Brian Wilson & TRP smoking dope?

[pynchonoid]

Preaching to the choir.  I've been listening to Brian
Wilson "Live at the Roxy" again recently, too - good
reminder that at heart it's rock music to be heard
live, add a few voices and some instrumentalists,
works for me.  I've also got "Imagination" in current
rotation, shows Wilson up to his good old tricks in
the studio.  

I like the idea that he was able to work through his
crack-up and seclusion and the rest of the craziness
and perform again, too.  Put his voice and his balls
on the line to do that in front of folks who are
listening to him as a teenager in their cars on the
way home.

Ives didn't realize the grand Universal Symphony he
held in his mind, he imagined hundreds of voices and
instruments, to be performed in nature with ambient
sound a part of the scheme. But he fell apart
physically and to a certain degree mentally just when
his vision was getting large enough to see it.

Ives put ambient sounds in his orchestral music,
something that Brian Wilson also does, birds and surf
in "Sunflower" come to mind.  Wilson's songs are the
find a place in the same stream of American
traditional song - popular, folk, classical, sacred -
that fed Ives, and genres that Ives self-consciously
played with in his compositions.

I liked "Smile", too, glad Brian Wilson was able to
pick up the pieces and put it back together again.
 
I don't think Pynchon had any sort of crack-up to
account for his long silence with regard to
publishing, but I do like to imagine Pynchon patiently
writing and reading and cobbling together the pieces
of his grand vision over the years, each novel
building on and tightly linked to the previous book,
and I expect in Against the Day he will pull lots of
strings from previous novels and tie some of them
together.  "Wouldn't it be nice?" if he manages to
make it a masterpiece, too.

--- robinlandseadel at comcast.net wrote:

> Weird---I've been sitting on a borrowed copy of the
> book for about three or four weeks now, having been
> in the midst of a low-level Brian Wilson obsession
> for the last few months. I've been working on and
> off on an ultimate Brian Wilson/Beach Boys
> ccompilation, one that focuses on the Pet
> Sounds/Smile era. One interesting element in "Smile"
> is that the development of Brian's basic musical
> materials is a lot more like classical music than
> popular music. In Brian's post surfer-dude songs,
> melodies pop up in a new context a few songs later
> ("Chlid is Father to the Man"/"Good
> Vibrations"/"Surf's Up",), there's greater freedom
> and range in the vocal parts and there are songs 
> composed out of brief motifs than longer melodys. I
> used to find it odd that Pynchon held the Beach Boys
> in such high regard. Now I listen to a sequence like
> Wonderful/Song For Children/Child Is The Father Of
> The Man and think Brian's a stone genius. There's a
> lot of elements in "Smile" that remind me of Charles
> Iv
> es.
>  -----
> 


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