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"Brian Wilson is a genius" was a journalistic tagline created by English publicist Derek Taylor in 1966, who was then employed by American rock band the Beach Boys. It was part of a larger campaign he developed to revamp the band's outdated surfer image and promote Brian Wilson's then-unheralded reputation as the "genius" behind the group. By the end of the year, 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 campaign ultimately bore a number of unintended consequences for the band's reputation and internal dynamic, and the hype generated by the campaign has been credited as a contributing factor in Wilson's professional and psychological decline.

The promotion coincided with the releases of the Pet Sounds album (May 1966) and "Good Vibrations" single (October 1966), as well as the Smile recording sessions (a project that was abandoned in 1967). During this period, Wilson sought the approval of what was known as the "hip intelligentsia" of the 1960s counterculture. To this end, Taylor wrote columns for various American and British publications, where he compared Wilson to classical figures like Bach, Beethoven, and Mozart. The campaign succeeded in spreading a wider recognition of Wilson's talents, but he felt more pressured to live up to the public's high expectations, while relationships with his band and family became strained. He turned to drugs to expand his creative conceptions, which bandmate Mike Love said became his undoing.

Taylor and the Beach Boys
Brian Wilson was responsible for writing or co-writing the Beach Boys' string of hits in the 1960s, which inspired a number of Los Angeles music industry figures to refer to him as a "genius". Biographer Peter Ames Carlin writes that session musicians who participated on Wilson's productions were "awestruck" by his musical abilities. Drummer Hal Blaine stated: "We all studied in conservatories; we were trained musicians. We thought it was a fluke at first, but then we realized Brian was writing these incredible songs. This was not just a young kid writing about high school and surfing." By early 1966, Wilson wanted to move the Beach Boys beyond their surf and hot rod aesthetic, an image that he believed was outdated. Instead, in Mike Love's description, Wilson sought recognition from the countercultural tastemakers, or the "hip intelligentsia". Collaborator Van Dyke Parks remembered: "Brian sought me out ... At that time, people who experimented with psychedelics—no matter who they were—were viewed as 'enlightened people,' and Brian sought out the enlightened people."

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. From 1965 to 1968, he provided publicity for groups such as the Byrds, Buffalo Springfield, Captain Beefheart and His Magic Band, the Beau Brummels, and Paul Revere and the Raiders. According to music critic Richie Unterberger, through his time working in Hollywood, Taylor "became, probably, the most famous rock publicist of the mid-'60s". Parks introduced Wilson to Taylor, and he was quickly assimilated into what was then an expanding coterie of Wilson's worldly-minded friends, musicians, mystics, and business advisers. Taylor later recall one conversation with Brian and his brother Dennis Wilson in which they denied ever writing "surf music or songs about cars [nor] that the Beach Boys had [ever] been involved in any way with the surf and drag fads ... they would not concede."

May 1966 – April 1967
Taylor started working as a publicist for the Beach Boys sometime before their album Pet Sounds was released in May 1966. He recalled that the "genius" promotion originated "because Brian told me that he thought he was better than most other people believed him to be". After becoming aware of how highly regarded Wilson was to musician friends like Parks and singer Danny Hutton and, wondering why it was not the mainstream consensus, Taylor 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. His campaign promoted Wilson as an exceptional "genius" among pop artists, an idea that Taylor personally believed in, and thus swept away the band's outdated surfer image. To this end, the Beach Boys paid him a salary of $750 a month (equivalent to $0 in ). He performed his services by promoting Wilson in numerous columns he wrote for various American and British publications. Wilson was presented as a pop luminary on the level of esteemed contemporaries like John Lennon, Paul McCartney, and Bob Dylan, as well as classical figures like Bach, Beethoven, and Mozart. An example of a typical profile by Taylor, which contains some exaggerated claims:

"This is Brian Wilson. He is a Beach Boy. Some say he is more. Some say he is a Beach Boy and a genius. This twenty-three-year-old powerhouse not only sings with the famous group, he writes the words and music then arranges, engineers, and produces the disc... Even the packaging and design on the record jacket is controlled by the talented Mr. Wilson. He has often been called "genius," and it’s a burden."

Pet Sounds became widely influential upon its release and raised the band's prestige as one of the most innovative rock groups. According to author Steven Gaines, Taylor is widely recognized as instrumental in the album's success due to his longstanding connections with the Beatles and other industry figures in the UK. Rolling Stone founding editor Jann Wenner later reported that fans in the UK identified the Beach Boys as "years ahead" of the Beatles and declared Wilson a "genius". Wilson answered his praises by saying: "I'm not a genius, I'm just a hard working guy." Throughout the summer of 1966, he 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 US number-one hit after "I Get Around" (1964) and "Help Me, Rhonda" (1965), reaching the top of the Billboard Hot 100 in December, and became their first number one in Britain.

As quoted in interviews, Wilson declared that the group's next album Smile (originally called Dumb Angel) was to be "a teenage symphony to God", and that it "will be as much an improvement over [Pet] Sounds as that was over Summer Days." 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"). When asked where he believed music would go, 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 teen magazine Hit Parader predicted that Smile and the forthcoming single "Heroes and Villains" would make the Beach Boys "the greatest group in the world ... [taking] over where The Beatles left off."

"Goodbye Surfing, Hello God!"
In October 1967, 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 "a genius, Genius, or GENIUS". Siegel extensively discussed Wilson's struggle to overcome the band's surfing image in America 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".

On the subject of Siegel's article, professor Andrew Flory wrote:

"Siegel greatly romanticized Wilson and Smile, echoing and fostering the pervasive audience view of Wilson as a tortured genius ... Depicting Wilson in decline, with the non-release of Smile as the most obvious byproduct of mental and creative psychosis, achieved two important goals. First, Siegel gave rock fans a manner in which to view Wilson as hip, helping countercultural audiences traverse the social chasm between "Fun, Fun, Fun" and "Good Vibrations." But more importantly, Siegel's article was one of many from the time that venerated Smile as a relic of this hipness, intensifying audience interest in the unavailable work."

Reactions from the band and rock critics
Wilson's bandmates and father Murry resented that he was singled out as a "genius". In a 1966 article that asked if "the Beach Boys rely too much on sound genius Brian", his brother Carl rejected the notion, explaining that although Brian was the most responsible for their music, every member of the group contributed ideas. Mike Love recalled, in his 2016 memoir, that "[a]s far as I was concerned, Brian was a genius, deserving of that recognition. But the rest of us were seen as nameless components in Brian's music machine ... This frustrated all of us but infuriated Carl ... It didn't feel to us as if we were just riding on Brian's coattails." On the other hand, Dennis steadfastly defended Brian's stature in the band, stating "Brian Wilson is the Beach Boys. He is the band. We're his fucking messengers. He is all of it. Period. We're nothing. He's everything." Writing in a 1971 article, Nolan said that at a certain point, Wilson "made it very clear" to then-business partner David Anderle "that it was always going to be the Beach Boys, that Brian wouldn't do it alone ... the Beach Boys ... [were] his family."

The press's romanticized portrayals of Wilson were amplified by Taylor's announcement that Smile was "scrapped" in May 1967. Later that month, Taylor terminated his employment with the group in order to focus his attention on organizing the June 16–18 Monterey Pop Festival, an event the Beach Boys declined to headline at the last minute. Their cancellation was heavily criticized and came to be seen as an admission of the band's failure to integrate with the "new music", resulting in a cataclysmic blow to their reputation. In 1968, Jazz & Pop's Gene Sculatti wrote that Wilson was "currently at the center of an intense contemporary rock controversy, involving the academic 'rock as art' critic-intellectuals, the AM-tuned teenies, and all the rest of us in between. ... the California sextet is simultaneously hailed as genius incarnate and derided as the archetypical pop music copouts". On December 14, 1967, Wenner printed an influential article in Rolling Stone that denounced the "genius" label, which he called a "promotional shuck" and an attempt to compare Wilson with the Beatles. He wrote: "Wilson believed [that he was a genius] and felt obligated to make good of it. It left Wilson in a bind; a bind which meant that a year elapsed between Pet Sounds and their latest release, Smiley Smile. ... The Beach Boys are just one prominent example of a group that has gotten hung up on trying to catch The Beatles. It's a pointless pursuit." Subsequently, many discerning rock fans began excluding the group from "serious consideration".

Effect on Wilson's decline
Wilson later said that, by 1967, he had run out of ideas "in a conventional sense", and that he was "about ready to die". He also expressed his 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 said that Taylor's line "forced Brian Wilson to have to continuously prove that he's a genius and not just a lucky guy with a tremendous amount of talent and a lot of people collaborating beautifully around him." To expand his creative conceptions, Wilson turned to drugs, which Love says ultimately became his undoing: "It was hard enough to match the Beatles, but now he had to keep up with Mozart?"

After 1967's Wild Honey, Wilson relinquished his creative hold on the Beach Boys.} From 1968 onward, his songwriting output declined substantially, but the public narrative of "Brian-as-leader" continued. Following the 1969 termination of their contract to Capitol Records, the band's new contract with Reprise stipulated Brian's proactive involvement with the band in all albums. Producer Terry Melcher attributed Wilson's diminished output to being aware of "his reputation, so he makes a lot of unfinished records; sometimes, I feel that he feels that he's peaked and does not want to put his stamp on records so that peers will have a Brian Wilson track to criticize."

By the 1970s, fans and detractors began speaking of Wilson as a burned-out acid casualty. Carlin says that Wilson's "public suffering" in the 1970s effectively "transformed him from a musical figure into a cultural one". Wilson did not attract the level of press attention he achieved in the 1960s until a new marketing campaign was devised in 1976. This time, the tagline "Brian's Back!" was intended to promote Wilson's return as an active producer and touring member of the band. It was the first of many "Brian's back" campaigns, and in the ensuing decades, the announcement was repeated on numerous occasions in different contexts.

"Genius" as hyperbole


Wilson said: "I didn't think I was a genius. I thought I had talent. But I didn't think I was a genius." Wilson was formally diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder and mild manic depression. When asked if he disliked being known as a "crazy guy" who writes "crazy songs", he replied: "Yeah, I do. ... I think it's exaggerated. It's going an extra 20 yards." C.W. Mahoney of The Washington Free Beacon characterized Wilson's appeal to the millennial indie music landscape as "a Daniel Johnston who made listenable music". He opined that Wilson's reputed genius "is evidence of our obsession with childlike innocence and the victory of boring poptimism", adding that Pet Sounds may be "great" but is not as sophisticated as "what [Frank] Zappa was doing in 1966, to say nothing of Miles [Davis]". According to writer Carl Wilson (no relation to Brian's brother): "Critics like to squabble over which artists are overrated or underrated. But Wilson defies those categories entirely. ... Instead of the overrated, call [him part of] the overstocked." His belief is that the "extravagant praise" for Brian is partly the result of a "retroactive overcorrection to The Beach Boys’ slighting by the late-1960s counterculture". In Carl's view,

"The word "genius" always risks estranging its subject from their cultural context. There were many influences on Wilson’s signature style ... Wilson’s ability to draw on and synthesise all these influences, while keeping pace with competitors such as The Beatles and The Byrds, was impressive but it was not out of nowhere, and it was hardly unique among musicians. What made it more dramatic was that it came in the person of a white Christian kid from the California suburbs instead of Jewish New Yorkers like Leiber and Stoller or the Detroit soul musicians of Motown, cranking into high gear around the same time. Combining clean-cut, boy-next-door appeal with aesthetic forward-thinking was what made Wilson a real anomaly in US pop-culture history. And in that myth was also the seed of his downfall, as creativity and conformity collided."

Music writer Richard Goldstein related his impression of Wilson based on a meeting in 1967: "I've read monographs on the Beach Boys that describe Wilson as a self-conscious artist, fully aware of musical history. That wasn't my impression. He came across as a typical rock autodidact, deeply insecure about his creative instincts, terrified that the songs he was working on were too arty to sell." According to Van Dyke Parks, Wilson was a highly innovative songwriter, but it was a "mistake" to call him a genius. In Parks' opinion, Harry Nilsson "was truly a genius—the smartest guy I ever met in the music business. ... He followed his own nose without any sense of apology, reserving even the right to be wrong because he knew that it was necessary to keep that right to reach any height." In early 1999, HBO commissioned an interview of Wilson by the Flaming Lips' Wayne Coyne for an episode of Reverb which never aired. Following the interview, Coyne felt that Wilson surrounded himself with yes-men, which he found "off-putting at times", and that "later on, I was like, 'Well, if he's such a genius, why can't he talk?'" Coyne added: "I'm not in contempt of him, though. I just hate that if someone is drug-damaged, or eccentric, or possibly mad, people will let them shit all over themselves thinking, 'Isn't he cool?'"

Wilson as "tragic genius"


In his article for the BBC's website, journalist Carl Wilson writes that the image of Brian as "tragic genius" represents the pop-world equivalent of "what the tragic genius of Vincent Van Gogh is to modern art: a parable of sensitivity sacrificed to cruel indifference. ... For decades that lore has echoed through new records and retrospective box sets, countless books and essays, documentaries, TV movies, fictional accounts, ... and tribute songs". He adds that the story behind the legend features its own antagonist, Mike Love, who is known for his distaste of the Smile album and for urging Wilson not to "fuck with the formula". Love called the quote the "most famous thing I've ever said, even though I never said it." He wrote that it crystallized a reductive "morality tale" that positions Wilson as "the tormented genius who was undone by his own family", a theme which appears throughout the writings of Wilson's "awestruck biographers".

Author Luis Sanchez cites David Leaf's 1978 book The Beach Boys and the California Myth as the first work that "put the 'Brian Wilson is a genius' trope into perspective", adding that "One compelling aspect of Leaf's story is its dynamic of good guys and bad guys." According to music critic Richie Unterberger, the book examined the behind-the-scenes tensions and family history that had never been covered before. He adds that "If there is a flaw to Leaf's writing, it's that its praise of Brian Wilson is often unabashed, and his dominant creative role in the group arguably overstated." Sanchez concurs that the book takes on an oversimplified view: "The tendency of Leaf's particular mythology ... is to settle on the notion that The Beach Boys' music is meaningful exclusively in terms of Brian Wilson's genius." Love criticized the biography for solidifying a narrative that cast himself, his bandmates, and other members of Wilson's family as villains. In the revised 1985 edition of his book, Leaf wrote that he "no longer indict[s] the world of 'being bad to Brian,' when it's apparent that Brian has been hardest on himself."

Carl concludes that as of the 2010s, the interest in Brian's life comes primarily from "the human-interest angle" rather than a musical one, "[which] plays into the popular tendency to fetishise any overlap between genius and madness, which seems at once like a denial of the commonness of mental illness and a way to channel our envy of the gifted. [Plus] there is the nagging desire, whether exploitative or well-meant, to push the one-time prodigy to produce again, to squeeze out one last masterpiece. These factors all distort both Wilson's story and his significance."