But the programme had originally intended to be a film just about Wilson himself, after his 1966 symphonic opus Pet Sounds – arguably the greatest album ever made – took popular music to new heights. Except the plan was shelved when producers couldn’t work with Wilson, deeming him non-verbal and unable to communicate in any meaningful way, his drug intake and mental health issues beginning to take hold.
(L-R) Brian Wilson, Mike Love, Dennis Wilson, Carl Wilson, David Marks of The Beach Boys in 1962 (Photo: Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images)
With his wonderful tenor voice and unerring way with melody, Wilson took pop to new frontiers with complex, harmonious songs (helped by fellow Beach Boys brothers Carl and Dennis, Mike Love, Al Jardine and Bruce Johnson) and groundbreaking studio techniques.
Brian Wilson of the rock and roll band “The Beach Boys” directs from the control room while recording the album Pet Sounds in 1966 in Los Angeles, California (Photo: Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images)
Yet a melancholy always lay behind the good time hits on lonely, heartbreaking ballads like “In My Room” and “Surfer Girl”. Wilson had been born in Inglewood, California, in 1942 where he and his brothers grew up loving early rock’n’roll and doo wop; his father Murry, a failed musician, was a violent man: Wilson was deaf in one ear from the childhood beatings.
Wilson then made his greatest creation “Good Vibrations”, a work of staggering complexity that took months to perfect. But Wilson’s psyche could not handle his increasing hallucinogenic drug intake, making him hear voices in his head, nor his obsessive perfectionism. In 1967 he began work on his “teenage symphony to God”, an album called Smile that was abandoned when Wilson had a nervous breakdown. Smile gained mythical status as the greatest lost album of all time.
square NEWS Beach Boys co-founder Brian Wilson dies aged 82
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The 90s brought acrimonious Beach Boys lawsuits, but in the noughties came the unlikeliest of revivals. In 2002, he returned to touring to perform Pet Sounds in its entirety to awed audiences, inadvertently kick-starting the album-in-full touring industry. To much surprise and excitement, he then finally finished Smile in 2004.
And it is Wilson’s legacy that a man who withstood so much sadness – including the death of Dennis and Carl – produced a songbook of rare beauty that can rival anyone; the troubled pop genius for whom mere “pop” is not adequate enough a word.
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