For Brian Wilson’s lengthy contributions to the tarnished monolith of 20th-century rock culture, neither he nor his work has ever sat easily within it.
Wilson, the Beach Boys songwriter who died on June 11 at 82, did love rock ‘n’ roll, per se: He shamelessly ripped off Chuck Berry for the band’s iconic early single “Surfin’ U.S.A.,” and his mid-to-late discography is overstuffed with generic, iterative boogie-woogie riffs. But the tender, artful balladry and sorcerous studio experimentation that cemented his legacy are totally sui generis for the genre, comprising an act of emotional and creative bravery so rare and beautiful in American culture that it has never been successfully imitated.
Wilson grew up an all-American jock in the painfully square, white, aerospace-dominated 1950s Los Angeles suburbs — albeit one with offbeat cultural predilections, such as his obsession with the music of Midwestern jazz vocal group the Four Freshmen. In Peter Ames Carlin’s superb 2006 biography Catch a Wave: The Rise, Fall & Redemption of the Beach Boys’ Brian Wilson, he recounts an episode in which Wilson cajoled his teenage classmates into a disastrous public rendition of the group’s “It’s a Blue World.” A supportive classmate could only muster a sheepish “Well, at least you tried.”
According to Carlin, the embarrassment stung for years. Wilson was a soft man in a hard post-World War II society: As a much-disputed legend goes, the deafness he experienced in his right ear was the result of a blow from his father Murry, a thwarted songwriter in his own right who became an industrial equipment salesman and all-purpose domestic tyrant.
“Maybe the worst thing about my dad was how he dealt with my fear,” Wilson wrote in his 2016 memoir. “Whenever I got afraid, he would yell at me or slap me or call me a p****. … He couldn’t stand to see me that way, and he did everything wrong to get me feeling differently.”
Not fame or fortune — those, along with Wilson’s golden ear, are more attributable to the radicalizing cultural influence of his surfer brother, Dennis, or the ferocious capitalism of Beach Boys frontman Mike Love — but his genius came in large part from that fear. The earliest, pre-Pet Sounds glimpses of Wilson’s off-kilter songwriting genius come from naked, painful confessions of anxiety not quite fit for 1960s pop radio: not just soulful laments like “The Warmth of the Sun,” but the neurotic, cryptosexual odyssey of “She Knows Me Too Well,” or the bombastic kitchen-sink drama of “Let Him Run Wild,” allegedly inspired by Murry’s extramarital affairs.
With Pet Sounds, the Beach Boys’ 1966 magnum opus, Wilson turned his outsider’s fear inside-out. By mastering the studio in collaboration with the crack studio musicians who backed Wilson’s idol, Phil Spector, the young composer found enough aural space to envelop his worries and spin them into a musical embrace that was supernaturally comforting, even when the sentiments expressed were profoundly lonely: “After all I’ve done to you, how can it be you still believe in me?” he sings on the record’s second track. It’s sandwiched between a defiantly naïve expression of faith in marriage, the immortal “Wouldn’t It Be Nice,” and a lovably clunky paean to home, family, and monogamy in “That’s Not Me” — not exactly hot-ticket subject matter as the Vietnam War and American counterculture escalated.
Wilson’s first wife, Marilyn, told Rolling Stone in 1976 that when Pet Sounds was finished, he brought home an acetate “and we just lay there alone all night, you know, on the bed and just listened and cried and did a whole thing. It was really, really heavy. We both cried.” In his 2016 memoir, Wilson wrote that it was “a spiritual record. When I was making it, I looked around at the musicians and the singers, and I could see their halos. That feeling stayed on the finished album.”
THE ROCK AND ROLL HALL OF FAME IS NOT VERY ROCK AND ROLL
With so much at stake personally, Wilson couldn’t withstand the record’s relative commercial failure, not to mention the subsequent sputtering out of his ambitious follow-up, Smile. Half Prospero, half Gomer Pyle, Wilson abjured his magic and spent much of the following two decades stumbling into mania, depression, and drug abuse, before eventually reemerging into public life and personal prosperity. He leaves behind seven children, including five adopted late in life.
The ten-ton Behind the Music melodrama of Wilson’s later life often threatened to obscure his actual musical contribution, already so offbeat and vulnerable. Still, its optimism, sincerity, and painstaking work ethic stand in sharp relief to the scabrous cultural explosions of the 1960s, the genesis moment for rock music and all it wrought. Wilson’s music will long outlive it as a brave and timeless inversion of the historically eternal fear of a cruel world: his “healing sounds,” as his brother Carl once described them, wrapping listeners in freely offered beauty and mastery.
Derek Robertson co-authors Politico’s Digital Future Daily newsletter and is a contributor to Politico Magazine.