Brian Wilson facts for kids
Quick facts for kids
Brian Wilson
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Wilson performing in New Orleans with the Beach Boys during their 2012 reunion tour
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| Background information | |
| Birth name | Brian Douglas Wilson |
| Born | June 20, 1942 Inglewood, California, U.S. |
| Origin | Hawthorne, California, U.S. |
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| Years active | 1961–present |
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Brian Douglas Wilson (born June 20, 1942) is an American musician, singer, songwriter, and record producer who co-founded the Beach Boys. Often called a genius for his novel approaches to pop composition, extraordinary musical aptitude, and mastery of recording techniques, he is widely acknowledged as one of the most innovative and significant songwriters of the 20th century. His best-known work is distinguished for its high production values, complex harmonies and orchestrations, layered vocals, and introspective or ingenuous themes. Wilson is also known for his formerly high-ranged singing and for his lifelong struggles with mental illness.
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Early life
Brian Douglas Wilson was born on June 20, 1942, at Centinela Hospital in Inglewood, California, the first child of Audree Neva (née Korthof) and Murry Wilson, a machinist and later a part-time songwriter. He has Dutch, Scottish, English, German, Irish, and Swedish ancestry. Brian's two younger brothers Dennis and Carl were born in 1944 and 1946, respectively. Shortly after Dennis' birth, the family moved from Inglewood to 3701 West 119th Street in nearby Hawthorne, California. He characterized his father as "violent" and "cruel", however, many of the stories which later circulated about his father's treatment were "dirty lies", and that "even the things that are true" had been misreported.
From an early age, Wilson demonstrated an extraordinary skill for learning by ear. Speaking of his unusual musical abilities prior to his first birthday, his father said that, as a baby, he could repeat the melody from "When the Caissons Go Rolling Along" after only a few verses had been sung by the father. The Wilsons' father encouraged his children in the music field in numerous ways. As a child, Wilson was given six weeks of lessons on a "toy accordion" and, at seven and eight, sang solos in church with a choir behind him. There, his choir director discovered that Wilson had perfect pitch. After the Wilson family purchased a piano for their home, Brian abandoned his accordion and devoted hours to learning his favorite songs on piano. Later, he learned to write manuscript music from a friend of his father's.
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Wilson sang with various students at school functions and with his family and friends at home, teaching his two brothers harmony parts that all three would then practice. He also played piano obsessively after school, deconstructing the harmonies of the Four Freshmen by listening to short segments of their songs on a phonograph, then working to recreate the blended sounds note by note on the keyboard. Moreover, he owned an educational record called The Instruments of the Orchestra and frequently listened to his favorite radio station at the time, KFWB. He was introduced to R&B by Carl and taught to play boogie woogie piano by their uncle Charlie. According to Brian, he and Carl often "stayed up all night" listening to Johnny Otis' KFOX radio show to discuss its R&B songs and add them "to our musical vocabulary". Carl said that, by the time Brian was ten, "he could play great boogie-woogie piano!"
One of Brian's first songwriting exercises, penned on a sheet of paper when he was nine, was a rewriting of the lyrics to Stephen Foster's "Oh! Susannah". In his 1991 memoir, he recalls writing his first song for a 4th grade school project concerning Paul Bunyan. In a 2005 interview, he said that he began composing original music in 1955, when he was 12.
Carl said, "There were many years of [Brian's] life where he did nothing but play the piano. Months at a time. Days on end. Four Freshmen records. Just all music." Dennis remembered, "Brian was the freak. He used to stay in his room all day listening to records rather than play baseball." Their mother recalled that Brian "constantly" listened to the radio in his room during his junior high school years. "Murry once [said] to me, 'Do you think we should worry about him?' I said, 'No. He's just loving the music.'"
Education
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In high school, Wilson was quarterback on his local football team at Hawthorne High. He also played baseball and was a cross-country runner in his senior year. Before his success in music, Wilson's only paid employment was a part-time job sweeping at a jewelry store for four months when he was 15. On weekends, he was also a cleaner for his father's machining company, ABLE. Around this time, Wilson auditioned to be the singer of the record to mark the launch of the Original Sound Record Company, "Chapel of Love" (unrelated to the 1964 song), but he was rejected for being too young. For his 16th birthday, he received a portable two-track Wollensak tape recorder, allowing him to experiment with recording songs, group vocals, and rudimentary production techniques. Biographer Peter Ames Carlin writes that the tapes suggest that "Brian liked nothing more than to gather his friends around the piano [...] Most often he'd harmonize with [...] friends from his senior class."
Written for his Senior Problems course in October 1959, Wilson submitted an essay, "My Philosophy", in which he stated that his ambitions were to "make a name for myself [...] in music." One of Wilson's earliest public performances was at a fall arts program at his high school. He enlisted his cousin and frequent singing partner Mike Love and, to entice Carl into the group, named the newly formed membership "Carl and the Passions." The performance featured tunes by Dion and the Belmonts and the Four Freshmen ("It's a Blue World"), the latter of which proved difficult for the ensemble. The event was notable for the impression which it made on another musician and classmate of Wilson's in the audience, Al Jardine.
Fred Morgan, Wilson's high school music teacher, remembered that Wilson, at 17, had demonstrated an above-average understanding of Bach and Beethoven. Nonetheless, he gave Wilson a final grade of C for his Piano and Harmony course due to incomplete assignments. For his final project, instead of composing a 120-measure piano sonata, Wilson submitted a 32-measure piece. Morgan gave the work an F. Reflecting on his last year of high school, Brian said that he was "very happy. I wouldn't say I was popular in school, but I was associated with popular people."
Wilson enrolled as a psychology major at El Camino Junior College in Los Angeles, in September 1960, while simultaneously continuing his musical studies at the community college as well. He was disappointed to find that his music teachers strongly disapproved of pop music, and he quit college after a year and half. By Wilson's account, he wrote his first all-original melody, loosely based on a Dion and the Belmonts version of "When You Wish Upon a Star", in 1961. The song was eventually known as "Surfer Girl". However, Wilson's closest high school friends disputed this, recalling that Wilson had written numerous songs prior to "Surfer Girl".
Music career
Wilson began his professional career as a member of the Beach Boys, serving as the band's songwriter, producer, co-lead vocalist, bassist, keyboardist, and de facto leader. After signing with Capitol Records in 1962, he became the first pop artist credited for writing, arranging, producing, and performing his own material. He also produced other acts, most notably the Honeys and American Spring. By the mid-1960s, he had written or co-written more than two dozen U.S. Top 40 hits, including the number-ones "Surf City" (1963), "I Get Around" (1964), "Help Me, Rhonda" (1965), and "Good Vibrations" (1966). He is considered among the first music producer auteurs and the first rock producers to apply the studio as an instrument.
In 1964, Wilson had a nervous breakdown and resigned from regular concert touring, which led to more refined work, such as the Beach Boys' Pet Sounds and his first credited solo release, "Caroline, No" (both 1966), as well as the unfinished album Smile. As he declined professionally and psychologically in the late 1960s, his contributions to the band diminished, and legends grew around his lifestyle of seclusion and overeating. His first comeback, divisive among fans, yielded the would-be solo effort The Beach Boys Love You (1977). In the 1980s, he formed a controversial creative and business partnership with his psychologist, Eugene Landy, and relaunched his solo career with the album Brian Wilson (1988). Wilson disassociated from Landy in 1991. Since 1999, he has toured regularly as a solo artist.
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Heralding popular music's recognition as an art form, Wilson's accomplishments as a producer helped initiate an era of unprecedented creative autonomy for label-signed acts. The youth zeitgeist of the 1960s is commonly associated with his early songs, and he is regarded as an important figure to many music genres and movements, including the California sound, art pop, psychedelia, chamber pop, progressive music, punk, outsider, and sunshine pop. Since the 1980s, his influence has extended to styles such as post-punk, indie rock, emo, dream pop, Shibuya-kei, and chillwave. Wilson's accolades include numerous industry awards, inductions into multiple music halls of fame, and entries on several "greatest of all time" critics' rankings. His life was dramatized in the 2014 biopic Love & Mercy.
In a 2016 Rolling Stone interview, Wilson responded to a question about retiring: "Retirement? Oh, man. No retiring. If I retired I wouldn't know what to do with my time. What would I do? Sit there and go, 'Oh, I don't want to be 74'? I'd rather get on the road and do concerts and take airplane flights." Similarly, in 2017, Wilson told Rolling Stone that he had not written a song since 2012, but still had no intentions of retiring from the road. In 2019, Wilson embarked on a co-headlining tour with the Zombies, performing selections from Friends and Surf's Up.
Around this time, Wilson had two back surgeries that left him unable to get around without a walker. Wilson was still performing concerts shows at the time the COVID-19 pandemic emerged in early 2020. He resumed his concert touring in August 2021. Two releases followed in November. The first, At My Piano, was issued by Decca and consists of new instrumental rerecordings of Wilson's songs played by himself on piano. The second was the soundtrack to Long Promised Road, which includes new and previously unreleased recordings by Wilson.
Artistry
Influences
Early influences
Chord-wise, Wilson's main music influences come from rock and roll, doo-wop, and vocal-based jazz. At about age two, he heard Glenn Miller's 1943 rendition of Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue, which had a profound emotional impact on him. Wilson said, "It sort of became a general life theme [for me]." As a child, his favorite artists included Roy Rogers, Carl Perkins, Bill Haley, Elvis Presley, Henry Mancini, and Rosemary Clooney. Asked for the first music that he had felt compelled to learn and sing repeatedly, Wilson answered with Haley's 1954 recording of "Rock Around the Clock". Most of Wilson's education in music composition and jazz harmony came from deconstructing the harmonies of his favorite vocal group, the Four Freshmen, whose repertoire included songs by Gershwin, Jerome Kern, and Cole Porter.
Wilson credited his mother with introducing him to the Four Freshmen, and he attributed his love for harmonies and the human voice to the group, whom he considered had a "groovy sectional sound". Their 1956 album Freshmen Favorites was the first pop album that Wilson listened to in its entirety and he cited Voices in Love (1958) as "probably the greatest single vocal album I've ever heard". He referred to their arranger, Dick Reynolds, as "just about a God to me" and later employed his services for the Beach Boys' Christmas album and Adult/Child. It is likely that Wilson learned virtually the entirety of the Four Freshmen's recorded repertoire up through 1961, after which his obsession with the group was reduced.
Inquired for his music tastes in 1961, Wilson replied, "top 10", referring to essentially any of the top hits of the era. Particular favorites included many songs by Chuck Berry, the Coasters, and the Everly Brothers. Later in his career, Wilson recorded renditions of certain favorites, including the Everly Brothers' "Devoted to You" (1958), the Robins' "Smokey Joe's Cafe" (1955), the Olympics' "Hully Gully" (1960), the Shirelles' "Mama Said" (1961), and the Regents' "Barbara Ann" (1961).
He disliked surf music when the Beach Boys began forming; in the estimation of biographer Timothy White, Wilson instead aspired for a "new plateau midway between Gershwin and the best Four Freshmen material". Gershwin's influence became more apparent in Wilson's music later in his career, particularly after the 1970s, when he dedicated himself to learning the violin parts from Rhapsody in Blue for the first time. In 1994, Wilson recorded a choral version of Rhapsody in Blue with Van Dyke Parks.
Singing
Through listening to Four Freshmen records, Wilson developed a distinctive singing style—a versatile head voice that allowed him to sing high without engaging in falsetto, although he did also sing in falsetto on some Beach Boys songs. Wilson recalled that he "learned how to sing falsetto" through listening to the Four Freshmen's renditions of songs like "I'm Always Chasing Rainbows", "I'll Remember April", and "Day by Day". Another strong influence was Rosemary Clooney, whom he said "taught me to sing with love in my heart [...] I would sing along with [her recording of "Hey There"], studying her phrasing, and that's how I learned to sing with feeling." In 1966, he said that the highest note he could sing was D5.
Wilson typically sang in a pure tenor voice until later in his adult life, when he began invoking his tenor only on rare occasions. He was sometimes embarrassed by his singing, as he was worried of being perceived as a homosexual, and would avoid performing in a high voice for this reason. After the early 1970s, Wilson's voice degraded due to his excessive consumption of cigarettes. 15 Big Ones marked the introduction of what biographer Peter Ames Carlin terms Wilson's "baritone croak". In a 1999 interview, Wilson remarked, "You know Bob Dylan? Well, live, you know, he sort of has this harsh, raspy voice. That's what I have. I'm like the Bob Dylan of the '90s."
Songwriting
Musical structures
Explaining his writing process in 1966, Wilson stated that he started with finding a basic chord pattern and rhythm that he described as "feels", or "brief note sequences, fragments of ideas", and "once they're out of my head and into the open air, I can see them and touch them firmly. They're not 'feels' anymore." He wrote that he aspired to write songs that appear "simple, no matter how complex it really is." In a 2009 interview, he stated that his favorite chord is E major seventh, while his favorite key signatures to play in are B, C♯, E, and E♭.
Wilson also composed his own arrangements – an unusual practice among rock groups of the 1960s.
Production style
Wilson's best-known productions typically employed instruments such as saxophones and bass harmonicas. He usually instructed Blaine to play only the snare and floor-tom afterbeats used on Spector's records. Owing further to Spector's influence, Wilson rarely used ride or crash cymbals in his work and often combined color tones (such as a banjo doubled with a harpsichord) to produce novel sounds. Among other practices that Wilson copied directly from Spector was recording two echo chambers simultaneously, as well as having standup bass and Fender bass play identical parts. His bass parts were usually played with a hard plectrum, giving the instrument a more percussive sound, a practice he had drawn from Motown.
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String ensembles were rarely used in Wilson's productions prior to Pet Sounds, and he did not usually record strings as part of the basic track, instead preferring to overdub them afterward. Once the instrumental track was completed, vocals would then be overdubbed. Beginning with the 1963 song "Surfin' U.S.A.", Wilson double-tracked the vocals, resulting in a deeper and more resonant sound. According to Wilson, after his first nervous breakdown in 1964, he endeavored to "take the things I learned from Phil Spector and use more instruments whenever I could."
Starting in 1964, Wilson performed tape splices on his recordings, usually to allow difficult vocal sections to be performed by the group. By 1965, he had become more adventurous in his use of tape splicing, such as on the song "And Your Dream Comes True", which was recorded in sections and then edited together to create the final song. These experiments culminated with the similar, but more complex editing processes adopted for "Good Vibrations" and Smile. Mark Linett, who has engineered Wilson's recordings since the 1980s, stated, "He certainly wasn't the first person to do edits, but it was unusual to record a song in four or five sections, and then cut it together."
In Priore's assessment, Wilson reconfigured Spector's Wall of Sound techniques in the pursuit of "audio clarity" and "a more lush, comfortable feel". The 2003 book Temples of Sound states that Wilson distinguished himself from Spector through the usage of certain instruments, such as banjo, and that Spector's productions "do not possess the clean muscle of Brian's work." Danny Hutton, who attended many of Wilson's recording sessions, felt that Wilson's engineering talents had been underrated by the public. Hutton noted, "Somebody could go in right after Brian's session and try to record, and they could never get the sound he got. There was a lot of subtle stuff he did. [...] He was just hands-on. He would change the reverb and the echo, and all of a sudden, something just – whoa! – got twice as big and fat."
Personal life
Deafness in right ear
At age 11, during a Christmas choir recital, Wilson was discovered to have significantly diminished hearing in his right ear. A family doctor soon diagnosed the issue as a nerve impingement. The cause is unclear; theories range from it being a birth defect to him being struck by either his father or a neighborhood boy.
It is unlikely for Wilson to have been born partially deaf since such congenital defects usually appear at an earlier age. Brian's father Murry offered, "He was injured in some football game or some injury of some kind. Or it just happened, who knows?" According to Brian's mother Audree, "Brian thinks it happened when he was around ten. Some kid down the street really whacked him in the ear." On another occasion, Audree said that the deafness was caused by Murry hitting Brian with an iron while Brian was asleep.
One account from Wilson suggested that the deafness was caused by his father slapping his ear shortly before his third birthday. Timothy White states that Brian rarely discussed the issue with Murry after the father had "reacted so menacingly the one time Brian had brought up the subject". Brian said of his father in a 2000 interview, "I was born deaf [...] He hit me with a 2×4, but I was already deaf by that time." In his 2016 memoir, the blame is given to a neighborhood boy.
Due to this infirmity, Wilson developed a habit of speaking from the side of his mouth, giving the false impression that he had had a stroke. He also had ringing in the ear that worsens when he is tired or subjected to loud noise. In the late 1960s, he underwent corrective surgery that was unsuccessful in restoring his hearing.
Relationships and children
Wilson's first serious relationship was with Judy Bowles, a girl he had met at a baseball game in mid-1961. She inspired his songs "Judy" (1962), "Surfer Girl" (1963), and "The Warmth of the Sun" (1964). During their relationship, Wilson gradually became more romantically involved with Marilyn Rovell, a high school student he had met in August 1962.
Wilson and Marilyn were married in December 1964. Together, they had two daughters, Carnie and Wendy (born 1968 and 1969, respectively), who later had musical success of their own as two-thirds of the group Wilson Phillips. Wilson believed that he "wasn't a good husband", nor "much of a father".
In July 1978, Wilson and Marilyn separated, with Wilson filing for divorce in January 1979. Marilyn was given custody of their children. He subsequently maintained a relationship with Debbie Keil, a Beach Boys fan and the band's fan mail sorter, until 1981. Following this, Wilson entered a relationship with one of his nurses, a black woman named Carolyn Williams he had met in 1979, which lasted until January 1983.
Wilson initially dated former model and car saleswoman Melinda Kae Ledbetter from 1986 to late 1989. He and Ledbetter reconnected and were married on February 6, 1995. Since 1999, Ledbetter has been Wilson's manager, a job which she has said is "basically negotiating, and that's what I did every single day when I sold cars." They adopted five children: Daria Rose (born 1996), Delanie Rae (born 1998), Dylan (born 2004), Dash (born 2009) and Dakota Rose (born 2010). By 2012, Wilson had six grandchildren.
Cultural impact and influence
Wilson is widely regarded as one of the most innovative and significant songwriters of the late 20th century.
The level of creative control that Wilson asserted over his own record output was unprecedented in the music industry, leading him to become the first pop artist credited for writing, arranging, producing, and performing his own material. Although there had been numerous examples of artists who were essentially "self-produced", Wilson distinguished himself for having directed every phase of an album's production.
In addition to being one of the first music producer auteurs, Wilson helped popularize the idea of the recording studio as a compositional tool, and he was the first rock producer to use the studio in this fashion.
His accomplishments as a producer effectively set a precedent that allowed subsequent bands and artists to enter a recording studio and act as producers, either autonomously, or in conjunction with other like minds, and music producers afterward drew on his influence.
Further to his invention of new musical textures and his novel applications of quasi-symphonic orchestras, Wilson helped propel the mid-1960s art pop movement, and, with Pet Sounds, was immediately heralded as art rock's leading figure.
Wilson's work with the Beach Boys, especially on Pet Sounds, "Good Vibrations" and Smile, marked the beginnings of progressive pop. Writing in 1978, David Leaf identified Wilson's 1960s productions as a chief influence on bands such as Queen, Electric Light Orchestra (ELO), 10cc, and Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, among others.
Wilson has also been declared the "godfather" of punk, indie rock, and emo. Principally through his early records, Wilson, alongside his collaborator Mike Love, was a key influence on the development of punk rock and the movement's evolution into indie rock.
Later in the 20th century, Wilson became known as the "godfather" to an era of independently produced music that was heavily indebted to his melodic sensibilities, chamber pop orchestrations, and recording experiments.
Many of the most popular acts of the 1980s and 1990s recorded songs that celebrated or referenced Wilson's music, including R.E.M., Bruce Springsteen, Barenaked Ladies, the Jayhawks, and Wilco.
Wilson's influence continues to be attributed to modern dream pop acts such as Au Revoir Simone, Wild Nothing, Alvvays, and Lana del Ray. In 2022, She & Him, accompanied by the release of Melt Away: A Tribute to Brian Wilson, embarked on a concert tour dedicated to renditions of Wilson's songs.
Accolades
Awards and honors
- Nine-time Grammy Award nominee, two-time winner.
- 2005: Best Rock Instrumental Performance for "Mrs. O'Leary's Cow".
- 2013: Best Historical Album for The Smile Sessions.
- 1988: Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as a member of the Beach Boys.
- 2000: Songwriters Hall of Fame, inducted by Paul McCartney, who referred to him as "one of the great American geniuses".
- 2006: UK Music Hall of Fame, inducted by Pink Floyd guitarist David Gilmour.
- 2003: Ivor Novello International Award for his contributions to popular music.
- 2003: Honorary doctorate of music from Northeastern University in Boston, Massachusetts.
- 2004: BMI Icon at the 52nd annual BMI Pop Awards, being saluted for his "unique and indelible influence on generations of music makers."
- 2005: MusiCares Person of the Year, for his artistic and philanthropic accomplishments
- 2007: Hollywood Bowl Hall of Fame
- 2007: Kennedy Center Honors committee recognized Wilson for a lifetime of contributions to American culture through the performing arts in music.
- 2008: Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement.
- 2011: UCLA George and Ira Gershwin Award at UCLA Spring Sing.
- 2016: Golden Globe nomination for "One Kind of Love" from Love & Mercy.
Polls and critics' rankings
As of 2021[update], the website Acclaimed Music lists eight of Wilson's co-written songs within the thousand highest rated songs of all time: "Surfin' U.S.A." from 1963; "Don't Worry Baby" and "I Get Around" from 1964, "California Girls" from 1965; "Wouldn't It Be Nice", "God Only Knows", and "Good Vibrations" from 1966; and "Surf's Up" from 1971.
- In 1966, Wilson was ranked number four in NME's "World Music Personality" reader's poll—about 1,000 votes ahead of Bob Dylan and 500 behind John Lennon.
- In 2008, Wilson was ranked number 52 in Rolling Stone's list of the "100 Greatest Singers of All Time". He was described in his entry as "the ultimate singer's songwriter" of the mid-1960s.
- In 2012, Wilson was ranked number eight in NME's list of the "50 Greatest Producers Ever", elaborating "few consider quite how groundbreaking Brian Wilson's studio techniques were in the mid-60s".
- In 2015, Wilson was ranked number 12 in Rolling Stone's list of the "100 Greatest Songwriters of All Time".
- In 2020, Brian Wilson Presents Smile was ranked number 399 in Rolling Stone's list of "The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time".
- In 2022, Wilson was ranked second in Ultimate Classic Rock's list of the best producers in rock history.
Discography
- Brian Wilson (1988)
- Sweet Insanity (1990) (unofficial)
- I Just Wasn't Made for These Times (1995) (soundtrack)
- Orange Crate Art (1995) (with Van Dyke Parks)
- Imagination (1998)
- Gettin' In over My Head (2004)
- Brian Wilson Presents Smile (2004)
- What I Really Want for Christmas (2005)
- That Lucky Old Sun (2008)
- Brian Wilson Reimagines Gershwin (2010)
- In the Key of Disney (2011)
- No Pier Pressure (2015)
- At My Piano (2021)
- Brian Wilson: Long Promised Road (2021) (soundtrack)
See also
- Pet Projects: The Brian Wilson Productions
- Playback: The Brian Wilson Anthology
- List of people with absolute pitch
- List of people with bipolar disorder
- List of recluses
- List of unreleased songs recorded by the Beach Boys
Images for kids
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Wilson said of Phil Spector, "I really respect him as a producer – so I just copied him."
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A visual representation of the functionally ambiguous harmonic structure of "God Only Knows".
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Wilson performing "Good Vibrations" in Washington D.C. in 2017
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Exterior of Western Studio in Hollywood, Wilson's preferred recording facility in the mid-1960s.
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Wilson at a Beach Boys photoshoot, 1964
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A view of Los Angeles as seen from Beverly Hills, where Wilson took residence in October 1965.
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Wilson in October 1966
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set up a home studio.
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Wilson produced recordings for the band Redwood, later known as Three Dog Night (pictured 1969).
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At his wife's behest, Wilson worked on adult contemporary music projects with former wrestler Joe Thomas (pictured 2017)
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Brian Wilson Presents Smile at the Royal Festival Hall in London on February 21, 2004
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Wilson performing with the Beach Boys during their brief 2012 reunion
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