Five boys in the studio, with a music stand in front of them, seemingly concentrating on their work.

Two of them sing, two others follow the operation benevolently and critically, but the fifth, a tall, slim guy with hair so neatly shaved that he could also go to the army with it, stands in the background, monitors, intervenes, corrects, with it everything sounds the way he heard it polyphonically in his head before.

Tilman Spreckelsen

Editor in the Feuilleton.

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You don't have to know the history of the Beach Boys and their record "Surfin' USA" to see who's in charge in the studio just from this photo on the inner sleeve.

Brian Wilson, the eldest of the three brothers who formed the band with their cousin Mike Love and their friend Al Jardine, replaced by David Marks at the time at the time by David Marks, was the eldest of the three brothers who formed the band at just twenty years old Take control of production.

One against all

He was to perfect this until the pop music milestone “Pet Sounds” a few years later.

The tense relationship between the songwriter and musical mastermind on the one hand and the group on the other hand, whose most important feature was the harmony singing, in which everyone played their irreplaceable role, was subsequently obvious, no matter how much the emphatically egalitarian album cover gave a different picture wanted to mediate.

Brian Wilson, who had already withdrawn from the band's tours - which at least resulted in Al Jardine's successful return - resigned after the band's rebellion against his advanced record project "Smile".

After the disturbing seventies it is a miracle that Brian Wilson, now only tall and no longer thin,

And it was Wilson who wrote a wonderfully melancholy close to this record with "Summer's Gone", a swan song to all the joy of having found oneself again as a group, to the "Endless Summer" that a 1974 best-of album had evoked .

"Old friends have gone", it says in 2012, "They've gone their separate ways / Our dreams hold on / For those who still have more to say / Summer's gone / Gone like yesterday / The nights grow cold / It's time to go / I'm thinking maybe I'll just stay."

That applied to the brothers Dennis and Carl Wilson, who had both died by then, and it applied to the band: a new collaboration never materialized, and some of what Brian Wilson had written for it appeared in 2015 on his solo album with the meaningful title " No Pier Pressure".

Unlike on the record with the Beach Boys, there are no surfer songs on it, but it is framed by two songs that tell melancholically and with stylistic devices that Wilson was able to develop over half a century, that one neither has the time can still hold on to old friendships, this one even less than that one.

Where did it all go, an old child wonders, what happened there, and what part do I have in it?

Today Brian Wilson celebrates his eightieth birthday.