Most – including the writer of this opinion piece - listen to music in the way they watch football. They don’t hear the important, truly cerebral things in music in much the same way that they don’t see the truly important, cerebral things in football.
Listening to the Beach Boys, it was easy to assume the music was the simplistic creation of the sun and fun it celebrated.
Only for the various Beach Boys documentaries and books to come out over the decades. It turned out Wilson wasn’t just a peer of other musicians, he was a much-revered peer. In the 1985 documentary The Beach Boys: An American Band, people like Paul McCartney were at a birthday party of Wilson’s caught on film. Wilson was viewed as a genius, and musical types would explain the genius by dissecting the myriad musical flourishes that went into Beach Boy songs.
The Wrecking Crew was arguably the best book account of Wilson’s remarkable mind. It turns out Wilson despised touring, so eventually he worked out a deal with the band whereby he would stay behind to write songs and make music while they played the music before big audiences. The Wrecking Crew was the group of savant-like studio musicians that weren’t pretty enough to be on stage, but who knew and loved to create music in the way that Wilson did.
Which is where Adam Smith comes in. With The Wealth of Nations, Smith didn’t invent “capitalism.” Capitalism wasn’t even a word yet, since Karl Marx hadn’t yet been born. In Smith’s case, he was reporting on people producing with an eye on getting, and frequently dividing up labor with others with an eye on getting much more.
That is almost surely why Smith led off his book with the famous pin factory. It explained so much. One man working alone could maybe produce one pin per day, but several men working together in specialized fashion could produce tens of thousands of pins.
Wilson intuitively grasped this truth. His specialty was writing music, followed by coordinating all manner of musicians and instruments on the way to enormously complicated songs that sounded easy to the untrained ear.
What’s important is that Wilson couldn’t have written and produced the songs that he did if he was expected to be on the road all the time. Work divided solved the problem. Particularly after hearing Rubber Soul by the Beatles, and concluding in depressed, devastated fashion that the Beatles’ so-called “concept album” had left his Beach Boys band hopelessly and perhaps forever behind, Wilson knew he had to get out of the tour busses and concert venues that were keeping him out of the studio.
The result of this division of labor was of course Pet Sounds. Free to fully specialize, Wilson created his masterpiece. That’s why Smith would have found Wilson a good subject had they lived at the same time. Work divided didn’t impoverish Wilson in zero sum fashion, it propelled him.
It was said somewhere that Good Vibrations, the single that followed the 1966 release of Pet Sounds, was the most expensive single ever made. There was Wilson yet again combining all sorts of instruments and their players into a song that could never have been produced alone.
Like Smith, Wilson knew that people weren’t a cost, or a job taken, they were an input without which progress would grind to a halt. It’s something to think about now for sure, but realistically always.
