It was the end of an era today when Brian Wilson's family, on Facebook, announced that he had passed away earlier today at the age of 82. For the past few years, Brian had suffered from dementia.
For those people born on another planet or lived in a cave, Brian Wilson was the co-founder and main composer (almost always in collaboration with lyricists like Mike Love and others) of the Beach Boys. This death really hurts, while not unexpected, because the Beach Boys' music was one of the major soundtracks of baby boomers' youth including mine. But the music was timeless and enjoyed by subsequent generations and will no doubt be played 100 years from now.
For the last day of school this year in the school where I work, the kids went home to the sounds of some of the greatest hits of the Beach Boys. That's the kind of music I like to hear because they are among the classics of the best era ever of popular music, the 1960s.
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| Brian in his youth |
I don't have to name the songs he penned but perhaps the best one of many great songs was "Good Vibrations" from 1966, which took him MONTHS to compose. Pet Sounds, an album from that era, was also highly regarded. He attempted to do yet another album called Smile, but he abandoned the project for decades when mental illness overtook his life. He finally finished it and released it a number of years ago, to much acclaim.
Brian had a lot of setbacks and tragedies along the way. Mental illness, substance abuse, court battles with other band members, a ruthless and abusive father, then the deaths of brothers Carl and Dennis, and finally the death of his longtime (second) wife, Melinda Ledbetter Wilson. She died in January of last year. By this time, Brian had been diagnosed with dementia. It's like the poor guy could never catch a break.
Last year I finished reading Brian's memoir or autobiography, not the one that unethical shrink Eugene Landy conned him into doing, but the one that came out in around 2015 or 2016. It is an easy read.
Brian was typically low-key in live performance, and, in the peak years of the early 1960s, his singing was always a highlight because he often employed falsetto vocals.
Case in point:
Brian Douglas Wilson was born on June 20, 1942, in Inglewood, Calif., to Murry and Audree (Korthof) Wilson. His father was a heavy-machinery salesman who had collected a handful of credits as a frustrated songwriter. His mother, a homemaker, kept the Beach Boys’ books in the early days of the band.
The family moved to Hawthorne, another working-class corner of Los Angeles County, when Brian was a toddler, and had two more boys, Dennis and Carl.
From a young age, Brian was almost completely deaf in his right ear. He gave various explanations for the condition, citing a blow from a neighborhood boy or, in some tellings, his father.
As a teenager, Brian was a fan of Chuck Berry’s rock ’n’ roll but was especially entranced by the close, melting harmonies of the jazz-influenced vocal group the Four Freshmen; he led his brothers in careful recreations of their songs.
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As "they" say, the rest is history.
