The Cruel Stage Father Of The Beach Boys
Brian Wilson needed years of therapy and professional help to process the trauma of his abusive childhood.
Perhaps no other band in American history has embodied California’s sun-soaked fun on the surf than the Beach Boys. The group’s harmonic ballads epitomized leisurely American culture and bridged the gap between white picket fences of the 1950s and 1960s counterculture.
Tragically, the lead musician behind that vision came from a more troubling background.
Grammy Award-winning singer-songwriter Brian Wilson and his two brothers Dennis and Carl, who made up the bulk of the Beach Boys, were first pushed into music by their father, Murry Wilson, a salesman by day and songwriter by night.
Murry Wilson methods of getting his boys to perform for him were cruel and obscene — and he once forced Brian Wilson to defecate on a newspaper in the kitchen before making him clean it up.
“My dad was violent. He was cruel,” recalled Wilson. “Whenever I got afraid, he would yell at me or slap me or call me a pussy. When he didn’t put his hands on us, he tried to scare us in other ways. He would take out his glass eye and make us look into the space where they eye used to be.”
Michael Ochs Archives/Getty ImagesBrian Wilson’s father and the Beach Boys’ manager, Murry Wilson, regularly beat his child and tormented him into adulthood.
Wilson said the abuse continued as his mother looked on and Wilson occasionally even provoked him. “I once took a shit on a plate and brought it to my dad,” he said.
While Brian Wilson and his bandmates would go on to have global success, the traumatized rockstar began to self-medicate with marijuana, cocaine, and LSD. In addition to the physical abuse he endured at his father’s hand, Wilson also claimed to have experienced pangs of anxiety and heard screaming voices in his mind since he was 14 years old.
He later attempted to silence these voices through years of substance abuse and quack doctors who exploited his vulnerable position. Though his career eventually slumped under these pressures, Wilson ultimately found a professional doctor to help him, wrote his memoir, and regained the confidence to go back on stage.
