Which were the hardest parts of your past to dredge through? “The parts where I took drugs.” “It took about a year,” Wilson says, adding, “Pet Sounds took three months.” Photograph: Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images Recording Pet Sounds in Los Angeles in 1966. I’m genuinely fascinated to know how such a book was ever written. Wilson will soon publish a memoir, I Am Brian Wilson, based on interviews he conducted with co-author Ben Greenman. I pitch Wilson a few more questions, but a frustrating system takes shape: he’ll say something tidy or blunt, and when asked to expand will say, “I don’t know” or, “I can’t answer that.” He is subdued, distant in a deep and serious way, so that for decades many admirers who have come face to face with him have walked away feeling dashed, rebuffed even, while at the same time instinctively sympathetic, conscious of some awful interior strife. I ask in what ways the songs of Pet Sounds still give him satisfaction, and he says: “I think… musical.” His sentences tend to tip out on the gasping ends of breaths, as if at some cost. I ask how Wilson’s feelings about that song have changed since he first played it, half a century ago. The audience response has been overwhelming – standing ovations, Reiss points out, whenever Wilson reaches the end of Pet Sounds’ pivotal track, God Only Knows. He says: “I always got to the stage on time.”Įvery night, Wilson has been playing through the whole of Pet Sounds to the accompaniment of an 11-piece band. Had two shows in Tokyo! And one in Osaka!” “And then,” Reiss continues, “we flew to Japan.
I ask Wilson how he has coped, so far, with such a demanding tour. His eyes are small and close set, the brows slightly angled so that they tentpole over the bridge of his nose. He has a pallid, pillowy face that suggests in places the faded strain of some mild cosmetic surgery he had done in the 80s. Straight-backed on a sofa, a large cushion on his lap, Wilson remains still throughout this recital.
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