Brian Wilson, the founder and principal creative force of the Beach Boys, whose catalogue of early hits embodied the fantasy of California as a paradise of beautiful youth, fast cars and endless surf and made them the most popular American rock group of the 1960s, has died at 82. 

The family announced the death on his official webpage, but did not provide further information. 

The Beach Boys were formed in 1961 in Hawthorne, California, near Los Angeles, by brothers Brian, Dennis and Carl Wilson, their cousin Mike Love and their friend Al Jardine, and the regional success that year of their first single, Surfin’, thrust them to national attention when Capitol Records signed them almost immediately as the label’s first rock act. 

They would make the Billboard Top 40 list 36 times in as many years, a tally unequalled by an American band. While each member contributed to the Beach Boys’ signature angelic vocal harmonics, Brian Wilson was the widely acknowledged mastermind behind their music. 

A spectacularly imaginative songwriter, he was responsible for initial successes including Surfin’ USA, Surfer Girl, I Get Around, All Summer Long, Don’t Worry Baby, The Warmth of the Sun and California Girls. Such numbers evoked the joys of hot-rodding under boundlessly blue skies and, above all, the bronzed, bikinied lifestyle of Southern California. 

Brian Wilson was still performing Beach Boys songs in 2022. Photo / Getty Images 

From the beginning, the Beach Boys were wildly successful. Their work combined traditional American songwriting in the manner of Stephen Foster and George Gershwin, close “barbershop” harmonies appropriated from groups such as the Four Freshmen, the lushly ornate “Wall of Sound” production values of Phil Spector and the exuberant rock-and-roll of Chuck Berry. 

Brian Wilson increasingly moved away from songwriting formulas and turned instead to a deeply personal “outsider” mode of creation that tested the boundaries of sounds, harmonies and song structures. A 2007 article in the New Yorker by music critic Sasha Frere-Jones went so far as to call Wilson “indie rock’s muse” and it is hard to imagine the works of such latter-day bands as the High Llamas, Yo La Tengo and Belle & Sebastian without his influence. 

Although the Beach Boys occasionally recorded songs by other musicians, including members of the band, Brian Wilson’s brother Dennis summed up the group as Brian’s “messengers”. 

“Brian Wilson is the Beach Boys,” he said in 1971. “He is all of it. Period. We’re nothing. He’s everything.” 

Yet there was an abiding pathos in Brian Wilson’s best records. It consisted not merely of the idealised scenes the songs depicted, but the fact that they were created by a depressed, socially awkward, partially deaf young man who never surfed or much liked the beach and spent a great deal of his time alone in his room. 

Indeed, Brian Wilson led what was often an unhappy and unsettled life, and suffered a breakdown in the late 1960s that drastically curtailed his life and later work. As he expressed in one of his most personal songs, ‘Til I Die, released on the 1971 album Surf’s Up: 

I’m a cork on the ocean, 

Floating over the raging sea, 

How deep is the ocean? 

I lost my way 

The Beach Boys, pictured in 1962, formed in 1961. Photo / Capitol Records Archive 

Pressure and Pet Sounds 

At the height of their career, The Beach Boys were under pressure to turn out song after song, album after album, while making live concert appearances throughout the United States and abroad. 

The albums Shut Down, Volume 2, All Summer Long, The Beach Boys Today! and Summer Days (And Summer Nights!!) were all released between March 1964 and July 1965 - each one representing an exponential leap for Brian Wilson as composer, arranger and producer. 

During the same period, a succession of British groups, led by the Beatles, came to the United States and knocked the Beach Boys from their perch near the top of the charts. By 1965, Wilson, increasingly troubled and anxious, had stopped touring with his band, with the expressed intent of devoting himself exclusively to production and songwriting. 

Pet Sounds, released in May 1966, dazzled everyone from Paul McCartney - who once called its God Only Knows the greatest pop song ever written - to the conductor and composer Leonard Bernstein, who concluded his warmly appreciative, nationally telecast exploration of rock with Wilson at home, playing alone at the piano. 

But Pet Sounds sold relatively poorly when it came out, and an internecine struggle had begun within the Beach Boys, one that would prove disastrous for all concerned. Some members of the band, particularly Love, the frontman during live performances, were vehemently opposed to any deviation from what had become an exceedingly lucrative formula, while Wilson - overstressed, overindulged, despondent, drugged and dissipated - was increasingly out of sight and out of touch. 

Later struggles 

At home in Los Angeles, Wilson worked on what he hoped would be his magnum opus, a vast, abstracted suite called Smile. He had a custom-made sand pit built in the house, to summon the aura of the beach. Never before had so much time and money been spent on a single recording; there were eventually 72 studio sessions. A bejeweled single, Good Vibrations featuring an electro-theremin, went immediately to No. 1, and anticipation for the album was intense. 

The complete Smile was announced for release in early 1967, then postponed indefinitely, at Brian Wilson’s insistence. 

He had begun to suffer from what would later be diagnosed as schizoaffective disorder, with incessant auditory hallucinations and paranoia. He reached a nadir when he became convinced that a two-minute cut called Mrs. O’Leary’s Cow - the “fire” part of a so-called Elements section on Smile that also contained musical evocations of earth, air and water - was somehow, by its very existence, igniting blazes all over Los Angeles County. Wilson then attempted unsuccessfully to destroy the tapes before entering a long despondency. 

For most of the following decade, Wilson was a near-complete recluse. He contributed one or two songs to Beach Boys recordings, which still came out on occasion but sold miserably. The group was often dismissed as hopelessly old-fashioned during the “psychedelic” late 1960s and early 1970s. Jann Wenner, the co-founder and first editor of Rolling Stone magazine, went so far as to dismiss claims of Wilson’s genius as “essentially a promotional shuck”. 

Brian Wilson (rear, right) was a Kennedy Centre honoree in 2007, with Steve Martin, Leon Fleisher, Diana Ross and Martin Scorsese. Photo / The Washington Post 

A quickly made substitute for Smile, entitled Smiley Smile, was finally issued in late 1967, to dismal reviews and poor sales, and the Beach Boys never recovered their creative momentum. 

Tracks from the original Smile project leaked out on the albums 20/20 (1969), Sunflower (1970) and Surf’s Up (1971). In 2004, a supposed “completed” version was issued by Wilson, in tandem with his lyricist and collaborator Van Dyke Parks and a Los Angeles band called the Wondermints. 

It took until 2011 for Wilson’s original Smile recordings to be released in their entirety, and the music was just as gorgeous, giddy, ambitious and strange as had been expected. In these discs, Wilson is better understood as a composer of electro-acoustical soundscapes than as a traditional songwriter. The disc was made up of fractured, elaborately ornamented musical tableaux, distinguished by their brevity, concentration and sheer sonic splendour that flowered in the ear. 

- More to come