Brian Wilson reimagines Gershwin at the Southbank
The former Beach Boy performs by the Thames
Philip Clark 1:16pm GMT 20th September 2011
Unfortunately for onetime Beach Boy Brian Wilson, George Gershwin didn’t write many songs about surfing.
In fact I’m not sure Gershwin wrote any songs about being a California beach bum in the early 1960s, unless you count 'Someone To Wash Over Me' which, anyway, might just be my little joke. When it comes to songs about surfing, Brian Wilson’s your man. Beach Boys hits like 'Surfer Girl', 'Wouldn’t It Be Nice', 'God Only Knows', 'Surfin’ USA', 'California Girl' and 'Good Vibrations' defined something new in pop. They were songs about surfing – how to surf, how to attract the opposite sex whilst in the process of surfing, the hedonistic existence that people who surf enjoy (and no doubt fully deserve); surfing as a useful thing to be doing at a time, when as God only knows, America was entirely at peace with itself.
I suspect Brian Wilson is not burdened by dualities of meaning. The problem with writing so many songs about surfing – apparently while studying music at school Brian failed to complete the assigned piano sonata, instead opting to submit a composition called Surfin' – is that you’re not likely to chance upon a particularly deep vein of human experience. Which, if you’re riding the waves (a reference to surfing there) of your career by singing songs about surfing is fine, but quickly shows limitations when applied to material that hints at universal emotions like loss, vulnerability, need and desire.
Having scored a striking success by bringing a live version of his long-lost album Smile to the Royal Festival Hall in 2004, Wilson returned this weekend with his Brian Wilson reimagines George Gershwin project. When did I grasp what a horrible slog this evening was going to be? Was it from the off as Wilson and his band began by re-imagining Rhapsody in Blue’s opening as Beach Boys-style close harmony singing? Or hearing “They Can’t Take That Away From Me” traced inelegantly over “California Girl”? Or an instrumental “I Got Plenty of Nothing” that dug as deeply into the Black roots of Gershwin’s original as Pot Noodles authentically express the aspirations of Asian cuisine? “I Got Rhythm” wanted to swing but, principally the fault of Wilson’s plodding drummer, sounded like it couldn’t be bothered
Miraculously, though, Gershwin emerged as the evening’s hero. Sitting through these butchered renditions, I realised how deeply I care about songs like “They Can’t Take That Away From Me” and “Summertime”. Miles Davis and Janis Joplin, in their re-imaginings, add to “Summertime” by zoning in on hidden corners, revealing radically different sides of Gershwin we didn’t already know. They interpreted Gershwin, but Wilson sucked him inside a synthetic, manufactured vacuum where production values triumph over content. The Beach Boys were big on post-Phil Spector studio techniques and close-harmony vocals, updates of ideas seeded by The Andrews Sisters, The Mills Brothers and The Four Freshmen – sophisticated studio craft that lent their tinsel weight. But Gershwin needs an opposite approach. Everything’s already there. His songs need to be stripped back to their essence.
In the second half, a compendium of Beach Boys hits, Wilson returned to what he does best. He sang about surfing.
Comments
Let's be honest here, you don't really know what you're talking about do you? In what sense is 'God Only Knows' a song about surfing? Whichever way you look at it, it isn't. The same as 'Don't Worry Baby', 'Darlin'', 'Love and Mercy', 'Heroes and Villains' and numerous other Brian Wilson/Beach Boys songs aren't about surfing either.
What you're basically doing is boiling down Brian Wilson's career to 'songs about surfing'. Anybody that has listened to 'Pet Sounds' or 'Smile' will tell you just how ridiculous that is.
Well, fair enough, I slightly over-egged the surfing pudding to make a point, but even the Brian Wilson songs that aren't directly about surfing are born of that same languid, lightweight, unengaged mindset that thinks surfing is a suitable subject to write any songs about, a deficiency which hearing him sing Gershwin, I'm afraid, cruelly exposed.
It is completely beyond me that anybody could hear songs like 'God Only Knows' and 'Heroes and Villains' and come to the conclusion that they come from a 'languid, lightweight, unengaged mindset'.
You're coming across as somebody that doesn't really like The Beach Boys and has only really heard the early hits that they had. Everything you're saying about Wilson seems to be based on the first 3/4 years of an almost 50 year career. It's a shame that you relied on the old surfing cliches for a lot of the article because I quite enjoyed your analysis of the Gershwin album that Wilson has released.
It's certainly true that fans of the Beach Boys were more likely to be satisfied than fans of George Gershwin.
I'm with Jim89 on this. I think your exasperation at the concert has over-spilled into an uncritical bash at something separate - i.e. the Beach Boys' 60s music. I'm not a Beach Boys fan, but I do think they made some of the finest popular music of the 62-67 period and it wasn't - contrary to legend - all about surfing. (I do like the quip made some time ago that Wilson invented California - it's like Yeats' Byzantium).
I'm not interested enough in Gershwin or Wilson (at this period) to have bothered what his renditions would be, and would probably have felt the same as you on the night. But Pet Sounds and songs like 'I Get Around' or 'Heroes and Villains' or 'Good Vibrations' are precisely about 'loss, vulnerability, need and desire'. If you listen a lot to classical music then I can imagine that you might find something 'languid and unengaged' in their musical grammar - but even that's open to debate.
I would also say there is an interesting discussion to be had about how in the 1990s rock criticism seized on Brian Wilson and compulsively elevated him to the level of 'musical genius', something conferred without a real sense of what the possible parameters might mean. Talking of which ... I write this just back from Finland having heard all seven Sibelius symphonies in Lahti on three consecutive nights.
Philip.
Your comments say far more about your ability as a music critic than they do about Brian Wilson and his music.