This article appeared on Liberation of November 2, 2008. The figure of Brian Wilson is one of the most popular and complex history of pop. It is also one of the most dramatic, though largely inner drama of it: his was a labor that lasted more than three decades, to the point that in early 2000 when the old deus ex machina dei Beach Boys tornò a calcare le scene, la sorpresa fu talmente grande da sfociare nell’incredulità. Quest’anno, Wilson esce con un nuovo album che, in maniera esplicita, vuole riassumere il senso di una vicenda intera. That Lucky Old Sun, questo il titolo, è prima di tutto una deliziosa raccolta di manufatti pop come ci si aspetta dall’uomo che, al pop, ha regalato alcuni tra i suoi inni di sempre. Lungi dall’essere perfetto, l’album procede tra sontuosi picchi emotivi e improvvise cadute di tono: la voce di Wilson è invecchiata, l’innocente freschezza degli anni ’60 è un ricordo, e anche a livello compositivo non tutto fila come dovrebbe. Ma è pur sempre un album del Wilson migliore, qui coadiuvato in fase di scrittura, oltre che dal vecchio sodale Van Dyke Parks, anche da Scott Bennett dei Wondermints, il gruppo che oramai accompagna il sessantaseienne Brian in pianta stabile. Inevitabilmente però, quello che colpisce è lo spiccato autobiografismo dell’opera, il suo porsi in maniera dialettica con un passato che per Wilson, già da qualche anno, ha smesso di vestire i panni della tragedia personale, per essere semmai sviscerato e riportato a nuova vita attraverso una serie di operazioni tutte concentrare su quel biennio 1966/1967 che per l’ex Beach Boy significarono l’inizio dell’incubo. Andiamo con ordine.
A inizi anni ’60 i Beach Boys sono the group of sun, surf, and beach life: their hearts cemented the myth of a carefree California where everything flows between happy beautiful girls, parties, unbridled fun ("Fun Fun Fun" and singing) and adolescents without end. The undisputed leader of the group is really Brian Wilson, melodic young talent who, in just a few years, you will also discover superfine arranger, producer, revolutionary, and songwriter as few if they are seen on Earth: Pet Sounds, the album of 1966 that puts an abrupt end to the Beach Boys as the world had learned to know them, is his first undisputed masterpiece. Album melancholy tones whose basic theme is just the end of adolescence traumatic entry into the adult world, but also and above all an amazing sequence of gestures, find, and inventions: the mastery of the Wilson producer and arranger, and author of immortal songs like "God Only Knows", that is to embarrass a competition, from the Beatles down, that masterpiece bestow standing ovations and tributes: it is known that just the Beatles Sgt Pepper is an answer to the same Pet Sounds, but while Wilson is already over, and sees '66 end those are the three minutes and fifteen seconds most visionary of the entire history of pop, a concentration of studio experiments, cut and sew pioneering interlocking melodies and splendor by Ages psychedelic that go under the name of "Good Vibrations".
It is here that begins the downward Wilson: twenty-five years that as soon as it embarks on its most ambitious and controversial project, a whole album as if they have never heard before, "a new masterpiece capable of subverting the laws and precepts of the entire youth music. The title of this album is Smile: announced for 1967, will never see the light. Plagued by mental illness, drug addicts, lost in a project of manic characters (the pathological perfectionism in the studio touches peaks, and the sessions go on for whole months unnerving recherche) at the end collapses Wilson: The draft Smile aborts, but what matters most is that this failure - along with professional, human, psychological - marks for a collapse from which he will never recover again. Stops writing, and retired to a private life that is pure hallucination, deprived of their leader, the Beach Boys end up trudging between the second rows of the great pop circus.
Wilson's first solo album arrives in 1988, after decades of darkness, torment, plagiarism and psychological subjection. But the real return on only 1999, when Wilson takes his Pet Sounds for a series of memorable concerts. And in 2004, the biggest surprise: the release of "non-masterpiece" Smile, thirty-seven years since its conception. It is clear as Wilson is exorcising his ghosts, and how he first dealt with it before you have to understand that, no new beginning is possible. No wonder then that in the new That Lucky Old Sun, Brian sings: "Twenty-five years I have turned off the light / tired because my eyes could not bear the glow / But now I'm back, drawing the best skies." Brian is back. Since 1967, when the California sun was dyed shades and colors too blinding for a boy from the beach that was never such.
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