How a band you never heard then disappeared
The Wondermints story, it’s the stuff of a rock novel of questionable quality. Two high school friends form a band. Out of their love of the music. They earn some success. They get a big break. Then on the cusp of the band taking a giant next step, they disappear. Fans outside their circle are left to wonder why the band is no more (which becomes a mystery to unravel) and what the world would have been like had they stayed together (which will remain a mystery but the speculation is so much fun!).
That’s a loose recounting of the Wondermints story. So loose of a recounting that it doesn’t quite feel accurate. Their story has less drama and more happiness than a rock novel of questionable quality. It’s a good news story that involves the Beach Boys and Generation X. It’s a meh news story in that the band never achieved success beyond their immediate scene, although that, too, may be a blessing. The Wondermints disappeared in a most Wondermints kind of way: in plain sight. Shine a light on them, and they’re still there. New music from the band called Wondermints after 2002 is not.
For context, let’s travel back in time to deep in prehistory, then early and late in the band’s career.
A half billion years ago
The place to start with the band’s music is a half billion years ago and a song called “Proto-Pretty.” The song itself is just 30 years old and begins with a swirling 12-string lick that sounds like it doesn’t know where it’s going — like a lost roller coaster car — then every quick turn makes perfect sense. The bass comes in swooping up and down like a divebombing seagull. The drums lay back in a cha cha beat. The singer comes in full voiced and confident, singing about trilobites and jelly heads with lines like, “The DNA is pretty.” At 1:43, the song evokes the sensation of skydiving in that moment when the parachute unfurls from the pack on your back. There’s an interlude in the middle of the song that evokes Queen, Cheap Trick, ELO, Dennis Wilson. Yet the sound is original, like somehow the space-time continuum bends out of shape and those other acts are playing sounds made up by the Wondermints rather than the other way around. It’s a barbaric yawp of a great new American band announcing itself to the world. Where did this band come from and where are they going?
Best lives
Fast forward from the Paleozoic Era to the late 1980s and a small music nerd scene in Los Angeles obsessed with the Beach Boys and, in particular, the Great Lost Beach Boys Album called SMiLE.
Made in the same meteoric creativity and virtuoso breath as Good Vibrations but now expanded over the course of an entire LP, SMiLE appeared on the verge of release in early 1967 with Capitol Records advertisements hyping its release. Then Brian Wilson’s creative energy ran out, and Capitol shelved the project. Instead, record listeners circa 1967 get the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band as the fundamental sonic text of the psychedelic era and a delineating marker in the history of pop music. In a few corners, people pondered the question: What if the Beach Boys had won the Space Race and got to the moon first with an album that was even better?
Unheard by anyone not involved in the record’s production, SMiLE became the stuff of legend. Future Wondermints Darian Sahanaja and Nick Walusko, kids on the 1980s L.A. music scene and Beach Boys superfans, wanted to hear SMiLE with a kid detective obsessiveness characteristic of Generation X. Legit tracks from the original SMiLE sessions were scarce (though versions of a few SMilLE songs made their way onto later Beach Boys records). Rumors flew that the original tapes had been destroyed. Rumors also flew that the current Reagan-era Beach Boys didn’t want the tapes released to distance themselves from their more trippy and artistically daring past. (This was, after all, the Beach Boys era of Kokomo.)
Through their emerging associations with record producers and writers covering the Beach Boys, the L.A. circle of SMiLE fans began hearing and gathering original tracks of varying quality. Personal collections grew. Bootlegs emerged. SMiLE became a real thing.
Now that Darian and Nick had heard SMiLE, they wanted to embody it. With Darian on keyboards and Nick on guitar, they began to cover songs from another Beach Boys record, Pet Sounds, that even the Beach Boys had never played live. They formed Wondermints, grew their reputation and found themselves on the same bill as Brian Wilson at a tribute show. Backstage, Wilson told L.A. disk jockey Rodney Bingenheimer that if he had a band like Wondermints in the 60s, he would take taken SMiLE on the road.
Zip past a few years, and Wondermints are on stage as Brian Wilson’s backing band, touring a restored version of the SMiLE album that they were instrumental in putting together in collaboration with Wilson’s team. Myself, as a Wondermints fan and SMiLE devotee from back in the pre-internet days before I had access to the music itself — the days when you had to find a record shop that sells bootlegs and have enough cash to buy one — I was blown away in my adulthood seeing the album performed live by Brian Wilson’s band. Take the unheard music you love so much — your teenage obsession — learn to play it, then defying all odds, perform it in concert halls alongside your idol and end each night (and sometimes each song) with an enthusiastic standing ovation.
Sadly, Wondermints guitar player Nick Walusko (aka Nicky Wonder) died in 2019. I saw the Brian Wilson SMiLE tour in Portland, Oregon in 2005, and one of my enduring memories is Nick Walusko playing the glimmering and birdlike guitar solo that carries the melody on the song “Pet Sounds.” My thought at the time was that these Wondermints guys have the best lives in the world. The chances of living out your childhood dream are astronomically small. It’s like flying a rocket to the moon. Winning a gold medal in the Olympics. Creating an invention that solves pollution. What are the chances? One in a million? One in a billion?
When the band began working with Brian Wilson in earnest, it meant the end of their run putting out their own records. They were still around and not around. This is how Wondermints disappeared in plain sight.
The band left their fans with just enough: three increasingly mind-blowing studio records, an album of cover songs that often surpass the originals, an underground live album of staggering musicianship that makes you wish you could have been there, a rarities collection that includes some of their best stuff and a 60s-sounding cheeky send up of a James Bond theme that plays over the closing credits of Austin Powers.
They were never as big as I believed they should have been, but commercial success is relative. Mainstream success has no ceiling. A band like R.E.M. started with a small cult following and 10 years later released CDs that sold more than 20 million copies. Success, however, like happiness, is a state of mind. Wondermints might have been able to claw their way to the top — and committed the ultimate Gen X sin of selling out your soul along the way. Instead, they made three stunning and largely unheard albums that mean more to record listeners like me than all 40 million copies of Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours currently in circulation. And not only did Wondermints get to play on stage with one of pop music’s greatest geniuses, their work helped cement the Beach Boys’ legacy as a band musically on par with (if not better than) the Beatles.
