Ten years ago, during an interview with Brian Wilson about “Love & Mercy,” a biopic about the Beach Boys leader, Wilson named “Wouldn’t It Be Nice?” as his favorite song of the hundreds he’d written in his life.
Even with so many iconic songs to choose, from “Surfin’ Safari” and “Good Vibrations” to “In My Room” and “God Only Knows,” you could understand why he picked that one.
Its music and words incorporated the wistful hopefulness that personified so much of Wilson’s art. Surely Wilson, who in many ways stayed an eternal teenager throughout his life, identified with the protagonist’s longing for a bigger, brighter future in “Wouldn’t It Be Nice?”
Wilson, whose musical genius far surpassed the boundaries of surf rock from which the Beach Boys arrived, died on Wednesday, June 11. He was 82.
“We are heartbroken to announce that our beloved father Brian Wilson has passed away,” Wilson’s family wrote on his Instagram page to announce his death. “We are at a loss for words right now. Please respect our privacy at this time as our family is grieving.
“We realize that we are sharing our grief with the world,” the post continued, before ending with Wilson’s signature signoff, “Love & Mercy.”
Wilson was born on June 20, 1942, and grew up in Hawthorne with a deep fascination for making music. When Wilson was 16, he recruited his younger brothers Carl and Dennis, their cousin Mike Love, and high school friend Al Jardine to get together in the Wilsons’ garage and form a band.
The 1961 single “Surfin’,” inspired by Dennis Wilson’s enthusiasm for the then-new surfing craze, was their first-ever release. A year later came the debut album “Surfin’ Safari,” for which Wilson, only 19 or 20 at the time, served as its uncredited producer.
As the early ’60s unfolded, the Beach Boys captured a massive audience with songs that depicted and mythologized the California Dream with beaches and surfboards, fast cars and teen love as part of the narrative on songs such as “Surfin’ U.S.A.”, “Fun, Fun, Fun,” “Little Deuce Coupe,” and “California Girls.”
Many of those songs remained favorites of Wilson throughout his life. In a 2012 interview with Love before the reunited Beach Boys headed out on a 50th anniversary tour, Wilson singled out the early ballads “Surfer Girl” and “Warmth of the Sun” as favorites in the set.
Even those early records showed a sophisticated musicality beyond what most of the Top 40 hits of the day provided, as fellow musicians noted in responses to the news of Wilson’s death.
“Brian Wilson was a musical and spiritual giant,” Micky Dolenz of the Monkees wrote on X. “His melodies shaped generations, and his soul resonated in every note. I was fortunate to know him; we all were blessed by his genius. Rest peacefully, Brian.”
“I’ve known the Beach Boys since the mid ’60s and have done lots of shows with them,” Randy Bachman of Bachman-Turner Overdrive and the Guess Who wrote on the same social media site. “They were the American answer to the Beatles. They wowed everyone with the songs, structures, vocals harmonies. The sunshine sound.”
Wilson was the chief songwriter for most of their hits, with Love his frequent lyricist. But as the decade unfolded, controlling efforts by Murry Wilson, the brothers’ abusive father, led to clashes with Brian, whose musical vision continued to blossom beyond the bounds of simpler pop songs.
Wilson eventually stopped touring with the band, preferring to stay in the studio to create new music, and as his use of drugs such as LSD increased and the mental illness later diagnosed as schizoaffective and bipolar disorders emerged, his behavior grew erratic.
Not that he stopped, creating such works as “Pet Sounds,” widely hailed as one of the greatest albums of all-time, or attempting to outdo that with “Smile,” a 1966 project he described as “a teenage symphony to God,” which remained unfinished and unreleased until Wilson completed his own version in 2004.
“Pet Sounds,” though not immediately a commercial success, was recognized by other artists as a landmark achievement over time. It spurred bands to reach for something more in the music they made, with the Beatles famously urged on in part to make “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” in response to what they heard on “Pet Sounds.”
“Anyone who really knows me knows how heartbroken I am about Brian Wilson’s passing,” wrote musician Sean Ono Lennon, the son of Beatle John Lennon and Yoko Ono. “Not many people influenced me as much as he did. I feel very lucky that I was able to meet him and spend some time with him. He was always very kind and generous.
“He was our American Mozart,” Lennon continued. “A one of a kind genius from another world.”
Musician John Cale, whose work with the Velvet Underground aimed for a different but equally groundbreaking sound in the ’60s, also took to X to honor Wilson.
“To me, Brian Wilson was not merely about surf music, rather a true musical genius toiling away at melding POP into startling sophistication,” Cale wrote. “He will be missed mightily.”
The darker periods in Wilson’s personal life, including a long period in the ’80s where his then-psychologist Eugene Landy took near complete control of Wilson’s life, remained largely in the shadows from the late ’60s through the ’80s when Wilson finally regained his autonomy and tentatively stepped back into a public life
He would talk about those periods, but not without hesitation.
“I was anxious about it; yeah, I was at first,” Wilson said during the 2015 interview about “Love & Mercy” and opening his whole life to scrutiny on the screen. “Then I got over it real quick. And I’m sure happy as hell to be there seeing the movie unfold.”
As his words suggest, Wilson was ultimately a survivor, though not without lingering traumas. On stage, his musical chops remained pristine even if his voice showed the occasional cracks as he aged. The L.A. group the Wondermints, his live band from 1999 on, provided the empathetic and eclectic backing needed to conjure up the sounds Wilson heard in his mind and captured on tape decades earlier.
And while Wilson didn’t say much between songs, and what he did say was often endearingly awkward, his devoted fans typically cheered supportively for every word he offered.
Wilson met Melinda Ledbetter in 1986 when he walked into a Los Angeles Cadillac showroom where she was a salesperson. She is credited with helping get Wilson away from Landy’s around-the-clock micromanagement, though it took years and the couple stopped seeing each other at one point due to Landy’s interference.
They married in 1995, and when Ledbetter died in January 2024, Wilson was bereft.
“My heart is broken,” he wrote on Instagram. “Melinda, my beloved wife of 28 years, passed away this morning. Our five children and I are just in tears. We are lost.
“Melinda was more than my wife,” the post continued. “She was my savior. She gave me the emotional security I needed to have a career. She encouraged me to make the music that was closest to my heart. She was my anchor. She was everything for us.”
Ledbetter was also a prime reason that the movie “Love & Mercy” got made, working with screenwriter Oren Moverman to tell stories that Wilson lacked the facility to tell himself.
In our 2015 interview about the film, Wilson was accompanied by actor John Cusack, who played Wilson in scenes set in the ’80s and ’90s. [Paul Dano played Wilson in the ’60s, and Elizabeth Banks played Ledbetter.]
“It’s not too often you can try to feel and imagine yourself in the shoes of someone who’s created some of the stuff that Brian’s created, which has been some of the most healing, loving music that all of us have ever heard,” Cusack said at the time.
He gently supported Wilson in the interview as the conversation started to flag, asking him questions such as what it had been like to relive scenes with Landy, who was played in the film by Paul Giamatti.
“The doctor periods were rough because I was, like, not a sissy, but I was a scared little guy in those days, you know,” Wilson said in response to one of Cusack’s questions.
In the same way, Love lent a verbal hand when he and Wilson talked about the 50th anniversary tour a few years earlier. As he talked about a new song, “That’s Why God Made the Radio,” mentioning it sounded like a Beach Boys song from the ’60s, Wilson began to sing the title lyrics.
“That one?” he asked Love.
“Yeah, that one,” Love replied.
“That’s going to be really good.”
“It’s a beautiful song,” Love says.
Like most of the music Wilson helped create, it was.
In our interview about “Love & Mercy,” Wilson also talked about writing the song as the opening track off his self-titled 1988 album, a song and record created during that period before Wilson had found the stability and enjoyment in life he came to enjoy with Ledbetter.
“I was sitting at my piano, I had a half a bottle of champagne and I got kind of loose,” Wilson said. “I started playing and the song was written in 20 minutes. It just happened real quick.”
And the message in its words and music?
“It’s about the loneliness in life, people that feel lonely, and lonesome,” he said. “I try to bring that out with my voice, you know.”
It was a feeling with which he was intimately familiar, as the lyrics make clear in its verses: “I was lyin’ in my room and the news came on TV / A lotta people out there hurtin’ and it really scares me,” he sings at one point.
But the chorus – that offered a little bit of home: “Love and mercy, that’s what you need tonight / So love and mercy to you and your friends tonight / Love and mercy, that’s what you need tonight.”
So love and mercy to you, Brian Wilson, and all your family and friends and fans, tonight and always.
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