tinny to me, with occasional blasts of bass. Anyway, the band was really ripping into those songs, and they are certainly not without skill. Brian’s voice was in good shape. All good.

After a 20 minute intermission the band filed back on stage and the place went dark. This is the beginning of the SMiLE section and it starts with a truly heavenly a cappella harmony called Our Prayer. The lights then came up and the rest of the album washed over us. It is in three movements of about 15 minutes each, like a symphony, though it could also loosely be divided into songs. During this section of the show Brian was obviously in a better mood. The music can’t help but bring your spirits up, and it is endearing that its creator is affected the same way listeners are. After the first movement I looked around a bit and noticed how many people either didn’t come back after the intermission and were milling around outside the tent or just left entirely. This leads me to my one overarching complaint about the show: the audience. It was fairly evident to me that many of the people there were either there to be seen, or cause they knew it is hip now to like Brian Wilson’s music, or they came for the early Beach Boys stuff then left. Of those who remained it was also pretty easy to see that only a select few really appreciated the SMiLE section. They all applauded at the right points, but I felt bad that the band didn’t get more positive feedback. In any case, I loved it. Some have said on the Internet that seeing SMiLE live is better than the CD, and I can see where they are coming from. It’s very emotional music, and that feeling really flows from the stage. Producing music of such complexity in a live setting is difficult at best, however, and there were a few compromises that had to be made. I must have a programmer’s attention to detail, because I missed a lot of little things that have become favorite moments from hearing the CD. All in all, though, the feeling of wanting the whole show to start over again stuck with me right till the end. It was that good.

The encores included a few more Beach Boys hits, a band intro, and a pretty rocking cover of Johnny B Goode. People got up to leave after the first encore set, but the band took the stage again and offered a glimpse of a Brian Wilson work-in-progress, which served as an intro to Love & Mercy, one of his biggest solo hits. The new song was obviously not finished, but is set to be a hauntingly beautiful gospel number. It’s obvious that Brian has a lot left to say and I am looking forward to hearing it.

We ate dinner Friday night after the nearly three hour show at a downtown place called Rocky Mountain Diner, which, ironically, is situated diagonally across the street from the building where my father would have worked if we had stayed in Denver when we moved there 19 years ago next month. I’m glad we didn’t stay, though the drive to the concert wouldn’t have been bad. Exhausted, we made it back to the hotel and hit the mattress already asleep. The alarm sounded at 5:30am for the trip back home to relieve my brother James and his wife Chevon of our two children. We drove back through the beautiful mountain canyons of western Colorado, stopped in Moab, Utah for lunch, and made it home by about 4:30pm.

Overall, I think my impression of the experience was summed up by a poster on the smileysmile.net message board, who said he thought the concert in Denver was bittersweet. It wasn’t as good as I hoped and believed it was going to be. The band is at the end of their tour and I am certain they are feeling the many miles they’ve covered. The audience wasn’t as appreciative as they should have been, and driving 20 out of those 48 hours was brutal. That’s the bitter. The sweet was to see a real musical hero perform live, something I never thought I would be able to see in the case of Brian Wilson. His story is inspirational. His music is too. Thank you, Brian!

From: stacey@joux21.every1.net
Subject: This system allows you to Have the collector’s items eradicated

The realization hits me from time to time that I really am a parent now. You’d think I would be constantly aware of it, since I do actually have two children, and I spend quite a bit of time with them. Most of the time it just feels natural to have the little quackeeoodles around. When it does hit me, though, I usually end up feeling appreciation and admiration for my own parents and their thirty-odd years of taking people places and paying for people and feeding people and taking care of people. The past four or five years, now that the kids are mostly grown up (my youngest brother turned 19 this summer), Mom and Dad have been sort of expanding their lives. They are involved in a lot more things than they used to, and I can’t help assuming that they might have gotten involved in some of those things a lot of years ago if they hadn’t had all of us taking up all their time. But, even with all their other activities, it’s obvious what is still most important to them. For example, since we are no longer managing the apartments where we live, I had to get all my own stuff out of the shed that the landlord keeps to store the lawnmower, etc. Over the years I’ve collected quite a few largish tools, many of them, ironically, purchased both for my own use and to help take care of the property. There was no way they would fit in our apartment, so I called and asked if I could stick a few things in Mom and Dads shed. Mom said yes but to ask my father first. I called yesterday afternoon and he said that would be fine but we’d have to make some room first, since the shed was full of all my siblings stuff. I loaded my stuff in the truck and went over. Dad and I spent about an hour and a half pulling old aluminum windows out of the shed and loading them into his horse trailer. We took them to a thrift store then came back and put my stuff in the shed. By the time we were all done we’d spent about two hours working, and pretty much filled up the shed again. I am fairly certain that Dad would like to be able to use his shed for his own stuff, but other than one or two items I saw last night, it is completely full of things belonging to his various children who don’t have room of their own. Being a father is about instilling values and ethics in your sons and daughters. It’s about teaching them right and wrong and helping them learn to get along in the world. It’s also about trying to give your kids a better life than you had. But I think mostly it is about being so unselfish that you really don’t mind storing a bunch of junk for as long as need be.

In the continuing saga, witness this development:

Actually, I think if you compare this side by side with the last installment, there isn’t as big a difference as I initially expected. There is a bit of travel evident in the upper left quadrant relative to last month’s picture, and if you look at it in a certain way, the thinning patch almost resembles a mirrored map of the U.S. If only it were reminiscent of the Virgin Mary, maybe I could sell my bald spot.