By: Jeff Hassay

Watching Brian Wilson sing songs about surfing, love and California at the Hollywood Bowl, accompanied by a large band of over a dozen spot-on musicians and an entire symphony orchestra is somewhat akin to watching Zeus throw lightning bolts from the sun-drenched clouds of Mt. Olympus. It is lovely. Maybe that’s why by the end of the show when actual fireworks lit up the warm Los Angeles sky most of the audience took it as an inevitable given; An evening of this level of shining wonder would need fireworks or maybe endless spewing rainbows to adequately come to an end.

Wilson offered little variation from Friday to Sunday night, most notably was the addition of “Do It Again” and a cover of “Johnny B Good” both in the latter show. He seemed a little more at ease on Sunday, having two days of performances to clam his once crippling stage fright that kept him away from performing for decades. Friday night played like a rehearsal. After finishing a pristine “Good Vibrations” Wilson got up and hurriedly walked offstage in the Frankenstein-meets-Ozzy Osborne way that he awkwardly moves his body nowadays only to have a singer go and fetch him back for another five songs. Sunday saw a looser (well, slightly) Wilson who even engaged in some banter with the audience, dedicated a song to the victims of Hurricane Ike and he ad-libbed something that I found slightly profound. After coming back from a break between sets, Wilson said “We’re back officially.” What an odd but simple sentence.

The set started with two songs from Wilson’s new album “Lucky Old Sun” and ended with another one. In between was all Beach Boys gold, usually delving way back in the catalogue. Sadly no solo material was played as Wilson sometimes did on his previous Smile tour (most notably was a gorgeous version of “Love and Mercy” a song that is still a monster hit in some alternate, perfect universe). The audience was in it from the get go, favoring “Sloop John B,” “Catch a Wave” and a firework laden aurally orgasmic “I Get Around” my favorite, though, was the impossibly beautiful “Surfer Girl.” The song is a wonder of simplicity and earnestness, Wilson’s voice shimmered and the accompaniment of Beach Boys background harmonies was flawless. There is a moment of awe at the end of the song where the vocals become falsettos calling in a shrill of ecstasy “…little one, little one...” It is magic on record but live with pitch-perfect bandmates picking up the chant the song was lifted—there was a vortex that opened bleeding some other, newer dimension of spine-tingling happiness. I’m kind of a neurotic sissy but at those two moments, Friday and Sunday night, I no longer feared death.