Even though Brian Wilson grew up only five miles from the Pacific Ocean, he rarely went to the beach. He’d felt scared by the size of the ocean on his first visit. Being light-skinned, he also feared sunburns. He tried surfing, but got hit on the head by his board and decided once was enough.
And yet, in songs like “Surfin’ U.S.A.,” “California Girls” and “Good Vibrations,” Wilson did as much as anyone to depict Los Angeles and California as a land of bikinis and warm, honey-colored sunsets. The songs he wrote about the West Coast, he said in “I Am Brian Wilson: A Memoir,” were “more about the idea of going in the ocean than they were about actually going in the ocean.” Wilson didn’t like waves, but realized how they could serve as a metaphor for life.
Wilson, whose death at 82 was announced by his family on Wednesday, was as closely associated with Los Angeles as anyone in music history. In 1988, The Los Angeles Times polled a passel of industry veterans and asked them to name the greatest L.A. band of all time; the Beach Boys came in second. (The Doors won, a dubious choice.) When Randy Newman wanted to mock the city in “I Love L.A.,” his covertly acerbic 1983 hit, he shouted, with almost-convincing enthusiasm, “Turn up the Beach Boys!”
Wilson’s fantasia of California — a Zion where everyone wore huarache sandals and drove deuce coupes — thrilled millions of people worldwide and aligned with a period in the state’s growth. Between 1962 and 1970, the Beach Boys’ heyday, the population of California increased by three million people. Wilson couldn’t claim credit for the boom, but no tourism board or corporate recruiter could design a better pitch. The songs were specific and local, but also universal. How else to explain “Surfin’ Safari” topping the singles chart in Sweden?
When they recorded their first 45, “Surfin’,” the local record label Candix suggested the band change its name from the Pendletones to the Beach Boys, to emphasize the surf theme. Dennis, the outgoing, often reckless Wilson brother, surfed regularly in South Bay, and told Brian it was a popular and emerging trend. The first single was successful, so Brian stuck with the theme. The beach was their brand. Four early Beach Boys singles and every one of their first three albums had the word surf in their titles.
Brian, a classic “indoor kid,” wrote about those adventures from a position of voyeurism. In a 1965 interview with The Los Angeles Times, he mentioned “our West Coast sound, which we pioneered.” The songs, he added, tell stories about teenagers. “We base them on activities of healthy California kids who like to surf, hot rod, and engage in other outdoor fun.” He saw these activities the same way he saw the ocean — through a window.
A songwriter doesn’t need to have firsthand experience with his subject matter, only an inquisitive imagination, an emotional link to a topic and an eye for detail. As an observer, Wilson could write exuberant songs about teenage frolic. But he had deeper and sadder inspirations, too. Murry Wilson, a frustrated songwriter and father to the three Wilson boys, was a physically and verbally abusive bully. The darkness that eventually overtook him started early, at home.
While Wilson was flying high as a successful (and envied) songwriter and performer, he suffered from depression and anxiety that led him to stop traveling by plane and touring; he made it worse by using cocaine and speed. “I was sinking,” he wrote.
He was shy and sensitive (music, he said, “was my only friend”), and mental illness pushed him deeper into solitude and contemplation. As much as his voyeuristic songs were fun fun fun, his personal songs about anxiety and rejection were gorgeous and troubled, with beautiful melodies and surprising vaults from major to minor keys.
He’d started by hitching his wagon to a trend, which showed a gift for marketing, then shifted his themes and creative ambitions once he had a foothold. The band toured without him, playing the hits and perpetuating the idea of the Beach Boys as a rock ’n’ roll clambake, even as Wilson struggled to contain his illness and wrote songs that transcended the group’s stature as the quintessential Los Angeles band.
Amid the palm trees, California has a darkness to match its brightness, as John Steinbeck, Nathanael West and James Ellroy have well documented. With his array of joyful, voyeuristic songs and pained, anxious ones, Wilson understood the two sides of the state, and human nature.
The decisive evidence of Wilson’s genius is his melancholy work: “In My Room,” “Don’t Worry Baby,” “I Just Wasn’t Made for These Times,” “’Til I Die” (written, Wilson said, while he was “depressed and preoccupied with death”), “Caroline, No,” “The Warmth of the Sun” (written the night John F. Kennedy was killed), the celestial “God Only Knows,” sung perfectly by Carl, and plenty more.
Robert Hilburn, a native Angeleno and the pop music critic of The Los Angeles Times for 35 years, recalled hearing the first Beach Boys hits when he was 21. “I thought they were cute and catchy, but too simple, too teen — they weren’t heavy like Bob Dylan was.” Then, as Wilson advanced as a writer, Hilburn noticed “the loneliness and sadness of Brian’s other songs, that came from his insecurity and paranoia. That dark side was the key. That’s what cements his legacy.”
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