Brian Wilson, singer and principal songwriter for what today must look like an oldies act, The Beach Boys, is an interesting figure in the list of many heartbroken musicians that, understandably, pour their poor souls into the music so dearly loved by many. I say interesting because the guy’s been through more hoops than the average singer-songwriter. While I don’t know him personally, let’s just say he’s garnered a sort of ‘legendary mythology’ amongst biographers.
Brian is diagnosed schizoaffective, more specifically he has a history of mental illness, especially following use of marijuana and LSD in the mid-60s, which inspired him (as header of The Beach Boys) to hire studio musicians for the weird compositions heard on the 1965 album Pet Sounds, a concept album about dreams of eternal romance, fear of abandonment, and the loss of innocence. Being at the top of the charts for several years and in an art-pop race against a little known act called The Beatles drove him to strange behaviour for the next album where he got everyone in the studio to wear fire hats and huff burnt wood in order to immerse the musicians in the recording of an experimental atonal piece called ‘fire’ – recording ceased after Brian got paranoid that the music was esoteric bad juju because a nearby building burnt down the day following recording. This next album SMiLE was scrapped because the pressure of his bandmates and the record company got to him; The Beatles won the race by releasing Sgt Pepper’s, then Brian broke down in tears when he first heard The Beatles single ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’.
After losing the race, Brian took to downsizing to a home studio and allowing the other Beach Boys to take control of the music. Periods of suicidal depression broke in, leaving a bathrobe-clad Brian to occasionally potter down to the studio, pre-view a song, and waltz back upstairs to his bed, and this went on and off for ten years amidst hospitalisations and mythical binging sessions of cocaine, speed, alcohol, as well as big juicy steaks and hamburgers. No one really knows because Brian is notoriously unreliable, but the cause of his right-ear deafness has been suggested to be from his abusive father hitting him with something like a 2×4, and the voices and delusions in his head from abusing psychedelics, seeing ‘God’. Somewhere somehow Brian couldn’t handle the pain of coming back down and facing reality.
In 1978, Brian’s wife of fourteen years, Marilyn, had an affair and the two separated, and it probably had something to with Brian becoming a fat, drug addicted depressed person who completely backed out of raising his children; he kept using cocaine against the better wish of the handlers and psychiatric help Marilyn had organised for him until the news of her bitter affair did him in and he went missing and tried to anaesthetise and overdose on alcohol et al. His brother and band mate, Dennis, would sneak him cocaine and hamburgers as a bribe to get Brian to make some music. Brian’s 1975 song ‘Still I dream of it’ goes like this:
‘Still I dream of it
Of that happy day
When I can say I’ve fallen in love’
A break away from something is never really a loss, rather it feels like you were never truly with it in the first place, like the whole game of love and creativity is and always will be a mirage where the only place to go is a return to an absolute eternal despair with nothing but your empty wish for the thing to come and that never will come because you’re old enough to know that life is one big hopeless catastrophe.
Somewhere along the way, and after another overdose, Brian was (re)admitted to Dr Eugene Landy’s 24-hour therapy program, undergoing a rigorous diet and health regime where he was cut off from friends and family, including his ex-wife and children. This lasted for at least six years before Landy had his psychiatric license revoked and was discovered to be overmedicating Brian with psychotropics so he could remain under control. Brian re-married to his second wife and got the appropriate help he needed. In 2002, he reflected: “I don’t regret [the Landy program]. I loved the guy—he saved me.” He also spoke on the voices he hears in his head: “Every few minutes the voices say something derogatory to me, which discourages me a little bit, but I have to be strong enough to say to them, ‘Hey, would you quit stalking me? Don’t talk to me—leave me alone!’”
No one really knows the cause of what set Brian onto this sorrowful path: was it bad genetics? Drug addiction? A free-fall from commercial and cultural grace, from ‘God’? Traumatic physical abuse at the hands of his father? Some toxic combination of fate and irreversible mistakes? Either way, there’s a sense of naivety that Brian holds onto in the face of it all, as his 1988 song ‘Love and Mercy’ goes:
‘I was lying in my room and the news came on T.V.,
A lot of people out there hurting, and it really scares me,
Love and mercy that’s what you need tonight!
So, love and mercy to you and your friends tonight!’
Image: Screen Media Films
*This was originally published in the ‘Tertangala: Heartbreak Issue’ (2024)
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