When former Beach Boy Brian Wilson announced in early 2002 that he was going to tour Pet Sounds, the 1966 album routinely held up as the greatest ever made, fans collectively held their breath. In the preceding 30 years, Wilson had struggled with drug addiction, had a series of nervous breakdowns and become a recluse, reportedly only leaving his bed to take delivery of his daily dose of cocaine. He was later diagnosed with bipolar schizoaffective disorder, which manifested in long bouts of depression and a cacophony of voices in his head.
In the Eighties, he famously fell under the influence of a psychologist named Eugene Landy, who promised to nurse him back to health, and who appointed himself Wilson’s manager and the beneficiary of his creative projects. Throughout this time, Wilson referred to Landy as his “master”. Landy was eventually given his marching orders, but Wilson remained in a fragile state. The idea that he could perform on stage at all, let alone play a complex and beautiful album cherished by millions, seemed – to put it mildly – outlandish.
I went to one of those shows at London’s Royal Festival Hall, driven by curiosity and preparing myself for the worst. In the event, it was utterly and profoundly moving. Wilson – who was greeted with a standing ovation before playing a note – spent most of it sitting behind a keyboard, grinning from ear to ear in a fluffy jumper. He looked like a retired president. But when he opened his mouth to sing, joining with his band for those rapturous harmonies, time seemed to stand still. Looking around, I saw that nearly everyone in the room was crying.
Wilson – who died today at the age of 82 – enjoyed magnificent highs and awful lows in his lifetime, but his moment in the sun was scorching. A composer, arranger, songwriter and singer, he was a bona fide genius, writing some of the sunniest and saddest pop music the world has ever known. There can’t be a musician in existence who doesn’t long to match the brilliance Wilson achieved while still in his teens and early twenties.
Throughout the Sixties, he and his fellow Beach Boys – his brothers Carl and Dennis, his cousin Mike Love and their friend Al Jardine – composed songs that perfectly encapsulated the innocence and optimism of California: “Good Vibrations”, “Fun, Fun, Fun”, “Surfin’ USA”, “Barbara Ann” and “I Get Around”.
If you want to know why Pet Sounds – conceived partly as a response to The Beatles’ Rubber Soul – is deemed the greatest of all pop albums, just look at its run of songs: “Wouldn’t It Be Nice”, “Don’t Talk (Put Your Head on My Shoulder)”, “Sloop John B”, “God Only Knows”, “Caroline No” and the eerily prescient “I Just Wasn’t Made for These Times”. That last song encapsulates what the world came to know about Wilson: musically, he existed in a higher realm, yet spiritually, he simply couldn’t find peace.
In 1964, Wilson had his first breakdown on a flight to a show in Houston. After that, he stopped performing live and retreated to the relative safety of the recording studio, leaving Dennis, Carl and Mike to keep up the band’s public profile on tour. It wasn’t until he set about writing Smile, the much-anticipated follow-up to Pet Sounds, that his demons, and the pressure of his talent, began to get the better of him. He had a grand piano placed in a specially built sandpit in his living room so he could feel the beach beneath his feet. Later, he set a fire in a bucket in the studio so that the musicians could draw inspiration from the smoke. Eventually, Wilson pulled the plug, Smile was canned, and he withdrew from public life.
Two years after those Pet Sounds shows, in 2004, I went to meet Wilson in Los Angeles. I was ostensibly there to interview him about his comeback album, the ominously titled Gettin’ In Over My Head, a patchy piece of work featuring collaborations with Elton John, Paul McCartney and Eric Clapton. By this time he was enjoying something of a renaissance, having played all over Europe and the United States (after performing Pet Sounds he and his band, The Wondermints, tackled Smile).
I found him in the presidential suite of a hotel in Universal City, just across the valley from his home, sitting bolt upright, his hands clamped anxiously to his knees. I quickly realised that if you asked him a leading question, he’d agree and parrot it back to you. Anything that could be answered with a simple “yes” or “no” would elicit just that.
But he also told me about his fear of failure, something that had plagued him since the early Sixties, and about his late father Murry’s reign of terror. Violent and domineering, Murry would take his own failures as a songwriter out on his sons, pushing them to the point of physical and mental exhaustion. Wilson also told me about the voices he still heard when he was alone that would sometimes soothe him and then switch into threatening mode, shouting at him: “You’re gonna get it, you’re gonna get it.” It was one of the rare occasions in my job as an interviewer that I felt I shouldn’t be there, that he was too vulnerable to be reliving some of the worst moments in his life with a stranger.
Wilson’s death comes just two days after the passing of another wayward genius, Sly Stone. The pair had much in common: both were visionaries who changed the face of music. Both were wildly erratic and put undue pressure on themselves to outstrip their own achievements. Both had drug habits that proved catastrophic to their health and to their creative lives. But just like Sly, Wilson leaves behind a remarkable legacy in the songs that successive generations know almost as well as their own names. His life in the spotlight was short, but what he created turned out to be timeless.
