To Be Brian Wilson (ooh, still dig those sounds): A Tribute
by Colin Fleming
A person only lives for so long, and so it goes with artists in the corporeal regard, just as it doesn’t in another. The greatest artists aren’t only people. They’re also their work, and likelier to be more their work than they are anything else. And just as this work lives forever, so, too, do they continue on.
The artistry of Brian Wilson defies dispute, even within a world in which just about everything will be debated, often for no other reason than the act of doing so. To some, he was the author of any of a number of the catchiest pop songs ever to play on the radio. For others, he was the auteur behind the masterpiece Pet Sounds, its quality all but ratified by God—because, like the song said, God knows—and the enigmatic would-be masterpiece (or record that transcends the concept of masterpiece, depending on whose side you’re on) in Smile. To those in the know, he was a guiding presence on a series of albums that faltered commercially in the late 1960s, which can help us to find a better way forward in our lives now and in the future.
Some of Wilson’s songs all but staple-gun us to our seats in their wisdom, demanding that we receive their bounty. They can overwhelm us with their nakedness. Their vulnerability. The courage that animates them.
Among these is a song that lasts for all of two minutes and one second and might as well continue for a thousand years. That would be “When I Grow Up (To Be a Man),” first released as a single on August 24, 1964.
People didn’t write songs like this. There has never been another that could pass for what we are so fond of terming a “comparable.” It may be the most introspective song in all of rock and roll history, leaning inwards—and forwards—with a humility and Socratic wisdom that we don’t get with a “Strawberry Fields Forever,” which is typically cited as the ultimate ruminative number.
Brian Wilson was a remarkable writer of songs for many reasons. There were matters like his understanding of harmonics, his prodigious gifts for arranging, his ability to render that which is vocal into what is simultaneously orchestral, but there was also something intensely human to his methodology: He was willing to doubt himself. To be scared and admit of fear. It was not necessary to play it cool, when being real was better and allowed others to connect with his finest songs as if they were also living them.
“When I Grow Up (To Be a Man)” is a subjunctive song. The “When” of the title indicates that this thing, the progression into manhood, isn’t in doubt—it’s going to happen—but from there, who knows. We often seek to shirk responsibility, increasingly as this century lumbers on, with all its technological developments, which can double as usurpations of our humanness, the basis and soul of Brian Wilson’s songwriting. We hate the unknown. We’re risk-adverse. We’re loath to try without the guarantee of a desired outcome. This isn’t living. It’s being here. Whereas “When I Grow Up (To Be a Man)” is all about living.
The lead voice on the song, which belongs to Mike Love, narrates a sort of version of the Socratic method as pertains the next stage of his life. He’s asking himself questions about the man he may become and the man he may fail to be. The interrogative process is a search for answers that can in turn help this individual grow as he thinks he ought to. If you don’t think—and, yes, worry—about what is next and what should be next, and instead count on everything falling into place when you get there, then “there” could be somewhere else—and something else—which does you, and others, less good.
The singer wonders if he’ll have the same passions and interests that he did as a kid. Will he like a woman for the same reasons he liked a girl? Only someone who is a true adult—who will be a true adult, and who, in some ways, was becoming an adult all along—would ask themselves these things. He’s unsure if he’ll like the same music, find humor in the same situations, and even if his kids will be proud of him as a father.
Think of that shocking reversal. Parents will tell anyone who will listen—and anyone who won’t—how proud they are of their kids, but how often do they ever think of being someone that their kids are themselves proud of?
Related: Harvey Kubernik’s in-depth interview with Brian Wilson
This is radical rock and roll. Radical art. Radical humanness. The forever stuff, if the machines don’t wipe us out with an all-too willing assist on our end. As the singer sings, we get a second lead voice, a Brian Wilson-led dialogic counterpoint—the sun-soaked pop variant of a Grecian choir, or a gentler, but equally firm, version of Lear’s Fool handling the high harmonies—that feels no less than indomitable than the tick of time.
Maybe time ends. Maybe everything ends. But until then, this music lives and breathes as truly, and arguably more, as anyone who hears it. We think of the hardcore moments in rock and roll as involving distortion, salacious lyrics, the raging beat, the knife-shredded amp, the blast of unholy feedback, and yet, this is rebel music. Honesty and truth are intense. Openness. The world needs this music. You could say that it needs it with greater urgency now than it did in 1964.
The song featured on The Beach Boys Today!, released in the late winter of 1965. [The album is available here.] The record formed the middle portion of a trilogy, begun with 1964’s All Summer Long and capped by Summer Days (And Summer Nights!!) in July 1965. These were the Beach Boys’ growing up albums, the putting away of childish things.
We have the sense that it’s late summer within this sonic triptych—autumn is coming. Take that last dip. Dig for the final clam. Meet up with the old gang before getting on with adulthood.
For Wilson, being an adult isn’t a matter of the calendar. It’s something internal. The right way to live. Of caring for others. Of loving. It’s helping someone else to progress in order that we’re all able to move forward together.
There are instances when you can’t tell what key “When I Grow Up (To Be a Man)” is in. Wagner with his Tristan chord could have sat down to try and process the track and nodded sagely. The tempo alters. There’s harmonic ambiguity, which is fitting, an inspired bit of parallelism—because with life, we never know, do we? The best laid plans, etc. Or the plans that were never made because the right questions weren’t asked. Concerns weren’t voiced. Answers weren’t found, roads to travel were blocked off before we ever got to them.
Watch the Beach Boys perform “When I Grow Up” on England’s Ready Steady Go! in 1964
You don’t die when you make art like this. There’s only life. Because this is the essence of life, at least as far as it goes with us humans. The sadness is less in the passing than it is in the never becoming. And what Brian Wilson became, and what Brian Wilson was, and is, will remain with us until the last stroke comes off the clock, or there isn’t a human to be found, whichever happens first.
Check out the Backstreet Boys’ (that’s not a typo) stunning (seriously!) live cover of “When I Grow Up”
[Other Beach Boys albums, including many expanded editions, are available in the U.S. here and in the U.K. here.]
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