I & THOU
DENNIS WILSON’S PACIFIC BLUE OCEAN + MARTIN BUBER
EPISODE 24 MUSIC IN PHASE SPACE
Thanks to Ryan Leas. I have used parts of his Stereogum Review for this
PACIFIC OCEAN BLUE
After several attempts, starting in 1970, to realize his own project, some of which made it to the finished album, Wilson recorded the bulk of Pacific Ocean Blue in the months spanning the fall of 1976 to the following spring, at the Beach Boys’ own Brother Studios. At the time of recording, Dennis’ hard living had begun affecting his looks and more importantly his singing voice, which now delivered grainy and rough, yet still deeply soulful, vocals.
“This was when he fully accepted himself as an artist. Brian had shown him chords on the piano, but as he’d become more proficient the music that came forth was not derivative of that. Having his own studio helped tremendously. With a little encouragement, and the right tools, Dennis took off.”
The context surrounding Pacific Ocean Blue is full of darkness. Like his elder brother, Dennis Wilson was a tortured character. He was the partier of the group, the one who lived the rock ’n’ roll lifestyle. He was a charmer who was also prone to fits of rage. There was the episode in the ’60s where Wilson was buddies with Charles Manson before he realized something wasn’t right, going as far as trying to help Manson get a record deal. The partying turned to ravaging alcoholism eventually. Wilson died by drowning in 1983, when he was just 39. He had been working on a follow-up to Pacific Ocean Blue, set to be titled Bambu, in the span of those six years. It remained unfinished when he died, making Pacific Ocean Blue the only solo record to his name.
When all ‘directions’ fail there arises in the darkness over the abyss the one true direction of man, towards the creative Spirit.
Martin Buber
Martin Buber wrote I and Thou as a series of aphorisms that serves to the concern: that people in modern society have lost touch with the genuine mode of encountering others in favor of an analytical mode of experiencing the world. What he calls the mode of experience engages the world by collecting data through our senses, analyzing and classifying that data, and then developing theories about it. When we experience something or someone in this mode, we treat that thing or person as a mere object. A traditional philosophical essay echoes the mode of experience. By writing instead in a more poetic style, Buber hoped to awaken a fundamental appreciation of what he calls the mode of encounter, which is opposed to logic and reason.
Nietzsche’s famous dictum, “God is dead.” Often forgets its addendum: “And we have killed him.” The problem of Enlightenment, as Buber saw it, was that it tried to carve out a place for Higher consciousness within a new, rational understanding of the world. By doing so, these philosophers made God or the Higher consciousness into an abstract principle whose function was to serve as a basis for rationality itself. Higher consciousness had lost any human-like features, and we had lost any way of personally relating to ourselves.
When Pacific Ocean Blue came out in ’77, it was met with critical praise but only modest commercial success. Then, over time, it became something of a lost cult classic. It was out of print for years and Wilson was dead: Between those factors, it seemed a piece of ephemera left decades behind. Upon its reissue in 2008, its stature rose to some extent. But, like the Beach Boys themselves, Pacific Ocean Blue still feels outside of the main narratives.
Part of the reason Pacific Ocean Blue may not feel as if it belongs anywhere is the fact that it sounds almost completely removed from the legacy of the Beach Boys. That darkness that ran through Wilson’s life? That’s woven into the album. He’s only 33 on the cover, but looks like a weathered, middle-aged man. His voice sounds nothing like the clean harmonies of the Beach Boys, but is rather a ragged, soulful growl or rasp through much of the record. Musically, you could sort of link it to ’70s singer-songwriters or ’70s soft rock, but the whole thing has a lived-in, dusty quality that feels like an idiosyncratic interpretation of rock tropes.
Despite its brisk 37-minute running time, the album plays like a sprawling late-‘70s classic. Across 12 tracks, Wilson shifted moods and styles constantly. There are melancholic ballads throughout, like the elegiac “Farewell My Friend” or “End Of The Show.” There’s the sun-fried funk of “Dreamer” and “Pacific Ocean Blues” and the simple, yearning beauty of “Rainbows,” which functions as a moment of resolution and brightness after an album that’s more often steeped in sadness. There’s the stunning opener, “River Song,” a track that has what should be too many sections and ideas for three minutes and 44 seconds, and yet pulls it off, coming together into a compact saga that feels gigantic, stacked with memorable melodies and driven by a dramatic ebb and flow.
If Higher consciousness exists, it would be a mere thing, a tool for humans to use in their investigations of the world and of themselves, and we would engage Higher consciousness through the mode of experience. According to Buber, Nietzsche is correct that such a Higher consciousness or God is dead; in fact, He or it could not be alive in any meaningful way.
Buber shows that spiritual engagement is achieved through the mode of encounter and serves as a model to develop an antidote to the alienation that modern society engenders in human beings. The religious core of I and Thou came from Buber’s interest in Hasidic Judaism. Hasidism stressed a personal dialogue with Higher consciousness through prayer, ritual, and ecstatic song and dance. For Buber, Hasidism showed that in a society where secular acts could become sacred, all people and all activities could be equally holy.
“When we approach our daily activities through the mode of encounter, in other words, we can build communities that meld our existential endeavors and our spiritual inclinations.”
So, it is not surprising that rock ’n’ roll records could have a spiritual connection if they take us out of our ordinary mode of experience and direct us to the mode of encounter.
At least as far back as I Just wasn’t Made For This Times , Beach Boys’s songs have addressed this alienation that comes from engaging the world through the mode of experience and the search for a more fulfilling mode of being in the world.
On the song’s meaning, Wilson stated
“It’s about a guy who was crying out because he thought he was too advanced, and that he’d eventually have to leave people behind. All my friends thought I was crazy to do Pet Sounds.”
Brain Wilson
In reviewer Donald A. Guercio’s interpretation:
“The lyrics are a first-person chronicle of disillusionment from a narrator who, despite being intelligent, can’t find a place where he can comfortably feel like a part of the world.”
On the relationship between words and music, Guercio elaborates:
“The music brings the despair of the lyrics to life with a melody that is lovely and pained all at once: The verses rise and fall in a way that accentuates the yearning tone of the lyrics, and the chorus rapidly accelerates to soaring melodic heights before crashing back down to perfectly capture the song’s churning emotions. … Wilson’s pained lead vocal is contrasted with layers of anguished harmonies on the chorus. Its instrumentation is similarly powerful, weaving harpsichord and theremin into a spooky orchestral tapestry, and powerful drumming wrings the maximum dramatic punch from each chorus.”
When we live in a cruel world full of unconcerned caregivers, backstabbing businessmen, and self-absorbed politicians, we add bricks to the walls that simultaneously protect and isolate us from them. In other words, in the modern world of commerce, war, and manufactured existence, we find people unconnected with each other who look out only for themselves instead of seeking relationships that stress the full dialogue of two beings engaged in the mode of encounter. ”
These two modes of experience and of encounter correspond to what Buber calls the basic words I-It and I-You. When I engage things and people in the mode of experience they become ‘Its’. I understand objects and people as instrumental for achieving some purpose. The cashier at the record store or the worker at Amazon.com is useful for getting the stuff I ordered. The teacher at school is useful for obtaining information and receiving a grade. My car is useful for getting me from place to place. In any case, I don’t get beyond the surface of Its. I understand them as members of a class, as belonging to a particular intellectual category. So there’s a necessary distance between the experiencing I and the experienced It. As well, I do not experience the It in the present because I experience it through my understanding of its particular temporal and spatial place in the world, an understanding that is fundamentally tied up with the categories and judgments I previously made. Thus, the I-It is a monologue.
On the other hand, the I-You encounter is understood as a dialogue between the two participants fully engaged in the present moment. When I engage things and people in an I-You encounter, I know the You with my whole being through an unmediated relation, not with my senses, my intellectual categories, or my judgments. In other words, there are no conceptual constraints or expectations separating the I from the You:
When I confront a human being as my You, and speak the basic word I-You to him, then he is no thing among things nor does he consist of things. He is no longer He or She, limited by other Hes or Shes, a dot in the world grid of space and time, nor a condition that can be experienced or described, a loose bundle of named qualities. Neighborless and seamless, he is You and fills the firmament. Not as if there were nothing but he; but everything else lives in his light.
(I and Thou, p. 59)
The I-You relation stresses the mutual, holistic, and dialogical existence of two beings. Perhaps the clearest expression in Beach Boys’s lyrics of this dialogue comes in “Pacific Ocean Blue.
When I treat you as an It, I degrade myself: I, too, become a mere thing. But when I treat you as a You, I am enriched in my own being. It is only in the mode of encounter that I am transformed and become fully human. “Relation is reciprocity. My You acts on me as I act on it”
(I and Thou, p. 67
The I-You encounter is best explained as love. But not love as most people understand the concept. For Buber, love is not an internal feeling. Rather, love is a situation in which we live, and which transforms our entire perception of the world. When I love someone, I see that person as completely unique and irreplaceable, and I see that love bridging any distance between us and somehow completing myself.
Buber shows that the desire for encounter is basic to human beings. When we look at languages of some pre-technological cultures, we see that they focus on relations between humans, rather than on categorical distinctions and isolated objects as we see in modern society. We say ‘far away’; the Zulu has a sentence-word instead that means: ‘where one cries, “mother, I am lost.”’ And the Fuegian surpasses our analytical wisdom with a sentence-word of seven syllables that literally means:
‘they look at each other, each wanting for the other to offer to do that which both desire but neither wishes to do’.”
(I and Thou, pp. 69–70)
In regard to child development, Buber traces our need for encounter back to the perfect reciprocity of the womb, where there is no separation between the mother and the child, and the womb is the entire universe for the fetus. From the moment of birth we long for some such similar immediate and all encompassing encounter, a desire that Buber calls the innate You. Languages and child development show that encounter is actually the primary human state, and our need to relate is a result of how we enter the world.
But the mode of encounter itself is always fleeting: any You will inevitable degenerate into an It as soon as I become aware of the encounter and begin to reflect on it. Any loved-one will become an It as soon as he or she is seen, for example, as beautiful, energetic, or green-eyed. Buber does not want to suggest that love cannot endure. Rather, what we call love is
“a continual oscillation between encounter and experience. “
Modern society is structured to direct us away from encounter and toward experience. The project of human culture has been steadily to improve our experience of the world. Modern science and technology, not to mention philosophy, direct us to see everyone and everything as an object to be understood intellectually and to be used for practical purposes to support our own well-being and happiness. Governments, economic systems, schools, and sometimes even the institution of marriage are built up out of I-It relations with the great cost that,
“the improvement of the capacity for experience and use generally involve a decrease in man’s power to relate”
(p. 92).
Max Horkheimer in Eclipse of Reason, had concerns similar to Buber’s. Horkheimer claims that since the Enlightenment, thinking has degenerated into what he calls “instrumental reason,” the subjective application of self-interest to all situations so as to promote technical efficiency. In the realm of politics, for example, candidates and elected officials treat their constituents and contributors as things to get them elected or keep them in office. Constituents, contributors, and lobbyists view elected officials as things to provide services or favors. In the work place, personnel have become human resources — understood not as genuine Yous to be honored and respected, but merely as replaceable Its waiting to be mined from the applicant pool. Of course, employers are just a means to obtaining a paycheck, itself only a means to obtaining both necessities and trivialities.
In the It-world, the I and the It become separated from each other into “two neatly defined districts: institutions and feelings.” We make a distinction between what is out there and what is in us. We feel trapped by the external institutions that we understand as forces beyond our control. Taken together, the forces of modern society function as an uncaring and inescapable apparatus. For Buber, the only way to keep the thin ice of modern life from cracking under our feet is to focus on I-You relations. But the mode of encounter is risky. It should not surprise us that the punishment for “Showing feelings of an almost human nature” is to tear down the wall and “to be exposed before / Your peers.” In the comfortable world of experience, very little is more frightening than to open oneself to the full reciprocity of encountering each other.
When I love, I make myself vulnerable to rejection and loss. In any case, I must drop all pretense, lower my defenses, and remove my masks in order to be fully open to the genuine dialogue of the I-You relation. I must bare my naked feelings and tear down the walls I have built in the It-world. Although those walls keep me safe and secure in the predictable I-It mode of experience, they simultaneously block my access to an encounter with the You.
More importantly for Buber, they block my access to an encounter with Higher consciousness, what he calls the eternal You.
Buber claims that a relation with Higher consciousness is important because the eternal You will not degenerate into an It, since Higher consciousness cannot be intellectually comprehended or qualified. My relation with the eternal You goes beyond the typical I-You encounter in that it is fully inclusive. For entering into the pure relationship does not involve ignoring everything but seeing everything in the You, not renouncing the world but placing it upon its proper ground. (I and Thou, p. 127) It’s not just Higher consciousness but also His entire creation with whom I relate.
Buber claims that the encounter with the eternal You is the only way to transform modern society from an It-world into an ideal community that functions in the mode of encounter. Not just individuals, but hierarchies, authorities are capable of rehabilitation.” Still, this decision to leave behind the world of experience is frightening because the world of encounter is intellectually incomprehensible and utterly beyond my control.
With all its risks and sacrifices, the I-You encounter is essential. While it is true that we can live entirely immersed in the safe, secure, and predictable I-It mode of experience, experience alone keeps us separated from what makes us fully human.
THE ETERNAL YOU
Again, the encounter with the eternal You is not an end in itself. We know that we have been met by Higher consciousness because we have been transformed and find ourselves filled with a loving responsibility for the whole of creation, a responsibility that arises not out of obligation but from a genuine desire. It promises a new society based on the I-You mode of encounter.
ROCK’N ROLL AS ART
Art is a way for us to get beyond ourselves and our ordinary mode of experience, as a way to reclaim our fundamental humanity. Our engaging a with Rock and Roll, either as creator or perceiver, can approximate the full reciprocity of the mode of encounter. The inspiration for the work of art is often a mystery even for the artist. Michelangelo’s claim that when carving a statue he was merely releasing the forms already present in the blocks of marble parallels Buber’s notion that a work of art emerges when a human being confronts a form that wants to become a work through him . . .
What is required is a deed that a man does with his whole being: if he commits it and speaks with his being the basic word to the form that appears, then the creative power is released and the work comes into being.
(I and Thou, p. 60)
Once it’s out, of course, an album is a thing in the world, capable of being experienced and analyzed as an It. I can follow the notes on a musical score or analyze the shapes and colors in a painting. But I can also encounter the work of art as a You. The work can “speak to me” or move me emotionally. In fact, our initial engagement with a work of art is usually in the mode of encounter. We relate to it first as a whole, not as a collection of analyzable qualities, and get lost in the song or image. Only later do we engage it in the mode of experience.
“Even a melody is not composed of tones, nor a verse of words, nor a statue of lines — one must pull and tear to turn a unity into a multiplicity . . .”
(I and Thou, p. 59).
There is No Pacific Ocean Blue Really. Matter of Fact It’s All Dark
There’s no question in my mind that Pacific Ocean Blue it’s a complete “experience” in terms of Buber’s ideal of a reciprocal relationship. We encounter Pacific Ocean Blue as a You that resists degenerating into an It.
“It’s driven by emotion; there’s nothing plastic about it.
That’s something that characterizes Pacific Ocean Blue as a whole: These are songs that often take surprising turns, seemingly straightforward initially or on the surface but veering into a new melodic idea suddenly, like the way the airy “Time” ruptures into a maddened conclusion of percussive horns and piano or how the world-weary sound of “Moonshine” changes gears for one of the only Beach Boys-esque moments on the album, an outro of harmonies that works like a salve amidst the album’s moodier tones. Almost every song feels bigger than its running time, which altogether makes for an album that feels like an epic despite (or perhaps because of) its tight editing.
Here’s the funny thing about the album: It’s actually reminiscent of the Beach Boys mythos, in its weird way. Written by the guy who actually lived a (wild) version of the life the band depicted, it’s naturally an album that feels influenced by life on the coast, life on the water. Whether in “River Song” — where Wilson sings, “It breaks my heart/ To see the city” — or on “Pacific Ocean Blues,” there’s an ecological bent to plenty of his songs and lyrics. But like everything about him as a figure and about the album, there’s a more haunted undertone, hearing his paeans to this life with the knowledge that it would eventually be the sea that would take him away.
Similarly, Pacific Ocean Blue is totally a summer album, just in a completely different way than the Beach Boys made summer music. It’s far from the fun, easygoing image of kids and cars at the beach. It’s like a broken-down, beleaguered sound for lonely, depressive times under a glaring sun.
“Dreamer” heaves forward, groaning into existence as if taking a cruise on a day of suffocating humidity. All of Pacific Ocean Blue’s ballads could soundtrack solitary, drunk walks home in the middle of a summer night. In fact, that’s a quality that runs through almost the entire album — as if you could picture Wilson alone and inebriated on the beach remembering things once romanticized, a seasickness flowing through those strange left turns so many of the songs take. In that way, it’s almost like an answer to the Beach Boys mythos, or at least for the way Wilson lived it himself. If you draw a line from early Beach Boys to 1977, Pacific Ocean Blue is the sound of those childhood dreams damaged, fractured, coming apart at the seams.
Maybe it didn’t sound quite that severe in 1977. Pacific Ocean Blue, worn as it feels, is also a strikingly well-written and consistently pretty album. The hindsight, knowing that Wilson would spend six long years struggling to finish another album while battling his alcoholism and then would die at far too young an age, colors the experience of the album. It makes the elegiac parts that much more elegiac; the melancholic parts feel like foreshadowing and guitar groove that both forces you to move and sounds like it’s in the process of falling apart at the same time it’s coming alive.
All of these distinctions make it a perfect document of the late ’70s, of the ’60s greats and the promise of their decade running to ground. It’s the sound of the long hangover, of excess and its tolls exhaled into a disenchanted atmosphere. It came out the same year as Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours, but it has more in common with their 1979 release Tusk in that way. These are the big, blown-out end games of stories that began 10 or 15 years before, the idealistic dream of the counterculture giving way to all of the sex and drugs and subsequent comedown.
It comes from a place that’s very far away from the stories the Beach Boys told in their earliest days, but it’s also the thematic extension, the real conclusion. It comes from a place that’s well beyond the loss of innocence, trying to parse everything that came after. It’s steeped in elegy — for Wilson himself, for the fabricated Golden Coast dream of the Beach Boys, for their era and generation. Pacific Ocean Blue is more than that. It was a flare-up of artistic genius, a work that’s rugged and heartbreaking in equal measure, a work that is still evocative and overwhelming four decades later.
