“I started crying as soon I heard it”: The one song played at Carl Wilson’s funeral
No one expects to write a pop song that will one day be played at someone’s funeral. That’s normally reserved for the ‘Amazing Grace’s of the world, but every so often, a song can hit a poignant note that feels appropriate when someone’s moving into the great beyond. At the same time, there was no way that anyone could have replicated those kinds of angelic voices that The Beach Boys made when Carl Wilson was eventually laid to rest.
Because when you think about the band’s harmonies, it all came down to how the Wilson brothers worked off each other. Even though Brian Wilson spent years trying to study how musical harmony worked from everyone from Phil Spector to The Four Freshmen, there’s something about the way that Brian, Dennis, and Carl blended together that can’t really be taught, even when they had to her heavyhitters like Bruce Johnston and Al Jardine behind them.
But out of every member of the group, Carl had the gentlest voice out of anyone. He never managed to have the same kind of grit in his voice that Dennis had and wasn’t the most captivating frontman like Mike Love was, but whenever he did take a lead vocal like on ‘God Only Knows’, he captured everything that his brother was trying to say perfectly over those complex chords.
And compared to the strange dips his brothers took, Carl was the one who never lost an ounce of shine on his vocals. He may have been present for the more embarrassing years in the late 1980s, but even when Dennis was at half-capacity and Brian was nowhere to be seen, Carl was always the steady voice reminding everyone that this was, in fact, the same band that made ‘I Get Around’ sound so infectious back in the 1960s.
After being diagnosed with lung cancer in 1997, though, it was only a matter of time before that golden voice would finally be silenced. No one quite expected him to be gone so quickly at the age of 51, but it turned out that he had already sung the greatest swan song he could have asked for on the song ‘Heaven’ from his solo career.
Brian may have been estranged from the band for a few years at that point, but when reminiscing on those times when they sang together, it became too much for him realising that he was never going to hear him again, saying, “I liked [Carl’s solo albums], they were interesting. I didn’t know what to expect. ‘Heaven could be here on earth.’ They played it at his funeral and I started crying as soon as I heard it.”
And regardless of how many dents The Beach Boys’ career had taken in recent years, Carl was still on top when he had to bow out. No one could have expected him to be taken so soon, but listening to the work that he put in on Tom Petty’s ‘Hung Up and Overdue’ from a few years before his death, you would have sworn that he was at the peak of health by how strong his vocals were soaring above everything.
The Beach Boys may continue to this day without any of the Wilson brothers in the group any more, and while they will put on a great show, there will always be something missing without that initial magic from those three voices harmonising together. Most of us will never know whether heaven could be here on Earth until it’s too late, but for a brief moment in time, Carl at the very least made the land of the living sound heavenly.
