The Beach Boys member Brian Wilson never wanted to talk to: “It’s really quite difficult”
A great memory that the majority of us music lovers share is the first time that we heard ‘God Only Knows’ by The Beach Boys.
Obviously, the title of ‘greatest song in the world’ can never be assigned to an individual track, given so much of what makes a good song is memory and experience. However, if you were to get answers from everyone on Earth, I imagine that this Beach Boys classic would probably be mentioned a lot more than other songs.
There’s a magic to it, something embedded within the harmonies, the layering, the lyrics, all of it, that creates an incredibly peaceful soundscape. If you listen with earphones, you could be convinced you were floating. Plenty of great artists have previously come out and said that it’s one of the best pieces of music ever made, as Courtney Love once said that it was proof of the existence of a higher power; meanwhile, Paul McCartney, arguably the greatest songwriter in the world, crowned it the greatest track of all time.
“‘God Only Knows’ is one of the few songs that reduces me to tears every time I hear it,” said McCartney, “It’s really just a love song, but it’s brilliantly done. It shows the genius of Brian. I’ve actually performed it with him, and I’m afraid to say that during the soundcheck, I broke down.”
Peace, harmony, wonder, beauty: These are words that could all be used to describe the music that The Beach Boys were making, but you’d struggle to squeeze them into a sentence when talking about the band itself. For a group that worked so well with harmony, they famously didn’t get along a great deal. Working with family is always going to be tricky, but these took it to a whole other level.
Divides within creative projects are pretty common, and they can often go one of two ways. They will result in the split of the band altogether, or the members will come to an agreement that they will be more like coworkers as opposed to friends. Just because you’re in a band with someone doesn’t necessarily mean you need to get along, and this was the approach that Brian and Carl Wilson took. There were a number of different factors that contributed towards the divide between members, but the most significant was when Brian Wilson opted to stop touring with the band.
Following a nervous breakdown in the ‘60s, he decided it was best for him to stay in the studio writing songs, while the rest of the band hit the road performing them. This naturally led to a crack as they were no longer operating as a unified front. The band was essentially on borrowed time from that moment on, but before an eventual split, Brian and Carl Wilson tried to work things out by simply refusing to speak to each other unless it was for work. Their system had legs for a little while, but let’s be real, there was never any longevity in such an approach.
“It’s really quite difficult to live in the same world with the other Beach Boys. I don’t make any lies about that, I don’t care who’s listening as far as, if you want the truth from Brian Wilson, then you’re going to have to take it as it is,” said Brian, “I’d rather take my brother and say ‘Look, go have your life, go have your own life, I’ll meet you in the studio and I’ll see you on the road’. I don’t say that to him though; in my heart, that’s what I’m saying to him. Instead, when I see him, I go ‘Hi Carl’, ‘Oh hi Brian’, and that’s it, that’s the extent of it.”
He continued, “One time we were doing an interview together and the interviewer asked Carl what it was between him and I. He goes ‘Well, Brian and I don’t have a need to talk to each other, ever. We’re just Beach Boys, but we don’t have any need to be friends’. And that’s true, he said it right on the nose. Right on the dot, that’s the truth.”
