Brian Wilson, who died last week nine days shy of his 83rd birthday, was called “child-like” for much of his adult life, and his band’s music will probably be associated with innocence (the makers’, the listeners’, and America’s: all lost) for as long as their recordings endure. When they first made it to radio, the Beach Boys really were boys, kids unable to legally drink or vote, and their early hits celebrated such juvenile pastimes as admiring girls and driving motor vehicles.1 Never mind that their version of American adolescence was more dream than reality. “Surfin’ is the only life, the only way for me,” the guys sang on their first single, “Surfin’.” Famously, only one of the five voices—that of Dennis, the middle Wilson child—belonged to someone who surfed.
But it was Brian’s guilelessness and vulnerability that cemented the band’s reputation for purity of heart. To paraphrase a line from 2016’s I Am Brian Wilson, he was a man who feared everything except admitting when he was afraid.2 Within two years of 1961’s “Surfin’,” the beach according to the Beach Boys had become a cold, inexorable place that presaged lost love (“Lonely Sea”), and Brian’s insecurities spilled out in evocative ballads like “Surfer Girl,” “Kiss Me, Baby,” and “In My Room,” a song often pointed to as a turning point for the band. The Beach Boys wouldn’t forgo cocky, jocular masculinity altogether (“I Get Around” was still to come in 1964) but those tracks increasingly shared space with tender odes to the ephemeral nature of everything good, a preoccupation that dominated Brian’s glorious, uncontested masterpiece Pet Sounds. “I may not always love you,” begins the album’s most adored track, “God Only Knows,” announcing itself as a praise song that pledges constancy while admitting impermanence. “It had loneliness,” he said in I Am Brian Wilson. “It’s an anxious song, maybe, but also one that’s sort of at peace.”
Brian’s genius was bound up in his fixation on these paradoxes: the absence that haunts every presence; the love that’s most vital just before it drains away; pain and beauty too enmeshed to be pulled apart. The truth that arrives, shatteringly and inevitably, before childhood’s end is that life is full of precious things to lose and we will lose them. Brian had a willingness not only to dwell in this fact but to exalt it, to accept the ecstasy with the agony and so wring a listener’s heart in two directions at once.
Brian discovered that “music is god’s voice” when he was a boy in desperate need of refuge. He taught himself how to arrange by listening obsessively to the Four Freshmen, a jazz vocal quartet whose album gave him “spiritual strength” as he struggled to endure the cruelty of his father. Murry Wilson is by now one of the most notorious villains in The Beach Boys’ (remarkably villain-filled) history, ranking alongside disgraced psychologist Eugene Landy, who exploited and abused Brian from 1982 to 1991, and litigious Wilson cousin Mike Love, the band’s Trump-following frontman whose offenses exceed the scope of this piece. But stories of Murry’s harms to his son still have the power to shock. Some are predictable (vicious beating with a belt, smacks to the face for speaking too loudly), while others are almost inconceivable. He’s rumored to have tied Brian to a tree and beaten him with a two-by-four, and he once told Brian to put his hands under a dry docked boat before he, Murry, knocked out the support. We’ll never know for sure if Murry’s violence was the cause of deafness in Brian’s right ear, but it’s well within the realm of possibility.
Much of I Am Brian Wilson, written by Ben Greenman and based on months of interviews with Brian, is spent working through the fact that Murry was integral to Brian’s affinity for music and to the Beach Boys’ existence. Yes, he threw Brian against a wall when he learned his sons spent grocery money on renting instruments, but then he got them a recording deal. He bought teenaged Brian equipment and took him to concerts; he was a songwriter in his own right as well as a victim of paternal abuse. “He could be generous and guide me toward great things,” Brian said, “but he could also be brutal and belittle me and sometimes even make me regret I was alive. I learned all those things when I was too young to understand them. Maybe they are the kinds of things that you’re never supposed to understand.”
Because decades of domestic abuse were followed by Brian’s heavy drug use and then the infantilizing, debilitating control of Eugene Landy, critics sometimes described Brian as locked in a state of perpetually arrested development from which he never quite emerged. With that lens, Brian’s refusal to hate or condemn his father could be seen as a child’s lingering loyalty, just one more piece of lasting damage. But Brian’s perspective was remarkably constant, complex, and considered throughout his life, with hallmarks not of incomprehension but introspection. Sensitivity to contradiction—of “In My Room,” he noted: “Two people wrote a song about loneliness, and five people sang it”—and spiritual conviction were foundational elements of his work. “I believe in god—in one God,” he said in 1966, “some higher being who is better than we are. But I’m not formally religious. I simply believe in the power of the spirit and the manifestation of this in the goodness of people.” It would be a mistake to diminish the intentionality of this position. (He even said of Eugene Landy, well after the man’s death, “I try to overlook the bad stuff and be thankful for what he taught me.”) When Brian invited fans to write letters about their favorite vegetables (“Vega-Tables,” 1967) or gave out directions to his house (“Busy Doin’ Nothin,’” 1968), he was not naive, or at least not only that. He was “on a musical mission, to spread the gospel of love through records.”
In an undated TV interview from what looks to be the late ’80s, Brian sketched out a loose association—previously expressed in songs like “Surf’s Up” (“I heard the word / wonderful thing: a children’s song”)—between God and being parented. “I want people to feel they’re covered, spiritually,” he explained. “So that when they listen to the music, they get a secure feeling plus they won’t even realize they’re being loved. It’s like a mother who takes care of a kid.” It’s a comparison that rhymes with Brian’s description, in his memoir, of his first memory—being put to bed by his mother. “I don’t have a picture of it in my head . . . I remember it from inside myself, just the feeling of it, hands lowering you down but a face staying above you to protect you.”
Brian’s musical roots, like so much of his development, were in his family. He wrote arrangements and produced his records with an intimate familiarity of what his younger brothers Carl and Dennis, whose deaths preceded his own, could do. Before he set foot in a studio, he sang with his brothers, as well as his mother and aunt and cousins. He made music with them, for them, because of them, to amuse and please them, to escape them and unite with them. Of course, this was truest when it came to his song-writing father. The SMiLE track “Child is Father of the Man,” with its title taken from a Wordsworth poem, has the phrase chanted in a way that loops it back on itself—the child, the father, the man tumbling together in a circle with no beginning or end. What looks like progression is often a cycle. “You let go of something and you gain something else,” Brian said in 1991. “You inherit something else. It’s not like you’ve lost something forever because you always get it back in another form. . . . You always gain something from losing something.”
In 1965, Murry wrote a long self-justifying letter to his son that ended with an appeal: “please try to understand that all I tried to do was make you all honest men.” It seems Brian never stopped trying to understand.
The title forSMiLE—the record meant to succeed Pet Sounds—came from Brian’s desire to “make the world smile. Because a smile could save your soul.” The i is in lowercase because he wanted to minimize the individual, the ego. If one can’t love beyond their ego, it will ruin their ability to be kind. Brian’s 1988 song “Love and Mercy” indicates as much; he asked himself what the world needed most, and wisdom kept him from stopping simply with love. “This song probably exemplifies the Christ that’s in me,” he said a few years later about its composition. He was speaking with the lowercase i in this moment; he’d already made the somewhat koan-like claim that “to live is to be a Christ”—meaning, I think, to suffer and to search for ways to turn that suffering into a gift. For Murry, unable to conquer his doubt and ego, that pain came out in the inflicting of more pain, a pain that he insisted had salutary effects. For Brian, who shied from parenting his daughters Wendy and Carnie for fear of repeating his dad’s mistakes, the method was music “because music is perfect. And just like in heaven, there’s no fucking up.”
My love for “Little Honda” won’t permit this to be glossed as cars alone. ↩
In the ’80s, he would initiate courtship with his second wife-to-be, Melinda, by leaving her a note that read “frightened, scared, lonely.” ↩
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