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| From | "Andrew Hickey" <stealthmunchkin@gmail.com> |
| Subject | Brian Wilson - That Lucky Old Sun |
| Date | Thu, 13 Sep 2007 21:33:59 +0100 |
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I originally posted this on Tuesday at my music blog (
http://olsenbloom.blogspot.com ) but thought some here might be
interested:
Wow.
Everyone at last night's (woefully under-promoted) Brian Wilson gig
went in hoping for the best but expecting the worst. The word was that
the new piece, That Lucky Old Sun, had Brian more excited than he had
been in years. That it was the most ambitious thing he'd ever done.
That he'd put it together almost in secret, not even letting many of
the band members, or his closest advisers, hear it until the last
minute.
If it was good, that would be OK. But no-one had any idea if Brian
Wilson was capable of 'good'. While his last proper album, Gettin' In
Over My Head, was excellent, it was mostly songs from 10-25 years
earlier. And if it was a failure... well... Brian Wilson fans care a
lot about the notoriously-fragile songwriter, and it could be very bad
for him.
The first set was promising, at least. Brian was in great (for him)
voice, playing with the lower end of his range, going into comical
bass parts. The setlist was unusual. While the Smile shows in 2004 had
concentrated on pre-Pet Sounds material, as opposed to the late-60s
and 70s material Wilson had played on his earlier tours, this set took
that to a ridiculous extreme - other than a few hits, the setlist
concentrated entirely on the Today! and Summer Days... And Summer
Nights! albums, covering obscure tracks like Salt Lake City, Girl
Don't Tell Me and She Knows Me Too Well. The one exception was the
Wild Honey oddity I'd Love Just Once To See You - one of Wilson's
little tossed-off jokey songs, but one I've always loved.
However, we were all there to hear That Lucky Old Sun.
The suite starts with a slow, soulful arrangement of the title song,
with contrapuntal vocals somewhere between the old Beach Boys song He
Come Down and Brian's arrangement of Ol' Man River, before bursting
into the Shortenin' Bread riff Brian has based so much of his music
on. The band start singing "Ooh mow mama mama holy hallelujah" - a
vocal line that Brian first mentioned in an interview thirty years ago
- and the piece proper begins.
Is That Lucky Old Sun any good? I truly have no idea. It's too complex
a piece, and too multi-layered, and the performance of it too bound up
in personal expectations, for any kind of judgement to be made on one
hearing. But in a sense, the question doesn't matter. That Lucky Old
Sun is exciting - in a way that no-one could have expected. This is
the work of a 65-year-old man. 65 year old men don't make exciting
music. Paul McCartney's new album might be quite pleasant, but he
knows no-one's going to remember him as 'the man who made Memory
Almost Full', and it shows.
Brian Wilson appears not to have given up hope that he'll be
remembered as 'the man who made That Lucky Old Sun', and it's just
about possible that he might. While in some ways this new work bears
comparison to the McCartney album, at heart it couldn't be more
different. While both have lyrics looking back from the end of a life
and recapping themes of old songs, in the case of That Lucky Old Sun
they're working in tension against the music, which is overwhelmingly
energetic, inspired, throwing off ideas like there's a million more
out there to get to in a hurry.
Like I said earlier, this may well be a failure - I'm just not willing
to trust my own judgement based on one emotionally-charged live
performance - but if it is it's a glorious, fantastic mess of a
failure, the kind of failure one might expect from an artist a third
of Wilson's age. And I suspect it isn't.
Part of this may be due to Wilson's band. While he's been working with
essentially the same band for nearly a decade, they've been performing
old material - sometimes in new forms, but always conceived before
they started working with him. But for the first time Wilson is able
to work with them as collaborators. Keyboardist Scott Bennett wrote
many of the lyrics, bandleader Darian Sahanaja (of the Wondermints),
the Billy Strayhorn to Wilson's Duke Ellington, helped Wilson
structure the piece and teach it to the band, and woodwind player Paul
Mertens arranged the strings and horns. Van Dyke Parks, Wilson's most
sympathetic collaborator, wrote the linking narrative and at least
some of the lyrics.
But while Wilson may need help realising his vision, it's his vision -
this could not be the work of anyone other than Brian Wilson. Little
touches creep in from previous works - a vocal part from the
unfinished 60s song Can't Wait Too Long, a full song ( Going Home )
from his mid-90s sessions with Andy Paley - and Wilson's musical
signatures are all over the piece. But at the same time, it's not just
Wilson staying within his comfort zone - the mariachi-flavoured
Mexican Girl, for example, is utterly unlike anything he's done
before.
The narrative, such as it is, is rather abstract as far as I could
tell (I couldn't make out many of the lyrics). It deals with love,
California, the sea - themes Wilson has touched on before on occasion,
as you may know - but through the eyes of a man in his sixties rather
than his twenties, drawing on the loss of his brothers. There is also
a very strong religious theme throughout the material. Given that
Wilson and Parks' previous collaboration, Smile, was practically an
invocation of the sun-god, I wish I could have heard more of the
lyrics to make out how important this was. The spoken narrative,
written by Parks, is in rhyming couplets over musical pads, and
reminiscent of the Beaks Of Eagles section of California Saga, if that
track had been infinitely less pretentious and infinitely more
interesting.
There were definitely flaws in the piece as performed last night, but
it remains to be seen how much of that is the piece and how much the
first-night performance. At times in the earlier sections of the
piece, the whole band vamps on two-chord riffs, similarly to the
sections of Smile where they play the Heroes & Villains riff (That
Lucky Old Sun is to Shortenin' Bread as Smile is to the Bicycle Rider
chorus), with the various instruments playing different variations at
the same time. These sections seemed to me overlong and lacking in
dynamic range, but there may well be subtleties in there I couldn't
hear - the mix seemed at times to be murky, and the sound engineer
seemed unprepared for how loudly Wilson was singing (a couple of times
the vocals distorted). If this is more to do with the night than the
material, it could possibly be Wilson's best album ever. If not, then
at least he tried.
And there are some pointers to it being a success. I was extremely
wary about the piece from the demos of two songs ( Midnight's Another
Day and Forever My Surfer Girl) posted on Wilson's website, which are
frankly fairly poor. However, in context, and with the additional
orchestration, both are much stronger than those recordings suggest.
Midnight's Another Day, in particular, had me in tears - and this is a
song I'd dismissed as tedious.
I have no idea how I'll modify my initial impression of this piece
when I listen dispassionately to the finished recording, but the sheer
invention, joy, energy and vigour of the piece has to be heard to be
believed.
After his normal hits encore, Wilson performed She's Leaving Home, in
an absolutely audacious rearrangement that has to be heard to be
believed - he's turned the verses into a 4/4 uptempo piece of sunshine
pop owing equally to the Beatles' Getting Better and his own Let Him
Run Wild, while keeping the waltz time chorus identical to the
original. It turns the song upside down and inside out, and I've been
unable to stop humming it since. It's the work of a musician at the
height of his powers and confidence.
For the last ten years, fans have been expecting Brian Wilson to (at
best) retire and (at worst) drop dead. From the release of his album
Imagination, which re-established him as a solo performer, time and
again he's done things (touring, performing Pet Sounds in its
entirety, facing the legacy of Smile, completing Smile) that we've
said would have to be the peak, the ultimate. Time and again we've
said "there's no way he can follow that. It'll all be downhill from
here - but that's OK, he's given us more than we could hope already."
Time and again he's not only followed it, but done something
exponentially, unimaginably better. Even if That Lucky Old Sun proves
in the cold light of day a lesser work than Smile, it's a work that
can be compared to it, and he wrote it in a matter of months rather
than over a period of forty years. For a man people were writing off
as having lost it before I was born, that's an astonishing comeback.
For the first time, I feel confident in not saying "he can't top that"
but instead saying "how's he going to top that?"
I can't wait to find out.
--
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