He heard voices … and music's soul: The anguished genius of Beach Boy Brian Wilson

The Age

2 days ago

Brian Wilson occupies a special place in the pop pantheon, the golden youth who blew his mind making mind-blowing music. His 1966 masterpiece Pet Sounds remains a benchmark in pop culture, blending classical harmonic theory with melodious songcraft, baroque orchestrations and an audacious sound palette, all conjured in Wilson's sandbox studio.
The Beach Boys' genius leader is gone now, dead at 82, but the good vibrations he created will take a very long time to fade away, if they ever do. They reverberated throughout his long life, even as their damaged creator struggled with debilitating mental health problems, cutting an increasingly strange and isolated figure.
The pop culture myth of Wilson swirled around this wild disparity between the beauty, emotion and dazzling resonance of his songcraft and the withdrawn, uncommunicative, damaged man who created it. But ultimately it is the music that defines him, an expression of an incredibly rich inner world that gave us all a window to the depths and artistry of his soul. Wilson was responsible for some of the very greatest music of his and our times, and all time. And all we need to do to tap into it is listen.
When they broke out in 1962, the Beach Boys' blend of rock'n'roll and classical harmonies offered America a pure expression of youthful, heady escapism. There was a darker story lurking behind, the wholesome family band whose father Murry Wilson managed them through fear and violence and ripped them off financially. It was a tension invisible to the eye but perhaps detectable to the ear, caught in their youthful leader's exquisite melodic balance of melancholy and joy, and his driving impulse for escapism in sound.
By the mid-'60s, Wilson's mental health was in serious decline, exacerbated by his use of marijuana and LSD. And with it, the band's sounds began to warp while the songs turned toward a poignant mourning for Wilson's lost innocence. As his younger brother Carl led the live band, Brian remained in Los Angeles, writing and producing groundbreaking new music with Phil Spector's session musicians, The Wrecking Crew.
Conjured out of Wilson's visionary head space, Pet Sounds overflows with near cosmic beauty. God Only Knows floats as a gorgeous devotional on a heart-bursting melody, while Good Vibrations ripples between dimensions, surely the most joyous, time-switching blast of sheer bliss ever recorded. Over in Britain, the Beatles took note and were pushed to even greater heights, creating some of their finest work in direct response to the challenge posed by the genius of Brian Wilson.
In its own time, Pet Sounds represented something thrillingly new, yet with a richness, depth and mystery that has somehow never faded. There are many who will still argue it is the greatest album ever made.
Wilson was responsible for a lot of other utterly fantastic music, even if he never quite reached the same peak again. Smile was a masterpiece that took decades to complete, a proposed follow-up to Pet Sounds that aspired to a level of complexity that shattered Wilson's fragile health, and didn't finally appear in full until he put it out as a solo album in 2004. It had forsaken its immediacy by then but remains a spectacular work of pop beauty.