Al Jardine says that the death of Brian Wilson “was not planned” and that, when he saw Wilson for the last time in May, he thought that his beach colleague recovered from some of the numerous health setbacks he had suffered. Although the resumption of any substantial appearance was out of the question for Wilson after their last tour together stopped in 2022, Jardine had fed the hope that when he was taking the road this summer, which could go on stage from Wilson. But the architect of the sound of the Beach Boys was died Wednesday at 82 on Wednesday.
“I saw Brian about a month ago, and it seemed to be on healing,” Garden Variety told Jardine on Thursday. “We were in the living room discussing, because it was doing a blood oxygen test. He had a nurse there, and she said, “Well, things seem good”, so I was not too worried.
“I thought he was going to be with us for a while. I impatiently expected that he comes to rehearsals in Los Angeles and I ordered a piano to be there for him “in case Wilson should be able to present himself for an invited appearance and take his familiar seat behind the keyboard, that he could occur. “It will therefore be an empty seat, I suppose,” said Jardine.
Garden was taken aback, in a pleasant way, by something that Wilson launched when he arrived at his home a month ago.
“I was getting out of Los Angeles, and I stopped to say hello. And this is a fun thing – the first thing Brian told me, when I came in the door, he looked at me and he said:” You started the group! ” Like that!
This memory on the part of Brian looked like a moment of greenhouse for garden, “because we encountered El Camino, the Junior College, while we were going to school in Los Angeles” in the early 1960s, when they were both fresh out of Hawthorne High nearby. “And I said:” Hey Brian, we have to start a group “- almost the same language, almost the same words” that Wilson pronounced during their last visit. “And I thought, wow, it’s interesting, and we laughed.
As for the way he reacts to the news, garden – which is one of the two original surviving members of the Beach Boys, with Mike Love – said: “I become emotional. Unfortunately, yes, I tend to tear up. But I’m fine.”
He continues with preliminary rehearsals for the tour he will do with Darian Sahanaja and other longtime members of the Wilson group as a solo artist, from July 4. These programs have the impression of having an additional import now. “I think that will keep the mind alive, and I think, yes, it will be more significant, perhaps,” says Jardine. It is partly because they have long planned to throw a material from the album “Beach Boys Love You” from the mid -1970s which was the last product and widely written by Wilson.
Jardine recalled the complementary relationship that Wilson had with the other members of the group to their peak in the 1960s, and the isolated opportunities that they would meet after that.
He describes his professional relationship with Wilson as “musically sympathetic, and I enjoyed almost everything he did, and he tolerated Almost everything I did. No, I’m kidding. But he liked my writing. Thanks to the experience, he was a great teacher, and we all learned to write original equipment because of him, original material, while we look at him at work. And it was a wonderful vocal coach. He knew how to deliver a voice and (translate) the kind of sounds he heard in his head. We were just as beneficial to each other, in this regard, because without us, he would have had no one to interpret music. It is therefore a big marriage, and I felt very included in the family. It was three brothers (Brian, Carl and Dennis Wilson) and a cousin (love), then they accepted me as an equal, which was a wonderful feeling. We have always had that feeling of belonging. Musically, we worked very hard in our profession. We were the engine, and he was a starter, by clicking with all this great music that we have delivered.
“I could not have had a more generous experience than sitting around the piano, learning the games and hearing them all come back to us as a whole. What a trip it was, ”continues Jardine. “Often, we did not even hear the songs” before entering the studio to work on the execution of vocal parts. After Wilson retired from the road for a few years in the success of the Beach Boys, “Brian would do the slopes while we were on tour, and later we came just to the studio and let’s start singing. He had all the games ready in his head, and he had just dealt with us, and with very little fanfare, we just started to finish the songs that had started while we were going. So he had to be very patient and wait until we came home.
The mixture was simple, in some way, at least on paper: “Mike usually wore the baritone. I wore the upper soprano. Brian was Alto, and Dennis and Carl were in the middle. It was the relationship we had musically. ”
But nothing in the complex world of Wilson’s musicality could never be reduced to everything that looks like a distance formula. Jardine is always stuck thinking about a session where he feels that he has not managed to pass perfectly – the exception that proves the rule, perhaps. “There is a particular song – (1964)” All Summer Long “, a super small song. But we sang flat. At least I know I did it, because I could hear my part. And it always bored me. There were so many games. Try to catch up and
The surviving members of the Beach Boys all gathered for a reunion tour in 2012. But before and following, there were two groups on tour of the group – the officially approved Beach Boys, led by Love and sometimes, including Bruce Johnston (who joined the group later in the 60s), and the Wilson group as a solo artist. Jardine joined the latter on tour for a special outing on the theme of “pets for pets” in 2006, then returned on board with Wilson in 2014, until the last dates in 2022.
Before the pandemic, known as Jardine, Wilson was engaged on stage. There would always be fans who, suspicious of Wilson’s immobility and the lack of affect in the center of these huge sets, wondered if he really wanted to be there. Jardine says he did it, even if his well -known psychological problems prevented him from being the idea of someone a demonstrative rocker.
“He was not at all uncomfortable on tour” for this long tour of tours, says garden. “He liked to be on the road with his family – his adoptive family, which was really what his group was. I came a little later and I finished this (circle), you know, our friendship endured, and he needed support (on main voices). I could sing a lot of songs together. breastfeeding or something like that.
In 2022, however, things were different, before they were called. “There was no trauma to speak to this latest tour in 22. It was somehow silent and started to suffer from the effects of the very long-term coide, I was told, so I think it was a turning point for him. He became detached.” And after several back surgeries, Wilson had to use a wheelchair or a walker. “His infirmity had to be really depressing, unable to walk again” without the walker. Even then, says Jardine, Wilson found the comfort of being on the road, although his ability to participate at night at night.
“He was with his adoptive family, and we all loved him, and he knew it, and he savor every moment,” says Jardine about this last tour. “Until he goes on stage. And then he could decide:” Well, I’m just going to let them do it. “Who knows what was going on by his mind, but he will check this last tour, and it was a difficult job for him;” So he became, on stage, not the artist that everyone thought they came to see. “
It is a challenge, but a garden feels that he is doing, to hit the road with most of the members of the same group now, now as a main singer. Of course, Jardine is known to be the main singer of “Help Me Rhonda” and other Beach Boys classics, as well as a harmonist. But now that this version of the group will pay tribute to the album “Love You” as part of the night setlist – in part because there is a set in a box commemorating the equipment in the mid -1970s of the group due this fall, and partly on the popular demand of the Fandom – there is no longer to solve.
“Thank goodness for the telepromises,” he says. “I have never had it in the past, but now it will be essential, because there are deep cuts that we add that we have not done before, and many things that I have never sang in concert any of these songs, apart from ‘Honkin’ ‘Down the Highway” of this particular album. “Among Brian’s songs that he is most looking forward to playing” Love You “, which tends to be one of the favorite albums of the Hardcore cultists from Wilson,” I think my favorite will be “a roller crankfish child”. I love the song “ Airplane ”, and of course, there is “Solar System”, two eccentric things that we all like.
He says: “This is part of the repertoire that has been underestimated for so long, and will bring light, in Brian’s memory, I really think we can do it. I think we are going to enlighten emotionally.
