(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "CALIFORNIA GIRLS")
THE BEACH BOYS: (Singing) I wish they all could be California girls. I wish they all could be California. I wish they...
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
We're taking time to remember the songwriter who had that wish, Brian Wilson, who was a genius. That is not my word. Paul McCartney said that about him, and so did Bob Dylan. With The Beach Boys in the 1960s, Brian Wilson elevated the sounds of California's surf music with elaborate choral arrangements and orchestral pomp. He also lost decades to mental illness and drug abuse before making a midlife comeback. What a life. His family announced yesterday that he has died at the age of 82. And so we called Brian Wilson biographer Peter Ames Carlin.
PETER AMES CARLIN: In 1962, when The Beach Boys really first began to make records, and he emerged as their visionary musically and compositionally, the music around was very simple. But, you know, Brian sort of created this musical palette. The sound is so dense and so full of different instruments being applied in so many unexpected ways. You know, "Fun, Fun, Fun," for instance, which is about a car - you know, he uses baritone saxophones as this low rumble that just sort of evokes this engine without really drawing attention to it. It's just there beneath the surface of the music.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "FUN, FUN, FUN")
THE BEACH BOYS: (Singing) And she'll have fun, fun, fun till her daddy takes the T-bird away. Fun, fun, fun 'till her daddy takes the T-bird away.
INSKEEP: And he, of course, is also using a lot of human voices as instruments here.
CARLIN: Yes. He was very inspired by The Four Freshmen, which was a jazz vocal harmony band from the '50s. And he wove his voice and the voices of his brothers, Carl and Dennis, and his cousin, Mike Love, and Al Jardine, their bandmate, into these incredibly elaborate sort of harmonic constructions that really transformed the sonic vocabulary of rock 'n' roll.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "I GET AROUND")
THE BEACH BOYS: (Singing) Round, round, get around, I get around, yeah. Get around, round, round, I get around. Get around...
CARLIN: I mean, genius is an overused word. But just given the disparity between the training that he received and what he achieved just in terms of his ability to - you know, to write arrangements and laying that above this foundation that came straight out of Chuck Berry. You know, just three-chord, rhythm-and-blues-inspired rock 'n' roll.
INSKEEP: You said a disparity between what he did and the training he received. What was that training?
CARLIN: Not much. I mean, I think he took some classes in high school, you know, and learned the basics of theory. But he just had this amazing, God-given ability. And, you know, by the time he was 22, 23 years old, he was writing and recording "Good Vibrations," which was just jaw-dropping to all the people. You know, even his peers, you know, John Lennon and Paul McCartney and Bob Dylan and all the greats of that era, just heard that song and were like, what's even happening here?
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "GOOD VIBRATIONS")
THE BEACH BOYS: (Singing) When I look in her eyes, she goes with me to a blossom world. I'm picking up good vibrations. She's giving me excitations. Ooh, bop-bop. I'm picking up good vibrations. Good vibrations.
INSKEEP: Why do you think it is that even as his music was coming together in this way, his life was seemingly coming apart?
CARLIN: Well, you know, he had - you know, along with his musical gifts, he also had, you know, psychiatric trouble. I mean, and for many, many years, he really didn't get any kind of treatment. You know, he self-medicated with drugs or alcohol or food and just anything to get through the days. Eventually, he did get a much more stable family situation and much more competent and professional psychiatric treatment. And once that happened, you know, he had this incredible 30-year coda from the mid-'90s into the teens and beyond, where he managed to finish "Smile," the sort of legendarily uncompleted sort of rock symphony he started working on in 1966.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "SURF'S UP")
THE BEACH BOYS: (Singing) A choke of grief, heart hardened. I, beyond belief, a broken man, too tough to cry.
CARLIN: When it finally appeared in 2004, it was astounding that he had found the courage and the strength to go back to this thing he had started and left undone in his early 20s and actually bring it to fruition.
INSKEEP: What was it like in those later years for you to talk with him about his life as a biographer?
CARLIN: Well, the way I always described Brian to friends is he's weirder than you can imagine, but not as crazy as you might think. You know, there was a lot about Brian that was quirky and hilarious and strange. He had a way - I mean, this is going to sound kind of weird, but somebody had cautioned me of this before I met him, which is that sometimes Brian knows things about you that you haven't told him yet.
A friend of his told me once that they had had a lot of conversations about a particular version of "Rhapsody In Blue," the Gershwin piece that Brian was obsessed with, but neither of them had the album. And one day, the guy came across it, like, in a garage sale, and he just had it in his living room and was thinking, I got to give this to Brian. And there was a knock on the door, and Brian was there saying, you got that Gershwin, right? And it was like - he said, I can't explain that. I don't know how that happened.
INSKEEP: (Laughter).
CARLIN: But there he was.
INSKEEP: What are some kinds of music of today that you think we wouldn't have or wouldn't have in quite the same way were it not for the influence decades ago of Brian Wilson?
CARLIN: I think he left his mark in so many ways. But I think probably primarily it's just his endless fascination with and skill at manipulating different sounds and weaving together different textures and instruments in completely unexpected ways and his ability to take all these sort of far-flung styles and sounds and weave them together into something that not only made sense, but also was - fit in the radio alongside with all the other sort of pop rock hits of the day. You know, in some ways, it's almost easier to talk about styles of music that he didn't influence in pop music. But it just - you know, he just had a very, very deep and very, very broad imprint on popular music.
INSKEEP: Peter Ames Carlin wrote a 2006 biography called "Catch A Wave: The Rise, Fall, And Redemption Of The Beach Boys' Brian Wilson," who has died. Mr. Carlin, thanks so much.
CARLIN: Thank you, Steve.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "GOD ONLY KNOWS")
THE BEACH BOYS: (Singing) God only knows what I'd be without you. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.
