Brian Wilson
Brian Douglas Wilson (born June 20, 1942) is an American musician, singer, songwriter, record producer, and mentally-unstable drug addict responsible for founding, leading, and wrecking the surf rock band The Beach Boys. As the main composer for the Beach Boys, he is responsible for many of the hit songs you hear on the radio which sound like the Bee Gees but American.
Early life[edit]
Wilson was born in Inglewood, California and moved with his family to Hawthorne Heights when he was two. At the age of four, Wilson lost his hearing in one ear when his father Murry smacked him hard in the ear. Dad was a manic depressive, and released an album called The Many Moods of Murry Wilson. This isn't a joke, you simply can't make this stuff up; in fact, it's actually quite sad if you think about it.
The Beach Boys[edit]
Early simplistic material[edit]
Brian's talent for songwriting expanded into complete mastery of chords which were common and harmonies that weren't complex. He wrote "Surfin'" but it didn't end there: He took the same horrible concept and chords and applied them to many, many songs. Realizing the material he was writing wasn't good, he became obsessed with the Ronettes song "Be My Baby", produced by wacko-haired producer/murderer Phil Spector, and proceeded to arrange every single one of his songs with those ripped chord structures, including his innovative "Heroes and Villains" (in which Brian Wilson cleverly uses this chord structure), his innovative "Wouldn't It Be Nice", a tag from "Good Vibrations", and the flagrant ripoff of the mentioned Ronettes song, retitled "Don't Worry Baby".
As a general rule which even Brian agrees with, don't listen to any material the Beach Boys wrote before 1964, or after 1973. And as another general rule, all Beach Boys material written between 1964 and 1973 sounds like "Be My Baby", so listen to that instead and save yourself a bunch of time.
Later complex material[edit]
Realizing that his material wasn't particularly good, Brian went to the studio and tried to rename his group "Brian Wilson and the Four Idiots", but this understandably didn't go over very well. Murry Wilson was so mad that he quit the group over the projected name change, and held his anger in very well by smacking Brian's ears instead of yelling at him. With Murry out of the way, Brian's father's voice threatening to kill him was replaced with a voice in his deaf ear threatening to kill him as the result of an acid trip.
Wilson would then go on to write some of his best music under this state of insanity, first with Pet Sounds in 1966, and reaching a climax with the smash hit Smile in 1967, which went all the way to No. 1 in the U.S. and to this day is the highest-selling album of the 1960s. Smile effectively destroyed the career of The Beatles as, upon hearing the album, John Lennon went nuts, Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band was shelved, and in its place laid the watered-down release of Sgt. Pepper's Smiley Super-Happy Lonely Hearts Club Band, which performed very poorly. Brian's songwriting career would progress until 1977, when he completed for an unreleased project called Adult/Child a song entitled "Hey Little Tomboy"; this song inspired Michael Jackson to write Thriller. After Adult/Child, Wilson went into therapy and let Mike Love ruin take over the band.
Later life[edit]
Wilson spent many years in bed, estranged from the rest of his group and being taken advantage of by his therapist Eugene Landy. Wondering what a demented man could work on, he finally finished work on Smile and released it as The Smile Sessions. He is also constantly in hot, dirty litigation with Mike Love, the man who claims to be the "real genius" behind the Beach Boys.