Brian Wilson, one of the founding members of the Beach Boys, has died at the age of 82.
“We are heartbroken to announce that our beloved father Brian Wilson has passed away,” a statement on Wilson’s Instagram reads. “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. Love & Mercy”
Wilson’s death comes about a year and a half after his wife, Melinda Ledbetter, died. Ledbetter was often credited with getting Wilson healthy after he was under the controversial “24-hour therapy” of psychologist Eugene Landy.
Wilson’s family didn’t specify how Wilson died. He had been diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder and mild bipolar disorder, and since 1965 had regularly experienced auditory hallucinations.
In 2024, a judge found that Wilson should be put in a conservatorship because of his “major neurocognitive disorder.”
The creative driving force behind the Beach Boys, Wilson wrote and co-wrote what would become some of the most memorable songs in U.S. history during his life. All told, Wilson had his hand in more than two dozen Top 40 hits over the course of his life, most of which came in the 1960s, including “Good Vibrations,” “Surfin’ U.S.A.,” “Fun, Fun, Fun,” “I Get Around” and “Barbara Ann.”
“I wanted to write joyful music that would make other people feel good,” Wilson said during The Beach Boys’ induction into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 1988. “That’s what I tried to do.”
But there is little question that Wilson’s enduring legacy will be 1966’s “Pet Sounds,” the album Rolling Stone once proclaimed to be the second best of all time. Wilson was inspired to write “Pet Sounds” after hearing The Beatles’ “Rubber Soul,” which opened his eyes to what a fully formed album could be. Wilson later said he told himself, “If I ever do anything in my life, I’m going to make that good an album.”
In Paul McCartney’s eyes, he did. The former Beatle has said that “Pet Sounds” has repeatedly brought him to tears throughout his life, and he counts one of the tracks on it, the simultaneously soothing and complex “God Only Knows,” as his favorite song of all time. “No one’s musical education is complete without hearing that album,” McCartney once said.
Just as “Rubber Soul” pushed Wilson to make “Pet Sounds,” “Pet Sounds” pushed the Beatles to make perhaps their most famous album: “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.”
“Without ‘Pet Sounds,’ ‘Sgt. Pepper’ never would have happened,” Beatles producer George Martin once said. “‘Pepper’ was an attempt to equal ‘Pet Sounds.’”
Wilson was born on June 20, 1942, in Inglewood, California, and raised in the nearby city of Hawthorne by his parents, Murry Wilson and Audree Neva. The oldest of three boys, all of whom would eventually join the Beach Boys, Brian was physically and emotionally abused by his father from a young age.
“I had a good childhood — except for my dad beating me up all the time,” he once said.
But Wilson and his two brothers, Dennis and Carl, nevertheless came to adopt their father’s love of music in spite of his abuse and Brian’s near-deafness in one ear. Together, they learned to harmonize in the living room and eventually formed a band called the Pendletones, which their label later renamed the Beach Boys, even though Brian didn’t know how to surf.
Thus began a prolific half-decade of Wilson’s writing career. Between 1962 and 1967, when Brian was in his early 20s, The Beach Boys released 13 albums in total and enjoyed massive success. But the lifestyle took its toll on Wilson, who suffered a nervous breakdown while touring in 1964 ― the same year he married his first wife, Marilyn Rovell ― and would go on to struggle with both drug and alcohol abuse and “schizoaffective disorder, which is … manic depressive with auditory hallucinations,” as his second wife, Ledbetter, later described it.
It was in this way that one of the Beach Boys’ albums, “Smile,” didn’t see the light of day for 37 years, leading to decades of whispers, wonder, theories and gossip. Asked in 2011 why “Smile” took so long to put out, Wilson replied in his usual laconic manner, “Because we were on drugs and we didn’t really know how to finish it.”
By the 1970s, Wilson’s life, let alone his career, was in shambles. His weight ballooned to more than 300 pounds as he struggled with addiction and became a recluse in his California home for several years. According to Biography.com, Wilson could sometimes be spotted at clubs in the city, not in his right mind and wearing only a bathrobe and slippers.
Soon after, Landy came into Wilson’s life, employing the controversial “24-hour therapy” regimen that got Wilson off drugs but made him utterly dependent on Landy, who came to dominate Wilson’s life both creatively and financially.
Eventually, Wilson’s family had to sue Landy in the early 1990s to obtain a restraining order against the psychologist, who subsequently handed over his license. (Wilson and Landy’s relationship is portrayed in the critically acclaimed 2015 film “Love & Mercy,” named after his 1988 solo song.)
In the 34 years since his legal separation from Landy, Wilson’s general condition improved. He married Ledbetter in 1995. He was father to seven children: Carnie and Wendy of Wilson Phillips fame from his first marriage, along with five children he adopted with Ledbetter.
Wilson released a series of solo albums over the years, and in 2004, he finally unveiled “Smile” to widespread critical acclaim. That year, while talking with Larry King, Wilson said, “I’ve got a happy life … I’m not as depressed as I was. I get depressed now and then, but not very much anymore.”
Despite suffering from lifelong stage fright, Wilson started to tour once again, his calming harmonies filling the air and soothing both the audience’s pain and his own.
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“All of us have the privilege of making music that helps and heals — to make music that makes people happier, stronger and kinder,” Wilson said at his 1988 Rock & Roll Hall of Fame speech.
He added, “Don’t forget: Music is God’s voice.”
