The brilliant yet troubled life of the Beach Boys' damaged genius

The Age

a day ago

Brian Wilson, who as the leader and chief songwriter of the Beach Boys became rock's poet laureate of surf-and-sun innocence, but also an embodiment of damaged genius through his struggles with mental illness and drugs, has died. He was 82.
His family announced the death but did not say where or when he died, or state a cause. In 2024, after the death of his wife, Melinda Wilson, business representatives for Brian Wilson were granted a conservatorship by a California state judge, after they asserted that he had 'a major neurocognitive disorder' and had been diagnosed with dementia.
On mid-1960s hits like Surfin' U.S.A., California Girls and Fun, Fun, Fun, the Beach Boys created a musical counterpart to the myth of Southern California as paradise.
That vision, manifested in Wilson's crystalline vocal arrangements, helped make the Beach Boys the defining American band of the era. During its clean-cut heyday of 1962 to 1966, the group landed 13 singles in the Billboard Top 10. Three of them went to No. 1: I Get Around, Help Me, Rhonda and Good Vibrations.
At the same time, Wilson — who didn't surf — became one of pop's most gifted and idiosyncratic studio auteurs.
'That ear,' Bob Dylan once remarked. 'I mean, Jesus, he's got to will that to the Smithsonian.'
Wilson's masterpiece was the 1966 album Pet Sounds. The album was a commercial disappointment upon its release, but the technical sophistication and melancholic depth of tracks like God Only Knows and I Just Wasn't Made for These Times eventually led critics and fellow musicians to honour it as an epochal achievement.
But in following up Pet Sounds, Wilson stumbled. Over months of sessions for an album he intended to call Smile, Wilson indulged his every eccentricity, no matter how expensive or fruitless, and his growing drug habit fuelled paranoia and delusion.