How many number ones did Brian Wilson have?
Back in 1964, a 22-year-old Brian Wilson described the brand new sound of the Beach Boys in fairly simplistic, nuts-and-bolts terms, saying that it emphasised “an uptempo beat, as pioneered by Chuck Berry; a very clean but strong beat, melodically simple but an infectious melody, and a social lyric. I think the key to our versatility is harmonic variation.”
Brian Wilson died on June 11th, 2025, at the age of 82, inspiring a huge reaction from the thousands of songwriters he helped inspire over his long career. While he’d continue to work and tour right up into the 2020s, though, Wilson’s most impactful period as a musician was always going to be that first decade with The Beach Boys, from the early 1960s to the early ‘70s, when he completely re-imagined the art of popular songwriting, doing for music composition what Bob Dylan had done for lyric writing.
Unlike a lot of great boundary-pushing pop innovators, Wilson—rivaled only by The Beatles—also maintained a mainstream viability, scoring loads of worldwide hits that ran the gamut from silly surfing songs to psychedelic theramin-driven freakouts.
Surprisingly enough, Wilson and the Beach Boys never saw one of their full-length, non-compilation studio albums hit number one in the UK or in the US. Of course, prior to the all-mighty Pet Sounds (which peaked at number two in the UK and just number ten in America), this really was a singles band at its core, and it was through those radio jams that the Beach Boys built their legacy.
Wilson himself either wrote or co-wrote close to 30 songs that landed on the Billboard Top 40 in the US, starting with the arguable invention of surf pop with 1961’s ‘Surfin’ and the Beach Boys’ first Top 40 entry, 1962’s ‘Surfin’ Safari.’
What was Brian Wilson’s first number one?
The popular Jan & Dean single ‘Surf City’, released in 1963, was also written by Brian Wilson, and was actually the first of his songs to hit the number one slot on the Billboard chart.
That same year, the Beach Boys’ ‘Surfin USA’ reached number three in America and became their first single to crack the Top 40 in the UK (it was also the overall best selling single of 1963 in the States). It wasn’t until the band shifted its focus from surfboards to cars, however, with 1964’s ‘I Get Around’, that they officially topped the US charts for the first time (peaking at number seven in Britain). Another Wilson composition, ‘Help Me Rhonda’, reached number one in the spring of ‘65.
Wilson’s fourth US number one, 1966’s stunning left turn ‘Good Vibrations’, was also the first Beach Boys single to top the UK chart, after a near miss from ‘God Only Knows’ (number two). They matched this feat again with 1968’s ‘Do It Again’, effectively marking the end of the band’s golden age.
Doing the maths, then, that’s a total count of four US number ones and two UK number ones for the great Brian Wilson. And if you were wondering, yes, the Beach Boys did reach number one in the US again with 1988’s ‘Kokomo’, but to Wilson’s credit he had nothing to do with that one.
