The gimmick of the Beach Boys was to package the 1960s California dream in pop singles that wed up-tempo guitar songs with multipart harmonies. The reason the group endured was Brian Wilson, the group’s resident genius, who died at 82. Wilson wrote, arranged and produced most of its catalog. (He also sang and played bass.) As he exhausted the possibilities of the group’s original approach, his music grew more ambitious.
Although his sonic experiments frustrated some of the Beach Boys’ fans (and other members of the group), it also resulted in an uncommon body of work, documentation of Wilson’s lifelong quest for musical beauty and grace. Even when Wilson spent years caught in the riptide of drug abuse and his own psychological struggles, his music was his life preserver — it provided solace for both him and his listeners.
Hear 12 of his greatest tracks. (Listen on Spotify and Apple Music.)
Wilson borrowed the music of Chuck Berry’s “Sweet Little Sixteen” like it was a buddy’s T-Bird and took it for a joyride, with new lyrics about surfboard wax, huarache sandals and the ecstatic mood of a teenage crowd. What made the single irresistible: the Beach Boys’ five-part harmonies on the chorus, which felt like California sunshine to anyone within earshot of a transistor radio.
The Beach Boys, ‘In My Room’ (1963)
Becoming the Beach Boys’ full-time producer and creative force, Wilson wrote one paean after another to the pleasures of being a teenager in California, but his music was also suffused with melancholy: “In this world I lock out all my worries and my fears,” he sang of his own bedroom. He deployed his falsetto for the first time in these sessions, accentuating his emotional frailty.
As Wilson told the tale, the inspiration for “California Girls” came from his first acid trip: After spending some time marinating in self-doubt with a pillow over his head, he went to the piano and played “bum-buhdeeda” cowboy music for an hour. That loping rhythm became the bedrock of one of the Beach Boys’ defining hits. The lyrics, by Wilson and his bandmate Mike Love, elided the song’s psychedelic origin in favor of clean-cut California hedonism.
The Beach Boys, ‘Sloop John B’ (1966)
Wilson began the sessions for “Pet Sounds,” the Beach Boys’ crowning achievement, by covering a Bahamian folk song (and summer-camp anthem). Although the chorus complains “I want to go home,” the joy and brotherhood in the music belies that, especially on the a cappella break.
Wilson’s happiest songs were fantasies. He wrote about surfing although he didn’t surf; he wrote about the joy of being a teenager even though he spent his adolescence terrorized by his father; and “Wouldn’t It Be Nice,” his greatest song about marital bliss, was cast as a youthful reverie. He kept experimenting with new sounds and techniques; the distinctive rhythm track here was provided by two accordions.
The Beach Boys, ‘God Only Knows’ (1966)
“God Only Knows” was inspired by baroque music and featured the harpsichord and the oboe — plus sleigh bells. Carl Wilson (one of three Wilson brothers in the Beach Boys) sang it with all the contradictory longing demanded by a devotional love song that begins “I may not always love you.” In the mid-60s, the Beach Boys and the Beatles were engaged in a constant battle of one-upmanship, trying to expand the sonic and melodic possibilities of rock music. Paul McCartney had to concede defeat on “God Only Knows”: He called it the greatest song ever written.
This ambitious single marks the pinnacle of Wilson’s career as a producer: It was recorded in 17 sessions in four studios across six months, employing dozens of elite musicians from the Los Angeles “Wrecking Crew” coterie, in what was likely then the most expensive single ever recorded. Drawing inspiration from his fellow studio obsessive Phil Spector, Wilson overdubbed until the sound throbbed.
Wilson’s unfinished Beach Boys masterwork was “Smile,” a song cycle, written in collaboration with the lyricist Van Dyke Parks, that he worked on throughout 1966 and 1967. He lost his nerve and shelved it when other band members criticized it as uncommercial, although various pieces of it, like the Wild West tale “Heroes and Villains,” emerged on LPs like “Smiley Smile.” “Smile” gained a reputation as one of rock’s great lost records and became a cultish object of fascination: The plot of Lewis Shiner’s acclaimed 1993 novel “Glimpses” centered on a time traveler trying to convince Wilson to complete the album.
The Beach Boys, ‘Johnny Carson’ (1977)
Wilson praised the long-running talk-show host, rhyming “He sits behind his microphone” with “He speaks in such a manly tone.” The track was found on the album “The Beach Boys Love You,” which was essentially a Brian Wilson solo album; swinging away from his full-employment program for L.A.’s studio musicians, he put most of the tracks together himself with Moogs and other synthesizers (which mostly sounded like he left them on the presets). The resulting music was almost childlike in its sincerity, anticipating outsider artists like Daniel Johnston.
Wilson emerged from years of seclusion with his first official solo album. The leadoff track was an openhearted plea for greater understanding, inspired by the Burt Bacharach and Hal David song “What the World Needs Now Is Love” (first recorded by Jackie DeShannon). Wilson called it “probably the most spiritual song I’ve ever written.” While the Beach Boys hit No. 1 that year with the easy-listening “Kokomo” (a song Wilson wasn’t involved with), “Love and Mercy” failed to chart.
Brian Wilson, ‘Vega-Tables’ (2004)
Almost four decades after abandoning “Smile,” Wilson rerecorded the album, finishing it this time. The result was sometimes majestic and sometimes whimsical, like this tribute to his favorite food group. Wilson had said his goal with “Smile” was to write a “teenage symphony to God.” The completed work not only lived up it to its reputation, it sounded like a human soul being made whole.
The last track on the Beach Boys’ last studio album: the sound of the sun setting over the Pacific Coast Highway. Surrounded once again by the Beach Boys’ harmonies, Wilson returned to his earliest theme — life in the California sunshine — only here it was an elegy for his own youth. “I’m going to watch the waves,” he sang. “We laugh, we cry, we live then die.”
