Meet Brian Wilson’s Secret Weapon: Darian Sahanaja
Darian Sahanaja has been Brian Wilson’s keyboardist and musical director ever since the Beach Boy returned to the road as a solo artist in 1999, but some nights he still looks around the stage and can barely believe what he’s a part of. “It can be mind-blowing,” he says. “If we’re playing ‘God Only Knows’ and I look around and see Brian and my buddies Probyn [Gregory] and Nick [Walusko] I can just lose it thinking about how we’re all here because of this music.”
Sahanaja has been a huge Beach Boys and Brian Wilson fan ever since he first heard “I Get Around” on Los Angeles radio as an adolescent in the mid-1970s. “It blew my mind,” he says. “I thought it was a current song, so I was surprised to hear it was 10 years old. The first record I bought with my own money was [the 1974 Beach Boys hits compilation] Endless Summer. I was like, ‘Oh my God! I can own this music and play it any time I want?'”
As he got older, Sahanaja read the David Leaf book The Beach Boys and the California Myth and immersed himself in Pet Sounds and other post-surf-song compositions by the band. “I knew about Smile as this mythical, unfinished album,” he says. “Then in the early 1980s little snippets of the album started to leak. When I met Nick Walusko, who I formed the Wondermints with, one of the first things we bonded over was Smile bootlegs. We got to know [music historian] Domenic Priore and a small group of us became the Smile intelligentsia of that period.”
It was another 10 years until Sahanaja finally crossed paths with Wilson. His band the Wondermints were playing a Brian Wilson charity tribute show in Los Angeles on a bill with Alex Chilton and Apples in Stereo when the man himself showed up unexpectedly backstage. “We were playing his song ‘This Whole World,'” says Sahanaja. “Apparently he perked up and was like, ‘Who is that? What is that? It sounds amazing.’ Somebody had to remind him it was a song he actually wrote since he had forgotten about it.”
They met briefly backstage, and upon the urging of legendary L.A. DJ Rodney Bingenheimer, Brian agreed to let Sahanaja and the Wondermints back him on a couple of radio shows, and a few years later when Wilson agreed to tour in support of his solo disc Imagination Sahanaja and the Wondermints got the gig. “It was surreal and a bit nerve-racking at first,” he says. “He’s very fragile. I was concerned he wasn’t going to make it through a whole song, let alone a show. During those first few shows I remember thinking, ‘This is gonna be the one where he bolts after a song.’ But he made it through the next one and the next one. Before I knew it, we had a mini-tour in our pockets. We were so thrilled.”
“As a teenager I refused to see the Beach Boys because Brian wasn’t playing with them. I was a little snob.”
The tour was a huge success, and before Sahanaja knew it, he was touring the world with Brian playing the entirety of Pet Sounds night after night. Things got even more surreal in early 2004 when Wilson decided to resurrect Smile, with Sahanaja serving as his right-hand man on the ambitious project. The former Smile junkie now had access to the every second of archival tape from the aborted album in pristine audio quality, and eventually the album’s original lyricist Van Dyke Parks joined them. “The whole thing was mind-blowing,” he says. “But it’s like that old superhero thing: with great power comes great responsibility.”