IN the annals of rock improbability, Brian Wilson making such exciting music at the age of 66 surely rates with an athletic Mick Jagger taking the Stones on tour, apparently permanently.
And what about the irony of those great melodic duelists of the '60s -- McCartney and Wilson -- completing albums that reflect on the remarkable trajectory of their lives?
But while McCartney's Memory Almost Full is a touch mournful, the tragic Beach Boy -- sent mad, literally, by McCartney's effortless genius in 1967 -- records this glorious and uplifting tribute to his sun-splashed city.
He may as well finish as he started. The surfin' safari began in September, 1962, a month before the Beatles dented the charts. They traded blows unevenly thereafter. It was an unfair contest -- Lennon, McCartney and producer George Martin versus the fragile Wilson, eventually consigned to a sandpit in the studio.
Sergeant Pepper's did him in and he mentally imploded working on Smile months later with the equally gifted Van Dyke Parks.
That 37 years later they could so magnificently and victoriously realise Smile meant the dark years were behind Wilson.
And in Going Home he utters surely the most pungently accurate autobiographical assessment in rock: "At 25 I turned out the light, coz I couldn't handle the glare in my tired eyes, but now I'm back drawing shades of kind blue skies."
Wilson's interpretation of Louis Armstrong's 1949 hit That Lucky Old Sun acts merely as the peg on which to hang vignettes of his life and his losses, including his dreams of his brothers on Midnight's Another Day. Nonetheless, the album is a hopeful encounter with his fate and what may lie after, and perhaps his finest moment since 1971's 'Til I Die.
Wilson still sounds wounded, but not doleful and there is a childlike sweetness to many of the sentiments here and even some of the simpler lyrics, as on Oxygen to the Brain.
Growing in confidence, Wilson has relied less on Parks this time around, but I'll eat my hat, and yours, if Parks didn't construct the witty California Role and engineer its scratchy 78 shellac feel.
It describes the undimmed confidence and opportunity that continue to define southern California, where there's a home and hope for everyone -- even a rolled gold nutcase like Brian Wilson.
And thank God for that.
Album title: That Lucky Old Sun
(Capitol/EMI)
Rating: 5/5
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