The Glory of Brian Wilson (1942 - 2025)

In the pantheon of troubled geniuses, few occupy as distinguished a place as Brian Wilson. The only person who seems to have trodden a similar path is Vincent Van Gogh. This might be a surprising comparison for some, but the best explanation for this can be found in an episode of Doctor Who. Please, bear with me.

Matt Smith's Doctor takes the troubled Van Gogh into the present day where he gets to experience the love for him and his work that he was never to experience in his actual life. The gallery's curator (played with exquisite touch by Bill Nighy) is asked by the Doctor - with Vince in earshot - where Van Gogh ranks in the history of art. It's a wonderful speech, and would be worth quoting in full, but I'm going to limit myself to this bit:

"He transformed the pain of his tormented life into ecstatic beauty. Pain is easy to portray, but to use your passion and pain to portray the ecstasy and joy and magnificence of our world - no-one had ever done it before."

Save for those final words, this is also the perfect summation of Brian Wilson's life and work.

Wilson's life was pretty horrible, largely thanks his utterly deplorable father, Murry Wilson; a sadistic taskmaster who delighted in humiliating his children (out of jealousy as much as anything else) whilst simultaneously exploiting their talent. Brian almost certainly had an underlying propensity for mental illness, but the toxic blend of a cruel father, the illusory delusions of fame, and the destabilising impact of spiralling drug use produced a corrosive force that simply tore him apart.

And yet, the music was magnificent. The first Beach Boys hits of the early 60's showcased the sweet harmonies of these blood brothers. The boys and their songs were a musical embodiment of teenage escapism. Mike Love - the only largely odious member of the band - struggled to accept that the band (indeed, the brand) could or should be anything else.

Brian's genius disagreed.

The spirit of competition between Wilson, Lennon/McCartney and Bob Dylan in the mid-60s was comparable to the Federer-Nadal-Djokovic dynasty, in which three GOATs slugged it out for all they were worth, each pushing the other to incomparable heights. For Wilson, The Beatles 1965 album, 'Revolver', was a thrown gauntlet. His reply remains one of music's greatest achievements. In 1966, 'Pet Sounds' was released.

There's a wonderful clip of the bass player (and session music legend) Carol Kaye, querying the sheet music notation for the song, Wouldn't it Be Nice, during its recording. The score for the song required two different overlayed bass parts, and Kaye was certain that he couldn't possibly have intended for them - as the score suggested - to be in different keys. But Brian assured her that it sounded fine in his head, and to play it as written. So she did, and it worked.

Listening to the stereo mix of Wouldn't It Be Nice offers an experience that comes close to synaesthesia, in that for all the world it sounds like a rainbow, which one absorbs whilst sliding down it. It's pure delight; hope as manifest destiny. The harmonies cushion and spiral, the drums thunder and snap. Timpani, glockenspiel, trumpet, saxophone, mando-guitar, accordion(!), and about a dozen more different instruments. For 1966, this was out past Saturn. It had never been done before because no one up to that point had had the audacity or the genius to pull it off. Pop music was meant to be simple, and this was as far from simple as it was possible to get.

And it wasn't the best song on the album, either. That honour goes to 'God Only Knows', the song Paul McCartney regards as the greatest song of them all. The melody is simply sublime. Without wanting wade too deeply into musical theory, the song contains three contrapuntal vocal parts and an almost restless tonal centre that never quite settles into the key of E or A. Wilson did not write the lyric, but its relationship to the music is symbiotic. The words are expressed from the perspective of a narrator who asserts that life without their lover could only be fathomed by God—an entity that had been considered taboo to name in the title or lyric of a pop song. That opening line, "I may not always love you" is one of pop's greatest. This was music of emotional daring that articulated the sweet-sorrow fullness of real human love and intimacy, suffused with spiritual yearning. It was light-years away from being helped by Ronda.

Wilson was at the peak of his powers, and when The Beatles responded to 'Pet Sounds' with something called 'Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band', he went all in. He was going to write nothing less than a 'teenage symphony to God'. And it was going to be called 'Smile'.

'Smile' is the greatest album that never quite was. Rather like a number of Tolkien epics, it exists in three iterations that all point to an obscured summit. There's the version that slowly leaked out onto subsequent albums by the band, with Smiley Smile and Surf's Up containing the bulk of it. Then there's the version that Wilson himself - with superb session musicians rather than his brothers or cousin - recorded and released in 2004. And finally, there's the version released 2011; a compilation of original recordings called 'The Smile Sessions', which is arguably as close as the world will ever get to hearing what Wilson himself heard before the mental implosion that left him unable to complete the project. It seems illogical to assert that the greatest album ever made wasn't actually made, but there it is. 'Smile' is flawless. Perfect. So perfect, in fact, that we can't quite see it directly. But it's there, in all its glory; a stained-glass collage of hymnals, doo-wop, surf music, chamber folk, musique-concrete and the unclassifiable.

Though Wilson never completely recovered from the breakdown he suffered during the recording of 'Smile', his musical gifts never deserted him, either. Right up to the final Beach Boys album, That's Why God Made the Radio - a 50th anniversary reunion effort released in 2011 - he continued to produce harmonised melodies of the first order. He kept performing, too, but sadly, these saw increasingly diminishing returns. He often looked vacant, lost, even bordering on anxious. The Alzheimer's that would eventually claim him had begun to make its mark.

Brian Wilson was a self-polishing diamond. He saw musical visions and set about realising them with unwavering determination. He pushed himself as far as he was capable, and in the end, perhaps pushed himself over the edge. The music he produced is inimitable, simply because so much of it is so musically counter-intuitive. He made the illogical sublime. And taken together, his music is a peerless and unfathomably rich aural legendarium. When you immerse yourself in the best music of Brian Wilson, you really are closer to God, I think. It's an elevated plane, a church of many colours, a hymn of innocence and experience of the Blakean kind.

There's a short song on the album, Surf's Up, called 'Til I Die. To me, it's only possible last word. Give it a listen and experience Brian Wilson. Human frailty will never sound more beautiful.