About 15 minutes into the first conversation we ever had, back in 1987, Brian Wilson looked down, tugged at this shirt and whipped it off. “There,” he said with a laugh. “Now I look like a real Beach Boy.”
This came as Wilson, who died this week at the age of 82, was struggling to articulate his feelings about the Brian Wilson legend, which said that the Southern California singer-songwriter was a genius but also a lunatic with a tenuous grasp on reality. “The ‘lunatic’ part I don’t agree with,” he told me, haltingly. “I don’t think I’m a lunatic, you know. The part that I agree with is the…”
He paused and frowned. “What was the other word?”
Genius.
“Genius, yeah! I feel that I’m a genius. I’m a genius at music. Any idiot would know that I have genius for music by listening to my albums. The point is that if you can’t believe in yourself that way, then you just ain’t gonna believe it. I just have a belief, you know?”
And that’s when he took his shirt off, doing the next stretch of our interview clad only in chinos and sandals.
That was all part of the Brian Wilson experience. He was troubled and fragile and undeniably brilliant, tormented by mental illness and at times incapacitated by drug use, but driven to make music of surpassing beauty, complexity and depth. The 2021 Wilson documentary “Long Promised Road” captured the contradictions with its mixture of tentative conversations with Wilson and riveting breakdowns of his songs as they were assembled layer by layer.
“I’ve been making records for 40 years,” veteran producer Don Was says in the doc as he listens to the way “God Only Knows” was constructed, “and I don’t know how you do that.”
Nobody really did, though Wilson would probably point to another tortured genius, Phil Spector, as a music-maker who might be able to figure it out. For a while in the mid-1960s, though, the music Wilson was making with the Beach Boys was the only legitimate challenge to the supremacy of the Beatles, something acknowledged by both sides. Wilson said he listened to the Beatles’ “Rubber Soul” and immediately got competitive and started to write the Beach Boys’ classic “Pet Sounds” album … which Paul McCartney said spurred him to make “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” … which in turn prompted Wilson to begin work on what was envisioned as his magnum opus, “Smile.”
That album was never finished and Wilson destroyed some of the master tapes, though it came out in a different form decades later. But even if it had come out, he admitted to me in 1987, it would not have been the Beatles-beating triumph he’d set out to create. “It wouldn’t have come close,” he said. “‘Sgt. Pepper’ would have kicked our ass.”
Instead, the failure of “Smile” led to a long, dark period for Wilson, one from which he only really emerged in the 1980s. That was when I first met him to do an interview for the 20th anniversary issue of Rolling Stone magazine. At the time, Wilson was living in a Malibu beach house on the bluffs overlooking the beach, and he was under the care of the controversial psychologist Eugene Landy.
At first, we sat in a tiny room at the bottom of a flight of stairs, with one of Landy’s aides sitting on the steps and listening in from a discrete distance. Wilson was uneasy, immediately announcing, “This is hard for me sometimes, because there’s this myth that people have about me. I mean, every interviewer for the last few years has asked me questions like ‘Is it true you had a sandbox in your living room?’ To some extent I feel like the legend it out there, not me.”
And Wilson wasn’t terribly interested in analyzing that legend; his answers were mostly short and not very revealing. After about 45 minutes that didn’t produce much and left Brian visibly tired, we decided to take a break before continuing what was supposed to be a two-hour conversation. Wilson put his shirt back on during the break, and when we returned to our little room, he nodded at the upright piano sitting against the wall.
“I’ve written some new songs,” he said. “Do you want to hear them?”
Of course I did, so he sat down at the piano and played “Love and Mercy,” a soaring song that would become a highlight of his first solo album in 1988 (and would provide the title for a 2014 film about Wilson). The song is a plea for understanding that can stand alongside similarly personal ones like “In My Room” and “I Just Wasn’t Made for These Times,” and playing it and a couple of others seemed to settle its composer. When the interview resumed, he was more focused, more talkative and more insightful about his life and work.
He talked about his triumphs (“I was young and energetic, and I could get a record cut and done in three f—ing hours”), his failures (“I was taking a lot of drugs, fooling around with a lot of pills, and it really did a number on my head”) and what drove him (“My dad used to beat me up a lot, so it increased my desire to want to be loved”). And until his energy began to flag, it was a stark reminder that the glorious music he’d made didn’t just have the power to inspire other people; it could also do that for its creator.
The next three and a half decades weren’t exactly a happy ending: Wilson had plenty of triumphant moments, but the demons never left and not all of the damage healed. The last time I spoke to him was in 2021, when he’d written a new song for “Long Promised Road” and was doing a little bit of press. At the time, he was really in no shape to be doing interviews; director Brent Wilson (no relation) tried to bring him into the conversation, but Brian mostly just sat at the piano in a second-floor room of his shiny hillside house overlooking the San Fernando Valley, offering one-word answers and shouting for an assistant who had the day off.
Three years later, after the death of his wife Melinda, court papers would be filed describing Wilson as suffering from a “major neurocognitive disorder (such as dementia).”
I left the room that day feeling a little frustrated but mostly sad. And I couldn’t help but think that maybe if he’d raised his hands to the keyboard in front of him, he could have found a little more inspiration and strength in the music he’d been making since he was a teenager.
But now that music remains. And if it can no longer bring a little love and mercy to the man who wrote it, it can certainly keep doing that for the rest of us.
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