Brian Wilson, the musical mastermind behind the Beach Boys, died at the age of 82, his family announced Wednesday. Earlier this week came news of the passing of Sly Stone, 82, whose startling originality combining elements of gospel, rock and soul enthralled audiences and fellow artists alike in the late ’60s and early ’70s recordings of Sly and the Family Stone. Both men were bona fide musical giants.
Though their music was similar only in being groundbreaking, Wilson and Stone’s lives followed similar, tragic narrative arcs. Both reached artistic peaks achieved by few others in pop music over periods of just a few years. Both were masters of the recording studio at a time when most artists left that part of their work to producers and focused on live performance. And both suffered from the ravages of drug abuse and mental illness for much of the remainder of their lives, making their many fans mourn for what more they could have offered.
But what they created in their primes served as inspiration for legions of artists to come.
Prince, Public Enemy and OutKast counted Sly Stone as a major influence. Wilson’s lush, deceptively sophisticated harmonies and instrumentation were foundational for too many orchestral pop artists to count, and thanks to his epic rivalry with the Beatles in the mid-’60s, they pushed each other to greater heights. The Beatles’ “Rubber Soul” stirred Wilson to create his masterpiece, the Beach Boys’ “Pet Sounds,” which then inspired the Beatles’ “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.”
Speaking of “Rubber Soul,” Wilson told the Tribune a little over a decade ago, “I was so blown away by that damn album that I went and wrote (“God Only Knows.”) Paul McCartney subsequently called Wilson’s work of genius possibly the greatest song ever written.
Wilson set out to top the Fab Four yet again with what would have been “Smile,” but threw in the towel on that legendary “lost album” amid intra-band acrimony and debilitating mental health issues.
Stone and Wilson both were children of California, but we choose to remember the brief but fascinating role of west suburban St. Charles in Wilson’s life. Having remarried and feeling revived, Wilson moved to the suburb in the late 1990s to live near producer Joe Thomas, who worked on Wilson’s 1998 comeback album, “Imagination.” Wilson, an iconic Southern Californian, didn’t learn to love Midwestern winters and in a few years’ time moved back to where he once belonged.
But we like to think our slightly less glamorous region played a significant role in Wilson’s latter-years career resurgence that followed from what we’ll call “the St. Charles years,” topped by his 2004 celebrated re-creation with a stellar band of his vision for “Smile.”
God only knows what we’d do without the immense musical legacies Wilson and Stone left us this week.
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