Moe Berg, of the Pursuit of Happiness, and Burton Cummings, of the Guess Who, also weigh in on the late musician.
June 12, 2025
By Nick Krewen
Special to the Star
Back in 2000, singer and songwriter Steven Page couldn’t believe his eyes … or his ears.
He was sitting around in an L.A. studio with the rest of his Barenaked Ladies bandmates as they worked on their album Maroon, when their producer Don Was announced he had a surprise for them.
“We all sat down behind the console and he walked in with Brian Wilson,” Page told the Star in an interview Wednesday. “And Brian inserted a CD-R into a CD player and it was him and his new band doing our song.”
The song that Brian Wilson, the influential songwriting architect of the Beach Boys who died Wednesday at 82, played for them was “Brian Wilson,” the fan favourite that debuted on the first full-length Barenaked Ladies album, Gordon, back in 1992.
It was written by Page, with the title and the lyrics referencing the tortured artist, known for a lifetime of traumatic mental health struggles.
And if that wasn’t enough, Wilson provided another thrill when he visited Toronto a few months later to perform at the Molson Amphitheatre, now known as Budweiser Stage.
“They invited us (Barenaked Ladies) to come and sing ‘Fun, Fun, Fun’ and ‘Love and Mercy’ with them,” Page recalled. “We did the sound check with him and it was incredible. Then we sat in the audience and watched the beginning of the show — which he started with the song I wrote when I was a teenager in my parents’ basement.”
While Page may have experienced the most surreal moment of anyone who encountered the influential songwriter, he admits that it took him a while to appreciate the genius behind such pop smashes as “I Get Around,” “Help Me, Rhonda” and “Good Vibrations.”
“I grew up not really being a Beach Boys fan,” he admitted. “As a kid, being a huge Beatles fan, I guess I always saw the Beach Boys as being too lightweight. It was a good time, car, surf and rock ‘n’ roll thing, and it just didn’t appeal to me.”
After a university friend gave him a mixtape containing deeper album cuts, Page changed his mind.
“I absolutely locked in,” he said. “I understood, at that point, that this was like adult music being made by children. There was a level of sophistication — and also this juxtaposition of light and dark in the same thing that was just so deeply appealing to me.
“Back then, when you read about Brian Wilson in the rock press, he was always treated like a punch line — a kind of rock ‘n’ roll casualty. Even then, before I really had the language to discuss mental health struggles, I understood that it was deeper than that, it was more painful than that, and that’s really what inspired (my) song.
“I wrote ‘Brian Wilson,’ but really, the song is about my own mental health struggles and the power that music has to lift you out of that.”
With bassist and co-lead vocalist Wilson at their creative helm, the original Beach Boys — which formed in 1961 and consisted of his brothers Carl and Dennis on guitar and drums, respectively, Al Jardine on guitar and cousin Mike Love on vocals — brandished the power to lift listeners out of their doldrums, projecting an image of California as a sun-dappled utopia.
Growing up in the wintry confines of Manitoba, Burton Cummings certainly bought what they were selling.
“I was a kid in Winnipeg in the 40-below winters listening to these beautiful songs about blond girls and surfboards and heading to the ocean,” Cummings told the Star. “Brian painted this picture of California that made the rest of the world very aware of a different lifestyle. He was very innovative.”
Cummings said he was hooked on the Beach Boys’ sound even before he joined The Guess Who as singer and keyboardist in 1966.
“They sang like no one else,” he said.
“He’s brilliant as far as harmonies and all that stuff goes,” said Cummings, whose favourite Wilson number is “Don’t Worry Baby.” “And it was he — and partly Dennis, too — who wanted to sing about cars. No one had sung about cars and surfing and all of that before, so not only was he brilliant, but he was new. It was all new, what he was doing.”
Despite the Beach Boys and the Guess Who touring during the same era, Cummings didn’t meet his idol until 1992, when he was a member of the Ringo Starr All-Starr Band and Wilson happened to be a guest at a birthday gathering for TV talk show host Arsenio Hall.
“I spent five or 10 minutes talking to him and I sang him a bit of ‘I’m Bugged at My Ol’ Man,’ which he would probably remember, because not everyone in the world would sing him that. It’s a very funny song of theirs on an early album.
“I was thrilled to meet him, but by that time, he wasn’t as communicative as I had hoped. But it was a thrill because he was an icon to me. Listening to his songs would take you somewhere else.”
Like Steven Page, troubadour Ron Sexsmith was also late to acknowledge Wilson’s genius.
While doing press for his self-titled sophomore album in 1995, Sexsmith said a journalist had told him that he must have listened to the Beach Boys seminal album Pet Sounds “at least 1,000 times.”
“I had never heard Pet Sounds and the writer got mad at me,” Sexsmith remembered. “But Hugh Phillips, the bass player for Bobby Wiseman’s band, lent me a cassette of the album just before I was flying down to L.A. for something — and it blew my mind. It was one of those ‘Where have you been all my life?’ moments.”
Sexsmith said that although he was aware of the album’s hits — “Wouldn’t It Be Nice,” “Sloop John B” and “God Only Knows” — the rest of the album “hit me like a lightning bolt.”
He immediately incorporated the Wilson influence into his next album, Other Songs.
“We had a song called ‘Average Joe,’ which was written as sort of a country song, initially, but I was asking (producer) Mitchell (Froom), ‘Is there any way that this could go more in a Beach Boy way?’
“So we refashioned the song and based it on the Pet Sounds recording, where the drums aren’t carrying the rhythm; it’s carried along by the bass and the keyboards and there’s percussion and stuff.”
Sexsmith has elevated his regard for Wilson alongside his other chief inspirations: The Kinks’ Ray Davies, The Who’s Pete Townshend and the Beatles.
“I’ve always been a child of melody, and whether it was Ray Davies, Gilbert O’Sullivan or Harry Nilsson, Brian’s melodies were at a level even beyond those guys. As a budding songwriter who was melody-based, you couldn’t really look to anyone greater than what Brian Wilson was doing.
“And it wasn’t just his melodies. There was a kind of innocence in his music that’s not really there in anyone else. Ray Davies was too cerebral, in a way, to be innocent and (John) Lennon was very acerbic. But Brian almost seemed like a man-child. It made him almost more endearing and made the music resonate in a deep, childhood way that is very moving. It wasn’t done in a cynical way and he wasn’t trying to push anyone’s buttons — it was just so real that it was almost overwhelming.”
For Moe Berg, of The Pursuit of Happiness, Brian Wilson’s music contained a duality that he admired.
“One of the things I really got out of the Beach Boys, even in their early music, was that sense of melancholy,” Berg said. “It was presented in an upbeat way, but there was always this feeling of sadness. That was something that I also related to. So, I always loved their harmonies, but also the more subversive idea of this summery fun music with melancholy infused into it.
“But I loved him my whole life.”
Sloan’s Jay Ferguson said that his band is directly influenced by Wilson’s talent.
“We prioritize harmony, and I think that any band that prioritizes vocal harmony is going to end up hearkening back to the Beach Boys in one form or another,” Ferguson told the Star, noting that the first concert he ever attended back in Halifax was a Beach Boys show. “If you take apart Beach Boys songs, some of them are really complicated and interesting and some of those forms of composition definitely influenced Sloan, not to mention the production style.
“There’s a song called ‘Junior Panthers’ on our One Chord to Another album that definitely hearkens back to a late-‘60s Beach Boys sound. Brian was so influential in his time and forward-looking that he was light years ahead of what other big artists were doing at the time.”
Steven Page says Brian Wilson was a pioneer.
“Pushing the studio as an instrument is probably his greatest contribution,” Page noted. “But also he’s really the first step into sophisticated vocal harmonies. Even though his music was light, it added a musical seriousness that had never existed in rock ‘n’ roll before.”
For Ron Sexsmith, Wilson was truly a gifted prodigy on par with other historic virtuosos.
“It’s a singular event, that Brian Wilson lived in our time. It’s like living in the time of Mozart or Beethoven.”