One year after Brian Wilson’s death: Beach Boys founder a genius like no other
A year ago today, Brian Wilson, the introverted, vulnerable genius behind the Beach Boys, died in his sleep at home in Beverly Hills. He was 82 years old, and his health was ruined: his death certificate included respiratory arrest, sepsis, cystitis, neurodegenerative disorder, obstructive sleep apnoea and chronic kidney disease.
His mental state had long been troubled too, his inner turmoil reaching back decades. Wilson had first experienced auditory hallucinations in 1965, the same time he had first taken LSD, and they curdled into paranoid delusions and severe anxiety. He also suffered from schizoaffective disorder and mild bipolar disorder. By the mid-1960s, the world terrified and overwhelmed Wilson, and he could not find a sustainable way to cope.
Many will remember Wilson for the lurid stories: the sandbox built in his dining room containing his grand piano, so that he could feel sand beneath his toes while he composed; the three years in the mid-1970s spent mostly in bed, his weight ballooning. And his suffering was visible: I saw him at the Royal Festival Hall 20 years ago, when he was 65. While the music soared gloriously, watching the man himself was almost painful, a lost soul who relied on others for everything except music.
Superficially, Wilson fits almost perfectly into the ancient narrative of genius and madness walking in lockstep. But letting Brian Wilson’s psychological and emotional battles take centre stage denies the spotlight to the music, and, good God, what music it was.
The archetypal Los Angeles band
Wilson and his two younger brothers, Carl and Dennis, grew up on the fringes of Los Angeles, and as a child his attention was caught by then-popular close-harmony singing. He was enthralled by the technical skills of the Chordettes, the Hi-Lo’s, the Everly Brothers and, a favourite of his, the Four Freshman, and its influence is audible in almost every Beach Boys song.
As a major creative force, the Beach Boys enjoyed maybe a decade of activity. Their first album, Surfin’ Safari, was released in 1962, and by the time of Surf’s Up (1971), there was little left in the tank. But their pomp was divided into two periods: the breezy, sun-kissed pop of an idealised California from 1962 to 1965, and then the incandescent, troubled, revolutionary genius which was really only exposed in 1966-67.
That first phase, of Surfin’ USA, I Get Around and, perhaps most iconically, California Girls, was a commercial triumph. Brian, Carl and Dennis Wilson, their cousin Mike Love and friend Al Jardine, managed by the Wilsons’ domineering and abusive father Murry, crafted a distinctive style which became known as the “California sound”. It wrapped tales of surfing, cars and adolescent romance in a tight, polished, impossibly sunny combination of close harmonies and early rock and roll, giving the band a five-year streak of 16 consecutive top 40 hits.
It was an artifice: the only keen surfer in the group was Dennis Wilson. But it was a brilliantly successful one. It was a decade of musical hyper-evolution—the Beatles went from Please Please Me to Let It Be in seven years—and Brian’s creativity was outpacing the record-buying public.
Although the Beach Boys were one of the few American groups not to wilt in the face of the “British invasion” of the United States, Wilson was driven by a “fucked-up” jealousy of the Beatles and “Wall of Sound” producer Phil Spector. After hearing Rubber Soul, he recruited lyricist Tony Asher and disappeared into the studio; Mike Love received telephone previews of the tracks but the other band members were excluded. What emerged in the spring of 1966 was Pet Sounds.
Pet Sounds: not a perfect album, but dazzling
Pet Sounds is not a perfect album, but it is a dazzling, innovative one. Wilson’s degree of control as songwriter and producer allowed him to compose at the mixing board, and he poured into it the influences of jazz, doo-wop, classical music, R&B, avant-garde and a dozen other genres, steeped in those close harmonies and heavily layered instrumentals.
The critics and fans were divided, because it was a revolutionary work; Eric Clapton and John Lennon regarded it as one of genius. Listen to Caroline, No, Wouldn’t It Be Nice, I Just Wasn’t Made For These Times or the tightly packed, emotional three-minute masterpiece of God Only Knows, and it’s clear Clapton and Lennon were right.
This was Wilson as auteur. Mike Love may have litigated his way to co-writing credits on dozens of Beach Boys songs in the early 1990s, but Pet Sounds belonged conceptually to one man, Brian Wilson. Brother Dennis summed up the wider truth.
“Brian is the Beach Boys. He is the band. We’re his fucking messengers. He’s all of it. Period. We’re nothing. He’s everything.”
But Wilson remained restless and unsatisfied. In October 1966, he released his “pocket symphony”, the astoundingly rich and complicated Good Vibrations. Six months, nearly 40 musicians, 100 hours of tape, all compressed into three minutes and 35 seconds. Listen to it. All that unfolded from Brian Wilson’s imagination.
At the same time, with highly regarded session musician Van Dyke Parks, Wilson was working on a new album. The follow-up to Pet Sounds but “something more advanced” than pop music, a musical kaleidoscope of Americana, SMiLE was under production for a year across 1966 and 1967 but never finished. With 50 hours of tape recorded, Parks had dropped out and Wilson, exhausted and mentally unwell, felt he had run out of ideas. Some of the recordings were tidied up and released as Smiley Smile, but it was a pale echo.
SMiLE might have been the summit of Wilson’s career, or an overwrought, self-indulgent mess. It didn’t matter, nor did it matter that Smiley Smile was a jejune disappointment. Wilson’s creative process, dating back to his childhood when he would deconstruct melodies he heard on the radio, taking them apart to see how they worked, had already changed popular music. Albums before Pet Sounds can seem thin, tinny, simplistic. Some still did afterwards, but they had no excuse. Wilson had torn the lid off a Pandora’s box of soundscape, making the production studio an instrument in itself — and he had done it alone, turned inwards, the introverted genius.
Listen to Pet Sounds. It’s only 35 minutes long, but if that can stand as a man’s epitaph, he has achieved something extraordinary.
• Eliot Wilson is a writer and historian; Senior Fellow for National Security, Coalition for Global Prosperity; Contributing Editor, Defence on the Brink