Brian Wilson in the control room while recording Pet Sounds in 1966 - Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images

Brian Wilson occupies a special place in the pop pantheon, the golden youth who blew his mind making mind-blowing music. His 1966 masterpiece Pet Sounds remains a benchmark in pop culture, blending classical harmonic theory with melodious songcraft, baroque orchestrations and an audacious sound palette, all conjured in Wilson’s sandbox studio.

The Beach Boys’ genius leader is gone now, dead at 82, but the good vibrations he created will take a very long time to fade away, if they ever do. They reverberated throughout his long life, even as their damaged creator struggled with debilitating mental health problems, cutting an increasingly strange and isolated figure.

The Beach Boys – Brian Wilson, Mike Love, Dennis Wilson, Carl Wilson and David Marks – pose for a portrait in 1962, Los Angeles, California

The pop culture myth of Wilson swirled around this wild disparity between the beauty, emotion and dazzling resonance of his songcraft and the withdrawn, uncommunicative, damaged man who created it. But ultimately it is the music that defines him, an expression of an incredibly rich inner world that gave us all a window to the depths and artistry of his soul. Wilson was responsible for some of the very greatest music of his and our times, and all time. And all we need to do to tap into it is listen.

When they broke out in 1962, the Beach Boys’ blend of rock’n’roll and classical harmonies offered America a pure expression of youthful, heady escapism. There was a darker story lurking behind, the wholesome family band whose father Murry Wilson managed them through fear and violence and ripped them off financially. It was a tension invisible to the eye but perhaps detectable to the ear, caught in their youthful leaders’ exquisite melodic balance of melancholy and joy, and his driving impulse for escapism in sound.

The Beach Boys pictured in 1964 - Hulton Archive/Getty Images

By the mid-Sixties, Wilson’s mental health was in serious decline, exacerbated by his use of marijuana and LSD. And with it, the band’s sounds began to warp whilst the songs turned toward a poignant mourning for Wilson’s lost innocence. As his younger brother Carl led the live band, Brian remained in Los Angeles, writing and producing groundbreaking new music with Phil Spector’s session musicians the Wrecking Crew.

Conjured out of Wilson’s visionary head space, Pet Sounds overflows with near cosmic beauty. God Only Knows floats as a gorgeous devotional on a heart-bursting melody, while Good Vibrations ripples between dimensions, surely the most joyous, time-switching blast of sheer bliss ever recorded. Over in Britain, the Beatles took note and were pushed to even greater heights, creating some of their finest work in direct response to the challenge posed by the genius of Brian Wilson.

In its own time, Pet Sounds represented something thrillingly new, yet with a richness, depth, and mystery that has somehow never faded. There are many who will still argue it is the greatest album ever made.

Album cover for Pet Sounds by The Beach Boys

Wilson was responsible for a lot of other utterly fantastic music, even if he never quite reached the same peak again. Smile was a masterpiece that took decades to complete, a proposed follow up to Pet Sounds that aspired to a level of complexity that shattered Wilson’s fragile health, and didn’t finally appear in full until he put it out as a solo album in 2004. It had forsaken its immediacy by then but remains a spectacular work of pop beauty.

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Some of Smile’s lost music made it onto the Beach Boys albums Smiley Smile (1967) and Surf’s Up (1971), both superb. Indeed, all the early Beach Boys music retains its irresistible pleasure, perhaps the greatest invocations of youthful vitality ever captured on record. And a much older Wilson surprised us all by demonstrating he could still pull that kind of razzle dazzle out of the bag in 2012, when he wrote and produced That’s Why God Made the Radio for a reunion with his surviving bandmates.

Brian Wilson performs with The Beach Boys on ABC’s Good Morning America in New York’s Central Park, June 12 2012 - REUTERS/Lucas Jackson

Some of Brian’s solo work is equally glorious, especially his complex 1988 comeback (entitled Brian Wilson) and That Lucky Old Sun from 2008. I know a session singer who worked with Wilson during that period and would talk of how confounded he was by Wilson instructing him to sing seemingly random melodic lines that only made sense when all played back together in their full multi-track glory. Wilson carried the music in his mind, a jigsaw of sound that he was piecing together one part at a time, but that Wilson himself could always hear.

The figure we would see in rare public outings did not seem compatible with the visionary splendour of his music. His clinical diagnosis was schizoaffective disorder (he heard voices) and manic depression, conditions possibly rooted in his abusive childhood and magnified by copious drug use in younger days. He had some difficult personal times but held onto the music, as if it was able to keep him afloat. I had the opportunity to interview him for the Beach Boys reunion in 2012, but he was slack and vacant and barely seemed present. “I can’t really answer that,” was his de facto response to every question.

Yet I saw him perform many times and on stage his mood would visibly lift. However disconnected his presence, the aural splendour utterly overwhelmed the visual incongruity, somehow restoring the lost genius at its centre to his gilded youth. Wilson really was a man made of music. It is music that will survive him, and probably outlive us all.

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