At 25 I turned out the light
Cause I couldn’t handle the glare in my
tired eyes
But now I’m back, drawing shades of kind
blue skies.

(From “Going Home,” By Brian Wilson and Scott Bennett, from the album, That Lucky Old Sun)

Early in his recent memoir, entitled I Am Brian Wilson, the enigmatic Beach Boy draws attention to the single most important person to impact his early life: his father, Murray Wilson. Though he is long dead, Wilson says that even now he hears the voice of his dad in his head: “Your music is no damned good, Brian. Get to work, Brian. You’re falling behind, Brian.” Time and again in the pages that follow he circles his father, alternating between love and appreciation and revulsion at his abuse.

Brian Wilson is 75, and yet he is still deeply impacted by his father. He says that “he stayed one of the most important people in my life, in good ways and bad. He could be generous and guide me toward great things, but he could also be brutal and belittle me and sometimes even make me regret that I was even alive.” Recalling a song that his father wrote when Brian was in school, he says that “[s]ometimes in school I would think about it and get tears in my eyes. People ask what made it a good song. He did. My dad did.” He loved his dad. He hated what he did.

In an extended reflection, Brian says he wants to try and explain his dad, yet it’s obvious that he is till grappling with how to understand him. He talks about how his dad gave him and his brothers the gift of music. But he also “took things away, by being rough and demanding.” He “yelled at me all the time and made me nervous,” he says, and “grabbed us by the arms and shoved us and hit us with hands that were sometimes open and sometimes even closed.” And yet, in all that he says about his dad, it is obvious that Brian loved him, appreciated him, and, perhaps more than anything, deeply desired his approval. Indeed, Brian’s adulation of producer Phil Spector may also reflect his desire for the approval of a father-figure. (Spector was not accommodating.) Even the psycho-therapist Eugene Landry, who likely saved Brian’s life only to assert an excessive control over it, may have been helped by Wilson’s need for a father-figure.

On one of the tracks on the Pet Sounds Sessions boxed set, you can listen in on a recording session where Murray Wilson harangues Brian. To visualize it further, watch the critically acclaimed biopic about Wilson, Love and Mercy. It is a fair rendering of a life impacted by not only his father but drug and alcohol abuse, mental illness, and his once controlling psychotherapist, Eugene Landy. And yet it’s difficult not to conclude how Brian Wilson would have been given more resources to deal with his demons had his father been at his side.

Reading it now makes me thankful for my own father, burdens me for the father-absence that so many children now experience, and prompts a prayer for Brian Wilson, that he will before the end of his life understand how great is his Father in Heaven’s love for him, how far He has come for him, and what great music remains for him to write in eternity. God only knows.

[For a thorough and well-documented bio of Wilson, I recommend Peter Ames Carlin’s 2006 book, Catch a Wave: The Rise, Fall & Redemption of the Beach Boys’ Brian Wilson. Follow that with Wilson’s own 2016 memoir, I Am Brian Wilson. His ghostwriter, Ben Greenman, does an excellent job of capturing Wilson’s voice, his child-like expressions of wonder, simple language, and questions, like, when he reflects on his brothers’ deaths, “they’re gone, and i don’t know where they’re gone." Finally, cap it with a viewing of the 2015 biopic, Love and Mercy.]