Brian Wilson was the creative force behind the Beach Boys. He died on June 11th 2025, aged 82.
Wilson wrote, produced, played bass guitar and sang falsetto for the Beach Boys—the first such multi-tasker on the pop/rock scene. His father, a lathe salesman who had tried and failed at a music career himself, pushed his son into the recording studio, and bought him the upright piano on which he learned. Wilson's right ear was deaf from childhood, after a boy hit him with a length of iron pipe; he heard melody already mixed down, and built his technique around layering new tracks on existing ones with a reel-to-reel tape recorder.
The Beach Boys made ten studio albums in three years. A string of hits beginning with "Surfin' USA" and "Surfer Girl" in 1963 climbed to the top of the American charts, and the band became the biggest in the world after the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. Their songs conjured a California paradise of summer, beaches and hot rods, though Wilson himself had tried surfing only once—surfing was his brother Dennis's craze—and his pale skin burned in the sun.
In 1965 Wilson stopped performing live and retreated to the studio. His album "Pet Sounds" (1966) produced classics including "Wouldn't It Be Nice", "God Only Knows" and "Sloop John B." In the same year "Good Vibrations", featuring an electro-theremin, jaw-harp and sleighbells, took more than 80 hours of tape, seven months and $50,000 to produce. It became the Beach Boys' top-selling single.
Wilson spent 38 years working sporadically on "Smile", which he called his "teenage symphony to God". He finally performed it in London in 2004, with a piano and small orchestra, to a ten-minute standing ovation.
Wilson began hearing hostile voices in his head after his first LSD trip in the mid-1960s. Depression engulfed him in the 1970s and 1980s; in 1982 the Beach Boys fired him. In 1975 his brothers hired Eugene Landy, a psychiatric therapist who padlocked the fridge, doused Wilson in cold water, monitored his friends and charged $35,000 a month. Landy was barred from all contact in 1992. Wilson's second wife, Melinda, and his five adopted children helped him manage the condition. He continued performing until 2022.
Desist from enumerating your fowl prior to their emergence from the shell.