Rolling Stone, “Brian Wilson, Beach Boys Co-Founder and Architect of Pop, Dead at 82“
Brian Wilson, who as leader of the Beach Boys and a founder of California rock invented a massively successful pop sound full of harmonies and sunshine, has died at the age of 82.
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Wilson’s legacy includes dozens of hit singles with the Beach Boys, including three Number One singles (“I Get Around,” “Help Me, Rhonda,” and “Good Vibrations”). In the 1960s, the Beach Boys were not only the most successful American band, but they also jockeyed for global preeminence with the Beatles. And on albums such as Pet Sounds, Wilson’s lavish, orchestral production techniques dramatically expanded the sonic palette of rock & roll and showed how the recording studio could be an instrument by itself.
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In 1961, Brian, Dennis, and Carl formed a band with their cousin Mike Love and their friend Al Jardine, managed by Murry Wilson; Brian played bass, took many of the lead vocals, and wrote the songs. Signed to Capitol Records and named the Beach Boys, they started to roll out hits like convertible Thunderbirds coming off an assembly line: “Surfin’ U.S.A.” (with music borrowed from Chuck Berry’s “Sweet Little Sixteen”), “Surfer Girl,” “Be True to Your School,” “Fun, Fun, Fun.” Those Brian Wilson compositions all sounded like insanely catchy jingles for the California teenage lifestyle — surfboards, hamburger stands, pep rallies — but on the flip side of the good times was a real sense of melancholy. Sometimes that was apparent in the lyrics — the lonesome “In My Room,” for example — and sometimes it was expressed nonverbally, with the Beach Boys’ heartbreaking multipart harmonies.
Wilson got more ambitious in his songwriting and experimented with new sounds—like the chunky surf guitar and falsetto lead on “I Get Around.” But he buckled under the stress of touring, having a nervous breakdown on the road in Europe in 1964. He decided that while the other Beach Boys toured the world, he would stay home and work on perfecting new material in the studio: When the band came back to California, they would step in and lay down their tracks. The results included gorgeous singles such as “California Girls” and the immortal 1966 album Pet Sounds.
The album, which regularly ranks at or near the top of the best albums ever made (Rolling Stone named it Number Two in its list of the 500 Greatest Albums of All Time), was inspired by the Beatles’ innovative work on Rubber Soul; in return, it inspired the Fab Four to new heights of experimentation on Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Paul McCartney frequently cited Pet Sounds as a masterpiece, giving it particular credit for its innovative bass playing, and has called the aching “God Only Knows” his favorite song of all time. The album was orchestrated with instruments that included harpsichords, bicycle bells, and barking dogs. The culmination was “Wouldn’t It Be Nice,” with its lyrics yearning for an adult life and love.
The other Beach Boys, particularly Mike Love, were not impressed by Pet Sounds, and Wilson considered releasing it as a solo record; as a Beach Boys album, it was only a middling success in the States, although its influence was huge and it was recognized as an instant classic in the U.K. Wilson followed up with the Beach Boys’ finest single, “Good Vibrations,” three-and-a-half thrilling minutes of electro-theremin and stacks of vocals, recorded over a period of six months in various studios at a cost that was reportedly, at that point, the most expensive single in history.
Wilson returned to the studio with plans to top himself: an album called Smile, which he told friends would be a “teenage symphony to God.” Working with lyricist Van Dyke Parks, he started to assemble an elaborate collection of musical suites, intended to change the face of popular music, but the sessions fell apart, weighed down by the indifference of the other Beach Boys, Wilson’s consumption of pot and LSD, and his growing mental instability. While recording “Mrs. O’Leary’s Cow,” a piece of the “Elements” suite about fire, Wilson handed out plastic firemen’s helmets to the orchestra and actually lit a fire in the studio to inspire them. When he found out that a building near the studio had burned down, he thought he had caused the fire through his music, freaked out, and locked the tapes in a vault.
New York Times, “Brian Wilson, Pop Auteur and Leader of the Beach Boys, Dies at 82“
Brian Wilson, who as the leader and chief songwriter of the Beach Boys became rock’s poet laureate of surf-and-sun innocence but also an embodiment of damaged genius through his struggles with mental illness and drugs, has died. He was 82.
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On mid-1960s hits like “Surfin’ U.S.A.,” “California Girls” and “Fun, Fun, Fun,” the Beach Boys created a musical counterpart to the myth of Southern California as paradise — a soundtrack of cheerful harmonies and a boogie beat to accompany a lifestyle of youthful leisure. Cars, sex and rolling waves were the only cares.
That vision, manifested in Mr. Wilson’s crystalline vocal arrangements, helped make the Beach Boys the defining American band of the era. During its clean-cut heyday of 1962 to 1966, the group landed 13 singles in the Top 10. Three of them went to No. 1: “I Get Around,” “Help Me, Rhonda” and “Good Vibrations.”
At the same time, the round-faced, soft-spoken Mr. Wilson — who didn’t surf — became one of pop’s most gifted and idiosyncratic studio auteurs, crafting complex and innovative productions that awed his peers.
“That ear,” Bob Dylan once remarked. “I mean, Jesus, he’s got to will that to the Smithsonian.”
Mr. Wilson’s masterpiece was the 1966 album “Pet Sounds,” a wistful song cycle that he directed in elaborate recording sessions, blending the sound of a rock band with classical instrumentation and oddities like the Electro-Theremin, whose otherworldly whistle Mr. Wilson would use again on “Good Vibrations.”
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Hailed as a master hitmaker while in his early 20s, Mr. Wilson soon showed signs of instability. Some of his behavior, like placing his piano in a giant sandbox inside his Hollywood Hills home, might have seemed the foibles of a coddled celebrity.
But in following up “Pet Sounds,” he stumbled. Over months of sessions for an album he intended to call “Smile,” Mr. Wilson indulged his every eccentricity, no matter how expensive or fruitless, and his growing drug habit fueled paranoia and delusion. Recording a song called “Fire,” he outfitted studio musicians in toy firefighters’ helmets and placed a smoldering bucket in their midst. When he later learned that a nearby building had burned down about the same time as that session, he scrapped the track, spooked by the thought that his studio “witchcraft” was responsible.
Abandoned by Mr. Wilson, “Smile” entered rock lore as a lost document of a brilliant but troubled mind. Mike Love, the Beach Boys vocalist and longtime foil of Mr. Wilson’s, called it “a whole album of Brian’s madness.” It remained unfinished for nearly 40 years.
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After “Good Vibrations” in 1966, the band did not have another No. 1 single until “Kokomo” in 1988, which was made without Mr. Wilson’s involvement.
The Beach Boys’ apex came around the time I was born, and I didn’t discover their music until my junior high days. There are certainly some great songs in their catalog, but the band as a whole ranks well below that of their British contemporaries–the Beatles, Stones, Zeppelin, and the Who in terms of my tastes.
While the label “genius” is overused, Wilson certainly qualifies. But he seems to have also personified the “mad genius,” suffering severe mental health issues through most of his adult life. No cause of death has been released but he was known to be suffering from dementia.
