Brian Wilson in 1965.
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Brian Wilson in 1965.
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Brian Wilson, who co-founded the iconic California band The Beach Boys and turned teen pop into a poetic, modernist musical form, has died at age 82.
“We realize that we are sharing our grief with the world,” Wilson’s family wrote in a statement on his website Wednesday.
The most frequently invoked description of Wilson’s music came from the artist himself when, playing on a phrase coined by Phil Spector, he declared that his goal was to write a “teenage symphony to God.” Grounded in dreams of an idealized youth, his songs reflected vast ambition enmeshed in the belief that pop could be a conduit to the sublime.
Beyond the recording studio where his mastery shone, Wilson struggled: He was abused by his father as a child, and mental health struggles, including audio hallucinations (later diagnosed as schizoaffective disorder), led him into isolation at the height of The Beach Boys’ success. His greatest musical works made room for the deep melancholy he experienced while evoking an almost otherworldly beauty, the sunset smear of a soul longing for peace.
This elevated quality infuses even the playfully slight songs of the early Beach Boys. As one of the first major rock bands of the 1960s, The Beach Boys made hit fodder of subjects like drag racing, high school rivalries and, of course, surfing to express the empowerment, freedom and fun many white middle-class kids felt as the post-war boom empowered their generation. Southern California became the mythologized center of the new American dream, and Brian Wilson‘s music was its soundtrack.
The Beach Boys on Nov. 2, 1964, in London, England: Dennis Wilson (1944-1983, from left to right), Brian Wilson, Mike Love, Al Jardine and Carl Wilson (1946-1998).
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The Beach Boys on Nov. 2, 1964, in London, England: Dennis Wilson (1944-1983, from left to right), Brian Wilson, Mike Love, Al Jardine and Carl Wilson (1946-1998).
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A pop mind like no other
That playfully adventurous sound reflected Wilson’s childhood obsessions — jazz and doo-wop harmonies and the work of American composers like George Gershwin. Raised in the working-class Los Angeles suburb of Hawthorne, an aerospace industry hub, Wilson became a student of music as a teenager, spending hours with his record player, memorizing the harmonies of his favorite group, The Four Freshman.
Like many teenagers, he and his brothers Carl and Dennis Wilson saw rock and roll as a means to social success. His father, Murry, a would-be songwriter with a propensity for abuse, saw his sons’ talents as a ticket to greater financial success. He managed the homegrown group, christened The Beach Boys in 1961, until Brian broke away from him in 1964, after going through his first nervous breakdown.
Even as he battled internal unrest, Wilson immediately set a new musical bar for teen-oriented pop music, as The Beach Boys found national success on Capitol Records. The seeming simplicity of early-1960s Beach Boys hits like “California Girls” and “I Get Around” was exponentially enriched within the sonic frameworks Wilson created, inspired by jazz harmonies, American composers and the then-nascent Black pop sounds of Chuck Berry and the girl groups.
As the 1960s unfolded, Wilson pushed the boundaries of the three-minute pop song in ways few could replicate. The Beatles’ American arrival in 1964 set the stage for what some fans have deemed the greatest friendly rivalry in popular music. Wilson and the songwriting team of John Lennon and Paul McCartney continually checked and wrecked each other, pushing themselves toward greater achievements with each competitive release.
Wilson’s genius peaks on ‘Pet Sounds’
Beatles producer George Martin called The Beach Boys’ 1966 opus, Pet Sounds, “a spur” for the Beatles’ game-changing concept album Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, while Wilson reportedly broke down and cried when he heard “Strawberry Fields Forever,” declaring, “They got there first.”
Wilson had arrived first in that game with Pet Sounds, which remains, some 60 years after its release, the apex of Top 40 pop as existential reverie. Released when Wilson was 24 and already in retreat from fame (he stopped touring with The Beach Boys after his 1964 breakdown), Pet Sounds was Wilson’s little Moby Dick, a masterwork encompassing all he believed music could do: 13 songs evoking what the critic Richard Goldstein identified as “loneliness [as] an active pursuit,” played by a group of Los Angeles studio musicians so skilled that they were dubbed the Wrecking Crew and produced by Wilson to exceed their meticulously crafted frames via sound effects like barking dogs, rattled soda cans and crickets whose voices Wilson captured in the twilight.
Wilson, who rarely wrote lyrics alone, worked with the advertising copywriter Tony Asher on verses that conjured the liminal space between adolescence and adulthood, captured in images like the shorn locks of a surfer girl on “Caroline, No” and poignant declarations like one song’s title, “I Just Wasn’t Made For These Times.” The other Beach Boys provided vocals prompted by Wilson’s instructions at the piano.
In many ways, Pet Sounds was his solo effort, his band members more symphony members than mates. The deep introversion Pet Sounds communicates was the result of this process, spurred on in part by Wilson’s worsening mental health, affected by both drug use and the feeling that the pop world that had granted him power no longer had room for his dreams.
A modest success upon release, Pet Sounds is now generally acknowledged as one of the greatest albums of all time. (The rock-era canonizing institution Rolling Stone magazine ranks it at No. 2 — right behind Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On.)
Wilson followed it in late 1966 with the single “Good Vibrations,” created through a revolutionary process: He convened his favorite studio musicians across 17 recordings sessions, amassing 90 hours of tape, and then assembled the song from the fragments.
“You would sit with a music stand, blank piece of paper, and you’d wait until Brian got around to giving you your notes, because he knew exactly what he wanted,” harmonica player Tommy Morgan told NPR in 2000. “He knew every note in his head.”
“Good Vibrations” was a critical and commercial smash that, for many listeners, announced the full arrival of psychedelia. Wilson’s next effort, however, capsized his artistic success. Smile was to be a song cycle co-written by the adventurous songwriter Van Dyke Parks that furthered Wilson’s experimental journey, but by most accounts, a combination of Wilson’s obsessiveness and the commercial desires of his Beach Boys bandmates and his label put a halt to the project. A watered-down version, Smiley Smile, came out in 1967. After decades of anticipation by music connoisseurs, Wilson completed Smile with new collaborators in 2004.
A retreat from public life
Although legally bound by a new contract with Reprise Records to continue to work with The Beach Boys, Wilson retreated further into himself in the 1970s. He briefly co-owned a health-food store, the Radiant Radish, and worked on home demos, occasionally contributing to recordings that became minor Beach Boys hits. By 1973, he had become perhaps rock’s most famous recluse, rarely leaving his Bel Air home.
Brian Wilson, smiling, at a Paul Simon tribute concert in 2005.
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Brian Wilson, smiling, at a Paul Simon tribute concert in 2005.
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In the mid-’70s, Wilson’s then-wife, Marilyn, hired psychotherapist Eugene Landy, known for his controversial “24-hour therapy,” to help Wilson out of a food-and-drugs spiral that had caused his weight to balloon to more than 300 pounds; Landy gradually overtook Wilson’s life, becoming not merely a constant, controlling companion but his manager and, on his 1988 solo debut, musical collaborator. Wilson and Landy parted ways in 1991 after his family intervened.
Wilson’s spirits were bolstered by his second wife, Melinda, and he began to recover and manage his mental illness, eventually growing strong enough to embark upon a true comeback, collaborating with second- and third-generation power pop musicians including Andy Paley, Darian Sahanaja of Wondermints, and the producer Don Was. He reunited with The Beach Boys for a tour and an album, That’s Why God Made the Radio, released in 2012.
In his final years, Wilson — whose daughters from his first marriage, Carnie and Wendy, found pop success of their own in the trio Wilson Phillips — cared for his five adopted children with Melinda until her death in 2024 and pursued an eclectic array of projects, including the tribute recording Brian Wilson Reimagines Gershwin, several highly collaborative solo albums and frequent tours reprising Beach Boys classics, including Pet Sounds.
A subdued presence onstage and in interviews after decades of struggling with mental illness, Wilson enjoyed the renown his history-changing music offered him and continued to share the message that beauty and love can help heal even the most broken people.
