Brian Wilson: 1942-2025
The Incalculable Songbook, Influence, and Legacy of One of the Most Important Figures of Popular Music
When Dennis Wilson died on December 28, 1983, popular culture was still robust and worthwhile despite a century of “serious” culture’s deterioration.
When Carl Wilson died on February 6, 1998, the deleterious ideas underpinning all culture had worked their way down in the intervening fourteen years, but there were veterans still producing inestimable value even though few or no artists of importance were emerging anymore.
We have lost inestimable giants over the last twenty-seven years, and there are fewer and fewer veteran artists on a mainstream level with every passing day.
Yesterday, one of those giants breathed his last, and popular culture’s long slide into entropic desuetude (to use the language of H.L. Mencken, who saw it even in his own day) slid calculably lower. Brian Wilson, one of the most towering figures of popular music and perhaps the greatest record producer in the history of electromagnetic tape, died nine days short of his eighty-third birthday.
Brian Wilson’s songbook, achievements, influence, and legacy are impossible to succinctly summarize. Countless obituaries in innumerable publications have been attempting that all over the world (and most or all are falling short). More public figures than you can count are paying tribute, from the most famous superstars to critically acclaimed cult artists to local up-and-comers and stalwarts. I have tried to express the inestimable value of his and his band, The Beach Boys', work. When Neil Peart, one of those aforementioned giants and a fan and admirer of Wilson and The Boys, died five-and-a-half years ago, I remarked that one reason I never really got into opera was that it was almost entirely in languages I didn’t understand, the integration of lyrics and music was of paramount importance, and Peart and his band Rush were nonpareil integrators of lyrics and music in a culture that was ever more indicative of disintegration, from the most fundamental ideas underpinning it to its superficial quotidian pop culture. They were masters of marrying lyrics and music into a synthesized whole that was greater than any of its parts and fit together so well that they reinforced each other with all the genius of the most impeccably constructed buildings, symphonies, or romanticist novels, where form follows function and every element reinforces every other part and one could not conceive of the parts separately. In a culture actively reinforcing anything but, this is a remarkable achievement.
Brian Wilson and The Beach Boys were also masters of this integration. But that was not the only reason Wilson and company were of inestimable importance. (Neil Peart and Rush were of inestimable importance for other reasons, too, but that is a topic for another day.)
In addition to composing, writing some of the lyrics, producing, and performing some of the most momentous pieces and recordings of our time, Brian Wilson, perhaps more than anyone else, slowed down popular culture’s bottoming out. If any one individual turned “rock and roll” into art—into something more than three chords in three minutes and ephemeral and disposable into something artful, colorful, thoughtful, epic, symphonic, even ageless—it was Brian Wilson.
Brian Wilson launched the too-brief but crucial art rock movement as much as or more than anyone else. And he continued to produce artful, musical, melodic, thoughtful works after that movement faded into history.
Paul McCartney has famously remarked on Wilson’s and The Boys’ influence on The Beatles, including but not limited to Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. What is less known is their influence on Frank Zappa, who praised “Little Deuce Coupe”’s innovative chord structure in The Real Frank Zappa Book, borrowed the riff of “Our Car Club” in “Who Needs the Peace Corps?” and hired horn players Sal Marquez and Glenn Ferris without an audition for no other reason than that they had played with The Beach Boys. (To call that uncharacteristic of Zappa is an understatement.)
It goes without saying that works of the quality that Brian Wilson and The Beach Boys exuded, from first listen and into more attentive listening, would be impactful far more than in the moment or that that impact would exceed those consuming it. The songs, famous and not so much, captivated the lives of millions of listeners. Many of them went on to produce Earth-shattering works of their own.
Brian Wilson’s compositions and productions were the launching point of more than just three-minute singer/songwriters, and turned a few of those into more ambitious, epic composers, at least for moments here and there. (They undoubtedly influenced some of Bruce Springsteen’s more epic moments.) The more musical, inventive, complex, ambitious subgenres of the last several decades, from progressive rock to baroque pop to even jazz fusion, owe much to The Beach Boys. All Beach Boys were unique, invaluable songwriters and performers who contributed to their nearly unfathomable legacy, but Brian Wilson was the leader and teacher who spearheaded all of it. Even after he had stepped back from his leadership role after the personal problems and pressures that have been well documented, his bandmates—brothers, cousin, and friends—picked up his lead and stepped up and continued the band’s output after watching him and, in some cases, being directly taught by him. Dennis’s intensely personal, astounding, Wagneresque tone poems are unique but owe more than a little to Brian’s influence and instruction. And the contributions of the other members alone were seismic in their influence. Ask Elton John or Elvis Costello (or Tom Petty, when he was alive).
If the last sixty years have been not entirely bereft of cultural value, few, if any, are responsible for that fact more than Brian Wilson.
Novelist-philosopher Andrew Bernstein has remarked that reading Ayn Rand is one of the most profound, inestimable intellectual experiences of his life and that reading Victor Hugo is one of the most profound emotional experiences of his life. If Rush can be loosely described as the closest rock has come to Rand (which isn’t saying much), Brian Wilson and The Beach Boys are arguably Hugoesque more than any other artist. The parallels are more numerous than the strictly emotional. Brian’s expression of emotion in song covered every conceivable feeling other than the most darker feelings of hatred and envy, which was itself an achievement in the time Rand referred to as the age of envy and amidst the horrific physical and emotional abuse and exploitation he suffered. Just as his compositions ranged in length and complexity from short to more extended and from direct three-chord rock and roll to more extended and multifaceted, his tunes covered every emotion. He is often considered little more than melancholy, but there is so much more, on the surface and subterranean. Whether with lyrical input from Mike Love, Gary Usher, Roger Christian, Tony Asher, Van Dyke Parks, Jack Reilly, Scott Bennett, or Joe Thomas or all by himself, Brian Wilson’s songs express every conceivable feeling other than those aforementioned unfortunate ones, from “Do It Again” to “In My Room” to “Let’s Go to Heaven in My Car” to “‘Til I Die” (a much more complicated and optimistic song than it appears at first few listens). What is also unquestionably Hugoesque is that no musical artist has dramatized the complicated dynamics between guys and gals from a male point of view like Brian Wilson. From the uneasy doubts of a girl’s fidelity in “In the Back of My Mind” to the woman’s nurturing empowerment of “Don’t Worry Baby”, no one expressed the males relations to females like Brian Wilson and company. And in a Kantian culture obsessed with human flaws and weaknesses, I have pointed out that “Don’t Worry Baby” is a refutation of Plato’s assertion that perfection is impossible on Earth, from Brian’s plangent vocal and his deft production to Roger Christian’s lyric. There is unrequited love in the Wilson songbook, for sure, as passionately and adroitly expressed as Hugo does of Gilliatt in The Toilers of the Sea, but none of it is quite so tragic as of that particular hero.
While “Don’t Worry Baby” may be perfect, it goes without saying that Brian Wilson’s life and work has its imperfect moments, but even those are often exaggerated and taken out of context. He flirted with modernism, particularly during the overrated Smile era and his collaborations with Van Dyke Parks. (“Vegetables” and “The Waltz” are better examples of Wilson-Parks compositions, the former even from the Smile era.) His wilderness years of staying in bed, overeating, and otherwise overindulging are legendary, but even that is misunderstood, taken out of context, and even exaggerated. It is hard to convey the experience of receiving abuse from the context of one as sensitive as Brian Wilson was. Far fewer know what it’s like for multiple entire families to be dependent on one’s creative output like Brian Wilson did. He made mistakes and had periods of lesser productivity. But even during that period, he and his output were amazing. During the years he was reportedly doing nothing but staying in bed, he was actually writing and producing some of his greatest records. I heard Los Lobos cover one of them, “Sail on Sailor”, one of the most inspiring anthems to perseverance, while working at the Greek Theatre in 2021. During this period, he actually made several live appearances with The Beach Boys (during some of them, one of his bandmates was straight-jacketed in an insane asylum, which, as far as I know, never happened to Brian Wilson). He travelled to The Netherlands to work on The Beach Boys’s album Holland in 1972, and, during his father’s funeral in Southern California, he was on the radio in New York promoting the work of American Spring, a group that included his then-wife and then-sister-in-law. In early 1976, purportedly during his personal nadir, he wrote and recorded “Still I Dream of It”, the hopeful longing of a man looking for love who has never found it, in his bedroom. Surely not autobiographical, it is a first-rate expression of someone else’s longing by a songwriter at the height of his ability as if it were autobiographical, and it is palpably not the work of someone completely dissociated from the world or completely nonfunctional. Some of Brian’s eccentric mannerisms and expressions, including talking out of one side of his mouth, were due to being born deaf in one ear, and prescription drugs did more damage to his brain than his recreational drug use.
Brian Wilson’s life and work would have been towering even in the context of someone without his obstacles and challenges. God only knows what we’d be without him.
And, if there is life yet in this culture, it will be in large part due to his work and influence.