Brian Wilson, singer-songwriter who created the Beach Boys, dies at 82
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Brian Wilson, the founder and principal creative force of the Beach Boys, whose catalogue of early hits embodied the fantasy of California as a paradise of beautiful youth, fast cars and endless surf and made them the most popular American rock group of the 1960s, has died at 82.
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The family announced the death on his official webpage, but did not provide further information.
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The Beach Boys were formed in 1961 in Hawthorne, Calif., near Los Angeles, by brothers Brian, Dennis and Carl Wilson, their cousin Mike Love and their friend Al Jardine, and the regional success that year of their first single, Surfin,' thrust them to national attention when Capitol Records signed them almost immediately as the label's first rock act.
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They would make the Billboard Top 40 list 36 times in as many years, a tally unequaled by an American band. While each member contributed to the Beach Boys' signature angelic vocal harmonics, Mr. Wilson was the widely acknowledged mastermind behind their music.
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A spectacularly imaginative songwriter, he was responsible for initial successes including Surfin' USA, Surfer Girl, I Get Around, All Summer Long, Don't Worry Baby, The Warmth of the Sun and California Girls. Such numbers evoked the joys of hot-rodding under boundlessly blue skies and, above all, the bronzed, bikinied lifestyle of Southern California.
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Yet Wilson also displayed an ambitious craftsmanship as a producer that culminated in the 1966 Beach Boys album 'Pet Sounds,' which many critics and music historians consider the first and greatest of all rock 'concept' albums building songs around a theme.
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Alternately celebratory and despairing, making effective musical use of such traditionally extramusical sounds as bicycle bells, car horns, trains and barking dogs, 'Pet Sounds' was not simply a collection of songs but a unified work of art, tracing a love affair from beginning to end, while melding an all-but-unprecedented intimacy of expression in rock with near-symphonic scope.
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The album and Wilson had a profound impact on musicians of the era and beyond. The Beatles acknowledged that the unity and complexity of 'Pet Sounds' helped inspire the similarly ambitious Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967).
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