Brian Wilson, Beach Boy, rock ’n’ roll visionary, dies at 82
The sunshine in so many of his songs was his way of dealing with the pain of his personal life.
Brian Wilson, the driving creative force behind the Beach Boys who endured abuse, mental illness and deafness in his right ear to become one of the most influential composers of the 20th century, has died. He was 82.
His family confirmed Wilson’s death in a social-media post on Wednesday. They did not release a cause. In recent years, he had been suffering from what his doctor called a “major neurocognitive disorder.”
Inspired by the melodies of Chuck Berry, the harmonies of the Four Freshmen and Phil Spector’s Wall of Sound style of production, Wilson brought the Beach Boys to the top of the charts and expanded the horizons of rock ’n’ roll with singles like Good Vibrations and albums such as Pet Sounds.
“When Wilson sang, ‘Wouldn’t it be nice if we were older,’ on the album’s magnificent opening song, he wasn’t just imagining a love that could evolve past high school, he was suggesting a new grown-up identity for rock & roll music itself,” said Rolling Stone magazine about Pet Sounds in its list of the 500 Greatest Albums of All Time.
Brian Douglas Wilson was born on June 20, 1942, in Inglewood, California, to Audree (nee Korthof) and Murry Wilson, an unfulfilled songwriter who worked as a machinist. In high school, Wilson was the quarterback of the Hawthorne High School football team and played baseball and ran cross-country. He formed the Pendletones — a nod to the Pendleton shirts favoured by surfers — in 1961 with his brothers Carl and Dennis, their cousin Mike Love and their friend Al Jardine.
By the time their label Candix Records released the band’s first single, Surfin’, in December 1961, the label had changed the band’s name to the Beach Boys. The single was followed by hits like Surfin’ Safari in 1962, Surfin’ USA in 1963, and I Get Around in 1964, which together laid the groundwork for what became known as the California Sound.
While Wilson has often been credited as the creator of the band’s best-known songs, he typically worked with other writers — particularly on lyrics — to bring his vision alive. Collaborators included Tony Asher and Van Dyke Parks, as well as Love, his cousin and bandmate.
Wilson told the UK’s Record Mirror in 1966 that he and Love wrote Surfin’ while they were at school, “just because the sport was becoming a big craze. Me? I’ve never surfed in my life …. We just tried to bring the essence of the sea to music.”
The sunshine that Wilson brought to his melodies was often a salve to the pain in his personal life. Wilson suffered from mental-health issues, and his father — who was initially the band’s manager — was emotionally and physically abusive.
Asked during a 2004 interview with the New York Times Magazine if it was true that he was deaf in one ear, Wilson replied, “Yes, my father used to beat the hell out of us.” He added: “That is probably why I wrote those happy songs. I try to get as close to paradise as I can. I try to steer clear of heartbreaks.”
In a 1971 interview with Rolling Stone, his father, who died in 1973, denied hitting his son in the ear. “Oh, I spanked his bottom, you know, like any father would do to a kid, just whap him a little bit,” he told the magazine. “No, I never hit my kid on the ear. No. No. I was too strong.”
Later, in his 2016 memoir, “I Am Brian Wilson,” which he wrote with Ben Greenman, Wilson recalled being hit in the head with a pipe by a neighbourhood kid as a child and that “the next day I realised that I couldn’t hear as well out of my right ear. I told my mom and she took me to the doctor, who examined me and said that the eighth nerve in my head was severed.”
Peter Ames Carlin, author of the biography, “Catch a Wave: The Rise, Fall, and Redemption of the Beach Boys’ Brian Wilson,” said that Wilson dealt with the effects of the abuse his entire life. In an interview for this obituary, Carlin said that to Wilson, the words fear and love were interchangeable.
“When he talks about songs he loves, he goes: ‘Ooh, that’s scary,’ ” Carlin told the Journal. “The fact that ‘Catch a Wave’s’ first lines [of its first verse] are: ‘Don’t be afraid to try the greatest sport around,’ it’s like, wait: Afraid? Afraid of what? You get the fear in the first three words. There’s always a dark cloud on the horizon, which is what creates the emotional complexity and makes it compelling to people, along with the music.”
Pet Sounds and Good Vibrations
By the mid-1960s, Wilson had stopped touring regularly with the Beach Boys. He stayed behind in the studio in what became one of the most fruitful creative periods of his life. He and the lyricist Asher wrote the enduring single “God Only Knows” in a half-hour one afternoon, he told The Wall Street Journal in 2016. The single was included on 1966’s Pet Sounds, an album that features an orchestra of non-traditional instruments like the theremin, harpsichord, bicycle bells and horns. Along with LPs like “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” by the Beatles — with whom the band had a creative rivalry — it helped establish the idea of the concept album in pop music.
During this time, Wilson also worked with Love to write “Good Vibrations,” a single that was intended for the Beach Boys’s Pet Sounds follow-up album, Smile, on which he collaborated largely with Parks.
Good Vibrations was released in 1966 and became one of the band’s signature songs, but Smile was ultimately shelved. Although the Beach Boys released some of the material on 1967’s Smiley Smile, Smile took on the aura of rock ’n’ roll legend: an unfinished, unreleased masterpiece.
“Van Dyke and I wanted Smile to be a musical tour of America through the eyes of kids — from Plymouth Rock to Diamond Head. We wanted to show people how American music had evolved over the years,” Wilson told the Journal in 2011. “The music was ahead of its time. Even the other Beach Boys didn’t fully understand the words when they recorded the vocal tracks.”
Both God Only Knows and Good Vibrations feature lead vocals from Wilson’s brother Carl, who died in 1998. His other brother, Dennis, drowned in 1983.
Wilson’s role as the creative centre of the Beach Boys began to ebb and flow in the 1970s and he continued to struggle with mental-health issues, drug use and controversial care from psychologists and caretakers.
“I’ve told a lot of people: don’t take psychedelic drugs,” Wilson told Rolling Stone in 2016. “It’s mentally dangerous to take. I regret having taken LSD. It’s a bad drug.”
In 2019, Wilson postponed a tour after feeling “mentally insecure.”
“It is no secret that I have been living with mental illness for many decades,” Wilson wrote in a statement announcing the postponed shows. “There were times when it was unbearable but with doctors and medications I have been able to live a wonderful, healthy and productive life with support from my family, friends and fans who have helped me through this journey.”
Wilson’s mental-health challenges continued for his entire life. Due to what his doctor called a “major neurocognitive disorder,” Wilson was placed under a conservatorship in May of 2024.
Wilson continued to work with the Beach Boys in various capacities over the years, helping write, record and tour with the band in support of 1976’s 15 Big Ones. He released his first solo album, Brian Wilson, in 1988 to mixed reviews. Subsequent solo albums included I Just Wasn’t Made For These Times (1995). He and Parks also released an album, Orange Crate Art, in 1995.
A return to the road
Wilson married his second wife, Melinda (Ledbetter) in 1995. Wilson credited her with becoming a stabilising force in his life after they started dating in the 1980s and she eventually became his manager. In the years after they wed, Wilson experienced a career resurgence, releasing solo albums and touring. He went on tour for his 1998 solo album, “Imagination,” with a band that was able to nail the intricate orchestral instrumentation and harmonies of his Beach Boys work. Later, he and his band took “Pet Sounds” on the road, playing the album in its entirety.
Melinda Wilson died in 2024.
“Melinda was more than my wife, she was my saviour,” Brian Wilson said in a statement
after her death. “She gave me the emotional security I needed to have a career. She encouraged me to make the music that was closest to my heart. She was my anchor.”
Wilson is survived by the five children that he and Melinda adopted, as well as his daughters with his first wife, Marilyn Wilson-Rutherford (nee Rovell), Carnie and Wendy, who are members of the pop group Wilson Phillips.
Wilson eventually returned to the songs of Smile, recording the album and releasing it in 2004 as Brian Wilson Presents Smile, closing with Good Vibrations. The album was well-received and picked up three Grammy nominations, winning one for the instrumental “Mrs. O’Leary’s Cow.”
Even though Wilson and his band would play the album in its entirety in concert, he was never completely at peace with the material. In the 2011 interview with the Journal, he said the memory of recording Good Vibrations in the ’60s made it hard to perform, and that hearing Smile made him uneasy.
“It’s like an amusement-park ride for me,” he said. “Too many times on that ride is too much for me to handle.”
Wall Street Journal
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