Brian Wilson: Long Promised Road makes for touching viewing

Brian Wilson may have been the driving force behind The Beach Boys and a genius of popular music, but he never had the swagger of those lads from Liverpool who were his only serious rivals for pop masterdom at the beginning of the 1960s.

In an early scene in Brent Wilson’s new documentary Brian Wilson: Long Promised Road, an interviewer from that febrile time tries to analyse the internal dynamics of the group — the original 1961 line-up included Brian’s brothers Dennis and Carl, their cousin Mike Love, and a friend called Al Jardine — following their string of runaway hit singles.

“Who determines what will be done next?” he asks the striped-shirted band. The tall, awkward one leans forward to reply: “I guess I do. I don’t know. I write the songs and produce them.”

If Wilson was trying to play down the stress that was already palpable in his troubled features, he wasn’t fooling anybody — least of all himself. By 1965 he had decided not to keep up the gruelling touring schedule, and stepped back into a role as composer and producer. Those early songs, urgent odes to cars and girls, awash with hopeful harmonies, soon began to acquire musical, if not lyrical, gravitas.

But complexity came at a price. By the time of 1966’s “Good Vibrations”, Wilson’s ambitions were already stretched, demanding that the song be recorded in four different studios. “Well, each studio is different,” explained the composer with disarming simplicity. “He had an orchestra in his head,” says Elton John in the film. “The Beatles had George Martin to do it for them. But Brian did it himself.”

The well-trodden story of Wilson’s unravelling — he began to suffer auditory hallucinations in his early twenties and was later diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder, which he continues to have — is handled with admirable sensitivity in the film, which is largely composed of conversations between Wilson and Rolling Stone editor Jason Fine as they drive along the Californian coastline.

Dudamel compares Wilson’s songs to those of Mahler and Schumann, while producer Don Was plays the ethereal opening to ‘God Only Knows’

Fine gained Wilson’s confidence when he wrote an article about the musician’s improbable comeback in the 1990s, and his quiet, reassuring style allows Wilson to reflect on his life as they listen to music on the highway. It doesn’t always make for comfortable viewing. On two separate occasions, as they approach a venue that Wilson knows will make him “scared”, he asks Fine to play the group’s 1976 hit “It’s OK”. The song’s supportive vibe (“It’s that time again/to shed your load, hit the road on the run again”) duly works its magic.

There are several moments when Wilson comes close to tears. In one of these, as he listens to a playback in the studio, we hear a recording of his abusive father Murry, the band’s first manager, bullying him and his brothers Dennis and Carl: “You guys think you’re good? Can we hear a chord? Just a chord? Like we used to?” So much for complexity. Visits to his brothers’ homes — both have died — are fraught with anxiety.

These disquieting scenes are intercut with testaments to Wilson’s musical prowess, for which there was presumably a queue of volunteers wishing to contribute. Elton John and Bruce Springsteen act as chief cheerleaders here (although Paul McCartney, rival, friend and mutual admirer, is a conspicuous absence), while the Venezuelan conductor Gustavo Dudamel compares Wilson’s songs to those of Mahler and Schumann. Producer Don Was sits before a mixing desk, plays the ethereal opening to “God Only Knows” and surrenders to the song’s effrontery. “That’s a banjo, huh? It’s a banjo!”

Wilson’s creative peak came with the release of 1966’s Pet Sounds, conceived and written in a sandbox at his Laurel Canyon home, in which he had also installed an Arabian tent and eight Tiffany lamps, hanging from the ceiling. “I smoked grass, [and] ate peanut butter and jelly sandwiches,” he tells Fine. “You know, young and rich.”

His next project for the group, the Smile album, was a stretch too far, and was abandoned. “We thought it was a little ahead of its time,” he says philosophically. (It was revived and finally released, in extended form, in 2011.) Wilson spent the following decades wrestling with drug addiction, mismanagement, litigation. These are sketched over, while Wilson himself has seemingly not a mean word to say about any of it, not even his controversial therapist and business counsellor Eugene Landy, with whom he was associated throughout the 1980s. “He was rough,” says Wilson, almost cheerfully. “He made me eat spaghetti off the floor.”

If he is able to put all that behind him, it is surely because of the remarkable resumption of his career in the new century. I was among those who witnessed his performance, armed with a whip-smart new band, of Pet Sounds at the Royal Festival Hall in 2002. His voice was pitchy, his stage presence occasionally unsettling, but I have never felt a wave of love in a concert hall such as that which greeted him on that night.

Wilson has been feeding off that energy ever since and has a new, and wholesome, addiction: touring. It seems the whole world wants to hear Pet Sounds and the resurrected Smile. (“Ahead of its time” seems about right.) His ingenuousness remains startling: “God Only Knows” gets a “standing ovation every time”, he tells Fine with an air of vague surprise. He recounts the story of his redemption with good humour, as he shares Cobb salads and ice cream with Fine in a local deli.

“I haven’t had a friend to talk to in three years,” says Wilson at one point, and the two of them perform a heart-melting, slightly tremulous high-five at the end of their meal.

Another drive, another conversation, provides the film with its most poignant moment, when Fine tells Wilson that a former collaborator and friend, Jack Rieley, has died. It is news to Wilson, and there is a long pause. “That absolutely broke my heart,” he says finally, and Fine apologises for breaking the news.

Wilson points to the music player and says: “Play ‘It’s OK’. By The Beach Boys.”

‘Brian Wilson: Long Promised Road’ is released in UK cinemas on January 21

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