A Whimsical World of Vegetables with Brian Douglas Wilson

As some of you may know, I have a bit of a teeny weeny all-consuming obsession with the greatest and weirdest band of all time: the Beach Boys. And especially the greatest and weirdest Beach Boy of them all, their musical leader Brian Wilson.

Many people don't realize that, despite their carefully manicured Mickey Mouse image, this band was really, really messed up. And the deeper down this iceberg you go, the more you're pushed down by the crushing ocean of all the unseen beauties, tragedies, and oddities that comprise their storied career; so you might as well just smile, give up, and let yourself sink peacefully into the inky abyss. 

Hence my creative focus of the past two years: an exhaustive documentary on the legendary what-if album that could have propelled them to supra-Beatles prestige, but whose failure to materialize utterly obliterated all hope of fulfilling their full creative potential. I'm talking about this album:

So far I've completed about 50 minutes out on YouTube now. And I'm currently on part 3 of what promises to be at least a 5 part docuseries. 

And this is all to preface what I'd like to share with you today.

During my research, I came across a really weird short story that Brian Wilson actually wrote for a music magazine in December 1966. This is the original article

Vegetables feature heavily in the story. Brian's friends Michael Vosse and David Anderle feature as living vegetables, as Brian himself tries to find life in a diseased world. Vegetables, you see, were an obsession of Brian's at the time. He would allegedly leave vegetables lying around his house for him and his friends to snack on, or to hand out through his kitchen window. And of course, he recorded an entire love song for vegetables for the SMiLE album. 

Over the course of a month, my fiance Madi let me borrow her watercolor supplies, and I painted 11 illustrations with the idea of making this story into some kind of weird children's book - not for children, surely, but maybe for stoners? I took a lot of advice from Madi because I am not very confident with watercolor, but I feel like with her help, I managed to figure it out pretty well by the end. It ended up being a lot of fun to make!

Without further ado, these are the illustrations, and the story as it appears in my upcoming video. 

Enjoy, and please comment below with your favorite vegetable!