June 16, 2025

As Long as There are Stars Above You

When I was little, any time I spent not wondering just what exactly was going on on Meat Loaf’s Bat Out Hell album, I was likely listening to The Beach Boys, and understanding everything. And I don’t mean it as a rebuke to Brian Wilson’s talent and genius that his music managed to speak to me on a visceral level when I was a toddler—lines like, “There’s a world where I can go/ And tell my secrets to/ In my room.” “Wouldn’t it be nice if we were older, then we wouldn’t have to wait so long?” “I’m getting bugged driving up and down the same old strip” [on my Big Wheel]. The Beach Boys sang songs about being true to your school, about wanting to go home. “And we’ll have fun fun fun til her Daddy takes the t-bird away.” When The Beach Boys sang, I felt like they were telling my story, even though I was landlocked in the middle of the continent and still years away from a driver’s license, with no understanding yet that a t-bird was not, in fact, a kind of bird. Or even what a bushy blonde hairdo looked like.

When I was little, I thought The Beach Boys was this obscure band that only me and my family knew about, their music playing on the boombox we had on our boat. I remember mentioning them once to one of my contemporaries—I was about six at the time—and her correcting me: They were called the BEASTIE boys. But not at my house they weren’t. My very first concert was The Beach Boys live at Copps Coliseum in Hamilton, Ontario, when I was about six years old, though I don’t think Brian Wilson was touring with them by then. When they returned to the pop charts in 1998 with “Kokomo” on the soundtrack from the movie Cocktail, we were ecstatic. I can’t help but think that a small part of the reason I’ve never done drugs is because “Drugs” was always the explanation my dad gave me for the more unlistenable Beach Boys songs, compared to their lush tones and gorgeous harmonies. I mean, what if I did LSD and ended up trapped inside “The Elements: Fire (Mrs. O’Leary’s Cow)”?

The Beach Boys would also make way for my own adolescent zeitgeist, the harmonies of Brian Wilson’s daughters, Wendy and Carnie, along with Chynna Philips, whose songs are as much part of my musical DNA as their parents’, underlining the dadness of it all. So it seems fitting to have passed Father’s Day this year thinking about and listening to Brian Wilson, who died just a few days before. He was the dad’s dad, and his good vibrations will keep on vibrating even now that he’s gone.