A little under two hours after I had put out Le Trip yesterday, the news came down that Brian Wilson died. Damn. I mean, he had a longer and richer career than someone seeing him holed up as a fat, psychotic wreck in the early and mid-70s would have thought, including a frankly astonishing flurry of projects in his third act. Not all of these projects were great or even all that useful - did we need Brian reimagining Gershwin or covering his favorite Disney tunes? - but the fact that he stayed active in the music business after all these years was certainly something not many bet on in the mid-70s or one decade later when he was under the indluence of uor favorite charlatan and mine, Dr. Eugene Landy. Now he's gone, and all the Wilson brothers are gone, while Mike Love can still goof around stages with his fake Boys. Why the hell are all the talented Beach Boys gone and the scrubs remain?
Anyhoo, be that as it may, especially since some guys the Boys drafted in when Brian was...uh...indisposed did a hell of a job. No, I'm not thinking of Bruce Johnston, who is almost as awful as Mike'n'Al, but of the Durban Beach Boys Ricky Fataar and Blondie Chaplin. You can probably see where this is going, folks. Is this a shameless attempt to lead to the two Durban-Beach Boy era albums I re-imagined? Yes, yes it is. Thing is, I quickly went through the archives yesterday evening and don't have anything purely or mainly Brian ready for publication, that isn't someone else's work. So I'm going back to my re-imaginings of Carl & The Passions - 'So Tough', on these pages known as All This Is That, and of Holland, which has become the double album epic Sail On Sailor. (You van find out more about thes eprojects in their original write-ups, should you be so inclined). There is some Brian in there - the arrangement for "Marcella" can only come from one man - and some of his dream-like music for the extremely odd Mount Vernon And Fairway-Suite has been saved as "The Pied Piper (A Dream Voyage)".
No, these aren't specifically Brian albums, but they are fine albums, full of inventive, fresh music that should have given them more attention in the early 70s, before Endless Summer and their own 15 Big Ones turned them irrevocably into an oldies act. Why not listening to these while you say goodbye to the last Wilson brothers? In the band, Brian always was the brain, and Carl was the soul, while Dennis was, uh, the libido and the muscle, probably. Now all Wilson brothers have sailed from us, but their fantastic music remains.
Sail on sailors, sail on...
All This Is That & Sail On Sailor
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