The sacred and the profane, the gnostic and the dumbass

good morning ~

(click the link / sunflower billboard to listen)

My Big BreakThe sacred and the profane, the gnostic and the dumbass

today’s track is my piano in the rain

the first of a bunch of upcoming StretchMetal programming is coming to the Hudson Valley this weekend. They’re a really great nonprofit org organizing reflective music events and the first one in my neck of the woods is happening this Sunday afternoon around Saapato’s beautiful farm pond. You should go! And to the event they’re doing at Avalon soon, too!

I’m not performing or anything, I’m just a really enthusiastic board member / volunteer.

Tickets and info available here - - and here’s the pond:

Near the end of 1995 I received a handful of CDs for Christmas. I know Jimmy Buffet's greatest hits were among them, and I believe Thriller was as well, but it was 20 Good Vibrations - a newly packaged Beach Boys best-of - that wedged itself in the discman and never came out. It's an unusual listening experience for someone who has never intentionally sat down to hear those lads. There's a bunch of surfing songs, there's a bunch of fast car songs, and they are all excellently rendered and irresistibly sugary. California Girls introduces a note of sophistication - the wild key changes and novel instrumentation in the introduction are unexpected and delightful - but it, too, stays on the (often sublime) theme of California teenage appetites. And then in the later third of the album there is a noticeable shift. Brian Wilson's arrangement of Sloop John B is magnificent. Enough said, sure, but it really allowed me to feel - for the first time outside of church by my reckoning - the complex, opiate rush of being emotionally devastated by a recording. It chugs along, it gains momentum, and when they're yelping together in harmony on the fadeout to "let me go home - I want to go home" I still feel it deep in my being. I remember so vividly listening to this song again and again in the back of my parents' beige minivan, yearning for the heartache the song could well up, a mouse hitting a pellet feed button. Then Good Vibrations follows, a song which is at its core also about being horny and thinking that girls are groovy, but does so in a psychedelic, dangerous-sounding way - they're sawing the ever-loving fuck out of those cellos, and that vocal bridge disorients you deliciously before bringing in the electro-theremin, far out. We get a little reprieve from it with "409" - more car stuff, also great, sure - and then snuck devilishly into the third-to-last slot is one of humanity's greatest accomplishments. Please, if you know of a song more beautiful than "God Only Knows," tell me - I need to hear it immediately. Even as a second grader, even as someone just recently initiated into the ritual of headphones, I knew that this was another level of accomplishment. I knew it was a sacred text. And what was it doing among all these otherwise delightful songs about bikinis, sun, and surf? And what the fuck is Kokomo?

The sacred and the profane, the gnostic and the dumbass, the holy and the wholly repulsive, all contained and cohabitating in the work of the Beach Boys. I am utterly fascinated by this band and often feel myself needing to pump the breaks when I start thinking about them - there's too much there. So much music, and so much proximity to the deep, unspoken core of American history and experience. That they arose from the suburbs, that their rise to prominence follows the postwar boom of recorded media, that their father was an evil striver who wanted to have so badly the genius that Brian Wilson obviously possessed, that they hung out with and recorded a song by Charles Manson, that they were constantly involved in bad, exploitative record deals and other business ventures, that they made such utterly sublime music and also some of the most embarrassing schlock, all of it has a grip on me. My old coworker was in it really deep and he let me in on his habit after finding out I, too, was a fan - he kept a private YouTube channel where he would resequenced and reimagine Beach Boys records with b-sides and alternate takes, making what he believed were the ultimate versions of the albums. Which was honestly really impressed me, plus he also paid for a VIP meet-and-greet when he saw Brian Wilson play live and I was touched that his love caused him to drop that kind of cash. But his hobby made a kind of sense - the tragedy, the missteps, the machinations, the deep, novelistic lore of this family band makes you wish for a world that could have been kinder to the Wilsons. If you listen long enough you, too, will want to go back in time and pull Dennis up from the marina waters.

Brian Wilson's passing hit me very hard and I felt horribly inadequate when I sat down to play his songs at the piano yesterday. But seen another way it's not my clunkiness and my reaching for the pitch, it's his total mastery of the voice, of the chord inversion. He loved his sounds like they were his pets, he pampered them, he let them scamper in the yard. I remembered, too, a really nice thing from I'm not sure when - my mom, my aunt, and I gathered around their living room upright, working out the harmonies to In My Room and warbling them together. Blood harmony, singing in accordance with your kin feels like touching the old magic, dark and powerful and horribly transformative if unleashed. But the thing that really gets me is this: we have to live in a world where the villainous boomer caricature Mike Love still tours under the name the Beach Boys (they just played the Carolina Country Music Fest with Kid Rock). Why has the God that Brian wrote only knowing about allowed his Mar-a-Lago frequenting cousin to still walk the Earth? Take him instead, oh lord!

I saw him once, got to see Brian play, in 2016 as part of the Pet Sounds 50th anniversary tour. It was so beautiful, a perfect night in San Francisco. Brian was unsteady on his feet and seemed a bit removed until he sat at the piano bench, there he came alive. Smiling and full of awe like it was his first moment on Earth, so excited to introduce every single member of his band. He had real generosity, real appreciation, and though he couldn't hit the high notes anymore, it was Carl who sang on God Only Knows, anyway.

But what about you? Are there things you’re fascinated by that you have to kind of keep yourself from getting lost in? What was the first CD you ever owned?