The one singer Brian Wilson was disappointed to meet: “Too bad”
There’s a certain innocence that comes with anything that Brian Wilson ever made.
Even though the rock industry is meant to be about people losing a little bit of their soul to make what they wanted, Wilson was one of the few people who genuinely wanted to make people happy every single time he made a record. He wanted the chance to give his fans the kind of happiness he felt when he made this music, but not everyone shared the same mentality when looking at their legacy.
Simply put, there are some stars that do not give two shits about the way that their music is perceived, and while that’s usually a good thing, it can get a little bit tiresome to hear everyone talking about making their songs only for themselves. Wilson still cared about what the public wanted, but that didn’t mean that every single one of his heroes had to share the same lust for life that he had whenever he played.
The industry can drag even the toughest people down, and it didn’t take long before even Mike Love started to see the cynical side of what The Beach Boys could be. He was more than happy to turn the band into a nostalgia act and stop caring about what the rest of the world thought, but Wilson didn’t want to keep making music with no real inspiration behind it. He had seen what that had done to some of his favourite bands, and that wasn’t about to happen to him when he made his records.
If you look at every other rock star from the age before The Beach Boys, though, each of them is practically their own version of Behind the Music. They were making all kinds of mistakes when it came to the people they surrounded themselves with, to the half-assed music that they made after a while, and no one seemed to have the same kind of cynicism over time as Chuck Berry did.
But when looking at Berry’s life, it reads like a tragic tale most of the time. All he wanted to do was play rock and roll to anyone who would hear him, and yet after becoming a staple of the nostalgia circuit, he was a parody of himself. Everyone still loved seeing him, but by the time that he was famous for a few years, Wilson could already see that some of the light seemed to be gone from his eyes whenever he met him.
Meeting someone that big is already legendary, but Wilson remembered everything being incredibly awkward, saying, “I met Chuck Berry one time on an airplane. I said, ‘Hi, I’m Brian Wilson!’ He goes, ‘Hey,’ and then he turned away. He wouldn’t talk to me. Too bad. But he taught me how to write rock & roll songs.” Granted, it might also have had a little something to do with how Wilson got his foot in the door.
Those early Beach Boys all came from him trying to make a surf version of what Berry was doing, so as far as the rock and roll legend could see, Wilson was only some kid who wanted to be everything that he was. And looking at how history played out, Berry felt that there was only room for one rock and roll legend singing about cars and partying in the USA every time he kicked off his tunes.
But Wilson was never brought into the big time as a way of being a replacement for Berry. Music was simply turning a corner, and some of the biggest names in music were now shifting to songs about surfing rather than Berry’s tales about small-town life. The magic hadn’t gone away, but life had to move on, and Berry did have his fair share of resentments after getting lost in the lurch.
