Beach Boys Prove True, by Rosicky Jones

In case you would go walking… don’t lose yourself.

I was on the floor staring at the ceiling fan.  I wanted it to move. Sweat bubbled on my cheeks and I wanted it to move.  Vincent Lee, sensing my yearning for movement, stood up and tugged the pull-cord three times.  I watched as five ivory blades rotated into a splash, a blur that at times clearly imparted a uniform image, one uniform entity, but during slower rotations, when the fan’s wobbling was too much to bear, I could make out each individual blade.  I could see the layers of dust that time had caked on, I could see the blade whose structural integrity had begun to give way to bowing, I could see how surprisingly flimsy they could be, and just when I began to doubt their ability, the wobbling gave way to rhythm, and synchronized movement, and the imperfections, while still present, seemed to blow away in the gusts of wind the fan was producing.  The pull-cord had four speeds, but we could not exceed the third setting.  The fourth speed was too fast; the blades couldn’t match pace, they would begin to wobble too violently, the amplitude’s range would chip at the ceiling paint.  This speed had the chance to be the most fulfilling, the windiest, but it was destructive, a risk too caustic to validate the possible breezy-brilliance reaped from “setting number four.”

This was my first real experience with the Beach Boys.  The first time I threw myself into their music, the individuals, the group, their story.  I spent three days in a cabin consuming their work, hallucinogens, gummy bears, and whiskey, and it culminated in me lying on the floor.  Lying on the floor was my self-prescribed remedy for the aforementioned self-prescribed remedy of drugs, alcohol, gummy bears, and music.  Pet Sounds provided the soundtrack and the fan provided the metaphor, five-blades twisted with imperfections but in near perfect synchronicity, five individuals who nearly reached the same “perfect synchronicity” as they ventured to the edge of creation, pain, genius, and insanity.  Pet Sounds is a linear concept album that seemed to be an experiment in perpetual motion and also a negative feedback loop ostensibly guiding you through the demise of Brian Wilson’s sanity.

A well-meaning triumvirate is responsible for my disregard of the Beach Boys: Uncle Jesse, Cocktail (the movie), and Vincent Lee.

As anyone in my demo would attest, specifically men, Uncle Jesse shaped us as much as any parent, teacher, or pedophilic priest did.  I watched Full House with the zeal and maniacal attention to detail commonly attributed to viewers of the Zapruder film.  Uncle Jesse was the show’s soul, the protagonist, and my generation’s hero, our JFK, our James Dean; he was everything that that fraudulent, pompous, self-important asshole Jordan Catalano (Jared Leto) wished he could be.  I liked Elvis because of him.  I masturbated to Aunt Becky because of him.  I was on board with everything he did. I even bought his version of the Beach Boys’ Forever – fuck, I own a video of him singing that song.  But even at my most sycophantic I still recognized how ill-fated John Stamos’ musical dalliances were.  So I naturally associated his version of Forever with the actual version of the song, and inaccurately dismissed the Beach Boys on false Uncle Jesse-fueled pretenses.

I tried my hand at a soccer career following high school and for a three-month stint shared a one-bedroom dorm with a goalie named Jimmy.  Jimmy and I were poor and a byproduct of poverty was our invisible discretionary income.  Without money we were left without cable and were forced to watch and re-watch and re-watch the three DVDs we owned: Hoop Dreams, Successful Goalkeeping Techniques (an instructional video), and Tom Cruise’s magnum opus, Cocktail.  We weren’t black enough to watch Hoop Dreams every day and the goalie video was apparently M. Night Shyamalan’s directorial debut because it was actually a movie about butterflies, so circumstances forced us to watch Cocktail every day for three months.  The Beach Boys’ song Kokomo was featured in that movie which means I have heard that song roughly 10 million times.  The Beach Boys were now sitting under two very thick layers of shit, Stamos shit and Cocktail shit.

The final triumvir is Vincent Lee.  Vincent is an incredibly accomplished and skilled guitarist which is why his Brian Wilson reverence is so fervent.  He has been pushing the Beach Boys on me for quite some time and I have rejected his musical advances.  To an innocent bystander my spurning may seem idiotic: Vincent has a genuine emotional attachment to the band and clear scientific understanding of Brian Wilson’s engineering prowess.  And in retrospect I should have listened, but Vinny is such a good musician that his tastes lay in a fringe few people would appreciate – he listens to The Crash Test Dummies, Tom Waits, The Silver Jews, Franz List, and a handful of European Bands that were so esoteric and cryptic that they inspired Albert Hoffman to invent LSD.  He is also a bit of a prick regarding most contemporary music, routinely saying things like “Drake is Miley Cyrus with an afro” and “All the crap you listen to is made up of four chords, G, C, F and A – so you’re basically just hitting repeat on one gigantic monstrosity of non-musical piss.”  I appreciate his opinion and he is one of my favorite people in the world, but fuck, sometimes I just want to listen to The White Stripes, you know?

Because of Vincent’s predilection for enigmatic musical heroes I assumed that I would be just as annoyed with the Beach Boy’s brilliance as I am with anything Tom Waits does.  Because of Cocktail I thought that the Beach Boys were a band full of Jimmy Buffetts who sang about sandy beaches all muthafuckin day.  Because Uncle Jesse covered their song with the gusto of a Jonas Brother I assumed that the music was artless and ABC-family-friendly drivel.

I was wrong.

I did not set out to have a Beach Boy-centric weekend.  It was Friday night and the alcohol had arrested our abilities to operate a vehicle so we were confined to the cabin and the cabin’s cable-less TV.  Vincent noticed my lowered inhabitations and made his move.  Just like any good prosecutor, he surveyed his witness, his witness’ habits, tics, and weaknesses.  He knew that I was hungry and lazy – so he grabbed a bag of Cheez-Its for me and told me that we would be watching the Beach Boys Documentary Endless Harmony* unless I wanted to grab the movies from the car, which was outside, which required movement on my part.  The sonofabitch had me right where he wanted me and within seconds the movie was playing and within minutes I was hooked.

*Elvis Costello and Sean Lennon were two of the movie’s musical experts.  I realize this column has left you questioning my musical knowledge, so take this with salt grains, but I don’t know why Elvis Costello is famous.  He seems like his whole career is owed to the thrift store that sold him his first set of hipster hat and glasses.  And I feel bad for Sean Lennon, the circumstances around his conception, his birth, his childhood, and his crap mother created a negative perception he would have to battle.  But goddammit he somehow exceeded that negative perception and made himself even more loathsome that anyone could have anticipated.  He’s like an Asian Casey Anthony.

The movie was dark and beautiful and the soundtrack traumatized me.  I had no idea I knew so many Beach Boys songs and I had no idea how many great songs they produced.  I felt guilty that I had brushed the band aside for such an unfortunately long time.  I had wasted so much pot-smoking and stoned nights listening to DJ Khaled yelling at me about “being the best” when I could have been expanding my mind to a Brian Wilson-fueled soundtrack.

The movie brought tears to my eyes.  I am drawn to stories featuring a trio of brothers; this is one of the reasons I love the Kennedys and Puzo’s Godfather.  I have two younger brothers so the familial trials and tribulations of a trio of brothers resonate with me.  The documentary took me through the deaths of the two youngest Wilson brothers and naturally forced me to consider my mortality and that of my two best friends, my brothers.  The movie featured Dennis Wilson’s tenderness, empathy, and debaucherous nature, which reminded me of my middle brother.  Carl Wilson’s stoic brilliance and the way he seemed to strike fear into those he played with reminded me of my youngest brother.  The brothers Wilson reminded me of my family and that tragedies strike indiscriminately, that time is a transient illusion, and that there is enough anguish and heartache to validate the melancholy brilliance Brian Wilson created.

My weekend ended with me lying on my back staring at a ceiling fan while listening to Pet Sounds on repeat.  I was deliriously consuming Beach Boys music while simultaneously repentant that it took until June 2011 for me to have this experience.  The brilliance of the Beach Boys is more than an anthology of classics, more than Brian Wilson’s genius and Mike Love’s arrogance, more than three shockingly talented brothers, more than a weekend spent in the woods falling in love with their records.  The brilliance of the Beach Boys is that there is brilliance, that perfection is not impossible, the brilliance of the Beach Boys is emphasizing that brilliance exists, that it is real, that it is possible.