This is the Worst Trip I've Ever Been On
How Brian Wilson's music contributed to my wanderlust
I didn’t plan to post today but I’d be remiss if I didn’t mark the passing of Brian Wilson and reflect on the impact his music has always had on me as a traveler.
Just nine more days and he would have seen the sun of another summer. But passing on one of the longest days of the year will have to suffice. Does the solstice even matter in the passing of the person who created the sound of endless summer?
Since I was a little kid, nothing has set my imagination on fire the way music does. I was born in 1972 into a family entrenched in car culture so, despite being firmly landlocked in the Midwest, The Beach Boys were a frequent soundtrack.
Music and travel are firmly connected in my life. Pre-Walkman, I still found ways to bring music on the road with me. I think I was 13 or 14 when I discovered that blasting my headphones while looking out the backseat window and letting my imagination run was just about the best feeling in the world. Now I do that with planes.
When I wrote earlier this week about my childhood L.A. dreams, I didn’t mention that many of them sprouted from the seeds planted by a copy of Endless Summer I stole from my older cousin when I was around seven or eight years old. Yeah, I also had access to my mom’s copy of Sgt. Pepper’s, and I loved it, but it didn’t have the spark and joy and relatability of The Beach Boys.
They sounded like magic because Wilson created music that sounded like nothing that preceded or followed. Golden and kinetic, with the bright sunshine harmonies and a bass rumble like an engine taking off just under the surface, The Beach Boys painted a world that was so different from mine, full of joy and fun.
Learning as an adult about Wilson’s mental struggles that mirror my own in some ways just made the dream that much more powerful. Of course he knew terror and melancholy. He couldn’t have needed to create a world of joyous sound to inhabit otherwise.
While the California surfing and beachy songs put my imagination to work, I related to the car songs. As I said, I grew up in car culture. My dad drove a souped-up GTO, which my mom thought was pretty cool. She’d see him when she was cruising the strip in Sedalia, Missouri on weekend nights. Illegal drag racing might have been involved.
By day my dad drove a delivery truck for a dairy and my mom was a secretary in a building across the street from the dairy’s loading dock. On a hot summer day, my dad met my mom at her car after work with a box of Popsicles and introduced himself.
Robin Wheeler, brought to you by Pontiac and Popsicles!
I’ve often said that my life was a Bruce Springsteen song before I was even conceived. Today, I realize it was just as much a Beach Boys song.
My dad loves cars, and cars are meant for going places. So we went places, always by car. I’ve heard two stories about taking my first steps. One of them claims it happened in a motel in Kansas on the way to Colorado.
I was two the first time I went to New Orleans. By car, of course. The GTO had been sold long before that, and the GTX that followed got totaled when my mom was pregnant. A Buick the color of champagne had to do.
When I was 14 I learned how to drive on the country road that led to my grandparents’ house. I already had my brain on a dream car: the 1965 Ford Mustang convertible in Twilight Turquoise.
I’d been told my parents wouldn’t be buying a car for me when I turned 16, possibly because of the all-consuming case of wanderlust I already had.
Regardless, a few days before I turned 16, my parents sent me to the barn to see the newborn kittens our barn cat had birthed.
There were no kittens, but there was a pony…
A Mustang. Red bow and all.
A 1980 Mustang.
A four-cylinder.
Automatic transmission.
With a carburetor that was prone to falling off in the middle of intersections.
I loved that car with all my heart, though, despite the number of times it tried to kill me. That weekend before my sixteenth birthday, my best friend Brian and I drove it in circles for hours in the open field behind my parents’ house. And then, when I finally got my driver’s license on the third try, I became a regular on the same strip my parents had cruised.
I made it about six months before I bought Endless Summer on cassette so I could listen to it while driving, often with six to eight of my friends crammed into the car, all of us caterwauling along to “I Get Around” and “Good Vibrations,” coming nowhere near a Beach Boys pristine harmony, but thrilling at our first taste of freedom courtesy of American automotive ingenuity.
The Mustang never went on any road trips, as I was promised immediate death if I left town in it. But we clocked plenty of hours on the strip along with an uncountable number of drives, lost in the flat rural plains, just driving and listening and dreaming of the places I would maybe, someday, go.
That’s at the core of who I am, and it’s the same thing I found in Brian Wilson’s music. The power to go. The power to dream, and create a world where I’m free. And that the freedom comes from the same human union and connection required to build a beautiful harmony that I feel deep in my sternum when I sing along.
If I must say goodbye to Brian Wilson, I’m saying goodbye with the sounds that informed this seven-year-old girl about who she would someday be.
Oh that 65 Mustang convertible is a gorgeous beast. My high school best friend’s brother had one. We popped it in neutral, coasted it down the road far enough to start it without him hearing us for a few late night cruises.