Which Beach Boys song did Brian Wilson write with his father Murry?
It’s hardly a revelation to anyone with even passing knowledge of The Beach Boys that main songwriter Brian Wilson had a strained relationship with his father, Murry. Wilson openly discussed the violent abuse he suffered at Murry’s hands in his 2016 autobiography.
And the abuse wasn’t just physical. “When he didn’t put his hands on us, he tried to scare us in other ways,” Wilson explained. The torment Murry inflicted on Brian, including a blow to the head, which was likely the reason behind his son’s partial deafness, was clearly a major cause of the Beach Boy’s psychological struggles in later life.
Nevertheless, Brian has credited his father with getting the band their start on the career ladder. Murry used his music industry contacts to get The Beach Boys, who were called The Pendletones at the time, into a studio to record their first single ‘Surfin’’. As the group’s manager, steered them through the business side of their early success.
But in 1964, the band fired Murry due to his increasingly overbearing presence while they were on tour. After a heated argument during the recording of ‘Help Me, Rhonda’ in 1965, Brian’s relationship with Murry broke down further, and the two remained on difficult terms until the latter’s death in 1973.
Yet there was one moment of reconciliation between the pair during the late 1960s that stands out, specifically because it came in the form of a song. In Brian’s words during a 2021 interview with Best Classic Bands, he wrote one of their final singles of the decade together with his dad, on the “doorstep” of his house and “some sitting around at the piano”.
So what did they write?
The song was ‘Break Away’, a wistful mid-tempo tune peppered with the lush harmonies typical of The Beach Boys and some soaring Brian Wilson vocals. Indeed, this was one of the last times Brian would manage to hit the heights on a lead vocal before his mental illness and physical deterioration took its toll on his singing.
Even though he co-wrote the entire song with his son, Murry Wilson asked not to be credited directly as a songwriter. Instead, he suggested the pseudonym Reggie Dunbar. “He didn’t want anyone to know that he wrote it with me,” Brian explained. Apparently, his father wasn’t over his expulsion from the band’s management team.
Still, he was happy to share a song idea with his eldest child, as they were watching TV together. Contrary to earlier accounts he’d given, in 2021 Brian also claimed he “was still friends” with his dad at the time.
Perhaps he was in a particularly forgiving mood. Or the hostility he’d faced from his father earlier the decade really had subsided. “He was a good buddy,” Brian added. And not a bad songwriting partner, either, it seems.
