Radiant Radish: Brian Wilson’s grocery store haven away from The Beach Boys
Whenever you have to run to the supermarket to grab milk and bread or for a last-minute midnight snack, would you expect Paul McCartney to be stacking the shelves or Mick Jagger to be on the tills? You’d be forgiven for thinking you had some horrific hallucinogenic illness with only minutes to live. But in the 1970s, if you lived in Los Angeles and popped to the shops only to see Brian Wilson manning the fort, it was not a mirage, but in fact, reality.
After a decade of psychedelics and surfing pop royalty, a quieter and more mundane life was calling for the Beach Boy as he ventured into entrepreneurial pastures new. Opening a health food grocery store called Radiant Radish in the late 1960s, Wilson was clearly focusing his efforts toward a fresh, more cleansed lease of life that would, most importantly, give him an outlet free from musical chart demands.
This is, of course, not an attempt to make light of Wilson’s many wide-ranging and well-documented mental health and substance abuse struggles that he suffered as a result of the damaging effects of fame, but opening his own shop was admittedly an unconventional method of channelling his stresses.
From its location in West Hollywood, the day-to-day running of the Radiant Radish was managed by Wilson’s close friends Steve Korthoff and Arnie Geller, but often during his downtime between the studio and the stage, the frontman was known to pop in and work the till – albeit bizarrely dressed in a bathrobe.
Questionable uniform choices aside, Wilson would truly give the legions of wellness influencers of today a solid run for their money, with the store stocked full with vitamins, supplements, and fresh produce. Symbolically, it clearly represented a clean break from the perils of the Beach Boys; an attempt by Wilson to find zen in his life despite the chaos. But in an almost prophetic sense, the striving for inner calm ultimately could not be achieved in the long term, and the Radiant Radish soon became rotten.
The store’s life only lasted a few years, and it eventually shut its doors for the final time in the early 1970s. Wilson claimed later that: “I spent too much money on produce, there wasn’t much money coming in, and we went bankrupt.” It was a valiant effort—but one, nevertheless, that almost bears the makings of a searing metaphor for the turbulent events that spiralled in Wilson’s life at the time.
With the chief Beach Boy retreating into the shadows in the years shortly thereafter, there is the potential for the story of his fated wellness venture to be one mired in tragedy. But if there’s anything that Wilson’s life has proven, it’s that even if things go wrong or a door closes on a certain path, as in this case with the Radiant Radish, there is always a chance to come back from the brink. Vitamins and supplements may not have ultimately been the answer, but therein also lies a lesson for everyone that true wellness is more than meets the eye.
