Brian Wilson: A visionary songwriter with an oceanic legacy

Boston Globe

3 days ago

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There was a pained intimacy to the best of Wilson's music that dug much deeper than the vocal harmonies and surf guitars his Beach Boys merged into their immortal sound. The aching 'Surfer Girl' cut through the cars-and-waves bravado of the West Coast
milieu the Wilson brothers grew up in. 'Don't Worry Baby' used Brian's trademark falsetto to express male vulnerability. 'In My Room' hinted at the inner turmoil that would lead to Wilson's departure from the group's touring operation, and a decades-long, endlessly analyzed struggle with his mental health.
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When I lived in California I got to know Domenic Priore, an LA native who may still be the world's biggest Brian Wilson fanatic. He was obsessed with 'Smile,' the 'lost' Beach Boys album that was supposed to come out after their magnum opus, 'Pet Sounds' (1966), but got shelved due to Wilson's erratic behavior and reluctance to let go. When the 'Smile Sessions' boxed set finally came out in 2011, Priore's lifelong infatuation was vindicated: He was invited to write liner notes for the project.
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I didn't quite share Priore's fixation on the Beach Boys' music, but I admired his commitment. His entire apartment at the time, just across the sand of Ocean Beach in San Francisco, was a virtual shrine to his favorite band and the lifestyle they epitomized – this despite the well-publicized fact that Brian never actually surfed and was terrified of the water.
Wilson explained his perfectionism around the making of 'Smile' to his desire to try to compose a 'teenage symphony to God.' I think I first came across that wonderful phrase when the underrated Providence power pop band Velvet Crush named an album 'Teenage Symphonies to God' in 1994.
Thousands of bands have taken cues from Wilson's orchestral aspirations and his rapturously arranged contrapuntal melodies. From mega-groups such as Fleetwood Mac and R.E.M. to more recent indie bands such as Animal Collective and
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'Being called a musical genius was a cross to bear,' Wilson told Rolling Stone in 1988, during
one of the many times his extended camp helped him step back into the public eye with albums, tours, and documentaries. 'Genius is a big word. But if you have to live up to something, you might as well live up to that.'
The Beach Boys' beginnings were far more humble than all that. In 1961, Wilson and his two younger brothers Dennis and Carl assembled a harmonizing vocal group with their cousin Mike Love and a high school classmate, Al Jardine, modeled after Brian's favorites, the buttoned-up Four Freshmen. When they auditioned for a local music-industry hustler, they were surprised that he wanted to hear original music.
The guy suggested that they needed an angle. Dennis, who had become intrigued by the new wave of surfers on the beaches near the family's suburban home in Hawthorne, blurted out that they'd written a song about the new shoreline craze.
The boys hurried home and tossed together 'Surfin,' based on a song Brian had written for his high school music class. (He'd received a C.)
A mere five years later, Wilson was working on the song routinely credited as his masterpiece. With its structural complexity and its eerie electro-theremin motif, 'Good Vibrations' would emerge from the rubble of the 'Smile' sessions in the fall of 1966. When Brian played the unfinished song over the phone for Carl, who was in South Dakota on tour with the rest of the band, his kid brother expressed his uncertainty.
'I don't know, Brian,' he said, according to one account of the incident. 'It sounds weird.'
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When the song became an overnight smash – in its first week of release it reportedly sold a hundred thousand copies daily, far and away the biggest success of the Beach Boys' entire career – the band, still touring, decided to debut it live in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Brian scrambled to get on a plane to Chicago and drove around Lake Michigan so he could teach the boys the arrangement.
Euphoric over the record's success, he called his wife, Marilyn, and asked her to bring some friends to meet him when he arrived home. At the airport, someone took photos of the group celebration, but Brian seemed uncomfortable.
Isn't this what you wanted? Marilyn asked.
Yes, Brian replied, as he would later relate. 'The problem is I don't know whether I should be saying hello to everybody or whether it's time to say goodbye.'
James Sullivan can be reached at
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