The first song Brian Wilson ever remembered hearing: “Overwhelmingly beautiful”
Brian Wilson could justifiably be considered the rock and roll answer to Mozart. He may never claim to be a genius, but his work with The Beach Boys put the genre on the same level on the same level as the sophisticated music from generations before, combining the ethereal harmonies of all his brothers with the most complex chords ever put into a pop song. Wilson may point out the countless rock and roll songs that influenced him initially, but his first experience with music all circles back to ‘Rhapsody in Blue’.
Throughout the first half of The Beach Boys’ career, though, their music seemed like the furthest thing from professional music. They may have had some fantastic singles, sure, but the amount of chord changes found in a song like ‘Fun Fun Fun’ wasn’t exactly going to set the world on fire.
Wilson was still finding his feet, though, and ‘Rhapsody in Blue’ was something to provide a road map for where he would go later. As opposed to the Chuck Berry records he played to death, Wilson’s orchestral background came from his mom, which may have been one of the greatest coincidences in pop music history.
Speaking with Rolling Stone, Wilson said ‘Rhapsody in Blue’ still resonates with him after all these years, saying, “‘Rhapsody in Blue’ is the first song I ever heard. When I was a little boy, very young, I heard it and said, ‘Mom, Mom, play it again!’ I loved the part where the violins came in. I just got this overwhelmingly beautiful vibe from the music”.
Even though nine out of ten people listen to Gershwin just to hear the pretty melodies, Wilson may have been slowly dissecting the song without knowing it. Compared to the other fantastic classical pieces by Bach and Beethoven, this piece by George Gershwin involves different harmonies being layered on top of each other at different times to create a kaleidoscope of sound.
This may have been a common practice centuries before, but no such much in the era when the likes of Little Richard were climbing the charts. If no one else was going to use it, though, Wilson figured that he might as well be the one to introduce the technique to the next generation.
If you listen to the middle section of ‘God Only Knows’ without the backing track, Wilson practically made his own rhapsody out of the vocal harmonies, featuring every member coming in at a different time in the mix and creating this mini symphony in just a few seconds. That wasn’t even the last time he tried out counterpoint, putting it into the breakdown of ‘I Just Wasn’t Made For These Times’.
Although this technique may not have been anything new to the musical technicians of the world, Wilson was taking the crux of what he had been raised on and shoehorning it into the Western pop single, and the music business hasn’t been the same ever since. Now that the next generation has the likes of ProTools and Logic with limitless options, the counterpoint idea that Wilson started has been given new possibilities beyond anything we’ve ever seen.
