God Only Knows What Brian Wilson Meant To Me
By
Leonard Zwelling
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/11/arts/music/brian-wilson-dead.html?searchResultPosition=1
Since his death last week, there has been a lot written about Brian Wilson’s contribution to popular music, his role leading The Beach Boys, and his troubled life of mental illness, addiction, and parental abuse. For details I refer you to The New York Times obituary above. I’m not going to write about any of that.
I was probably about 14 or 16 when I became a Beach Boys fan. The first album I owned was their In Concert LP, but I quickly acquired all the rest including LPs from an amazingly productive period for the group between 1964 and 1966 culminating with Pet Sounds (see second article above). Pet Sounds was wholly written, arranged, and produced by Brian Wilson. How those sessions transpired is captured well in the film Love and Mercy about Mr. Wilson’s creativity and mental instability. But always his focus is on the music. Ours ought to be as well.
I was extremely lucky to have seen Mr. Wilson in concert three times. Each time he played the entirety of one his records. First it was Smile, the record that got buried for forty years in late 1966 and was meant to follow Pet Sounds. Parts of it did, but the whole work was never heard until the 21st century. Second, was an album he released in 2008, That Lucky Old Sun. Third, we actually last saw him perform Pet Sounds in Houston. God Only Knows from Pet Sounds may be Mr. Wilson’s greatest song ever. During the Pet Sounds concert, the continuity of the music was broken as the audience rose as one for a standing ovation after this song was played. It is Paul McCartney’s favorite Brian Wilson song. It is a pop/rock masterpiece.
In these concerts, Brian sat at a keyboard and spoke just a little. His band was made up of world-class musicians including members of The Wondermints. That band had learned every nuance of every song in the Beach Boys’ catalogue. After Brian and his band ran through the albums, they sang another hour or so of Beach Boy hits.
These concerts were unique experiences as Brian was more the author of the music than the main performer. It would be like going to a performance of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony with Ludwig van conducting.
Why I am writing about Brian Wilson is that no musician captured my emotions better from the ages of 16 to 20 than he did with his joyful car and surf music when I was in high school to the angst-filled longing captured in Pet Sounds when I was a very lonely undergrad at Duke. Brian Wilson had somehow captured the inside of my head just as I was maturing. It was fortuitous, but I suspect there are many like me among the Baby Boomers who were touched by Brian’s music in the early parts of their lives and by his death last week.
If you want all the details of his life, read the obituary. If you want to know how Pet Sounds has become one of the greatest pop and rock albums ever recorded, read the second article and see Love and Mercy. But, if you really want to understand why Brian was considered a genius, just listen to his music. Any of it. Start with Pet Sounds. Go to All Summer Long and finally to Smile.
Brian Wilson was one of a kind. As I said, even Paul McCartney thinks God Only Knows is one of the greatest songs ever written. And he wrote Yesterday.
The Beach Boys and The Beatles were competing in 1966 and 1967. Rubber Soul begat Pet Sounds and Pet Sounds begat Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Boy, we could use a little more of that competition today. And if you think Beyonce vs. Taylor Swift compares. It just doesn’t.
The rivalry between the Beach Boys and The Beatles may never be experienced again. Of course, most of you never experienced it at all. But I did. It made all the difference in the world. The Beach Boys and The Beatles wrote the sound track to my life from 1964 to 1969. I will always be grateful for that.
