Brian Wilson, co-founder and primary songwriter for the Beach Boys, performing at the Vibrato Jazz Club in October 2015 in Los Angeles, Calif.Kevin Winter/Getty Images
Brian Wilson, the Beach Boys’ visionary and fragile leader whose genius for melody, arrangements and wide-eyed self-expression inspired Good Vibrations, California Girls and other summertime anthems and made him one of the world’s most influential recording artists, has died at 82.
Wilson’s family posted news of his death to his website and social media accounts Wednesday. Further details weren’t immediately available.
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 hit makers to international ambassadors of surf and sun. Wilson himself was celebrated for his gifts and pitied for his demons. He 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 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 No. 2 in a 2003 Rolling Stone list of the best 500 albums, losing out, as Wilson had done before, to the Beatles’ 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, fantasized about joining the Beach Boys. Paul McCartney cited Pet Sounds as a direct inspiration on the Beatles and the 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, Wilson 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 Monáe 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.
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, whether Brian’s many personal trials, the feuds and lawsuits among band members or 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.