"Brian Wilson is a genius" is a line that became part of a media campaign spearheaded in 1966 by the Beatles' former press officer Derek Taylor, who was then employed as the Beach Boys' publicist. Although there are earlier documented expressions of the statement, Taylor frequently called Brian Wilson a "genius" – a belief Taylor sincerely held; – as part of an effort to rebrand the Beach Boys and further legitimize Wilson as a serious artist on a par with the Beatles and Bob Dylan.
With the aid of numerous associates in the music industry, Taylor's promotional efforts were integral to the success of the band's 1966 album Pet Sounds in England. By the end of the year, an NME reader's poll placed Wilson as the fourth-ranked "World Music Personality"—about 1,000 votes ahead of Bob Dylan and 500 behind John Lennon. However, the hype generated for the group's intended follow-up album, Smile, bore a number of unintended consequences for the Beach Boys' reputation and internal dynamic. Wilson ultimately scrapped Smile and reduced his involvement with the group.
Wilson later said that the "genius" branding intensified the pressures of his career and led him to become "a victim of the recording industry". As he shied away from the industry in the years afterward, his ensuing legend originated the trope of the "reclusive genius" among studio-oriented musical artists and later inspired comparisons to other musicians such as Pink Floyd's Syd Barrett and My Bloody Valentine's Kevin Shields.
Background and origins
Brian Wilson wrote the majority of the Beach Boys' hits and was one of the first recording artists allowed to act as an entrepreneurial producer, a position he attained thanks to his immediate success with the band after their signing to Capitol Records in 1962. Wilson's talents inspired a number of Los Angeles music industry figures to refer to him as a genius. By early 1966, he wanted to move the group beyond their surf and hot rod aesthetic, an image that he believed was outdated and distracting the public from his talents as a producer and songwriter.; In Mike Love's description, Wilson sought recognition from the countercultural tastemakers, or the "hip intelligentsia". Wilson later reflected that "legends grew about ... our music ... and I was getting fascinated with the fact that I was becoming famous and there was an interest in my style of life."
In the meantime, the Beatles' former press agent Derek Taylor had left the UK and moved to California, where he started his own public relations company. By 1966, he had quickly assimilated into what was then an expanding coterie of Wilson's worldly-minded friends, musicians, mystics, and business advisers. In the description of music journalist Nick Kent, "Derek Taylor was at that time the single most prestigious figure with whom to have one's name linked in matters of promotion. ... he knew the Beatles and had actually worked with them and Brian Epstein. There could be no more spectacular recommendation."
Van Dyke Parks, Wilson's lyricist at the time, claimed to have introduced Taylor to Wilson, while biographer David Leaf wrote that it was Bruce Johnston who "set up a meeting for Derek with Brian." The Beach Boys began employing Taylor as their publicist in March 1966, two months before the release of their album Pet Sounds, with the group paying him a salary of $750 a month (equivalent to $ in ). According to Carl Wilson, although the band were aware that trends and the music industry were shifting, "Capitol had a very set picture of us", and the band were unhappy with the way the label promoted them circa Pet Sounds.
According to Taylor, the "genius" promotion came from Brian discussing how "he thought he was better than most other people believed him to be". Taylor recalled one conversation with Brian and Dennis Wilson in which the brothers denied ever writing "surf music or songs about cars or that the Beach Boys had been involved in any way with the surf and drag fads ... they would not concede." In Taylor's view, the Beach Boys' clean-cut "all-American" image, instigated by former manager and the Wilsons' father Murry, had "done them a hell of a lot of damage. Brian, in particular, suffered." He said that the prevailing attitude was that "Brian Wilson was not supposed to be strange", even though that quality was seen as normal for Hollywood people.
After becoming aware of how highly regarded Wilson was to musician friends such as Parks and singer Danny Hutton, Taylor wondered why it was not the mainstream consensus, and began "putting it around, making almost a campaign out of it".; To update the band's image with firsthand accounts of Wilson's latest activities, Taylor's prestige was crucial in offering a credible perspective to those outside Wilson's inner circle. He became intent on promoting Wilson as an exceptional "genius" among pop artists, a belief that he genuinely held.;
Contemporary press Pet Sounds and "Good Vibrations" One of the earliest instances of Taylor announcing that Wilson was a genius was in his 1966 article titled "Brian Wilson: Whizzkid Behind the Beach Boys". More references to the "genius" rhetoric appeared in Melody Maker and New Musical Express, specifically the articles "Brian, Pop Genius!" by Don Traynor (May 21, 1966), "Brian Wilson's Puppets?" by Alan Walsh (November 12, 1966), and "Brian: Loved or Loathed Genius" by Tracy Thomas (January 28, 1967). In Taylor's writings, Wilson was presented as a pop luminary on the level of esteemed contemporaries such as John Lennon, Paul McCartney, and Bob Dylan, as well as classical figures such as Bach, Beethoven, and Mozart.; What follows is a typical excerpt by Taylor, identified as "'60s Hollywood reporter Jerry Fineman", and contains some exaggerated claims:
Pet Sounds had been widely influential and raised the band's prestige as an innovative rock group. Taylor is widely recognized as instrumental in the album's success in the UK due to his longstanding connections with the Beatles and other industry figures. This was at a contrast to its underwhelming sales in the U.S., where its promotion was no different from earlier Beach Boys offerings and relied on the group's familiar public image instead of rebranding. Although most of the influential writers who had acknowledged the cultural value of Bob Dylan's work were not prepared to devote similar attention the Beach Boys, as biographer Peter Ames Carlin writes, "many musicians [in America] understood the significance of Brian's achievement on the album, as did a few members of the small but increasingly influential band of journalists and intellectuals who had begun to apply serious analytical thought to rock music."
In May, Taylor and Bruce Johnston traveled to London and arranged listening parties for the album, inviting prestigious musicians (including Lennon and McCartney) and rock journalists. These journalists subsequently helped promulgate the idea of Wilson as a "pop genius" and of the album's forward-thinking aesthetic. Much of the British and American press also focused on the disparity between Wilson as a "studio mastermind" and the Beach Boys' stage performances. Rolling Stone founding editor Jann Wenner later reported that British fans identified the Beach Boys as "years ahead" of the Beatles and declared Wilson a "genius". Musicians who praised Wilson on record included Lennon, Eric Clapton of Cream, Rolling Stones producer Andrew Loog Oldham, Spencer Davis of the Spencer Davis Group, and Mick Jagger of the Rolling Stones. Clapton told Melody Maker that "Brian Wilson is without doubt a pop genius."
Throughout the summer of 1966, Wilson concentrated on finishing the group's next single, "Good Vibrations". Additional writers were brought in as witnesses to his Columbia, Gold Star, and Western recording sessions, who also accompanied him outside the studio. Among the crowd: Richard Goldstein from the Village Voice, Jules Siegel from The Saturday Evening Post, and Paul Williams, the 18-year-old founder and editor of Crawdaddy! Released on October 10, 1966, "Good Vibrations" was the Beach Boys' third U.S. number-one hit, reaching the top of the charts in December, and became their first number one in Britain. One headline proclaimed that the Beach Boys' British distributor EMI Records were giving the band the "biggest campaign since the Beatles".
A Los Angeles Times West Magazine piece by Tom Nolan focused on the contradictions between Wilson's unassuming "suburban" demeanor and the reputation that preceded him (noting "he doesn't look at all like the seeming leader of a potentially-revolutionary movement in pop music"). Asked about the future of pop music, Wilson responded, "White spirituals, I think that's what we're going to hear. Songs of faith." At the end of 1966, NME conducted a reader's poll that placed Wilson as the fourth-ranked "World Music Personality"—about 1,000 votes ahead of Bob Dylan and 500 behind John Lennon. The Beach Boys themselves were crowned the top vocal group, ahead of the Beatles. Ringo Starr remarked, "We're all four fans of the Beach Boys. Maybe we voted for them."
Smile and cancellation
Wilson declared in a late 1966 interview that the Beach Boys' next album, Smile, would surpass all of their previous recording efforts. In April 1967, CBS aired the Leonard Bernstein-hosted television special Inside Pop: The Rock Revolution, where Wilson premiered the unreleased song "Surf's Up". The next month, Taylor announced that Smile had been "scrapped", and the music press subsequently amplified their romanticized depictions of Wilson.
In October, Cheetah magazine published "Goodbye Surfing, Hello God!", a memoir written by Jules Siegel. It included a tongue-in-cheek reference to the widespread "genius" rhetoric, with Siegel pondering the question of whether Wilson was "a genius, Genius, or GENIUS". Siegel covered Wilson's struggle to overcome the band's surfing image in the U.S. and credited the collapse of Smile to "an obsessive cycle of creation and destruction that threatened not only his career and his fortune but also his marriage, his friendships, his relationships with the Beach Boys and, some of his closest friends worried, his mind".
According to academic Kirk Curnett, Siegel's article was "the most instrumental in establishing Brian as mercurial in the broader senses of that term: as an eccentric and erratic artist perilously pursuing the muse instead of blithely serving the masses". Also discussing the article, professor Andrew Flory wrote:
Impact on Wilson's withdrawal
Wilson later said that he had run out of ideas by 1967 "in a conventional sense" and was "about ready to die". He also expressed a dissatisfaction with being branded a genius: "Once you've been labeled as a genius, you have to continue it or your name becomes mud. I am a victim of the recording industry." Parks echoed that Taylor's line "forced Brian Wilson to have to continuously prove that he's a genius". Mike Love said that Wilson turned to drugs as a way to expand his creative conceptions and deliver on the comparisons he had received with the Beatles and Mozart.