The Beach Boys’ Brian Wilson suffers from dementia

The Beach Boys’ Brian Wilson suffers from dementia


Singer-songwriter Brian Wilson, leader of the best phase of the Beach Boys group, was diagnosed with dementia. The information was published on the artist’s website.

According to the statement, the musician began to be protected by “long-standing representatives of the family”, since his wife Melinda died in January this year. “She was my savior. She gave me the emotional security I needed to have a career. She encouraged me to make the music that mattered most to me. She was my anchor,” the musician wrote on the occasion of the Melinda’s death.

The American website The Blast obtained access to the guardianship request, revealing that Wilson would not have the “capacity” to administer the appropriate drugs to treat “neurocognitive disorders (including dementia)” in his current state of health.

The document also described him as someone “unable to adequately meet his or her personal needs for physical health, food, clothing or shelter.”

A doctor argued in the request for relief that Wilson could not appear at a court hearing because he “often makes spontaneous, irrelevant or inconsistent statements” and is “incapable of maintaining decorum appropriate to the situation.”

Long struggle with mental illness

Considered one of the most creative musicians of his generation, Brian Wilson founded the Beach Boys in 1961 along with his two brothers, a cousin and a friend. The band popularized “surf music” in the 1960s, battled with the Beatles for the most creative releases of the decade, and achieved countless chart hits. However, Brian had several mental problems throughout the 1960s, due to drug use and artistic demands, culminating in a nervous breakdown during the recording of an album in 1967, in which he tried to overcome the experimentalism of “Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band”. “…he entered a psychiatric clinic in 1968 and, having lost his pleasure in music, began to distance himself, little by little, from the Beach Boys, becoming a recluse for much of the 1970s.

Brian only returned to work with the band in the studio in 1978, a period which led to further collapses and hospital admissions. His life came to be controlled by a psychiatrist, Eugene Landy, but when this association ended in the 1990s, the artist regained his lost creativity in a series of recordings and projects, both solo and with the Beach Boys. He also completed “Smile”, the lost 1967 album, with the right to an exclusive tour with the repertoire.

His fight for sanity inspired the 2014 film “The Beach Boys: A Success Story,” which despite its title focuses on the crash of the 1960s and its more recent recovery, with the help of Melinda, who helped him break through. supervising psychiatrist.

His latest album, “At My Piano”, was released in 2021. The release was followed by information that he would no longer perform live for “health reasons”. Despite this, Brian even recorded vocals to complete an unfinished ’70s project, scheduled for release in 2025.

Source: Terra

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