Dream and nightmare of the 1960s: On the death of beach boy musician Brian Wilson

When Brian Wilson had his biography written a good ten years ago, “I am Brian Wilson”, he was only difficult to remember the actually greatest and most productive time in his musician life; At a time in the middle 1960s, when he was responsible for one of the most stunning, ingenious pop albums of all time, the beach-boy album “Pet Sounds”, published in 1966. And on the other hand, he had more and more struggling with psychological problems.

“How do you notice that things get out of hand? In 1964 it started on board a plane to Houston when I lost my nerves and decided not to be able to go on tour with the band?” He asked in the biography without being able to give a precise answer.

Early mental illness

And Wilson immediately let a few more, quite deep into his life, follow the questions: “It was already in the 1940s when I got a beating from my father because he didn’t like my way? In the 1970s it started with the drugs or long before, with the first signs of the mental illness, with which nobody knew.”

In fact, Brian Wilson no longer wanted to go on tour when publishing “Pet Sounds”, he had too much to fight with anxiety disorders and paranoid hallucinations as symptoms of a later diagnosed schizophrenia.

The album, which should make him famous forever, but which was equally a curse – such an early masterpiece that does not succeed in a life in a life – but this album does not hear the dark, problematic sides of the musician 24 years old at the time.

Bigger than the Beatles

It bubbles over in front of incorrect depths, with a bliss, with cheerfulness and harmony channels, and with its accessible hit compositions and the many sound research experiments, “Pet Sounds” revolutionized pop music even more than the Beatles-Alben “Rubber Soul” and “Revolver” published at the same time.

Wilson, who was born in Inglewood, California on time at the beginning of the summer, and died of dementia, as his family announced on Wednesday, had “Woodn`t It Be Nice”, “Sloop John B”, the stunning “God Only Knows” or the no less stunning “here. To name albums, deliberately processed to Lennon/McCartney.

It had become clear to him that it had escaped that the Beach Boys surf sound had gotten into a dead end. Especially since Wilson was no longer willing to vote on the stage of songs like “Surfin USA” or “California Girls”.

“Surfin USA”, “California Girls”

With his younger brothers Dennis and Carl and their cousin Mike Love and the school friend Al Jardine, Wilson founded Beach Boys in 1961 and, within five years of fabulous ten albums, of which seven officials, recorded with countless hitsingles.

However, he had the beating father at his side, as a manager, and so Wilson finally developed with “Pet Sounds” into a musician who preferred to sit in the studio than on the beach. He preferred to have the sand of the beaches brought home to his living room, into a sandpit around his piano. He looked at the golden sixties and the “Summer of Love” from a secure distance.

New attempt with “smile”

The fact that he had problems with his brothers and bandmates in this way and referred to himself, as well as with the record company. Wilson met this with even more intensive studio work and the producing of “Smile”, together with the similarly ingenious van Dyke Parks.

But “smile” never finished, not as Wilson had imagined. The album appeared under the title “Smiley Smile” in a minor variant, with two of the best beach boys songs Ever, “Heroes and Villains” and “Good Vibrations”. The “smile” sessions were broke for years, they were only released from 2004.

As Wilson said in his memories: “The part of me who dealt with music was much more mature than it corresponded to my age.” After all, he survived the seventies, the many drugs, the medication he had because of his psychoses, the many kilos he dragged around with him: his weight was up to 160 kilos.

In 1977 he finally played a beach-boy album again, and further comeback albums followed in the following decades, a first solo album in 1980, the “Imagination” published at the end of the nineties, and in 2008 he was also a concept album with “That Lucky Old Sun”. Only the magic of “Pet Sounds” and “Smile”, the good vibrations that Wilson should never get back to. Whether he did this without his mental illnesses without the California nightmare, which he felt the 1960s? God Only Knows.