What was the first Beach Boys song that Brian Wilson wasn’t involved with?
Typically, when the world thinks about The Beach Boys, they see one man at the helm: Brian Wilson. Overwhelmingly, for many years, he was the man in charge. He was the principal songwriter, producer and composer, the mastermind behind their experimentation and evolution. But then it hit a point when he was gone.
From the moment the band began in 1961, things stayed mostly the same. Brian Wilson steered the ship as the founder and the creative mind behind it all. The story goes that his mum made him let his brothers Dennis and Carl in the band if he was going to start one. Then, friends Al Jardine, David Marks, and Bruce Johnston were added. Marks quit pretty quickly after, but then, for the majority of their early success, that was the group.
The way things worked stayed the same too – Brian wrote the songs, he brought them to the others, they’d go into the studio and the band, along with usually a mass team of other musicians, would try their best to bring Wilson’s ideas to life. He wouldn’t let it go until they did, building a reputation of being an intense perfectionist.
When the time came for the band to work without him, they likely felt a little lost. Without the leader who wrote the songs and had all the musical ideas in his mind, the band was basically left with blueprints and nothing else when it came to making 20/20, their 1969 record, which had to be done almost entirely without him.
The first time they had to face up to that was on ‘I Can Hear Music’. Brian Wilson played no part in this song for the first time in the band’s history. He doesn’t sing or play on it, he didn’t produce it, he didn’t even write it. Instead, the track was written by Ellie Greenwich, Jeff Barry and Phil Spector for The Ronettes, who recorded it first in 1966.
As Carl Wilson stepped up to the production and vocals plate for it, maybe the choice to do a Spector song was a purposeful one. Phil Spector was Brian’s hero, so maybe Carlo trusted that he could tap into his brother’s energy if he could tap into his inspiration.
But where was Brian Wilson, and why isn’t he on 20/20?
Brian Wilson features so little on 20/20 that he isn’t even in the portrait on the front cover. However, he still wrote a good number of the songs, leaving them to the rest of the band to figure out with only the sheet music and a few early outtakes of him singing them to work with.
But at the time, he was busy trying to save his own life. Throughout the late 1960s, Brian has become more and more of a recluse, suffering from schizoaffective disorder and mild bipolar disorder. He struggled with hallucinations, and by the end of the decade, they were unbearable. So, he checked himself into a psychiatric hospital in a bid to get better, while his band made this album mostly without him.
