Leader of the Beach Boys who found fame with hymns to California beach culture and developed into a musician of outstanding range and imagination
Waves of two kinds characterised the career of Brian Wilson, who has died aged 82. The first, to be found breaking on the surfing beaches of Southern California, provided the inspiration for the songs – Surfin’ USA, Surfin’ Safari, Surfer Girl – with which he and his group, the Beach Boys, achieved their early fame, defining an American teenage subculture that became a universal dream. The second was the giant wave of affection that greeted him in every concert hall around the world during a late-career comeback, when grateful audiences left a damaged figure in no doubt of the lasting value of his life’s work.
If Aaron Copland, Charles Ives, George Gershwin and Duke Ellington were geniuses of American musical composition, then so was Wilson. Emerging from the garage of a family home in a humdrum Los Angeles suburb where he, his two brothers, a cousin and a friend formed the band that achieved worldwide hits with I Get Around, California Girls and Good Vibrations, he developed into a musician of outstanding range and imagination, particularly gifted in the adventurous manipulation of vocal harmonies but also capable of devising instrumental pieces that ventured into structural and textural territory far beyond the normal frontiers of pop music.
