The Emotional--and Artistic--Anchor

Carl Wilson was the overlooked Beach Boy even though he sang the lead on some of the group’s most significant songs and his guitar style was the signature sound of the band’s earliest hits.

He was easy to miss because brother Brian got the most attention as the creative center of the group and for his drug habits and what he acknowledged as mental problems. And Dennis became the poster boy for the California lifestyle that served as the band’s gestalt (he was the only one who actually surfed in the early days).

But it was Carl who gave the group the sound that was the first thing many people heard: the Chuck Berry-derived guitar lick that opens “Surfin’ U.S.A.,” which in 1963 became the band’s first national top 10 hit. He modified that style through such early hits as “Fun, Fun, Fun,” creating one of the most recognizable sounds of ‘60s California surf rock. It was as central as the close harmonies the brothers, cousin Mike Love and neighbor Al Jardine crafted.

It’s also his voice--sweet and high--that is the lead on several key Beach Boys songs, most notably “Good Vibrations,” the band’s peak achievement. As such he provided an emotional anchor amid Brian’s sonic experimentations. Carl’s was, ultimately, the voice that best conveyed the sadness and uncertainties that emerged more and more in Brian’s songs.

Carl also in many ways was the glue that held the band together in the years when Brian was not a steady presence. Carl tried to fill the void by stepping forward as the producer of many sessions in the early ‘70s, a time when the band’s popularity was fading and its internal dynamics were splintering. The group acknowledged this by recycling its pre-Beach Boys name, Carl and the Passions, for the 1972 album “So Tough.”

Tired of the band becoming little more than a nostalgia act and weary of being the peacemaker between Love and both Dennis and Brian, Carl--

who became romantically involved with Fleetwood Mac’s Christine McVie in 1979--left the group in 1981 and made two solo albums in the next three years. He returned, though, after Dennis’ death in 1983.

The rift between Brian and the rest of the group also seemed to wear particularly hard on Carl. At a 1993 party at the Capitol Records tower in Hollywood to celebrate the release of the box set anthology “Good Vibrations: Thirty Years of the Beach Boys,” Carl was somber about the absence of Brian, then fresh from legal wrangles over the disposition of his affairs.

In contrast to the spirit in the parking lot, filled for the occasion with sand on which attendees played volleyball and ate burgers, Carl stood inside the studio where many of the early Beach Boys hits were recorded, saddened that with Dennis’ death and Brian’s estrangement, he was the only Wilson brother on hand.

“I haven’t talked to Brian in a while,” he said with a shrug. “I don’t even know his current phone number.”

Once Brian’s affairs and health were on the upswing, they became a closer family again.

One particularly moving scene was captured in “I Just Wasn’t Made for These Times,” a 1995 documentary about Brian made by record producer Don Was. In it, Brian, Carl and their mother, Audree, sit together at a piano, harmonizing on Brian’s melancholy confessional “In My Room.” It was a family moment that hadn’t happened through all the years since the Wilsons were boys.

“This is gonna sound stupid,” Brian remarks in an interview segment that follows, “but that’s the first time we’d ever done that--Carl and mom and me singing together--since Hawthorne.”

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Steve Hochman is a regular contributor to The Times’ pop music coverage.