Brian Wilson, the musician who co-founded the Beach Boys, has died, his family announced Wednesday.
“We are heartbroken to announce that our beloved father Brian Wilson has passed away,” the family wrote on Instagram and Wilson’s official website. “We are at a loss for words right now. We realize that we are sharing our grief with the world.”
Wilson’s death follows a dementia diagnosis, which was announced last year when his wife died and his children moved to place him under a conservatorship.
No further details were released on his death. He was 82 years old.
Wilson was known as the Beach Boys’ visionary and fragile leader whose genius for melody, arrangements and wide-eyed self-expression inspired “Good Vibrations,” “California Girls,” and other summertime anthems.
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 in the 1960s from local California band to national hitmakers to international ambassadors of surf and sun. Wilson himself was celebrated for his gifts and pitied for his demons. He was one of rock’s great romantics, a tormented man who in his peak years embarked on an ever-steeper path to aural perfection, the one true sound.
The Beach Boys rank among the most popular groups of the rock era, with more than 30 singles in the Top 40 and worldwide sales of more than 100 million.
The 1966 album “Pet Sounds” was voted No. 2 in a 2003 Rolling Stone list of the best 500 albums, losing out, as Wilson had done before, to the Beatles’ “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.”
The Beach Boys, who also featured Wilson’s cousin Mike Love and childhood friend Al Jardine, were voted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1988.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
