Sweet dreams, Brian Wilson. The world is already a lonelier place without him, after the news of his death on Wednesday, just a few weeks before his 83rd birthday. For the ultimate poet of summer, it’s fitting that he left the planet in June, right where he came in — the California boy who sang “The Lonely Sea,” the tortured genius who wrote one of the most mournful melodies imaginable and called it “The Warmth of the Sun,” the most beloved of American songwriters. Brian spent his life turning his pain and longing into dreams for the whole world to share. That’s why his songs will live on forever, as long as there are stars above you. As he once sang, he wasn’t made for his times. But that’s because Brian Wilson was made for all time.
“I only tried surfing once, and the board almost hit me in the head,” he told Rolling Stone in 1999. But Brian turned his fantasies into a California dream-world of fast cars and cool waves — a world that might even have room for a scared misfit like him. America loved the Beach Boys as clean-cut bros in candy-stripe shirts. Yet even in his early days, Brian was writing yearningly vulnerable tunes like “Please Let Me Wonder” and “When I Grow Up (To Be A Man)” — as he later said, “snapshots of how I was feeling as I grew up.”
The Beach Boys are the most legendary of American rock & roll bands, haunting the cultural imagination, with a twisted family story at the heart of the saga. Three suburban brothers thrown together in a surf band by their abusive manager/father: Brian, the haunted pop composer. Carl, the shy kid with the heavenly voice. Dennis, the wild-ass drummer who lived the cars-and-surf lifestyle Brian just sang about. Plus high school pal Al Jardine and their cousin Mike Love, who took pride in bringing the bad vibrations. How could these damaged kids make such beautiful music together? God only knows.
But Brian created a tableau of Southern California heartbreak, the sound of surfer boys and girls searching for a place to belong. The radio was full of his good-time hits, yet he stashed his pained confessions on the albums. He capped off his 1965 breakthrough Today! with a Side Two suite of ballads, where “She Knows Me Too Well” feels like Greek tragedy translated into doo-wop harmonies and surf guitars. Barely out of his teens, Brian sings like he can already see how brutal growing up will be.
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His melodies were so personal, generations of fans have heard the songs as autobiographical, no matter who the lyricist might be. There isn’t a lot that Van Dyke Parks, Mike Love, Richard Christian, or Tony Asher had in common, except that their poetic voices were so subsumed in those tunes that we heard their words as Brian’s story, from All fall down and lost in the mystery to East Coast girls are hip to don’t worry baby to I know there’s an answer, I know now, but I had to find it by myself. A song about motorbikes like “Little Honda” could sound like a prayer, coming from the same spiritual zone as “God Only Knows” or “Feel Flows” or “Wonderful” or “With Me Tonight.” The ache in those melodies, the overwhelmingly bittersweet melancholy, just made it all sound like an endless-summer meditation that Brian kept going, off and on, for decades. His songbook was one lifelong teenage symphony to God.
One of the most beautiful Brian shows I ever saw was in the summer of 2016, at Brooklyn’s Northside Festival, doing Pet Sounds as he sat on his piano bench. But he spaced the second verse of “I Just Wasn’t Made For These Times” — he just lost his place, chuckled, and said, “Oh, I forgot the words.” The crowd just sang it for him until he figured out where to come in for the chorus. This could have been a sad or pitiful moment; instead, it was suffused with warmth. The communal gratitude we felt at singing his song back to him was so powerful, just like the tangible joy he felt hearing us, especially when he came in right on time to sing, “What’s it all about?” That’s a moment I’ll never forget. But Brian Wilson gave us a whole lifetime of those moments.
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As the great critic Tom Carson once wrote, Brian’s eternal dream was to put his “I Get Around” and “In My Room” in the same song. It was an impossible struggle, but for a boy abused and despised by his tyrannical father, who kept beating him well into adulthood, music was his only way to connect to the world. His influence goes everywhere, from Dr. Dre and Tupac quoting “Surfin’ U.S.A.” for Californ-I-A to Taylor Swift going onstage in L.A. on the Speak Now tour with a line written on her arm in Sharpie: “Don’t worry baby, everything will turn out all right.”
Pet Sounds is his archetypal masterpiece, putting all his wounded romanticism in one album. He started writing it the morning after he first heard the Beatles’ Rubber Soul — he woke up, went to his piano, and wrote “God Only Knows.” He paid the price for messing with the formula — Pet Sounds flopped. For years, it was impossible to find a copy, strange as that sounds now. But it’s become one of the world’s most beloved classics, coming in at Number Two on Rolling Stone’s list of the 500 Greatest Albums, with “Wouldn’t It Be Nice.” As Brian said in his memoir, “The last word of the album is no but the album is a big yes.”
I interviewed Brian once, in the summer of 2000. He wasn’t speaking to the press, but his wife Melinda hooked me up because she enjoyed a super-bitchy review I wrote of an idiotic TV miniseries called The Beach Boys: An American Family, an anti-Brian screed produced by John Stamos, presenting Mike Love as the real genius of the group. (There’s a scene where his bandmates call Brian “the Stalin of the studio.”) Over the phone, I asked about “Good Vibrations” — where did a song like that come from? “God,” he told me. “And Phil Spector. God, Phil Spector and the Beach Boys all combined.”
He got so excited, he paused to mute his TV — it was mid-afternoon, so he had The People’s Court going full blast. But when he said, “Hold on, let me turn the TV down,” I thought, hell yes, Brian is muting Judge Wapner. He told me about hearing “Be My Baby” for the first time, on his car radio, and pulling over to the side of the road to cry. “Good Vibrations” was his attempt to capture that same magic. “I knew God was with us when we were doing it,” he told me. “It’s no ‘Be My Baby, but it’s a good record.”
You can hear his fragile angst early on, in the pangs of “Surfer Girl” and the falsetto harmonies of “I Get Around,” the kind of song about hanging out that could only have been written by a kid never invited to hang out. There was so much poignance even in an early ditty like the obscure (and wonderful) “Don’t Hurt My Little Sister.” The song came back to haunt him in old age, as he said in his 2016 memoir I Am Brian Wilson, “maybe because it’s a song about protection and I felt scared that no one was protecting me.”
That vulnerable spirit is there in songs like “Til I Die,” a cryptic 1971 ballad from Surf’s Up, an elegy for his lost youth. Still under 30, he faces up to mortality with a psychedelic vibraphone solo. “I’m a leaf on a windy day,” he sings. “Pretty soon I’ll be blown away/How long will the wind blow?” “Til I Die” is especially haunting in the extended 5-minute version from the essential Feel Flows box, with alternate lyrics. It’s one of his most powerful creations — but Brian was pushing so far, he scared off his band as well as the fans.
The Beach Boys’ classic Sixties hits have never faded away, as he chronicled the life and death of the American dream. These were the songs that made the whole world dream of Californication, from the joyride of “Fun, Fun, Fun” and “Be True To Your School” to the moody gloom of “In My Room.” The songs echo each other: “Don’t Worry Baby” and “Shut Down” narrate the same hot-rod drag race, from different emotional angles. These remain his best-known tunes — the best of the many hit collections is Endless Summer, which became a surprise blockbuster in the 1970s, when the band thought time had passed them by. Every home had one — it seemed like Seventies moms and dads got issued Endless Summer in the maternity ward.
But his melancholia was there from the beginning, as in “The Lonely Sea,” a harrowing beach-goth ballad from 1963, on the Surfin’ Safari LP. “The lonely sea, it never stops for you or me,” Brian sings, warning his girl that she’ll break his heart, because she’s just like the ocean. In the cheesy 1965 teen flick The Girls on the Beach, he crashes a surf party to croon “The Lonely Sea” to the bikini bunnies — dude, what a buzzkill. You can definitely see why the Beach Boys didn’t make more movies after this.
Brian was always aiming for history. You could hear that in an early oddity like “The Surfer Moon,” from 1963, where he’s a rookie producer making his first stab at an old-school show-biz standard. (The orchestra might sound a little lost at the beach, but blame it all on the surfer moon.) “Little Honda” is an ode to a two-wheeled muse—not a big motorcycle, just a groovy little motorbike. The song is so expertly built, every gear shift feels huge. Yo La Tengo’s 1997 feedback-guitar version is one of the most loving Beach Boys tributes.
Pet Sounds was his ultimate statement — but it didn’t sell enough to pay the theremin bills. The album was a rarity for decades. (I was 22 before I was ever in the same room as a copy of Pet Sounds, in the attic of Rhymes Records in New Haven, and yes, I remember everything about that cosmos-altering June afternoon, especially how “That’s Not Me” and “I’m Waiting for the Day” were my first-listen faves.) It’s still startling to hear—especially “God Only Knows,” a tune everyone on earth wishes they could sing, although these are high notes only angels or Carl Wilson could reach.
Brian could have learned his lesson and started playing it safe — but needless to say, he didn’t. Instead, he set out to make an even more experimental album. In April 1967, Brian appeared on the Leonard Bernstein TV special Inside Pop, sitting at his home piano to stun viewers with a solo premiere of a new song: “Surf’s Up,” an epic ballad from his upcoming Smile. Brian promised this magnum opus would top his ultimate rivals, the Beatles; he was shattered when the Fabs beat him into stores with Sgt. Pepper. Paul McCartney famously visited Brian in the studio, played “She’s Leaving Home” on the piano, and told him, “You’d better hurry up!”
But he couldn’t even finish the album, suffering a meltdown and leaving a pile of outtakes. It’s tragic that he didn’t just release that one-take piano “Surf’s Up” — it would have been enough to establish the song as a classic. By the time the song came out in 1971, it was forgotten by all except the lucky few who’d caught it on TV. Smiley Smile became the homemade basement-tapes version of Smile, with spaced-out gems like the doo-wop seance “With Me Tonight.” Wild Honey was a marvelous return to their trashy rock & roll roots, a 24-minute rush of garage-band kicks. But nobody bought this one either — Wild Honey became their worst seller to date. The boy genius was damaged goods.
Now full-grown men with beards, the band made Sunflower a soulful adult statement for the new decade — so polished, it’s practically their Abbey Road. Sunflower came out on the last day of August 1970, Surf’s Up almost exactly a year later, which must have seemed all wrong for the Beach Boys. But it’s fitting because both albums are about moving on after the surf is gone, which is why both resonate today. Surf’s Up finally unveiled the title song, along with spooked-out gems like “Long Promised Road” and “Til I Die.” They were the last great songs Brian would manage to complete for years.
Brian became rock’s most notorious lost boy in the 1970s, hiding in his mansion in a druggy haze, with the shades pulled down. As he later admitted, “I was in bed in the early Seventies.” He wore a bathrobe behind the counter of his health-food shop, the Radiant Radish. (The high point for him: “I learned to use a cash register.”) But when he managed to focus on music, he could still bring it — as in “Marcella,” a blast of Stonesy raunch about his favorite masseuse. He came through in 1977 with The Beach Boys Love You, a cult oddity prized by hardcore Brianistas. He sings painfully candid confessions in his rough (and often out-of-tune) voice, yet with all his melodic sparkle. As he explained, “I wrote some songs that were about how I felt in my thirties, the same way that Pet Sounds was about how I felt in my twenties.”
He vents his adult loneliness in “Airplane,” “I Bet He’s Nice,” and the bizarrely touching “Johnny Carson,” where he’s got no company except the late-night TV talk-show host. “I Wanna Pick You Up” remains one of rock’s loveliest fatherhood songs — even if it sounds like Dad could use some babysitting himself.
The Eighties and Nineties were full of comeback efforts, with scattered not-bad results. But Brian was written off as a tragic burnout. In 1987, for Rolling Stone’s twentieth anniversary issue, he was asked a couple of questions he sang back in 1965’s “When I Grow Up (to Be a Man).” Did he dig the same things that turned him on as a kid? “Laughing. I like to laugh.” And did he ever look back and wish he hadn’t done what he did? “Drugs,” he said quietly. “I wish I hadn’t taken them.” But he didn’t imagine having any place in the public imagination. “Not really an identity, no. Just a high voice. That’s about it.”
But that’s why it was such a shock when he re-emerged in the 2000s in a creative rebirth, finally making music worthy of his name again, onstage and in the studio. The 2001 TV special An All-Star Tribute to Brian Wilson served notice that he was back in shape. The whole four-hour concert was an unforgettable night of Brian worship: Paul Simon crooning “Surfer Girl,” Elton John doing the twist with Billy Joel for “Fun, Fun, Fun,” the Go-Gos bashing “Little Honda,” David Crosby yowling, “This is the worst trip I’ve ever been on.” But Brian stole the show, making a cold, rainy March night in NYC glow with the warmth of the sun.
He even went back to the great doomed opus of his youth, Smile. It was rock’s most legendary unfinished masterpiece, with outtakes assembled on the 2011 box The Smile Sessions. But the definitive Smile is his fully realized 2004 version, with Brian finally strong enough to do these songs justice, in his sublimely autumnal “Cabin Essence” and “Surf’s Up.” It peaks with “Wonderful,” a two-minute reverie about childhood, a fragile tune he’d never had the voice for until now. Once his most infamous defeat, Smile became one of the great artistic triumphs of his life. Good vibrations, indeed.
He kept revisiting these songs for decades, always hearing the new stories they were telling as they evolved over time. “Keep an Eye on Summer,” a deep cut from the 1964 throwaway LP Shut Down Volume 2, took on a whole new meaning when he sang it on his 1998 Imagination, ruminating on how time fades away. In a 2018 radio interview, Al Jardine summed up “In My Room” beautifully: “I assumed it was Brian Wilson’s personal story about being secluded and lonely and feeling those feelings we all have.”
He wrote the last of his classics with “Summer’s Gone,” his finale for the Beach Boys’ 2012 reunion, That’s Why God Made The Radio. It was a farewell to his lost brothers Carl and Dennis, but as he said, “It was like ‘Caroline, No’ also, because I was thinking about younger versions of myself.” Brian sings about watching the waves, maybe on the same beach where he sang “The Lonely Sea” decades ago. “Old friends have gone, they’ve gone their separate ways,” he sings. “Our dreams hold on for those who have more to say.”
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“Summer’s Gone” seems to sum up the whole Brian Wilson saga in five bittersweet minutes, transforming grief and solitude into timeless beauty. The damage of his early years could have destroyed him — yet he found a way to transform it into music that will be sung around the world as long as people can sing. His life could have been a horror story — he turned it into a love song.
This is a heavy loss for anyone who loves music — it seems the more we talk about him, it only makes it worse to live without him. But let’s talk about him. We’re all lucky to share in the world he helped create in his music. He turned it into the kind of world where we belong. Good night and thank you, Brian Wilson. Surf’s up, forever.
