Song of the Day: The Beach Boys, "God Only Knows"

Brian Wilson passed away. I like the Beach Boys fine but have never been super invested in them (though I definitely like them more than Noel Gallagher does). But I wholly acknowledge Wilson’s contributions to pop music, and I don’t think his talent or his influence can be overstated. His life seemed tough and sad and strange, but it also seemed like he had access to joy.

My Beach Boys interest is basic as hell, and though I’d like to flex about loving some deep cut from Holland, the fact is my favorite Beach Boys song is “God Only Knows.” One of the most casually devastating pieces of music ever recorded, “God Only Knows” served as a centerpiece track on the band’s legendary 1966 album Pet Sounds, which was the moment the music started to transcend where they had been but also was the moment things started to crumble (after Pet Sounds, they attempted to make Smile as Wilson’s psyche started to deteriorate as his drug use increased; Wilson was in the wilderness for decades). It's a simple declaration of pain and heartache that begins melancholy and becomes catastrophic as the arrangement expands and the harmonies cascade on top of each other. It’s the sound of trying to square rejection. It’s the sound of falling apart.

I first heard “God Only Knows” during an episode of The Wonder Years called “Heartbreak.” In the middle of the show’s fourth season, Kevin Arnold (Fred Savage) is excited because he gets to spend the whole day on a joint field trip with another school whose attendees include longtime girlfriend Winnie Cooper (Danica McKellar), who moved across town at the end of the previous season. But Kevin’s dreams are dashed when he finds out Winnie has a new boyfriend at her new school, and Kevin is left to contemplate true heartbreak for the first time. The soundtrack to that experience is “God Only Knows.”

I did not watch The Wonder Years. In fact, I’m fairly certain this was the only episode I saw during the show’s entire six season run on ABC. But I can recall the experience of watching this with the visceral clarity of my son’s birth. My family used to spend the earliest part of summer vacation on Cape Cod, where a distant relative rented us a cottage for what I assume was a deep discount. The place itself was nothing special, but we were within walking distance of the beach and there was a lot of room to play outside. There was a small TV in the living room that did not have cable, so we were left with whatever the broadcast networks presented to us in that summer of 1991. I think we watched The Wonder Years simply because it was on, and we didn’t want to watch The Hogan Family or Unsolved Mysteries. (This happened so long ago that Fox didn’t exist yet.)

So I had no real investment in The Wonder Years, but I found myself getting sucked into the story, and by the time Kevin’s heart gets shattered at the end, I was fully devastated. I don’t remember crying, but I have a hard time believing I didn’t, because even know I get kind of choked up watching Fred Savage glumly climb back on the bus as Carl Wilson sings about life going on.

It's an effective scene, but it shouldn’t have been that effective. What did I know of heartbreak? I was nine years old and had just finished the third grade. I was still years away from being broken up with or having a girlfriend or even wanting to spend any time at all with girls. But for whatever reason that song in that context hit me where I lived. (This experience did not emotionally inoculate me: by the time I was in the position to be broken up with, it went poorly.)

It was not unlike another time a song from the ‘60s tore me apart. (I can’t remember precisely when this happened, but I was very much still a child.) My father had a copy of the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band on cassette that I would sometimes pilfer, and I remember lying in bed one night when “She’s Leaving Home” came through my Walkman. That’s another structurally weird, baroque-ish pop song, and even though it’s sung from the perspective of a parent saying goodbye to a child who is making her way in the world, it completely obliterated me. I cried so hard my parents came to check on me, and I couldn’t fathom the emotional devastation of sacrificing a chunk of your life to someone and in the end the best case scenario is they leave you behind. I usually track my emotional instability as manifesting in college, but apparently I’ve been broken (and apparently unable to deal with the idea of being left behind!) since before the Clinton administration.