By Bradley Lau | Underground Mirror
Before I ever saw the Pacific, I knew exactly how it sounded.
It sounded like Surfin’ U.S.A. spinning on my Fisher-Price record player in a sun-bleached subdivision in Brownsville, Texas. It sounded like Pet Sounds, the cassette chirping from my dad’s Ford Bronco as we barreled over the Queen Isabella Causeway toward South Padre Island, top down, the air thick with coconut scent from melting surf wax and the Gulf’s warm breath.
I was eight or nine when my aunt married a lanky surfer who also happened to be a graphic artist. He handed me my first board – a huge purple whale of a longboard I couldn’t carry without dragging the tail – and said, “You’ll grow into it.” He meant the board. But he also meant the life.
And I tried. On Boca Chica’s blue-brown shore breaks down by the jetties I later graduated to a tri-fin, dove tailed short board. On driveway ramps and the coarse sidewalks of South Texas, using Sims skateboards ‘borrowed’ from my uncle’s surf shop. Trying to balance in a world that didn’t quite know what to do with kids California dreaming under mesquite trees and powerlines.
My dad was born in San Diego. He understood. And his best friend from Minnesota, a tape engineer at 3M in the early days of home cassettes, really understood. He was a Brian Wilson completist. A man who believed, sincerely and without irony, that Brian’s falsetto could fix the world.
He’d bring over tapes of the whole catalog, Surfer Girl, Summer Days (and Summer Nights!!), Today!, Friends. Each one a different mix of innocence and ache. He treated The Lonely Sea like scripture. Quoted “Don’t Worry Baby” like gospel. Spoke of Brian Wilson the way other men spoke of Coltrane or Copland.
That stuck.
I didn’t know about the darkness in Brian yet. Not the breakdowns, the sandbox piano, the strange diets or haunted silence. I only knew the sound. The stories. “Catch a wave and you’re sitting on top of the world.” It felt true. So did “Wouldn’t It Be Nice.” So did “Farmer’s Daughter.”
Those harmonies, cleaner than communion, more wistful than prayer, turned our cul-de-sac in Texas into a promised coast. There’s a thing that happens when you’re a kid trying to conjure an identity from the scraps of pop culture. Music can become not just a soundtrack but a blueprint. A map to a version of yourself that hasn’t quite happened yet. Brian Wilson wrote that map.
Brian’s writing didn’t just paint California, it invoked it. His lyrics shimmered with paradox: beaches kissed by anxiety, joy made fragile as foam. He co‑wrote “I Know There’s an Answer”, a confession disguised as pop, “get rid of your libido”, framed in hymnal harmonies. He crafted Good Vibrations over 90 hours in the studio, stitching together pieces of sound and emotion in ways the Beatles would only later dare.
Artists saw it too. Questlove called Brian “the human being who made art out of inexpressible sadness”, a man who made it possible for artists afterward to express pain without apology. Elton John said he was “the biggest influence on my songwriting ever,” a revolutionary whose impact reshaped pop itself. Sean Ono Lennon called him “our American Mozart”, a one‑of‑a‑kind genius from another world. Bob Dylan said simply, “Jesus, that ear. He should donate it to the Smithsonian”.
And once, just once, I saw the Beach Boys perform. Spring Break, South Padre Island, early ’80s. Brian had stopped touring by that time and the band was already halfway to nostalgia, but Brian’s songwriting and spirit was woven into the songs.
I’m older now. The surfboard’s gone. The magazines, the cassettes, all vanished in one garage purge or another. But the ache remains. That shimmer of longing and light Brian perfected.
He gave us a California we could carry inside.
Rest easy, Brian.
We’re still listening.
Still dreaming.
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