By Stuart Mitchner
Writing about Brian Wilson (1942-2025) on Father’s Day is a complicated proposition. In Catch A Wave: The Rise, Fall & Redemption of the Beach Boys’ Brian Wilson (Rodale 2006), Peter Ames Carlin ponders the possibility that Brian blames his father Murry Wilson (1917-1973) for delivering the blow “that destroyed almost all of the hearing in his right ear.” The tangled back story of the “crushing blow” to a musician “who would spend his life manipulating sound textures but could never hear music in stereo” takes a more suggestive turn when Brian admits “I was so afraid of my dad and the way he talked to me that something got inside of me and I just started making great records.”
Still leaving a lot unsaid, Wilson offers a cautiously worded account of his father’s treatment of him and his Beach Boy brothers Dennis and Carl in a 2004 interview: “He was the one who got us going. He didn’t make us better artists or musicians, but he gave us ambition. I’m pleased he pushed us, because it was such a relief to know there was someone as strong as my dad to keep things going. He used to spank us, and it hurt too, but I loved him because he was a great musician.”
In His Own Words
Wilson speaks as a father himself in I Am Brian Wilson (DaCapo 2016), a memoir, with Ben Greenman. While watching his daughter Carnie sing, he says, “I was thinking about when she was little; about her sister when she was little; about how I was young then, too; about the cover of Sunflower; about feeling my mom’s hands as she lowered me into the crib. People are beautiful. Life can be, too.”
Brian’s thoughts about people and life express a personal truth nicely articulated by the Velvet Underground’s John Cale: “What Brian came to mean was an ideal of innocence and naivety that went beyond teenage life,” resulting in “fully developed songs, adult and childlike at the same time. There was something genuine in every lyric.”
Sunflower Lullaby
The 1970 album Sunflower with its cover photograph of the band and their children is the Beach Boys recording I’ve always felt closest to. Our only child was born six years later, and for the first thousand nights of his life, I’d stand in front of the record player as he drowsed in my arms to music that felt like family, as if Brian Wilson and his brothers were his California uncles singing lullabies (not all that great a stretch, since his father and I were born in the same town, Hutchinson, Kansas). The songs that guided our son to dreamland almost 50 years ago — “This Whole World,” “Add Some Music to Your Day,” “All I Wanna Do,” “Our Sweet Love,” “Forever” — still console and inspire him during dark times.
Breaking the News
When Brian Wilson died last week, I hesitated to break the news to Ben, who has grown up idolizing Brian above all the many musicians who have brightened his difficult life. There was no way to soften the blow when John Lennon was murdered. With Brian, I had the option of waiting until he found out for himself, as I’d done with Ben’s other rock heroes. Now here we were in his room at two in the morning surrounded by shelves of albums and CDs, six guitars, a keyboard, four amps, and a dozen effect pedals. He was playing a record of his choosing for me, a nightly ritual, much as I’d done for him during those first thousand nights. I decided to approach the moment by asking him to play “This Whole World” from Sunflower. Since he was, as is often the case, not in the mood for anything so transcendently joyous, I had no choice but to break the news, my rationale being who better to tell him than the person who had brought Brian’s music into his life?
Brian and Paul
While reading the worldwide tributes to Brian, I learned that his musical soulmate Paul McCartney was born two days ahead of him, on June 18, 1942, a fact that follows the sequence of my own listening history between February and May of 1964. Living in New York at a time when the only records I owned were either jazz or classical, I abandoned my portable stereo for the infectious sounds coming from the little blue Sony I kept on a windowsill overlooking West 87th Street. With Beatle-blitzed Manhattan still reeling, I had no choice, not with a city slicker DJ named Murray the K constantly playing their music and chatting with four Brits who sounded like ones I’d hung out with the previous spring in Greece.
That sudden change in listening habits at least made some kind of sense. But the Beach Boys? I’d always thought of those California High School Harrys as a joke — until after multiple hearings of “I Get Around,” I found myself singing along, not the wretched “real cool head making real good bread” verses but the soaring chorus, sharing harmony heaven with someone who turned out to be Brian Wilson. Coming back to U.S. Top 40 radio a few years later I found that the Beach Boys had gone from “I Get Around” to “God Only Knows.”
Troubled Genius
I didn’t buy my first Beach Boys album, Smiley Smile, until September 1967, motivated by the Brian-Wilson-Troubled-Genius narrative being perpetuated by the rock press, the album having reportedly been cobbled together using surviving fragments from the doomed recording session for Smile, which was said to have precipitated Wilson’s breakdown. Overshadowed by the media hype about what was to have been the Beach Boys’ answer to the Beatles’ recently released Sgt. Pepper, Smiley Smile was mostly ignored or derided and sold poorly in the U.S. in spite of being a playful, quirky, intimate, comfortably listenable piece of work, with a storybook mood set by the cover image of a cottage buried in a Douanier-Rousseau-style jungle, smoke from its chimney spelling out the title, a preview of the cozy, homey spontaneity of the music within.
Born in Hawthorne
The fact that Brian Wilson was born in a Los Angeles suburb called Hawthorne didn’t get my attention until I began overthinking the legend of the fearful, abusive father beating a son destined to produce works of musical genius. What gives the story a Hawthornian twist is Brian’s reference to “the way he talked to me,” so powerfully that “something got inside of me.” This was where my thoughts were headed when I found out Hawthorne had indeed been named for the author of The Scarlet Letter and the creator of Roger Chillingworth, who had a way of getting inside of people like Hester Prynne, the Rev. Arthur Dimmesdale, and their daughter Pearl.
The origin of the town’s name is worth mentioning. It was founded in 1905 by two real-estate developers, one of whom had a daughter who shared her birthday, July 4, with Nathaniel Hawthorne. The town was originally known as the “Hawthorne Improvement Company,” a concept that would have amused the author of The House of the Seven Gables, as would the daughter’s name, Laurine Woolwine. I can imagine her in the opening sentence of “The Artist of the Beautiful” — “An elderly man, with his pretty daughter on his arm, was passing along the street, and emerged from the gloom of the cloudy evening into the light that fell across the pavement from the window of a small shop.”
“God Only Knows”
I like to think that Hawthorne would be responsive to the quality of enchantment in Brian Wilson’s music for “God Only Knows,” which transcends the musicological rhetoric of “highly chromatic” progression and “strong tonic change” upon the “resolution of the chord preceding the refrain.” Last night one listen on YouTube set the melodic line going in my mind, to be hummed, whistled, and mused on, but with a haunting insistence that led to the thought that Hawthorne might have written a tale about a melody of such subtly insistent beauty that it could tempt one into a state of blissful madness. Or save one’s soul.