Brian Wilson, Beach Boys leader and summer's poet laureate, dies at 82

NEW YORK (AP) — Brian Wilson, the Beach Boys’ visionary and fragile leader who helped compose and arrange “Good Vibrations,” “California Girls” and dozens of other summertime anthems and became one of the world’s most influential and admired musicians, has died at 82.

Wilson’s family posted news of his death to his website Wednesday. Further details weren’t immediately available. Since May 2024, Wilson had been under a court conservatorship to oversee his personal and medical affairs, with Wilson’s longtime representatives in charge.

The eldest and last surviving of three musical brothers — Brian played bass, Carl lead guitar and Dennis drums — he and his fellow Beach Boys rose from local act to national hitmakers to international ambassadors of the American dream. Wilson himself was celebrated for his beautiful music and pitied for his demons. He was one of rock’s great Romantics, a tortured soul who in his peak years embarked on an ever-steeper quest for aural perfection.

The Beach Boys rank among the most popular acts of the rock era, with more than 30 singles in the Top 40 and worldwide sales of more than 100 million. 1966's “Pet Sounds” was voted No. 2 in a 2003 Rolling Stone list of the best 500 albums, losing out, as Wilson did from the start, to the Beatles’ “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.” The Beach Boys, who also featured Wilson cousin Mike Love and family friend Al Jardine, were voted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 1988.

Fans ranged from Elton John and Bruce Springsteen to Katy Perry and Bob Dylan. The Who’s drummer, Keith Moon, fantasized about joining the Beach Boys. Paul McCartney cited “Pet Sounds” as a direct inspiration on the Beatles and said the ballad “God Only Knows” often moved him to tears.

Their music was like an ongoing party, with Wilson as mastermind and wallflower. He was a tall, shy man, partially deaf (allegedly because of beatings by his father, Murry Wilson), with a sweet, crooked grin, and he rarely touched a surfboard unless for publicity. But out of the lifestyle that he observed and such musical influences as Chuck Berry and the Four Freshmen, he devised a magical and durable soundscape — easy melodies, bright harmonies, vignettes of beaches, cars and girls that resonated worldwide.

Decades after its first release, a Beach Boys song can still conjure up instant summer — the wake-up guitar riff that opens “Surfin’ USA”; the melting harmonies of “Don’t Worry Baby”; the chants of “fun, fun, fun” or “good, good, GOOD, good vibrations”; the behind-the-wheel chorus “’Round, ‘round, get around, I get around.” Beach Boys songs have cheered on generations from iPods and boom boxes, radios and 8-track players, and any device that could be placed on a beach towel.

The Beach Boys’ innocent appeal survived changing trends and times and the group’s increasingly troubled backstory — Brian’s many personal trials; allegations of their father's mismanagement and physical abuse; feuds and lawsuits; the alcoholism of Dennis Wilson, who drowned in 1983. Brian Wilson’s ambition took the Beach Boys into territory far beyond the simple pleasures of their early hits — transcendent, eccentric and destructive. They seemed to live out every fantasy, and every nightmare, of the California myth.

Brian Wilson was born June 20, 1942, two days after McCartney. His musical gifts were obvious and as a boy he was playing piano and teaching his brothers to sing harmony. The Beach Boys started as a neighborhood act, rehearsing in Brian’s bedroom and in the garage of their house in suburban Hawthorne, California. Surf music was catching on locally and Dennis, the group’s only real surfer, suggested they cash in. Brian and Love hastily wrote up their first single, “Surfin,’” a minor hit released in 1961.

They wanted to call themselves the Pendletones, in honor of a popular shirt. But when they first saw the pressings for “Surfin,’” they discovered the record label had tagged them “The Beach Boys.” Other decisions were handled by their father, a musician and apparent tyrant who hired himself as the manager and holy terror. By mid-decade, Murry Wilson had been displaced and Brian was in charge.

Their breakthrough came in early 1963 with “Surfin’ USA,” so closely modeled on Chuck Berry’s “Sweet Little Sixteen” that Berry successfully sued to get a songwriting credit. It was their first Top 10 hit and a boast to the nation: “If everybody had an ocean / across the USA / then everybody’d be surfin’, / like Cali-for-nye-ay.” From 1963-66, they were rarely off the charts, hitting No. 1 with “I Get Around” and “Help Me, Rhonda” and narrowly missing with “California Girls” and “Fun, Fun, Fun.” For their many television appearances, they wore candy-striped shirts and grinned as they mimed their latest hit, with a hot rod or surfboard nearby.

Wilson often contrasted his own bright falsetto with Love’s nasal, deadpan tenor. The extroverted Love was out front on the fast songs, but when it was time for a slow one, Brian often took over. “The Warmth of the Sun” was a song of despair and consolation that Wilson alleged — to some skepticism — he wrote the morning after President John F. Kennedy was assassinated. “Don’t Worry Baby,” a ballad equally intoxicating and heartbreaking, was a leading man’s confession of doubt and dependence, an early peek at Brian’s crippling insecurities.

His first marriage, to singer Marilyn Rovell, ended in divorce and he became estranged from daughters Carnie and Wendy, who would help form the pop trio Wilson Phillips. His life stabilized in 1995 with his marriage to Melinda Ledbetter, with whom he had daughters Daria and Delanie. He also reconciled with Carnie and Wendy and they sang together on the 1997 album “The Wilsons.” Melinda Ledbetter died in 2024.

FILE - Mike Love, left, and Brian Wilson of The Beach Boys, perform at the Miller Time concert on Pier 84 on July 8, 1983 in New York. (AP Photo/ David Handschuh, File)

FILE - The Beach Boys, from left, Al Jardine, Carl Wilson, Brian Wilson and Mike Love, hold their trophies after being inducted into the Rock 'n' Roll Hall of Fame in New York, Jan. 21, 1988. (AP Photo/Ron Frehm, File)

FILE - Members of The Beach Boys, from left, Bruce Johnston, David Marks, rear, Brian Wilson, Mike Love and Al Jardine appear during ABC's "Good Morning America" summer concert series, on June 15, 2012, in New York. (Photo by Jason DeCrow/Invision/AP, File)

FILE - Musician Brian Wilson poses for a portrait at his home in Los Angeles on July 28, 2008. (AP Photo/Matt Sayles, File)

FILE - Musician Brian Wilson poses for a portrait in Los Angeles on June 2, 2015. (Photo by Casey Curry/Invision/AP, File)

NEW YORK (AP) — U.S. flu infections showed signs of a slight decline last week, but health officials say it is not clear that this severe flu season has peaked.

New government data posted Friday — for flu activity through last week — showed declines in medical office visits due to flu-like illness and in the number of states reporting high flu activity.

However, some measures show this season is already surpassing the flu epidemic of last winter, one of the harshest in recent history. And experts believe there is more suffering ahead.

“This is going to be a long, hard flu season,” New York State Health Commissioner Dr. James McDonald said, in a statement Friday.

One type of flu virus, called A H3N2, historically has caused the most hospitalizations and deaths in older people. So far this season, that is the type most frequently reported. Even more concerning, more than 91% of the H3N2 infections analyzed were a new version — known as the subclade K variant — that differs from the strain in this year’s flu shots.

The last flu season saw the highest overall flu hospitalization rate since the H1N1 flu pandemic 15 years ago. And child flu deaths reached 289, the worst recorded for any U.S. flu season this century — including that H1N1 “swine flu” pandemic of 2009-2010.

So far this season, there have been at least 15 million flu illnesses and 180,000 hospitalizations, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates. It also estimates there have been 7,400 deaths, including the deaths of at least 17 children.

Last week, 44 states reported high flu activity, down slightly from the week before. However, flu deaths and hospitalizations rose.

Determining exactly how flu season is going can be particularly tricky around the holidays. Schools are closed, and many people are traveling. Some people may be less likely to see a doctor, deciding to just suffer at home. Others may be more likely to go.

Also, some seasons see a surge in cases, then a decline, and then a second surge.

For years, federal health officials joined doctors' groups in recommending that everyone 6 months and older get an annual influenza vaccine. The shots may not prevent all symptoms but can prevent many infections from becoming severe, experts say.

But federal health officials on Monday announced they will no longer recommend flu vaccinations for U.S. children, saying it is a decision parents and patients should make in consultation with their doctors.

“I can’t begin to express how concerned we are about the future health of the children in this country, who already have been unnecessarily dying from the flu — a vaccine preventable disease,” said Michele Slafkosky, executive director of an advocacy organization called Families Fighting Flu.

“Now, with added confusion for parents and health care providers about childhood vaccines, I fear that flu seasons to come could be even more deadly for our youngest and most vulnerable," she said in a statement.

Flu is just one of a group of viruses that tend to strike more often in the winter. Hospitalizations from COVID-19 and RSV, or respiratory syncytial virus, also have been rising in recent weeks — though were not diagnosed nearly as often as flu infections, according to other federal data.

The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

FILE - Pharmacy manager Aylen Amestoy administers a patient with a seasonal flu vaccine at a CVS Pharmacy in Miami, Tuesday, Sept. 9, 2025. (AP Photo/Rebecca Blackwell, File)