Brian Wilson: Tin Pan Became Beach Sand

In the beginning...

Given the phosphoric nature of his creativity, it couldn’t last beyond the next riptide.

He had no John Paul George or Ringo for that matter. Not even a George Martin.

In the middle...

So he lived without irony, which is to live unprotected, and alone offered up lazy-daisy melodies, two-minute paens of teenage angst, deep from within dark studios and collapsed dungeons of an exhausted mind.

Somehow the California sky birthed those sounds, glazed in light beams and downy floss. Tin Pan became beach sand. And the warm blue Pacific curled down the coast and sailed him in a glass-bottom dream.

So it was that ironic and that irony shoved him from a wave’s crest and he fell like an Icarus into the arms of startled sea nymphs. Then Charles Manson came around for coffee. Bad vibrations. Flat harmony.

In the end...

He remains a frozen-faced sentinel, Buddha in exile, now resting on a piano stool, the center of attention, while dancers shimmy and shake to those long-ago melodies raised by a young man (a nod to Yeats) tossing on his bed, rhyming in love’s despair.

Brian never made it out, but his songs race with summer children, forever kicking the sunset waves at Malibu, cheering storm clouds, knowing you can only see real fun fun fun in the rear-view mirror, hanging off the cracked windshield of a Little GTO.