Three Weeks Done, One to Go

Random thoughts on Brian Wilson and Sly Stone

So…

I am typing this using dictation, since the Italian keyboard that was giving me so much trouble is now giving me the ultimate trouble: it’s not working. I’m not a techie, but this shouldn’t be complicated. And yet…

So I’m just speaking this through and I won’t really be able to edit much, or so we’ll see how it goes.

I am in a beautiful farmhouse along the Camino that I just stopped in because I needed a break after 8 km and no food, and I got a coffee and an earful from an American lives here with his Dutch wife, in a property they just bought four months ago. Marco is an extremely likable New Yorker with many stories and an intense life story filled with magic, includi gcamino magic.

He also has a background as a chef in New York and Amsterdam and elsewhere. He is cooking dinner now, and shares my lack of enthusiasm for French food (he has given me the courage to even type those sacrilegious words), so I’m very curious to see what he makes for dinner.

(I also want to note that I only just discovered that I had not changed the setting for commenting from “paid only” to allow “anyone” to comment on posts. Dumb, my apologies. I wondered why I wasn’t getting any comments except from the same few people! But a friend pointed it out and I think I have corrected it. Please comment if you are so inclined, so that i might find that is the case. At least then I would know that I have it fixed. )

I have one last week of Camino ahead of me, and I won’t make it to the very end. I am trying to plan my travels ahead, which is not very easy in this part of France. As I think I noted last time, there are very few direct lines anywhere, and when you do find a train it’s extremely expensive. So I need to figure out where I’m going to finish, so I can catch a train to Paris. we also have some serious temperatures coming, highs heading up well over 35°C and over 100 Fahrenheit. Which for walking for mile after mile, is really not appealing. Early departures help (I started at 5:30 the other morning) and I will probably end up doing shorter stages, yesterday’s 28 km stage really doing a number on my feet.

we also had an absolutely spectacular thunderstorm the other night, which I will try to post a video of, though it was much more impressive in person than it is on the video. Lots of lightning strikes, and loads of trees down the next day, I counted six that I had to either climb over or walk around.

As I’ve been walking, I’ve been listening mostly to the music of Sly and the Family Stone and Brian Wilson and the Beach Boys, for obvious reasons. Loads of people have been commenting in different media on their passing, and on their brilliance, and especially on what they meant to them as a child. More on the Beach Boys and Brian Wilson than Sly and the family, but obviously both were huge.

For me, more than anything, they represent the 60s in California, my native state. The dream that they participated in and sold, whether it was the endless summer of Brian Wilson or the flower power soul gospel rock of Sly and the family Stone. (Please forgive me my typographical trespasses, trying to go back and fix things without a proper keyboard is really a pain in the ass.)

The main thing I want to say about both of them is that what is very striking to me is how SHORT their creative peaks really were. Most artists have their classic runs, but it’s still striking to lay it out: Brian Wilson’s creative peak was really only from 1963 to 1967, five short years, and even 1967 was pretty dodgy. He had a lot of cleaning up to do in subsequent years, especially with the reconstruction and celebration of 1967‘s aborted album, Smile, which didn’t appear in public until 2005. I was at the concert in San Francisco where he debuted the band and the whole work and it was really one of the most spectacular concerts I’ve ever seen. Top five, for sure. Musically there was just nothing like it.

I also went back and listened not only to Pet Sounds, which is his Magnum opus (along with a dozen indelible pop hits), but also to the box set that was re-issued many years later to celebrate the album. What was most striking to me was that there is a disc that contains the entire album, minus The Beach Boys vocals, which after all, were the band’s main attraction.

But shorn of the vocals, one really can hear the absolutely spectacular, beyond-genre music that Brian created. Along with the help of the cream of LA session musicians, Brian created music that rewards a closer, cleaner listen. On this disc, one can hear the vast array of different instrumentation that Wilson used in creating this masterpiece. The vocals, which are so breathtaking, have tended to obscure a lot of it, and hearing the instru,entation without the vocals is a musical experience like few in pop. It’s certainly not rock music, or even pop music, it’s something more. It makes me want to hear a big band do just the instrumental versions. But in the meantime, go to Apple Music or Spotify or wherever you stream, and go to that second disc on the Pet Sounds box. I would share a link, but I’m really not up for the battle. You have been advised.

There’s also a really lovely album from about 10 years ago of Brian playing some of his best work just on the piano, with no vocals, which were never his strength. It’s not even particularly well-recorded, but the simplicity of it allows you hear the chord voicings and the incredibly strange bass lines that he would incorporate into his music. The melodies also become very clear, not that they weren’t before, but you get a tremendous sense of the mighty musical vision he possessed.

Because after all, IMHO, most other Beach Boys albums are not good. Simple as that. But the singles… And Pet Sounds… And Smile… all of them created in those short years… Well that’s more than enough. So rest in peace, Brian.

Meanwhile, Sly Stone. And even more tragic figure than Brian. His creative peak lasted, what, two years? Three? 1968, 1969… By 1970 he was also already falling apart. And I know that it has its admirers, but his late 1971 album There’s a Riot Going On is just a mess. It may have been the start of a new style, but that’s almost by accident, and there’s exactly one good - well, decent - song on it.

But in the two years before that, he - THEY - created some of the greatest pop, rock, soul, funk - whatever you wanna call it - music ever made. But most of the albums, other than 1969‘s Stand, are just not very good. Sly was a weird genius, and his musical oddities are strangely similar to a lot of Brian Wilson’s. Or, I would venture, even Frank Zappa’s. California freaks, all three of them

But when he - when THEY - put it together, it was a sound so powerful, that on the singles – “everyday people, dance to the music, m’lady, you can make it if you try, sing a simple song, I want to take you higher, hot fun in the summertime, everybody is a star, and of course, thank you for letting me be myself again” (right down to the funny spellings that obviously influenced a genius of similar, and greater, breadth, Prince) - stand, while all the strange, unfinished, and otherwise subpar songs on the albums have faded into history.

That’s why the only Sly and the family Stone album we really need is the greatest hits. But damn, that’s a good one.

With both of these weird, insanely, epically-creative geniuses, it’s interesting that at the end of the day, besides Brian‘s two magnum opuses, all that’s left is the singles, which is kind of the way pop music works for the most part. The cream is what is remembered, and the genius that created them is honored.

And that is what we mourn this week.

Honestly, with another war in the Middle East interrupting, and a Cold War with communist country, and war in Europe… It all feels like the sixties again. At least with Brian and Sly, it feels like 1967 in a good way.

*****

And that’s it from here for now. Still feels weird not to have a keyboard, I hope it was readable.

Onward.