Aubrey Malone recounts the troubled life of Beach Boys front man Brian Wilson who died in June
It isn’t every day of the week you’ll see Bob Dylan paying tribute to someone who’s just died, especially someone in his eighties. But he did to Brian Wilson, the Beach Boys frontman, when he passed away last month. Many others paid tribute to him as well, not only for his music but because he was regarded as one of the nicest guys in music.
There are some singer/songwriters – and Wilson was probably the first of that breed to occupy the mainstream – who can’t help making hits. Think of the Everly Brothers, Roy Orbison, Abba. Almost every song from these kinds of performers seem to be instantly recognisable, something you’d want to sing along to.
Wilson had that gift too. So many of his songs have become anthems. I Get Around and Surfin’ U.S.A. were the first two Beach Boys songs I remember hearing in the sixties. They seemed to be everywhere. The melodies were so infectious. Then came Help Me Rhonda and Sloop John B. Instant classics. I thought they beat the Beatles hands down.
The song of theirs that really “sent” me, as we used to say back then, was Good Vibrations. There was so much going on in it, so much echo and falsetto and octave jumps, and the harmonising was to die for. I remember winnig it on an EP in a competition in the RTE Guide, or whatever the RTE Guide was called in 1966. I played it until the needle all but wore out. There were three other tracks on the EP. I remember one of them being by Elvis. I had so many Elvis records then that I thought EP stood for Elvis Presley!
Happy days with The Beach Boys
The Beach Boys have sold over 100 million records. Beat that! The group, as most people know, was founded by Brian. He was backed by his two brothers, Dennis and Carl, as well as a cousin, Mike Love, and a friend, Al Jardine. They were managed by their father Murry, an accomplished pianist.
I always thought of Brian as an uncomplicated person, someone who liked sitting in the sun or driving a fast car with a “babe” by his side. Such preconceptions were untrue.
Only in later years did I learn that he had mental health problems from his early life . He also had a troubled relationship with his father, a controlling and sometimes violent man. And he didn’t know anything about surfin.’ “I tried it once,” he confessed, “and got conked on the head with the board.”
He rarely went to the beach in his youth because “I had light skin that burnt easily.” He preferred looking at the ocean: “It was like a piece of music. Each of the waves was moving around by itself but they were also moving together.”
Wilson married Marilyn Rovell in 1964. That was the year he decided to leave the group for a while to focus on his writing, being replaced by Bruce Johnston. It was also the year he started smoking pot. He took stronger drugs too, Seconals and downers, “because they were part of what it meant to be a creative person in the sixties.” Acid made him hear voices. Some of them were like his father telling him what to do. Others were directions for songs.
Drugs, he explained, weren’t substances he liked for themselves: “They were ways of dealing with the fact that my head wasn’t right.” Unfortunately, they only made it worse: “Bad days turned into bad months, and then bad years.”
Something else happened in 1964 too: He had his first nervous breakdown then. “It was like being drunk all the time,” was the way he put it, “but worse.” One of the voices he heard at this time was that of Phil Spector, a recording artist he idolised. One night he was watching a dystopian Rock Hudson film, Seconds. In the middle of it he “heard” the voice of Phil Spector telling him he’d never be as good as he was.
His focus became more serious as the decade went on. By the end of the sixties he felt truly messed up. The labours he expended on putting out iconic albums like Pet Sounds took their toll.
Children started to arrive. During his bad years he hid away from them. “Meals happened without me” he revealed, “When the kids came home from school I might still be in a bathrobe sitting at the piano.”
He knew he needed help but didn’t know where to go for it. His father was working with him in the studio now. He’d become involved in the music industry with him. That became another kind of pressure, the old control being exerted again. Eventually he had to fire him.
It isn’t every day of the week you’ll see Bob Dylan paying tribute to someone who’s just died, especially someone in his eighties. But he did to Brian Wilson
He always said the seventies was the worst decade of his life: “I was taking speed or doing coke or coming through the door drunk with a cigarette in my hand.” One time he painted his whole house purple. Marilyn was demented with him.
His father died in 1973. Part of him was grieving and part relieved. He sought help from a psychiatrist, Eugene Landy. Landy stabilised him. He became a kind of surrogate father in time but he too was controlling. He roared at him a lot, telling him he needed to get back to doing what he did best, making hit records.
Wilson continued his wild ways, interrupting a session at a jazz club one night in 1974 by leaping on stage and singing “Be-Bop-A-Lula” in his bathrobe and slippers.
He dismissed Landy after he raised his fee to $20,000 a year. The next few years saw him regressing into his bad habits. He took an overdose one night. Another time he was hospitalised for alcohol abuse. He still did some recordings with his brothers but he was under par a lot of the time. They took care of him both physically and on the business side of things.
Landy came back into his life in 1976. Marilyn called on him when Wilson’s weight started to spiral out of control. By now he hadn’t appeared onstage for almost a decade apart from a few shows. Landy got his weight down from 300 pounds to 185, but at some cost. “He put himself in the middle of everything in my life,” Wilson complained, “He called it 24 hour therapy. When friends came to see me, he interviewed them.”
His astronomical fees made Wilson feel he was being used by him in the same way Elvis Presley and Michael Jackson began to feel used by their physicians when their focus turned to money. He threw a punch at him one night and Landy threw one back. That caused another split between them.
“Things were better when he left,” Wilson said, “We put out some pretty good albums.” But in 1978 he ended up in a mental hospital, his weight ballooning back up to 300 pounds again.
One day he called Marilyn and asked her for a divorce. She agreed. It took place the following year.
With or without her, his head was still all over the place. On stage he became something of a joke. During one concert he couldn’t help laughing for no reason. Eventually his band fired him.
He’d been seeing another woman for years now, Melinda Ledbetter. She became his rock, nursing him through the eighties and helping him rehabilitate himself in a way Landy couldn’t. This was no easy task. One night in 1985 he attempted suicide by swimming out to sea. Dennis had died by drowning two years earlier.
In 1988 Carl died of lung cancer. As often seemed to be the case with the Beach Boys, tragedy was followed by good news – they had their first number 1 hit since “Good Vibrations” with a song called Kokomo.
Landy was still hovering around the fringes of his life now. In 1989 they even formed a business together. It was called Brains and Genius, a play on Brian and (Eu)Gene.
The nineties was a decade of lawsuits for Wilson, many of them relating to the publishing rights of songs sold unwisely by his father decades earlier. He was also the object of a court action himself when Mike Love sued him for failing to give him royalties and songwriting credits.
He married Marilyn in 1995. She continued to keep him on the straight and narrow. In 1999 he did his first solo tour. He ushered in the new millennium the following year with his first concert album, Live at the Roxy Theatre.
Landy died in 2006. Wilson felt nothing when he heard the news. He was still performing now, his rehabilitation completed by the woman at his side. In 2011 he reunited with the Beach Boys for a 50th anniversary tribute album, That’s Why God Made the Radio.
Four years later there was another album, No Pier Pressure. In 2016 he wrote an autobiography, I Am Brian Wilson.
He developed back problems in 2019 which led to surgeries. The following year his touring was interrupted by Covid. In 2022 he was sued by Marilyn for outstanding royalties. He performed his final concert that year.
Marilyn died last year. Soon afterwards, Wilson developed dementia. There was very little for him to live for now. Then came the news that he was gone from us. His friend Paul McCartney put it well when he said, “How we will continue without Brian Wilson no one knows.”
Wilson was Everyman, a homebody who was as American as Mom’s apple pie. At home he was like a big child but in the recording studio he was a perfectionist, a workaholic, someone who could range from Disney to Gershwin in the blink of an eye. Sean Lennon called him “America’s Mozart.” Wilson saw himself more as Bach – for the counterpoint.
A humble genius, he was, as one writer put it, “Cary Grant without a mirror.”
He hid his demons from people because there were too many albums to be made, too many concerts to be performed. He was a good actor. Even his sad songs, someone said, sounded happy.
“I kept going,” he wrote in his autobiography, “through all of it, all the drugs, all the lawsuits, all the bad feelings that came between me and the people close to me.”
He isn’t “going” anymore, sadly, but his songs are.
What a legacy.
