When Brian Eno wrote recently “play is how children learn, art is how adults play”, he could have been referring directly to Brian Wilson. The Beach Boys‘ bedrock and modern epitome of the tortured genius, who died yesterday (June 11) aged 82, could be remembered at many stages of his legendary ascent, decline and resurgence. The slick-haired, plaid-shirted teenager down on Malibu beach in 1962, wrapping his forearm around a surfboard alongside his brothers and bandmates. The solitary, troubled figure singing ‘Surf’s Up’ at a piano in 1966. The awkward chatterbox of 1970s TV interviews. The beaming pop godhead of his 2002 ‘Pet Sounds’ tour, back after decades of depression, addiction, seclusion and mental health battles; or – as we saw in Brent Wilson’s 2021 documentary Brian Wilson: Long Promised Road – the scared, confused and lonely man they left him.
But best would be to remember him at his maverick peak: feet in a sandbox, fire helmet at a precarious angle, smoke from the studio fire wafting about his piano. Such recording antics are often cited as strange, sad evidence of Wilson’s psychological issues, as his dabblings in drugs set off nervous breakdowns and a bipolar schizoaffective disorder that would plague him with voices in his head for the rest of his life.
But they also represent pop music’s most inspired and influential awakening; an untrammelled if all-too-brief explosion of sonic playfulness and adventure which gave us some of the most sublime music of the ’60s (‘God Only Knows’, ‘Wouldn’t It Be Nice’, the obsessively constructed “teenage symphony to god” ‘Good Vibrations’) and propelled the decade forward at a great leap. By inspiring The Beatles’ own sonic explorations on ‘Sgt Pepper…’, Wilson was the US half of a musical big bang which obliterated pop music’s restrictive old world and created a limitless new one.
Wilson was born in Inglewood, California, on June 20, 1942, the first child of Audree Neva and machinist turned songwriter Murry Wilson. Showing innate musical talent from an early age – he had perfect pitch and was blessed with an ability to learn by ear – he was performing church choir solos by the age of seven, writing songs by 12 and leading his younger brothers Carl and Dennis in close harmony parts inspired by vocal group The Four Freshmen.
For a high school arts project, he formed a group called Carl And The Passions featuring Carl and his regular singing partner, Mike Love; schoolfriend and musician Al Jardine watched on, impressed. In 1961, following a truncated stint at LA’s El Camino College, Wilson formed The Pendletones with his brothers, Love and Jardine; the band was renamed The Beach Boys by Candix Records ahead of their first single ‘Surfin’’, a local LA hit.
Despite not being a surfer himself, the next three years saw Wilson and The Beach Boys define Californian culture and become a US pop phenomenon, releasing 10 albums and a series of timeless hit singles hymning the eternal pleasures of cars, girls and surfboards: ‘Surfin’ Safari’, ‘Surfin’ U.S.A.’, ‘Fun, Fun, Fun’, ‘I Get Around’, ‘Help Me, Rhonda’, ‘California Girls’ and the joyous barbershop ‘Barbara Ann’. Yet seeing himself as more of a Spector-style backroom figure – he was the first pop artist to write, perform and produce his own music – Wilson was uncomfortable on tour.
In December 1964, stressed by the threat of Beatlemania, his all-encompassing role in the band and his recent marriage to Marilyn Rovell, he suffered a nervous breakdown on a flight from Los Angeles to Houston – the first of three – and withdrew from playing live with the band. From that point, The Beach Boys became a revolutionary double-pronged proposition. The band, with bassist Bruce Johnston replacing Wilson, continued to tour the world to wild teen receptions, while Wilson secluded himself in the studio, composing ever more inventive and elaborate songs for them to record on their return.
An increasing interest in philosophy, religion and drugs – ‘California Girls’ was partly written during a first LSD trip which Wilson would call “a religious experience” which “tore my head off” – sparked an ambitious and intense creative surge in Wilson’s studio work, culminating in 1966’s ‘Pet Sounds’ album, an elegant, symphonic and introspective evolution of The Beach Boys’ sound and themes which was a relative flop on release but is now considered one of the greatest pop albums of all time. It was here that Wilson pioneered progressive pop and psychedelia, revolutionised studio-as-instrument production and became one of the leading figures of the art rock movement.
The record intensified a friendly trans-Atlantic rivalry between The Beach Boys and The Beatles, inspiring the Liverpool group to experiment even further with studio techniques on 1967’s ‘Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band’. But its crushing lack of success in the US also deepened Wilson’s drug-induced paranoia and depression.
The stand-alone single ‘Good Vibrations’, a “pocket symphony” intricately pieced together at huge cost from dozens of sessions and 90 hours of tape, was a hit which elevated pop music as an artform and launched a late ’60s wave of pop and psych rock experimentation, but Wilson’s ambitious, avant garde art pop follow-up project ‘Smile’ – recorded at great length amid such studio tomfoolery as role-play, carrot-chomping and the now legendary session for ‘Fire’ involving the musicians in fire helmets, burning wood in the studio – was scrapped, and remained unfinished until 2004.
Wilson remained The Beach Boys’ creative hub and made brief, sporadic returns to the live line-up, but increasingly secluded himself from the band over the coming decades, becoming reclusive, bedroom-bound, unproductive, withdrawn during sessions and addicted to over-eating, alcohol and cocaine. Devastated by his father’s sale of The Beach Boys’ catalogue in 1969 for just $700,000 – and Murry’s subsequent death in 1973 – there were spells in psychiatric care, suicide attempts, and overdoses.
In 1975, he fell under the supervision of psychologist Eugene Landy, whose 24-hour therapy program initially rejuvenated Wilson. But a second period in his care in the 1980s was even more controlling, as Landy took on the role of Wilson’s manager, business partner, co-writer and significant creative beneficiary, until being dismissed with a restraining order in 1991.
During these years there were several attempted “comebacks”, including his participation in The Beach Boys’ self-titled 1985 album, a well-received solo record in 1988 and a 1995 collaboration with ‘Smile’ lyricist Van Dyke Parks, entitled ‘Orange Crate Art’. But his most celebrated resurgence came with his orchestral tours of the ‘Pet Sounds’ and ‘Smile’ albums in the early 2000s; emotion-drenched shows which placed him centre-stage again after decades in the shadows, something his millions of fans had given up hope of ever seeing again. There was a celebratory Glastonbury set in 2005, and by 2011 he was touring with The Beach Boys again, amid a flurry of 21st-century Wilson albums and the development of a 2014 biopic, Love & Mercy.
Wilson was often a symbolic rather than active presence at concerts, however, and his health continued to decline. He played his last live show in Chicago in 2022, sitting “rigid and expressionless” throughout, and in 2024, it was announced that Wilson was suffering from dementia. Hee died 18 months later of as-yet-unspecified causes, leaving behind a legacy of pop symphonies as eternal as the deity he wrote them for.