PURE IMAGINATION

Many of those who have had their ears blessed and their hearts touched by pop warhorses like Good Vibrations and God Only Knows—among many other iconic Beach Boys Californian anthems that (mostly) remain as fresh as Laguna Beach’s foamy surf—are now paying their respects and celebrating the artistry of the late Brian Wilson, who died yesterday at the age of 82.

Now, in the S Tier of songs he’s responsible for, I doubt the one I’ve chosen for my own humble tribute would feature anywhere high on the list—and yet, for reasons personal to me, I kind of love it.

One summer, my late father bought Imagination, Wilson’s late-’90s comeback album, and blasted its title track as he set to work on some project at his drawing board. Often, the arrival of a new album would be judged by how much work it inspired on the first, second, and third listens.

Though the album was accused by some critics of sounding overproduced and occasionally falling prey to naff lyrics, music as light and breezy as Wilson’s Imagination still stimulates the creative mind in a way that, to quote Ray Milland in Billy Wilder’s The Lost Weekend, “tosses the sandbags overboard so the balloon can soar.”

What I distinctly remember about this defiantly optimistic album was how it stood in contrast to the mounting lore of Wilson’s mental health struggles and reclusion—mythologised in the press to Peter Green or Stanley Kubrick proportions. Though fleeting shadows of darkness pass over this serene lagoon of boomer pop from time to time, the album mostly resembles pure sunlight, just as it did in the early days of Wilson and The Beach Boys.

However, reprising classic Beach Boys tropes through a wistful lens of nostalgia, the opening number, Your Imagination, does carry a bittersweet innocence, as the clearly wounded Wilson attempts to recreate the long-lost days of childhood and youth—long before the stormy seas of his mind had nearly drowned him in his room.

Perhaps the enduring legacy of Brian Wilson and The Beach Boys lies in their desire to keep singing in a bid to preserve the dream of innocence in a world gone badly wrong. After all, their 1960s California Eden of surfboards and beautiful women was turned into a satanic hellscape by the antithetical Charles Manson (infamously associated with Dennis Wilson)—an association that may have briefly tarnished the band’s clean-cut image but ultimately did little to diminish their immovable legacy on rock ’n’ roll’s Mount Rushmore.

And in that pre-9/11 oasis of the late ’90s, Pure Imagination reminds us that, at the close of the 20th century—at least in the West—civilisation seemed to have navigated its way to calmer shores. Wilson, like America, had been buffeted from one crisis to another, yet somehow still managed to protect something pure through it all.

Another bucket of sand
Another wave and the pier.

Another bucket of sand
Another wave and the pier
I miss the way that I used
To call the shots around here
You know it would've been nice
If I had something to do
I took a trip through the past
And got to spend it with you
You take my hand
Smile and say you don't understand
To look in your eyes
And see what you feel
And then realize that nothing's for real

'Cause you know it's just

Your imagination runnin' wild (runnin', runnin', runnin')
Your imagination runnin' wild (runnin', runnin', runnin', runnin')
Your imagination runnin' wild (runnin', runnin', runnin')