Let’s continue with the musical savants of the Sixties.
Today’s birthday boy is Brian Wilson, genius composer and producer/arranger of
The Beach Boys and the talent behind Pet Sounds, one of the most highly
regarded albums of its era. As time goes on, the album has even eclipsed The
Beatles.
I’m willing to concede that in terms of the brilliance in
the arrangements of the songs and in the songs themselves, but I also have a
cavil. The Beach Boys never rock, indeed I’m not sure that Brian Wilson knows
what rock’n’roll is, other than Chuck Berry. Which is fine for its day, but
they were not the band to take the form through the Sixties. Wilson is a
particularly Californian type of artist, and the sound he created on Pet Sounds
epitomizes that ideal. It’s laid-back but its mellowness has an undercurrent of
angst because one is never sure how hip or cool or with it one is. There’s a
sense that spiritual truths are worth attaining but hedonism is easier, and so ersatz spirituality is rife as is a dream that pop could be more enduring,
more true, not just an amazing vibe.
I’m satirizing it and simplifying the spirit of an album
like Pet Sounds, but I can’t help it. Call it bad Easterner spite. In my youth,
I had no time for The Beach Boys at all—they even looked corny. Only much later
did I give Wilson’s masterpiece a serious listen and learned what all the fuss
was about. I bought a re-issued vinyl mono version in 2011 and was finally captivated
in a way that the CD never quite managed to do.
Today’s song is one that, lyrically, suits me fine. It’s one
of my favorites on the album, along with “Caroline, No,” “Sloop John B.,” “God
Only Knows,” “Wouldn’t It Be Nice,” and “I Know There’s an Answer.” Choosing “I Just Wasn’t Made for These Times”
suits my mood this week rather well. In the wake of the do nothing but dig the
surf and sun and sky at the shore for two weeks, I find myself somewhat in the
dumps. And Wilson gets that feeling in with the overlapped lines in the great
chorus: “Sometimes I feel very sad / (Can’t find nothin’ to put my heart and
soul into).” You said it, brother.
The song is a very tuneful meditation on frustration, some
would say depression. Sure, but not of the clinical variety, more like the kind
born of actual dissatisfaction: “I keep looking for a place to fit in / Where I
can speak my mind / I’ve been trying hard to find the people / That I won’t
leave behind.” That kind of dissatisfaction with one’s peers or milieu is not
unusual for artists who want to strike out into a new territory, much as Wilson
did with this album (to the consternation, to some extent, of his band mates).
That nagging sense that there is “somewhere” where one would fit in and find
kindred spirits is what makes the status quo—whatever it is—somehow unacceptable.
Where the song really gets haunting is with the climb in
register (the use of falsetto and high lead voice with higher harmonies is what
used to annoy me about The Beach Boys, probably because their vocals are simply
out of my range) to “They say I got brains but they ain’t doin’ me no good” and
the sudden drop after “I wish they could” that segues into a little musical
interlude that mimics the brief flurry of hope (“things start to happen again”.
. . “I think I got something going for myself”), with amazing multi-tracked
background voices, between the opening dissatisfaction and the declaration of
the chorus—which is kind of two voices in the head speaking at once, and with a drum that sounds like a throbbing headache—that brings us to the lovely melodic
line (it sounds like a recorder but is actually an odd electronic instrument
called a Tannerin) that supports the song’s title: “I guess I just wasn’t made
for these times.” It arrives like a sweet benediction. Oh, so that’s it; I’m
just doomed to feel like I don’t belong in the here and now. The second time,
the Tannerin gets a great little workout.
I have to confess to that feeling as a constant in my teens
if only because of all the stuff I was reading that had nothing to do with the times
of my actual life. See, even if you read fantasy and sci-fi written in your
lifetime, you aren’t really zoning out away from your era like you are if you
read primarily in much older times. With lit and art of another time you
introject a lot of feelings and ideas and ideals that simply are no longer available.
It can definitely produce an odd dissociation. But that’s me. I’m not sure what
made Wilson, who was certainly enamored of the recording equipment of his day,
feel that he wasn’t made for his times. Maybe it’s just a way of saying that
time is passing too fast and the music he had a grasp on is getting beyond him.
The great thing about an album like Pet Sounds is that it comes to sound better as time goes on. It’s a
time capsule that was made in its time but doesn’t reside there. It’s not
outdated, and that may be what finally gives a positive meaning to Wilson’s
lyric. Neither he nor his music was made for those times—the mid-Sixties,
specifically—but they have become synonymous with the cutting-edge,
pop-music-wise, of that time and have maintained a freshness and fascination up
to the present. To not be of “these times” is to be for “all time.”
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