Waves of two kinds characterised the career of Brian Wilson, who has died aged 82. The first, to be found breaking on the surfing beaches of Southern California, provided the inspiration for the songs – Surfin’ USA, Surfin’ Safari, Surfer Girl – with which he and his group, the Beach Boys, achieved their early fame, defining an American teenage subculture that became a universal dream. The second was the giant wave of affection that greeted him in every concert hall around the world during a late-career comeback, when grateful audiences left a damaged figure in no doubt of the lasting value of his life’s work.
If Aaron Copland, Charles Ives, George Gershwin and Duke Ellington were geniuses of American musical composition, then so was Wilson. Emerging from the garage of a family home in a humdrum Los Angeles suburb where he, his two brothers, a cousin and a friend formed the band that achieved worldwide hits with I Get Around, California Girls and Good Vibrations, he developed into a musician of outstanding range and imagination, particularly gifted in the adventurous manipulation of vocal harmonies but also capable of devising instrumental pieces that ventured into structural and textural territory far beyond the normal frontiers of pop music.
Wilson’s early music, conceived in a climate that provided a natural home for open-top sports cars and drive-in movie theatres, was lit by the California sun. But right from the start it also had a darker, more anxious side. He had just celebrated his 21st birthday when his song In My Room expressed, via a lyric written by his friend Gary Usher, his uncertainty in the face of the adult world and its expectations. Even when the waves were at their most inviting, some of Wilson’s songs contained an undertow of knowledge that the good times of youth come to an end: “Won’t last forever” went the insistent background chorus to When I Grow Up (To Be a Man), a hit for the Beach Boys in 1964, when its composer was only 22.
As the first tortured genius of the 1960s pop music explosion, Wilson sometimes gave the impression that he would also become its first victim. While creating expressions of youthful rapture, he was suffering episodes of personal unhappiness and confusion, which culminated in a lengthy period of seclusion and therapy. But if he would never again match the magical quality of his early masterpieces, he survived his difficulties to tour the world in later life, performing his classic songs to audiences happy to get the chance to register their affection and, through their applause, to help soothe his old wounds.
The evolution of his talent had been accelerated in the mid-60s by the transatlantic competition between the Beach Boys and the Beatles. The two bands listened with respect and fascination to advance copies of each other’s albums; when Wilson heard Rubber Soul in December 1965, it stimulated him to create the following year’s Pet Sounds, the album containing God Only Knows, the song that Paul McCartney later described as one of the greatest ever written. The rivalry may have contributed to pressures that eventually proved intolerable. But in the six short years between his first blithe hymns to California beach culture and the sophistication and complexity of Heroes and Villains and Surf’s Up, Wilson produced a body of work of a richness and originality unparalleled in its field, and even more remarkable in the light of the tensions and conflicts that lay behind its creation.
He was born in Inglewood, California, the first of three sons of Murry Wilson, a would-be songwriter who earned his living by working on the production line at the nearby Goodyear tyre factory, and his wife, Audree (nee Korthof). Married when they were 21 and 20 respectively, both parents played the piano. The arrival of a second son prompted a move in 1944 to Hawthorne, a town in the south-west of Los Angeles county, then with a population of 10,000, within easy reach of Manhattan beach and the Pacific Ocean.
According to Brian, he and his brothers, Dennis and Carl, were subjected to physical and mental abuse by their impatient and irascible father, who lived out his thwarted ambitions through his sons while constantly belittling their achievements. “My dad’s tirades were unending,” he claimed in a controversial 1991 autobiography, Wouldn’t It Be Nice. “The effects these outbursts had on me was severe. By the time I started elementary school, I was nervous and high-strung, withdrawn and frightened of almost everything. I expected everyone to yell at me or threaten me.”
He was also completely deaf in his right ear, although whether through a birth defect or from one of his father’s regular beatings he was never sure; its origin was “lost and buried among my family’s many skeletons”. As well as saving him from the Vietnam draft, his deafness meant that the inventor of sumptuous chorales and instrumental tone poems would never be able to hear his music in stereo.
The three Wilson boys grew up with music. Brian learned the piano and the accordion, listened to doo-wop, R&B and the Everly Brothers on the radio, and sang in his school choir, until his pure falsetto voice drew taunts. His sensitive, easily bruised temperament was already seemingly at odds with his tall build, his early prowess at sport (baseball and gridiron football in particular) and his love of goofy horseplay. His younger brothers formed a striking contrast: Dennis the irresponsible golden youth, devoted to surfing, hot rods and the pursuit of beach girls; Carl a gentler soul who took on the role of conciliator.
In 1961 the three brothers formed a group, with Brian on bass guitar, Dennis on drums and Carl on lead guitar. Their neighbour Al Jardine played rhythm guitar and their older cousin Mike Love sang, as they all did. Calling themselves the Pendletones, after a brand of plaid shirts popular among local teens, they already had been turned down by one Los Angeles record company when they visited Hite and Dorinda Morgan, a husband-and-wife team who were friends of the Wilsons’ parents and ran a small label from an office in Hollywood.
Favourably impressed by their cover versions of current hits, the Morgans suggested that they needed to come up with their own songs, preferably with an original theme. Returning to the Morgans’ office a few days later, the group brought with them a simple but catchy song called Surfin’, with a melody by Brian and a lyric by Love, prompted by Dennis’s enthusiasm for his hobby. At the suggestion of a promotion man, the Pendletones became the Beach Boys in time for the release of the record, which became a regional hit and led to an approach from Capitol Records, with whom the group quickly signed a contract. Their next 45s, Surfin’ Safari and Surfin’ USA, took them into the upper reaches of the national charts.
If those initial up-tempo successes illustrated Brian’s debt to Chuck Berry (whose Sweet Little Sixteen was the template for Surfin’ USA), the next hit showed a different side of the young songwriter’s talent. Surfer Girl, a dreamy ballad with adventurous close harmonies, displayed the influence of the Four Freshmen, but with a teenage sensibility. The lovestruck lyric was Wilson’s own work, inspired by his feelings for a girlfriend. The B-side, the up-tempo Little Deuce Coupe, was also a hit, and found Wilson collaborating with a new lyricist, the disc jockey Roger Christian, who proved adept at celebrating the group’s other shared interest besides surfing and girls: the California culture of hot rods and drag racing. A third major influence, the lavish production style of Phil Spector, would emerge in another Wilson-Christian collaboration, the sublime Don’t Worry Baby, in 1964.
Fear of the ocean meant that Brian was no surfer, but he loved cars and girls. In November 1964, aged 22, he married the 16-year-old Marilyn Rovell, who, with her elder sister Diane and their cousin Ginger Blake, had formed a vocal group called the Honeys, on whom Brian would sharpen his production skills. They had begun dating two years earlier, and Brian proposed by phone while on tour with the group, on landing in Australia after a mid-air panic attack that proved a harbinger of problems to come.
It would not be long before Brian staged a successful revolt against the crude attempts of his father to control every aspect of their career through playing the parts of manager, promotion man and – particularly unwelcome – adviser on songwriting and record production. Murry’s financial generosity had provided his teenaged sons with their first instruments, as well as cars and surfboards, but he derided the songs about what he saw as silly, ephemeral subjects, and fined them for such offences as hanging out with girls ($50), swearing ($100) and not setting up their equipment fast enough (also $100). He was fired by the group following an argument at the 1964 session at which they recorded I Get Around, their first No 1. But he still retained control of their song publishing company, and five years later, to Brian’s fury, he sold their copyrights for $700,000; within a few years they would be worth many millions.
At the very peak of their success, however, Brian was exhibiting symptoms of instability. He had always suffered from nerves on stage, and after another in-flight breakdown the group decided to replace him for live appearances. The session musician Glen Campbell, not yet a solo star, was their first choice, with another friend, Bruce Johnston, eventually becoming the long-term replacement.
Freed from the terrors of the road, the group’s chief songwriter was able to spend increasing amounts of time in the recording studio. That was where he was happiest, collaborating with the cream of Hollywood’s session musicians, who were intrigued by his unorthodox imagination. They responded by pouring their own creativity into his sessions, responding to his desire to introduce new sounds. Soon Beach Boys records were featuring the bass harmonica, the accordion, and bottles and cans transformed into percussion instruments.
His intention, he later claimed, was “to redraw the entire map of pop music”. Hints of the different approach evident in two massive hits, Help Me Rhonda and California Girls, came into full bloom in Pet Sounds, where a cover version of Sloop John B – suggested by Jardine, who had started out as a folk singer – represented the only acknowledgment of the style that had made them famous and provided them with another hit single. But now, rather than zestful and optimistic songs about cars and surfing, it was the yearning ballads with their chromatic melodies, unexpected harmonic shifts and delicate instrumental textures – the heart-melting Don’t Talk (Put Your Head On My Shoulder), I Just Wasn’t Made for These Times, I Know There’s An Answer and Caroline, No – that set the tone.
Not all the members of the group were delighted by the new approach, which they rightly suspected to have been rooted in Brian’s first experience of LSD: an undiluted dose taken in the spring of 1965 which left him, in the words of his biographer Tim White, both exhilarated and distraught, and never quite the same again. Love, in particular, despised the introspective lyrics supplied by Tony Asher, an advertising copywriter who found precisely the right words to match the swooning poetry of Wilson’s melodies. As the group’s extrovert front man, Love wanted to stay with the simple formula that had worked so well, and was not reluctant to express his opinion in the most caustic terms. A rift opened, and it would never be fully closed.
A mixed reception for Pet Sounds in the US (although it was acclaimed in Britain) indicated to Love that he was in the right, and Brian’s next project, a song cycle originally titled Dumb Angel and later known as SMiLE, proved even more divisive. Love provided the hippy-trippy words for Good Vibrations, the epic product of 30 separate studio sessions, but he balked at the new style of free-associative lyrics supplied by Van Dyke Parks, a 23-year-old former child actor and musical prodigy, for the other songs, whose melodies Brian composed at a grand piano placed in a sand-box specially built in the dining room of his Beverly Hills house. Famously, Love found it impossible to get his head around “Over and over / The crow flies / Uncover the cornfield” (from the song Cabin Essence).
The orchestrations for these new multi-sectioned songs were becoming ever more elaborate and eccentric, culminating in Brian’s insistence that the session musicians playing on a piece called The Elements: Fire, a strident cacophony intended to evoke the conflagration that devastated Chicago in 1871, should do so wearing plastic firemen’s helmets bought by Marilyn at a children’s shop. A real fire across the street after the session, followed by an outbreak of blazes in Los Angeles, seemed a bad omen, but the real reason for the abandonment of SMiLE was the internal strife that disheartened first Parks, who walked away from the project, and then Wilson.
Brian’s increasing dependence on drugs – marijuana, LSD, and eventually and most damagingly cocaine – destroyed what had once been an exemplary work ethic; now he stayed at home in his new Bel Air mansion with his wife and two small daughters, rising late, eating junk food and playing Spector’s records over and over again to the occasional visitor. There was concern as the weight of the man who had once owned a Hollywood health-food store called The Radiant Radish ballooned until, in the 1980s, it exceeded 140kg (22st).
Remnants of the aborted SMiLE project were released under the title Smiley Smile, and Good Vibrations became a No 1 hit around the world, but Brian’s contributions to the group’s subsequent albums diminished along with their mass popularity, even though there were occasional new jewels, veering from the euphoria of This Whole World to the almost unbearable poignancy of Til I Die. Not even an appearance at Fillmore East in New York alongside the Grateful Dead and the long awaited release of the legendary Surf’s Up – based on a solo version performed for Leonard Bernstein on a US TV show – on an album of the same name in 1971 could fully restore the Beach Boys’ fortunes. At Wembley Stadium on midsummer’s day in 1975 they performed a magical set that briefly reminded 50,000 people who had turned up to hear Elton John of the timeless joy of their music, but of Brian there was no sign.
Patchy reunion albums, managerial upheavals, Brian and Marilyn’s divorce, artistic and financial disagreements between Love and the Wilsons, peacemaking efforts by Carl, Dennis’s death by drowning in 1983 and the departure of Jardine punctuated the years leading up to the appearance, in 1988, of an excellent solo album led off by a fine song, Love and Mercy, in which Brian seemed to have made peace with his demons. For six years he had been in the care of Eugene Landy, a psychotherapist who insisted on 24-hour care and control of his clients. In Brian’s case he also assumed the functions of manager, co-songwriter and record producer, earning fees of about $300,000 a year for his work, as well as royalties. Wilson’s autobiography Wouldn’t It Be Nice was ghostwritten under Landy’s supervision and later disowned by its subject.
Landy’s success in persuading Brian to lose weight and give up recreational drugs helped to avert a possible early death, but many believed that his use of other forms of medication had turned his patient into a muted, zombie-like creature: the inmate of a prison without walls. But in 1986, while browsing in a Cadillac showroom, Brian met a saleswoman, Melinda Ledbetter, with whom he struck up a relationship. As depicted in the 2014 feature film Love & Mercy, in which the youthful and older versions of Brian were played by Paul Dano and John Cusack, she helped free him from the clutches of Landy, who was eventually charged with unethical behaviour and improper prescription of drugs, losing his licence to practise.
Wilson married Ledbetter in 1995. His new wife became his new manager, supervising a revival that took wing in 1998, when – shortly after his brother Carl’s death from lung cancer – he toured the world performing Pet Sounds in its entirety, with the skilled members of a Los Angeles band, the Wondermints, taking the place of the original Beach Boys. (The performances were repeated in 2016, on a tour marking the album’s 50th anniversary.)
In 2002 he appeared in the garden of Buckingham Palace, performing God Only Knows at Queen Elizabeth II’s golden jubilee celebration. Two years later he chose the Royal Festival Hall in London for the world premiere of the painstakingly reconstructed SMiLE, giving a triumphant performance prefaced by a standing ovation for Van Dyke Parks, who was in the audience. A new recording of the piece was released to further acclaim, followed by the appearance of the original version, pieced together from the 1967 recordings. Several solo albums followed, featuring new songs of variable quality and guest appearances from such admirers as Elton John and McCartney.
Witnesses to his post-comeback appearances would sometimes be disconcerted by occasional signs of strain and bemusement, and that angelic voice had lost most of its youthful range and flexibility. Nevertheless, in every concert there were moments when he came to life and demonstrated that he could share the audience’s enjoyment of bathing in the still-sunkissed warmth of a seemingly endless string of great songs, the products of one of the most fertile and innovative musical minds of his time.
Melinda died in January 2024. Two weeks later Wilson’s management team applied for a conservatorship order, following a diagnosis of dementia. He is survived by the two daughters of his first marriage, Wendy and Carnie, by five adopted children – three daughters, Daria, Delanie and Dakota, and two sons, Dylan and Dash – and by six grandchildren.
• Brian Wilson, songwriter and singer, born 20 June 1942; died 11 June 2025
