YouTube Gold: Good Vibrations

Brian Wilson was an astonishing but fragile talent

Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys died earlier this month and one of the legends of 60’s rock n roll departed the scene with many lamentations. Wilson co-founded his band which sold an image of Southern California fun and innocence that masked an often sad and difficult life.

The music was relentlessly cheerful in the beginning as the Beach Boys sang about cars, sun, surfing and girls.

By the mid-60’s though, Wilson was exploring his gift and came up with the astonishing Pet Sounds.

It was a revolutionary album that took pop music to something vastly more sophisticated. Someone flew a copy over to the UK where the Beatles wore it out and Paul McCartney credited it as the inspiration behind Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.

Wilson wrote a masterpiece intended for Pet Sounds, Good Vibrations, but it wasn’t finished in time for the release. It has endured for decades as a touchstone of 60’s culture or what peopel wanted to believe it was.

Sadly, not long after Pet Sounds, Wilson began to have serious mental health problems and his brother Dennis, also a Beach Boy, started to spend time around the Manson Family.

There was plenty of darkness around the band, in other words, but still enough light to create extraordinary music for a time.