Brian Wilson, who has died aged 82, had a visionary grasp of what could be done in the brief span of a pop song. Rock mythology has cast him as an Icarus who flew too close to the sun, torched by ambition, brilliance and mental breakdown. But he took a different view. “I’m not a genius,” the leader of The Beach Boys told Rolling Stone magazine in 1971. “I’m just a hardworking guy.”
Born in 1942, Wilson was raised in Hawthorne, a suburban town in Los Angeles County nicknamed “the city of good neighbours”. Despite partially losing his hearing as a child, he had an unusually acute ability to pick up tunes. He excelled at sports at school, but preferred to spend long hours at the piano picking apart favourite songs. The barbershop harmonies of vocal ensemble The Four Freshmen were a key influence. So was the record producer Phil Spector with his elaborately orchestrated “wall of sound” style.
Wilson formed The Beach Boys in 1961 with his brothers Dennis and Carl, their cousin Mike Love and a high school classmate, Al Jardine. At the suggestion of the group’s only true surfer, Dennis, they hymned the emblematic pastime of southern Californian teen culture. “Surfing is the
only life/The only way for me” were the opening lines of their debut single, “Surfin’”. The words were written and sung by Love, while Wilson scored and arranged the music. Lyrics would never be his speciality. For him, voices were sublime musical instruments, expressing feelings through sound rather than language.
The Beach Boys struck gold with swoony choral harmonies, twangy surf-music guitars and beats cresting like waves on an eternally sunny Pacific shoreline: the “California sound”, as it was dubbed. Their first Billboard Hot 100 top 10 single was “Surfin’ USA” in 1963. With Wilson playing bass and singing backing or lead vocals, they were the siren call of young America at its brightest — until The Beatles touched down at JFK airport in 1964.
One of the few US groups to withstand the British Invasion, The Beach Boys had a run of chart hits that year. But they resembled a novelty act next to their sharp Liverpool rivals. Like the sportsman that he might have become, Wilson responded with competitive zeal. As the psychedelic-rock era dawned, he carried The Beach Boys far from their teen-idol origins.
In a record industry that worked its talent like factory hands, Wilson demanded an auteur’s freedom. Obsessive hours were spent in the studio searching for the right sound. To his bandmates’ dismay, he quit touring in 1965 in order to concentrate on recordings. “If I may comment, Brian goes through Panicsville every time a new record is released,” his mother said during an interview the band gave in 1965.
“Don’t Worry Baby”, a 1964 answer song to The Ronettes’ “Be My Baby”, served notice of his self-taught gift for multi-part harmonies and studio production. In 1966, the band released their masterpiece Pet Sounds, which Wilson wrote, arranged and produced almost single-handed. “I’d just call it, at this point, Contemporary American Music. Not rock ’n’ roll. Rock ’n’ roll is such a worn-out phrase,” he said soon after the album’s release.
Wilson wanted not just to match The Beatles’ studio experiments but outpace them. His songs brought unparalleled sophistication to a sound-world of girl groups, doo-wop, surf music and orchestral pop. In his hands, a chart hit could become, as he termed it, “a teenage symphony to God”. About 20 extra musicians were required for Pet Sounds’ baroque centrepiece “God Only Knows”, playing instruments ranging from French horn to improvised percussion with a pair of plastic cups.
Eccentricities such as placing a piano in a sandbox in his home to mimic a beach added lustre to the “genius” tag (attached to him in a 1966 marketing campaign devised by a Beatles publicist). “I’m experimenting in sound combinations with combinations of instruments which aren’t generally associated with the rock ’n’ roll business,” he explained. But imaginative audacity was shadowed by psychological fragility.
Wilson’s decision to stop touring was precipitated by a nervous breakdown on an aeroplane. He was overwhelmed by paranoid hallucinations while making Smile, the intended follow-up to Pet Sounds. The contending forces of mental illness, perfectionism, competition, psychoactive drug use and his bandmates’ doubts, even hostility, proved too much. Breaking point was preceded by the remarkably intricate 1966 single “Good Vibrations”, which took seven months to make and was rumoured to have cost upwards of $400,000 in today’s prices.
After Smile was shelved, becoming rock’s most tantalising “lost” album, Wilson retreated from public view. He made occasional contributions to Beach Boys records and oversaw the 1972 debut album by the duo Spring, which included his first wife Marilyn Wilson, with whom he had two daughters. They divorced in 1979. He later married Melinda Ledbetter, who died last year. They adopted five children.
Ledbetter was credited with ending Wilson’s association with controversial psychiatrist Eugene Landy, allegedly a Svengali-style figure who was banned from contacting the singer-songwriter in 1992. Taking over as Wilson’s business manager, she enabled him to make a comeback. In 2004, he revived the unfinished Smile in a rapturously received concert in London and then a studio recording. Further albums followed and, in 2011, a reunion with The Beach Boys began. His last album, At My Piano, was released in 2021.
“Dynamics. They’re the key to good records. Dynamics applied with love,” he said in 1966. The array of instrumentation, vocals, melodies, rhythms and harmonies in his most striking songs represented the apogee of what could be achieved in a recording studio. It required hard work, at considerable personal cost — but the spark of genius was there too.
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