Brian Wilson, Beach Boys’ Leader, Dies

Brian Wilson, who as the leader and chief songwriter of the Beach Boys became rock’s poet laureate of surf-and-sun innocence, but also an embodiment of damaged genius through his struggles with mental illness and drugs, has died. He was 82.

His family announced the death but did not say where or when he died, or state a cause. In 2024, after the death of his wife, Melinda Wilson, business representatives for Brian Wilson were granted a conservatorship by a California state judge, after they asserted that he had “a major neurocognitive disorder” and had been diagnosed with dementia.

On mid-1960s hits like “Surfin’ U.S.A.,” “California Girls” and “Fun, Fun, Fun,” the Beach Boys created a musical counterpart to the myth of Southern California as paradise.

That vision, manifested in Wilson’s crystalline vocal arrangements, helped make the Beach Boys the defining American band of the era. During its clean-cut heyday of 1962 to 1966, the group landed 13 singles in the Billboard Top 10. Three of them went to No. 1: “I Get Around,” “Help Me, Rhonda” and “Good Vibrations.”

At the same time, Wilson — who didn’t surf — became one of pop’s most gifted and idiosyncratic studio auteurs.

“That ear,” Bob Dylan once remarked. “I mean, Jesus, he’s got to will that to the Smithsonian.”

Wilson’s masterpiece was the 1966 album “Pet Sounds.” The album was a commercial disappointment upon its release, but the technical sophistication and melancholic depth of tracks like “God Only Knows” and “I Just Wasn’t Made for These Times” eventually led critics and fellow musicians to honor it as an epochal achievement.

But in following up “Pet Sounds,” Wilson stumbled. Over months of sessions for an album he intended to call “Smile,” Wilson indulged his every eccentricity, no matter how expensive or fruitless, and his growing drug habit fueled paranoia and delusion.

Abandoned by Wilson, “Smile” entered rock lore as a lost document of a brilliant but troubled mind. Mike Love, the Beach Boys vocalist and longtime foil of Wilson’s, called it “a whole album of Brian’s madness.” It remained unfinished for nearly 40 years.

Struggles with Two Men

Wilson’s life story came to be portrayed as a struggle to escape from the yokes of two men: his abusive father and a controlling psychotherapist, Eugene Landy. Landy’s unorthodox methods were effective in nursing Wilson back to health during two periods of treatment in the 1970s and ’80s. Yet Landy also went into business with his patient, sharing copyrights with Wilson and taking writing credits on some of his songs.

Landy eventually came under the scrutiny of California authorities and surrendered his license. After an intervention by Wilson’s family, a court order also blocked Landy from contact with Wilson.

Wilson spoke openly about his struggles with mental illness, including his experience with schizoaffective disorder, a condition characterized by hallucinations and delusions. The condition led to the conservatorship granted to his business associates in early 2024.

Early Years

Brian Douglas Wilson was born June 20, 1942, in Inglewood, California, to Murry and Audree (Korthof) Wilson. His father was a heavy-machinery salesperson who had collected a handful of credits as a frustrated songwriter. His mother, a homemaker, kept the Beach Boys’ books in the early days of the band.

The family moved to Hawthorne, California, when Brian was a toddler, and had two more boys, Dennis and Carl.

By 1961, the three Wilson boys were playing rock music with Love, a cousin, and a schoolmate of Brian’s, Al Jardine.

Around that time, Dennis began surfing and delighted in the fashion, trendy lingo and carefree lifestyle that went along with it. One day he told Brian and Love, “You guys ought to write a song about surfing.”

They did, and that fall, the group recorded its first song, “Surfin’.” The young men called themselves the Pendletones, after a type of flannel shirt popular among surfers. When they received the finished record, released by a small local label, Candix, they discovered that they had been renamed the Beach Boys.

Signed by Capitol Records in 1962, the group was prolific from the start, releasing 10 studio LPs through 1965.

Wilson became the band’s primary producer and songwriter, and his sophistication soon shone through. “Surfer Girl,” a lilting, harmony-drenched ballad that went to No. 7 in 1963, was perhaps the first pop hit written, arranged, produced and sung by the same person.

Wilson’s first No. 1, however, came as a writer of Jan and Dean’s song “Surf City” (1963). In a sign of conflicts to come, Murry Wilson, who managed the Beach Boys and controlled the band’s songwriting copyrights, was furious that Brian had given a valuable hit to another act.

Other problems surfaced. “Surfin’ U.S.A.” resembled Chuck Berry’s “Sweet Little Sixteen” a bit too closely, so Berry’s name was added to the credits, and his publisher acquired the song’s copyright.

In December 1964, Wilson married Marilyn Rovell, who sang in a girl group called the Honeys. A few weeks later, he had a panic attack on a flight to a Beach Boys engagement in Houston and decided to quit touring to concentrate on songwriting and recording.

That same year, the group fired Murry Wilson as manager.

As Brian Wilson would recount, his father had long tormented him. In one form of punishment, his father would remove his glass eye and force his son to stare into the empty socket.

“My dad was violent,” Wilson wrote in a 2016 memoir, “I Am Brian Wilson,” written with Ben Greenman. “He was cruel.”

Pet Sounds’ Release

Freed from his father’s control and the Beach Boys’ touring demands, Wilson immersed himself in the studio.

“Pet Sounds,” released in May 1966, elevated the Beach Boys’ music to a level far above anything they had created before. With the rest of the group on the road, Wilson made the album primarily with studio musicians.

Upon release, the album stalled at No. 10, a relative dud by Beach Boys standards. By then, however, Wilson was working on his next gem: the single “Good Vibrations.”

Spliced together from months of sessions across four studios, “Good Vibrations” was a catchy and sonically adventurous invocation of peppy West Coast spirituality. Released in October 1966, the song became an indelible radio hit, but it was Wilson’s last moment at the vanguard of pop.

Landy’s Influence

Wilson’s drug use, which had begun during happier times for the band, had grown out of control, stunting his creativity. “I lost interest in writing songs,” Wilson once told Rolling Stone.

For about a year, starting in 1975, he was treated by Landy, whose methods included dousing his patient with cold water in the morning. He also limited his patient’s contact with others, including Wilson’s family, to underscore the therapist’s role as “the ultimate power in this situation,” as Landy once put it.

Wilson continued to perform as part of the Beach Boys, but his behavior was erratic and his drug use continued. In 1982, the Beach Boys kicked Wilson out of the group, and he returned to the care of Landy. His treatment, begun in seclusion in Hawaii, included a strict diet and vitamin regimen, with Wilson under constant supervision.

Landy’s techniques raised eyebrows, but in Wilson’s case they seemed effective. When the singer made the press rounds in 1988 for his first solo album, “Brian Wilson,” he appeared fit, energetic and focused.

The extent of Landy’s control over his patient, and his involvement in Wilson’s career, drew concern among Wilson’s family and people in the music industry. The two men started a business partnership, called Brains and Genius, that allowed Landy to draw profits from Wilson’s recordings, films and other ventures.

Landy was the executive producer of “Brian Wilson,” and he and his girlfriend, Alexandra Morgan, shared songwriting credits with Wilson on some tracks. Wilson said he even modified his will to make Landy its primary beneficiary.

After an investigation by California authorities into his treatment of Wilson and other patients, Landy surrendered his license in 1989, though he continued to work with Wilson through their partnership. Members of Wilson’s family filed a conservatorship case over Wilson’s care. In 1992, as a result of a settlement in that case, Landy was barred by court order from making any contact with Wilson; his name and that of Morgan, whom he later married, were removed from song credits. Landy died in 2006 at 71.

Melinda as Savior

In 1995, Wilson married Melinda Ledbetter, a former model who worked at a car dealership and had sold him a Cadillac. He frequently credited her with helping him rebuild his life after his entanglement with Landy. She died in 2024.

“Melinda was more than my wife,” Wilson said at the time. “She was my savior. She gave me the emotional security I needed to have a career. She encouraged me to make the music that was closest to my heart. She was my anchor.”

Brian and Melinda adopted three daughters, Daria, Delanie and Dakota, and two sons, Dylan and Dash. Those children survive him, as do two daughters from his marriage to Marilyn, Carnie and Wendy Wilson, of the pop group Wilson Phillips; and six grandchildren.

Dennis Wilson drowned in the Pacific Ocean in 1983 after a drinking binge. He was 39. Carl Wilson died of lung cancer in 1998 at age 51.

c.2025 The New York Times Company. This article originally appeared in The New York Times.