Latest news with #GeorgeGershwin
Los Angeles Times
14-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Los Angeles Times
The Mayan, a staple of DTLA nightlife, will close its doors this fall
The Mayan, a popular music venue and nightclub in downtown L.A., announced Monday morning that it will be closing under its current management after a 35-year run. 'It is with heavy yet grateful hearts that we announce The Mayan will be closing its doors at the end of September, after 35 unforgettable years,' read a statement from the venue's Instagram page. 'To our loyal patrons, community and friends: thank you for your unwavering support, your trust and the countless memories we've created together. You made every night truly special.' The announcement also called on longtime and potentially new patrons to celebrate the club's final months in fashion, with weekly Saturday dance nights through Sept. 13. It is currently unknown what, if anything, the historic venue will be used for after the Mayan shutters. The Mayan did not immediately respond to The Times' request for information. The Mayan Theater — located at 1038 S. Hill St., next door to the Belasco — first opened Aug. 15, 1927, with a performance of George Gershwin's Broadway musical 'Oh Kay.' As its name alludes to, the theater is one of the best known examples of the Mayan Revival architectural movement that took place in the U.S. during the 1920s and 1930s, which drew inspiration from pre-Columbian Mesoamerican structures. As The Times reported in 1989, the giant bas-relief figures on the venue's exterior are of the Maya god Huitzilopochtli seated on a symbolic earth monster. The three-tiered chandelier in the theater — rigged for red, blue and amber lights — is a replica of the Aztec calendar stone found near Mexico City. The design of tapered pillars was inspired by the Palace of the Governors at Uxmal, a Maya ruin on Yucatán Peninsula dating from AD 800. Mexican anthropologist and sculptor Francisco Cornejo assisted the architects to craft a building that was based on authentic designs of pre-Columbian American societies. During the Great Depression, the theater was rented out to the Works Projects Administration, which operated it as an Actors Workshop theater. In 1944, Black producer, director and entrepreneur Leon Norman Hefflin Sr., staged a production of the popular and well-reviewed musical 'Sweet 'N Hot,' which starred Black film and stage icon Dorothy Dandridge. The Fouce family gained ownership of the theater in 1947 and shifted the venue's programming toward Spanish-language film screenings and performers. By the early 1970s, Peruvian-born filmmaker and actor Carlos Tobalina gained ownership of the theater and changed the programming to focus on pornographic and X-rated films. In 1990, the Mayan was brought under new management and inhabited its current form as a nightclub and music venue. The city has since declared the building as an official L.A. Historic-Cultural Monument. The Mayan has been used as a shooting location for many film productions, including the 1992 box-office smash 'The Bodyguard,' starring Kevin Costner and Whitney Houston; the 1998 skit-to-feature film 'A Night at the Roxbury;' the 1979 Ramones-led musical comedy 'Rock 'n' Roll High School;' and, most recently, the Netflix wrestling-themed series 'GLOW.' In recent years, the Mayan has played host to the cheeky lucha libre and burlesque show called Lucha VaVoom de La Liz and has held concerts by acts such as Jack White, M.I.A. and Prophets of Rage.
Telegraph
12-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
The troubled genius who flirted with Garbo and popped pills with Garland
'There is a fine line between genius and insanity, I have erased that line,' said Oscar Levant. Feted through the 1940s as both the highest paid concert pianist in America and one of the wittiest voices on the nation's radio, Levant charmed everyone from George Gershwin (with whom he often shared a piano stool) through Harpo Marx and Dorothy Parker (with whom he traded wisecracks) to Judy Garland (who regularly raided his bathroom for the prescription pills to which they were both addicted). Doug Wright's Tony Award-winning play, Good Night, Oscar, reminded audiences in New York earlier this year that Levant was also the first American celebrity to speak frankly on 1950s chat shows about his severe struggles with 'a regularly laundry list of mental health issues'. Pivoting on a virtuosic performance from actor and pianist Sean Hayes (best known for the sitcom Will & Grace), the play is based on a real event in 1958 when TV producers checked Levant out of a psychiatric unit for four hours to make an appearance on The Johnny Carson Show. The play's spine-tingling climax sees Hayes (in character as Levant) seated at the piano to perform Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue in its entirety, revealing the brilliance and melancholy lurking beneath his erratic and self-deprecating humour. 'I think one can draw a direct line from Levant's television appearances in the 1950s to the modern craze for reality TV,' says Wright over the phone between rehearsals for the London run. 'Because although a lot of what Oscar said shocked a culturally conservative audience, he also proved that a real person could be as compelling as any fictional character. Some would argue he exploited his problems for entertainment value. Others claim he was de-stigmatising them and bringing them to a greater public awareness. But I don't think those aims were mutually exclusive and Oscar preferred being on television to living his real life.' Born in Pittsburgh in 1906, Oscar Levant was the youngest of four sons of aspirational Russian Jewish immigrants. 'I paid thousands of dollars to psychiatrists to forget my childhood,' he would later say. His autocratic father, Max, was a watchmaker who disdained emotion and expected his sons to take up middle-class professions. His more rebellious and charismatic uncles and older brothers – the eldest of whom defied their father to become a professional violinist – took him to brothels. Meanwhile his mother Annie – a devotee of romantic music and elegant performers – insisted that her boys all learn instruments. She took them to see her brother conducting the then-20-year-old George Gershwin in 1918 and little Oscar – tutored in strict, classical style – was bowled over by the young composer's 'fresh, free, inventive' style. He was also pierced for the first time by an agonising jealousy that he would nurture for the rest of his life. Oscar's electric talent at the keyboard had been evident from the first but he loathed practising. He had to be dragged from games in the streets and literally tied to the piano stool and forced to play. Because his physical appearance – with his knock knees, big ears and general clumsiness – did not conform to her ideal of an elegant pianist, Annie would often turn her biting wit on her youngest. After the sudden death of his father when Oscar was 15, Annie sent him to New York to study a strict classical method. By the time he turned 18, he'd made a name for himself in the Big Apple's louche, arty salons as both a pianist (increasingly influenced by jazzier composers such as Irving Berlin) and a wit. He dropped bon mots with the quick-tongued intelligentsia who gathered around the Algonquin Round Table including Robert Benchley, George S Kaufman and Dorothy Parker (of whom he said 'at her cruellest her voice was most caressive – she was one of my favourite people'). But he fretted that he was sabotaging his career by playing court jester: 'I don't want to be known as a wag… I want to be known as a serious musician. But there I go. Jokes. Silly stories. It's a disease. Beethoven was deaf, Mozart had rickets and I make wisecracks.' He would also find himself distracted by the glamour of Hollywood, where he worked as a jobbing composer and dated a series of starlets. In 1930, he began a passionate affair with Virginia Cherrill while she was also being courted by Cary Grant (whose film I'm No Angel was breaking box office records at that time). Grant (who would later marry Cherrill) was so furious with Levant that he repeatedly rammed his car into the pianist's while it was parked outside the house where the lovers slept. 'I thought it was a peculiar way of any one showing his strength, even though I sympathised with his mood,' said Levant. His way with women (who found him a tender lover, although requiring extensive mothering) saw him able to charm even the most elite of beauties. Once, when spotting the famously aloof Greta Garbo dining alone in a restaurant, he summoned a waiter: 'Please tell Miss Garbo to quit staring at me…' She was so amused she invited him to join her. Levant's obsession with Gershwin's music quickly developed into a 'neurotic love affair' and the two became close friends. He was the first pianist after the composer to record Rhapsody in Blue with many preferring the giddy panache of his version, so the rivalry was fierce. Doug Wright categorises their relationship as 'fraternal. Profoundly loving, intimately connected and a little sadistic, Gershwin always had the upper hand and Levant submitted to that like a lapdog.' Only one of Levant's songs – 'Blame it On My Youth' had become a standard and at parties where Gershwin was playing piano, he liked to invite his young lapdog of a friend over to 'play a medley of your hit'. In revenge, Levant would quip: 'If you had to do it all over again, George, would you still fall in love with yourself?' Both men accepted that while Gershwin had 'genius', Levant had only 'talent'. Levant tried to cash in his superior classical education by studying with Schoenberg, under whose tutelage he wrote a piano concerto. But he continued to self-sabotage and 'inserted a boogie-woogie strain in the middle of it. It spoiled the whole thing.' Levant enjoyed a more casual friendship with Harpo Marx, inviting himself to the comic's Hollywood home in 1936 for just over a year during which he ran up huge phone bills and monopolised Marx's guests. 'He was a leech and a lunatic – in short a litchi nut,' recalled Marx. 'But I loved the guy… for all his sarcasm and sullen cracks [he] didn't mean to hurt anyone except himself.' In the mid-1930s, Levant met the actress June Gale, who would become his second wife (his first, another actress, Barbara Woodell, had lasted less than a year), but their on-off courtship was threatened when the young Judy Garland – then filming The Wizard of Oz – developed a crush on him. Their affair was not consummated and they remained friends – confiding in each other about stage fright and swapping prescription pills. Levant would later joke that, 'If we had ever married, she would have given birth to a sleeping pill instead of a child – we could have named it Barb-iturate.' Levant finally married Gale in 1939 and their marriage (during which they raised three daughters) would become the bedrock of his life as his phobias multiplied and depression deepened. In Wright's play the audience sees the couple's snarky repartee as Levant jokes that 'marriage is like retail – you break it, you bought it' while June rallies back 'Marriage is about commitment – it's just a question of who commits whom first.' Wright says he felt qualified to dramatise their relationship because 'my own beloved father was bipolar and a large part of my mother's life was taken up in navigating that, trying to create a normal environment around a very abnormal temperament. After my father died, my mother said: 'I never told you children this, but for 55 years I kept a secret suitcase packed in the boot of the car. I was always ready to leave.' Levant was at his most successful across the 1940s, working as a touring pianist and making regular appearances on popular radio panel show, Information Please (on which witty and well-read panellists attempted to answer questions submitted by listeners). But his mental health was in free-fall. A desperate June turned to Dr Greenson – the psychiatrist who also treated Marilyn Monroe – but the medic appears to have increased his reliance on prescription drugs. 'He was getting everything,' June later recalled. 'Demerol, paraldehyde and handfuls of pills, when he couldn't even find his mouth.' His daughter Lorna later recalled him as 'a kind of spooky figure in pyjamas'. Levant would spend the rest of his life in and out of psychiatric institutions – 'a sad sack in a dressing gown who could barely get out of bed,' says Wright. Although he could still turn on his charm when pressed: he began appearing on chat shows in 1950 after moving to California. He appealed to a new generation of Hollywood stars and in their 1996 biography A Talent for Genius Sam Kashner and Nancy Shoenberger describe a night on which Elizabeth Taylor, Joan Collins and James Dean dropped in to visit with Dean staying much later to discuss music. In her autobiography Collins later wrote that: 'James Dean and Oscar Levant got along famously. Each relished the other's unusualness.' Levant remained friends with Taylor throughout her first four marriages, joking she was 'always a bride, never a bridesmaid'. Chat shows like the one dramatised in Good Night, Oscar often saw Levant, in his own words, 'saying something outrageous enough to get me thrown off air'. He also hosted his own show, Oscar Levant's Words about Music, which was cancelled in 1956 after he led off on Marilyn Monroe's conversion to Judaism joking that: 'Now Marilyn Monroe is kosher, Arthur Miller can eat her.' A second show, The Oscar Levant Show saw him sparring with writers such as Christopher Isherwood and Aldous Huxley, with whom he discussed hallucinogenic drugs and the best musical accompaniment for suicide. The last decade of Levant's life saw him slow down, swapping pharmaceutical addictions for sudden obsessions with various sweet foods, from chocolate to tapioca. He last appeared in public at an event honouring Charlie Chaplin in 1970 and died at home in Los Angeles in 1972, aged 65. 'Writing about such a witty man was a challenge,' admits Wright. 'He gave me some terrific lines to use and I had to write my own to match. It brought out all my writerly insecurities. There are nights when I've stood in the back of the theatre keeping score: two for Oscar, one for Doug.'
Indianapolis Star
08-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Indianapolis Star
Dance Kaleidoscope's 2025-26 season will have star choreographers, cutting-edge work
Over its 2025-26 season, Dance Kaleidoscope will perform cutting-edge choreography that uses classical music and modern compositions to explore a plethora of human experiences. Starting in September, Indianapolis' longest-running dance company will bring four shows to the stage that include pieces created by staff and some of today's top talent from around the country. The season will continue with a collaboration with the Indianapolis Chamber Orchestra that includes music by John Adams, George Gershwin and Philip Glass. And the finale will pair a new work by Dance Kaleidoscope Artistic Director Joshua Blake Carter with live music. Find more information and season tickets on sale now at Single tickets will go on sale at a future date. Sept. 12-14, at Schrott Center for the Arts at Butler University, 610 W. 46th St. Dance Kaleidoscope will perform choreographer Robyn M. Williams' piece about transformation and inner strength. Her work has been at the Kennedy Center, Jacob's Pillow and more iconic venues. Feb. 6-8, 2026, at the Tobias Theater at Newfields, 4000 Michigan Road The company will perform "Train" by Robert Battle, the former artistic director of Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater and the resident choreographer at the Paul Taylor Dance Company. Also on the program will be a premiere by the winner of the Jaffee-Hall Emerging Choreographer Award, which is named after two former Dance Kaleidoscope artistic directors. What else is on stage: Plays based on little-known history populate Phoenix Theatre's 2025-26 season April 17-19, 2026, at the Schrott Center for the Arts The Indianapolis Chamber Orchestra will join the dance company on a program that includes John Adams' "Shaker Loops" (choregraphed by Carter), George Gershwin's "An American in Paris" (choreographed by Artistic Director Emeritus David Hochoy) and Philip Glass' "Glass Pieces" (choreographed by Rehearsal Director Sean Aaron Carmon). June 26-28, 2026, at the Tobias Theater Using music by composer Jordan Munson, Carter will choreograph "Infinity Engine," a new piece that pairs experimental composition and contemporary dance. This Indy newsletter has the best shows, art and eats
Chicago Tribune
03-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Chicago Tribune
What to do in Chicago for Fourth of July weekend: Wu-Tang Clan, patriotic music in Grant Park and fireworks at Navy Pier
Our picks for events in and around Chicago this weekend. It's Independence Day weekend, and Chicagoland offers no shortage of ways to celebrate. If you're looking for just one recommendation, though, consider heading to Hyde Park for The 4th on 53rd. The grassroots efforts of a small group of neighbors has blossomed over 30 years into an ideal version of American patriotism: an inclusive parade where 'everyone marches,' children decorate bikes, and families gather for a fun festival highlighting local your Fourth of July celebration with the Grant Park Orchestra as it performs quintessential American music: Duke Ellington and George Gershwin, hits from Broadway, and flag-waving favorites. Can't get out of the holiday without a little Sousa. Principal percussionist Josh Jones will be featured in 'Yankee Doodle Fantasy.'Or maybe the stars and stripes aren't flying so high for you this year? Rejoice in our First Amendment freedoms with a few laughs. No one better to help with that than Sammy Obeid, a Lebanese-Palestinian American comedian who hails from Oakland, California. His act combines an affable persona, sharp storytelling and incisive political commentary. Regardless of whether you agree with all of his takes, he'll get you Clan rolls into town on what's been billed as their final tour — 'The Final Chamber' — more than 30 years after their founding on Staten Island in 1992. Run the Jewels opens, offering a whole other reason to Cole, another Oakland native, unleashes her defining blend of R&B, soul and hip hop at the United Center. 'The Way It Is' tour marks her 20th anniversary and also features Tink, Jeremih and Elijah influential Buffalo Grove emo band has reunited for a tour that stops for two nights at Thalia Hall. Formed in 1989 by brothers Mike and Tim Kinsella along with Victor Villarreal and Sam Zurick, perhaps you know them better from such later projects as Joan of Arc, Owls and American Football. Jump on this if you want to go; Saturday's show is already sold out. Also features Coffin Prick and Jenny Pulse. … but in this case, it's the fifth of July in Ravinia — close enough. Chicago, now marking its 58th year since its local founding, has long been a staple of the summer outdoor concert scene. This time, the band is joined by a Fleetwood Mac tribute band, Stevie Zanies show features a solid lineup of comedians well known to Chicago audiences: Adam Gilbert, Skyler Higley, Chris Higgins and Kristen Toomey. You've got three more chances to catch the show. 7 p.m. and 9:15 p.m. July 5 and 7 p.m. July 6 at Zanies Comedy Night Club, 1548 N. Wells St.; tickets $32.25 (ages 21+; 2 item minimum) at Fireworks 2025: All the Fourth of July shows in the Chicago areaExpect plenty of pyrotechnics all weekend long in the city's parks and boulevards, but for Chicago's official fireworks, head to Navy Pier.'Jurassic World Rebirth' not your speed? Consider the Music Box Theatre's mini festival of Federico Fellini films. It includes a new, 35mm print of '8½' as well as 'La Dolce Vita,' 'La Strada,' 'City of Women' and 'Amarcord.' Years ago, I saw 'Nights of Cabiria' on a steamy hot night, and it still lingers in my mind as a different sort of summer blockbuster.
The Guardian
11-06-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Brian Wilson obituary
Waves of two kinds characterised the career of Brian Wilson, who has died aged 82. The first, to be found breaking on the surfing beaches of Southern California, provided the inspiration for the songs – Surfin' USA, Surfin' Safari, Surfer Girl – with which he and his group, the Beach Boys, achieved their early fame, defining an American teenage subculture that became a universal dream. The second was the giant wave of affection that greeted him in every concert hall around the world during a late-career comeback, when grateful audiences left a damaged figure in no doubt of the lasting value of his life's work. If Aaron Copland, Charles Ives, George Gershwin and Duke Ellington were geniuses of American musical composition, then so was Wilson. Emerging from the garage of a family home in a humdrum Los Angeles suburb where he, his two brothers, a cousin and a friend formed the band that achieved worldwide hits with I Get Around, California Girls and Good Vibrations, he developed into a musician of outstanding range and imagination, particularly gifted in the adventurous manipulation of vocal harmonies but also capable of devising instrumental pieces that ventured into structural and textural territory far beyond the normal frontiers of pop music. Wilson's early music, conceived in a climate that provided a natural home for open-top sports cars and drive-in movie theatres, was lit by the California sun. But right from the start it also had a darker, more anxious side. He had just celebrated his 21st birthday when his song In My Room expressed, via a lyric written by his friend Gary Usher, his uncertainty in the face of the adult world and its expectations. Even when the waves were at their most inviting, some of Wilson's songs contained an undertow of knowledge that the good times of youth come to an end: 'Won't last forever' went the insistent background chorus to When I Grow Up (To Be a Man), a hit for the Beach Boys in 1964, when its composer was only 22. As the first tortured genius of the 1960s pop music explosion, Wilson sometimes gave the impression that he would also become its first victim. While creating expressions of youthful rapture, he was suffering episodes of personal unhappiness and confusion, which culminated in a lengthy period of seclusion and therapy. But if he would never again match the magical quality of his early masterpieces, he survived his difficulties to tour the world in later life, performing his classic songs to audiences happy to get the chance to register their affection and, through their applause, to help soothe his old wounds. The evolution of his talent had been accelerated in the mid-60s by the transatlantic competition between the Beach Boys and the Beatles. The two bands listened with respect and fascination to advance copies of each other's albums; when Wilson heard Rubber Soul in December 1965, it stimulated him to create the following year's Pet Sounds, the album containing God Only Knows, the song that Paul McCartney later described as one of the greatest ever written. The rivalry may have contributed to pressures that eventually proved intolerable. But in the six short years between his first blithe hymns to California beach culture and the sophistication and complexity of Heroes and Villains and Surf's Up, Wilson produced a body of work of a richness and originality unparalleled in its field, and even more remarkable in the light of the tensions and conflicts that lay behind its creation. He was born in Inglewood, California, the first of three sons of Murry Wilson, a would-be songwriter who earned his living by working on the production line at the nearby Goodyear tyre factory, and his wife, Audree (nee Korthof). Married when they were 21 and 20 respectively, both parents played the piano. The arrival of a second son prompted a move in 1944 to Hawthorne, a town in the south-west of Los Angeles county, then with a population of 10,000, within easy reach of Manhattan beach and the Pacific ocean. According to Brian, he and his brothers, Dennis and Carl, were subjected to physical and mental abuse by their impatient and irascible father, who lived out his thwarted ambitions through his sons while constantly belittling their achievements. 'My dad's tirades were unending,' he claimed in a controversial 1991 autobiography, Wouldn't It Be Nice. 'The effects these outbursts had on me was severe. By the time I started elementary school, I was nervous and high-strung, withdrawn and frightened of almost everything. I expected everyone to yell at me or threaten me.' He was also completely deaf in his right ear, although whether through a birth defect or from one of his father's regular beatings he was never sure; its origin was 'lost and buried among my family's many skeletons'. As well as saving him from the Vietnam draft, his deafness meant that the inventor of sumptuous chorales and instrumental tone poems would never be able to hear his music in stereo. The three Wilson boys grew up with music. Brian learned the piano and the accordion, listened to doo-wop, R&B and the Everly Brothers on the radio, and sang in his school choir, until his pure falsetto voice drew taunts. His sensitive, easily bruised temperament was already seemingly at odds with his tall build, his early prowess at sport (baseball and gridiron football in particular) and his love of goofy horseplay. His younger brothers formed a striking contrast: Dennis the irresponsible golden youth, devoted to surfing, hot rods and the pursuit of beach girls; Carl a gentler soul who took on the role of conciliator. In 1961 the three brothers formed a group, with Brian on bass guitar, Dennis on drums and Carl on lead guitar. Their neighbour Al Jardine played rhythm guitar and their older cousin Mike Love sang, as they all did. Calling themselves the Pendletones, after a brand of plaid shirts popular among local teens, they already had been turned down by one Los Angeles record company when they visited Hite and Dorinda Morgan, a husband-and-wife team who were friends of the Wilsons' parents and ran a small label from an office in Hollywood. Favourably impressed by their cover versions of current hits, the Morgans suggested that they needed to come up with their own songs, preferably with an original theme. Returning to the Morgans' office a few days later, the group brought with them a simple but catchy song called Surfin', with a melody by Brian and a lyric by Love, prompted by Dennis's enthusiasm for his hobby. At the suggestion of a promotion man, the Pendletones became the Beach Boys in time for the release of the record, which became a regional hit and led to an approach from Capitol Records, with whom the group quickly signed a contract. Their next 45s, Surfin' Safari and Surfin' USA, took them into the upper reaches of the national charts. If those initial up-tempo successes illustrated Brian's debt to Chuck Berry (whose Sweet Little Sixteen was the template for Surfin' USA), the next hit showed a different side of the young songwriter's talent. Surfer Girl, a dreamy ballad with adventurous close harmonies, displayed the influence of the Four Freshmen, but with a teenage sensibility. The lovestruck lyric was Wilson's own work, inspired by his feelings for a girlfriend. The B-side, the up-tempo Little Deuce Coupe, was also a hit, and found Wilson collaborating with a new lyricist, the disc jockey Roger Christian, who proved adept at celebrating the group's other shared interest besides surfing and girls: the California culture of hot rods and drag racing. A third major influence, the lavish production style of Phil Spector, would emerge in another Wilson-Christian collaboration, the sublime Don't Worry Baby, in 1964. Fear of the ocean meant that Brian was no surfer, but he loved cars and girls. In November 1964, aged 22, he married the 16-year-old Marilyn Rovell, who, with her elder sister Diane and their cousin Ginger Blake, had formed a vocal group called the Honeys, on whom Brian would sharpen his production skills. They had begun dating two years earlier, and Brian proposed by phone while on tour with the group, on landing in Australia after a mid-air panic attack that proved a harbinger of problems to come. It would not be long before Brian staged a successful revolt against the crude attempts of his father to control every aspect of their career through playing the parts of manager, promotion man and – particularly unwelcome – adviser on songwriting and record production. Murry's financial generosity had provided his teenaged sons with their first instruments, as well as cars and surfboards, but he derided the songs about what he saw as silly, ephemeral subjects, and fined them for such offences as hanging out with girls ($50), swearing ($100) and not setting up their equipment fast enough (also $100). He was fired by the group following an argument at the 1964 session at which they recorded I Get Around, their first No 1. But he still retained control of their song publishing company, and five years later, to Brian's fury, he sold their copyrights for $700,000; within a few years they would be worth many millions. At the very peak of their success, however, Brian was exhibiting symptoms of instability. He had always suffered from nerves on stage, and after another in-flight breakdown the group decided to replace him for live appearances. The session musician Glen Campbell, not yet a solo star, was their first choice, with another friend, Bruce Johnston, eventually becoming the long-term replacement. Freed from the terrors of the road, the group's chief songwriter was able to spend increasing amounts of time in the recording studio. That was where he was happiest, collaborating with the cream of Hollywood's session musicians, who were intrigued by his unorthodox imagination. They responded by pouring their own creativity into his sessions, responding to his desire to introduce new sounds. Soon Beach Boys records were featuring the bass harmonica, the accordion, and bottles and cans transformed into percussion instruments. His intention, he later claimed, was 'to redraw the entire map of pop music'. Hints of the different approach evident in two massive hits, Help Me Rhonda and California Girls, came into full bloom in Pet Sounds, where a cover version of Sloop John B – suggested by Jardine, who had started out as a folk singer – represented the only acknowledgement of the style that had made them famous and provided them with another hit single. But now, rather than zestful and optimistic songs about cars and surfing, it was the yearning ballads with their chromatic melodies, unexpected harmonic shifts and delicate instrumental textures – the heart-melting Don't Talk (Put Your Head On My Shoulder), I Just Wasn't Made for These Times, I Know There's An Answer and Caroline, No – that set the tone. Not all the members of the group were delighted by the new approach, which they rightly suspected to have been rooted in Brian's first experience of LSD: an undiluted dose taken in the spring of 1965 which left him, in the words of his biographer Tim White, both exhilarated and distraught, and never quite the same again. Love, in particular, despised the introspective lyrics supplied by Tony Asher, an advertising copywriter who found precisely the right words to match the swooning poetry of Wilson's melodies. As the group's extrovert front man, Love wanted to stay with the simple formula that had worked so well, and was not reluctant to express his opinion in the most caustic terms. A rift opened, and it would never be fully closed. A mixed reception for Pet Sounds in the US (although it was acclaimed in Britain) indicated to Love that he was in the right, and Brian's next project, a song cycle originally titled Dumb Angel and later known as SMiLE, proved even more divisive. Love provided the hippy-trippy words for Good Vibrations, the epic product of 30 separate studio sessions, but he balked at the new style of free-associative lyrics supplied by Van Dyke Parks, a 23-year-old former child actor and musical prodigy, for the other songs, whose melodies Brian composed at a grand piano placed in a sand-box specially built in the dining room of his Beverly Hills house. Famously, Love found it impossible to get his head around 'Over and over / The crow flies / Uncover the cornfield' (from the song Cabin Essence). The orchestrations for these new multi-sectioned songs were becoming ever more elaborate and eccentric, culminating in Brian's insistence that the session musicians playing on a piece called The Elements: Fire, a strident cacophony intended to evoke the conflagration that devastated Chicago in 1871, should do so wearing plastic firemen's helmets bought by Marilyn at a children's shop. A real fire across the street after the session, followed by an outbreak of blazes in Los Angeles, seemed a bad omen, but the real reason for the abandonment of SMiLE was the internal strife that disheartened first Parks, who walked away from the project, and then Wilson. Brian's increasing dependence on drugs – marijuana, LSD, and eventually and most damagingly cocaine – destroyed what had once been an exemplary work ethic; now he stayed at home in his new Bel Air mansion with his wife and two small daughters, rising late, eating junk food and playing Spector's records over and over again to the occasional visitor. There was concern as the weight of the man who had once owned a Hollywood health-food store called The Radiant Radish ballooned until, still in his early 30s, he weighed more than 109 kg (17st 2lb). Remnants of the aborted SMiLE project were released under the title Smiley Smile, and Good Vibrations became a No 1 hit around the world, but Brian's contributions to the group's subsequent albums diminished along with their mass popularity, even though there were occasional new jewels, veering from the euphoria of This Whole World and to the almost unbearable poignancy of Til I Die. Not even an appearance at Fillmore East in New York alongside the Grateful Dead and the long awaited release of the legendary Surf's Up – based on a solo version performed for Leonard Bernstein on a US TV show – on an album of the same name in 1971 could fully restore the Beach Boys' fortunes. At Wembley Stadium on midsummer's day in 1975 they performed a magical set that briefly reminded 50,000 people who had turned up to hear Elton John of the timeless joy of their music, but of Brian there was no sign. Patchy reunion albums, managerial upheavals, Brian and Marilyn's divorce, artistic and financial disagreements between Love and the Wilsons, peacemaking efforts by Carl, Dennis's death by drowning in 1983 and the departure of Jardine punctuated the years leading up to the appearance, in 1988, of an excellent solo album led off by a fine song, Love and Mercy, in which Brian seemed to have made peace with his demons. For six years he had been in the care of Eugene Landy, a psychotherapist who insisted on 24-hour care and control of his clients. In Brian's case he also assumed the functions of manager, co-songwriter and record producer, earning fees of about $300,000 a year for his work, as well as royalties. Wilson's autobiography Wouldn't It Be Nice was ghostwritten under Landy's supervision and later disowned by its subject. Landy's success in persuading Brian to lose weight and give up recreational drugs helped to avert a possible early death, but many believed that his use of other forms of medication had turned his patient into a muted, zombie-like creature: the inmate of a prison without walls. But in 1986, while browsing in a Cadillac showroom, Brian met a saleswoman, Melinda Ledbetter, with whom he struck up a relationship. As depicted in the 2014 feature film Love & Mercy, in which the youthful and older versions of Brian were played by Paul Dano and John Cusack, she helped free him from the clutches of Landy, who was eventually charged with unethical behaviour and improper prescription of drugs, losing his licence to practise. Wilson married Ledbetter in 1995. His new wife became his new manager, supervising a revival that took wing in 1998, when – shortly after his brother Carl's death from lung cancer – he toured the world performing Pet Sounds in its entirety, with the skilled members of a Los Angeles band, the Wondermints, taking the place of the original Beach Boys. (The performances were repeated in 2016, on a tour marking the album's 50th anniversary.) In 2002 he appeared in the garden of Buckingham Palace, performing God Only Knows at Queen Elizabeth II's golden jubilee celebration. Two years later he chose the Royal Festival Hall in London for the world premiere of the painstakingly reconstructed SMiLE, giving a triumphant performance prefaced by a standing ovation for Van Dyke Parks, who was in the audience. A new recording of the piece was released to further acclaim, followed by the appearance of the original version, pieced together from the 1967 recordings. Several solo albums followed, featuring new songs of variable quality and guest appearances from such admirers as Elton John and McCartney. Witnesses to his post-comeback appearances would sometimes be disconcerted by occasional signs of strain and bemusement, and that angelic voice had lost most of its youthful range and flexibility. Nevertheless in every concert there were moments when he came to life and demonstrated that he could share the audience's enjoyment of bathing in the still-sunkissed warmth of a seemingly endless string of great songs, the products of one of the most fertile and innovative musical minds of his time. Melinda died in January 2024. Two weeks later Wilson's management team applied for a conservatorship order, following a diagnosis of dementia. He is survived by the two daughters of his first marriage, Wendy and Carnie, by five adopted children – the daughters Daria, Delanie and Dakota, and the sons Dylan and Dash – and by six grandchildren. Brian Wilson, songwriter and singer, born 20 June 1942; died 11 June 2025
