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.
His family announced the death on Instagram but did not say where or when he died, or state a cause. In early 2024, after the death of his wife Melinda, business representatives for Mr. Wilson were granted a conservatorship by a federal judge, saying that he had “a major neurocognitive disorder” and had been diagnosed with dementia.
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.”
“Pet Sounds” was a commercial disappointment upon its release, but its technical sophistication and melancholic depth on tracks like “God Only Knows” and “I Just Wasn’t Made for These Times” eventually led critics and fellow musicians to honor it as an epochal achievement. In both 2003 and 2020, Rolling Stone ranked “Pet Sounds” No. 2 on its list of the greatest albums of all time.
The LP was one volley in a celebrated creative rivalry between the Beach Boys and the Beatles. The producer George Martin later attested that “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,” the Beatles’ landmark 1967 album, “never would have happened” if not for “Pet Sounds.”
“It was ‘Pet Sounds’ that blew me out of the water,” Paul McCartney once said. “I figure no one is educated musically ’til they’ve heard that album.”
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.
“I had a helluva time getting through some of the frustrations that go along with being a successful record artist,” Mr. Wilson told The New York Times Magazine in 1988. “When I got out there with the Beach Boys, at first I was OK, because I was riding a wave, riding a crest. But then, later on, 10 years later, I got scared, and I got lost, and I was eating caramel sundaes for breakfast. I was all out of whack!”
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.
Mr. Wilson’s life story came to be portrayed as a struggle to escape from the yokes of two men: his abusive father and a controlling psychotherapist, Eugene Landy. Mr. Landy’s unorthodox methods, which included monitoring Mr. Wilson 24 hours a day and padlocking his refrigerator, were effective in nursing Mr. Wilson back to health during two periods of treatment in the 1970s and ’80s. Yet Mr. Landy also went into business with his patient, sharing copyrights with Mr. Wilson and taking writing credits on some of his songs.
Mr. Landy eventually came under the scrutiny of the California authorities and surrendered his license. After an intervention by Mr. Wilson’s family, a court order also blocked Mr. Landy from contact with the singer.
Mr. Wilson spoke openly about his struggles with mental illness, including his experience with schizoaffective disorder, a condition characterized by hallucinations and delusions. In early 2024, after the death of his wife Melinda, business representatives for Mr. Wilson petitioned a California court for a conservatorship, saying that he had “a major neurocognitive disorder” and had been diagnosed with dementia.
Starting in the late 1990s, he undertook a series of concert tours that celebrated his Beach Boys work as a treasure of American song. Onstage, Mr. Wilson often sat at the piano with a blank expression, and in public statements he could seem as guileless as one of his melodies.
At the Beach Boys’ Rock & Roll Hall of Fame induction in 1988, he described his ambitions: “I wanted to write joyful music that would make other people feel good.”
A Generational Talent
Brian Douglas Wilson was born on June 20, 1942, in Inglewood, Calif., to Murry and Audree (Korthof) Wilson. His father was a heavy-machinery salesman who had collected a handful of credits as a frustrated songwriter. His mother was a homemaker who kept the Beach Boys’ books in the early days of the band.
The family moved to Hawthorne, another working-class corner of Los Angeles County, when Brian was a toddler, and had two more boys, Dennis and Carl.
From a young age, Brian was almost completely deaf in his right ear. He gave various explanations for the condition, citing a blow from a neighborhood boy or, in some tellings, his father.
As a teenager, Brian was a fan of Chuck Berry’s rock ’n’ roll but was especially entranced by the close, melting harmonies of the jazz-influenced vocal group the Four Freshmen; he led his brothers in careful recreations of their songs.
By 1961, the three Wilson boys were playing rock music with Mr. Love, a cousin, and a schoolmate of Brian’s, Al Jardine. In the band’s most familiar early lineup, Brian played bass, Dennis was on the drums, Carl and Mr. Jardine played guitar, and they all sang.
Around that time, Dennis began surfing and delighted in the fashion, trendy lingo and carefree lifestyle that went along with it. One day he told Brian and Mr. Love, “You guys ought to write a song about surfing.”
They did, and that fall, after a rehearsal while the Wilsons’ parents were out of town, the group recorded its first song, “Surfin’.” The young men called themselves the Pendletones, after a type of flannel shirt popular among surfers. When they received the finished record, released by a small local label, Candix, they discovered that they had been renamed the Beach Boys.
“Surfin’” was a crude blueprint for what would become the Beach Boys’ signature sound: a simple lead vocal line (sung by Mr. Love) accompanied by sunny harmonizing, doo-wop-style scatting and a rudimentary rock beat. To that point the surf music fad had primarily involved guitar instrumentals, but by adding vocals the Beach Boys created a wave rider’s credo:
Surfing is the only life, the only way for me
Now come on pretty baby and surf with me
Though Mr. Wilson embraced the youthful freedom that surfing represented, he never took to the sport. “I tried it once and got conked on the head with the board,” he once said.
Signed by Capitol Records in 1962, the group was prolific from the start, releasing 10 studio LPs through 1965. With short hair, toothy smiles and matching striped shirts, the young men cut a wholesome image. Their harmonies, shared by all members, were vivacious and pristine.
Mr. Wilson became the band’s primary producer and songwriter, and his sophistication soon shone through. “Surfer Girl,” a lilting, harmony-drenched ballad that went to No. 7 in 1963, was perhaps the first pop hit written, arranged, produced and sung by the same person.
Mr. Wilson’s first No. 1, however, came as a writer of Jan and Dean’s song “Surf City” (1963). In a sign of conflicts to come, Murry Wilson, who managed the Beach Boys and controlled the band’s songwriting copyrights, was furious that Brian had given a valuable hit to another act.
Other problems surfaced. “Surfin’ U.S.A.” resembled Chuck Berry’s “Sweet Little Sixteen” a bit too closely, so Berry was added to the credits, and his publisher acquired the song’s copyright.
In December 1964, Mr. Wilson married Marilyn Rovell, who sang in a girl group called the Honeys. A few weeks later, just before Christmas, he had a panic attack on a flight to a Beach Boys engagement in Houston and decided to quit touring to concentrate on songwriting and recording.
That same year, the group also fired Murry as manager. He responded by promoting a Beach Boys copycat group, the Sunrays, which quickly flamed out.
As Mr. Wilson would recount, his father had long tormented him physically and emotionally. In one form of punishment that Mr. Wilson described many times, his father would remove his glass eye and force his terrified son to stare into the empty socket.
“My dad was violent,” Mr. Wilson wrote in a 2016 memoir, “I Am Brian Wilson,” written with Ben Greenman. “He was cruel.”
Freed from his father’s control and the Beach Boys’ touring demands, Mr. Wilson immersed himself in the studio. For a time, he embodied the role of a visionary working within the confines of commercial pop, much like the producer Phil Spector, Mr. Wilson’s hero.
“Pet Sounds,” released in May 1966, elevated the Beach Boys’ music to a level far above anything they had created before. With the rest of the group on the road, Mr. Wilson made the album primarily with studio musicians, and he employed a broad sonic palette: French horns, strings, timpani and playful sound effects like bicycle bells, all in addition to the standard rock complement of guitar, bass and drums.
The songs, like “Wouldn’t It Be Nice” and “Caroline, No,” explored themes of lost innocence and the transition to adulthood. Most were written with Tony Asher, a young lyricist and jingle writer whom Mr. Wilson had recently met. Mr. Wilson took painstaking care with every detail of the recording, including lushly arranged stacks of vocal harmonies, which for the other Beach Boys often meant an excruciating number of takes. Mr. Love called him “the Stalin of the studio,” only half in jest.
Upon release, the album stalled at No. 10, a relative dud by Beach Boys standards. By then, however, Mr. Wilson was already working on his next gem: the single “Good Vibrations.”
Spliced together from months of sessions across four studios — according to Mr. Love, the group recorded 25 to 30 vocal overdubs for a segment that lasted just five seconds — “Good Vibrations” was a catchy and sonically adventurous invocation of peppy West Coast spirituality. Released in October 1966, the song became an indelible radio hit, but it was Mr. Wilson’s last moment at the vanguard of pop.
In Thrall
“Smile,” the next album project, which Mr. Wilson made with another songwriting collaborator, Van Dyke Parks, was intended to be his supreme achievement. Mr. Wilson hyped it at the time as “a teenage symphony to God.”
Yet the album collapsed after more than 80 sessions in 1966 and 1967. To meet their obligations to Capitol, the Beach Boys quickly assembled two albums in late 1967 — “Smiley Smile,” a scaled-down version of Mr. Wilson’s opus, and “Wild Honey” — which had little impact.
For years thereafter, the group was adrift. The Beach Boys were caught between the new vogues of heavy rock and folk-influenced singer-songwriters, and their albums sold modestly at best. Mr. Wilson was withdrawn, spending long stretches in bed and obsessively listening to old records like the Ronettes’ “Be My Baby,” Spector’s masterpiece from 1963.
Mr. Wilson’s drug use, which had begun during happier times for the band — the buoyant 1965 hit “California Girls,” he said, was written after an acid trip — had grown out of control, stunting his creativity. “I lost interest in writing songs,” Mr. Wilson once told Rolling Stone. “I lost the inspiration. I was too concerned with getting drugs to write songs.”
Some Beach Boys albums, like “Surf’s Up” (1971) and “Holland” (1973), released by the band’s new label, Reprise, still had a spark of invention.
But the band changed course after Capitol issued “Endless Summer” (1974), a compilation of the group’s early hits, which became the Beach Boys’ second No. 1 album and their first in a decade. Although the band’s live shows had long been packed with old numbers, its next studio album, “15 Big Ones” (1976) — promoted heavily as Mr. Wilson’s comeback — leaned on nostalgic covers of Chuck Berry, the Righteous Brothers and others.
The album went to No. 8, the band’s best showing for a studio LP since 1965. Yet Mr. Wilson remained isolated and troubled. For about a year, starting in 1975, he was treated by Mr. Landy, whose methods included dousing his patient with cold water in the morning. He also limited his patient’s contact with others, including Mr. Wilson’s family, to underscore the therapist’s role as “the ultimate power in this situation,” as Mr. Landy once put it.
Mr. Wilson continued to perform as part of the Beach Boys, but his behavior was erratic and his drug use continued. After one 1977 appearance by the band in London, Melody Maker, a music publication, reported that Mr. Wilson “looked totally zomboid and completely unaware of what was happening around him.” He and Marilyn separated in 1978, and their divorce was finalized in 1981.
In late 1982, the Beach Boys kicked Mr. Wilson out of the group, and he returned to the care of Mr. Landy. His treatment, begun in seclusion in Hawaii, included a strict diet and vitamin regimen, with Mr. Wilson under constant supervision. Having forgotten many of his own compositions, he relearned Beach Boys classics like “Surfer Girl” from a songbook.
Mr. Landy portrayed himself as a surrogate parent helping Mr. Wilson rebuild his life. “I’m the good father,” he told The Los Angeles Times in 1983. “I’m re-parenting the way he perceives life.”
Mr. Landy’s techniques raised eyebrows, but in Mr. Wilson’s case they seemed effective. When the singer made the press rounds in 1988 for his first solo album, “Brian Wilson,” he appeared fit, energetic and focused. Mr. Wilson, and the band, credited Mr. Landy with a lifesaving turnaround.
Yet the extent of Mr. Landy’s control over his patient, and his involvement in Mr. Wilson’s career, drew concern among Mr. Wilson’s family and people in the music industry. The two men started a business partnership, called Brains and Genius, that allowed Mr. Landy — who charged Mr. Wilson as much as $35,000 a month and drove a Maserati bearing the license plate “HEADOC” — to draw profits from Mr. Wilson’s recordings, films and other ventures.
Mr. Landy was the executive producer of “Brian Wilson,” and he and his girlfriend, Alexandra Morgan, shared songwriting credits with Mr. Wilson on some tracks. Mr. Wilson said he even modified his will to make Mr. Landy its primary beneficiary.
After an investigation by the California authorities into his treatment of Mr. Wilson and other patients, Mr. Landy surrendered his license in 1989, though he continued to work with Mr. Wilson through their partnership. Members of Mr. Wilson’s family filed a conservatorship case over Mr. Wilson’s care. In 1992, as a result of a settlement in that case, Mr. Landy was barred by court order from making any contact with Mr. Wilson; his name and that of Ms. Morgan, whom he later married, were removed from song credits. Mr. Landy died in 2006 at 71.
“Through history there are stories about tyrants who control entire countries,” Mr. Wilson wrote in his memoir. “Dr. Landy was a tyrant who controlled one person, and that person was me.”
In 1995, Mr. Wilson married Melinda Ledbetter, a former model who worked at a car dealership and had sold him a Cadillac. He frequently credited her with helping him rebuild his life after his entanglement with Mr. Landy. She died in 2024.
“Melinda was more than my wife,” Mr. Wilson said at the time. “She was my savior. She gave me the emotional security I needed to have a career. She encouraged me to make the music that was closest to my heart. She was my anchor.”
Brian and Melinda adopted three daughters, Daria, Delanie and Dakota, and two sons, Dylan and Dash. Those children survive him, as do two daughters from his marriage to Marilyn, Carnie and Wendy Wilson, of the pop group Wilson Phillips; and six grandchildren.
Dennis Wilson drowned in the Pacific Ocean in 1983 after a drinking binge. He was 39. Carl Wilson died of lung cancer in 1998 at age 51.
Legal Troubles
Around the time that Mr. Wilson was separating from Mr. Landy, he became embroiled in various legal fights over the lucrative business of the Beach Boys’ music.
He sued to reclaim the group’s music publishing catalog, Sea of Tunes, which Murry Wilson had sold in 1969 for just $700,000; Brian Wilson contended that his father, who died in 1973, had forged his signature on sale documents.
In a settlement, Mr. Wilson received $10 million, but the copyrights remained with Irving Music, a publisher associated with A&M Records. (Mr. Wilson later regained rights to his songwriting catalog and in 2021 sold them to Universal Music for more than $50 million, according to a lawsuit filed by his former wife, now known as Marilyn Wilson-Rutherford; she said she was entitled to millions from that deal under the terms of their divorce agreement.)
Mr. Love sued Mr. Wilson over songwriting credits, and in 1994 a jury ruled in his favor. Mr. Love was awarded $5 million and gained co-writing credit on 35 classic Beach Boys songs, including “California Girls,” “Help Me, Rhonda” and “I Get Around.”
The two men spent much of the Beach Boys’ latter years tussling in and out of court, with Mr. Love frequently saying that he had not received proper recognition for his contributions to the group and complaining about the lone-genius halo that had been affixed to Mr. Wilson.
“For those who believe that Brian walks on water, I will always be the Antichrist,” Mr. Love declared in a 2016 memoir, “Good Vibrations: My Life as a Beach Boy,” written with James S. Hirsch.
In the public imagination, Mr. Wilson remained the undisputed mastermind of the group, his story of troubled genius lodged in rock mythology. A 2014 film, “Love & Mercy,” portrayed him as a duality, with two actors — Paul Dano and John Cusack — playing Mr. Wilson, first at his creative peak in the 1960s and then struggling with mental illness in middle age.
By the 2000s, Mr. Wilson was leading a series of celebratory tours, with a backing band that included members of the Wondermints, a Los Angeles group adept at recreating his arrangements. With help from Mr. Parks, his original collaborator, and Darian Sahanaja of the Wondermints, Mr. Wilson reconstructed “Smile” and in 2004 released it on the Nonesuch label.
He also canceled some events over what he called problems with mental illness, and in his memoir he described hearing threatening voices in his head.
Yet his influence only grew. In the 2000s, he won two Grammy Awards, and in 2007, he received the Kennedy Center Honors, alongside Diana Ross, Martin Scorsese, Steve Martin and the concert pianist Leon Fleisher. In 2021, he released “At My Piano,” featuring his solo versions of Beach Boys classics, and he toured that year and in 2022.
“Being called a musical genius was a cross to bear,” he told Rolling Stone in 1988. “Genius is a big word. But if you have to live up to something, you might as well live up to that.”
Ben Sisario, a reporter covering music and the music industry, has been writing for The Times for more than 20 years.
The post Brian Wilson, Pop Auteur and Leader of the Beach Boys, Dies at 82 appeared first on New York Times.
