The tragic truth of Brian Wilson’s tortured childhood
It seemed as though Brian Wilson was set up to fail from early in life. The Beach Boys leader had his mental health issues become a serious concern in the latter half of the 1960s, but he had been experiencing panic attacks and disembodied voices as early as the middle part of the decade. Almost full deafness in his right ear made it a massive challenge to become a musician, but Wilson persisted.
The crux of the trauma came from Wilson’s father, Murry. Later known as the first manager of The Beach Boys, Murry helped take his teenage sons’ band and made them a national phenomenon. Brian and his father clashed often, with Wilson eventually firing his father in 1964. The pair’s conflicts stemmed from a childhood of physical and psychological abuse on Murry’s part.
“My dad was violent. He was cruel,” Wilson wrote in his 2016 memoir I Am Brian Wilson. “He drank too much and became a monster- and he didn’t know how to deal with his son’s fears. Whenever I got afraid, he would yell at me or slap me or call me a pussy.”
Murry was at least partially responsible for Brian’s deafness, even though Brian would claim that he was born at least partially deaf. Still, Murry’s physical abuse likely exasperated his already fragile condition. Murry’s abuse didn’t stop at the physical – he also traumatised his sons by utilising his glass eye.
“When he didn’t put his hands on us, he tried to scare us in other ways,” Wilson wrote. “He would take out his glass eye and make us look into the space where the eye used to be.”
“Sometimes, I provoked my dad. Once I took a shit on a plate and brought it to my dad. ‘Here’s your lunch,’ I said,” Wilson recalled. “He was sitting down with his pipe in his mouth. ‘Get in the bathroom,’ he said. Then he came in and whipped the hell out of me. I was bringing the plate to him because of the times I didn’t deserve. There were hundreds of those times, at least.”
In his memoir, Wilson did his best to try and understand his father. “Lots of things have been written about my dad. Lots of them are true. Some of them are dirty lies,” Wilson wrote. “But even things that are true aren’t always what they seem. I have said how hard it is for me to talk about my dad, and that’s partly because I want to get it right. He’s not here to explain himself.”
