Wouldnt It Be Nice

Wouldn't It Be Nice
By Lewis Shiner

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What if? It's not just science fiction and fantasy that asks this question,
it's all of fiction. What if a young student murdered his landlady to
prove his moral superiority? What if a woman survived the Civil War
and three marriages only to find true love too late?
It's also the question by which we transform ourselves. What if I quit
my job and moved to the desert? What if I turned myself loose to create
"a teenage symphony to God?"
The Icarus who attempted that teenage symphony in 1966 is now 53.
For Brian Wilson it's been thirty years of struggle: with drugs and diet,
with people who want to run his life for him, with the intensity of his
own feelings.
The good news is that Wilson's life is finally his own again. He is
newly married to a woman named Melinda, who is calm and sweet and
loving with him. He has a new house in the safety of a gated
community high above the city. And he is back in the public eye with
two new albums and a movie on the Disney channel.
The film is I Just Wasn't Made For These Times, directed by
producer-of-the-moment Don Was. The soundtrack is a kind of Best of
Brian Wilson, live in the studio with crack session players like Jim
Keltner, Benmont Tench, and Waddy Wachtel. This is not only a
wonderful album in its own right, it represents a healing of other
wounds. It features Wilson's first-ever recording with his two daughters,
Carnie and Wendy, late of Wilson Phillips.

The other new album is Orange Crate Art, a timeless and
beautifully-constructed collection of songs by Van Dyke Parks. Parks
was the lyricist of that ill-fated teenage symphony, and with a couple of
exceptions (like 1973's "Sail On Sailor") he and Wilson had not worked
together since.
On this Sunday afternoon in August, Wilson is facing one more
unpleasant struggle, namely a live interview. He is nervously pacing
the floor in an aqua polo shirt, white sweat pants, white socks and deck
shoes. He is also wearing sunglasses, "to be cool," he says
unconvincingly, "not to hide behind."
The house is spacious and light. In the den are a pair of perpendicular
white leather couches, arranged so that visitors will be talking into
Wilson's good ear, the left one. He's been deaf in the right since
childhood, which he attributes to a beating by his father. It's just one of
the many ironies of the Brian Wilson story that he's never heard music
in stereo.
One wall is filled by a rack-mounted audio system, speakers, and a big
screen TV. At the moment the TV is tuned to a baseball game with the
volume low.
The subject at hand is Orange Crate Art, but that's not what's on
Wilson's mind today.
Today Wilson is thinking: "What if I could get back together with the
Beach Boys?"
*
Van Dyke Parks first met Brian Wilson thirty years ago. At the time
Parks was a session pianist by day--for the Beach Boys, among
others--and a folksinger at night. Wilson was taken with Parks's
brilliant and impressionistic lyrical style and wanted to work with him
on his teenaged symphony--an album first known as Dumb Angel and
eventually known as Smile.

To make an immensely long story short, Parks was caught between
Wilson's creativity on the one hand, and on the other Wilson's inability
to go ahead without the approval of his band--who also happened to be
his family. Parks bowed out, made his acclaimed solo debut, Song
Cycle, and for nearly thirty years has felt his own pain of wounds
unhealed.
*
The failure of Smile was a major turning point for Wilson. He became
less involved with the Beach Boys' records, more introspective, less
able to deal with the increasingly unreasonable demands of the record
business. Because Wilson was still seen as a potential source of hit
records--and therefore money--there were plenty of people who were
more than willing to take charge of his life for him.
Over the years, there have been repeated attempts to pull together the
hundreds of hours of tape to make a coherent Smile album. For a while
the Beach Boys held it out as a carrot every time they changed record
companies. Thirty minutes or so of Smile music was included in the
1993 Good Vibrations boxed set, and Capitol had made yet another
empty promise, The Smile Era, a 3-CD set that was supposed to be out
this summer but in fact never got beyond the drawing boards.
Why has interest in this album stayed alive for thirty years? Maybe
because the years have only increased the