Brian Wilson

BRIAN WILSON'S father, Murry, was an aspiring songwriter (his "Two Step Side Step" was once played by Lawrence Welk's band on a national radio show), and he imbued his children with a love for music. As teenagers, Brian and his brothers, Carl and Dennis, and their cousin Mike Love spent hours harmonizing around the piano. Late in 1961, they recorded a few demos, one of which--"Surfin'"--became a hit in Southern California and eventually reached No. 75 on the national charts. Remarkably, Brian Wilson's most productive years as a songwriter and producer would end while he was still in his early twenties.

The Beach Boys--so dubbed by a record executive--invented a new sound, combining Four Freshman-like vocal harmonies with Ventures guitar licks. "Surfin' Safari" (No. 14, 1962) began a string of hits, and the Beach Boys established themselves as the top group in America. In early 1965, Wilson--still only twenty-three years old--suffered a nervous breakdown. He stopped touring with the band, and instead devoted himself full-time to writing and producing. The result was Pet Sounds, on which Wilson employed legions of studio musicians--and only vocal tracks from the other Beach Boys--to create a pop record unlike any other.

Pet Sounds yielded just one Top 10 single, and the album peaked at No. 10, subpar for a Beach Boys release. Yet critics and other musicians were astounded. Paul McCartney was a huge fan, saying in 1990, "It was Pet Sounds that blew me out of the water. I love the album so much. I've just bought my kids each a copy of it for their education in life." Wilson and the Beatles were then involved in a friendly trans-Atlantic battle for pop supremacy, and McCartney listened to the record constantly while he and John Lennon were coming up with the songs that would become Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.

Disappointed by the public's response to Pet Sounds, Wilson was determined to create a song that couldn't miss. He spent six months in the studio and an unprecedented $16,000 before he finally emerged with the multilayered "Good Vibrations." The single reached No. 1 and became the group's biggest hit.

For his next project, Wilson decided to record an entire album using the techniques he'd honed on "Good Vibrations." The new album, titled Smile early on, was intended as a "teenage symphony to God." Working with lyricist Van Dyke Parks, Wilson recorded a number of tracks, but when the Beach Boys returned from a triumphant trip to Europe and heard the Smile songs, they were less than thrilled with Wilson's complex arrangements and Parks' cryptic lyrics. Faced with the band's resistance and his own emotional problems, Wilson suffered another breakdown. Smile was permanently shelved. Wilson wrote and recorded sporadically for the remainder of the sixties, but gave up on musical experimentation.

The seventies were basically lost, as Wilson spent much of his time in bed, gorging himself on food and drugs. Now, while that might sound like an engaging way to spend a few years, being bloated on drugs doesn't do wonders for the creative process (just ask Truman Capote or Elvis), and Wilson's genius was in little evidence on those rare occasions when his work actually appeared on a Beach Boys record. Wilson divorced his wife, Marilyn, in 1979 after nearly fifteen years of marriage. The union produced two daughters, Carnie and Wendy, two-thirds of the early-nineties pop trio Wilson Phillips.

In 1983, the Beach Boys, desperate for a productive Brian, hired psychotherapist Eugene Landy. Landy had cared for Wilson briefly during the mid-seventies, when Wilson was able to make a few public appearances. This time Landy "treated" Wilson for nearly a decade. Brian Wilson, a solo album, was released in 1988 to generally good reviews. Sales were poor, however, and Sire Records declined to release Wilson's follow-up album. Meanwhile, Landy took co-producing and co-writing credits for much of Wilson's solo work, he helped ghost Wilson's autobiography, and he consumed larger and larger chunks of the Wilson fortune. Finally, Wilson's family intervened and, in 1991, a judge ordered Landy to cease further contact with him.

In 1993, Capitol Records released Good Vibrations: Thirty Years of the Beach Boys, a five-disc, 142-track set that included half an hour's worth of material from the Smile sessions. The box set garnered a rare five-star review in Rolling Stone and sold well. Two years later, record producer Don Was produced and directed I Just Wasn't Made for These Times, a sixty-nine-minute documentary about Wilson which drew more raves. The soundtrack included reworkings of old Beach Boys songs performed for the film, and was certainly Wilson's most affecting work since Pet Sounds. Wilson also performed vocals on 1995's Orange Crate Art, a collection of songs written by Van Dyke Parks. These projects have all raised hopes among Wilson's fans that, unencumbered by drugs or doctors, at least a shadow of his creative powers might return.

Brian Wilson is arguably the greatest American composer of popular music in the rock era. Born and raised in Hawthorne, CA, Wilson formed the Beach Boys -- with his two younger brothers, cousin Mike Love, and school friend Alan Jardine -- and they became the most successful American rock band in history by performing his songs, which initially combined the rock urgency of Chuck Berry with the harmonies of the Four Freshmen. Wilson's musical imagination expanded during the '60s to the point of such remarkable works as "Good Vibrations," a chart-topping Beach Boys single of 1966. Wilson retreated from his dominance of the Beach Boys after 1967, as their popularity declined. He made sporadic contributions to their records, returning only briefly as a songwriter and producer in the mid-'70s.

Wilson issued a debut solo album in 1988, with a promising lead single "Love and Mercy," but a pop crossover proved elusive; ironically, the Beach Boys had concurrently recorded their own comeback around the same time, and took "Kokomo" to the top of the charts. Wilson's second album, Sweet Insanity, was rejected by Sire, but in 1995, he reunited with his mid-'60s collaborator Van Dyke Parks for Orange Crate Art. That same year, Wilson was the subject of a documentary feature, I Just Wasn't Made for These Times, which also appeared as a soundtrack album. Following in 1998 was Imagination, which included several throwbacks to lush Beach Boys productions, but failed to entice a wide commercial audience.

Although Wilson was never a standout as a live performer, he began touring, and promptly released a pair of live titles: Live at the Roxy Theatre (2000) and Pet Sounds Live (2002). Unfortunately, his cobbled studio follow-up, 2004's Gettin' in Over My Head, exhibited the same foibles as Imagination. Also, it was overshadowed by Wilson's preparation of the legendary Beach Boys record SMiLE for its live debut and a new studio recording. He debuted the new SMiLE at the Royal Festival Hall in London on February 20, 2004, and recorded it in the studio that April. Both the live and studio versions earned rapturous reviews, and Wilson then launched a full world tour of SMiLE. The seasonal effort What I Really Want for Christmas followed in October 2005.

Then, Wilson began preparing another thematic work to follow on from SMiLE after he was commissioned by London's Southbank Centre. By late 2007, he had written and premiered That Lucky Old Sun -- based on the American vocal standard and including the participation of his SMiLE band as well as Van Dyke Parks -- at the Royal Festival Hall. Recordings quickly followed, and in September 2007, the album was released worldwide. ~ William Ruhlmann & John Bush, All Music Guide