To understand the genius of Brian Wilson, the Beach Boys mastermind whose family announced his death yesterday at age 82, go listen to “Surfer Girl.” Try to forget that you’ve heard this 1963 hit playing in the background of your life for decades. Forget that it’s about making out in a woody. Forget even that you’re hearing the voices of young men, some of them still teenagers, some of them brothers. Hear what Wilson may have heard: gooey vibrational waves, surging and receding, coating the ear. Art that’s oceanic in form as much as in content. Pure sound.
And then add back in all of the song’s emotions—innocence, longing, brotherly harmony, nostalgia for the barbershop-singing ’50s, giddiness for the dawning ’60s. The lyrical image of a surfer guy ogling a surfer girl is plainly kitsch, but it’s rendered with the seriousness and sadness inherent in really wanting something. Wilson said this was the first original song he ever wrote; The New York Times reports that it might have been the first pop hit in history to have been written, arranged, produced, and performed by the same person. It was an early triumph that demonstrated Wilson’s method: singular control and meticulous sound design, used to venerate collective feelings.
The band—initially comprising the three Wilson brothers, one cousin (Mike Love), and one schoolmate (Al Jardine)—got their start in 1961, playing in the Wilson-family garage in Los Angeles County. So much was still new then: rock and roll, surfing as a national hobby, the very concept of teenagedom as a discrete and special time in life. The record industry itself was in only its relative adolescence. Wilson worshipped the music of the producer Phil Spector, who helped pioneer the notion of treating the studio as an instrument. And the Beatles, the Beach Boys’ great contemporaries, were just then experimenting with the idea of rock albums as unified artistic statements.
The Beach Boys were pretty-faced pinups merchandising the trendy Southern California beach lifestyle—but Wilson didn’t surf, and he didn’t love being onstage. He later said that he thought of himself as “a behind-the-scenes man, rather than an entertainer.” The other band members, recognizing his talents, let him play that role. “I had ideas coming into my head all the time,” he told the Harvard Business Review in 2016. “Many had to do with using instruments as voices and voices as instruments. I would put sounds together to create something new. Some ideas didn’t work, because they were too difficult to achieve at the time. But most did. And then I immediately moved to the next thing.”
Following a panic attack in 1964, he quit touring, which freed him up to pursue his greatest vision: an album that would be as dense and wondrous as Spector’s music, and as ambitious as what the Beatles pulled off in 1965 with Rubber Soul. Thus was born 1966’s Pet Sounds, which is still known as one of the greatest albums ever. The recording process was ego-flattening for his bandmates—Wilson demanded endless vocal takes, and replaced many of their instrumental contributions with the work of session musicians from the famous Wrecking Crew. The resulting album was an ornate musical diorama made up of toy-box noises—harpsichord, bells, timpani—and sinuous voices that drifted between glumness and uplift. It closed with the sound of a barking dog and a chugging train, as if to emphasize the unity between the kaleidoscopic music and our kaleidoscopic world.
But Pet Sounds was not merely the technical achievement of an all-controlling aesthete. Wilson had spiritual aims for the record: “We prayed that we could bring love to people, and it really worked,” he’d later say. Co-created by the advertising copywriter Tony Asher, the lyrics used the Beach Boys’ perpetual narrator—some pining young man—to tug on existential themes with down-to-earth poignancy. “God Only Knows” was devastatingly relatable: the sound of someone in love imagining loss, spiraling out to ask for divine help with a catastrophe that hasn’t even happened yet. Songs such as “I Just Wasn’t Made for These Times” and “I Know There’s an Answer” plumbed depression and alienation with palpable confusion. The narrator didn’t know if his pain was his fault or everyone else’s.
The themes of those songs, as well as Wilson’s obsessive habits in the studio, took on a tragic resonance for fans as he struggled for decades after Pet Sounds. Wilson began experiencing hallucinations in 1965, and he’d later be diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder. He fell into a socially isolated routine of taking drugs and binging on junk food. A charismatic psychotherapist named Eugene Landy entered his life and took control of both his health and his business interests. Wilson credited the doctor with saving his life but also reportedly felt he’d been confined to a “strange hell” he couldn’t escape from; their relationship ended a few years after Landy surrendered his medical license to state officials in the late ’80s. (Landy admitted to improperly supplying drugs to patients, but otherwise denied the allegations against him.) When Wilson died, he was under the care of a conservatorship sought by family members.
Yet although Wilson’s creative golden age ended in the ’60s, his influence kept growing. I first really got into him when a version of Smile, his long-incomplete post–Pet Sounds opus, was finally released in 2004 with the title Brian Wilson Presents Smile. The music sounded nothing like the early-digital-era rock and pop I’d been listening to as a high schooler; it was earnest and fizzy, with touches of country-and-western and hula music. But the way the songs seemed stitched together, almost in cut-and-paste fashion, was recognizably modern. The album had been sketched out nearly four decades earlier, but it had anticipated recorded music’s trajectory as a producer’s medium, unbounded by any fealty to what a live band sounds like.
Today, lots of musicians work in the way Brian Wilson did: holing up in their room, using technology to conjure any sound their brain can dream of, spending great expanses of time getting the details just right. His legacy should also inspire his disciples to look not just inward but outward, toward an appreciation of what their vibrations can do for others.
The post Brian Wilson’s World of Sound appeared first on The Atlantic.
