Live Review: Brian Wilson

Don’t be confused by the concurrent Beach Boys tours that have landed in Australia recently. Brian Wilson’s Pet Sounds 50th Anniversary Tour is the only Beach Boys-related event you should beat yourself senseless for missing.

Wilson and his 10-piece band performed the landmark record, plus a staggering array of hits, in the intimate (but acoustically slightly naff) Adelaide Entertainment Centre Theatre. It was glorious. What were you thinking, staying in to watch Bondi Rescue?!

For those not keeping score, impeccable LA band The Wondermints is beneath the hood of Wilson’s 21st century victory lap. Approximately the same group powered the Beach Boys 50th Reunion Tour (which visited Adelaide in 2012) but that tour went kaput when Mike Love, who legally owns the Beach Boys name, resumed his golden oldies-style touring despite Wilson’s desire to continue the reunion. As Love told his cousin in 1966: Don’t fuck with the formula, Bri.

You can bet Mike Love doesn’t get standing ovations when he shuffles on stage each night. You can bet his nostalgia-fest doesn’t open with the breathtaking a cappella beauty of Our Prayer, from 1967’s abandoned Smile, just as you can bet Wilson’s encore won’t be Kokomo. The Brian Wilson Band actually features more legitimate Beach Boys than does Love’s facsimile — there’s no mistaking Al Jardine’s voice, still so pure and clear and American, singing lead on songs like Help Me, Rhonda. Then there’s his son Matt Jardine, who has worked with the Boys for decades, providing flawless falsetto on Don’t Worry Baby and God Only Knows.

Brian hid behind his iconic white grand piano, singing as best he could, relying on Jardine and wunderkind “musical secretary” Darian Sahanaja to cover him only once or twice. It’s admirable that no attempt was made to gloss over his time-ravaged pipes with auto-tune or backing tapes, and any chin-stroker dissatisfied with Wilson’s 2016 calibre should recall that it’s a miracle the man is even here. His stage fright and distaste for touring are well documented, to say nothing of his years of drug dependency and emotional anguish.

California Girls, I Get Around, Dance, Dance, Dance and Little Deuce Coupe primed the crowd, before doe-eyed ballads like Surfer Girl. Things got slightly bizarre when Blondie Chaplin appeared for his showcase looking like the 64-year-old lovechild of Keith Richards and Laurie Anderson. His persona was curious in tonight’s context but his electric delivery of Wild Honey, Funky Pretty and Sail On, Sailor made it abundantly clear that his '70s invitation to join the Boys was no fluke.

After a short intermission the band performed Pet Sounds in sequence. Its complex matrices were never more apparent; these ten musicians negotiating the nuanced textures of Wilson’s wild imagination with relish and finesse. Band leader Paul Von Mertens provided the ballsy bass harmonica of I Know There’s An Answer and the crystalline flute of Sloop John B Probyn Gregory used 12-string electric, french horn, slide theremin and trombone. Nelson Bragg enthusiastically punctuated it all with wood blocks, tambourines, djembes and triangles.

For such orchestral compositions, real timpanis and harpsichords rather than digital replications would have been wonderful. The mix was occasionally iffy and the band probably wouldn’t call tonight its tightest performance. But Wilson’s arrangements, as ever, soared. I Just Wasn't Made For These Times and the instrumental finale Pet Sounds were sublime.

When all 12 performers returned for an encore that included Good Vibrations, Barbara Ann, Surfin’ USA and Fun, Fun, Fun Adelaide’s buttoned-down, middle-class and overwhelmingly white audience suddenly found its groove — or rather, complete lack thereof. Terror flashed in Jardine’s eyes as an escalating number of punters clambered awkwardly over each other’s seats toward the stage. A single douchebag might have ruined it, but the folks only wanted to dance. Their daggy, uncoordinated elation was entirely proper: If Pet Sounds is music for pure listening, then surely Wilson’s early 1960s compositions are for partying.

The man himself might not be long for this world, but this music he wrote — every note of it — is timeless.