Lyin’ in bed, just like Brian Wilson did…

Brian Wilson died today, June 11, 2025. This was written two years ago.

I knew a little about Brian Wilson’s struggles, but I had never heard of his illness, called schizoaffective disorder, before the documentary Long Promised Road.

The Wilson brothers’ father contributed to his son’s emotional disorder, I am sure. He was abusive and a hearing loss in one of Brian’s ears has several explanations, but the most reasonable one, to me, is that his father hit him hard upside the head with the flat surface of an electric iron.

The blow to Brian’s ear was about the time the hallucinations began. Brian didn’t see things. He heard them. They were voices telling him terrible things about himself and suggesting that he do terrible things. I’ve heard those voices, all my life, but they were inside my head. Brian’s voices were out there in The World, and they were very real.

I did enough research to establish that the link between mental illness and creativity is nonsense. I still believe, though, that Wilson’s music is so beautiful because that was how he fought the voices. The only place, I think, where he could silence them was in the studio, recording music with his brothers and cousins and friends and with his wife and her sister.

I could not watch the rest of the PBS special because Brian is now so wooden. I lost my nerve. That was a bad decision on my part, but it was because The Brian Wilson that impacted my life made me all rubbery and jiggly and happy. You can’t NOT dance to, for example, “Help Me Rhonda” or “I Get Around.” I still remember, at Branch School, three lovely eighth-grade girls—Patsy Silva, Marilyn Machado, Carolyn Coehlo— (all of them from Azorean stock, by the way) dancing to Beach Boys 45’s in Mr. Lane’s room at lunchtime. I had crushes on all three, but I was just a punk kid.

That was a long time ago. As the documentary revealed, even if he’s seemingly diminished, Brian Wilson is very much alive.

And the fact that he’s even around—upright, breathing, performing, even though he’s tentative, afraid, monosyllabic—is a kind of miracle. I think the first three adjectives I just used are far more important than the last three. “God Only Knows” is the kind of music that vaporizes demons, both Brian’s and mine.

The “genius” stuff can take a back shelf. Wilson was not compared, in the documentary, to Mozart. The conductor of the Los Angeles Philharmonic chose Mahler and Schubert instead.

That’s labeling the man with not-very-faint praise. But what counts isn’t Brian Wilson’s genius. It’s his courage.

And those harmonies…

Brian could still Bring It many years later. With Al Jardine.

This song was just plain fun. From the TV show American Bandstand.

Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery: The Beatles answered “California Girls” with this song, a little more arch but just as fun. Paul McCartney in Red Square more than a few years ago.