Bad week for musical geniuses dying at 82.

Saw him 3rd row in a small theatre in 2015. I was directly facing him at his piano and he looked a bit out there, although he sang and played well enough.

RIP

"Vacations. Carl worked at the gas station, for a dollar an hour, while Denny took the car .... Brian sat at home, in his room, with his weight problems and his ear disease, his allergies, his pathological shyness, and wrote dreams about outdoors, where the sun was always shining, where the cosmic surfer's wave unfurled towards infinity, and where everyone was golden, young and beautiful forever"

-- Nik Cohn, from Guy Peellaert's "Rock Dreams" (1973)



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 2025-06-12 05:00 by tatters.

Such sad news. I saw him once with my dad at the theatre in Asbury Park, NJ and another time with The Beach Boys (Al Jardine, Mike Love) in Saratoga. He was great and he spoke with the fans after the theatre show. His songs paint a picture in the mind.

So sad to hear about Brian's passing. RIP and thanks for the wonderful music.

So sad. I’ve never seen Beach Boys but like them a lot.. Thanks Brian for all the memories RIP

Last vibration. RIP Brian.

RIP Brian ...Angels with you

Amazing body of work ......... In My Room ....



ROCKMAN

The harmonies will live on forever. The brothers are together again.

RIP Brian Wilson.

RIP Brian. First solo record is fantastic.

Musical genius, absolutely iconic. RIP Brian.

I have been a fan of the Beach Boys and Brian Wilson as long as I have been a Stones fan. What a brilliant music mastermind. I was so lucky to see Brian Wilson live in Oslo Norway, also in London UK with Blondie Chaplin.

Love And Mercy!

Bjornulf

I remember when the song Good Vibrations was released.I was only a little kid and It gave me instant goosebumps.
It was only many years later when I discovered where this out of space sound came from: the theremin, and the Hammond. That sound fascinates me till today.

Rip Brian Wilson †

A true musical genius who created some of the greastest music ever recorded.

The article below says it far better than I could. RIP Brian.

Brian Wilson’s World of Sound

By Spencer Kornhaber

June 12, 2025, 1:42 PM ET

To understand the genius of Brian Wilson, the Beach Boys mastermind whose family announced his death yesterday at age 82, go listen to “Surfer Girl.” Try to forget that you’ve heard this 1963 hit playing in the background of your life for decades. Forget that it’s about making out in a woody. Forget even that you’re hearing the voices of young men, some of them still teenagers, some of them brothers. Hear what Wilson may have heard: gooey vibrational waves, surging and receding, coating the ear. Art that’s oceanic in form as much as in content. Pure sound.

And then add back in all of the song’s emotions—innocence, longing, brotherly harmony, nostalgia for the barbershop-singing ’50s, giddiness for the dawning ’60s. The lyrical image of a surfer guy ogling a surfer girl is plainly kitsch, but it’s rendered with the seriousness and sadness inherent in really wanting something. Wilson said this was the first original song he ever wrote; The New York Times reports that it might have been the first pop hit in history to have been written, arranged, produced, and performed by the same person. It was an early triumph that demonstrated Wilson’s method: singular control and meticulous sound design, used to venerate collective feelings.

The band—initially comprising the three Wilson brothers, one cousin (Mike Love), and one schoolmate (Al Jardine)—got their start in 1961, playing in the Wilson-family garage in Los Angeles County. So much was still new then: rock and roll, surfing as a national hobby, the very concept of teenagedom as a discrete and special time in life. The record industry itself was in its relative adolescence. Wilson worshipped the music of the producer Phil Spector, who helped pioneer the notion of treating the studio as an instrument. And the Beatles, the Beach Boys’ great contemporaries, were just then experimenting with the idea of rock albums as unified artistic statements.

The Beach Boys were pretty-faced pinups merchandising the trendy Southern California beach lifestyle—but Wilson didn’t surf, and he didn’t love being onstage. He later said that he thought of himself as “a behind-the-scenes man, rather than an entertainer.” The other band members, recognizing his talents, let him play that role. “I had ideas coming into my head all the time,” he told Harvard Business Review in 2016. “Many had to do with using instruments as voices and voices as instruments. I would put sounds together to create something new. Some ideas didn’t work, because they were too difficult to achieve at the time. But most did. And then I immediately moved to the next thing.”

Following a panic attack in 1964, he quit touring, which freed him up to pursue his greatest vision: an album that would be as dense and wondrous as Spector’s music, and as ambitious as what the Beatles pulled off in 1965 with Rubber Soul. Thus was born 1966’s Pet Sounds, which is still known as one of the greatest albums ever. The recording process was ego-flattening for his bandmates—Wilson demanded endless vocal takes, and replaced many of their instrumental contributions with the work of session musicians from the famous Wrecking Crew. The resulting album was an ornate musical diorama made up of toy-box noises—harpsichord, bells, timpani—and sinuous voices that drifted between glumness and uplift. It closed with the sound of a barking dog and a chugging train, as if to emphasize the unity between the kaleidoscopic music and our kaleidoscopic world.

But Pet Sounds was not merely the technical achievement of an all-controlling aesthete. Wilson had spiritual aims for the record: “We prayed that we could bring love to people, and it really worked,” he’d later say. Co-created by the advertising copywriter Tony Asher, the lyrics used the Beach Boys’ perpetual narrator—some pining young man—to tug on existential themes with down-to-earth poignancy. “God Only Knows” is devastatingly relatable: the sound of someone in love imagining loss, spiraling out to ask for divine help with a catastrophe that hasn’t even happened yet. Songs such as “I Just Wasn’t Made for These Times” and “I Know There’s an Answer” plumb depression and alienation with palpable confusion. The narrator doesn’t know if his pain is his fault or everyone else’s.

The themes of those songs, as well as Wilson’s obsessive habits in the studio, took on a tragic resonance for fans as he struggled for decades after Pet Sounds. Wilson began experiencing hallucinations in 1965, and he was later diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder. He fell into a socially isolated routine of taking drugs and bingeing on junk food. A charismatic psychotherapist named Eugene Landy entered his life and took control of both his health and his business interests. Wilson credited the doctor with saving his life but also reportedly felt that he’d been confined to a “strange hell” he couldn’t escape from; their relationship ended a few years after Landy surrendered his medical license to state officials in the late ’80s. (Landy admitted to improperly supplying drugs to patients but otherwise denied the allegations against him.) When Wilson died, he was under the care of a conservatorship sought by family members.

Yet although Wilson’s creative golden age ended in the ’60s, his influence kept growing. I first really got into him when a version of Smile, his long-incomplete post–Pet Sounds opus, was finally released in 2004 with the title Brian Wilson Presents Smile. The music sounded nothing like the early-digital-era rock and pop I’d been listening to as a high schooler; it was earnest and fizzy, with touches of country-and-western and hula music. But the way the songs seemed stitched together, almost in cut-and-paste fashion, was recognizably modern. The album had been sketched out nearly four decades earlier, but it had anticipated recorded music’s trajectory as a producer’s medium, unbounded by any fealty to what a live band sounds like.

Today, lots of musicians work in the way Brian Wilson did: holing up in their room, using technology to conjure any sound their brain can dream of, spending great expanses of time getting the details just right. His legacy should also inspire his disciples to look not just inward but outward, toward an appreciation of what their vibrations can do for others.

Drew

RIP Brian. An incredible talent. I was not a Beach Boys fan per se but can appreciate a thing of beauty. Brian created many, many of those.

Brian Wilson had a musical vision that few could bring to fruition as high quality recorded music. The Beach Boys were his vehicle. The guy wrote some fantastic songs, created incredible arrangements, and as a young boy when that stuff got released in the 60's it really resonated with me. I still have all of my old Beach Boys 45's, and some LP's that get turntable time. I really liked the Beach Boys of the 60's and 70's, but not on the same level as with the Stones and a few other bands.
RIP Brian, and thanks for the great tunes!

I'm sure I've told this story here many times before, but after buying tickets for Brian's very first solo concert, my girlfriend and I decided to get married on the day of the concert. That night, under those circumstances, hearing songs like "Wouldn't It Be Nice" and "God Only Knows" shook me to my emotional core in ways I never could have possibly imagined.

Years later, when I had Brian sign a Smile poster for me at a record store across the street from where that concert had taken place (and where I would see him perform again later on that night), I told him the story of how I had scheduled my wedding to take place on the day of his first solo concert. Brian looked up and smiled. Jeff Foskett, who was standing next to Brian, and thinking I might be full of it, quizzed me on the date, which of course I knew. Later that night, to my wife's great embarrassment, Jeff repeated the story onstage during the concert.

But it's something a young woman said to me earlier in the day at the autograph session that I remember most of all. She said, "You got him to smile. We waited in line for over an hour, and in all that time, you were the only person who got him to look up and smile."



Edited 3 time(s). Last edit at 2025-06-13 03:48 by tatters.

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tatters
But it's something a young woman said to me earlier in the day at the autograph session that I remember most of all. She said, "You got him to smile. We waited on line for over an hour, and you were the only person he looked up at and smiled."

That's a great story. Brian was indeed and enigma that way. It seems like he was a robot most times, though I think of this one video, that really represents a cool honest moment from both Mike and Brian. Its so brief, but its so rare with Brian that it's stuck with me. Cause we all just wanted to see Brian happy, and Mike got this, seemingly, very genuine memory and moment out of Brian that I thought was kinda sweet. Who knows, maybe it was all for show lol:

[www.youtube.com]

Beach Boys TV Special - John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd take Brian Wilson Surfing 1976 (Malibu Beach)

The area looks familiar (Hills in the background) were Ronnie Wood had rented a house in 1976--- Images of Ronnie and Mick walking on the beach on their way to a Birthday party (Carinthia West, photographer)



video: [youtu.be]

This is a thread in memory of Brian Wilson.

If you don't like Brian Wilson or Beach Boys, then please do not post here, there are several Off Topic threads about their music.

I think it is a disgrace to post here saying "I do not like" or "not my cup of tea"; it is like going to a funeral and say "I did nok like him/her"... Some decency is a minimum please.

And no reason to reply here regarding this matter, it is not open for discussion, and any such posts will be deleted, with harm added and noted to the matter.

Bjornulf

Well said, Bv.

This is my story about when Brian had my band's CD in his hand!


I was in my 20s in the early 2000s, in an indie band, and obsessed with Brian and the BBs.

My bassist bandmate and I went to the Pet Sounds show at the Royal Festival Hall. It was sensational. After the show we dashed to the back of the venue, hoping to see Brother Brian leave - and to give him our demo CD!

There were almost no other fans, and low and behold, out came Brian - towering tall and wrapped in a long white parker.

We handed him our CD as he stepped into the big black car, and he glanced at it, then looking kind of bemused, passed it back to his minder, and back to us!

So close!

Thanks for the music Brian.

Exclusive

Beach Boys’ Al Jardine: My Final Meeting with Brian Wilson

"I thought he was going to get better," says Beach Boys co-founder Jardine, who had been hoping to have Wilson make a guest appearance on his upcoming solo tour

By Brian Hiatt
June 12, 2025


Ebet Roberts/Redferns

[www.rollingstone.com]

[archive.ph]

Mike Love Pays Tribute to Brian Wilson at Songwriters Hall of Fame Induction: “I Do Feel His Presence”

Love, a founder member of The Beach Boys, was inducted alongside music legends George Clinton, Michael McDonald and The Doobie Brothers.

By Ethan Millman
June 12, 2025


Mike Love and John Stamos - June 12, 2025 in New York City (Joy Malone/Getty Images)

[www.hollywoodreporter.com]

I was lucky enough to see Brian in person four times that contain two “I was there” moments:

Festival Hall, Osaka, July 9, 1999 — his first ever solo concert outside the USA
Wembley Arena, London, September 28, 2012 — his final on-stage appearance with The Beach Boys

On the opening night of his first solo tour abroad, to the ringing applause that went on and on after the encore was over, Brian came back alone and walked on to the stage centre, waving big time, visibly touched by the responses he got, and then walked off, a scene I — and every one of the audience members for sure — will never forget.

R.I.P. Brian Wilson, the talent like no other

The Beach boys my second favourite group besides the Stones .Saw them first in 1978 Christchurch .Met Brian Three times 2004 CHCH 2012 Sydney airport 2016 Auckland .Will be seeing Mike loves Beach boys when over in the UK July . Brian was a very complex musical genius whose music will live on for eternity.RIP Brian

I believe the true genius was in Brian’s ability to go more than 8000 days from the onset of a debilitating mental illness that nearly ended his music career when Caroline, No was released in 1966, to the moment we heard Love and Mercy open his first solo album in 1988.

Finally getting off street drugs, receiving psychiatric help, finding the right medication, and meeting his wife Melinda marked the real turning point. He met Melinda in 1986, but it was not until 1991 that he was freed from the control of Dr. Eugene Landy. By 1998, he was able to get back on stage, which, aside from a few brief appearances with the Beach Boys in the 70s, 80s, and 90s, was a major milestone in his long recovery from serious mental illness.

Few musicians with this debilitating disease have recovered to live a life on their own terms and with the happiness he found in his later years, as I write about in this piece:

[open.substack.com]

Quote
MizzAmandaJonez

[open.substack.com]

Thank you for your wise input, but don't exaggerate. In the end it's a GAD GAD GAD,
which half the world suffers from.

Quote
MizzAmandaJonez
I believe the true genius was in Brian’s ability to go more than 8000 days from the onset of a debilitating mental illness that nearly ended his music career when Caroline, No was released in 1966, to the moment we heard Love and Mercy open his first solo album in 1988.

Finally getting off street drugs, receiving psychiatric help, finding the right medication, and meeting his wife Melinda marked the real turning point. He met Melinda in 1986, but it was not until 1991 that he was freed from the control of Dr. Eugene Landy. By 1998, he was able to get back on stage, which, aside from a few brief appearances with the Beach Boys in the 70s, 80s, and 90s, was a major milestone in his long recovery from serious mental illness.

Few musicians with this debilitating disease have recovered to live a life on their own terms and with the happiness he found in his later years, as I write about in this piece:

[open.substack.com]

Nice story. Thanks.

One small note (for what it's worth) ... I saw Brian a couple times doing Pet Sounds a few years ago with Al Jardine, and during the show he credited Al with arranging Sloop John B.

Dutchman, Thank you for reading and for your perspective. While it’s true that anxiety is common, Brian Wilson’s condition is well documented as involving much more than Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD), which is characterized by persistent, excessive worry. His experiences included decades of psychosis, years under the control of a controversial therapist, and a long absence from music and public life. I shared his story not to exaggerate, but to highlight the depth of his struggle and the significance of his eventual return. In the end, his true genius is the music he made before being stricken with this disease, AND in creating music again while living with the illness. That resilience is what makes his story so meaningful, and the journey back is quite amazing in itself… Good Psychiatrist, the right medication and Love and Mercy, as his wife and he clearly shared on the Larry King interview I linked in the story.

Cheers Dutchman, thanks for taking the time to read my article.

Thx Chris L, noted and I’ll update.

CHELSKEITH



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 2025-06-15 15:58 by MizzAmandaJonez.

name 5 songs that brian wrote that moved you and why?

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kkhoranstoned
name 5 songs that brian wrote that moved you and why?

I can’t give a reason as to why, but my favourite five Beach Boys songs are:

In My Room
Surfer Girl
I Get Around
Warmth of The Sun
California Girls