Brian Wilson: A visionary songwriter with an oceanic legacy
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There was a pained intimacy to the best of Wilson's music that dug much deeper than the vocal harmonies and surf guitars his Beach Boys merged into their immortal sound. The aching 'Surfer Girl' cut through the cars-and-waves bravado of the West Coast
milieu the Wilson brothers grew up in. 'Don't Worry Baby' used Brian's trademark falsetto to express male vulnerability. 'In My Room' hinted at the inner turmoil that would lead to Wilson's departure from the group's touring operation, and a decades-long, endlessly analyzed struggle with his mental health.
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When I lived in California I got to know Domenic Priore, an LA native who may still be the world's biggest Brian Wilson fanatic. He was obsessed with 'Smile,' the 'lost' Beach Boys album that was supposed to come out after their magnum opus, 'Pet Sounds' (1966), but got shelved due to Wilson's erratic behavior and reluctance to let go. When the 'Smile Sessions' boxed set finally came out in 2011, Priore's lifelong infatuation was vindicated: He was invited to write liner notes for the project.
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I didn't quite share Priore's fixation on the Beach Boys' music, but I admired his commitment. His entire apartment at the time, just across the sand of Ocean Beach in San Francisco, was a virtual shrine to his favorite band and the lifestyle they epitomized – this despite the well-publicized fact that Brian never actually surfed and was terrified of the water.
Wilson explained his perfectionism around the making of 'Smile' to his desire to try to compose a 'teenage symphony to God.' I think I first came across that wonderful phrase when the underrated Providence power pop band Velvet Crush named an album 'Teenage Symphonies to God' in 1994.
Thousands of bands have taken cues from Wilson's orchestral aspirations and his rapturously arranged contrapuntal melodies. From mega-groups such as Fleetwood Mac and R.E.M. to more recent indie bands such as Animal Collective and
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'Being called a musical genius was a cross to bear,' Wilson told Rolling Stone in 1988, during
one of the many times his extended camp helped him step back into the public eye with albums, tours, and documentaries. 'Genius is a big word. But if you have to live up to something, you might as well live up to that.'
The Beach Boys' beginnings were far more humble than all that. In 1961, Wilson and his two younger brothers Dennis and Carl assembled a harmonizing vocal group with their cousin Mike Love and a high school classmate, Al Jardine, modeled after Brian's favorites, the buttoned-up Four Freshmen. When they auditioned for a local music-industry hustler, they were surprised that he wanted to hear original music.
The guy suggested that they needed an angle. Dennis, who had become intrigued by the new wave of surfers on the beaches near the family's suburban home in Hawthorne, blurted out that they'd written a song about the new shoreline craze.
The boys hurried home and tossed together 'Surfin,' based on a song Brian had written for his high school music class. (He'd received a C.)
A mere five years later, Wilson was working on the song routinely credited as his masterpiece. With its structural complexity and its eerie electro-theremin motif, 'Good Vibrations' would emerge from the rubble of the 'Smile' sessions in the fall of 1966. When Brian played the unfinished song over the phone for Carl, who was in South Dakota on tour with the rest of the band, his kid brother expressed his uncertainty.
'I don't know, Brian,' he said, according to one account of the incident. 'It sounds weird.'
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When the song became an overnight smash – in its first week of release it reportedly sold a hundred thousand copies daily, far and away the biggest success of the Beach Boys' entire career – the band, still touring, decided to debut it live in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Brian scrambled to get on a plane to Chicago and drove around Lake Michigan so he could teach the boys the arrangement.
Euphoric over the record's success, he called his wife, Marilyn, and asked her to bring some friends to meet him when he arrived home. At the airport, someone took photos of the group celebration, but Brian seemed uncomfortable.
Isn't this what you wanted? Marilyn asked.
Yes, Brian replied, as he would later relate. 'The problem is I don't know whether I should be saying hello to everybody or whether it's time to say goodbye.'
James Sullivan can be reached at
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Advertisement 'I've had the idea for a long time of a room with lots of books, all placed neatly on shelves, and something slicing through the shelves' was how he described his startling vision for his 1977 theater piece 'I Was Sitting on My Patio This Guy Appeared I Thought I Was Hallucinating.' In an interview with The New York Times shortly before its premiere, he went on: 'There is a telephone, and a telephone wire. There is a scrim or gauze over the front of the stage, and images are sometimes projected on it.' (In its subsequent review, the Times took note of the work's 'monstrous title.') Advertisement Dialogue would find its way into the ledger later in the process. It might be fragmentary and repetitious -- or there might be none at all. The seven-hour 'Deafman Glance (Le Regard du Sourd),' from 1971, and the 12-hour 'Life and Times of Joseph Stalin,' from 1973, were entirely silent. 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Robert Wilson was born in Waco, Texas, on Oct. 4, 1941, to Diugiud Mims Wilson Jr., a lawyer, and Velma Loree Hamilton, a homemaker. Because he had a stammer as a child, his parents sent him to study dance in the hope of building his self-confidence. His teacher, Byrd Hoffman, noticed that the boy's problem was that he was trying to speak too quickly, and his words were colliding. She taught him to slow down and focus his thought processes, and he overcame his impediment, although he later used the halting patterns and repetition of his childhood stammer as an element in his work. 'Byrd Hoffman was in her 70s when I first met her,' Mr. Wilson told the website Theater Art Life in 2020. 'She taught me dance, and she understood the body in a remarkable way. She talked to me about the energy in my body. About relaxing. About letting my energy flow through.' He memorialized his teacher by using her name in several projects, including his first New York ensemble, the Byrd Hoffman School of Byrds, and the Byrd Hoffman Foundation, which underwrites various projects of his, including the Watermill Center, a 10-acre arts incubator on Long Island's South Fork. Advertisement Mr. Wilson enrolled at the University of Texas at Austin in 1959 to study business administration but dropped out in 1962. While there, however, he took a job working in the kitchen of the Austin State Hospital for the Mentally Handicapped. At his request, he was soon reassigned to the hospital's recreation department, where he used the skills he had learned from Byrd Hoffman to help patients channel their energy into making art. He moved to Brooklyn in 1963 and studied architecture and interior design at Pratt Institute, earning his Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in 1965. While a student at Pratt, he designed puppets for 'Motel,' the final play in Jean-Claude van Itallie's satirical 'America Hurrah' trilogy, which was staged at the Pocket Theater in New York and at the Royal Court Theater in London. He also earned money working as a therapist for brain-damaged children. Mr. Wilson presented experimental works of his own at the Peerless Theater, a movie house across the street from Pratt. He briefly returned to Texas at his parents' insistence, but his life as a young gay man with theatrical interests proved difficult for him under the eyes of his deeply religious family. He attempted suicide, he said, and was briefly institutionalized in Texas. On his release, he returned to New York, where he rented a loft in SoHo and started the Byrd Hoffman School of Byrds. While writing his early plays, he supported himself by teaching acting and movement classes in Summit, New Jersey, where one day, in 1968, he saw an altercation between a police officer and a young Black man, Raymond Andrews, who was deaf and mute and unable to defend himself. Wilson took the teenager under his wing, appearing in court on his behalf and eventually adopting him. Advertisement Andrews survives him, along with a sister, Suzanne, and a niece, Lori Lambert. Mr. Wilson collaborated with Andrews on 'Deafman Glance' (1971), which he described as a 'silent opera.' By then, he had attracted notice with his first mature work, 'The King of Spain' (1969). Seeing this three-hour, plot-free play, Harvey Lichtenstein, the director of the Brooklyn Academy of Music, commissioned Wilson's next work, 'The Life and Times of Sigmund Freud' (1969). 'My theater is formal. It's different from the way most directors work,' Mr. Wilson told Texas Monthly in 2020. 'It's another world I create; it's not a world that you see wherever you are, if you're in your office or if you're on the streets or at home. This is a different world. It's a world that's created for a stage. Light is different. The space is different. The way you walk is different. The way you sing is different than the way you sing in the shower.' He added: 'Theater serves a unique function in society. It's a forum where people come together and can share something together for a brief period of time. Art has the possibility of uniting us. And the reason that we make theater -- the reason we call it a play -- is we're playing. We're having fun. And if you don't have fun playing, then don't do it.' Advertisement This article originally appeared in
