by Brian Wilson
I said yes.
“So we’re all set?”
“Well,” I said, “I can’t really read it. The letters are so small and I can’t find my glasses. Can you send it back to me with bigger letters?”
Ray hung up while I was talking, but he sent me that second fax, too. The letters were the perfect size. I could read every title. And the best one, the one that I knew would start the album, was right at the top: “Rhapsody in Blue.”
When I started the Gershwin album, Paul Von Mertens worked with me closely. He and I had already talked a little bit about the songs before Ray and I made the list, but we talked about them more and more. We talked about what they meant. We talked about which ones could be rearranged without taking too much away from the originals, and which ones should be done just like they were done originally. We listened to old versions by so many other singers. He helped me decide which songs would work best for my vocal range. Some of them went too high for my older voice, and I’m not even sure that I could have sung them when I was young. Paul, he’s great, and he’s a student of anything Gershwin. He arranged the strings and horns on the whole album. I made some adjustments to them, revamped what he wrote out, but he did most of it. He’s very good. He’s on top of it.
I had Paul Von Mertens. Gershwin had his own Paul. He had Paul Whiteman, a bandleader who played all around the West but came to New York in 1920 to work for Victor Records. He met Gershwin there, and the two attended a jazz show in 1923 with a Canadian singer. I think Gershwin played piano at the show. Paul Whiteman went home from it and had an idea. His idea was to ask Gershwin to make a piece of music that represented America. Gershwin wasn’t sure at first. He thought maybe the idea was too big, and that anything he made would collapse under the weight of it. I know how he felt. But then he read a newspaper article that said Vincent Lopez, another piano player and composer in New York, was about to do his own version, and Gershwin started to think that maybe he should do it. While he was taking a train from New York up to Boston, he let his mind roam around and think about the country and all the things it created even without composers, and how a composer might be able to organize all that energy into a piece of music. The piece came quickly after that, and Ira had the idea of calling it “Rhapsody in Blue.”
“Rhapsody in Blue” was the first Gershwin piece I heard, or at least the first piece I heard that I knew was by him. I might have heard other songs sung by popular singers or jazz singers, but then one day I was at my grandmother’s house and she played a copy of “Rhapsody in Blue,” the Glenn Miller version that he did in 1943. I must have been two or three, which meant that the record was only about a year old. When she played it for me, I was blown away. I was transported somewhere else. I just smiled and listened and tried to take it all in. When it was over, my grandmother asked me how I liked it, and I couldn’t answer. My mother asked me the same thing, and I still couldn’t answer. I guess I was still trying to take it all in. Back then, that’s what I did with music. My mother said that I could hum entire tunes when I was real small. After I heard “Rhapsody in Blue” that first time, I let it play through over and over again in my head until I could hum the entire tune. I liked the way it sounded, and I liked the way it had ideas in it, and I even liked the way he worked with his brother. If I had to pick a favorite section, I’d pick the middle, the prettiest part. The violins had amazing harmonies. He was doing amazing things with the way lines ended, with the way they put themselves down.
At the time, I hadn’t studied Gershwin. I didn’t know anything about how he was born Jacob but called George, the same way his brother was born Israel but called Ira. I didn’t know anything about the Yiddish theater, or what his life was like on the Lower East Side in the early twentieth century, or how he didn’t even start with the piano until he was ten. But I did hear his music, and that taught me one thing early on, which was that music is perfect. It’s sound taken to a higher level. Some rock and roll groups and some rock and roll songs will be remembered. I hope that mine will be. But I am sure that Gershwin will be remembered. His music was very special. He was very advanced musically, ahead of his time. So maybe it’s not just that he’ll be remembered. Maybe it’s that everyone else will catch up to him and start to hear things the way he heard them.
I wanted to show people his ideas when I made the record, but I also wanted to show people my ideas. In a way, the picks that Paul and I made were a kind of second SMiLE, another picture of America but with Gershwin’s puzzle pieces instead of mine. That meant that I had to change things. I did “Rhapsody in Blue,” but I changed it around a bit. The original key was too high. I put it in C, down a bit. I thought it sounded great that way. “I Loves You, Porgy” was a chance to try to capture the mood of a Negro spiritual. I left the lyric in the feminine; some people change the words, but that wouldn’t seem fair to Ira, and I wanted to pay homage to him, too.
At times I went for a summer vibe, not only when it was obvious, in “Summertime,” but also in “I Got Plenty o’ Nuttin’.” Other times it was finding the level of the song, like “Love Is Here to Stay.” It was a real pleasure to sing those melodies. They are sweet and sensitive songs. I sang differently than I did with Beach Boys songs or my own. For “They Can’t Take That Away from Me,” I tried to make my voice convey the main idea, which is that you hold on to what you have tightly. It’s also a shuffle beat, like “Little Deuce Coupe,” so I could get right into it. And on “Someone to Watch Over Me,” we cut it with a harpsichord and ended up close to “Caroline, No” in feel. Going back to Gershwin and American music of that time, I had to pass through lots of the music I made, and that was a real interesting experience.
When I think of an arrangement for a song, I don’t get it down on paper right away. Other people take lots of notes. Paul McCartney did colorful drawings showing where all the instruments should go in the mix; some of them were published in the liner notes to one of his albums, and I thought they were amazing. I can’t really draw, though I sometimes did little drawings for the singles. I drew a transistor radio once for the Mount Vernon and Fairway EP sleeve, and I also drew the sleeve for the “Love and Mercy” single. But I don’t draw so much for my music. It’s mostly mental with me.
I was sitting there at the board. We were doing the Gershwin songs. I was quiet. I didn’t have anything to say really. I was looking straight at the board. Maybe ten minutes passed, though someone told me it was an hour. Someone else said, “We have to get going. What are you doing?”
“I’m working,” I said. I was working out the arrangement in my head. I might lay down a vocal and peel it up. I might turn a track down so I could hear another track in isolation.
Fifteen minutes later I stood up from the board. Maybe it wasn’t just fifteen minutes. I went over to the piano, though whenever I went over to the piano, it wasn’t just to play the piano. It was to sing the melody line and demonstrate the harmonies and show all the parts of the songs. I wanted to make sure that everyone in the studio heard me and understood what I meant. I tried to be specific but not too technical. “I want to get a chunk-a-chunk-a melody,” I’d say. Or I’d do the rhythms out loud: “I want you to play boom, boom—boom boom.”
I could be technical also. I was technical back when we did Pet Sounds, and I was technical sometimes on the Gershwin record, too. When we were recording “Summertime,” I stopped the session on the talkback and told Todd Sucherman, who was drumming, “At the fourth bar of that transition thing, I want you to hit the snare hard three times—boom, boom, boom. Everyone else, drop out.”
We went to Ocean Way Recording in Hollywood, which used to be United Western, for that one. I love that studio because of its design. I was cutting the vocal for “Someone to Watch Over Me.” We went through the first take. “That’s the take,” I said.
Melinda and Mark Linett were there at the studio, and they turned to me with looks on their faces—and not supportive looks. “Why don’t we try another one?” Melinda
said.
“That’s the one,” I said. “I can hear it. I’m sure.” They still didn’t look convinced. I used Ray as a tiebreaker. “Ray, what do you think?”
“I think you’ve got a better one in you,” he said.
I tried it again. I’m willing to try.
The two new songs were the most intense. The Gershwin estate let me work with fragments and turn them into songs. One of them was called “Will You Remember Me” and the other one was called “Say My Say.” Scott Bennett wrote lyrics, I added some new melodies, and we turned them into two new songs, “The Like in I Love You” and “Nothing But Love.” I especially liked the lyrics he did for “The Like in I Love You.” It’s a love song, but one that talks about how love is not just one great feeling but lots of little feelings that add up over time.
I see your picture coming through
The story’s always you
It’s more than harmony
When you sing with me
It’s an entire symphony
The other great part of that song was when Scott wrote about the way that ideas happen in art. You have to be willing to look everywhere in your life.
The pain in painting
The muse in music
And the pain in music, too; even though the Gershwin songs could be light and sophisticated, they could also get to some of the scarier parts of life. Some days during the record I heard voices or I felt like I wasn’t completely keeping things under control, and the music really helped me get centered again. Listening to Gershwin’s melodies or even finishing some of them could be as satisfying as writing my own songs. I wondered what would happen if he could come back and hear it. What would he say? Hopefully he’d say that it was great. I hope I did right by him.
Gershwin makes singers. In 2001, during the time of the tribute show to me at Radio City, I made some friends go uptown with me to a cabaret show. I didn’t tell them who we were going to see. It was Rosemary Clooney. She did a record in the late ’70s where she sang Gershwin songs. We didn’t overlap much in our choices, except that we both did “Love Is Here to Stay” and “You Can’t Take That Away from Me.”
Tony Bennett was in the audience. I was in jeans and a flannel shirt. After the concert we went backstage. Rosemary looked up. “Oh my, it’s Brian,” she said. “When are you going to write a song for me?”
“I’ll do it,” I said. “I’ll write a ballad.”
She died not long after that. I didn’t get to write a song for her. But in a way, all the songs are for her. When she did “Tenderly” back in 1956, she taught me how to sing. I’ll never forget it.
The Gershwin project did so well that the record label asked us to do a second album. The record label was Disney, and that led to the idea, which was to take songs from Disney movies and give them the same treatment as the Gershwin songs.
Disney was a big source of everything for me. I remember when Disneyland opened in Anaheim. I was thirteen years old. It was an amazing thing. I remember friends going there. It was like a whole other country inside America, but somehow even more American. I went with Carnie and Wendy when they were little, and I went with Daria and Delanie when they were little. I remember going with Daria and Delanie better. We were coming out of a candy store, and Daria had a big jawbreaker and Delanie had a huge lollipop. I asked them if I could share, and then I took a huge bite out of the jawbreaker and a huge bite out of the lollipop.
The Disney amusement park was a big deal, but the movies were an even bigger deal. The first wave of cartoons came out either before I was born or when I was a tiny baby: Snow White in 1937, Pinocchio in 1940, Dumbo in 1941. Bambi came out in August of 1942, when I was only two months old. I didn’t see it then. But there was another round about ten years later—Cinderella in 1950, Alice in Wonderland in 1951, Peter Pan in 1953—when I was the perfect age, and then more classics in the ’60s, like Mary Poppins and The Jungle Book. Those I remember catching on TV when my kids were little, which is also when I saw some of the movies from the ’40s. One thing those movies did was give audiences great songs. It goes from the newer Randy Newman songs, which blow me away, all the way back to songs like “Baby Mine” from Dumbo. “Baby Mine” was beautiful. It has a beautiful melody and it’s so much fun to sing. It’s one of my favorite cuts on that record. Paul and I did selections and arrangements for that, too, the same way we had on the Gershwin. We tried to find songs that matched my voice or songs where I could match the emotion with a new arrangement.
Because there were so many great Disney songs and so many movies, we tried to go with only one song per movie. That made it kind of hard. There were so many amazing songs that the Sherman Brothers wrote for Mary Poppins, but we picked only “Stay Awake.” That’s my favorite song on the Disney album. I love the chords, and I think my lead vocal is one of the best of my entire solo career. From The Jungle Book, we did “The Bare Necessities,” which was the only song the Sherman Brothers didn’t write for that movie. “The bare necessities of life will come to you”—that really got to my soul. That was written by Terry Gilkyson, who also wrote “Memories Are Made of This,” a great song that was recorded by Dino, Desi, and Billy—a group that Billy Hinsche was in with Dean Martin’s son, Dean, and Desi Arnaz’s son, Desi. I really liked those guys. Two of them were my brothers-in-law; Carl was married to Annie Hinsche first and then to Gina Martin after that. Billy and I wrote the group’s last single, “Lady Love.” That came out in 1970, right around the time Elton John released “Your Song.” That was the only exception on the whole Disney record—not Dino, Desi, and Billy but Elton John. We did two of the songs he wrote with Tim Rice for The Lion King. We did “Can You Feel the Love Tonight,” which was a big ballad we did a little smaller, still keeping the spiritual lyrics, and “I Just Can’t Wait to Be King,” which we did like an early rock and roll song, with a kind of shuffle beat. Those lyrics I didn’t like as much. They embarrassed me. It was way too egotistical. I liked “Colors of the Wind” from Pocahontas. How can the wind have colors? It’s a very pictorial lyric.
We closed the record with “When You Wish Upon a Star” from Pinocchio, which Dion and the Belmonts had covered back in 1960. I had been thinking about their version when I wrote my first song, “Surfer Girl,” and when I thought about it again I realized how important the lyrics were to me. It was one of the songs that had always been with me, ever since I was a little kid. When I showed the track list around, some people wondered if “When You Wish Upon a Star” was my way of saying good-bye to recording, if I was ending things by going back to the beginning. I think they could probably have thought that about almost any final song on any record I could have made at that point. Lots of things seemed like ways of ending.
You’d think that by the time I got to sixty I would have learned everything about singing, but that turned out not to be true at all. I keep learning, and lots of that is about unlearning. Back in the ’60s I was absolutely obsessed with my voice. I was really obsessed with how it sounded, especially the high parts. Now I don’t sing as high anymore and I use it simply as an instrument to communicate love and good vibes. The Gershwin album was a huge help in that way because I was singing songs that so many great singers had done before me, and the Disney album was the same way. Those two albums have some of the best lead vocals I have ever done in my solo career.
The Disney record has one other place where it meets up with the other music I made. There was a song on Surf’s Up called “Disney Girls (1957).” I didn’t write it. Bruce Johnston did. It was one of the songs he did that became the most famous. It wasn’t about any specific Disney girls like Annette or Darlene. It was about how certain parts of American culture were myths that kept people away from reality.
Oh, reality, it’s not for me
And it makes me laugh
Oh, fantasy world and Disney girls
I’m coming back
It was a song about nostalgia, but not necessarily the good part of nostalgia. The guy
in the song loves that he can think about Disney and Patti Page and Tootsie Rolls, but those things aren’t really part of his life anymore. The guy is stuck in time and trying to go back to something that wasn’t even real in the first place. I always thought it was a sad song, but a great song. The Disney album I made was different. It wasn’t about the idea of Disney really. It was about all these great songs that happened to be from Disney movies. I could update the songs with new arrangements. I could combine old songs and new songs. No one was stuck in time.
The Disney album was also the final chapter in a run of albums that seemed very different but were all kind of the same thing. Those four albums—the live remake of SMiLE through Lucky Old Sun, the Gershwin album, and then the Disney album—were all ways of looking at America. SMiLE was about how America thought of itself, how it invented itself and what it thought about itself as it moved west. Lucky Old Sun was mainly about California, but it was really about all of America. Gershwin was writing mainly about New York, but he was really writing about all of America. And Disney was something that everyone had in common. The liner notes for the Disney record mentioned that. They said that the record was like a meeting between two people who created America’s idea of California, me and Walt Disney. The cover art showed a surfing van driving toward a sunset, and the sunset had mouse ears like Mickey. It was a little strange.
The Gershwin and the Disney are the solo records I listen to most in the car. I don’t know if it’s because I don’t like listening to songs I wrote or because I love the way I’m singing on those albums, but I like hearing them. I listen to the radio for other people’s songs, too, and every once in a while one will pop up and catch me. Once I was driving with someone, maybe Carnie, and “Baby Come Back” by Player came on the radio. It’s not a band that people remember very much, but I loved that song. That’s how songs work with me. I don’t go by a band’s reputation or how many records they’re selling. I listen for a kind of magic that gives energy to all the people listening. I heard that energy in Michael McDonald, “What a Fool Believes.” I heard it in Diana Ross and in almost every Marvin Gaye song. I heard it in a song called “Pretty Little Angel Eyes,” which was produced by Phil Spector and sung by a guy named Curtis Lee. That was all the way back in 1961. I don’t even know if the guy made other records, but that record was a great one. He was a hell of a singer.
