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.
“We are heartbroken to announce that our beloved father Brian Wilson has passed away. We are at a loss for words right now,” his family wrote in a statement posted on social media. “Please respect our privacy at this time as our family is grieving. We realize that we are sharing our grief with the world.”
Wilson’s family did not provide a cause of death, but it was revealed in February 2024 that the Beach Boys legend was battling dementia.
“Brian gave so much to the world through his music, his spirit and his strength. He was a sweet, gentle soul as well as fierce competitor,” Wilson’s longtime manager Jean Sievers said in a statement to Rolling Stone. “There will never ever be anyone like him again. God truly broke the mold when he created Brian Wilson. Besides being a creative genius, he was one the smartest and funniest people I’ve ever known. His message of love will live on through his music forever.”
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.
Born June 20, 1942, Brian Wilson grew up in Hawthorne, California, a modest town next to the Los Angeles Airport. Brian was the eldest of three brothers; his younger brothers were Dennis and Carl. Their father, Murry, was an aspiring songwriter and a tyrant. “Although he saw himself as a loving father who guided his brood with a firm hand, he abused us psychologically and physically, creating wounds that never healed,” Wilson wrote in his 1991 autobiography, Wouldn’t It Be Nice: My Own Story.
Wilson grew up playing sports and obsessing over music, teaching his brothers to harmonize with him. Music was his sustenance and his solace, he said: “Early on, I learned that when I tuned the world out, I was able to tune in a mysterious, God-given music. It was my gift, and it allowed me to interpret and understand emotions I couldn’t articulate.”
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.
Wilson spent most of the next decade in his Bel Air mansion, which included both a recording studio and a sandbox in the living room (he put his piano in it so he could feel sand between his toes when he played). “He was a man so lonely and so abused and maligned, ostracized,” Van Dyke Parks told Rolling Stone in 2004. “It was an outrage what he suffered.”
The Beach Boys continued without Brian Wilson; even as their album sales evaporated, they remained a popular oldies-oriented touring act. Over the following decades, Wilson would periodically rejoin the band and sometimes even tour with them, despite the intra-band lawsuits over songwriting credits and money. In 1988, Wilson hesitantly stepped back into the public eye and started releasing solo albums, beginning with the cult masterpiece Brian Wilson, which had a executive producer credit for Wilson’s longtime therapist, Dr. Eugene Landy (who later had lost his license to practice therapy). It was outpaced commercially by Wilson’s daughters, Carnie and Wendy, who formed two-thirds of Wilson Phillips, a vocal trio that sold ten million copies of their 1990 debut album. Wilson performed with his daughters on 1995’s I Just Wasn’t Made for These Times. That same year he released Orange Crate Art, an collaboration with Van Dyke Parks.
Smile‘s legend had only increased in the decades since it was abandoned; it was considered the great lost rock album and even inspired a time-travel novel (Lewis Shiner’s Glimpses) where the protagonist convinces Wilson to complete the album. Although songs, including “Heroes and Villains” and “Surf’s Up,” had made their way piecemeal onto Beach Boys albums, it was generally assumed that it was impossible to piece together the shards of Wilson’s masterpiece. In 2004, however, against all odds, Wilson completed the album; in a five-star review, Rolling Stone said it was “beautiful and funny, goofily grand.”
Wilson had found his way to something that once seemed impossible: a happy ending. “I’ll tell you something I’ve learned,” he confided to Rolling Stone in 2004. “It’s hard work to be happy.” The album earned Wilson his first-ever Grammy Award, as the LP’s “Mrs. O’Leary’s Cow” — the song that sparked Wilson’s meltdown decades earlier — won Best Rock Instrumental Performance.
In 2012, Wilson reunited with the Beach Boys for That’s Why God Made the Radio, the band’s first album together since 1996; the LP peaked at Number Three on the Billboard 200, their highest-slotting album since 1965. Wilson also embarked on a tour with the Beach Boys. Both the album and the tour marked the end of his Beach Boys tenure.
In February 2024, just weeks after the death of Brian’s second wife and longtime manager, Melinda, Brian’s family revealed that the singer was suffering from dementia, and a conservatorship was sought to secure his continued care.
“This decision was made to ensure that there will be no extreme changes to the household, and Brian and the children living at home will be taken care of and remain in the home where they are cared for,” the Wilson family statement said at the time. “Brian will be able to enjoy all of his family and friends and continue to work on current projects as well as participate in any activities he chooses.”
This story is developing.
From Rolling Stone US.