Music recently lost two greats: Sly Stone and Brian Wilson

I've been crazy busy, but I feel I must join, if belatedly, in commemorating two brilliant artists we lost recently, both of whom profoundly affected the course of pop music in the 1960s, a time when I was especially attuned to it.

I first heard "Everyday People" by Sly and the Family Stone sometime during my second year of law school, probably on WBCN, then Boston's "underground" FM rock station. It grabbed me for its sound, a bold blend of the principal styles of Black pop music at the time: R&B, funk, and soul. Some writers claim it also incorporates "psychedelica." I don't hear it, though it may be true of some of the group's other songs.

What most caught my attention, and admiration, were the lyrics. Unlike most male pop singers, Sly began, not with a boast or a statement of despair, but with humility: "Sometimes I'm right, I can be wrong./ My own beliefs are in my song." In the next verse he made the statement everyone remembers: "Different strokes for different folks!" He begins the next, and also the final verse with a plea: "We've got to live together!"

It's a song as meaningful and relevant today as it was in 1968.

The Beach Boys rode a wave of popularity in that began in 1963 when "Surfin' USA" reached number three on the Billboard chart . Like much rock and roll, the song drew directly on Black roots. The music is credited to Chuck Berry, as it uses the tune of his "Sweet Little Sixteen", slightly arranged by the co-credited Brian Wilson, who wrote the lyrics with assistance from his cousin and fellow Beach Boy Mike Love.

"Surfin' USA" began a series of hits, almost all of which were written or co-written by Brian, that glorified two prominent aspects of Southern California teenage culture: surfing and cars. These were mostly songs by and about guys; "Surfer Girl" and "Car Crazy Cutie" were among the exceptions. The songs celebrated "manly" virtues such as fearlessness in the face of monster waves and keeping cool in a hotly contested drag race. 

The song I chose to feature in the clip above, "Don't Worry Baby," released in 1964, shows Brian turning from the macho pose of his earlier songs, and showing vulnerability. It begins with his protagonist having vague misgivings - "Well it's been building up inside me/ For oh I don't know how long" - but his girlfriend provides comfort and reassurance - "Don't worry baby/ Everything will turn out alright." Then we learn the specific reason for his anxiety:

"I guess I should've kept my mouth shut/ When I started to brag about my car/ But I can't back down now/ Because I pushed the other guys too far"

His  big mouth has led to his being challenged to a race. Does his girlfriend beg him to ignore the challenge and not race? No way:

"She told me baby, when you race today/ Just take along my love for you/ And if you knew how much I loved you/ Baby nothing could go wrong with you"

Was she right? Did he survive, even win, the race? So it seems, although the song doesn't tell us. After all, he's a narrator still around to tell the story. Moreover, the optimistic feeling of the song convinces us that he didn't suffer the sad fate of Tommy in Ray Peterson's "Tell Laura I Love Her."

I was surprised to learn that the lyrics of "Don't Worry Baby" aren't exclusively Brian's. The title, and chorus, are his, as is the general story line. He was inspired by the Ronettes' hit, "Be My Baby." Working off this, possibly with inspiration from his girlfriend Marilyn Rovell, who later became his first wife, he got the title, "Don't Worry, Baby" and the general idea for a story line, along with the chorus. He gave this to his frequent collaborator Roger Christian, who presented Brian with lyrics in a parking lot. Brian took them home and composed the music. 

That Brian's songs were almost all the products of collaborations doesn't, in my view, diminish his status as a genius. If anything, I think, it improves it. His ability to envision a song's concept and to find an ideal collborator - Christian being a natural for car songs as he was a racing enthusiast who earned the monicker "poet of the strip" - speaks to his brilliance.

Sly Stone photo: Sarfatims, CC BY 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

Brian Wilson photo: IthakaDarinPappas, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons