(Credit: Far Out / Harry Chase / Alamy)
Sat 16 August 2025 16:30, UK
Brian Wilson was a genius.
By the time of his sad passing in 2025, his genius was an undeniable fact that no one would argue with. But at the start, when he was still new on the scene and The Beach Boys were slowly evolving, Wilson was an underrated gem that took people a minute to appreciate. That was Paul Simon’s experience.
Admittedly, when The Beach Boys first emerged, there was an air of lameness about them. Still today, if new listeners come in at the wrong songs first, getting caught up on tracks like ‘Cuckoo Clock’ or ‘Surf Jam’, it would be easy to make the band and Wilson seem like nothing but a corny, commercial slice of an idealised California.
That was their original image: they were the new kings of the radio, the new all-American wonderkids singing songs about taking their “best girl” out, surfing with their friends, or having good old-fashioned party-hops with their buddies. It was a sanitised vision that was always clean-cut, straddling the worlds of mainstream music and youth culture. They never really had any edges to them.
They were also aggressively West Coast. With almost all of their earliest releases tethered to the setting of the beach, despite the fact that only one band member could even surf, The Beach Boys alienated audiences in other States, and Paul Simon was an East Coaster through and through, unfamiliar with the lifestyle that they enshrined in saccharine song.
Born and raised in Queens, New York, Simon was perhaps the furthest point from The Beach Boys’ sun-tanned energy. If Simon had ever wanted to relate, the closest he would’ve been able to get would have been a sunny day at Rockaway Beach. He admitted his bias outright, saying, “I didn’t pay a lot of attention to Brian for a while because The Beach Boys’ subject matter was so West Coast.”
But then things began to change. As the band evolved beyond that more cliché, caricature of an image, Wilson’s songwriting went far beyond that initial, location-specific subject matter. It got deeper and hazier, more influenced by universal emotions or by psychedelic youth culture as they integrated into the counterculture.
Around that time, Simon started paying attention. “Then he got into this really touching music with ‘In My Room’, and ‘Good Vibrations’ was amazing,” he said, picking a song from both sides of the spectrum, from an emotional ballad to a spirally drug song.
He had the moment that so many music makers had: he woke up and realised that Wilson was someone else, doing something special. “The melodies are so beautiful, almost perfect. I began to realise he was one of the most gifted writers of our generation,” he said, slowly starting to understand that he’d been underappreciating a truly great talent for too long.
Overlooking art due to pre-conceived notions is an easy mistake to make, and one that so many artists and listeners at the time had to come around to. It took the band a minute to shake off that early image and to get themselves taken seriously as an outfit of genuine pioneering talent and not just music for squares to listen to. But once the sand was shaken off them and their evolution kept rolling into more and more interesting places, the world paid attention and adopted them as an all-time favourite.
Simon concluded, “Brian Wilson’s music has made a lot of people happy for a long time. I love his music.”
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