Brian Wilson, 1942-2025

My dad once told me that when The Beatles returned from their triumphant first tour of America in February 1964, an interviewer asked them what the best American music they’d heard on the trip was and John Lennon said something along the lines of: “Well, there’s a band called The Beach Boys who are pretty good.” Within a couple of days, all the kids at dad’s school were listening to The Beach Boys.

That was good talent spotting from Lennon. By that point, The Beach Boys, led by Brian Wilson, had done little to stand out from the “surf music” boom of the early 1960s sent up in the opening of “Top Secret!”; three of the four albums they had released had had the word “surf” in the title. Perhaps Lennon was thinking of “In My Room” from their third LP, “Surfer Girl.” Thematically, it is a lot like Lennon’s “There’s a Place,” which appeared on The Beatles’ first LP and stood out from their earlier material in hinting at more lyrical depth.

If “In My Room” hinted at the songwriter Wilson could be, it didn’t take him much longer to become it. August 1964 saw the release of “When I Grow Up (To Be a Man)” where Wilson looked past youth into the future:

Will my kids be proud or think their old man is really a square?

When they’re out having fun yeah, will I still wanna have my share?

Will I love my wife for the rest of my life, rest of my life,

When I grow up to be a man?

It ends with the repeated:

Won’t last forever,

It’s kind of sad

“Wouldn’t It Be Nice,” which came out on their classic album “Pet Sounds” in May 1966, returned to this theme, with Wilson once again looking to adulthood:

Maybe if we think and wish and hope and pray it might come true (run, run with you),

Baby, then there wouldn’t be a single thing we couldn’t do,

We could be married (we could be married),

And then we’d be happy (and then we’d be happy),

Oh, wouldn’t it be nice?

Amid the mounting social chaos of the 1960s, Wilson didn’t see the dawning of the Age of Aquarius. He saw a future where the kids listening to his records would get their hair cut, put on a suit, get a job, get married, have kids, and live a lot like their parents. If rates of family fragmentaion show that this wasn’t entirely true, its is true that the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s turned out a lot more like the 1960s than any of the utopias or dystopias imagined in that decade. “Wouldn’t It Be Nice” is well used at the end of “Shampoo,” that stinging attack on the mores of the 1960s. Wilson knew childhood would end and that adulthood would follow. He managed the rare trick of recognizing a moment while he was in it and capturing that.

Wilson will probably be most remembered for his music, and if he had never made a record except “God Only Knows” his reputation would be secure. His singles like “Good Vibrations” and “Heroes and VIllains” were more like suites with multiple themes: Wilson would have put the second side of “Abbey Road” out as a single.

But, on his best records, the musical depth is matched by a lyrical depth. True, he collaborated with lyricists like Mike Love and Tony Asher, but the consistency of the themes suggests that they came from Wilson, the ever present. I once read a review of “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off” which said, as close as I can recall, that it captures three people in their last moment of childhood and that the pathos arising from that is what lifts it above the hundreds of gormless teen comedies that filled video store shelves in the 1980s. Just as John Hughes could infuse a genre like the teen movie with a quality which produced something timeless, so Brian Wilson did with pop music.

The 1960s produced more than its fair share of musical geniuses. Brian Wilson was among the very best.