Brian Wilson heard voices. For some 60 years, he had auditory hallucinations. Sometimes he couldn’t make out what they said. Sometimes he could, which was worse. He was diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder and bipolar disorder, and spent years passing in and out of seclusion and lucidity, occasionally cut off from his muse, not to mention his family, his band, and his fans.
Wilson also heard sounds. At times, his efforts to translate and preserve those sounds—pet sounds—tormented him (and his Beach Boys bandmates) too. “They say dogs can hear sounds that humans cannot,” his cousin, collaborator, and nemesis Mike Love once said, “and I swear Brian must have been part canine because he was reaching for something intangible, imperceptible to most, and all but impossible to execute.” When he grasped that thing and pulled off the impossible task of capturing the ineffable on vinyl, the results were exquisite. Wilson wasn’t on the Beach Boys’s buoyant 1969 cover of the Ronettes’s “I Can Hear Music”—he’d been admitted to a psychiatric hospital in 1968 and was largely absent for the recording of the album it appeared on, the decade-closing 20/20. But like that song’s speaker, Wilson heard “sweet, sweet music”—and thanks to his work, so did we.
“I’ve lived a very, very difficult, haunted life,” Wilson said in 2007. That was one side of his story. So was the sentiment he expressed in his 2016 autobiography: “People are beautiful. Life can be, too.” That haunted, beautiful life ended on Wednesday, when Wilson, who had suffered from dementia, died at 82.
In popular culture, Wilson exemplified the archetype of the tortured, fragile genius—the prophet plagued with, and blessed by, visions. As with other 1960s musical luminaries, such as Pink Floyd’s Syd Barrett and Fleetwood Mac’s Peter Green, Wilson’s instability was exacerbated by pressure, celebrity, and psychedelic drug use. It was something of an upset that Wilson was by far the longest-lived of the three brothers—Brian, Carl, and Dennis—who cofounded and formed the backbone of the Beach Boys, along with Love and a faithful friend from school, Al Jardine. Rock-star excess claimed many musical icons of the ’60s and ’70s who had fewer demons than the Beach Boys’s bandleader, but Wilson, despite rough seas, sailed on.
He lived to record and release a celebrated rendition of his unfinished ’60s epic, Smile; to tour on that album, plus the scrupulously reproduced Pet Sounds; to record his recollections and sit for somewhat awkward interviews; to become a more present, reliable romantic partner, father, and grandfather. This elder statesman phase, in which Wilson was less creative but also less reclusive, allowed legions of younger admirers (like me) to see and hear him. How engaged he was depended on the day and the gig, but often, on stage, the mental clouds cleared, the band came close to touching the live wire of Wilson’s inspiration, and his own smile shone through, as brilliant and joyous as his songs. “The people love it,” he said in 2016, of playing Pet Sounds live. “They just love it.”
Wilson was a prodigy, and starting with 1961’s “Surfin’,” he harnessed his talents to produce dozens of decade-defining hits—first perfecting surf music and the so-called “California sound” before aiming for a more elevated tone in his “teenage symphonies to God,” which reached their fullest fruition on the 1966 opus, Pet Sounds. The Beach Boys boasted an embarrassment of vocal riches, not least of which was Brian’s own plaintive tenor and falsetto. But Brian’s elaborate arrangements and perfectionist studio sessions coordinated those pipes into a harmonic, angelic choir, which was bolstered by the contributions of collaborators like the Wrecking Crew and Van Dyke Parks.
“Brian knew exactly what he wanted to hear and he had it in his head when he walked into the room,” Parks said. Those were the voices in his head that he could command and expel, by committing them to tape. And then, from his lips to millions of listeners’ ears, they entered other heads, where they took up permanent residence and delivered only delight.
“I wanted to write joyful music that would make other people feel good,” Wilson said at the Beach Boys’s Rock & Roll Hall of Fame induction in 1988. For him, lasting solace was elusive. Wilson was abused—by his father, his psychologist, and himself. Rarely, however, did he harm others, except by compelling take after take in his obsessive pursuit of platonic pop, which yielded numerous masterpieces and, less spectacularly, innumerable recordings of “Ding Dang.” Thanks primarily to Brian, the Beach Boys became the quintessential American band: the country’s answer to the Beatles, except that the Beatles were really an answer to them.
Wilson, an eminence among musical oracles, was the sound of ’60s pop, as much as—maybe more so than—the decade’s other legendary singer-songwriters and front men: Paul McCartney and John Lennon; Mick Jagger and Keith Richards; Bob Dylan, Paul Simon, Ray Davies, Pete Townshend. The Beach Boys bridged eras and musical traditions, employing a richer, softer, and, by Brian’s estimation, more feminine sound, an instantly distinctive synthesis of barbershop quartets, girl groups, and Phil Spector’s Wall of Sound.
When I first heard the Beach Boys, on a collection of cassette tapes at my grandmother’s house, their best-known songs, save “Kokomo,” were already oldies, and the young men who had made them were edging toward ancient themselves. (Dennis Wilson was already dead.) At 5 or 6 years old, I couldn’t conceive of how long ago the heydays of Roy Orbison, Buddy Holly, or Brian Wilson were; to me, their music was as new and vibrant as it was when it came out.
My grandmother had a house in the Adirondacks, a six-hour drive from where we lived in New York City, and improbably, we went to that wilderness every weekend. I remember the sights, smells, and sounds from those half-day roundtrips: the secondhand smoke that clung to the clothes of my grandma’s second husband; stopping for fast food; reading books or playing Tetris on my Game Boy until I got too carsick or it got too dark to see the screen. After that, we would listen and sing along to those timeless tunes from the ’50s and ’60s. My grandma’s Mercury Sable wasn’t as fast or as cool as the cars Wilson wrote about, but his songs sped us toward our distant destination.
In the first phase of my fandom, I imprinted on the upbeat earworms from the first few years of the Beach Boys’s career: “Surfin’ U.S.A.,” “Surfin’ Safari,” “Fun, Fun, Fun,” “Catch a Wave,” “Little Deuce Coupe,” “I Get Around,” “California Girls,” “Help Me, Rhonda,” and many more. But before long, I was drawn even more to the slower songs—the ones that were just as catchy, but also melancholic and elegiac, even though they were written by a boy who was barely out of his teens. (Or maybe because they were.) Those songs expressed the innocence and sadness of Wilson’s spirit: “Surfer Girl,” “In My Room,” “Your Summer Dream,” and a little later, “Don’t Worry Baby,” “The Warmth of the Sun,” and “Please Let Me Wonder,” from which Wilson graduated to creative high points (for him, and for anyone) like “Good Vibrations,” “Wouldn’t it Be Nice,” and “God Only Knows.” Those last few musical monuments, especially, made Wilson the sort of studio auteur that other artists emulate and to which other geniuses genuflect.
After paying due deference to Pet Sounds, I eventually immersed myself in later, less popular cuts, from an era when the Beach Boys’s striped shirts, surfboards, and doo-wop were passé, and the then-shaggier band was still seen as square and too clean-cut for the counterculture. In those years, Wilson receded, not only live but also in studio, which made more room for his friends and family to flex their own prodigious songcraft. But Brian still put his stamp on the band’s post–Pet Sounds period, from immediate follow-ups Smiley Smile, Wild Honey, Friends, and Sunflower to ’70s high points such as Surf’s Up, Holland, and Love You. Plenty of accomplished musicians would kill for a catalog of less heralded gems like “Heroes and Villains,” “Do it Again,” “Wake the World,” “This Whole World,” “’Til I Die,” “I’ll Bet He’s Nice,” or that triumphant Wilsonian wonder, “Surf’s Up.” The only downside of the deservedly exalted status of Pet Sounds is that it tends to eclipse lesser wonders.
Though Wilson’s songwriting slowed as his psychological duress deepened, and his band’s fortunes suffered for it, the Beach Boys made almost 20 albums in their first 10 years, driven by Brian’s inspiration and aspiration. Subsequent decades brought splits and sporadic reunions, squabbles over songwriting credit with the ornery, self-aggrandizing Love, and, from time to time, vintage Wilson tracks like “Love and Mercy” from his 1988 eponymous album, or the three-song suite from the end of the Beach Boys’s last album, 2012’s That’s Why God Made the Radio. Wilson continued to perform until 2022, and was seen in public as recently as last May, when the frail-looking leader of the group reunited with the rest of the surviving Beach Boomers at the premiere of a Disney+ documentary about the band.
When Wilson’s compositions work their way into your psyche, all it takes is a snatch of one song for hundreds to resurface. “I’ve been on a bit of a Beach Boys kick lately,” I texted a friend early this year. That message sparked a discussion of our favorite Beach Boys songs; I toyed with a top 10 and gave up when I ran out of room with way too many classics not included. My friend told me that he and his wife had been soothing their new baby by singing her “Surfin’ U.S.A.” And so the cycle starts anew. “It was a childhood dream of mine to make music that made people feel loved,” Wilson said. The maker of that music is gone, but his summer dream lives on.
Even the most successful artists often fall short of their ambitions: Their output pales in comparison to the potential they glimpsed when the less prosaic concept first formed in their minds. “I find that search on every song we’ve ever made: that search for a lost sound,” Wilson said. After almost 83 years, he had to call off the search, but his hunt, and his hurt, weren’t wasted. Wilson is lost, but the sound was found.
