Brian Wilson is dead – Diepresse.com

Brian Wilson is deadand, as with any truly big pop, you immediately remember the song that you absolutely have to hear now, he wrote it himself: « ‘Til I Die », his expression of the Oceanian feeling, the underlying in the impersonal, in general. It said like a cork on the ocean on the angry lake, it said, and: « I am a leaf on a windy day, soon I will be blown away. » Now he is blown away, the brilliant head of the Beach Boys, who had not only lost his genius towards the end of his life, but his mind. He had become demented, was under guardianship.

He had always been a problem child: Brian Wilson, eldest son of a tyrannical father who beat him to the piano, deaf after an accident on an ear, suffered a large part of his life from depression and overweight. In contrast to his brother Dennis Wilson, who had drowned in 1983, he was a good surfer, but he wrote the greatest hymns on this California sport and way of life, on fast cars and California girls, on fun and life. His brothers Dennis and Carl (died of lung cancer in 1998), his cousin Mike Love and his school friend Alan Jardine sang them in a subtle network of voices, to which he himself usually contributed the high falsetta.

The fact that even in the apparently undisturbed jubilation, for example in « Fun Fun Fun » or « I Get Around », you thought you heard a minimal dose of bitterness made these songs even greater. He let himself be shaken up in the room to write the like, it said: In « In My Room », published in 1963, he sang the lonely, dark room and swore himself: « I won’t be afraid. »

Failed « teenage symphony to God »

He quickly found the Beatles and their chief composers Lennon/McCartney as the great competition of his beach Boys. He was one step ahead in 1966 with the gently abysmal album « Pet Sounds », full of gifted songs like « God Only Knows », but then the Beatles came with « Sgt. Pepper », and Brian Wilson suffered from fear and stress. The almost supernatural -cheering single « Good Vibrations » was still successful, but he knew that an aesthetic coup was expected from him, a « Teenage Symphony to God », as he said himself. He also worked on one, but he failed. For decades, « Smile » was – only appeared in fragments at that time, such as the playful « Heroes and Villains » – as a lost masterpiece; When it finally came out as a whole in 2004, the disappointment was great.

Brian Wilson sank into Düsternis, stayed in the room, took everything that stunned the pain, described himself to a psychiatrist named Eugene Landy, who supervised him like a child and supposedly had to pay expensive with song rights. He left his beach Boys, who have now been as West Coast hippies, and over and over again for years. Or you him. When he appeared without her, in Europe for the first time in 2002, you often experienced a sunken, sometimes a broken man.

The joy was all the greater when he fulfilled himself again in 2007 at the jazz festival in the State Opera, as a Naiv-smared rock’n’roller, perhaps the greatest student of Chuck Berry, from whose « Sweet Little Sixteen » he had knitted his « Surfin ‘USA ».

Last 2017 live in Vienna

« I just wasn’t made for thesis », now as a old man in a polo shirt, he was able to renew this old-fashioned song of songs, which he had already laid out on « Pet Sounds »; For his beach Boys he wrote nostalgic like « That’s why God Made the Radio ». But soon they went separate paths again: in 2017 he and his band (led by his antipoden Mike Love) were both heard in the Vienna Stadthalle, but with six weeks. The Beach Boys were Californically professional; Brian Wilson, often looking into the void with anxious expression, brought « Pet Sounds » completely and showed himself again as what he was in total: a tragic genius. Now it is blown away. Pop music owes him some of her greatest moments.