Brian Wilson: Not Made For These Times, Ahead of These Times
by John Diliberto 6/17/2025
A giant surfed his final wave last week. Brian Wilson of The Beach Boys left the planet on June 11 at the age of 82. It was a tough week of deaths. Electric Prunes singer James Lowe, Sly Stone and I just learned that Gambian kora master, Foday Musa Suso, plucked his final string on May 25. And now, Brian Wilson has surfed his last wave. 
Well actually, he never did surf in the ocean, but he did surf waves of sound. I hear Brian Wilson all over modern music. He’s in the vocal arrangements of Kate Bush and Tori Amos; an electronic artist recording as Tonight Sky created a dream pop album replete with Beach Boys harmonies. Kraftwerk took their influence for the track, “Autobahn. “ Everyone from The Ramones to Animal Collective took inspiration from them and The Beatles were chasing their sound for most of their existence
I grew up with the Beach Boys. All their surf and hotrod songs were on the radio when I was young and the first single I ever bought was The Beach Boys’ “Help Me Rhonda.” But then with the British Invasion, The Beatles and then psychedelic rock, The Beach Boys began to seem old-fashioned to me, especially since a lot of Wilson’s vocal harmony arrangements were often inspired by The Four Freshman, who were old-fashioned. That was until I bought a Best of the Beach Boys album in a cut-out bin in the early 1970s and was blown away anew.
While I think Pet Sounds is overrated; too many of those Four Freshman harmonies, I also think “Good Vibrations” is the greatest rock song written. It was art rock before the event because Brian Wilson was before the event. Take a look at the genre descriptions in Wikipedia for their 1967 album, Smiley Smile: Lo-fi, psychedelia, avant-garde, bedroom pop, minimal. You’d think it was released in 2017, not 1967, well, except for the psychedelic part. Wilson was an experimenter in the studio, using electronics and tape manipulation well before their time in pop music, taking Phil Spector’s “wall-of-sound” to new heights, creating songs that were multi-part works and not one riff and a hook pop tunes.
Brian Wilson was a troubled soul. He suffered from anxiety, scattered his mind to Syd Barrett dimensions on LSD and finally was battling dementia in the end, a crime for anyone, but more so for someone with such a creative mind. I am sure though, that Brian Wilson is now surfing the heavens.
I read his autobiography, Wouldn’t it be Nice, when it first came out. Shocking – he told of the abuse he suffered in the early days of the Beach Boys. I’m sure his creativity was driven by his sadness. The drug use was not a surprise…