Beach Boys visionary leader Brian Wilson dies at age 82

Brian Wilson, the singer-songwriter who co-created the iconic Beach Boys rock band, has died, his family said in a statement. He was 82.

“We are at a loss for words right now,” the statement said. “We realize that we are sharing our grief with the world.”

The statement did not disclose a cause of death. Wilson had suffered from dementia and was unable to care for himself after his wife Melinda Wilson died in early 2024, prompting his family to put him under conservatorship.

Wilson’s genius for melody, arrangements and wide-eyed self-expression inspired the songs Good Vibrations, California Girls, and other summertime anthems, making him one of the world’s most influential recording artists.

The eldest and last surviving of three musical brothers – Brian played bass, Carl lead guitar and Dennis drums – he and his fellow Beach Boys rose in the 1960s from local California band to national hitmakers to international ambassadors of surf and sun.

Wilson was one of rock’s great romantics, a tormented man who in his peak years embarked on an ever-steeper path to aural perfection, the one true sound.

The Beach Boys (left to right): Al Jardine, Mike Love, Dennis Wilson, Brian Wilson and Carl Wilson [AP Photo]

The Beach Boys rank among the most popular groups of the rock era, with more than 30 singles in the Top 40 and worldwide sales of more than 100 million.

The 1966 album Pet Sounds was voted number two in a 2003 Rolling Stone list of the best 500 albums, losing out, as Wilson had done before, to the Beatles’ album Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. The Beach Boys, who also featured Wilson cousin Mike Love and childhood friend Al Jardine, were voted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1988.

Wilson feuded with Love over songwriting credits, but peers otherwise adored him beyond envy, from Elton John and Bruce Springsteen to Smokey Robinson and Carole King. The Who’s drummer, Keith Moon, fantasised about joining the Beach Boys. Paul McCartney cited Pet Sounds as a direct inspiration on the Beatles and the Wilson ballad God Only Knows as among his favorite songs, often bringing him to tears.

Wilson moved and fascinated fans and musicians long after he stopped having hits. In his later years, he and a devoted entourage of younger musicians performed Pet Sounds and his restored opus, Smile, before worshipful crowds in concert halls.

Meanwhile, The Go-Go’s, Lindsey Buckingham, Animal Collective and Janelle Monae were among a wide range of artists who emulated him, whether as a master of crafting pop music or as a pioneer of pulling it apart.

Former Beatles member Paul McCartney hoists the arm of Beach Boys founder Brian Wilson after inducting him into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in New York City, the US, June 15, 2000 [Reuters]

An endless summer

The Beach Boys’ music was like an ongoing party, with Wilson as host and wallflower. He was a tall, shy man, partially deaf (allegedly because of beatings by his father, Murry Wilson), with a sweet, crooked grin, and he rarely touched a surfboard unless a photographer was around.

But out of the lifestyle that he observed and such musical influences as Chuck Berry and the Four Freshmen, he conjured a golden soundscape – sweet melodies, shining harmonies, vignettes of beaches, cars and girls – that resonated across time and climates.

Decades after its first release, a Beach Boys song can still conjure instant summer – the wake-up guitar riff that opens Surfin’ USA; the melting vocals of Don’t Worry Baby; the chants of “fun, fun, fun” or “good, good, GOOD, good vibrations”; the behind-the-wheel chorus “’round, round, get around, I get around.”

Beach Boys songs have endured from turntables and transistor radios to boom boxes and iPhones, or any device that could lay on a beach towel or be placed upright in the sand.

The band’s innocent appeal survived the group’s increasingly troubled back story, including Brian’s many personal trials, the feuds and lawsuits among band members and the alcoholism of Dennis Wilson, who drowned in 1983.

Brian Wilson’s ambition raised the Beach Boys beyond the pleasures of their early hits and into a world transcendent, eccentric and destructive. They seemed to live out every fantasy, and many nightmares, of the California myth they helped create.

Brian Wilson was born June 20, 1942, two days after McCartney. His musical gifts were soon obvious, and as a boy, he was playing piano and teaching his brothers to sing harmony. The Beach Boys started as a neighbourhood act, rehearsing in Brian’s bedroom and in the garage of their house in suburban Hawthorne, California.

Surf music, mostly instrumental in its early years, was catching on locally: Dennis Wilson, the group’s only real surfer, suggested they cash in. Brian and Love hastily wrote up their first single, Surfin’, a minor hit released in 1961.

Their breakthrough came in early 1963 with Surfin’ USA, so closely modelled on Berry’s Sweet Little Sixteen that Berry successfully sued to get a songwriting credit. It was the Beach Boys’ first Top 10 hit and a boast to the nation: “If everybody had an ocean / across the USA / then everybody’d be surfin,’ / like Cali-for-nye-ay.”

From 1963-66, they were rarely off the charts, hitting number one with the songs I Get Around and Help Me, Rhonda and narrowly missing with California Girls and Fun, Fun, Fun. For television appearances, they wore candy-striped shirts and grinned as they mimed their latest hit, with a hot rod or surfboard nearby.

Wilson won just two competitive Grammys, for the solo instrumental “Mrs. O’Leary’s Cow” and for “The Smile Sessions” box set. Otherwise, his honors ranged from a Grammy lifetime achievement prize to a tribute at the Kennedy Center to induction into the Songwriters Hall of Fame.

In 2018, he returned to his old high school in Hawthorne and witnessed the literal rewriting of his past: The principal erased an “F” he had been given in music and awarded him an “A.”