Louder AAA
In a 1964 episode of American Bandstand, as Dick Clark is interviewing the Beach Boys, all fresh-faced and matching Pendleton stripes, he asks: “You have hit after hit. Who determines what will be done next?” Twenty-one-year-old Brian Wilson grins shyly at his bandmates and says: “Well, I guess I do, I don’t know.” Then in the next second he adds: “I write the songs and produce them, so I have a lot to say about it.”
That moment offers a glimpse of the two sides of Brian Wilson, the legendary leader of the Beach Boys, who died on June 11, 2025, a week shy of his 83rd birthday. He was one of the most creative, ambitious songwriters and producers of the rock era, responsible for an iconic West Coast sound that crested high with 36 Top 40 singles within 10 years, including Surfin’ USA, Surfer Girl, I Get Around, Wouldn’t It Be Nice, California Girls, Good Vibrations and God Only Knows. Yet despite the once-in-a-generation talent and confidence it took to achieve that, he had a humility that often toppled into self-doubt – along with a then-undiagnosed mental illness that eventually silenced him for years.
As someone who once acknowledged: “I’d earned over a million dollars by the time I was old enough to vote,” Brian was well aware of his talent and accomplishments. But when I first interviewed him, in 1996, he was visibly uncomfortable with all the mythology around him. It probably didn’t help that I was awestruck to be sitting across from the man who wrote Surf’s Up. But he brushed off any mention of genius, likely haunted by the heightened expectations that come with it. “No, I’m just a hard-working guy,” he told me. “And I always get a little bit paranoid when I get a lot of attention.”
As his childhood friend and fellow Beach Boy Al Jardine said: “Brian was a humble musical giant. But he didn’t want attention, and was only interested in making the best possible music.”
That music started in the early 1950s, in Hawthorne, California, a Los Angeles suburb 10 minutes from the beach. Brian and his younger brothers, Dennis and Carl, encouraged by their musician parents, began harmonising as boys. By high school Brian was serious about music. While his brothers were out playing baseball, he was in his room, playing piano, training his ear – literally, as he was born deaf in one ear – and transcribing records by George Gershwin and his favourite group, The Four Freshmen (“They taught me the most”).
From the beginning, Brian possessed a multi-track mind. He could hear full-blown arrangements in his head. That gift was one even he didn’t fully understand. When I asked about one of his most elaborate creations, Good Vibrations, he was characteristically Buddha-like. “I could see the whole song in my mind from the start,” he said.
In another era, someone with such gifts – he also had perfect pitch - might have ended up becoming a classical composer. But Brian was a teenager in the 1950s. He loved cars and girls, and he was crazy for the three-chord rock’n’roll of Chuck Berry that rhapsodised both. When you think about the early Beach Boys sound, it’s really The Four Freshmen-meets-Chuck Berry, underpinned by touches of classical harmony. The missing lyrical ingredient that gave that unusual hybrid its commercial push was surfing. Famously, Brian himself didn’t surf (he tried once, his brother Carl said, and was “terrible”). But Dennis, the most extroverted Wilson, did, and suggested to Brian that surfing might make for good song fodder.
In the early 60s the Beach Boys caught multiple waves that had them riding with the decade’s leading hitmakers, from The Beatles to Motown. Thanks to Brian’s work ethic, the band were prolific. It’s startling to realise that before the much-lauded Pet Sounds, they released ten albums (nine went gold). Each was chock full of hits, whose fun, wholesome exteriors masked increasing levels of complexity and melancholy.
At every turn, Brian experimented with something new. He tweaked the opening line of When I Wish Upon A Star and crafted an equally poignant ballad out of it – Surfer Girl. He mixed shifting keys with jazzy harmonies on The Warmth Of The Sun. He combined inverted doo-wop chords and profound lyrical sadness on In My Room. The apex of that early period was the double-shot single I Get Around and Don’t Worry Baby, intricate vocal collages with driving groove and revved-up guitar on one side, a lush, towering ballad on the other. One of Brian’s favourites, Don’t Worry Baby has a melody that, if played by an orchestra, could pass as a classical piece (indeed, you can hear Brian interpret it that way on his final release, At My Piano).
Really, when you dissect any of his songs, you find strange, wonderful alchemy. As a musician who has covered Beach Boys’ songs, I stand in awe of their design (appropriately, Brian once described himself as a “song architect”). The melodies and chords rarely go where you think they might, yet somehow always make perfect sense. And for all their intricacy, they have universal appeal. Not an easy thing to do.
As those hits stacked up, so did the Beach Boys’ troubles with the Wilsons’ father, Murry, who was their manager. “That was difficult, because it’s hard to chew your dad out,” Carl said in The Beach Boys: American Band.
Murry Wilson, a frustrated songwriter and abusive alcoholic, loomed large in Brian’s life, both terrorising him and inspiring him to want to excel. But Murry felt like he was owed for his boys’ success. He’d got them signed to Capitol, and started a publishing company for Brian’s songs. But as the band became more self-reliant, they bristled against his control (Brian wrote I’m Bugged At My Old Man in 1965). In the studio he would regularly browbeat Brian (“I’m a genius too!” he shouts in an infamous bootleg). Brian eventually had to fire him. Four years later, Murry, still bitter, secretly sold the publishing to all of Brian’s early hits for a low-ball price of $700,000. That betrayal was devastating for Brian.
In the 90s, after Murry died, Brian claimed fraud and sued to get his publishing back. He didn’t win, but was awarded $25 million in damages, which was only a fraction of what the songs were worth.
Adding to the stress of the time, the album-tour-album treadmill wore on Brian. He was always an uneasy performer, and at the outset of their 1964 tour he collapsed in a nervous breakdown during a flight. Replaced in the touring band by Glen Campbell, then permanently by Bruce Johnston, Brian was free. Free to concentrate on his true passions: songwriting and producing. Free to follow his curiosity about everything from “metaphysics to spirituality”. And free to experiment with LSD (his first trip resulted in California Girls).
‘Free’ was the guiding word for the next two years.
Work on the Pet Sounds album began with prayer sessions, for music that would touch people’s souls, and for a release that would outdo The Beatles’ then-latest album Rubber Soul – a combination of “spirituality and competition”, Brian said. While the Beach Boys toured, Brian and his new lyric partner Tony Asher wrote songs about loss, alienation and the end of innocence, then took them into the studio with top session collective the Wrecking Crew. “Each one of those guys added their own special touch,” Brian told me. Dispensing with the guitar-bass-drums approach of previous Beach Boys albums, Brian spent months creating orchestral textures with “peaks and valleys”.
“He heard combinations of sounds that had never been heard before,” said bassist Carol Kaye. “He would put things together like electric guitar, banjo, harpsichord and a harp, all playing the same line, so they’d just create this really strange sound,” Tom Petty said. But as Tony Asher told me in 1998: “Even though the arrangements were advanced, Brian was always conscious of the commercial thing, this absolute need to relate.” Famously, his bandmates didn’t relate.
Returning from the road to hear the tracks, their reaction was not what Brian hoped for. Although Bruce Johnston called it “a great leap forward,” Mike Love dismissed it as “Brian’s ego music”. As knocks to Brian’s “psychodelicate” self-esteem go, there were more ahead. Although Pet Sounds is now rightly hailed as one of the greatest albums ever, with songs such as Caroline, No, Wouldn’t It Be Nice and God Only Knows, it was seen then as a misstep. And for Brian, it was soon one-upped by The Beatles’ Revolver.
So he dug in further, with Good Vibrations. Inspired by his mum’s comment about how dogs can pick up vibrations from people, this ‘pocket symphony’, a stunning feat of imagination and compositional intensity, took seven months, several studios and $75,000 (unheard of then) to complete. The mosaic approach that joined together all of Brian’s songwriting obsessions – rock’n’roll, Phil Spector, classical, gospel, avant-garde (the theremin!) – remains a landmark in modern music, much imitated, rarely equalled.
“The success of Good Vibrations inspired me to keep moving in that direction,” Brian said. And SMiLE took the mosaic approach to the next level.
With another outside lyricist, Van Dyke Parks, the concept was a multi-movement American travelogue. Brian called it “a teenage symphony to God”. Parks called it “collaborative heaven”, saying: “Brian wanted to drop the surfboard and progress.” Maestro Leonard Bernstein recognised one of the duo’s first songs together, Surf’s Up, as an “historic revolution”. Reflecting the era, there were a lot of drugs in the mix, but Parks says they never interfered with their “extremely focused and athletic” work habits.
Meanwhile, Brian converted his house into ‘fun rooms’. His grand piano sat in a giant sandbox (which gave birth to Heroes And Villains). An adjoining room became an Arabian tent with cushions and hookahs and velvet floors. Another room had nothing but tumbling mats, to encourage physical fitness. In the studio, Brian exerted total control – conducting, producing, driving the players to new heights (listening to him on the talkback to the players, there’s always a mix of his excitement and impatience to hear his arrangements gel). He had musicians wear fire helmets to perform Mrs. O’Leary’s Cow, the fire section of the elements suite.
Call it eccentricity, but it was more a reflection of his childlike sense of play. (The same spirit that inspired the album’s title would see him opening his own West Hollywood health food store, The Radiant Radish, shortly after.) But the label’s impatience for cars-and-girls hits and the group’s resistance to experimentation (Mike Love said: “Don’t fuck with the formula!”) became too much. “The guys knew it was great music, but they didn’t think it was right for them,” Brian said diplomatically in the 2004 documentary Beautiful Dreamer.
“As he was just achieving the apex of his creative arc, he abandoned the project in the interest of social harmony,” Van Dyke Parks said in the same doc. “But I could see he was heading for an emotional collapse.”
For over three decades, SMiLE would remain the most famous unfinished album in rock history. When it was shelved, something in Brian died. His then-wife Marilyn told producer Don Was in 1995: “He was just torn down. And I think he felt guilty, like the other guys resented him for always being singled out as the genius. It became more and more that he would just stay in bed, and let the guys continue on their own in the studio.”
The Beach Boys kept releasing albums, including Smiley Smile, a tepid salvage job of SMiLE. But as Al Jardine told me in 2023: “We were increasingly out of sync with the times. To put it in surfing terms, sometimes you catch the perfect wave and take it as far as you can go, other times you know you’re going to get wiped out.”
“No one could fill Brian’s shoes,” Bruce Johnston told me.
In 1968, Brian wrote a charming bossa tune titled Busy Doing Nothing (a highlight of the underrated Friends album), which was basically a list of directions on how to get to his house. But that title could describe his life during the 70s and 80s. He retreated from the world. At home in his bathrobe, long hair and beard, he gorged himself to 300 pounds, and floated in a haze of drugs and booze. He was an absentee Beach Boy, contributing occasional appearances to their albums, and an absentee dad to two daughters living under his roof, Wendy and Carnie (later of Wilson Phillips). Something needed to change.
In 1975, Brian’s family enlisted the services of Dr. Eugene Landy, a celebrity therapist who’d treated notables such as Richard Harris and Alice Cooper. Sessions were on and off again. In 1977 he wrote and produced the cult classic Love You album. “Brian is back!” went the marketing push. But he wasn’t really.
Finally, in 1982, after being fired from the band, Brian went under full-time care of Landy, whose 24-hour-a-day “milieu therapy” meant that he and his assistants (later called “the surf nazis” by the Wilson family) controlled everything in Brian’s life – diet, exercise, where he went, who he talked to. Landy drew up a list of “negative influences”, which included pretty much all of Brian’s family and friends. On top of Landy’s $400,000-a-year fee, he extended his Svengali reach into Brian’s creative and financial life, becoming his producer, co-writer and manager.
While Landy may have restored Brian’s physical health and saved him from becoming a drug casualty, the trade-off was that Brian effectively became a prisoner. In 1988, he recorded his first solo album, under Landy’s watch. It was chaos in the studio, a revolving door of producers, high-profile guests such as Tom Petty and Jeff Lynne, and Landy’s girlfriend writing new lyrics for Brian’s songs. Although the ballad Love And Mercy became a fan favourite, it’s a strangely sterile set of songs, Brian imitating his former self. The album was overshadowed by the Beach Boys’ surprise comeback hit, Kokomo.
In 1992, Brian’s ghost-written memoir, Wouldn’t It Be Nice, painted the former heroes in his life – namely the Beach Boys – as villains, while the true villain, Landy, got pages of praise.
The Wilson family finally intervened, and in 1989 Landy admitted that he’d been unlawfully administering drugs to Brian. He lost his medical license. In the 2021 documentary Long Promised Road, Brian looked back on the period, what he called “nine years of control” and said: “He made money off my name”.
In his last years with Landy, he’d met Melinda Ledbetter, who eventually became his wife and “emotional support” for the final decades of his life. His resurgence in the 21st century still feels like a kind of miracle. With the Beach Boys now a memory (Dennis died in 1983, Carl in 1998), Brian surrounded himself with an amazing new band, dedicated to recreating his masterworks with note-for-note accuracy for the stage. The mental illness remained, as did the self-doubt. But with a loving infrastructure and one of the most adoring fan bases of any modern artist, he flourished. I covered album shows for both Pet Sounds and SMiLE, and they remain two of the most moving and memorable concerts I’ve ever seen.
In 2006, Brian opened up to Ability magazine about his schizo-affective disorder, saying he’d been having “auditory hallucinations” in his head “all day, every day” for 40 years, since he was 25. “Every few minutes the voices say something derogatory to me, which discourages me a little bit, but I have to be strong enough to say to them: ‘Hey, quit stalking me. Leave me alone.’” Brian said he still had negative thoughts, but “the positive is starting to win”.
In 2021, he sold his publishing to Universal for $50 million, and in 2022 he played his final show. His wife Melinda passed away in 2024. A few months after, Brian was put into conservatorship because he’d been diagnosed with dementia.
After his death, the loving tributes poured in. Elton John called him “a musical genius and revolutionary”. Bruce Springsteen hailed “the visionary leader of America’s greatest band, the most musically inventive voice in all of pop, with an otherworldly ear for harmony”. Paul McCartney, who has called God Only Knows his favourite song, said: “The notes he heard in his head and passed to us were simple and brilliant at the same time”. Neil Young said: “He was like Mozart or Beethoven – the music will live forever”. Van Dyke Parks said: “He moved mountains. He changed the language”. A statement from the surviving Beach Boys said: “His unparalleled talent and unique spirit created the soundtrack of so many lives around the globe, including our own”.
Although Brian Wilson was often defined by his fragility and struggles with mental health, it would be more appropriate to remember him for his incredible resilience and strength. Think of all the things he managed to survive and overcome. Even he joked about the possible connection between his last name Wilson and ‘will power’. In the 2004 documentary Beautiful Dreamer: The Story Of SMiLE, you can witness that triumphant spirit, as he resurrects the work that nearly killed him 37 years previously. “He’s the one who pulled himself out of the darkness into the sunlight,” his wife Melinda said.
In my two encounters with him, Brian was quirky and a little uneasy. But completely without guile. Not that different from that kid on American Bandstand. When I asked if there was something he’d still like to do as a songwriter, he said: “I would like to write one song that imparts a love message.”
Actually, Brian you wrote a lifetime’s worth.
